Latest Semiconductor News Update on Feb 11 to 17, 2024

Cisco to cut 5% of global workforce

Cisco Systems Inc, the world's largest maker of networking equipment, plans to cut thousands of jobs as slowing corporate technology spending wipes out its sales growth. Cisco said the restructuring plan will affect about 5% of its employees. The company has nearly 85,000 employees as of 2023, which means the layoffs will involve about 4,000 jobs. This is the same approach used by many big tech companies to cut costs.

Cisco's sales in the third fiscal quarter ending in April 2024 will reach US$12.1 billion to US$12.3 billion. That compared with the average analyst estimate of $13.1 billion. Excluding certain items, profit per share would have been 84 to 86 cents, compared with forecasts of 92 cents. The company currently forecasts a revenue range of $51.5 billion to $52.5 billion for fiscal 2024. Excluding certain items, earnings per share would be $3.68 to $3.74. Both targets were below Wall Street forecasts.

Continental to cut 7150 jobs in savings push at Auto Unit

German auto parts manufacturer Continental AG has announced that it is implementing global measures announced in December to improve the R&D efficiency of the automotive sector, which will affect approximately 1,750 jobs worldwide. In addition, it is analyzing site mergers in the Rhein-Main region, and around 5,400 jobs will be affected by administrative streamlining measures.

A new wave of layoffs is sweeping Europe's auto parts supply chain industry because of weak economy, rising inflation and a shift toward electrification. Recently, Bosch, the world's largest auto parts supplier, announced that its software and electronics department will lay off up to 1,200 employees by the end of 2026 due to high inflation and rising raw material and energy costs, which slows the industry’s transition to electric vehicles.

Prospect Analysis of Semiconductor Market in 2024

According to WSTS, the global semiconductor market grew by 8.4% in Q4 2023 compared with the Q3 2023. The 8.4% was the highest quarterly growth rate since 9.1% in Q2 2021, and it is also the highest growth rate from the Q3 to the Q4 in 20 years since the 11% increase in the Q4 2003. In the Q4 2023, there was a year-on-year growth of 11.6%, after negative year-on-year growth in the previous five quarters.

Semiconductor market growth in 2024 will be driven by memory IC. WSTS predicts memory growth of 44.8%, non-memory growth of 6.5%, and total market growth in 2024 of 13.1%. While predicting that the overall market will grow by 16.8%, Gartner assumes that the memory market will grow by 66%. Memory will be driven by the recovery of the PC and smartphone markets. These two areas will also help the non-storage market, but other non-storage market drivers, such as automotive and industrial, will increase slowly in 2024.

NVIDIA unveils its new Eos AI supercomputer with 4608 x H100 AI GPUs

According to report, Nvidia has shown the public the architecture of its latest enterprise-focused supercomputer, Eos, which is designed for advanced AI development at data center scale and is the company's fastest AI supercomputer.

Designed for AI workloads and scalability, Eos (powered by the DGX SuperPOD architecture) features 576 DGX H100 systems, each containing 8 H100 GPUs, for artificial intelligence (AI) and High-performance computing (HPC) workloads. The system is packed with a total of 1,152 Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C (56 cores per CPU) processors and 4,608 H100 GPUs, enabling Eos to achieve Rmax 121.4 FP64 PetaFLOPS and 18.4 FP8 ExaFLOPS performance in HPC and AI respectively.

OpenAI launches video model Sora

OpenAI recently launched Sora, a new generative AI model. Sora is a text-to-video model on X. The user texts the desired scene, and Sora will return a high-definition video. Sora can also generate video clips inspired by images and extend existing videos or fill in missing frames.

Sora is currently limited to generating videos over one minute. OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has made multimodality — a combination of text, image and video generation — a goal to provide a broader suite of AI models.

What’s more, the model has a deep understanding of language, enabling it to accurately interpret prompts and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions. Sora can also create multiple shots within a single generated video that accurately persist characters and visual style.

Renesas to acquire software firm Altium for $6 billion

On February 14, Japanese semiconductor firm Renesas plans to acquire Australian software firm Altium for $6.0 billion in accordance with Australian law. According to the terms of the transaction, subject to the fulfillment of a number of conditions, Renesas Electronics will acquire all issued shares of Altium for a cash price of AUD 68.50 per share, equivalent to a total equity value of approximately AUD 9.1 billion (approximately 887.9 billion yen). The acquisition enables two industry leaders to join forces to build an integrated, open electronic systems design and lifecycle management platform that allows collaboration across component, subsystem and system-level designs.

Apple settles trade secrets lawsuit with Rivos

Apple opens new tab plans to settle a lawsuit that accused tech startup Rivos of stealing its trade secrets related to computer-chip technology, according to a joint court filing on Friday in California federal court. Rivos and Apple notified the judge that they plan to complete the settlement by March 15, according to a filing released on Friday. Apple accused Rivos in May 2022 of poaching engineers with access to confidential company information. Apple's lawsuit alleges that former employees stole proprietary information at Rivos' request as part of the hiring process.