(Image source: CES official website)
Titanium Media January 7 news, today is the last day of the 2022 International Consumer Electronics Exhibition (CES) event. Affected by the continued spread of the new crown Semicon epidemic, the exhibition took the form of a combination of live display and online live broadcast in Las Vegas, USA, and ended the meeting one day earlier (from 8th to 7th).
According to data provided by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), MORE THAN 2,200 companies from 160 countries and regions participated in CES 2022.
For the participation of Chinese enterprises, Titanium Media App learned from the CES conference organizers that under the dual influence of the new crown epidemic and the Sino-US game, most Chinese companies did not participate in this year's exhibition, and finally only 152 Chinese mainland technology companies attended CES 2022, including TCL, Hisense, Hesai Technology, Black Sesame Technology and other enterprises, accounting for less than 7%, of which only 60 Chinese companies participated in the US CES offline exhibition, setting a new low in the past.
It should be known that the number of Chinese companies participating in CES in 2018 reached a record 1551, accounting for more than one-third of the total number of exhibitors. However, as Sino-US relations began to be tense in the second half of 2018, the number of Chinese companies participating in CES decreased year by year, with about 1213 Chinese companies participating in CES 2019, accounting for about a quarter of the total number of exhibitors; by January 2021 CES 2021, the number of Chinese companies participating in the exhibition plummeted to 210, accounting for less than 11%.
Not only Chinese technology companies, but also Us technology giants such as Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, and Amazon have also announced that they will not participate in CES 2022. And the technology giants such as Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm who chose to participate in CES 2022 have also announced that they will deliver keynote speeches online. It is worth noting that many of this year's online speeches are not broadcast live on the official WEBSITE OF CES, but on their own social platforms to release new products.
Looking back at the entire CES 2022, although many companies have not chosen to participate, as a barometer of global consumer electronics technology, the CES conference still has a lot of highlights, including a number of chip giants through the form of online release show a lot of blockbuster products and technological innovation, and intelligent driving, electric vehicles, lidar, metacosm, NFT, green and low-carbon and other new concepts and important innovative technologies have also become the highlight of this CES conference.
Firepower! The four chip giants are fighting head-on
This year, 2022 has just begun, and the entire semiconductor battle for kings has been ignited.
On the first day of the opening of CES 2022, the three chip giants of NVIDIA, AMD and Intel have demonstrated their new products and new architectures, and Qualcomm and Microsoft have cooperated to develop "metacosmity" chips. In particular, the Ryzen 6000 processor released by AMD this time is manufactured by the world's most advanced TSMC 6nm process, which gives birth to the latest achievements in the field of advanced semiconductor processes.
At 23:00 Beijing time on January 4, AMD was the first to launch the new Ryzen 6000 series mobile CPU processors, designed to enhance the performance of thin and light gaming laptop devices. The new generation of Ryzen 6000 series uses 6nm process, Zen 3+ architecture, and an integrated GPU with RDNA 2 architecture, which is twice as fast as the previous generation, and can play most AAA masterpieces at 1080P resolution, with ray tracing characteristics, more suitable for light gamers.
Interestingly, after the launch, AMD CEO Lisa Su posted a picture showing the new Ryzen 6000 chip on social media, and predicted that more products of the AMD Ryzen and Radeon GPU series would be released this year. Some foreign media believe that this move is a shout to the other two chip giants to show AMD's leading position in the industry. According to the financial report data, since Su Zifeng became CEO in October 2014, AMD's market value has grown from only $2.5 billion to $164.5 billion, close to Intel.
Subsequently, image processing (GPU) giant Nvidia officially released the long-awaited GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and 3050 TWO GPU products at CES. Among them, the RTX 3090 Ti has a maximum of 320 Tensor TFLOPS performance, equipped with 24GB, 21Gbps bandwidth GDDR6X memory, is the first "50" level desktop GPU, can provide power to the latest ray tracing games with a frame rate of more than 60fps, known as the "new generation of graphics card king"; RTX 3050 is an entry-level game graphics card, in addition to performance improvements, will also be ray tracing and DLSS and other technologies decentralized, becoming the sub-flagship graphics card products.
Nvidia said that in the future, there will be 160 new notebooks from mainstream manufacturers such as Asus, HP, and Dell equipped with RTX GPUs, and the fourth-generation Max-Q technology will be used to further improve equipment energy efficiency and battery life. On high-end gaming laptops, Nvidia said the RTX 3080 Ti laptop has a suggested retail price of $2499 and the RTX 3070 Ti laptop has a suggested retail price of $1499, and laptops equipped with these two new GPUs will be available on sale on Feb. 1.
The "toothpaste factory" Intel is in hot pursuit, holding a special CES 2022 conference in the early morning of January 5, talking about graphics cards and automatic driving, and passing on a new product matrix strategy. Intel announced that its GPU product, arc alchemist GPUs, has begun shipping, and is expected to launch several products with Arc discrete graphics, including Acer, Asus, Clevo, Dell, GIGABYTE, Haier, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, MSI and NEC. However, Intel did not indicate news about when the first devices equipped with Intel Arc GPUs were sold.
In terms of CPU, Intel also once again faced AMD and Qualcomm, releasing the 12th generation Core Alder Lake platform, including the 45W high-performance H series, the 28W mainstream performance P series, and the U series for thin and light notebook products, with power consumption between 15W and 9W, a total of 28 products in the three series, providing up to 14 core configurations. It is worth noting that Intel Evo-branded laptops equipped with the new 12th generation H series chips will require a separate Arc GPU, so laptops equipped with Intel Core processors this year will be equipped with their own GPUs, rather than continuing to use NVIDIA or integrated graphics. The new 12th-generation Alder Lake chip for desktops went on sale today.
The primary matrix product for Intel's latest 12th generation Alder Lake chip family
For Qualcomm, this CES no longer mentions the direction of Snapdragon's mobile processing platform, and Qualcomm CEO Anmont mainly shared its latest technologies, products and cooperation in the fields of automotive, computing and XR. In terms of ARM architecture CPU processors, Qualcomm announced that with high-speed and secure 5G and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, advanced AI capabilities, enhanced image and audio capabilities, and enterprise-grade security, the Snapdragon computing platform portfolio has enabled more than 200 PC manufacturers to innovate devices, and is testing or deploying enterprise versions of Snapdragon and 2-in-1 laptops for many customers, including Microsoft, Acer, Asus, HP and Lenovo.
The popularity of autonomous driving is high: Sony wants to build cars, and Intel Mobileye pushes the L4 chip
Affected by the explosive growth of new energy vehicles, companies in the upstream and downstream of the automotive industry chain have exhibited the latest research and development of autonomous driving technology at CES 2022, and the attention is still unabated, and the scale mass production and commercialization of autonomous driving have become the new highlights at CES.
On January 5, Mobileye, Intel's self-driving subsidiary, released its flagship self-driving chip, EyeQ Ultra. Mobileye said that the EyeQ Ultra uses a 5nm process with a computing efficiency of 176 trillion times per second, which will compete with Tesla, Nvidia and Qualcomm in the field of advanced driving computing chips.
Mobileye EyeQ Ultra autopilot chip
Erez Dagan, vice president of Intel and executive vice president of Products and Strategy of Mobileye, a subsidiary of Intel, said in an interview with Titanium Media App and others that the performance of the EyeQ Ultra is equivalent to the performance of 10 EyeQ 5s, which marks a huge leap forward in the EyeQ series of system integration chips. The chip was co-designed with Mobileye software, allowing the chip to achieve an extremely high energy efficiency ratio without sacrificing performance. It is reported that the EyeQ Ultra system integration chip is expected to be supplied at the end of 2023, and fully realize vehicle-level mass production in 2025.
In addition, Intel also announced that it will jointly develop a Level 4-enabled pure electric vehicle (EV) with Geely's new smart pure electric brand, Extreme Kr, which will be equipped with six EyeQ 5 system integration chips (SoCs) and will be available in China by 2024.
Intel announced that they have cooperated with Baidu's automotive company Jidu, and Jidu's first mass-produced model will be equipped with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoC (System-on-Chip). The jigzag model is expected to be launched in 2023 and will become an automotive robot capable of L4 autonomous driving capabilities. At the same time, the concept car of the product is expected to be officially unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show in April this year.
What is very unexpected is that Sony has also officially joined the "car-making" army. During CES 2022, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida announced that he would establish Sony Mobility Inc., whose main task is to commercialize its electric vehicle business.
It is reported that Sony has released a prototype Vision-S for a concept electric vehicle at CES in 2020, which was designed by participants including Magna and Bosch. This year at CES, in addition to showing off its Vision S on the spot, Sony also released a new Vision-SUV prototype. Kenichiro Yoshida said that the first priority of this SUV is safety, and a total of 40 detection sensors are installed inside and outside the vehicle to ensure the safety of drivers and passengers.
"With imaging, sensing, cloud computing, 5G and entertainment, we believe Sony is well positioned to redefine mobility." Kenichiro Yoshida said the company views "mobility" as an "entertainment space" where passengers can choose personal entertainment options and use a 5G internet connection.
It is understood that the VISION-S 01 coupe has begun testing on public roads in Europe in December 2020.
Qualcomm, Sony, and Samsung are running to the metaverse and NFT
"Metaverse" is the hot word of this year's CES, AR/VR has become a new weather vane, qualcomm, Sony and other manufacturers have made new progress.
Qualcomm announced that it is working with Microsoft to develop custom chips for AR glasses, and will also integrate AR chips with software such as Microsoft Mesh and Snapdragon SPaces XR development platform to expand and accelerate the application of AR in consumer and enterprise markets.
Qualcomm said that in the XR field, the convergence of physical and digital space has occurred and is accelerating, digital twins have landed in many industries, and Qualcomm Snapdragon XR platform has empowered most of today's VR and AR terminals. With the gradual formation of the metacosm, the XR development trend will be further strengthened. Qualcomm's technology is "the key to the metaverse." Today, Microsoft and Qualcomm are confident in the development of the Metacosm, and are collaborating on a number of initiatives to drive ecosystems together, including developing customized AR chips to create a new generation of energy-efficient, lightweight AR glasses that provide a rich and immersive experience.
Sony's side unexpectedly announced the second generation of PlayStation VR products, including 4 cameras and a controller tracking infrared camera for eye tracking, supporting 4KHDR, 110 degree field of view and fixation rendering, using OLED screens, resolution of 2000 * 4000, 90/120 frame rate. In addition, Sony's original game Horizon: Call of the Mountains, created specifically for its PS VR2, is also coming soon.
Nvidia announced that its metaversyma creation tool Omniverse will be officially open to creators. According to reports, Omniverse will be provided free of charge to individual creators, with Nvidia's real-time 3D design collaboration and virtual world simulation platform Omniverse, artists, designers and creators can create 3D materials and scenes on laptops or workstations based on top design applications, and enterprise users need to pay an annual fee.
Omniverse's feature display (Source: NVIDIA official website)
Nvidia said omniverse has been downloaded by nearly 100,000 creators since its public beta a year ago, who have accelerated their workflows with the platform's underlying rendering, simulation and AI technologies.
At the same time, Nvidia also announced a partnership with multiple technology platforms to support users to sell their own virtual content. Nvidia also announced updates to the Omniverse Machinima and Omniverse Audio2Face platforms.
South Korea's Hyundai Motor and Boston Dynamics announced that the two sides are unveiling their latest automotive technology with "meta-universe" components.
Interestingly, consumer goods giant Samsung added NFTs (non-homogeneous tokens) to the new Neo QLED 4K and 8K TVs released at CES this year, and users can use the "NFT Aggregation Platform" within Samsung MicroLED, Neo QLED and The Frame TVs to place orders for NFT entries.
However, the titanium media App observes two new phenomena at CES this year: one is that the smart speaker products that were very popular at CES in previous years have been unnoticed this year, and there are no related new products, and more consumer goods have turned to smart homes, green environmental protection, etc.; another discovery is that Apple technology and products can be seen everywhere during the CES 2022 exhibition, and the hottest new products include new accessories compatible with Apple's "find" function and smart door locks that can be unlocked with iPhones. Intel also released a new generation of Core chips specifically for the Apple M1, which allows Apple's influence to continue to be exported.
Maribel Lopez, chief analyst of industry analysis firm Lopez Research, said that the biggest significance of this year's CES is to show the leading technology products in the metacosm and NFT fields.
Compared with CES 2020, the overall size of this year's CES conference has been greatly reduced.
According to CTA data, international companies participating in this CES 2022 accounted for about 30% of the total number of companies, most of which came from Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Among them, more than 200 companies from South Korea participated in the exhibition, only 19 Japanese companies participated in CES 2022 offline, and Japanese technology giants such as Panasonic cancelled offline display activities the day before the opening of the conference.
(This article was first published on titanium media App, author | Lin Zhijia)