Nearly all companies listed on TrendForce’s revenue ranking of the global top 10 fabless IC design houses for the first quarter posted year-on-year growth. Novatek was the sole exception and saw a slight dip in its revenue compared with the same period a year ago. For IC companies, the growing sources of end-market demand for this year come from networking equipment, data centers, servers and automotive electronics.
The latest mobile DRAM market analysis by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, finds that smartphone makers continue to upgrade memory specifications of their devices as to get the optimal performances from the latest mobile operating systems. At the same time, more products within the mainstream application processor lines are supporting the latest-generation memory solutions. The developments, together with advances in DRAM manufacturing processes, have accelerated the pace of market adoption for LPDDR4 and its variant LPDDR4X.
The sharp upswing in prices of mobile DRAM products is expected to hold back the growth of average per device memory content for smartphones this year, says the market intelligence firm TrendForce. Furthermore, TrendForce has lowered the estimated average memory content of smartphones for 2017, from 3.7GB to 3.2GB. The revised average memory content figure represents an increase of 33.4% compared with the 2016 figure.
The introduction of the deep Learning (DL) approach to machine learning has led to incredible developments in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years, attracting interests from cloud computing and semiconductor chip businesses. According to TrendForce’s latest research on AI, the three forces that drive advances in machine learning are software, hardware and data. AI systems based on DL requires vast amounts of data to train their abilities such as identifying objects and processing requests. Therefore quantity and quality of data directly affects AI systems’ accuracy. As cloud and software platform companies compete to bring AI solutions for different applications, ownership and access to data will become crucial to their strategies.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, reports that the average spot price of PC DRAM DDR4 chips has fallen by about 1.92% since April 20. Latest analysis indicates that PC DRAM's chip prices generally have been higher in the spot market than in the contract market.. The recent drop in the average spot price of PC DRAM DDR4 chips is thus a correction to limit the price gap between the two markets. Nonetheless, DRAMeXchange maintains the view that DRAM prices will generally stay on an uptrend during the entire 2017. This is mainly attributed to tight supply resulting from the lack of major fab expansion plans and yield issues with leading-edge processes.