CES 2023: AMD, Stellantis, Cadence, and More

It is CES in Las Vegas this week. All things consumer electronics. Cadence's base is in the Venetian these days, as I said in my preview post CES 2023 Preview: Come and See Us in the Venetian. That is pretty convenient for me too, since the keynotes are in the Venetian too, so I don't have to trek out and back from the convention center to attend them. Since it was pouring with rain today, I spent the day here and will go and report on what's going on in the Convention Center tomorrow (the weather is forecast to be sunny). If there is one thing Las Vegas doesn't do well, it is rain. The parking lots become dotted with lakes, all the escalators and moving walkways get turned off, and the traffic jams up.

Cadence

Cadence focuses its presence at CES entirely on the Tensilica product line of processors for Audio, Vision, and AI. This is partly for historical reasons, in that Tensilica used to attend CES before Cadence acquired them. But also that is where there is an overlap between the people attending CES and the Cadence product line. Nobody comes to CES to check out design tools for their next chip.

The other thing that we have is a gallery of consumer electronics products that use Tensilica processors in them. There are actually many more than we are allowed to display, even under NDA at the booth. As you can see, there are smartphones, smart speakers, chips for automotive, notebooks, and more.

AMD Keynote

CES opens the evening before the show truly opens in the convention center, with a couple of keynotes. For a few years now, the first keynote has been Lisa Su of AMD. There was actually a second keynote by BMW that I'd have liked to attend but it starts at almost the same time as the AMD keynote ended and was on the other side of the city, so that was not possible to attend.

AMD has a broad product line, especially since last year's acquisition of Xilinx giving them the capability to hardware programmability into more applications. I'm not going to try and talk about all of the products she talked about, I'll just hit a few highlights. There are analysts who do nothing else than follow all the processors of companies like AMD.

AMD is a leader in processors for gaming. Here is the Ryzen 9 7950 processor. As with so many products, you can see that it uses chiplet technology and advanced packaging. It (or at least the main processor) is built in 5nm. It dissipates 120W and runs at up to 5.7GHz. Of course, gaming is always great for showing off in a keynote theatre with a screen that is literally a couple of hundred feet wide across a huge hotel ballroom. You just had to be there, I'm afraid.

As is common in keynotes like this, there were guests such as Panos Panay, the chief product officer for Microsoft. Obviously, Microsoft works closely with AMD to ensure that its product line runs on AMD-powered computers, so it is clearly a major partner. But I'd like a little more technical content than just what great partners everyone is.

More interesting was retired NASA astronaut Cody Coleman. In her career she spent over 180 days in space, some in the shuttle program and some on the International Space Station. The Perseverance Mars Rover is powered by Virtex FPGAs, made by Xilinx and the time it was built, now formally AMD Virtex FPGAs.

Of course, no keynote these days is complete without talking a lot about AI. That evening, Lisa announced the Instinct MI300, which is the worlds first datacenter integrated CPU and GPU. They are not integrated on a single die, they are too big for that (146B transistors). Like so many products today, they used advanced packaging with chiplets in 5nm and 6nm processes. Lisa actually had one to show us, and you can see that it is a huge system-in-package. My notes say that she said it contains 9 xPU chiplets and some number of other memory and communication chiplets.

There was lots more. More products. Augmented reality (AR) with Magic Leap. Robotic surgery with Intuitive Surgical. Rendering Avatar 2.

No keynote is complete without a nod to sustainability, for AMD that means power in datacenters, which are a big and growing component of the world's energy costs.

A typical rack can hold 15 servers. For the equivalent of those 15 servers from the competition, AMD just needs 5 AMD EPYC 9654. Last year, AMD shipped 50M servers worldwide, which is an energy saving for 52B KWh with AMD versus our competition.

Stellantis Keynote

The afternoon keynote was by Carlos Taveres, the CEO of Stellantis. You might not know who Stellantis is, if you don't follow automotive companies. It was created in 2021 with a marger between Fiat-Chrysler and the French PSA Group, mainly Citroen and Peugot. Fiat-Chrysler was itself created when the Daimler-Chrysler merger pretty much failed and private equity stepped in and split them up again.

That gives them a lot of brands, not just the obvious ones, but Alfa Romeo, Maserati, RAM trucks, and more (see the image above).

Cars of the future are all about software, and Carlos emphasized:

We have clear strategic vision. We are moving fast and refreshing our software systems. Starting in 2024 there will be three new software stacks.

He introduced Linda Jackson, who is CEO of Peugot. The whole time that I lived in France I drove an over ten-year old Peugot 104. That was the generation before the iconic Peugot 205. The 205 was very popular, and my real-estate agent told me that she had had hers stolen twice, from inside a locked garage.

Anyway, apparently all our car controls are going to change, at least with Peugot. Peugot is "attractive, tech-forward, and human-centric". She introduced the new car controls called Hypersquare, consisting of four controls as in the above image.

This is gaming in real life

This replaces the steering wheel (but I don't think the pedals). Cars are more interesting than chips for keynotes because you can drive one onto the stage. She had an Inception concept car that she said:

Like its name, Inception is the start of something new, hitting the road from 2026.

Carlos returned to point out that Americans are very into trucks and SUVs. Stellantis has Jeep and RAM. Jeep is going all electric. In fact Stellantis is planning for 50% BEV (battery electric vehicle) in the US by 2030, and 100% BEV in Europe by 2030. That means there will be 75 new BEVs from Stellantis by the end of the decade.

We will master the entire value chain from batteries to electric motoers. We have five megafactories planned for batteries. We have 2X the density with a new battery chemistry using less cobalt.

He had pictures of big trucks that will be driven by Hydrogen. I should point out two problems with hydrogen that I think tend to get glossed over. First, it is very different to contain it because the molecules are so small, and you cannot use steel pipes. Second, the only economic way to make hydrogen is from methane, so if you are concerned about carbon emissions, this does not help since the process produces hydrogen, but also carbon-dioxide.

RAM Truck brand CEO Mike Koval came out and introduced the latest RAM concept truck. Of course it is electric, and has lots of cargo space. It can even follow you around on, say, a farm as you feed your animals.

CES in the Convention Center

I will attend CES in the LVCC so watch for a post about what's going on all over the show floor sometime next week.

 

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