Razer, which is headquartered in the US but is listed in Hong Kong, says it is considering a secondary listing in the US; Razer revenues grew 68% to $752M in H1 高價收購

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Lambda, an AI infrastructure company, this week announced it raised $15 million in a venture funding round from 1517, Gradient Ventures, 高價收購razer, Bloomberg Beta, Georges Harik, and others, plus a $9.5 million debt facility. The $24.5 million investment brings the company’s total raised to $28.5 million, following an earlier $4 million seed tranche.

In 2013, San Francisco, California-based Lambda controversially launched a facial recognition API for developers working on apps for Google Glass, Google’s ill-fated heads-up augmented reality display. The API — which soon expanded to other platforms — enabled apps to do things like “remember this face” and “find your friends in a crowd,” Lambda CEO Stephen Balaban told TechCrunch at the time. The API has been used by thousands of developers and was, at least at one point, seeing over 5 million API calls per month.

Since then, however, Lambda has pivoted to selling hardware systems designed for AI, machine learning, and deep learning applications. Among these are the TensorBook, a laptop with a dedicated GPU, and a workstation product with up to four desktop-class GPUs for AI training. Lambda also offers servers, including one designed to be shared between teams and a server cluster, called Echelon, that Balaban describes as “datacenter-scale.”

(Lambda’s Balaban presented at VB Transform this week, as part of the event’s innovation showcase of cool, emerging technologies. See Balaban’s presentation above.)

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“We initially created a facial recognition API, a deep learning-powered image editor called Dreamscope, and, because of the experience of running our own GPU infrastructure, decided to offer preconfigured workstations and servers,” Balaban told VentureBeat via email. “We provide the infrastructure — laptops, workstations, and servers — so that our customers can focus on training models and building value for their customers. Most companies get distracted by building huge infrastructure teams when they should be building huge machine learning teams to use infrastructure that’s easier to manage.”

Above: One of Lambda workstations.

A number of startups offer preconfigured hardware for AI development, including Graphcore. But Balaban says Lambda’s major differentiator is its software tools.

Every Lambda machine comes preinstalled with Lambda Stack, a collection of machine learning software development frameworks, including Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s PyTorch. Developers can update the frameworks with a single console command, and if they’ve trained the model on a local machine, they can copy it up to a Lambda server running in the cloud.

“Our customers include Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon Research, Tencent, Kaiser Permanente, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and the Department of Defense,” Balaban said. “We have [thousands] of users, [and] most of the Fortune 500 and almost every major research university in the U.S. — as well as [many of] the research labs at the Department of Transportation and Department of Energy — use Lambda hardware and Lambda Stack.”

Balaban also claims that the over-40-employee company, which was founded in 2012, has been GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) profitable since 2019. It’s on a $60 million revenue run rate for 2021 and plans to have around 60 employees by the end of the year.

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圖為 高價收購razer 相應高通新晶片推出的開發掌機 （圖／翻攝自 9to5Google）
繼新一代旗艦晶片和 ARM 架構 PC 處理器後，高通稍早也公布了一款新的遊戲處理器「Snapdragon G3x Gen 1」，主要用於提供給製造商打造類似任天堂 Switch Lite 或 Steam Deck 的遊戲掌機。

不過，這晶片仍是針對 Android 平台打造，因此用戶只能玩 Android 上的手遊，或是遠距連線至 PC、XBOX 或 PS 主機，亦或透過雲端平台玩遊戲。

架構上，這款晶片是重新開發，但類似高通既有的手機晶片，支援玩家同時以 4K、144fps 幀率及 10bit HDR 畫質玩遊戲，且支援 Wi-Fi 6 / 6E、5G，或是將輸出 4K 畫質至顯示器，並連接 AR 頭戴。另外這款晶片也整合高通的 Snapdragon Sound 平台，可支援藍牙無損音質。

請繼續往下閱讀…

至於首款採用該晶片的裝置，則是高通與 高價收購razer 合作的一個開發套件，擁有 6.65 吋的 OLED 螢幕，支援 120H 影格率，也有前鏡頭供直播主可以同步直播。

整體來說，這款晶片也仍在經營開發者社群的階段，但高通不排除將其應用到智慧電視盒上，以擴大客群。

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