EU competition authorities are not conducting a formal investigation into chips used for artificial intelligence, the European Commission announced on Monday, October 2.

“The Commission is not conducting a formal investigation into the matter you refer to,” an EU executive spokesman said in an email to Reuters, which asked for comment on the rumors.

A few days earlier, the French antitrust authority raided Nvidia on suspicion of anti-competitive practices. Nvidia declined to comment on the situation after the French raid.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that the EU’s competition watchdog was informally gathering views on potentially unfair practices in the GPU market.

Samsung’s contract chip manufacturing division has a new customer in the form of a Canadian startup called Tenstorrent, which develops chips with artificial intelligence technologies.

Tenstorrent is among a number of startups trying to compete with Nvidia, which dominates the AI ​​chip market. The company makes chips for data centers, but is also working to supply other markets, including automotive.

As part of the deal, Tenstorrent plans to use one of Samsung’s advanced manufacturing processes (4nm) to produce chips. Some of Tenstorrent’s chips are built using technology known as RISC-V, an open-source semiconductor architecture that competes with Arm and x86. However, the chip that Samsung will produce is called Quasar and is not based on RISC-V technology.

“Tenstorrent’s goal is to develop high-performance computing and deliver those solutions to customers around the world,” Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller said in a statement.

These pulsars are special in the sense that they periodically emit a pulse as they spin, which is why they are known as periodic radio frequency emission sources (RRATs).

Pulsars, or rapidly rotating neutron stars, are formed from the remains of the cores of massive stars after supernova explosions. Their high density and rapid rotation make them an ideal laboratory for studying the laws of physics under extreme conditions.

Unlike most pulsars, which emit pulses continuously, RRAT is difficult to find in normal pulsar search mode. They are isolated pulse by pulse from a huge amount of data obtained using a highly sensitive radio telescope.

Since the discovery of the first RRAT in 2006, radio telescopes around the world have discovered more than 160 RRATs. Detailed studies of several faint pulsars indicate that they are pulsars with special physical properties in the magnetosphere, and constitute about 5% of the total number of pulsars.

The Beijing Astronomical Observatory (NAOC) research team developed a new system for searching for individual pulses and systematically searched for individual pulses in data obtained from the 2020 FAST Galactic Pulsar Snapshot Survey.

The 76 RRATs discovered by the new method account for about 12% of the total number of pulsars discovered in the FAST study, according to Han Jinglin, a leading researcher in the field. This suggests that there are more such periodically emitting pulsars than previously thought.

To better understand the physical properties of RRATs, scientists also used FAST to observe 59 known RRATs detected by international telescopes. The polarization signals of these periodically emitted pulses detected by FAST indicate that they are emitted from the same region of the neutron star’s magnetosphere as normal pulses, according to the study.

“The study has important implications for understanding the dense remnants of dead stars in the Milky Way and their emission characteristics,” Han said, adding that highly sensitive radio telescopes such as FAST are the best tools for detecting such amazing pulsars.