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AMD to end Threadripper Pro 5000 drought for non-Lenovo PCs

As the House of Zen kills off consumer-friendly non-Pro TR chips

Dylan Martin Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 23:00 UTC

A drought of AMD's latest Threadripper workstation processors is finally coming to an end for PC makers who faced shortages earlier this year all while Hong Kong giant Lenovo enjoyed an exclusive supply of the chips.
AMD announced on Monday it will expand availability of its Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 CPUs to "leading" system integrators in July and to DIY builders through retailers later this year. This announcement came nearly two weeks after Dell announced it would release a workstation with Threadripper Pro 5000 in the summer.
The coming wave of Threadripper Pro 5000 workstations will mark an end to the exclusivity window Lenovo had with the high-performance chips since they launched in April.

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Intel is running rings around AMD and Arm at the edge

What will it take to loosen the x86 giant's edge stranglehold?

Tobias Mann Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 14:30 UTC

Analysis Supermicro launched a wave of edge appliances using Intel's newly refreshed Xeon-D processors last week. The launch itself was nothing to write home about, but a thought occurred: with all the hype surrounding the outer reaches of computing that we call the edge, you'd think there would be more competition from chipmakers in this arena.
So where are all the AMD and Arm-based edge appliances?
A glance through the catalogs of the major OEMs – Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Inspur, Supermicro – returned plenty of results for AMD servers, but few, if any, validated for edge deployments. In fact, Supermicro was the only one of the five vendors that even offered an AMD-based edge appliance – which used an ageing Epyc processor. Hardly a great showing from AMD. Meanwhile, just one appliance from Inspur used an Arm-based chip from Nvidia.

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Intel says Sapphire Rapids CPU delay will help AMD catch up

Our window to have leading server chips again is narrowing, exec admits

Dylan Martin Wed 8 Jun 2022 // 20:55 UTC

While Intel has bagged Nvidia as a marquee customer for its next-generation Xeon Scalable processor, the x86 giant has admitted that a broader rollout of the server chip has been delayed to later this year.
Sandra Rivera, Intel's datacenter boss, confirmed the delay of the Xeon processor, code-named Sapphire Rapids, in a Tuesday panel discussion at the BofA Securities 2022 Global Technology Conference. Earlier that day at the same event, Nvidia's CEO disclosed that the GPU giant would use Sapphire Rapids, and not AMD's upcoming Genoa chip, for its flagship DGX H100 system, a reversal from its last-generation machine.
Intel has been hyping up Sapphire Rapids as a next-generation Xeon CPU that will help the chipmaker become more competitive after falling behind AMD in technology over the past few years. In fact, Intel hopes it will beat AMD's next-generation Epyc chip, Genoa, to the market with industry-first support for new technologies such as DDR5, PCIe Gen 5 and Compute Express Link.

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Intel demands $625m in interest from Europe on overturned antitrust fine

Chip giant still salty

Tobias Mann Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 19:21 UTC

Having successfully appealed Europe's €1.06bn ($1.2bn) antitrust fine, Intel now wants €593m ($623.5m) in interest charges.
In January, after years of contesting the fine, the x86 chip giant finally overturned the penalty, and was told it didn't have to pay up after all. The US tech titan isn't stopping there, however, and now says it is effectively seeking damages for being screwed around by Brussels.
According to official documents [PDF] published on Monday, Intel has gone to the EU General Court for “payment of compensation and consequential interest for the damage sustained because of the European Commissions refusal to pay Intel default interest."

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TSMC may surpass Intel in quarterly revenue for first time

Fab frenemies: x86 giant set to give Taiwanese chipmaker more money as it revitalizes foundry business

Dylan Martin Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 17:01 UTC

In yet another sign of how fortunes have changed in the semiconductor industry, Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC is expected to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue for the first time.
Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance.
The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC.

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Intel withholds Ohio fab ceremony over US chip subsidies inaction

$20b factory construction start date unchanged – but the x86 giant is not happy

Dylan Martin Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 23:19 UTC

Intel has found a new way to voice its displeasure over Congress' inability to pass $52 billion in subsidies to expand US semiconductor manufacturing: withholding a planned groundbreaking ceremony for its $20 billion fab mega-site in Ohio that stands to benefit from the federal funding.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was tentatively scheduled to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Ohio manufacturing site with state and federal bigwigs on July 22. But, in an email seen by the newspaper, the x86 giant told officials Wednesday it was indefinitely delaying the festivities "due in part to uncertainty around" the stalled Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.
That proposed law authorizes the aforementioned subsidies for Intel and others, and so its delay is holding back funding for the chipmakers.

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Intel demos multi-wavelength laser array integrated on silicon wafer

Next stop – on-chip optical interconnects?

Dan Robinson Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 14:40 UTC

Intel is claiming a significant advancement in its photonics research with an eight-wavelength laser array that is integrated on a silicon wafer, marking another step on the road to on-chip optical interconnects.
This development from Intel Labs will enable the production of an optical source with the required performance for future high-volume applications, the chip giant claimed. These include co-packaged optics, where the optical components are combined in the same chip package as other components such as network switch silicon, and optical interconnects between processors.
According to Intel Labs, its demonstration laser array was built using the company's "300-millimetre silicon photonics manufacturing process," which is already used to make optical transceivers, paving the way for high-volume manufacturing in future. The eight-wavelength array uses distributed feedback (DFB) laser diodes, which apparently refers to the use of a periodically structured element or diffraction grating inside the laser to generate a single frequency output.

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Intel to sell Massachusetts R&D site, once home to its only New England fab

End of another era as former DEC facility faces demolition

Dylan Martin Thu 30 Jun 2022 // 00:00 UTC

As Intel gets ready to build fabs in Arizona and Ohio, the x86 giant is planning to offload a 149-acre historic research and development site in Massachusetts that was once home to the company's only chip manufacturing plant in New England.
An Intel spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday to The Register it plans to sell the property. The company expects to transfer the site to a new owner, a real-estate developer, next summer, whereupon it'll be torn down completely.
The site is located at 75 Reed Rd in Hudson, Massachusetts, between Boston and Worcester. It has been home to more than 800 R&D employees, according to Intel. The spokesperson told us the US giant will move its Hudson employees to a facility it's leasing in Harvard, Massachusetts, about 13 miles away.

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Intel’s CEO shouldn’t be surprised America can’t get CHIPS Act together

Silicon supremo warns he could prioritize expansion in Europe if Congress doesn’t approve subsidies

Dylan Martin Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 19:57 UTC

Comment How serious is Intel about delaying the build-out of its planned $20 billion mega-fab site in Ohio?
It turns out very serious, as Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger made clear on Tuesday, less than a week after his x86 giant delayed the groundbreaking ceremony for the Ohio site to show its displeasure over Congress' inability to pass $52 billion in subsidies to fund American semiconductor manufacturing.
In comments at the Aspen Ideas Festival yesterday, Gelsinger warned Intel would prioritize building factories in Europe over the US if Congress fails to act on the long-stalled chip subsidies bill.

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Intel details advances to make upcoming chips faster, less costly

X86 giant says it’s on track to regaining manufacturing leadership after years of missteps

Dylan Martin Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 02:00 UTC

By now, you likely know the story: Intel made major manufacturing missteps over the past several years, giving rivals like AMD a major advantage, and now the x86 giant is in the midst of an ambitious five-year plan to regain its chip-making mojo.
This week, Intel is expected to detail just how it's going to make chips in the near future that are faster, less costly and more reliable from a manufacturing standpoint at the 2022 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits, which begins on Monday. The Register and other media outlets were given a sneak peek in a briefing last week.
The details surround Intel 4, the manufacturing node previously known as the chipmaker's 7nm process. Intel plans to use the node for products entering the market next year, which includes the compute tiles for the Meteor Lake CPUs for PCs and the Granite Rapids server chips.

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