According to Bloomberg, Arm Holding PLC, the holding company behind the Arm instruction set and Arm chip designs, just issued a 60-day notice period of license retirement to Qualcomm, its long-time partner. The UK-based ISA provider has notified Qualcomm that it will cancel the Arm ISA architectural license agreement after the contract-mandated 60-day notice. The issues between the two arose in 2022, just a year after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and its IP. Arm filed a lawsuit claiming that the reason was "Qualcomm attempted to transfer Nuvia licenses without Arm's consent, which is a standard restriction under Arm's license agreements." To transfer Nuvia core licensing, Qualcomm would need to ask Arm first and create a new licensing deal.

The licensing reworking came just in time when Qualcomm experienced its biggest expansion. The new Snapdragon 8 Elite is being used in the mobile sector, the Snapdragon X Elite/Plus is being used in Copilot+ PCs, and the automotive sector is also getting the new Snapdragon Cockpit/Ride Elite chipsets. Most of that is centered around Nuvia Oryon core IP, a high-performance, low-power design. Arm's representatives declined to comment on this move for Bloomberg, while a Qualcomm spokesman noted that the British company was trying to "strong-arm a longtime partner."

In a statement for Tom's Hardware, Intel has announced a two-year warranty extension for its 13th and 14th Generation Core processors. This decision comes in response to widespread reports of crashes and instability affecting a broad range of models, from high-end flagship chips to mid-range offerings. The extension effectively increases the standard warranty period from three to five years for most boxed processors, with even the limited-edition models seeing an increase from one to three years. This move aims to reassure customers and mitigate concerns about potential long-term damage to affected chips. Intel has identified excessive voltage as the root cause of the problem, which has led to unexpected system crashes and blue screens of death (BSODs), particularly during gaming and other demanding tasks.

The company plans to release a microcode update by mid-August to prevent further degradation in unaffected processors. However, this update will not resolve issues in chips that have already experienced problems, and users with malfunctioning processors will need to seek replacements. The tech giant has faced criticism for its delayed response to the issue, which has plagued users for months. In its statement, Intel also addressed concerns about Via Oxidation, clarifying that while this separate issue was discovered in 2022, it is not the cause of the current instability problems. The company claims to have implemented fixes and enhanced screening procedures for Via Oxidation by early 2023, with affected chips reportedly removed from the supply chain by early 2024.

Just a few months after hiring Ben Skeggs, a lead maintainer of the open-source NVIDIA GPU driver for Linux kernel, NVIDIA has announced a complete transition to open-source GPU kernel modules in its upcoming R560 driver release for Linux. This decision comes two years after the company's initial foray into open-source territory with the R515 driver in May 2022. The tech giant began focusing on data center compute GPUs, while GeForce and Workstation GPU support remained in the alpha stages. Now, after extensive development and optimization, NVIDIA reports that its open-source modules have achieved performance parity with, and in some cases surpassed, their closed-source counterparts. This transition brings a host of new capabilities, including heterogeneous memory management support, confidential computing features, and compatibility with NVIDIA's Grace platform's coherent memory architectures.

The move to open-source is expected to foster greater collaboration within the Linux ecosystem and potentially lead to faster bug fixes and feature improvements. However, not all GPUs will be compatible with the new open-source modules. While cutting-edge platforms like NVIDIA Grace Hopper and Blackwell will require open-source drivers, older GPUs from the Maxwell, Pascal, or Volta architectures must stick with proprietary drivers. NVIDIA has developed a detection helper script to guide driver selection for users who are unsure about compatibility. The shift also brings changes to NVIDIA's installation processes. The default driver version for most installation methods will now be the open-source variant. This affects package managers with the CUDA meta package, run file installations and even Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC is reportedly planning to increase its wafer prices by up to 10% in 2025, according to a Morgan Stanley note cited by investor Eric Jhonsa. The move comes as demand for cutting-edge processors in smartphones, PCs, AI accelerators, and HPC continues to surge. Industry insiders reveal that TSMC's state-of-the-art 4 nm and 5 nm nodes, used for AI and HPC customers such as AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel, could see up to 10% price hikes. This increase would push the cost of 4 nm-class wafers from $18,000 to approximately $20,000, representing a significant 25% rise since early 2021 for some clients and an 11% rise from the last price hike. Talks about price hikes with major smartphone manufacturers like Apple have proven challenging, but there are indications that modest price increases are being accepted across the industry. Morgan Stanley analysts project a 4% average selling price increase for 3 nm wafers in 2025, which are currently priced at $20,000 or more per wafer.

Mature nodes like 16 nm are unlikely to see price increases due to sufficient capacity. However, TSMC is signaling potential shortages in leading-edge capacity to encourage customers to secure their allocations. Adding to the industry's challenges, advanced chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging prices are expected to rise by 20% over the next two years, following previous increases in 2022 and 2023. TSMC aims to boost its gross margin to 53-54% by 2025, anticipating that customers will absorb these additional costs. The impact of these price hikes on end-user products remains uncertain. Competing foundries like Intel and Samsung may seize this opportunity to offer more competitive pricing, potentially prompting some chip designers to consider alternative manufacturing options. Additionally, TSMC's customers could reportedly be unable to secure their capacity allocation without "appreciating TSMC's value."

Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has confirmed that the upcoming 18A process of the Panther Lake CPU generation is on schedule for a mid-2025 release, which aligns with the initial projection. This development marks a significant milestone in the company's ongoing efforts to integrate AI capabilities into its processors. The mid-2025 release date is expected to follow the debut of Intel's Arrow Lake process in late 2024 or early 2025, a release that holds the promise of significant advancements in AI computing. During Intel's Q1 2024 Quarterly Results, Gelsinger expressed confidence in the company's AI capabilities, stating that the Core Ultra platform currently delivers leadership AI performance and that the next-generation platforms, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, will launch later this year, tripling AI performance. He also mentioned that the Panther Lake generation, set to release in 2025, will grow AI performance up to an additional 2x.

The Panther Lake generation represents the culmination of three generations of work in a short time and is expected to continue Intel's iterative approach. This transition is marked by a shift from a hybrid architecture, a combination of different types of processors, to a disaggregated die, where different components of the processor are separated, as AI computing becomes increasingly prominent. This strategic move is aimed at optimizing AI performance and flexibility. This marks the third generation of the Intel Core Ultra series, following Ultra 100 (Meteor Lake), Ultra 200 (Arrow Lake), and Lunar Lake (200V). Intel's release strategy mirrors the pattern set by the Hybrid Architecture, with Alder Lake debuting in 2021, followed by Raptor Lake in 2022, and a refreshed Raptor Lake released last year to bridge the gap until LGA 1851 was ready. However, Intel's roadmap has seen adjustments in the past, such as the initial promise of an Arrow Lake release before the end of 2024, which was later retracted. The mid-2025 release of Panther Lake aligns with rumors of Arrow Lake's late 2024 or early 2025 debut, suggesting that the 18A process CPU generation could debut several months after Arrow Lake.

Once trusted as the staple of technology journalism, the website CNET has been publically demoted to Untrusted Sources on Wikipedia. CNET has faced public criticism since late 2022 for publishing AI-generated articles without disclosing humans did not write them. This practice has culminated in CNET being demoted from Trusted to Untrusted Sources on Wikipedia, following extensive debates between Wikipedia editors. CNET's reputation first declined in 2020 when it was acquired by publisher Red Ventures, who appeared to prioritize advertising and SEO traffic over editorial standards. However, the AI content scandal accelerated CNET's fall from grace. After discovering the AI-written articles, Wikipedia editors argued that CNET should be removed entirely as a reliable source, citing Red Ventures' pattern of misinformation.

One editor called for targeting Red Ventures as "a spam network." AI-generated content poses familiar challenges to spam bots - machine-created text that is frequently low quality or inaccurate. However, CNET claims it has stopped publishing AI content. This controversy highlights rising concerns about AI-generated text online. Using AI-generated stories might seem interesting as it lowers the publishing time; however, these stories usually rank low in the Google search index, as the engine detects and penalizes AI-generated content probably because Google's AI detection algorithms used the same training datasets as models used to write the text. Lawsuits like The New York Times v. OpenAI also allege AIs must scrape vast amounts of text without permission. As AI capabilities advance, maintaining information quality on the web will require increased diligence. But demoting once-reputable sites like CNET as trusted sources when they disregard ethics and quality control helps set a necessary precedent. Below, you can see the Wikipedia table about CNET.

The artificial intelligence boom is driving a sharp rise in electricity use across the United States, catching utilities and regulators off guard. In northern Virginia's "data center alley," demand is so high that the local utility temporarily halted new data center connections in 2022. Nation-wide, electricity consumption at data centers alone could triple by 2030 to 390 TeraWatt Hours. Add in new electric vehicle battery factories, chip plants, and other clean tech manufacturing spurred by federal incentives, and demand over the next five years is forecast to rise at 1.5%—the fastest rate since the 1990s. Unable to keep pace, some utilities are scrambling to revise projections and reconsider previous plans of closing fossil fuel plants even as the Biden administration pushes for more renewable energy. Some older coal power plans will stay online, until the grid adds more power production capacity. The result could be increased emissions in the near term and risks of rolling blackouts if infrastructure continues lagging behind demand.

The situation is especially dire in Virginia, the world's largest data center hub. The state's largest utility, Dominion Energy, was forced to pause new data center connections for three months last year due to surging demand in Loudoun County. Though connections have resumed, Dominion expects load growth to almost double over the next 15 years. With data centers, EV factories, and other power-hungry tech continuing rapid expansion, experts warn the US national electricity grid is poorly equipped to handle the spike. Substantial investments in new transmission lines and generation are urgently needed to avoid businesses being turned away or blackouts in some regions. Though many tech companies aim to power operations with clean energy, factories are increasingly open to any available power source.

Global semiconductor capacity is expected to increase 6.4% in 2024 to top the 30 million *wafers per month (wpm) mark for the first time after rising 5.5% to 29.6 wpm in 2023, SEMI announced today in its latest quarterly World Fab Forecast report.

The 2024 growth will be driven by capacity increases in leading-edge logic and foundry, applications including generative AI and high-performance computing (HPC), and the recovery in end-demand for chips. The capacity expansion slowed in 2023 due to softening semiconductor market demand and the resulting inventory correction.

International Data Corporation (IDC) has upgraded its Semiconductor Market Outlook by calling a bottom and return to growth that accelerates next year. IDC raised its September 2023 revenue outlook from $518.8 billion to $526.5 billion in a new forecast. Revenue expectations for 2024 were also raised from $625.9 billion to $632.8 billion as IDC believes the U.S. market will remain resilient from a demand standpoint and China will begin recovering by the second half of 2024 (2H24).

IDC sees better semiconductor growth visibility as the long inventory correction subsides in two of the largest market segments: PCs and smartphones. Automotive and Industrials elevated inventory levels are expected to return to normal levels in 2H24 as electrification continues to drive semiconductor content over the next decade. Technology and large flagship product introductions will drive more semiconductor content and value across market segments in 2024 through 2026, including the introduction of AI PCs and AI Smartphones next year and a much-needed improvement in memory ASPs and DRAM bit volume.

TrendForce has issued its latest findings, indicating that the global SSD market has rectified its supply and demand dynamics in 2022, following a resolution in the shortage of master control ICs that had hampered the market in 2021. Despite the normalization of supply, global SSD shipments witnessed a decline, with only 114 million units shipped in 2022—a 10.7% decrease from the prior year.

The top three SSD shipment leaders of 2022 were Kingston, ADATA, and Lexar, with Kingston and ADATA maintaining solid advantages and experiencing growth in market share over 2021. Lexar's growth was attributed to an aggressive push for revenue in anticipation of going public. Kimtigo, in 2022, made significant strides in expanding into industrial control and OEM markets, which in turn boosted its shipment volume and market share. Netac maintained its competitive edge in the SSD market alongside securing several government orders in the enterprise SSD sector, keeping its market share and ranking consistent with the previous year.

TrendForce reports that consumer appetite for electronic products took a hit from high inflation, with global DRAM module sales in 2022 reaching US$17.3 billion—a 4.6% YoY decline. Revenue performance varied significantly among module makers due to the different domains they supply.

TrendForce's data indicated that the top five memory suppliers in 2022 accounted for 90% of total sales, with the top ten collectively capturing 96% of global market revenue. Kingston maintained its dominant market share of 78%. Even with a slight revenue dip, it held steadfast to its position as the global leader. Despite poor end-market demand, Kingston's robust brand scale, along with its comprehensive product supply chain, limited its revenue decline to a modest 5.3%, keeping it firmly at the top of market share rankings.

According to the editorial blog post published on the Samsung blog by SangJoon Hwang, Executive Vice President and Head of the DRAM Product & Technology Team at Samsung Electronics, we have information that High-Bandwidth Memory 4 (HBM4) is coming in 2025. In the recent timeline of HBM development, we saw the first appearance of HBM memory in 2015 with the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X. The second-generation HBM2 appeared with NVIDIA Tesla P100 in 2016, and the third-generation HBM3 saw the light of the day with NVIDIA Hopper GH100 GPU in 2022. Currently, Samsung has developed 9.8 Gbps HBM3E memory, which will start sampling to customers soon.

However, Samsung is more ambitious with development timelines this time, and the company expects to announce HBM4 in 2025, possibly with commercial products in the same calendar year. Interestingly, the HBM4 memory will have some technology optimized for high thermal properties, such as non-conductive film (NCF) assembly and hybrid copper bonding (HCB). The NCF is a polymer layer that enhances the stability of micro bumps and TSVs in the chip, so memory solder bump dies are protected from shock. Hybrid copper bonding is an advanced semiconductor packaging method that creates direct copper-to-copper connections between semiconductor components, enabling high-density, 3D-like packaging. It offers high I/O density, enhanced bandwidth, and improved power efficiency. It uses a copper layer as a conductor and oxide insulator instead of regular micro bumps to increase the connection density needed for HBM-like structures.

Jon Peddie Research reports the growth of the global PC-based graphics processor unit (GPU) market reached 61.6 million units in Q2'23 and PC CPU shipments decreased by -23% year over year. Overall, GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of 3.70% during 2022-2026 and reach an installed base of 2,998 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPUs) in the PC will grow to reach a level of 32%.

Year to year, total GPU shipments, which include all platforms and all types of GPUs, decreased by -27%, desktop graphics decreased by -36%, and notebooks decreased by -23%.

International Data Corporation (IDC) today published its second forecast for the worldwide quantum computing market, projecting customer spend for quantum computing to grow from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $7.6 billion in 2027. This represents a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.1%. The forecast includes base quantum computing as a service as well as enabling and adjacent quantum computing as a service.

The new forecast is considerably lower than IDC's previous quantum computing forecast, which was published in 2021. In the interim, customer spend for quantum computing has been negatively impacted by several factors, including: slower than expected advances in quantum hardware development, which have delayed potential return on investment; the emergence of other technologies such as generative AI, which are expected to offer greater near-term value for end users; and an array of macroeconomic factors, such as higher interest and inflation rates and the prospect of an economic recession.

Corsair Gaming, Inc. ("Corsair" or the "Company"), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers, streamers, content-creators, and gaming PC builders, today announced financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2023, and reiterated its financial outlook for the full year 2023.

Second Quarter 2023 Select Financial Metrics

• Net revenue was $325.4 million compared to $283.9 million in the second quarter of 2022, an increase of 14.6%. Gaming components and systems segment net revenue was $246.7 million compared to $194.9 million in the second quarter of 2022, while Gamer and creator peripherals segment net revenue was $78.8 million compared to $89.0 million in the second quarter of 2022.
• Net income attributable to common shareholders was $1.1 million, or net income of $0.01 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $59.4 million, or a net loss of $0.62 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2022.
• Adjusted net income was $9.8 million, or net income of $0.09 per diluted share, compared to adjusted net loss of $19.0 million, or a net loss of $0.20 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2022.
• Adjusted EBITDA was $17.8 million, compared to a loss of $11.0 million in the second quarter of 2022.
• Cash and cash equivalents were $184.0 million as of June 30, 2023.

Intel decided to drop the relatively new AVX-512 instruction set for laptop/mobile platforms when it was discovered that it would not work in conjunction with their E-core designs. Alder Lake was the last generation to (semi) support these sets thanks to P-cores agreeing to play nice, albeit with the efficiency side of proceedings disabled (via BIOS settings). Intel chose to fuse off AVX-512 support in production circa early 2022, with AMD picking up the slack soon after and working on the integration of AVX-512 into Zen 4 CPU architecture. The Ryzen 7040 series is the only current generation mobile platform that offers AVX-512 support. Phoronix decided to benchmark a Ryzen 7 7840U against older Intel i7-1165G7 (Tiger Lake) and i7-1065G7 (Ice Lake) SoCs in AVX-512-based workloads.

Team Red's debut foray into AVX-512 was surprisingly performant according to Phoronix's test results—the Ryzen 7 7840U did very well for itself. It outperformed the 1165G7 by 46%, and the older 1065G7 by an impressive 63%. The Ryzen 7 APU was found to attain the highest performance gain with AVX-512 enabled—a 54% performance margin over operating with AVX-512 disabled. In comparison Phoronix found that: "the i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake impact came in at 34% with these AVX-512-heavy benchmarks or 35% with the i7-1065G7 Ice Lake SoC for that generation where AVX-512 on Intel laptops became common."

In July 2022, Intel announced that the company was winding down its Optane division, effectively discontinuing the development of 3D XPoint memory that it has been marketing for a long time. Once viewed as a competitive advantage, the support for Optane has been removed from future platforms. However, Intel has announced plans to extend Optane shipments by another quarter amidst additional stock or significant demand from customers buying Optane DIMMs for their enterprises. Initially set to ship the final Optane Persistent Memory 100-series DIMMs on September 30, Intel extends this date by three months to December 29, 2023.

Intel states, "Customers are recommended to secure additional Optane units at the specified 0.44% annualized failure rate (AFR) for safety stock. Intel will make commercially reasonable efforts to support last time order quantities for Intel Optane Persistent Memory 100 Series."

NVIDIA's compute and AI-oriented H100 GPU is supposedly getting an upgrade. The H100 GPU is NVIDIA's most powerful offering and comes in a few different flavors: H100 PCIe, H100 SXM, and H100 NVL (a duo of two GPUs). Currently, the H100 GPU comes with 80 GB of HBM2E, both in the PCIe and SXM5 version of the card. A notable exception if the H100 NVL, which comes with 188 GB of HBM3, but that is for two cards, making it 94 GB per each. However, we could see NVIDIA enable 94 and 64 GB options for the H100 accelerator soon, as the latest PCI ID Repository shows.

According to the PCI ID Repository listing, two messages are posted: "Kindly help to add H100 SXM5 64 GB into 2337." and "Kindly help to add H100 SXM5 94 GB into 2339." These two messages indicate that NVIDIA could prepare its H100 in more variations. In September 2022, we saw NVIDIA prepare an H100 variation with 120 GB of memory, but that still isn't official. These PCIe IDs could just come from engineering samples that NVIDIA is testing in the labs, and these cards could never appear on any market. So, we have to wait and see how it plays out.

According to the report from Reuters, Acer has apparently continued shipment of computer hardware to Russia, despite the firm supposedly suspending its operations in the country. With the war in Ukraine, on April 8 of, 2022, Acer published a statement: "Due to recent developments, Acer has decided to suspend its business in Russia." However, today Reuters reports that it has gained access to documents/data of customs that confirm that Acer has shipped computer hardware worth at least 70.4 million US Dollars between the period of April 8, 2022, and March 31, 2023.

Interestingly, Acer is a firm headquartered in Taiwan. However, Switzerland-based Acer Sales International SA entity shipped these units to Russia, thus not violating any Taiwanese sanctions to Russia that are in place. When asked about these shipments, Acer in Taiwan responded: "We strictly adhere to applicable international regulations and trade laws regarding exports to Russia." Additionally, the company stated that the Swiss subsidiary "had not shipped any laptops or desktops to Russia since April 8 last year." Still, instead, it had supplied a "limited number of displays and accessories to the Russian market for civilian daily use while ensuring compliance with international sanctions."

Lenovo Group today announced full-year results, reporting Group revenue of US$62 billion and net income of US$1.6 billion, or US$1.9 billion on a non-Hong Kong Financial Reporting Standards (HKFRS) [1] basis. Profitability was stable with gross margin and operating margin both delivering 18-year highs and non-HKFRS net margin flat year-to-year. While Group revenue was impacted due to the softness in the device market, revenue from non-PC businesses reached a fiscal year high of nearly 40%, fueled by Lenovo's diversified growth engines of Solutions and Services Group (SSG) and Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) growing revenue to record highs of US$6.7 billion and US$9.8 billion respectively, up 22% and 37% year-on-year.

After a year of industry and global uncertainties, Lenovo sees positive signs of the market stabilizing. The Group expects the entire PC and smart devices market to resume year-to-year growth in the second half of 2023, and for the IT services market to resume relatively high growth - together these will drive the total IT market in 2023 back to moderate growth. In the mid-to-long term, digital and intelligent transformation will continue to accelerate, leading to a big growth potential for cloud and computing infrastructure.

In its recent Second Quarter of the Fiscal Year 2023 conference, Synopsys issued interesting information about the recent moves of chip developers and their usage of artificial intelligence. As the call notes, over 200+ chips have been taped out using Synopsys DSO.ai place-and-route (PnR) tool, making it a successful commercially proven AI chip design tool. The DSO.ai uses AI to optimize the placement and routing of the chip's transistors so that the layout is compact and efficient with regard to the strict timing constraints of the modern chip. According to Aart J. de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, "By the end of 2022, adoption, including 9 of the top 10 semiconductor vendors have moved forward at great speed with 100 AI-driven commercial tape-outs. Today, the tally is well over 200 and continues to increase at a very fast clip as the industry broadly adopts AI for design from Synopsys."

This is an interesting fact that means that customers are seeing the benefits of AI-assisted tools like DSO.ai. However, the company is not stopping there, and a whole suite of tools is getting an AI makeover. "We unveiled the industry's first full-stack AI-driven EDA suite, sydnopsys.ai," noted the CEO, adding that "Specifically, in parallel to second-generation advances in DSO.ai we announced VSO.ai, which stands for verification space optimization; and TSO.ai, test space optimization. In addition, we are extending AI across the design stack to include analog design and manufacturing." Synopsys' partners in this include NVIDIA, TSMC, MediaTek, Renesas, and IBM Research, all of which used AI-assisted tools for chip design efforts. A much wider range of industry players is expected to adopt these tools as chip design costs continue to soar as we scale the nodes down. With future 3 nm GPU costing an estimated $1.5 billion, 40% of that will account for software, and Synopsys plans to take a cut in that percentage.

Three years ago, Intel announced a goal to increase global annual spending with diverse suppliers to $2 billion by 2030. We are proud to announce we reached $2.2 billion in diverse supplier spending in 2022, eight years ahead of schedule. This $2.2 billion represents nearly 15 times the annual total when our supplier diversity program launched in 2015 and double our 2019 results.

According to data from Mercury Research posted on Twitter, AMD has gained CPU market share against Intel over the past year. AMD has gone from a 27.7 percent market share in Q1 2022 to a 34.6 percent market share in the first quarter of 2023, which is an increase of 6.9 percent, whereas Intel has gone from 72.3 percent to 65.4 percent, still placing Intel at almost two thirds of the market of x86 CPUs. It should be noted that this includes all types of CPUs, but it's unclear if it includes the chips AMD sells to Microsoft and Sony for their respective consoles.

A separate screenshot posted by @firstadopter details server CPU market share, excluding IoT, although it's unclear what that means in this specific case. Here, AMD has gained 6.3 percent market share, but the company has only gone from a meager 11.6 percent last year, to 18 percent this year, with Intel holding a massive 82 percent market share. AMD's gain here was lower than overall, but it shows that larger corporations are starting to adopt more and more AMD hardware on the server side, where in all fairness, AMD has taken something of a lead over Intel when it comes to the maximum amount of CPU cores each company can offer, even though the per core performance still lags behind Intel to a degree. It'll be interesting to see if AMD can maintain its momentum in market share gain once Intel launches more competitive products later this year, especially in the server market space.

MediaTek has been unveiling some new mobile chipsets this week, but keen-eyed news outlets have noticed that the Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company is simply renaming and relaunching hardware from last year, with some tweaks here and there. Today's announcement of the Dimensity 8050 SoC was almost immediately questioned - GSMArena noticed that this "new" model was a near dead ringer, in terms of specifications, for last year's mid-range Dimensity 1300 and 1200 smartphone chipsets. There are some upgrades in terms of memory bandwidth, and MediaTek boasts that the 8050 has been updated with its sixth generation HyperEngine technology.

Alarm bells were ringing when folks realized that the much older Dimensity 8000 SoC was built on a 5 nm process - the supposedly superior (in terms of model number hierarchy) 8005 is a 6 nm chip. Last week the mobile specialist site also spotted that MediaTek's Dimensity 7050 chipset was yet another example of the smartphone tech company rolling out a "rebranding phase." The news outlet pointed out that this newly revealed mobile CPU was just a renamed Dimensity 1080 - with the original model having hit the market in November 2022. MediaTek seems to renaming several older chipsets based on TSMC's 6 nm process - it is possible that this effort is part of a company drive to clear surplus silicon.

Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly known as Facebook) has begun implementing widespread staff layoffs across multiple company departments. The cutback operation was announced last month, with the social media giant targeting 10,000 positions (throughout 2023) in an effort to become more efficient. 13,000 staffers were released from their jobs last year, representing 13% of the workforce at the time - advertising revenues had declined in 2022 and Meta said that the change was required in order to navigate economic downturns. A repeat of that sentiment has been issued this year and two internal games development studios have been affected quite heavily by the latest layoff initiative, reports suggest. Ready at Dawn and Downpour Interactive are getting a lot of press coverage - due to former staffers divulging details of Meta's cutbacks via social media.

Thomas Griebel, a (now former) Senior engine programmer at Ready at Dawn, took to Twitter two days ago and made claim that: "One third of the studio was laid off today, including the studio head." He also observes that the studio has been shrinking over time: "Also lost some really great people just due to attrition. Think we're down almost (down to a) half since when I started in August (2022)." Former Ready at Dawn technical designer Colin McInerney has also released a string of information about co-workers being let go. Michael Tsarouhas (senior designer) and Daan van Zelst (level designer) have confirmed that they were released from their roles at Downpour Interactive.