The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build its third-generation, high performance computing (HPC) system, called Kestrel. Named for a falcon with keen eyesight and intelligence, Kestrel's moniker is apropos for its mission—to rapidly advance the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) energy research and development (R&D) efforts to deliver transformative energy solutions to the entire United States.

Installation of the new system will begin in the fall of 2022 in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) data center. Kestrel will complement the laboratory's current supercomputer, Eagle, during the transition. When completed—in early 2023—Kestrel will accelerate energy efficiency and renewable energy research at a pace and scale more than five times greater than Eagle, with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power.

Qualcomm has been in the game of creating SoCs for the PC market with the company's Snapdragon lineup. These processors mainly were beefed-up versions of their mobile designs and were based on the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA). Microsoft has backed this effort by creation Windows-on-Arm (WoA) project that enables the Windows OS to operate on Arm processors. However, up until now, Qualcomm's designs were not very powerful as they represented a relatively moderate approach to the problem and almost made no sense of purchase compared to the standard laptops equipped with x86 processors from AMD and Intel. This is about to change.

According to the news from Investor Day yesterday, Qualcomm is preparing high-performance Arm SoCs for the PC market. The company has recently acquired Nuvia Inc., a startup focused on creating novel IPs based on Arm ISA. And this is what Qualcomm will use in building its next-generation PC processors. As the company plans, in August of 2022, it should start sampling OEM partners with these new chips, and we will be seeing them in consumers' hands in early 2023. If everything goes as planned, this should represent direct competition to AMD, Intel, and now Apple in the high-end SoC market. After PCs, the company plans to tackle datacenter, mobile, and automotive market.

IBM today announced its new 127-quantum bit (qubit) 'Eagle' processor at the IBM Quantum Summit 2021, its annual event to showcase milestones in quantum hardware, software, and the growth of the quantum ecosystem. The 'Eagle' processor is a breakthrough in tapping into the massive computing potential of devices based on quantum physics. It heralds the point in hardware development where quantum circuits cannot be reliably simulated exactly on a classical computer. IBM also previewed plans for IBM Quantum System Two, the next generation of quantum systems.

Quantum computing taps into the fundamental quantum nature of matter at subatomic levels to offer the possibility of vastly increased computing power. The fundamental computational unit of quantum computing is the quantum circuit, an arrangement of qubits into quantum gates and measurements. The more qubits a quantum processor possesses, the more complex and valuable the quantum circuits that it can run.

IDC expects the semiconductor market to grow by 17.3% in 2021 versus 10.8% in 2020. According to IDC, the industry will see normalization and balance by the middle of 2022, with a potential for overcapacity in 2023 as larger scale capacity expansions begin to come online towards the end of 2022. Growth is driven by mobile phones, notebooks, servers, automotive, smart home, gaming, wearables, and Wi-Fi access points, with increased memory pricing. IC shortages are also expected to continue easing through 4Q21 as capacity additions accelerate.

"The semiconductor content story is intact and not only does it benefit the semiconductor companies, but the unit volume growth in many of the markets that they serve will also continue to drive very good growth for the semiconductor market," says Mario Morales, Group Vice President, Enabling Technologies and Semiconductors at IDC.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments of add-in boards increased in Q2'21 from last year, while Nvidia increased market share to 80% from last quarter a 0.3% increase as well as 2% year-over-year.. Over $11.8 billion AIBs shipped in the quarter—an increase of 179% year-over-year.

Add-in boards (AIBs) use discrete GPUs (dGPU) with dedicated memory. Desktop PCs, workstations, servers, rendering and mining farms, and scientific instruments use AIBs. Consumers and enterprises buy AIBs from resellers or OEMs. They can be part of a new system or installed as an upgrade to an existing system. Systems with AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry. Entry-level systems use integrated GPUs (iGPU) in CPUs that share slower system memory.

The panic buying of chips persisted in 2Q21 owing to factors such as post-pandemic demand, industry-wide shift to 5G telecom technology, geopolitical tensions, and chronic chip shortages, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Chip demand from ODMs/OEMs remained high, as they were unable to meet shipment targets for various end-products due to the shortage of foundry capacities. In addition, wafers inputted in 1Q21 underwent a price hike and were subsequently outputted in 2Q21. Foundry revenue for the quarter reached US$24.407 billion, representing a 6.2% QoQ increase and yet another record high for the eighth consecutive quarter since 3Q19.

According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, worldwide shipments of PCs are expected to grow 14.2% to 347 million units in 2021. This is down from IDC's May forecast of 18% growth with continued supply chain and logistical challenges cited as the main reasons. The Tablet market is also expected to grow in 2021 but at a much slower pace of 3.4%.

"We continue to believe the PC and tablet markets are supply constrained and that demand is still there," said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "The lengthening of the supply shortages combined with on-going logistical issues are presenting the industry with some big challenges. However, we believe the vast majority of PC demand is non-perishable, especially from the business and education sectors."

While the server industry transitions to the latest generation of processors based on the x86 platform, the Intel Ice Lake and AMD Milan CPUs entered mass production earlier this year and were shipped to certain customers, such as North American CSPs and telecommunication companies, at a low volume in 1Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. These processors are expected to begin seeing widespread adoption in the server market in 3Q21. TrendForce believes that Ice Lake represents a step-up in computing performance from the previous generation due to its higher scalability and support for more memory channels. On the other hand, the new normal that emerged in the post-pandemic era is expected to drive clients in the server sector to partially migrate to the Ice Lake platform, whose share in the server market is expected to surpass 30% in 4Q21.

Worldwide revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, is estimated to grow 15.2% year over year in 2021 to $341.8 billion, according to the latest release of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Tracker. The market is forecast to accelerate further in 2022 with 18.8% growth and remain on track to break the $500 billion mark by 2024. Among the three technology categories, AI Software occupied 88% of the overall AI market. However, in terms of growth, AI Hardware is estimated to grow the fastest in the next several years. From 2023 onwards, AI Services is forecast to become the fastest growing category.

Within the AI Software category, AI Applications has the lion's share at nearly 50% of revenues. In terms of growth, AI Platforms is the strongest with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2%. The slowest will be AI System Infrastructure Software with a five-year CAGR of 14.4% while accounting for roughly 35% of all AI Software revenues. Within the AI Applications market, AI ERM is expected to grow slightly stronger than AI CRM over the next five years. Meanwhile, AI Lifecycle Software is forecast to grow the fastest among the markets within AI Platforms.

Intel's struggles with semiconductor manufacturing have been known for a very long time. Starting from its 10 nm design IP to the latest 7 nm delays, we have seen the company struggle to deliver its semiconductor nodes on time. On the other hand, Intel's competing companies are using 3rd party foundries to manufacture their designs and not worry about the yields of semiconductor nodes. Most of the time, that 3rd party company is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Today, thanks to some reporting from Nikkei Asia, we are learning that Intel is tapping TSMC's capacities to manufacture some of the company's future processors.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, Nikkei notes that: "Intel, America's biggest chipmaker, is working with TSMC on at least two 3-nm projects to design central processing units for notebooks and data center servers in an attempt to regain market share it has lost to Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia over the past few years. Mass production of these chips is expected to begin by the end of 2022 at the earliest." This means that we could expect to see some of the TSMC manufactured Intel processors by the year 2023/2024.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the global leader in feature-rich semiconductor manufacturing, today announced it is expanding its global manufacturing footprint with the construction of a new fab on its Singapore campus. In partnership with the Singapore Economic Development Board and with co-investments from committed customers, GF's more than US $4B (S$5B) investment will play an integral role in meeting the growing demand for the company's industry-leading manufacturing technologies and services to enable companies worldwide to develop and scale their business.

In a virtual groundbreaking ceremony, Singapore Minister for Transport and Minister-in-charge of Trade Relations S. Iswaran and Mubadala Investment Company Managing Director and Group CEO H.E. Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, were joined by: UAE Ambassador to Singapore H.E. Jamal Abdulla Al Suwaidi; Singapore Ambassador to the UAE H.E. Kamal R Vaswani; Singapore Economic Development Board Managing Director Chng Kai Fong; GF Board Chairman Ahmed Yahia Al Idrissi; along with GF executives including CEO Tom Caulfield; CFO David Reeder; SVP and Head of Global Operations KC Ang; SVP of Global Sales Juan Cordovez; VP of Human Resource for APAC and International Fabs Janice Lee; and VP of Technology Development in Singapore Dr. Soh Yun Siah.

NVIDIA has recently announced the company's first standalone Grace CPU that will come out as a product in 2023. NVIDIA has designed Grace on Arm ISA, likely ARM v9, to represent a new way that data centers are built and deliver a whole new level of HPC and AI performance. However, the CPU competition in a data center space is considered one of the hardest markets to enter. Usually, the market is a duopoly between Intel and AMD, which supply x86 processors to server vendors. In the past few years, there have been few Arm CPUs that managed to enter the data canter space, however, NVIDIA is aiming to deliver much more performance and grab a bigger piece of the market.

As a self-proclaimed leader in AI, Intel is facing hard competition from NVIDIA in the coming years. In an interview with Fortune, Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger has talked about NVIDIA and how the company sees the competition between the two. Mr. Gelsinger is claiming that Intel is a leader in CPUs that feature AI acceleration built in the chip and that they are not playing defense, but rather offense against NVIDIA. You can check out the whole quote from the interview below.

NVIDIA today announced its first data center CPU, an Arm-based processor that will deliver 10x the performance of today's fastest servers on the most complex AI and high performance computing workloads.

The result of more than 10,000 engineering years of work, the NVIDIA Grace CPU is designed to address the computing requirements for the world's most advanced applications—including natural language processing, recommender systems and AI supercomputing—that analyze enormous datasets requiring both ultra-fast compute performance and massive memory. It combines energy-efficient Arm CPU cores with an innovative low-power memory subsystem to deliver high performance with great efficiency.

Intel's problems with processor production, especially with newer nodes like 10 nm and 7 nm, have been widely known. The company has not been able to deliver the latest semiconductor process on time and has thus delayed many product launches. However, things are looking to take a complete U-turn and the hell will freeze. During the "Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future" webcast event that happened yesterday, the company made several announcements regarding the 7 nm process and its viability. We have already reported that the company is working on the new Meteor Lake processor lineup for 2023, supposed to be manufactured on the fixed 7 nm node.

However, it seems like Intel will have to tap external capacities to manufacture a part of its processor production. The company has confirmed that it will use an unknown TSMC process to manufacture a part of the 2023 processor lineup. That means that Intel and TSMC have already established the needed capacity and that TSMC has already booked wafer capacity for Intel. This has never happened before, as Intel always kept its processor production under the company roof. However, given that there is a huge demand for new semiconductor processes, Intel has to look at external manufacturing options to keep up with the demand.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the leading provider of semiconductors, is supposed to start 3 nm node production this year. While Samsung, one of the top three leading semiconductor foundries, has been struggling with the pandemic and delayed its 3 nm node for 2022, TSMC has managed to deliver it this year. According to a report, the Taiwanese semiconductor giant is preparing the 3 nm node for the second half of this year, with the correct date of high-volume product unknown. The expected wafer capacity for the new node is supposed to be around 30,000 wafers per month, with capacity expansion expected to hit around 105,000 wafers per month in 2023. This is similar to 5 nm's current numbers of 105,000 wafers per month output, which was 90,000 just a few months ago in Q4 2020. One of the biggest customers of the upcoming 3 nm node is Apple.

SiPearl has this week announced their collaboration with Open-Silicon Research, the India-based entity of OpenFive, to produce the next-generation SoC designed for HPC purposes. SiPearl is a part of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) team and is responsible for designing the SoC itself that is supposed to be a base for the European exascale supercomputer. In the partnership with Open-Silicon Research, SiPearl expects to get a service that will integrate all the IP blocks and help with the tape out of the chip once it is done. There is a deadline set for the year 2023, however, both companies expect the chip to get shipped by Q4 of 2022.

When it comes to details of the SoC, it is called Rhea and it will be a 72-core Arm ISA based processor with Neoverse Zeus cores interconnected by a mesh. There are going to be 68 mesh network L3 cache slices in between all of the cores. All of that will be manufactured using TSMC's 6 nm extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) technology for silicon manufacturing. The Rhea SoC design will utilize 2.5D packaging with many IP blocks stitched together and HBM2E memory present on the die. It is unknown exactly what configuration of HBM2E is going to be present. The system will also see support for DDR5 memory and thus enable two-level system memory by combining HBM and DDR. We are excited to see how the final product looks like and now we wait for more updates on the project.

Samsung has been one of the world's biggest foundries and one of three big players still left in the leading-edge semiconductor process development and manufacturing. However, the Korean giant is always seeking ways to improve its offerings, especially for Western customers. Today, it is reported that Samsung has reportedly talked with regulators in Texas, New York, and Arizona about building a $17 billion silicon manufacturing facility in the United States. The supposed factory is going to be located near Austin, Texas, and is supposed to offer around 1800 jobs. If the deal is approved and Samsung manages to complete the project on time, the factory is supposed to start mass production in Q4 of 2023.

What process is Samsung going to manufacture in the new fab? Well, current speculations are pointing out to the 3 nm node, with Samsung's special GAAFET (Gate All Around FET) technology tied to the new node. The fab is also expected to make use of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography for manufacturing. Samsung already has a facility in the US called S2, however, that will not be upgraded as it is still serving a lot of clients. Instead, the company will build new facilities to accommodate the demand for newer nodes. It is important to note that Samsung will not do any R&D work in the new fab, and the company will only manufacture the silicon there.

Intel has today reported its Q4 2020 earnings disclosing full-year revenue with the current CEO Bob Swan, upcoming new CEO Pat Gelsinger, and Omar Ishrak, Chairman of Intel's board. During the call, company officials have talked about Intel's earnings and most importantly, addressing the current problems about the company's manufacturing part - semiconductor foundries. Incoming Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has talked about the state of the 7 nm node, giving shareholders reassurance and a will to remain in such a position. He has made an argument that he has personally reviewed the progress of the "health and recovery of the 7 nm program."

The 7 nm node has been originally delayed by a full year amid the expectations, and as with the 10 nm node, we have believed that it is going to experience similar issues. However, the incoming CEO has reassured everyone that it is very much improving. The new 7 nm node is on track for 2023 delivery, when Intel is expected to compete with the 3 nm node of TSMC. Firstly, Intel will make a debut of the 7 nm node with client processors scheduled for 1H 2023 arrival, with data center models following that. The company leads have confirmed that Intel will stay true to its internal manufacturing, but have stressed that there will still be a need for some outsourcing to happen.

NVIDIA has launched its GeForce RTX 3000 series of graphics cards based on the Ampere architecture three months ago. However, we are already getting information about the next-generation that the company plans to introduce. In the past, the rumors made us believe that the architecture coming after Ampere is allegedly being called Hopper. Hopper architecture is supposed to bring multi-chip packaging technology and be introduced after Ampere. However, thanks to @kopite7kimi on Twitter, a reliable source of information, we have data that NVIDIA is reportedly working on a monolithic GPU architecture that the company internally refers to as "ADxxx" for its codenames.

The new monolithically-designed Lovelace architecture is going make a debut on the 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, a whole year earlier than Hopper. It is unknown which foundry will manufacture the GPUs, however, both of NVIDIA's partners, TSMC and Samsung, are capable of manufacturing it. The Hopper is expected to arrive sometime in 2023-2024 and utilize the MCM technology, while the Lovelace architecture will appear in 2021-2022. We are not sure if the Hopper architecture will be exclusive to data centers or extend to the gaming segment as well. The Ada Lovelace architecture is supposedly going to be a gaming GPU family. Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician, has appeared on NVIDIA's 2018 GTC t-shirt known as "Company of Heroes", so NVIDIA may have already been using the ADxxx codenames internally for a long time now.

Editor's Note: This is written by Arm vice president and general manager Paul Williamson.

Over the last year, I have been inspired by the innovators who are dreaming up solutions to improve and enrich our daily lives. Tomorrow's mobile applications will be even more imaginative, immersive, and intelligent. To that point, the industry has come such a long way in making this happen. Take app stores for instance - we had the choice of roughly 500 apps when smartphones first began shipping in volume in 2007 and today there are 8.9 million apps available to choose from.

Mobile has transformed from a simple utility to the most powerful, pervasive device we engage with daily, much like Arm-based chips have progressed to more powerful but still energy-efficient SoCs. Although the chip-level innovation has already evolved significantly, more is still required as use cases become more complex, with more AI and ML workloads being processed locally on our devices.

In a report by Phoronix, we have the latest information about Intel's efforts to prepare the next generation of hardware for launch sometime in the future. In the latest Linux kernel patches prepared to go mainline soon, Intel has been adding support for its "Meteor Lake" processor architecture manufactured on Intel's most advanced 7 nm node. While there are no official patches in the mainline kernel yet, the first signs of Meteor Lake are expected to show up in the version 5.10, where we will be seeing the mentions of it. This way Intel is ensuring that the Meteor Lake platform will see the best software support, even though it is a few years away from the launch.

Meteor Lake is expected to debut in late 2022 or 2023, which will replace the Alder Lake platform coming soon. In a similar way to Alder Lake, Meteor Lake will use a hybrid core technology where it will combine small and big cores. The Meteor Lake platform will use the new big "Ocean Cove" design paired with small "Gracemont" cores that will be powering the CPU. This processor is going to be manufactured on Intel's 7 nm node that will be the first 7 nm design from Intel. With all the delays to the node, we are in for an interesting period to see how the company copes with it and how the design IPs turn out.

TSMC has had quite a good time recently. They are having all of their capacity fully booked and the development of new semiconductor nodes is going good. Today, thanks to the report of DigiTimes, we have found out that TSMC is ramping up the production lines to prepare for 3 nm high-volume manufacturing. The 3 nm node is expected to enter HVM in 2022, which is not that far away. In the beginning, the new node is going to be manufactured on 55.000 wafers of 300 mm size, and it is expected to reach as much as 100.000 wafers per month output by 2023. With the accelerated purchase of EUV machines, TSMC already has all of the equipment required for the manufacturing of the latest node. We are waiting to see more details on the 3 nm node as we approach its official release.