Intel's semiconductors nodes have been quite controversial with the arrival of the 10 nm design. Years in the making, the node got delayed multiple times, and only recently did the general public get the first 10 nm chips. Today, at IEEE's annual VLSI Symposium, we get more details about Intel's upcoming nodes, called Intel 4. Previously referred to as a 7 nm process, Intel 4 is the company's first node to use EUV lithography accompanied by various technologies. The first thing when a new process node is discussed is density. Compared to Intel 7, Intel 4 will double the transistor count for the same area and enable 20% higher performing transistors.

Looking at individual transistor size, the new Intel 4 node represents a very tiny piece of silicon that is even smaller than its predecessor. With a Fin Pitch of 30 nm, Contact Gate Poly Pitch of 50 nm between gates, and Minimum Metal Pitch (M0) of 50 nm, the Intel 4 transistor is significantly smaller compared to the Intel 7 cell, listed in the table below. For scaling, Intel 4 provides double the number of transistors in the same area compared to Intel 7. However, this reasoning is applied only to logic. For SRAM, the new PDK provides 0.77 area reduction, meaning that the same SoC built on Intel 7 will not be half the size of Intel 4, as SRAM plays a significant role in chip design. The Intel 7 HP library can put 80 million transistors on a square millimeter, while Intel 4 HP is capable of 160 million transistors per square millimeter.

Based on a report in the Taiwanese media, AMD is quickly becoming a key customer for TSMC and is expected to become its third largest customer in 2023. This is partially due to new orders that AMD has placed with TSMC for its 5 nm node. AMD is said to become TSMC's single largest customer for its 5 nm node in 2023, although it's not clear from the report how large of a share of the 5 nm node AMD will have.

The additional orders are said to be related to AMD's Zen 4 based processors, as well as its upcoming RDNA3 based GPUs. AMD is expected to be reaching a production volume of some 20,000 wafers in the fourth quarter of 2022, although there's no mention of what's expected in 2023. Considering most of AMD's products for the next year or two will all be based on TSMC's 5 nm node, this shouldn't come as a huge surprise though, as AMD has a wide range of new CPU and GPU products coming.

Millions of viewers around the world today watched the world premiere cinematic trailer for Frost Giant Studios' eagerly-anticipated real-time strategy game, Stormgate. Southern California-based Frost Giant Studios was founded in 2020 by Tim Morten and Tim Campbell, veteran game development leaders who helped create some of the most acclaimed and best-selling PC games of all time-as well as some of the most-watched esports-including Blizzard Entertainment's WarCraft III and StarCraft II.

"We are building Stormgate for the real-time strategy community--past, present, and future," said Tim Morten, CEO and production director at Frost Giant Studios. "Our vision is to create a social experience that breaks down the barriers that have kept people away, to welcome back players who have been waiting for the next great RTS, and to prove that the RTS genre can thrive once again."

AMD in its 2022 Financial Analyst Day presentation unveiled its next-generation CDNA3 compute architecture, which will see something we've been expecting for a while—a compute accelerator that has a large number of compute units for scalar processing, and a large number of x86-64 CPU cores based on some future "Zen" microarchitecture, onto a single package. The presence of CPU cores on the package would eliminate the need for the system to have an EPYC or Xeon processor at its head, and clusters of Instinct CDNA3 processors could run themselves without the need for a CPU and its system memory.

The Instinct CDNA3 processor will feature an advanced packaging technology that brings various IP blocks together as chiplets, each based on a node most economical to it, without compromising on its function. The package features stacked HBM memory, and this memory is shared not just by the compute units and x86 cores, but also forms part of large shared memory pools accessible across packages. 4th Generation Infinity Fabric ties it all together.

In 2021 TSMC saw an increase in sales of 24.9 percent in monetary value, but for 2022, the company is expecting this figure to reach somewhere around the 30 percent mark. For this quarter alone, TSMC is expecting a revenue of somewhere between US$17.6 to US$18.2 billion, with a gross margin ending up as high as 58 percent. Despite the positive outlook, TSMC hasn't been doing well on the Taiwanese stock exchange this year, as the company has lost more than a tenth of its value in 2022.

That said, TSMC is pressing forward and will still be spending in excess of US$40 billion in 2023 to expand its production capacity, following the US$40 to US$44 billion it will invest this year. The company isn't overly concerned about inflation at this point in time either, saying it doesn't have a direct impact on the semiconductor industry. TSMC is seeing a slowdown in the consumer chip space, but it's seeing an uptick in business when it comes to EV related ICs. TSMC's production lines are at full utilisation for at least the rest of 2022, but most likely long into 2023.

Jon Peddie Research reports that the global PC-based graphics processor units (GPU) market reached 96 million units in Q1'22 and PC GPUs shipments decreased 6.2% due to disturbances in China, Ukraine, and the pullback from the lockdown elsewhere. However, the fundamentals of the GPU and PC market are solid over the long term, JPR predicts GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of 6.3% during 2022-2026 and reach an installed base of 3.3 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPU) in the PC market will grow to reach a level of 46%.

AMD's overall market share percentage from last quarter increased 0.7%, Intel's market share decreased by -2.4%, and Nvidia's market share increased 1.69%, as indicated in the following chart.

Ayar Labs, the leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, is developing with NVIDIA groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure based on optical I/O technology to meet future demands of AI and high performance computing (HPC) workloads. The collaboration will focus on integrating Ayar Labs' technology to develop scale-out architectures enabled by high-bandwidth, low-latency and ultra-low-power optical-based interconnects for future NVIDIA products. Together, the companies plan to accelerate the development and adoption of optical I/O technology to support the explosive growth of AI and machine learning (ML) applications and data volumes.

Optical I/O uniquely changes the performance and power trajectories of system designs by enabling compute, memory and networking ASICs to communicate with dramatically increased bandwidth, at lower latency, over longer distances and at a fraction of the power of existing electrical I/O solutions. The technology is also foundational to enabling emerging heterogeneous compute systems, disaggregated/pooled designs, and unified memory architectures that are critical to accelerating future data center innovation.

Today we got information that AMD's upcoming Instinct MI300 will be allegedly available as an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). AMD APUs are processors that combine CPU and GPU into a single package. AdoredTV managed to get ahold of a slide that indicates that AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator will also come as an APU option that combines Zen4 CPU cores and CDNA3 GPU accelerator in a single, large package. With technologies like 3D stacking, MCM design, and HBM memory, these Instinct APUs are positioned to be a high-density compute the product. At least six HBM dies are going to be placed in a package, with the APU itself being a socketed design.

The leaked slide from AdoredTV indicates that the first tapeout is complete by the end of the month (presumably this month), with the first silicon hitting AMD's labs in Q3 of 2022. If the silicon turns out functional, we could see these APUs available sometime in the first half of 2023. Below, you can see an illustration of the AMD Instinct MI300 GPU. The APU version will potentially be of the same size with Zen4 and CDNA3 cores spread around the package. As Instinct MI300 accelerator is supposed to use eight compute tiles, we could see different combinations of CPU/GPU tiles offered. As we await the launch of the next-generation accelerators, we are yet to see what SKUs AMD will bring.

Tachyum today launched the world's first universal processor, Prodigy, which unifies the functionality of a CPU, GPU and TPU in a single processor, creating a homogeneous architecture, while delivering massive performance improvements at a cost many times less than competing products.

After the company undertook its mission to conquer the processor performance plateau in nanometer-class chips and the systems they power, Tachyum has succeeded by launching its first commercial product. The Prodigy Cloud/AI/HPC supercomputer processor chip offers 4x the performance of the fastest Xeon, has 3x more raw performance than NVIDIA's H100 on HPC and has 6x more raw performance on AI training and inference workloads, and up to 10x performance at the same power. Prodigy is poised to overcome the challenges of increasing data center power consumption, low server utilization and stalled performance scaling.

The global inflation rises are no secret and more and more companies are looking to increase prices of their goods, so not entirely unsurprising, reports of TSMC planning price hikes in early 2023 are starting to appear. TSMC has supposedly already contacted its customers to notify them about the upcoming price increase, to give them as much time as possible to make any changes to their plans, if needed. The price increase will vary depending on the node in question, but is reported to be somewhere between five and eight percent according to the Nikkei.

Part of the increase is also related to TSMC's rapid expansion that's going on at the moment, since the company is going to need to invest a lot more capital when it comes to building the advanced fabs that its customers are relying on. TSMC is expected to invest some US$40-44 billion this year alone on fabs and new equipment. This is a fairly small price increase compared to the big increase TSMC implemented in August 2021, where some nodes saw price hikes of up to 20 percent. That said, TSMC isn't alone in increasing their pricing, as UMC and SMIC have also increased their prices several times since last year. Nikkei claims that UMC and SMIC are charging more than TSMC on some nodes. However, in the past, TSMC used to offer discounts to its clients on a quarterly basis once a chip had gone into mass production and everything progressed smoothly, but TSMC discontinued this discount scheme last year. As such, it looks like cheaper chip costs aren't to be expected any time soon.

Our first-quarter net sales came in at €3.5 billion which is at the high end of our guidance. The gross margin of 49.0%, is as guided. Our first-quarter net bookings came in at €7.0 billion, including €2.5 billion from 0.33 NA and 0.55 NA EUV systems as well as very strong DUV bookings, reflecting the continued high demand for advanced and mature nodes.

"We continue to see that the demand for our systems is higher than our current production capacity. We accommodate our customers through offering high-productivity upgrades and reducing cycle time in our factories, and we continue to offer a fast shipment process. In addition, we are actively working to significantly expand capacity together with our supply chain partners. In light of the demand and our plans to increase capacity, we expect to revisit our scenarios for 2025 and growth opportunities beyond. We plan to communicate updates in the second half of the year.

Back in March there were reports of TSMC's N3E node having been moved from 2024 to the end of 2023. However, it seems like the node is already seeing better than expected yields and is now being pulled in further and TSMC is expecting to start volume production as early as Q2 in 2023. The node does appear to have been frozen when it comes to further development as of the end of March. Yields are said to be much higher than the N3B node, which is also under development, but with limited information available about it.

The first customer for the new node is expected to be Apple, as the company is largely paying for much of the cutting edge node development at TSMC. However, both Intel and Qualcomm are said to be some of the first customers for the new node. More details should hopefully be announced tomorrow during TSMC's first quarter earnings call. The N3E node is a reduced layer EUV process, but before it goes into mass production, it's likely we'll be seeing the N3 node first. Early production of 3 nm parts later this year is expected to be at around 10 to 20k wafers per month initially, rising to about 25 to 35k a month once TSMC's new fab is ready. Once the N3E node is in full swing, the monthly capacity of 3 nm parts should be around 50k wafers a month, but depending on customer demand, it might end up being even higher.

When NVIDIA announced its Grace CPU Superchip, the company officially showed its efforts of creating an HPC-oriented processor to compete with Intel and AMD. The Grace CPU Superchip combines two Grace CPU modules that use the NVLink-C2C technology to deliver 144 Arm v9 cores and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. Each core is Arm Neoverse N2 Perseus design, configured to achieve the highest throughput and bandwidth. As far as performance is concerned, the only detail NVIDIA provides on its website is the estimated SPECrate 2017_int_base score of over 740. Thanks to the colleges over at Tom's Hardware, we have another performance figure to look at.

NVIDIA has made a slide about comparison with Intel's Ice Lake server processors. One Grace CPU Superchip was compared to two Xeon Platinum 8360Y Ice Lake CPUs configured in a dual-socket server node. The Grace CPU Superchip outperformed the Ice Lake configuration by two times and provided 2.3 times the efficiency in WRF simulation. This HPC application is CPU-bound, allowing the new Grace CPU to show off. This is all thanks to the Arm v9 Neoverse N2 cores pairing efficiently with outstanding performance. NVIDIA made a graph showcasing all HPC applications running on Arm today, with many more to come, which you can see below. Remember that NVIDIA provides this information, so we have to wait for the 2023 launch to see it in action.

NVIDIA has today announced its Grace CPU Superchip, a monstrous design focused on heavy HPC and AI processing workloads. Previously, team green has teased an in-house developed CPU that is supposed to go into servers and create an entirely new segment for the company. Today, we got a more detailed look at the plan with the Grace CPU Superchip. The Superchip package represents a package of two Grace processors, each containing 72 cores. These cores are based on Arm v9 in structure set architecture iteration and two CPUs total for 144 cores in the Superchip module. These cores are surrounded by a now unknown amount of LPDDR5x with ECC memory, running at 1 TB/s total bandwidth.

NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip uses the NVLink-C2C cache coherent interconnect, which delivers 900 GB/s bandwidth, seven times more than the PCIe 5.0 protocol. The company targets two-fold performance per Watt improvement over today's CPUs and wants to bring efficiency and performance together. We have some preliminary benchmark information provided by NVIDIA. In the SPECrate2017_int_base integer benchmark, the Grace CPU Superchip scores over 740 points, which is just the simulation for now. This means that the performance target is not finalized yet, teasing a higher number in the future. The company expects to ship the Grace CPU Superchip in the first half of 2023, with an already supported ecosystem of software, including NVIDIA RTX, HPC, NVIDIA AI, and NVIDIA Omniverse software stacks and platforms.

Intel and AMD will be releasing new CPUs that support DDR5 DRAM solutions for PCs and servers this year. In response, the DRAM industry led by South Korean suppliers is developing solutions to complement the arrival of the new CPUs. In the midst of the gradual shift to DDR5, DRAM suppliers will also scale back the supply of DDR3 solutions, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. With Korean suppliers accelerating their withdrawal from DDR3 production, Taiwanese suppliers yet to kick off mass production using newly installed capacities, and Chinese suppliers falling short of their expected yield rate, the global supply of DDR3 solutions will undergo an impending decline. With respect to the demand side, however, not only has the supply of networking chips been ramping up, but material shortage issues are also gradually easing. As such, buyers are now procuring DDR3 solutions ahead of time, resulting in a tight supply and demand situation in the DDR3 market. TrendForce therefore expects DDR3 DRAM prices to recover from a bearish first quarter and undergo a 0-5% QoQ increase in 2Q22.

China is reacting to new outbreaks of the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus with partial lockdowns. This could further delay the availability of laptops with 12th Gen Intel Core processors and NVIDIA's Ti graphics cards, which debuted at the beginning of the year. The first factories have already been closed in Suzhou in the east of the country. Supply chain and logistics bottlenecks, a shortage of certain chip types and price increases are already on the horizon.

At Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger and Intel's business leaders outlined key elements of the company's strategy and path for long-term growth. Intel's long-term plans will capitalize on transformative growth during an era of unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Among the presentations, Intel announced product roadmaps across its major business units and key execution milestones, including: Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, Intel Foundry Services, Software and Advanced Technology, Network and Edge, Technology Development, More: For more from Intel's Investor Meeting 2022, including the presentations and news, please visit the Intel Newsroom and Intel.com's Investor Meeting site.

AR/VR device shipments revised up to 14.19 million units in 2022, with an annual growth rate of 43.9%, according to TrendForce research. Growth momentum will come from increased demand for remote interactivity stemming from the pandemic, as well as Oculus Quest 2's price reduction strategy. Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Oculus Quest 2 are first in market share for AR and VR, respectively.

According to TrendForce, the topic of the Metaverse has driven brands to actively plan for and stimulate product shipment performance. However, the AR/VR device market has yet to experienced explosive growth due to two factors: component shortages and the difficulty of developing new technologies. In addition, cosmetic and size considerations have made the more optically and technically difficult Pancake design the first choice for new high-end products. Furthermore, various embedded tracking feedback technologies key to enhancing the user's immersive experience such as eye tracking and 6DoF further affect the development progress of a new product as a whole. Since there are no new foreboding products on the horizon, TrendForce believes, no other branded products have a chance at supplanting the current mainstream status of Oculus or Microsoft until at least 2023.

Just a few days ago, we reported that Intel is preparing to unveil the company's first application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) dedicated to mining cryptocurrency. To be more specific, Intel plans to show off its "Bonanza Mine" ASIC at the 2022 ISSCC Conference, describing the chip as "ultra low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC." We have yet to see how this competes with other industry-made ASICs like the ones from Bitmain. However, it seems like the startup company GRIID, valued at around $3.3 billion, thinks that the Bonanza Mine ASIC is the right choice and has entered a definitive supply agreement with Intel.

According to the S-4 filing, GRIID has "entered into a definitive supply contract with Intel to provide ASICs that we expect to fuel our growth. The initial order will supply units to be delivered in 2022 and GRIID will have access to a significant share of Intel's future production volumes." There are a few other mentions of Intel in the document, and you can see another exciting tidbit below.

Intel and TSMC are positioning themselves as two competing foundries for a significant period. However, as the difficulties in semiconductor manufacturing rise, the collaboration of the two seems inevitable. Not because Intel is eyeing TSMC's clients, but because of the race to produce the most minor and best possible semiconductor node. We already know that Intel plans to use some of TSMC's nodes for its Ponte Vecchio accelerator that contains 47 tiles. However, we didn't realize just how big the contract between the two companies was. According to the latest report from DigiTimes, Intel is supposed to become one of the top three clients at TSMC.

As the report notes, the collaboration should extend to at least TSMC's 2 nm node, expected in 2025. After that, the state of semiconductors is unknown. Intel has a solid chance to be in the top three customers in 2023 and become one of the primary sources of profit for the Taiwanese giant. We are excited to see how this prediction plays out and hope to hear more from both in the future.

Historically, AMD was working with two semiconductor manufacturing companies: TSMC and GlobalFoundries. According to the latest report coming from Gokul Hariharan, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, AMD could soon tap another semiconductor manufacturer to produce the company's growing list of processors. As the report indicates, AMD could start working with the South Korean giant Samsung and utilize the firm's 4LPP process that represents a second generation of the low-power 4 nm silicon node. This specific node is allegedly the choice for AMD APUs designed to fit inside Google's Chromebook devices, which require low-power designs to achieve excellent battery life.

AMD could realize this move in late 2022, as Samsung's 4LPP node goes into mass production at that point. It means that we could see the first Samsung-made AMD APUs in late 2022 or the beginning of 2023. And apparently, the two company's collaboration could be much more significant as AMD is evaluating Samsung's 3 nm nodes for other products spanning more segments in 2023/2024. There are no official, definitive agreements between the two, so we have to wait for more information and official responses from these parties. Anyways, if AMD decides to produce a part of its lineup at Samsung, the remaining TSMC capacity would ensure that the supply of every incoming chip remains sufficient.

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.