Silicon Box, a cutting-edge, advanced panel-level packaging foundry announced its intention to collaborate with the Italian government to invest up to $3.6 billion (€3.2 billion) in Northern Italy, as the site of a new, state-of-the-art semiconductor assembly and test facility. This facility will help meet critical demand for advanced packaging capacity to enable next generation technologies that Silicon Box anticipates by 2028. The multi-year investment will replicate Silicon Box's flagship foundry in Singapore which has proven capability and capacity for the world's most advanced semiconductor packaging solutions, then expand further into 3D integration and testing. When completed, the new facility will support approximately 1,600 Silicon Box employees in Italy. The construction of the facility is also expected to create several thousand more jobs, including eventual hiring by suppliers. Design and planning for the facility will begin immediately, with construction to commence pending European Commission approval of planned financial support by the Italian State.

As well as bringing the most advanced chiplet integration, packaging, and testing to Italy, Silicon Box's manufacturing process is based on panel-level-production; a world leading, first-of-its-kind combination that is already shipping product to customers from its Singapore foundry. Through the investment, Silicon Box has plans for greater innovation and expansion in Europe, and globally. The new integrated production facility is expected to serve as a catalyst for broader ecosystem investments and innovation in Italy, as well as the rest of the European Union.

Today the Supervisory Board of ASML Holding NV (ASML) announces that it intends to appoint Christophe Fouquet, currently ASML's Chief Business Officer and member of the Board of Management, as the company's next President and Chief Executive Officer. The appointment is subject to notification of the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders on April 24, 2024. On the same date, ASML's Co-Presidents Peter Wennink and Martin van den Brink will retire from ASML upon completion of their current appointment terms.

Nils Andersen, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, said: "The Supervisory Board, together with the management team, has gone through a comprehensive succession planning process. With Christophe, we have identified a very experienced leader with deep understanding of ASML's technology and the semiconductor industry ecosystem - acquired through different roles at ASML and other companies - and the right leadership qualities and culture fit. We are grateful and full of admiration for the immense contributions that Peter and Martin have made over decades, helping to shape ASML into the successful company that it is today. Peter and Martin have been preparing ASML for the future, and we know they will be fully engaged in securing a smooth transition for the company and all of ASML's stakeholders."

Oxide Computer Company today unveiled the world's first commercial Cloud Computer, a true rack-scale system with fully unified hardware and software designed for on-premises cloud computing. The company also announced a $44 million Series A financing round led by Eclipse with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, and Rally Ventures to accelerate production for Fortune 1000 enterprises. This brings the company's total financing raised to date to $78 million.

Despite the rapid rise of cloud computing, the vast majority of IT infrastructure today continues to live outside the public cloud in on-premises data centers, where enterprises are forced to cobble together a set of disjointed hardware and software components to run their businesses. Since its inception, Oxide's mission has been to solve this problem, developing the first unified product that delivers the developer experience and operational efficiencies of the public cloud to on-premises environments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force in chip design, with recent examples from China and the United States showcasing its potential. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, believes that AI can empower individuals to become programmers, while Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, predicts an era where AI dominates chip design. During the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Su emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for the next generation of chip designers. To excel in this field, engineers must possess a holistic understanding of hardware, software, and algorithms, enabling them to create superior chip designs that meet system usage, customer deployment, and application requirements.

The integration of AI into chip design processes has gained momentum, fueled by the AI revolution catalyzed by large language models (LLMs). Both Huang and Mark Papermaster, CTO of AMD, acknowledge the benefits of AI in accelerating computation and facilitating chip design. AMD has already started leveraging AI in semiconductor design, testing, and verification, with plans to expand its use of generative AI in chip design applications. Companies are now actively exploring the fusion of AI technology with Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to streamline complex tasks and minimize manual intervention in chip design. Despite limited data and accuracy challenges, the "EDA+AI" approach holds great promise. For instance, Synopsys has invested significantly in AI tool research and recently launched Synopsys.ai, the industry's first end-to-end AI-driven EDA solution. This comprehensive solution empowers developers to harness AI at every stage of chip development, from system architecture and design to manufacturing, marking a significant leap forward in AI's integration into chip design workflows.

Customers from Japan to Ecuador and Sweden are using NVIDIA DGX H100 systems like AI factories to manufacture intelligence. They're creating services that offer AI-driven insights in finance, healthcare, law, IT and telecom—and working to transform their industries in the process. Among the dozens of use cases, one aims to predict how factory equipment will age, so tomorrow's plants can be more efficient.

Called Green Physics AI, it adds information like an object's CO2 footprint, age and energy consumption to SORDI.ai, which claims to be the largest synthetic dataset in manufacturing.

In an interview with The Guardian, NVIDIA's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Michael Kagan added his remarks on the company and its cryptocurrency position. Being the maker of the world's most powerful graphics cards and compute accelerators, NVIDIA is the most prominent player in the industry regarding any computing application from cryptocurrencies to AI and HPC. In the interview, Mr. Kegan expressed his opinions and argued that newly found applications such as ChatGTP bring much higher value to society compared to cryptocurrencies. "All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn't bring anything useful for society. AI does," said Kegan, adding that "I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. But you don't redirect the company to support whatever it is."

When it comes to AI and other applications, the company has a very different position. "With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: you just tell it what to do, and it will. And if it doesn't work the way you want it to, you tell it 'I want something different," he added, arguing that the new AI applications have usability level beyond that of crypto. Interestingly, trading applications are also familiar to NVIDIA, as they had clients (banks) using their hardware for faster trading execution. Mr. Kegan noted: "We were heavily involved in also trading: people on Wall Street were buying our stuff to save a few nanoseconds on the wire, the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibers under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange."

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the latest Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. The new virtual machines will be generally available on September 1, and customers can now launch them in 10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones around the world. In addition, the Arm-based virtual machines can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This ability has been in preview and will be generally available over the coming weeks in all the regions that offer the new virtual machines.

Earlier this year, we launched the preview of the new general-purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series, built on the Ampere Altra processor. These new virtual machines have been engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads. Since then, hundreds of customers have tested and experienced firsthand the excellent price-performance that the Arm architecture can provide for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and.NET applications, gaming, media servers, and more. Starting today, all Azure customers can deploy these new virtual machines using the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI).

As the year ends, one of the biggest consumer trade shows, CES, is on the horizon, and manufacturers are ready to present the work that will become real throughout the year. AMD will offer a keynote at the CES 2022 press conference, and we expect to hear more about the upcoming Zen3 processors with 3D V-cache stacked in them. However, what is interesting is that we may listen to more details about Zen4 core. In an exclusive interview conducted by Antony Leather, Forbes contributor and the person behind CrazyTechLab, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster started the hype machine by sharing that AMD will announce some Zen4 core details at the CES 2022 conference.

AMD CTO Mark PapermasterWith regards to the upcoming generation - I point to CES in January. We're excited to be revealing some additional details on our new product launches that will deliver phenomenal experiences and as we've said, later in the year as it progresses we'll share more detail on Zen 4 with some mentioned at CES and more announcements on it over the course of 2022. It will be a very exciting year for AMD.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced that Tenstorrent, an AI semiconductor and software start-up developing next-generation computers, will license the new SiFive Intelligence X280 processor in its AI training and inference processor. SiFive will deliver more details of its SiFive Intelligence initiative including the SiFive Intelligence X280 processor at the Linley Spring Processor Conference on April 23rd.

Tenstorrent's novel approach to inference and training effectively and efficiently accommodates the exponential growth in the size of machine learning models while offering best-in-class performance.

Let me be the first to say that the two may not be directly related, but it is an awfully strong coincidence that both pieces of news come out on the same day. Indeed, earlier in the day AMD put out a press release (full release past the break) announcing "multiple organizational changes focused on strengthening the company's senior leadership team and accelerating growth." Several familiar names have been promoted within the company to be in charge of more products and visions across their CPU and GPU business units. Mark Papermaster, for example, is now an executive VP as well as CTO of AMD, and the company has also hired in new talent, including industry veteran Sandeep Chennakeshu, as executive VP of "Computing and Graphics responsible for the company's high-performance PC, gaming and semi-custom businesses".

Perhaps all this re-structuring and new hiring comes in handy, at a time when we have seen several people leave AMD for Intel or otherwise. Indeed, shortly after that press release went out, word got to us that James Prior, Senior Product Manager for AMD, and an ardent employee for nearly 6 years, is no longer working for the company. We have no word yet on what is next for James, but it was more than a small surprise to know that the person you just spoke with at CES, and had a long conversation of AMD's desktop processors, is gone just like that. We have known James for many years now, and can attest to his work ethics as well as being a great guy all-round. We wish him the best in his future ventures, and look forward to also seeing how AMD's re-structuring turns out.

SUSE today announced support for Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA . Running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, SAP HANA users can now take advantage of high-capacity Intel Optane DC persistent memory in the data center. Users can optimize their workloads by moving and maintaining larger amounts of data closer to the processor and minimizing the higher latency of fetching data from system storage during maintenance. Support for Intel Optane DC persistent memory, currently available in beta from multiple cloud service providers and hardware vendors, is another way SUSE is helping customers transform their IT infrastructures to reduce costs, deliver higher performance and compete more efficiently.

"Persistent memory technology will spark new applications for data access and storage," said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE CTO. "By offering a fully supported solution built on Intel Optane DC persistent memory, businesses can take greater advantage of the performance of SAP HANA. SUSE continues to partner with companies like SAP and Intel to serve customers worldwide who are looking to fuel growth by transforming their IT infrastructure. It is their needs that drive the direction of our innovation."

AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster, in an interview with TheStreet, confirmed AMD's plans with 7 nm for their graphics offerings are just beginning with Radeon VII. When inquired on AMD's plans for their graphics division, Papermaster said that "What we do over the course of the year is what we do every year. We'll round out the whole roadmap." he then added that "We're really excited to start on the high-end... you'll see the announcements over the course of the year as we round out our Radeon roadmap."

So these comments form papermaster seemingly confirm two things: first, that AMD plans to "round out" its lineup using the 7 nm process technology, which means increasing offerings at different price points. The use of the word "refresh" almost takes the breath away, since refreshes are usually based on the same previous architectures. However, AMD does have plans for a new mid-range chip to finally succeed Polaris in Navi, which should become the next AMD launch in the 7 nm process for graphics technologies.

Consumers' video expectations are being shaped by the brilliant images promised by 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) video and beyond. However, the technical-based hurdles and data demands of higher quality video mean that the majority of users only have access to full HD or lower video technology. For nearly three years, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has been working in lock-step with its members, the world's best-known leaders in video, to develop a better quality internet video technology that benefits all consumers. Today, the Alliance is proud to announce the public release of the AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) specification, which delivers cross-platform, 4K UHD or higher online video, royalty-free - all while lowering data usage.

Whether watching live sports, video chatting with loved ones, or binging on a favorite show, online video is becoming a bigger part of consumers' daily lives. In fact, video is so important to users that by 2021, 82 percent of all the world's internet traffic will be video, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index , 2016-2021. To remove many of the hurdles required by older, optical disc-era, video technologies, AOMedia developed AV1 specifically for the internet video-era, paving the way for companies to make more of the royalty-free, 4K UHD and higher video devices, products, and services that consumers love.

AMD has been making waves on computing markets with its latest line of processors powered by its innovative Zen microarchitecture. Its strengths and weaknesses are very well known by now, so there's no use harking them all over again; suffice it to say that the company has regained competitiveness - and then some - with many of Intel's products in as many different industry sectors. The company's APU solutions, for one, are one of a kind solutions that allow users to do some very impressive gaming sans a discrete GPU. However, Intel's been spending the last several years before AMD's Zen entrenching themselves in all markets, so AMD clearly has an uphill battle in fighting existing relations and supply channels. Case in point: Dell.

Channel Pro is reporting that Dell EMC's CTO, John Roese, said today at WMC that "Intel is the big player, AMD is the second player. There's enough diversity between them that there are use cases to have them both in our portfolio, but just the sheer breadth of the Intel processor portfolio is massive compared to even the accelerated AMD world."

AMD is in no mood to stick to the 14 nm process for as long as Intel has (building four performance x86 CPU micro-architectures on it). In an interview with EE Times, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster confirmed that the company's "Zen 2" and "Zen 3" CPU micro-architectures will be built on the next-generation 7 nm silicon fab process. Transition to the 7 nm process is not as straightforward as optically shrinking your chip designs and shipping them over to your foundry. Apparently it requires big technical changes for the chip design teams, which AMD feels are better executed while it's still riding on the success of its current "Zen" architecture.

"We had to literally double our efforts across foundry and design teams…It's the toughest lift I've seen in a number of generations," said Papermaster. He added that the 7 nm node requires new "CAD tools and [changes in] the way you architect the device [and] how you connect transistors-the implementation and tools change [as well as] the IT support you need to get through it." Papermaster predicts that 7 nm will be a "long node like 28 nm" in that chip designers will have to build several refinements to their designs on the node before the newer 4 nm node could be heralded. He urged semiconductor foundry companies to introduce EUV (extreme ultra-violet lithography), a technique used to etch transistors and circuits at the infinitesimally small 7 nm node, as soon as possible, so AMD could have more options at manufacturing its next generation processors.

Reports are circling around the web regarding an AMD meeting featuring some of its higher ups - namely, CEO Lisa Su, head of Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri, and AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster happening on the 16th of May. The purpose of this meeting seems to be to discuss AMD's inflexion point, and lay out a vision for the company's future, supported on its upcoming products: the too-long-awaited Vega, its successor Navi, and the natural evolution of the company's current Zen processors, tentatively identified as Zen+.

Naturally, a company such as AMD has its roadmap planned well in advance, with work on next-generation products and technologies sometimes even running in parallel with current-generation product development. It's just a result of the kind of care, consideration, time and money that goes into making new architectures that makes this so. And while some would say Vega is now approaching a state akin to grapes that have been hanging for far too long, AMD's next graphics architecture, Navi, and its iterations on Zen cores, which the company expect to see refreshes in a 3-to-5-year period, are other matters entirely. Maybe we'll have some more details regarding the specific time of Vega's launch (for now expected on Computex), as well as on when AMD is looking to release a Zen+ refresh. I wouldn't expect much with regards to Navi - perhaps just an outline on how work is currently underway with some comments on the expectations surrounding Global Foundries' 7 nm process, on which Navi is expected to be built. And no, folks, this isn't a Vega launch. Not yet.

id Software, the pioneering game studio behind "Doom" and "Quake," in a marketing video about how its developers and gamers are benefiting from AMD Ryzen processors, hinted that it is working on a new next-generation game engine that succeeds idTech 6, which is heavily optimized for AMD Ryzen processors. id CTO Robert Duffy spoke at length about how Ryzen is putting more CPU capabilities in the hands of gamers at attractive price-points, which is letting game developers add that much more content and production design that benefits from this level of parallelism and performance.

The most interesting part about Duffy's comment comes later in the video, where he talks about a new game engine that id is working on, which will be "far more parallel than idTech 6" (far more multi-core and multi-thread friendly), and that it will be able to consume "all of the CPU [compute power] that Ryzen can offer." Duffy also confirmed that "Quake Champions," the studio's upcoming online hero-based FPS, will be optimized for both Ryzen and Radeon Vega.The video follows.

AMD CTO, speaking at an investors event organized by Deutsche Bank, recently announced that the company's next-generation "Vega" GPUs, its first high-end parts in close to two years, will be launched in the first half of 2017. AMD is said to have made significant performance/Watt refinements with Vega, over its current "Polaris" architecture. VideoCardz posted probable specs of three parts based on the architecture.

AMD will begin the "Vega" architecture lineup with the Vega 10, an upper-performance segment part designed to disrupt NVIDIA's high-end lineup, with a performance positioning somewhere between the GP104 and GP102. This chip is expected to be endowed with 4,096 stream processors, with up to 24 TFLOP/s 16-bit (half-precision) floating point performance. It will feature 8-16 GB of HBM2 memory with up to 512 GB/s memory bandwidth. AMD is looking at typical board power (TBP) ratings around 225W.

Intel will be capable making chips on the 14 nanometer silicon fabrication process, in 18-inch diameter wafers, "in two years," as development of the technology and machinery to make it happen is making good progress, according to company CTO Justin Rattner. He noted that Intel's aggressive tech advancement will keep Moore's Law relevant for at least the next 10 years. By the end of 2013, Intel's D1X Fab in Oregon, Fab 42 in Arizona, in the US, and Fab 24 in Ireland will begin producing batches of simple chips such as P1272 and P1273 series SoCs. After 14 nm, development for 10 nm, 7 nm, and 5 nm will follow, in order.

In a keynote address opening the prestigious annual Hot Chips symposium, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster delivered a vision for the coming "Surround Computing Era", and unveiled new processor architecture details, enabling technologies and design methodologies that will help drive the next era in computing. Surround computing is an extension of pervasive and ambient computing trends and describes an environment where computing technologies are completely natural and seamless parts of daily life.

"Surround computing imagines a world without keyboards or mice, where natural user interfaces based on voice and facial recognition redefine the PC experience, and where the cloud and clients collaborate to synthesize exabytes of image and natural language data. The ultimate goal is devices that deliver intelligent, relevant, contextual insight and value that improves consumers' everyday life in real time through a variety of futuristic applications. AMD is leading the quest for devices that understand and anticipate users' needs, are driven by natural user interfaces, and that disappear seamlessly into the background," said Papermaster during his opening remarks.

Weeks after security mogul Eugene Kaspersky opined that Apple is "10 years behind Microsoft on security," Kaspersky Lab revealed that it is collaborating with Apple to investigate security concerns (read: vulnerabilities) of its operating systems, and improve its security. Kaspersky Lab CTO Nikolai Grebennikov in an interview with Computing.co.uk was quoted saying "Apple recently invited us to improve its security."

Kaspersky Lab maintains that Apple's software is extremely vulnerable, going as far as to claim that Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security. "Our first investigations show Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security. For example, Oracle closed a vulnerability in Java, which was a target for a major botnet several months ago," said Grebennikov. Apple's decision to handle updates of Java runtime environment for OS X by itself, breaking away from Oracle's update cycle, particularly drew flack from Grebennikov. "Apple blocked Oracle from updating Java on Mac OS, and they perform all the udpates themselves. They only released the patch a few weeks ago - two or three months after the Oracle patch. That's far too long," he said. Kaspersky isn't too optimistic about the infinitely more popular iOS platform, either. "Our experience tells us that in the near future, perhaps in a year or so, we will see the first malware targeting iOS," it commented.

AnandTech is reporting Eric Demers is leaving AMD. This apparently was backed up with an official statement from AMD. Here is what they both had to say,

I just found out that AMD's Eric Demers (Corporate VP & CTO, Graphics Division) is leaving the company at the end of this week. He's not going to Intel or NVIDIA but I suspect that someone of Eric's talents will remain in the industry. I just had dinner with Eric a couple of weeks ago and he seemed very positive on AMD's roadmap going forward. Given how important the GPU is becoming in this ever expanding industry, someone like Eric is in very high demand.

We now have an official statement from AMD:

Eric Demers, AMD Corporate Vice President and CTO, Graphics Business Unit, has decided leave AMD to pursue other opportunities. AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster will assume interim responsibility for the Graphics Business Unit CTO role until a replacement is found. AMD remains fully committed to our critical graphics IP development and discrete GPU products. We have a tremendous depth of talent in our organization, a game plan that is resonating with our customers and our team, and we are continuing to bring graphics-performance-leading products to market. We will attract the right technology leader for this role. We thank Eric for his contributions to the business and wish him well in his future endeavors.