Intel in February launched a couple of China-exclusive 13th Gen Core SKUs to highly optimize their price-performance for the PC gaming crowd there. These included the Core i5-13490F (6P+4E but with 24 MB L3 cache), and Core i7-13790F (8P+8E but with 33 MB L3 cache). In the wake of increased competition from AMD with its non-X Ryzen 5 7600, Ryzen 7 7700, and price-adjustments for its 7600X and 7700X, Intel is giving these SKUs slight price cuts. The i5-13490F launched at ¥1,599 (roughly $230), but is now retailing for ¥1,499 (roughly $200). There's no word on if these SKUs will launch outside China. The idea behind them is to increase the L3 cache sizes without touching the core-counts or clock-speeds, to improve cache-sensitive gaming performance. These chips are packaged in special "dark" retail boxes as shown below.

NVIDIA's presence in high-performance computing has steadily increased, with various workloads benefiting from the company's AI and HPC accelerator GPUs. One of the important markets for the company is China, and export regulations are about to complicate NVIDIA's business dealing with the country. NVIDIA's major partners in the Asia Pacific region are Inspur and Huawei, which make servers powered by A100 and H100 GPU solutions. Amid the latest Biden Administration complications, the US is considering limiting more export of US-designed goods to Chinese entities. Back in 2019, the US blacklisted Huawei and restricted the sales of the latest GPU hardware to the company. Last week, the Biden Administration also blacklisted Inspur, the world's third-largest server maker.

In the Morgan Stanley conference, NVIDIA's Chief Financial Officer Colette Cress noted that: "Inspur is a partner for us, when we indicate a partner, they are helping us stand up computing for the end customers. As we work forward, we will probably be working with other partners, for them to stand-up compute within the Asia-Pac region or even other parts of the world. But again, our most important focus is focusing on the law and making sure that we follow export controls very closely. So in this case, we will look in terms of other partners to help us." This indicates that NVIDIA will lose millions of dollars in revenue due to the inability to sell its GPUs to partners like Inspur. As the company stated, complying with the export regulations is the most crucial focus.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

Looking back at 2H22, as server OEMs slowed down the momentum of their product shipments, Chinese server buyers also held a conservative outlook on future demand and focused on inventory reduction. Thus, the flow of orders for enterprise SSDs remained sluggish. However, NAND Flash suppliers had to step up shipments of enterprise SSDs during 2H22 because the demand for storage components equipped in notebook (laptop) computers and smartphones had undergone very large downward corrections. Compared with other categories of NAND Flash products, enterprise SSDs represented the only significant source of bit consumption. Ultimately, due to the imbalance between supply and demand, the QoQ decline in prices of enterprise SSDs widened to 25% for 4Q22. This price plunge, in turn, caused the quarterly total revenue from enterprise SSDs to drop by 27.4% QoQ to around US$3.79 billion. TrendForce projects that the NAND Flash industry will again post a QoQ decline in the revenue from this product category for 1Q23.

The four major North American cloud service providers (CSPs) have made cuts to their server procurement quantities for this year because of economic headwinds and high inflation. Turning to server OEMs such as Dell and HPE, they are observed to have scaled back the production of server motherboards at their ODM partners. Given these developments, TrendForce now projects that global server shipments will grow by just 1.31% YoY to 14.43 million units for 2023. This latest figure is a downward correction from the earlier estimation. The revisions that server OEMs have made to their outlooks on shipments shows that the demand for end products has become much weaker than expected. They also highlight factors such as buyers of enterprise servers imposing a stricter control of their budgets and server OEMs' inventory corrections.

On January 7th, the Minisforum UM773 was launched in China with the AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor and received widespread praise from consumers. Now, the new version of UM773, UM773 Lite, has arrived globally with a more affordable price. Considering that users usually connect external keyboards and mouses, the two USB 3.2 ports have been replaced with USB 2.0 ports. All other design will be the same as UM773. The price, however, will be more favorable.

The new UM773 Lite features the new AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS, AMD Radeon 680M Integrated Graphics, DDR5 dual-channel memory, PCIe 4.0 SSD, and the most advanced USB4 Type-C port. The Ryzen 7 7735HS is one of AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series mobile processors, featuring 8 cores and 16 threads, with a based clock of 3.2 GHz and a maximum turbo clock of 4.75 GHz and a default TDP targeted at 54 W. The RDNA2 Radeon 680M integrated GPU has 12 CUs up to 2.4 GHz.

The Netherlands-based ASML has reportedly launched a comprehensive investigation into the company's branch in China following reports that one of its former employees allegedly stole confidential information. According to Bloomberg, the employee in question was part of a product life cycle management (PLM) program for ASML's advanced lithography solutions. Specifically, the employee worked for the Teamcenter software division responsible for lithography tool management. This software was used to create digital twins of scanners and other tools and allowed information to be shared among the company's employees. In ASML's case, the software contained all the confidential information about the scanners and how they work, which makes it a target for IP theft. We do not know if this is a China-sponsored action to boost its domestic lithography tool development; however, ASML has issued a statement below.

ASMLWe have experienced unauthorized misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China. We promptly initiated a comprehensive internal review. Based upon our initial findings we do not believe that the misappropriation is material to our business. However, as a result of the security incident, certain export control regulations may have been violated. ASML has therefore reported the incident to relevant authorities. We are implementing additional remedial measures in light of this incident.

Chinese company Origin Quantum announced that it has developed China's first practical 24-qubit quantum computer using superconducting chip technology, named Wuyuan. The computer uses an unspecified number of quantum processing units (QPUs), but comes with a custom operating system, and a cloud-computing platform, allowing Chinese businesses to hire the computer as they would any HPC cloud-computing instance. Origin Quantum said that with the production of Wuyuan, the company is already developing an even more powerful quantum computer, named Wukong. Origin Quantum is one of the many curiously new Chinese high-technology startups that have sprung up and don't feature on Western tech sanctions lists, to which Western companies are forbidden to sale certain high-tech machinery and chips to.Many Thanks to TumbleGeorge for the tip.

According to Bloomberg, Japan and the Netherlands are getting ready to join the US in limiting access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment for China. The three nations are currently in talks—that might end as soon as today—over how they can impose joint limits on what kind of equipment and tools can be exported to China. Apparently there will be no official announcement if a deal is struck, instead the restrictions will simply be implemented as required.

Bloomberg states that the Netherlands will expand export restrictions that ASML is already under, which according to the publication means stricter export rules around DEUV machines, which are used in cutting edge semiconductor nodes. Japan is said to implement similar export restrictions for Nikon as well as Tokyo Electron, with the US already having implemented restrictions for Applied Materials. The export restriction deal is in part being done to appease US equipment makers, who have complained that their international competitors haven't been under the same export restrictions when it comes to China, as they have. The question is if the export restrictions will hinder China in the long run, or if the nation will simply push ahead and develop its own, competing semiconductor manufacturing tools.

Update Jan 28th: Japan and the Netherlands reached an agreement with the US on Friday and the two countries are said to be making individual announcements with regards to their individual agreements with the US.

TrendForce's recent analysis of the foundry market reveals that demand continues to slide for all types of mature and advanced nodes. The major IC design houses have cut wafer input for 1Q23 and will likely scale back further for 2Q23. Currently, foundries are expected to maintain a lower-than-ideal level of capacity utilization rate in the first two quarters of this year. Some nodes could experience a steeper demand drop in 2Q23 as there are still no signs of a significant rebound in wafer orders. Looking ahead to the second half of this year, orders will likely pick up for some components that underwent an inventory correction at an earlier time. However, the state of the global economy will remain the largest variable that affect demand, and the recovery of individual foundries' capacity utilization rates will not occur as quickly as expected. Taking these factors into account, TrendForce currently forecasts that global foundry revenue will drop by around 4% YoY for 2023. The projected decline for 2023 is more severe when compared with the one that was recorded for 2019.

Due to the various major events that affected the global economy and politics, the overall demand for consumer electronics made a sharp downward turn in 2022, and global shipments of notebook (laptop) computers began to fall over the quarters. TrendForce's latest analysis finds that global shipments of notebook computers (from ODMs) reached just around 186 million units for 2022, showing a YoY drop of 24.5%. As for 2023, the outlook on the performance of the notebook computer market remains uncertain at this moment. TrendForce expects the YoY decline to moderate to about 7.8%, but shipments are projected to total only 171 million units.

Because market demand was anemic in 4Q22, promotional activities related to the traditional year-end peak season did not generate a lot of sales momentum. Looking at regional markets, notebook brands (PC OEMs) slashed prices in the US and China, but their sales results still did not meet expectations. This development was mainly attributed to factors such as high inflation suppressing consumers' disposable income. Since the sales results for 4Q22 were lackluster, efforts to get rid of the existing stockpile of whole devices might continue through 2Q23. Furthermore, order placements from channels are going to be much more restrained.

TrendForce's latest analysis of the DRAM market finds that the inventory pressure on suppliers remain significant due to the persistently weak demand for consumer electronics. Among the top three DRAM suppliers, only Samsung has seen a slight drop in inventory level thanks to its highly competitive pricing strategy. To prevent DRAM prices as a whole from making another sharp dive, a few suppliers such as Micron have been cutting production. Therefore, the QoQ decline in DRAM prices are projected to shrink to around 13~18% for 1Q23. However, the slump will have yet to reach the bottom at that time. Regarding the QoQ changes in the prices of the major categories of DRAM products for 1Q23, PC DRAM and server DRAM are projected to again register a drop that is near 20%. Conversely, mobile DRAM will experience the smallest price decline because its profit margin is ready the thinnest.

Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, has reportedly filed patents that it is developing extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scanners for use in the manufacturing process of semiconductors. This news comes amid increasing tensions between Huawei and the US government, which has imposed a series of sanctions on the company in recent years. According to UDN, Huawei has filed a patent that covers the entire EUV scanner with a 13.5 nm EUV light source, mirrors, lithography for printing circuits, and proper system control. While filing a patent is not the same as creating an accurate EUV scanner, it could enable China to produce a class of chips below 7 nm and have a homegrown semiconductor production, despite the ever-increasing US sanctions.

The development of EUV scanners is a significant milestone for Huawei and the semiconductor industry. However, the company's progress in this area may be hindered by the US government's sanctions, which have limited Huawei's access to certain technologies and markets. It is important to note that Chinese SMIC wanted to develop EUV fabrication based on third-party EUV tools; however, those plans were scrapped as the Wassenaar agreement came into action and prohibited the sales of advanced tools to Chinese companies. Huawei's development could represent a new milestone for the entire Chinese industry.

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce states that Chinese memory manufacturer YMTC is now at risk of exiting the market for 3D NAND Flash products by 2024 following its formal placement on the Entity List of the US Commerce Department on December 15. From this point forward, the Commerce Department will be reviewing and approving individual transactions related to the exportation, re-exportation, and sales of equipment, technologies, and other related goods from the US to YMTC. With acquisitions of equipment parts and technical support from its US partners becoming very difficult and prolonged, YMTC is going to be severely constrained from raising its bit output. Hence, its foothold on the market for 3D NAND Flash products is expected to weaken as time goes by.

TrendForce points out that without the support of the key equipment providers, YMTC is now facing a huge technical obstacle in the development of its latest 3D NAND Flash technology known as Xtacking 3.0. In particular, raising yield rate for the 128L and 232L processes is going to be extremely challenging for the Chinese memory manufacturer. Taking account of this latest escalation in the US-China trade dispute, TrendForce has further corrected down its projections on YMTC's supply bit growth rate and the total NAND Flash supply bit growth rate for next year. YMTC supply bits were initially forecasted to grow by 60% YoY for 2023. However, there was a massive downward correction that put its growth rate at just 18%. Now, YMTC is forecasted to post a YoY decline of 7%, which is a complete reversal from the earlier projections.

The United States has recently imposed several sanctions on technology exports to China. These sanctions are designed to restrict the transfer of specific technologies and sensitive information to Chinese entities, particularly those with ties to the Chinese military or government. The primary motivation behind these sanctions is to protect American national security interests, as well as to protect American companies from unfair competition. According to Financial Times, we have information that Chinese tech Giant, Alibaba, can not access Arm licenses for Neoverse V1 technology. Generally, the technology group where Neoverse V-series falls in is called Wassenaar -- multilateral export control regime (MECR) with 42 participating states. This agreement prohibits the sale of technology that could be used for military purposes.

The US argues that Arm's Neoverse V1 IP is not only a product from UK's Arm but a design made in the US as well, meaning that it is a US technology. Since Alibaba's T-Head group responsible for designing processors that go into Alibaba's cloud services can not use Neoverse V1, it has to look for alternative solutions. The Neoverse V1 and V2 can not be sold in China, while Neoverse N1 and N2 can. Alibaba's T-Head engineer argued, "We feel that the western world sees us as second-class people. They won't sell good products to us even if we have money."

Global sales of total semiconductor manufacturing equipment by original equipment manufacturers are forecast to reach a new high of $108.5 billion in 2022, rising 5.9% from the previous industry record of $102.5 billion in 2021, SEMI announced today in its Year-End Total Semiconductor Equipment Forecast - OEM Perspective at SEMICON Japan 2022. The record high caps three consecutive years of record revenue. The global total semiconductor manufacturing equipment market is expected to contract to $91.2 billion next year before rebounding in 2024 driven by both the front-end and back-end segments.

"Record fab constructions have driven total semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales to cross the $100 billion mark for a second straight year," said Ajit Manocha, SEMI president and CEO. "Emerging applications in multiple markets have set expectations for significant semiconductor industry growth this decade, which will necessitate further investments to expand production capacity."

The worldwide semiconductor industry is projected to invest more than $500 billion in 84 volume chipmaking facilities starting construction from 2021 to 2023, with segments including automotive and high-performance computing fueling the spending increases, SEMI announced today in its latest quarterly World Fab Forecast report. The projected growth in global factory count includes a record high 33 new semiconductor manufacturing facilities starting construction this year and 28 more in 2023.

"The latest SEMI World Fab Forecast update reflects the increasing strategic importance of semiconductors to countries and a wide array of industries worldwide," said Ajit Manocha, SEMI president and CEO. "The report underscores the significant impact of government incentives in expanding production capacity and strengthening supply chains. With the bullish long-term outlook for the industry, rising investments in semiconductor manufacturing are critical to laying the groundwork for secular growth driven by a diverse range of emerging applications."

AMD's next-generation Radeon RX 7900 high-end graphics cards are set to arrive next week and bring the new RDNA3 GPU architecture to the masses. However, it seems like the customers will have to fight for their purchase as the availability could be scarce at launch, leading to potentially increased prices with low stocks. According to Igor's Lab report, Germany will receive only 3,000 reference MBA (Made By AMD) units of Radeon RX 7900 series cards. In contrast, the rest of the EMEA region will receive only 7,000 MBA units. These numbers are lower than expected, so AIB partners may improve the supply once their designs hit shelves.

On the other hand, mainland China will not receive any MBA units of the new cards as a sign of increasing tension with Taiwan. Of course, AMD's board partners will supply their designs to China, and they are allowed to; however, it seems that only AMD is making a statement here. In addition to supply issues, the launch is rumored to be covered in BIOS issues such as memory leaks and the COVID-19 outbreak affecting production in closed factories. Of course, all of this information should be taken with a grain of salt, and we must wait for the official launch before making any further assumptions.

Currently, the US has an exclusion in place when it comes to import tariffs relating to graphics cards and GPUs imported from China, but the exclusion is set to expire on the 31st of December this year. So far, the US government has been quiet on whether or not the import tariff will be reinstated or not. If the tariff was to be reinstated, US consumers are looking at a 25 percent import duty on graphics cards, starting on the 1st of January, 2023.

There's no easy way to circumvent the tariff either, as it includes items like "printed circuit assemblies, constituting unfinished logic boards," according to Tom's Hardware. Not all graphics cards are made in China though, but the majority of graphics cards are today. It's possible that NVIDIA's move of its logistics center from Hong Kong to Taiwan could have some relation to this as well, as NVIDIA would then be shipping products out of Taiwan, rather than China, depending on how the US Customs classifies Hong Kong these days. We should know what happens in a month's time, but a 25 percent import duty on graphics cards will likely kill most sales, as most people already find them overpriced. This would of course affect AMD and NVIDIA, as well as their partners in the same way, unless they make their graphics cards outside of China.

The 60th edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system is still the only true exascale machine on the list.

With an HPL score of 1.102 EFlop/s, the Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) did not improve upon the score it reached on the June 2022 list. That said, Frontier's near-tripling of the HPL score received by second-place winner is still a major victory for computer science. On top of that, Frontier demonstrated a score of 7.94 EFlop/s on the HPL-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and it relies on AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processor. The system has 8,730,112 cores and a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

According to TrendForce, global notebook shipments in 4Q22 are likely to decline to 42.9 million units, down 7.2% QoQ and 32.3% YoY, lower than the same period before the pandemic. In addition, market demand is affected by negative factors such as inventory, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and rising inflation, leading to a downward revision of notebook market shipments in 2022 to 189 million units, a 23% decline YoY, with the proportion of shipments in the first and second half of the year at 53:47, the first top-heavy scenario in the past ten years.

According to research, the structural imbalance between notebook market supply and demand remains unresolved at present, leading this year's notebook shipments to present a downward movement trend quarter by quarter. TrendForce believes, after current inventory pressure gradually returns to a healthy level, Chromebooks may be the first wave of products that will see a recovery in demand by 2Q23 and traditional cyclical growth momentum is expected to return to the market, with shipments set to rebound slightly from 14.44 million in 2022 to 16.2 million units.

According to the latest TrendForce research, pandemic-induced materials shortages abated in the second half of this year and the supply and delivery of short-term materials has recovered significantly. However, assuming materials supply is secure and demand can be met, the annual growth rate of server shipments in 2023 is estimated to be only 3.7%, which is lower than 5.1% in 2022.

TrendForce indicates that this growth slowdown is due to three factors. First, once material mismatch issues had eased, buyers began adjusting previously placed purchase order overruns. Thus, ODM orders also decreased but this will not affect the 2022 shipment volume of whole servers for the time being. Second, due to the impact of rising inflation and weakness in the overall economy, corporate capital investment may trend more conservative and IT-related investment will emphasize flexibility, such as the replacement of certain server terminals with cloud services. Third, geopolitical changes will drive the continuing emergence of demand for small-scale data centers and previous construction of hyperscale data centers will slow. The recent ban on military/HPC servers issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce on October 7 has a very low market share in terms of its application category, so the impact on the overall server market is limited at present. However, if the scope of the ban is expanded further in the future, it will herald a more significant slowdown risk for China's server shipment momentum in 2023.

In September, we reported that Apple, the world's most valuable company, would source some of its 3D NAND flash chips from the Chinese Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC). However, according to the latest political pressure from the US government, Apple has reportedly canceled any contracts with the Chinese company and will not include their 3D NAND chips in the production of iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers. Even with YTMC's Xstacking 3.0 six-plane architecture that provides triple-level cell storage with I/O speeds of 2400 MT/s, Apple is not going to source any NAND Flash memory as US-China political relationship gets tighter regulations.

However, this could not be a deal breaker for both companies, as NAND Flash is in high demand, and new clients will emerge. As for Apple, the company has contracts with Kioxia, SK Hynix, Samsung, and possibly others that will ensure a steady supply of storage for the company's solutions.

Semiconductor manufacturers worldwide are forecast to expand 300 mm fab capacity at a nearly 10% compound average growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 to 2025, reaching an all-time high of 9.2 million wafers per month (wpm), SEMI announced today in its 300 mm Fab Outlook to 2025 report. Strong demand for automotive semiconductors and new government funding and incentive programs in multiple regions are driving much of the growth.

"While shortages of some chips have eased and supply of others has remained tight, the semiconductor industry is laying the groundwork to meet longer-term demand for a broad range of emerging applications as it expands 300 mm fab capacity," said Ajit Manocha, SEMI President and CEO. "SEMI is currently tracking 67 new 300 mm fabs or major additions of new lines expected to start construction from 2022 to 2025."

Declines continued for the traditional PC market as global shipments totaled 74.3 million units during the third quarter of 2022 (3Q22), according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. Cooling demand and uneven supply have contributed to a year-over-year contraction of 15.0%. However, shipment volumes remain well above pre-pandemic levels when PC volumes were largely driven by commercial refreshes due to the looming end of support for Windows 7.

"Consumer demand has remained muted though promotional activity from the likes of Apple and other players has helped soften the fall and reduce channel inventory by a couple weeks across the board," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers. "Supply has also reacted to the new lows by reducing orders with Apple being the only exception as their third quarter supply increased to make up for lost orders stemming from the lockdowns in China during the second quarter."