Optical computing has been the research topic of many startups and tech companies like Intel and IBM, searching for the practical approach to bring a new way of computing. However, the most innovative solutions often come out of startups and today is no exception. According to the report from EETimes, optical computing startup Lightelligence has developed a processor that outperforms regular GPUs by 100 times in calculating some of the most challenging mathematical problems. As the report indicates, the Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE) from Lightelligence manages to outperform regular GPUs, like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080, by almost 100 times in the NP-complete class of problems.

More precisely, the PACE accelerator was tackling the Ising model, an example of a thermodynamic system used for understanding phase transitions, and it achieved some impressive results. Compared to the RTX 3080, it reached 100 times greater speed-up. All of that was performed using 12,000 optical devices integrated onto a circuit and running at 1 GHz frequency. Compared to the purpose-built Toshiba's simulated bifurcation machine based on FPGAs, the PACE still outperforms this system designed to tackle the Ising mathematical computation by 25 times. The PACE chip uses standard silicon photonics integration of Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) for computing and MEMS to change the waveguide shape in the MZI.

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive computing, today at the SC21 supercomputing conference introduced the Alveo U55C data center accelerator card and a new standards-based, API-driven clustering solution for deploying FPGAs at massive scale. The Alveo U55C accelerator brings superior performance-per-watt to high performance computing (HPC) and database workloads and easily scales through the Xilinx HPC clustering solution.

Purpose-built for HPC and big data workloads, the new Alveo U55C card is the company's most powerful Alveo accelerator card ever, offering the highest compute density and HBM capacity in the Alveo accelerator portfolio. Together with the new Xilinx RoCE v2-based clustering solution, a broad spectrum of customers with large-scale compute workloads can now implement powerful FPGA-based HPC clustering using their existing data center infrastructure and network.

While the global electronics supply chain experienced a chip shortage, the corresponding shortage of foundry capacities also led various foundries to raise their quotes, resulting in an over 20% YoY increase in the total annual revenues of the top 10 foundries for both 2020 and 2021, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. The top 10 foundries' annual revenue for 2021 is now expected to surpass US$100 billion. As TSMC leads yet another round of price hikes across the industry, annual foundry revenue for 2022 will likely reach US$117.69 billion, a 13.3% YoY increase.

TrendForce indicates that the combined CAPEX of the top 10 foundries surpassed US$50 billion in 2021, a 43% YoY increase. As new fab constructions and equipment move-ins gradually conclude next year, their combined CAPEX for 2022 is expected to undergo a 15% YoY increase and fall within the US$50-60 billion range. In addition, now that TSMC has officially announced the establishment of a new fab in Japan, total foundry CAPEX will likely increase further next year. TrendForce expects the foundry industry's total 8-inch and 12-inch wafer capacities to increase by 6% YoY and 14% YoY next year, respectively.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller integrated circuits and storage solutions, today announced its technology development of PCIe Gen 5 customizable SSD solutions for Enterprise and Client SSDs. Phison customers from Hyperscale Cloud Data Centers to PC Gaming demand the fastest performance motherboards and SSD storage devices. Their business models require that they transition to the newest technologies when they first become available, usually well before the rest of the software and hardware ecosystem has been established.

Phison is enabling our valued customers with PCIe Gen 5 SSD platforms that may be customized to perform optimally in their applications. Customers who are early adopters of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs will benefit from superior specifications and first to market leadership revenue. The data rate specification for PCIe Gen 5 at 32 Gb/s is twice the lane speed of PCIe Gen 4 at 16 Gb/s, enabling either double the overall performance, or offering similar performance, but using half as many lanes as PCIe Gen 4.

Tachyum Inc. today announced that it has successfully executed the Linux boot process on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of its Prodigy Universal Processor, in 2 months after taking delivery of the IO motherboard from manufacturing. This achievement proves the stability of the Prodigy emulation system and allows the company to move forward with additional testing before advancing to tape out.

Tachyum engineers were able to perform the Linux boot, execute a short user-mode program and shutdown the system on the fully functional FPGA emulation system. Not only does this successful test prove that the basic processor is stable, but interrupts, exceptions, timing, and system-mode transitions are, as well. This is a key milestone, which dramatically reduces risk, as booting and running large and complex pieces of software like Linux reliably on the Tachyum FPGA processor prototype shows that verification and hardware stability are past the most difficult turning point, and it is now obvious that verification and testing should successfully complete in the coming months. Designers are now shifting their attention to debug and verification processes, running hundreds of trillions of test cycles over the next few months, and running large scale user mode applications with compatibility testing to get the processor to production quality.

Lattice Semiconductor, the low power programmable leader, today expanded its growing portfolio of automotive products with the announcement of versions of the Lattice Certus -NX FPGA family optimized for infotainment, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and safety-focused applications. Built on the Lattice Nexus platform, these new Certus-NX devices combine automotive-grade features with best-in-class I/O density, power efficiency, small size, reliability, instant-on performance, and support for fast PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

"Demand for automotive semiconductors is increasing as the ongoing trends towards automotive system electrification, autonomy, and connectivity have manufacturers looking for ways to deliver the advanced features and user experiences drivers are looking for in their next vehicle," said Jay Aggarwal, Director of Silicon Product Marketing, Lattice Semiconductor. "With class-leading performance and power efficiency, support for popular I/O standards in a small form factor, and high reliability, our Certus-NX general purpose FPGAs make a compelling silicon platform for the next-generation automotive applications car makers are eager to provide to their customers."

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.

The ramp-up of the Intel Ice Lake and AMD Milan processors is expected to not only propel growths in server shipment for two consecutive quarters from 2Q21 to 3Q21, but also drive up the share of high-density products in North American hyperscalers' enterprise SSD purchases, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In China, procurement activities by domestic hyperscalers Alibaba and ByteDance are expected to increase on a quarterly basis as well. With the labor force gradually returning to physical offices, enterprises are now placing an increasing number of IT equipment orders, including servers, compared to 1H21. Hence, global enterprise SSD procurement capacity is expected to increase by 7% QoQ in 3Q21. Ongoing shortages in foundry capacities, however, have led to the supply of SSD components lagging behind demand. At the same time, enterprise SSD suppliers are aggressively raising the share of large-density products in their offerings in an attempt to optimize their product lines' profitability. Taking account of these factors, TrendForce expects contract prices of enterprise SSDs to undergo a staggering 15% QoQ increase for 3Q21.

Intel Corporation today reported second-quarter 2021 financial results. "There's never been a more exciting time to be in the semiconductor industry. The digitization of everything continues to accelerate, creating a vast growth opportunity for us and our customers across core and emerging business areas. With our scale and renewed focus on both innovation and execution, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity, which I believe is merely the beginning of what will be a decade of sustained growth across the industry," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "Our second-quarter results show that our momentum is building, our execution is improving, and customers continue to choose us for leadership products."

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive computing, today introduced the Versal HBM adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), the newest series in the Versal portfolio. The Versal HBM series enables the convergence of fast memory, secure connectivity, and adaptable compute in a single platform. Versal HBM ACAPs integrate the most advanced HBM2E DRAM, providing 820 GB/s of throughput and 32 GB of capacity for 8X more memory bandwidth and 63% lower power than DDR5 implementations. The Versal HBM series is architected to keep up with the higher memory needs of the most compute intensive, memory bound applications for data center, wired networking, test and measurement, and aerospace and defense.

"Many real-time, high-performance applications are critically bottlenecked by memory bandwidth and operate at the edge of their power and thermal limits," said Sumit Shah, senior director, Product Management and Marketing at Xilinx. "The Versal HBM series eliminates those bottlenecks to provide our customers with a solution that delivers significantly higher performance and reduced system power, latency, form factor, and total cost of ownership for data center and network operators."

AMD's ambitious acquisition of Xilinx, makers of cutting-edge FPGAs, has been approved by the UK Competition and Markets Authority. This would go down as AMD's biggest tech acquisition, as the company is forking out USD $35 billion in stock. If it goes through, the AMD-Xilinix combine will see current AMD shareholders own 74% of the company, and current Xilinx shareholders with the other 26%. Both companies announced in April 2021 that their shareholders "overwhelmingly" approved of the deal. The Xilinx buyout by AMD isn't too far behind in terms of value, to NVIDIA's ambitious $40 billion bid to acquire Arm Holdings.Many Thanks to DeathtoGnomes for the tip

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the addition of two new technology leaders to its executive leadership team, as well as several changes to Intel business units. Current Intel executives Sandra Rivera and Raja Koduri will each take on new senior leadership roles, and technology industry veterans Nick McKeown and Greg Lavender will join the company.

"Since re-joining Intel, I have been impressed with the depth of talent and incredible innovation throughout the company, but we must move faster to fulfill our ambitions," said Gelsinger. "By putting Sandra, Raja, Nick and Greg - with their decades of technology expertise - at the forefront of some of our most essential work, we will sharpen our focus and execution, accelerate innovation, and unleash the deep well of talent across the company."

Today as part of its MWC 2021 virtual event, Intel showcased multiple groundbreaking network deployments powered by its technology and unveiled the Intel Network Platform. It also announced new additions to its leading product portfolio for 5G and edge, reaffirming its position as the leading network silicon provider. The company confirmed its leadership in virtual radio access network (vRAN), noting nearly all commercial vRAN deployments are running on Intel technology. In the years ahead, it sees global vRAN base station deployments scale, from hundreds to "hundreds of thousands," and eventually millions.

"Network transformation is critical to unleash the possibilities of 5G and maximize the rise of the edge to create new and better business outcomes for our customers across the globe. As the leading network silicon provider, we have been driving this shift to virtualizing the core to access to edge, and implementing edge computing capabilities with our decade of experience, to power our society's digital revolution," said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president, Network Platforms Group.

Today during the Six Five Summit, Intel unveiled its vision for the infrastructure processing unit (IPU), a programmable networking device designed to enable cloud and communication service providers to reduce overhead and free up performance for central processing units (CPUs). With an IPU, customers will better utilize resources with a secure, programmable, stable solution that enables them to balance processing and storage.

"The IPU is a new category of technologies and is one of the strategic pillars of our cloud strategy. It expands upon our SmartNIC capabilities and is designed to address the complexity and inefficiencies in the modern data center. At Intel, we are dedicated to creating solutions and innovating alongside our customer and partners—the IPU exemplifies this collaboration," said Guido Appenzeller, chief technology officer, Data Platforms Group, Intel.

Tachyum Inc. today announced that it has taken delivery of an IO motherboard for its Prodigy Universal Processor hardware emulator from manufacturing. This provides the company with a complete system prototype integrating CPU, memory, PCI Express, networking and BMC management subsystems when connected to the previously announced field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation system board.

The Tachyum Prodigy FPGA DDR-IO Board connects to the Prodigy FPGA CPU Board to provide memory and IO connectivity for the FPGA-based CPU tiles. The fully functional Prodigy emulation system is now ready for further build out, including Linux boot and incorporation of additional test chips. It is available to customers to perform early testing and software development prior to a full four-socket reference design motherboard, which is expected to be available Q4 2021.

British competition regulator Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Monday, launched an enquiry into the ramifications of AMD's buy-out of FPGA maker Xilinx. The agency is soliciting opinions from the public on whether the $35 billion all-stock purchase will make goods and services less competitive for the UK. Unlike NVIDIA's Arm buyout the Xilinx acquisition is seeing no opposition from tech-giants. The Register notes that AMD could combine Xilinx's FPGAs with its x86 CPU and RDNA SIMD to create highly customizable HPC accelerators. AMD president Dr Lisa Su said "By combining our world-class engineering team and deep domain expertise, we will create an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to define the future of high performance computing."

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) and Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) announced today that stockholders voted to approve their respective proposals relating to the pending acquisition of Xilinx by AMD. The acquisition will bring together two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise to enable leadership in computing platforms for cloud, edge and end devices. Together, the combined company will have the ability to capitalize on opportunities spanning some of the industry's most important growth segments, including data centers, gaming, PCs, communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace and defense.

"For several years, AMD has successfully executed our long-term growth strategy and deepened the company's partnerships to drive high performance computing leadership," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "The acquisition of Xilinx marks the next leg in our journey to make AMD the strategic partner of choice for the largest and most important technology companies in the world as an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to support their future innovation."

Intel and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced a three-year partnership to advance the development of domestically manufactured structured Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platforms. The Structured Array Hardware for Automatically Realized Applications (SAHARA) partnership enables the design of custom chips that include state-of-the-art security countermeasure technologies. A reliable, secure, domestic source of leading-edge semiconductors remains critical to the U.S.

"We are combining our most advanced Intel eASIC structured ASIC technology with state-of-the-art data interface chiplets and enhanced security protection, and it's all being made within the U.S. from beginning to end. This will enable defense and commercial electronics systems developers to rapidly develop and deploy custom chips based on Intel's advanced 10 nm semiconductor process," said José Roberto Alvarez, senior director, CTO Office, Intel Programmable Solutions Group.

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive computing, today announced the company has expanded its UltraScale+ portfolio for markets with new applications that require ultra-compact and intelligent edge solutions. With form factors that are 70 percent smaller than traditional chip-scale packaging, the new Artix and Zynq UltraScale+ devices can now address a wider range of applications within the industrial, vision, healthcare, broadcast, consumer, automotive, and networking markets.

As the world's only hardware adaptable cost-optimized portfolio based on 16 nanometer technology, Artix and Zynq UltraScale+ devices are available in TSMC's state-of-the-art InFO (Integrated Fan-Out) packaging technology. Using InFO, Artix and Zynq UltraScale+ devices meet the need for intelligent edge applications by delivering high-compute density, performance-per-watt, and scalability in compact packaging options.

Addressing the demands of the modern data center, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced a range of new data center products and solutions, including a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store.

Today's most demanding and complex applications, from networking and AI analytics to financial trading, require low-latency and real-time performance. Achieving this level of performance has been limited to expensive and lengthy hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined, hardware accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

AMD has applied for a United States Patent that describes a CPU design with FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) elements integrated into its core design. Titled "Method and Apparatus for Efficient Programmable Instructions in Computer Systems", the patent application describes a CPU with FPGA elements inscribed into its very core design, where the FPGA elements actually share CPU resources such as registers for floating-point and integer execution units. This patent undoubtedly comes in the wake of AMD's announced Xilinx acquisition plans, and brings FPGA and CPU marriages to a whole other level. FPGA,as the name implies, are hardware constructions which can reconfigure themselves according to predetermined tables (which can also be updated) to execute desired and specific functions.

Intel have themselves already shipped a CPU + FPGA combo in the same package; the company's Xeon 6138P, for example, includes an Arria 10 GX 1150 FPGA on-package, offering 1,150,000 logic elements. However, this is simply a CPU + FPGA combo on the same substrate; not a native, core-integrated FPGA design. Intel's product has severe performance and latency penalties due to the fact that complex operations performed in the FPGA have to be brought out of the CPU, processed in the FPGA, and then its results have to be returned to the CPU. AMD's design effectively ditches that particular roundabout, and should thus allow for much higher performance.

Tachyum Inc. today announced that it is signing early adopter customers for the software emulation system for its Prodigy Universal Processor, customers may begin the process of native software development (i.e. using Prodigy Instruction Set Architecture) and porting applications to run on Prodigy. Prodigy software emulation systems will be available at the end of January 2021.

Customers and partners can use Prodigy's software emulation for evaluation, development and debug, and with it, they can begin to transition existing applications that demand high performance and low power to run optimally on Prodigy processors. Pre-built systems include a Prodigy emulator, native Linux, toolchains, compilers, user mode applications, x86, ARM and RISC-V emulators. Software updates will be issued as needed.

Today at AWS re:Invent 2020, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced EC2 instances that will leverage up to eight Habana Gaudi accelerators and deliver up to 40% better price performance than current graphics processing unit-based EC2 instances for machine learning workloads. Gaudi accelerators are specifically designed for training deep learning models for workloads that include natural language processing, object detection and machine learning training, classification, recommendation and personalization.

"We are proud that AWS has chosen Habana Gaudi processors for its forthcoming EC2 training instances. The Habana team looks forward to our continued collaboration with AWS to deliver on a roadmap that will provide customers with continuity and advances over time." -David Dahan, chief executive officer at Habana Labs, an Intel Company.

BittWare, a Molex company, today unveiled the IA-840F, the company's first Intel Agilex -based FPGA card designed to deliver significant performance-per-watt improvements for next-generation data center, networking and edge compute workloads. Agilex FPGAs deliver up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower power, depending on application requirements. BittWare maximized I/O features using the Agilex chip's unique tiling architecture with dual QSFP-DDs (4× 100G), PCIe Gen4 x16, and three MCIO expansion ports for diverse applications. BittWare also announced support for Intel oneAPI, which enables an abstracted development flow for dramatically simplified code re-use across multiple architectures.

"Modern data center workloads are incredibly diverse, requiring customers to implement a mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures," said Craig Petrie, vice president of marketing for BittWare. "The IA-840F ensures that customers can quickly and easily exploit the advanced features of the Intel Agilex FPGA. For those customers who prefer to develop FPGA applications at an abstracted level, we are including support for oneAPI. This new unified software programming environment allows customers to program the Agilex FPGA from a single code base with native high-level language performance across architectures."

Intel continues to "shed fat" on its business portfolio. After last year's sale of its smartphone modem chip business to Apple, the company is now parting ways with its power management circuitry division - Enpirion - and offloading it to Richtek, a division of Taiwanese MediaTek. The sale price of $85 million is a drop in the bucket for Intel's overall bottom line, so it's not a way for the company to cash in some desperately needed money - all accounts of Intel's troubles in the wake of its semiconductor manufacturing issues and AMD's market resurgence pale in comparison to Intel's revenues.

This actually looks like a company that's actually streamlining its R&D expenditures and focusing on execution for the markets Intel sees as most important for today and for tomorrow. Intel's Enpirion focuses on building power management chips for FPGA circuits, SoCs, CPUs, and ASICs, and will now serve to bolster MediaTek's SoC business while allowing the Taiwanese company to expand and diversify its business portfolio, even as Intel focuses on their core competencies.