The U.S. Department of Commerce today announced $1.5 billion in planned direct funding for GlobalFoundries (Nasdaq: GFS) (GF) as part of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. This investment will enable GF to expand and create new manufacturing capacity and capabilities to securely produce more essential chips for automotive, IoT, aerospace, defense, and other vital markets.

New York-headquartered GF, celebrating its 15th year of operations, is the only U.S.-based pure play foundry with a global manufacturing footprint including facilities in the U.S., Europe, and Singapore. GF is the first semiconductor pure play foundry to receive a major award (over $1.5 billion) from the CHIPS and Science Act, designed to strengthen American semiconductor manufacturing, supply chains and national security. The proposed funding will support three GF projects:

GlobalFoundries (GF) today announced the appointment of Hui Peng Koh as vice president and general manager of the company's semiconductor manufacturing facility in Malta, New York. Building on her experience in leading the 1,200 strong engineering team in Malta for the last three years, Ms. Koh is stepping up to lead GF's most advanced U.S. fab that supports a wide range of customers. She succeeds long time GF executive and industry veteran Peter Benyon who will retire in early July 2023 after more than 40 years in the semiconductor industry including being part of the GF team since the acquisition of Chartered Semiconductor in 2011.

Ms. Koh, an accomplished leader with more than 23 years of semiconductor manufacturing experience, currently serves as vice president of manufacturing engineering at GF. Prior to her current role, she was the director of lithography and held various leadership positions at the company's Malta facility. Previously, she served in several technology development roles at GF's Singapore campus. Ms. Koh earned her master's degree in materials engineering from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Here are the first pictures of AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X. If the naming caught you off-guard, our older article on AMD's new nomenclature could help. Pictured below is the AMD reference-design board of the R9 290X. It's big, and doesn't have too much going on with its design. At least it doesn't look Fisher Price like its predecessor. This reference design card is all that you'll be able to buy initially, and non-reference design cards could launch much later.

With its cooler taken apart, the PCB is signature AMD, you find digital-PWM voltage regulation, Volterra and CPL (Cooperbusmann) chippery, and, well, the more obvious components, the GPU and memory. The GPU, which many sources point at being built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process, and looks significantly bigger than "Tahiti." The chip is surrounded by not twelve, but sixteen memory chips, which could indicate a 512-bit wide memory interface. At 6.00 GHz, we're talking about 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other rumored specifications include 2,816 stream processors, four independent tessellation units, 176 TMUs, and anywhere between 32 and 64 ROPs. There's talk of DirectX 11.2 support.It gets better, the source also put out benchmark figures.

In a bid to step up competitiveness of its Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" dual-GPU graphics card against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX TITAN and GTX 690, AMD add-in-board (AIB) partners slashed prices of the card by almost a third. What was once retailing for $1,100-1,200, is now down to $699.99. Prices of the card on American retailer Newegg.com, are ranging between $699.99 to $789.99, with two AIBs capturing the $729.99 and $749.99 price points, along the way. With the right kind of CrossFire profiles, a Radeon HD 7990 can offer frame-rates rivaled only by GTX Titan and GTX 690. Then there are also AMD's recent CrossFire micro-stuttering fix, and eight Never Settle games with realistic resale value of $100 to account for. These prices should also give GeForce GTX 780 buyers second thoughts.

Weak demand and stiff competition from NVIDIA's offerings could lead to AMD discontinuing its flagship graphics card, the Radeon HD 7990 "Malta," by the end of Q3 (end of September). The card was launched just this April, as a redux of last year's misfired Radeon HD 7990 "New Zealand," after getting power draw and performance-per-Watt right. Availability of Radeon HD 7990 has been greatly slimmed, so inventories dry out by the end of Q3. Radeon HD 7990 is commanding a steep four-figure price that's on-par with NVIDIA's offerings that it's trying to compete with, GeForce GTX TITAN, and GTX 690. Rather than lowering prices of the card to make it competitive, it looks like AMD decided to discontinue it, within a fixed time frame (Q3). Perhaps it's an indication of AMD's rumored Radeon HD 9000 series' October arrival not being a unicorn?We just received following statement from AMD: "AMD has not EOL'd the world's fastest graphics card, the AMD Radeon HD 7990". So, all this says is that the card is not end-of-life (EOL) yet, but may be EOL'd in the future.. or not.

NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 760 could be the company's last GTX 700 series retail desktop SKU, at least for this year. A leaked slide by the company lays out how this year's three new GTX 700 series SKUs pretty much seal the product stack. It reveals that GeForce GTX TITAN will remain NVIDIA's flagship graphics card throughout the year. The thousand-dollar single-GPU card is based on the GK110 silicon, with 2,688 CUDA cores, and 6 GB of memory. The GeForce GTX 780, introduced this March, replaces the GeForce GTX 680 on the product-stack, even at its much higher launch price of $650, compared to its predecessor's $500. The GTX 780 has no competition from AMD at its price-point.

The slide also reveals that the GeForce GTX 770, which was launched late last month, will replace the GeForce GTX 670 from the stack. Based on the GK104 silicon, it features 1,536 CUDA cores, and 2 to 4 GB of memory. Given that it has a lot in common with the GeForce GTX 680, albeit with higher clock speeds, GPU Boost 2.0, its $400 pricing surprised us. The GeForce GTX 770 outperforms AMD's HD 7970 GHz Edition, and is generally priced on-par. The only definitively faster AMD card is the $1100 HD 7990 "Malta," which makes the GTX 770 the king of its segment.

It was only a matter of time after AMD's launch of the more energy-efficient Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" graphics card, that Sapphire would design a liquid-cooled Atomic variant. The card is based on a custom-design 12-layer PCB, ships with factory-overclocked speeds, and uses a high-grade VRM with 12-phase vGPU, 4-phase VDDCI, and 2-phase MVDD, which draw power from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The card is cooled by a full-coverage water-block, and features an aluminum back-plate to cool memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB. The card features 6 GB of total memory, 3 GB per GPU.

On the demo system, the full-coverage block was seen connected to a conventional-looking liquid-cooling loop, and not something closed-loop/AIO. Coolant tubes from the card run to a conventional-looking reservoir, a 240 x 120 mm radiator, and a pump that occupies a 5.25-inch drive bay, and features a pressure gauge. We're not sure if the Sapphire Atomic-branded FB blocks for the CPU and chipset are part of the package, but Sapphire has, in the past, given CPU blocks with its Atomic-branded cards. This is one card to watch out for.

HIS joined the Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" party by launching its own card, which predictably, is based on AMD's reference design. Called HIS HD 7990 Fan, the card features AMD-reference clock speeds of 1000 MHz core and 6.00 GHz memory; and features the "whisper quiet" triple-fan cooling solution. The card features a pair of 28 nm "Tahiti" GPUs, each featuring 2048 stream processors, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interfaces. There is a total of 6 GB of memory on board. AMD's Never Settle Reloaded, with eight games, come included. The HIS HD 7990 Fan is expected to be priced at US $999.

Ahead of its April 24 launch, AMD board vendors has been distributing marketing materials to their retail partners. One such retailer in Japan revealed the flagship graphics card's specifications sheet, revealing details such as clock speeds and GPU core configuration.

To begin with, AMD isn't compromising much on clock speeds on the HD 7990 "Malta," in an effort to lower power draw. The card features GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, which puts it above the single-GPU Radeon HD 7970, but not much lower than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, with its 1050 MHz. The memory is clocked at 6.00 GHz, on par with the HD 7970 GHz Edition, which yields a cumulative memory bandwidth of 576 GB/s.

Market launch of AMD's Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" dual-GPU graphics card is less than a week away, according to an OCaholic report. Sources told the publication that AMD plans to launch its flagship graphics card on the 24th of April, 2013. According to it, reviews of the card should already be underway. AMD Radeon HD 7990 is the company's flagship graphics card, featuring a pair of 28 nm "Tahiti" GPUs. According to specifications derived from older reports, it packs a total of 4096 stream processors, and 6 GB of GDDR5 memory across two 384-bit wide memory interfaces. What sets this card apart from the HD 7990 "New Zealand" launched last year by AMD's partners is the power-optimizations AMD put into it, leaving the card to draw power from "just" two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and make do with a dual-slot cooling solution.

A lucky bloke who managed to score an engineering sample of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7990 sought to make a quick buck by auctioning it on Ebay. An opening bid of $0.99, and 36 bids (ATP) later, the auction has reached the $1,125 mark. The engineering sample is said to ship with clock speeds of 950 MHz core, and 6.00 GHz memory. The dual-GPU graphics cards ships with two fully-loaded AMD "Tahiti" GPUs, with 2048 stream processors each, and a 384-bit memory interface holding 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, each. If anything the Ebay listing gave us some gorgeous pictures of the beast.