Intel is reportedly in talks with TSMC to secure foundry allocation to meet its product roadmap execution. The company is sending an executive delegation to meet with TSMC later this month, to secure foundry capacity for the N3 (3 nm) silicon fabrication node, and ensure that Intel's allocation isn't affected by other customers such as Apple. As part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel has decided to build its products essentially as multi-chip modules with each block of IP built on a silicon fabrication node most optimal to it, so the company maximizes cutting-edge foundry nodes only on the technology that benefits from it the most. N3 will play a vital role with logic/compute tiles in products bound for 2023, as N3 hits critical volume in the first half of the year.

In related news, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, stressed on the importance for American chip designers to seek out semiconductor manufacturing in America, and cautioned against investing in Taiwan (without naming TSMC). This comes in the wake of geopolitical uncertainty in the region. In response to this statement issued to DigiTimes, TSMC CEO Mark Liu downplayed the matter, and said that Gelsinger's statement wasn't worth responding to, and that he doesn't slander industry colleagues. TSMC and Samsung have each announced multi-billion Dollar foundry investments in the US, in attempts to make the global semiconductor supply chains resilient to any security situation that may emerge in East Asia.

Since Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joined the company earlier this year, the messaging language from Intel has changed radically, as it has become a no-nonsense message of Intel going back to its roots as a leading foundry and a leading chip maker. However, Gelsinger might've overstepped a little bit as of lately, as during a conference in California, he went on record saying that Intel deserves special treatment by the US government, in favor of some of its competitors.

At the same time, it's not hard to see why Intel thinks the US government should favor it and other US companies like Micron and Texas Instruments, over Samsung and TSMC. However, Intel's selling argument here is that investing in non-US companies means that the R&D money and IP ends up abroad, which isn't entirely true when it comes to foundries. Gelsinger also complained about the fact that Samsung and TSMC was getting large government subsidies in their home countries and claimed that because of those subsidies, Intel was competing with Korea and Taiwan, rather than with Samsung and TSMC.

Today, Intel celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the world's first commercially available microprocessor. With its launch in November 1971, the 4004 paved the path for modern microprocessor computing - the "brains" that make possible nearly every modern technology, from the cloud to the edge. Microprocessors enable the convergence of the technology superpowers - ubiquitous computing, pervasive connectivity, cloud-to-edge infrastructure and artificial intelligence - and create a pace of innovation that is moving faster today than ever.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 4004 chip. Think of how much we've accomplished in the past half-century. This is a sacred moment for technology. This is what made computing really take off!," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. The 4004 is the pioneer microprocessor, and its success proved that it was possible to build complex integrated circuits and fit them on a chip the size of a fingernail. Its invention also established a new random logic design methodology, one that subsequent generations of microprocessors would be built upon, before evolving to create the chips found in today's modern devices.

Intel's Aurora supercomputer is a $500 million contract with the US Department of Energy to deliver an exascale supercomputer for Argonne National Laboratory. The project aims to build a machine capable of cranking over one ExaFLOP of computing at sustained workloads. The supercomputer aims to reach two ExaFLOPs of computing power once the installation system is completed and powered. The contract bound Intel to create accelerators that are powerful enough to achieve this magical number. However, they left Intel with room to do a little bit extra. With Ponte Vecchio GPU behind the project, it seems like the GPU is performing better than expected.

According to Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, the system will reach over 2 ExaFLOPs at peak and a bit below in sustained workloads. As per preliminary calculations done by The Next Platform, the system's estimations point towards 2.43 ExaFLOPs peak and around 1.7 ExaFLOPs in sustained workloads at Double-precision floating-point format math, aka FP64. The system will utilize Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors with HBM memory and the powerful Ponte Vecchio GPU with 47 tiles and over 100 billion transistors.

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter 2021 financial results. "Q3 shone an even greater spotlight on the global demand for semiconductors, where Intel has the unique breadth and scale to lead. Our focus on execution continued as we started delivering on our IDM 2.0 commitments. We broke ground on new fabs, shared our accelerated path to regain process performance leadership, and unveiled our most dramatic architectural innovations in a decade. We also announced major customer wins across every part of our business," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "We are still in the early stages of our journey, but I see the enormous opportunity ahead, and I couldn't be prouder of the progress we are making towards that opportunity."

In the third quarter, the company generated $9.9 billion in cash from operations and paid dividends of $1.4 billion. Intel CFO George Davis announced plans to retire from Intel in May 2022. He will continue to serve in his current role while Intel conducts a search for a new CFO and until his successor is appointed. Third-quarter revenue was led by strong recovery in the Enterprise portion of DCG and in IOTG, which saw higher demand amid recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19. The Client Computing Group (CCG) was down due to lower notebook volumes due to industry-wide component shortages, and on lower adjacent revenue, partially offset by higher average selling prices (ASPs) and strength in desktop.

It's funny how new company CEOs always seem to blame their predecessors for whatever went wrong and it seems like Pat Gelsinger is no different, as he's throwing shade at his predecessors for not having been engineers. At the same time, he's set his mind on winning Apple back as a customer, as all Intel apparently has to do "is create a better chip than they can do themselves", with they being Apple here.

It should be pointed out that Intel hasn't had an engineer at the helm of the company since 2005, so the question is how far back Pat Gelsinger wants to throw the blame, although a guesstimate would be back to at least 2012/2013 when Paul Otellini stepped down. That said, in an interview with Axios, it's stated that "while he acknowledges the need to prove himself, Gelsinger said he will rebuild the company's credibility with its customers so that if they say they need a million of some chip by Monday, the order will be there by Sunday night."

In an interview with the BBC, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said that the company is no longer considering the UK as a site for a chip fab, due to Brexit, something the company had apparently done prior to Brexit. Now the company is looking for a location in another EU country for a US$95 billion investment for a new semiconductor plant, as well as upgrades to its current plants in Ireland.

Although Intel had not made any firm decisions on a site location prior to Brexit, Gelsinger is quoted as saying "I have no idea whether we would have had a superior site from the UK, but we now have about 70 proposals for sites across Europe from maybe 10 different countries." He continues "We're hopeful that we'll get to agreement on a site, as well as support from the EU... before the end of this year."

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger predicts that chips and semiconductors will make up as much of the car's bill-of-materials (BOM) as the engine (or main propulsion) itself. This change will happen as early as in 2030, said Gelsinger, speaking at a keynote address, at the IAA Mobility 2021 show in Munich. Gelsinger's prediction is backed by internal research conducted by Roland Berger, and McKinsey.

As of 2019, chips barely made 4% of a vehicle's BOM, confining mainly to the ECU and an optional infotainment system. By 2030, electronics will take over a more complex set of roles, including full automation, and AI that can drive anywhere. A fully automated vehicle, or AV, will be next big thing in personal transport. Gelsinger predicts a $115 billion TAM (total addressable market) size for automobile semiconductors by the end of the decade.

The U.S. Department of Defense, through the NSTXL consortium-based S2MARTS OTA, has awarded Intel an agreement to provide commercial foundry services in the first phase of its multi-phase Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C) program. The RAMP-C program was created to facilitate the use of a U.S.-based commercial semiconductor foundry ecosystem to fabricate the assured leading-edge custom and integrated circuits and commercial products required for critical Department of Defense systems. Intel Foundry Services, Intel's dedicated foundry business launched this year, will lead the work.

"One of the most profound lessons of the past year is the strategic importance of semiconductors, and the value to the United States of having a strong domestic semiconductor industry. Intel is the sole American company both designing and manufacturing logic semiconductors at the leading edge of technology. When we launched Intel Foundry Services earlier this year, we were excited to have the opportunity to make our capabilities available to a wider range of partners, including in the U.S. government, and it is great to see that potential being fulfilled through programs like RAMP-C." -Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO.

For most people, a tool is something you hold in your hand: pliers, hammer, screwdriver. Inside an Intel chip factory, a tool is a whole different deal. Fab tools are huge and hugely costly and take entire teams to muscle into place and install. As Intel aggressively ramps its worldwide manufacturing footprint, a construction milestone recently passed at Intel's Ronler Acres factory in Hillsboro, Oregon.

At the company's massive $3 billion Mod3 factory expansion, the first tool rolled in. The honor went to a thin film deposition tool. It arrived not in a leather tool belt, but aboard two semitractor-trailers. Once completed and hooked up, it will weigh 10 tons. And by the time the Mod3 project is done in about six months, the thin film deposition tool will be joined by more than a dozen like it. A typical Intel fab, once built out, is stuffed with about 1,200 chipmaking tools, many of them costing millions of dollars apiece.

Intel Corporation today revealed one of the most detailed process and packaging technology roadmaps the company has ever provided, showcasing a series of foundational innovations that will power products through 2025 and beyond. In addition to announcing RibbonFET, its first new transistor architecture in more than a decade, and PowerVia, an industry-first new backside power delivery method, the company highlighted its planned swift adoption of next-generation extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), referred to as High Numerical Aperture (High NA) EUV. Intel is positioned to receive the first High NA EUV production tool in the industry.

"Building on Intel's unquestioned leadership in advanced packaging, we are accelerating our innovation roadmap to ensure we are on a clear path to process performance leadership by 2025," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the global "Intel Accelerated" webcast. "We are leveraging our unparalleled pipeline of innovation to deliver technology advances from the transistor up to the system level. Until the periodic table is exhausted, we will be relentless in our pursuit of Moore's Law and our path to innovate with the magic of silicon."

Intel has recently confirmed during a recent earnings call that it is now manufacturing more 10 nm wafers than 14 nm wafers as part of its IDM 2.0 plan. This news comes four years after Intel first started shipping 10 nm products to customers however the production capacity did not exist to launch any mainstream desktop processors. Intel launched a few low-power mobile Ice Lake processors in 2019 but their 2021 flagship 11th Generation Rocket lake processors remained on 14 nm. This looks set to change as Intel highlights reduced production costs and prepares to launch 10 nm 12th Generation Alder Lake processors in Q4 2021. Intel will offer more details on their future manufacturing plans during their upcoming Intel Accelerated event.

Intel CEOUnder IDM 2.0, our factory network continues to deliver and we are now manufacturing more 10-nanometer wafers than 14-nanometer. As 10-nanometer volumes ramp, economics are improving with 10-nanometer wafer cost 45% lower year-over-year with more to come.

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."

Intel is exploring a deal to purchase GlobalFoundries for roughly $30 billion according to people familiar with the matter, which would serve as Intel's largest acquisition to date. GlobalFoundries is owned by Mubadala Investment Co and it was widely reported that the company was planning an initial public offering later this year. This latest report comes as Intel continues talks with RISC-V chip designer SiFive for a $2 billion purchase as part of a major restructuring effort led by new CEO Pat Gelsinger. Intel is planning to boost its manufacturing capacity with the IDM 2.0 initiative where they have already committed to building two new fabs in Arizona and will offer manufacturing services to other countries. GlobalFoundries currently holds about 7% of the global foundry market by revenue and has several large customers including AMD, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA.

Intel has recently announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger and Dr. Ann Kelleher (senior vice president and general manager of Technology Development) will be hosting a webcast on July 26th to provide a deeper look at Intel's process and packaging roadmaps. These updates will focus on the companies IDM 2.0 Strategy which seeks to increase the companies manufacturing capabilities through the creation of new fabs and the development of more advanced processes. Intel will also offer manufacturing capabilities to external companies using these foundries which it hopes will allow it to better compete with the likes of TSMC, Globalfoundries, and Samsung. You can watch the webcast on July 26th at 2 PM PDT, Intel will publish a link to it on their Newsroom website.

Intel is exploring a massive €20 billion ($23.7 billion) manufacturing investment in the European Union that aims to produce "20% of the world's logic chips" by 2030, reports the Financial Times. This is likely to be separate from the company's ongoing investments in Ireland. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently met with the leaders of France and Italy in a bid to "rebalance the semiconductor manufacturing landscape to make supply chains more resilient." Reading between the lines it becomes clear that they are referring to the world's overdependence on Asia, particularly Taiwan, for cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing.

The location of Intel's new mega-fab remains undecided, as the company is still sitting down with the various EU member states to work out a favorable deal. Regardless of where it lands, the investment would align with the EU's grand-strategy to localize semiconductor manufacturing on a large scale, with the goal of making the EU a net-exporter of semiconductors.

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."

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, speaking at the company's 2021 Computex Opening Keynote address stated that the explosive demand for chips caused by recent inflections of technology, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in demand outstripping supply by such extent, that it could "still take a couple of years for the ecosystem to address the shortages."

Gelsinger detailed how the world of information technology is at its biggest crossroads ever, with the emergence of Cloud, 5G, AI, and smarter edge computing changing the way people work, learn, and interact. This has caused a huge growth in the demand for semiconductors straining technology supply chains around the world. Gelsinger stated that his company is working with partners across the technology ecosystem to increase output to meet demand. He detailed how Intel has nearly doubled its own chip wafer manufacturing capacity over the past four years. "But while the industry has taken steps to address near-term constraints, it could still take a couple of years for the ecosystem to address chip shortages of foundry capacity, substrate, and components.

The following is an opinion editorial by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. It introduces Intel's 2020-2021 Corporate Responsibility Report: I am honored to return to Intel as CEO, and both humbled by the challenges and excited by the limitless opportunities made possible by the magic of technology.

Digital technology is transforming the world at an accelerated pace, driven by what I call the four "superpowers": cloud, connectivity fueled by 5G, artificial intelligence (Al) and the intelligent edge. They are superpowers because each expands the impact of the others. And together, they are reshaping every aspect of our lives and work. This goes straight to Intel's purpose and my own passion: creating world-changing technology that touches and improves the lives of every person on the planet.

NVIDIA has recently announced the company's first standalone Grace CPU that will come out as a product in 2023. NVIDIA has designed Grace on Arm ISA, likely ARM v9, to represent a new way that data centers are built and deliver a whole new level of HPC and AI performance. However, the CPU competition in a data center space is considered one of the hardest markets to enter. Usually, the market is a duopoly between Intel and AMD, which supply x86 processors to server vendors. In the past few years, there have been few Arm CPUs that managed to enter the data canter space, however, NVIDIA is aiming to deliver much more performance and grab a bigger piece of the market.

As a self-proclaimed leader in AI, Intel is facing hard competition from NVIDIA in the coming years. In an interview with Fortune, Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger has talked about NVIDIA and how the company sees the competition between the two. Mr. Gelsinger is claiming that Intel is a leader in CPUs that feature AI acceleration built in the chip and that they are not playing defense, but rather offense against NVIDIA. You can check out the whole quote from the interview below.

Intel will formally enter the third-party semiconductor foundry business under the Intel Foundry Services (IFS) brand, announced CEO Pat Gelsinger, on Tuesday. This entity would operate under a business model not unlike that of TSMC, with its latest foundry technologies available to third-party customers, besides Intel. The company hopes to become a major foundry service provider to U.S. and E.U. customers, particularly enterprise and government contractors that need secure semiconductor manufacturing on U.S. soil.

To this effect, Gelsinger announced that the company will invest $20 billion in the state of Arizona, to set up two semiconductor foundries. Intel could have an edge over other foundry companies as its foundry service portfolio includes Intel technologies as IP blocks. IFS will be led by semiconductor industry veteran Dr. Randhir Thakur, who will report directly to Pat Gelsinger. The $20 billion investment in Arizona, according to Intel, will generate over 3,000 high-skilled jobs, over 3,000 construction jobs, and approximately 15,000 local long-term jobs.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger made the first official reference to the company's future-generation client processor, codenamed "Meteor Lake." Slated for market release in 2023, the processor's compute tile will be taped out in Q2-2021. Launching alongside the "Granite Rapids" enterprise processor, "Meteor Lake" will be a multi-chip module leveraging Intel's Foveros chip packaging technology.

Different components of the processor will be fabricated on different kinds of silicon fabrication nodes, and interconnected on the package using EMIB inter-die connections, or even silicon interposers. The compute tile is likely the tile containing the processor's CPU cores, and Intel confirmed a 7 nm-class foundry node for it. "Meteor Lake" will be a hybrid processor, much like the upcoming "Alder Lake," meaning that it will have two kinds of CPU cores, larger "high performance" cores that remain dormant when the machine is idling or dealing with lightweight workloads; and smaller "high efficiency" cores based on a low-power microarchitecture.

Intel today revealed that it will launch its 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable processor series at an online event titled "How Wonderful Gets Done 2021," on April 6, 2021. This will be one of the first major media events headed by Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger. Besides the processor launch, Intel is expected to detail many of its advances in the enterprise space, particularly in the areas of 5G infrastructure rollout, edge computing, and AI/HPC. The 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the new 10 nm "Ice Lake-SP" silicon, heralding the company's first CPU core IPC gain in the server space since 2015. The processors also introduce new I/O capabilities, such as PCI-Express 4.0.

Recently appointed Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has announced via Twitter that the company will be holding a webcast on March 23rd - likely in the toes of Rocket Lake's actual release, which is expected towards the end of the month. The webcast, titled "Intel Unleashed", seems to serve as the premier event with Pat Gelsinger firmly entrenched on Intel's reins, and should be a tour de force for Intel's strengths, planned execution on product development and release, and growth opportunities - and, if we're being honest, a frontal recognizance of Intel's current weaknesses. for now, the only information Pat Gelsinger put forwards is that this is a business update, and that "exciting things" are coming in 2021.

Today marks Intel's official CEO transition as Pat Gelsinger becomes the company's eighth chief executive officer in its history. Gelsinger is an accomplished CEO and industry veteran with more than four decades of technology and leadership experience - including 30 years at Intel, where he began his career.

Gelsinger shared his thoughts on returning to lead the company, saying:
"As the incoming CEO, I am just really thrilled that we have the opportunity to take this great icon of a company, this company that has been crucial to every aspect of technology, and have it be that leader again into the future. Because I believe that Intel has a treasure trove of technologists, of technology, and ultimately its core DNA is being that technology leader for the future. I'm just thrilled as a technologist, as a geek at heart, to be able to be in that leadership role to help bring the passions, the history, the opportunity of this great company forward as never before. Our best days are in front of us."