As we know, the Japanese government has offered some subsidies for the TSMC/Sony joint venture to build a chip fab in the Kumamoto Prefecture, but now it seems like the Japanese government has decided to ask for assurances. The Japanese government is said to have put aside US$5.2 billion, a relatively small amount even compared to India, to help semiconductor manufacturers that want to build new fabs in Japan. Of that, US$3.49 million is already said to be earmarked for the TSMC/Sony joint venture, in exchange for around 10 years of production in Japan.

The rules are apparently not quite finalised as yet, as the government is said to be getting public comments on the specific rules that should apply to the subsidies. One of the conditions could be that the foundry would have to ramp up production in times of shortages, others might include the protection of key Japanese technologies, or ongoing investment into the fab(s), although the latter is usually something that is done simply out of good business practice. Time will tell how things play out, but it seems like the Japanese government has given a bit more thought to its subsidies than what has been announced by some other nations so far.

It looks like Intel and TSMC have a deal in place to manufacture 3 nm chips. The world-leading Taiwanese fab is setting up a new facility exclusively to cater to Intel, according to DigiTimes, citing industry sources. This facility will be located in the Baoshan area of Hsinchu, in northern Taiwan. The 3 nm node will enable Intel to keep its newfound cadence of launching new CPU microarchitectures with IPC increases each year. The annual IPC increase cadence in particular, would be faster than even the "Tick-Tock" cadence prior to 2015, as the company pushed IPC increases and foundry nodes each alternating year. The company faces stiff competition from AMD, which has been posting IPC increases each year since 2017, and leveraged TSMC 7 nm nodes to beat Intel in the IPC game for the first time in over 17 years.

TSMC has held its quarterly earnings conference today and it's good news all around, at least if you're TSMC or one of its shareholders, as the company reported record profits of US$6.01 billion for the quarter, or an increase of 16.4 percent compared to the same quarter last year. At the same time, the company announced that it's going to increase its CapEx, by no less than US$40-44 billion this year, which should be compared to the US$30 billion in 2021. The company is expecting to continue to rake in money this quarter, with an expected revenue before expenditures and tax of US$16.6 to US$17.2 billion, compared to US$15.74 billion for this quarter.

Looking at the graphs provided by TSMC which shows where its revenue is coming from, its 7 nm and 5 nm nodes are now accounting for 50 percent of TSMC's revenues. The 5 nm node on its own, almost made as much money as its 16 and 28 nm nodes combined in Q4. We can also see that the 5 nm has gone from eight percent of TSMC's revenues in 2020, to 19 percent this year, with the 7 nm node dropping slightly from 33 percent to 31 percent. 2021 saw a massive 51 percent revenue growth in automotive components for TSMC compared to 2020, yet it only accounted for four percent of TSMC's total revenue for 2021. Smartphones and HPC are jointly holding 81 percent of TSMC's business based on revenue, which isn't likely to change any time soon.

Anandtech asked AMD during a meeting at CES about the production nodes used to make its chips at TSMC and the importance of leading edge nodes for AMD to stay competitive, especially in light of the cost of using said nodes. Lisa Su confirmed in her answer to Anandtech that AMD is using an optimised high-performance 5 nm node for its upcoming Zen 4 processor chiplets, which there interestingly appears to be both 2D and 3D versions of. This is the first time we've heard a mention of two different chiplet types using the same architecture and it could mean that we get to see Zen 4 based CPUs with and without 3D cache.

What strikes us as a bit odd about the Anandtech article, is that they mention the fact that several of TSMC's customers are already making 4 nm and soon 3 nm chips and are questioning why AMD wouldn't want to be on these same nodes. It seems like Anandtech has forgotten that not all process nodes are universally applicable and just because you can make one type of chip on a smaller node, doesn't mean it'll be suitable for a different type of chip. For the longest of times, mobile SoCs or other similar chips seem to always have been among the first things being made on new nodes, with more complex things like GPUs and more advanced CPUs coming later, to tweaked versions of the specific node. The fact that TSMC has no less than three 7 nm nodes, should be reason enough to realise that the leading edge node might not be the ideal node for all types of chips.

AMD this CES announced the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card, its product to debut on the TSMC-N6 (6 nm) silicon fabrication process. Armed with just 4 GB of memory, the card is launched with an SEP of $199, although its real-world pricing tells a different story, according to retail prices leaked of two upcoming ASUS-branded custom-design RX 6500 XT cards.

The ASUS TUF Gaming RX 6500 XT is priced around 340€ including taxes, while the DUAL RX 6500 XT goes for 299€; a far-cry from the roughly 220€ pricing. The RX 6500 XT is purported as an entry-mid category product, designed for 1080p AAA gaming with Fidelity FX Super Resolution unlocking some more eye-candy. It is based on the same RDNA2 graphics architecture as the rest of the RX 6000 series.

ASML, makers of vital semiconductor fabrication machinery powering the world's leading fabs, including TSMC, provided its first damage-assessment of the fire incident at one of its component plants near Berlin, on January 3. This plant manufactures several mechanical and optical components of semiconductor fabrication machinery, such as wafer tables and clamps, reticle chucks and mirror blocks.

ASML, in a press-release, disclosed that production of components used in DUV (deep-ultraviolet) machines, has been restarted, as that area of the plant is unaffected by the fire. A region of the plant that manufactures wafer clamps for use in its EUV (extreme ultraviolet) machines, however, has been affected by the fire. The company is still in the process of coming up with a recovery plan for this area, and will come up with a tentative date for restart of production only after that. EUV lithography is leveraged for 5 nm and upcoming 3 nm silicon fabrication nodes at TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. TSMC is known to be ASML's largest customer. ASML stated that it will release its Q4-2021 and full-year 2021 financial results on January 19, and it may provide more updates on the matter.The press-release follows.

AMD already declared the CPU core counts of its EPYC "Genoa" and "Bergamo" processors to top out at 96 and 128, respectively, a core-count believed to have been facilitated by the larger fiberglass substrate of the next-gen SP5 CPU socket, letting AMD add more 8-core "Zen 4" chiplets, dubbed CPU complex dies (CCDs). Until now, AMD has used the chiplet as a common component between its EPYC enterprise and Ryzen desktop processors, to differentiate CPU core counts.

A fascinating theory that hit the rumor-mill, indicates that the company might leverage 5 nm (TSMC N5) carve out larger CCDs with up to 16 "Zen 4" CPU cores. Half of these cores are capped at a much lower power budget, essentially making them efficient-cores. This is a concept AMD appears to be carrying over from its 15-Watt class mobile processors, which see the CPU cores operate under an aggressive power-management. These cores still turn out a reasonable amount of performance, and are functionally identical to the ones on 105 W desktop processors with a relaxed power budget.

AMD's next-generation Ryzen "Raphael" processor could launch only in the second half of 2022, confirms a leaked company slide scored by VideoCardz. The slide points to a Ryzen 5000X3D series product-stack update within the 1H-2022. These are Socket AM4 processors that leverage the company's updated "Zen 3(+)" CPU core die (CCD), which features 64 MB of 3D Vertical cache memory in addition to 32 MB of L3. AMD claims that 3DV Cache technology significantly improves performance akin to a generational update (anywhere between 5% to 25% depending on the application). The company is targeting "Spring" 2022 for launch, which would put this around early-Q2.

The "Raphael" Socket AM5 processor is sure to catch much of the attention, as it's the company's true next-gen desktop product. It heralds Socket AM5, a new LGA-based socket; and next-generation connectivity that includes DDR5 memory and PCI-Express Gen 5. The CCDs of these processors are built on the TSMC N5 (5 nm) silicon fabrication node, and are based on the "Zen 4" microarchitecture. The leaked slide shows the first grainy picture of Socket AM5, with a retention mechanism not unlike what we're used to, on the Intel platform. We're hearing rumors that AM5 will somehow manage cooler-compatibility with AM4 despite the radical redesign to the socket. An H2-2022 launch would put "Raphael" close to Intel's 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" launch, as team blue hopes to return to an annual IPC-uplift cadence, with up to 8 "Raptor Cove" P-cores, and 16 "Gracemont" E-cores.

AMD is planning to crash Intel's big 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-P" mobile processor launch with its own next-gen launch, the Ryzen 6000 mobile processor series. These chips are the company's first built on the TSMC N6 (6 nm) silicon fabrication process, and combine up to 8 "Zen 3+" CPU cores, with a next-generation iGPU based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. The company has given the Media CoreNext and Video CoreNext engines incremental updates, according to a leaked slide scored by VideoCardz.

Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" processors come with hardware-accelerated decode of the AV1 video format. The Display CoreNext (display I/O engine) now supports DisplayPort 2.0, complete with DSC, UHBR10, HDR10+, and variable refresh-rate. The HDR pipeline has awareness for the various display panel types, including OLED and mini-LED. The iGPU on "Rembrandt" features up to 12 compute units (768 stream processors). It remains to be seen if Ray Accelerators are featured, as that would make this the first iGPU (on the PC platform) with DirectX 12 Ultimate support.

According to an article by DigiTimes, which kind of states the obvious, the foundry industry isn't likely to change much over the next few years, as the cost of building a cutting edge foundry keeps increasing, which means the competition isn't likely to catch up with the market leaders. The costs mentioned are estimates, but seem quite likely and explains why there's so little competition in the foundry business.

It's unclear if the costs have been inflation adjusted or not, but a 90 nm 12-inch fab that could output 50,000 wafers a month, is said to have cost US$2.4 billion to build when it was the cutting edge node. Once things moved on to 28 nm, the equivalent fab would've cost US$6 billion, whereas a cutting edge 5 nm fab today, comes in at as much as US$16 billion. These are obviously long term investments, as even today, 90 nm nodes are used for plenty of chips, but most of the nodes above 28 nm are today used for specialty products rather than commonly used ICs, unless we're talking about 8-bit microcontrollers or some simpler components which companies such as TSMC and Samsung wouldn't even bother making.

USound, a global developer and manufacturer of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) loudspeakers for personal devices and wearable technology, today announced that it has raised $30 million (€25 million) to move into mass production of its second generation MEMS loudspeakers for several global companies. The investment round was led by Austria's leading venture capital firm, eQventure, with participation from venture capitalists Hermann Hauser (co-founder of ARM) and Longzhong Yang (co-founder of BYD), as well as a strong participation from the European Investment Bank.

USound MEMS loudspeakers take up 50% less space, use 80% less energy, and boast a greater frequency range than rival speaker products used in TWS earphones, headphones, smartphones, VR/AR glasses, wearables, and hearing aids. Due to its reduced size, MEMS speakers impact the size and weight of any wearable, providing more in-ear comfort and style for the consumer. USound's MEMS speakers are dramatically reducing system costs due to its SMT reflow capability, enabling fully automatic assembly of audio products to achieve the highest quality and performance. In comparison to a pure monolithic MEMS solution, USound's MEMS speakers are smaller and offer higher sound pressure levels, better sound quality, and lower manufacturing costs.

TSMC today introduced its N4X process technology, tailored for the demanding workloads of high performance computing (HPC) products. N4X is the first of TSMC's HPC-focused technology offerings, representing ultimate performance and maximum clock frequencies in the 5-nanometer family. The "X" designation is reserved for TSMC technologies that are developed specifically for HPC products.

"HPC is now TSMC's fastest-growing business segment and we are proud to introduce N4X, the first in the 'X' lineage of our extreme performance semiconductor technologies," said Dr. Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of Business Development at TSMC. "The demands of the HPC segment are unrelenting, and TSMC has not only tailored our 'X' semiconductor technologies to unleash ultimate performance but has also combined it with our 3DFabric advanced packaging technologies to offer the best HPC platform."

According to reports out of Taiwan, Intel's meeting with TSMC might not have ended up in favour of Intel, as TSMC has apparently asked Intel to pay up a deposit in advance to get access to its upcoming 3 nanometer node. This is unlikely to be what Intel had hoped for, but at the same time, the 3 nanometer node is likely to be popular among many of TSMC's customers, unless the cost becomes prohibitive.

Intel was apparently hoping to be able to get a dedicated production line, much in the way of what Apple has at TSMC, but it seems like this is going to cost and the question is if Intel is willing to pay or not. The reason for a dedicated production line could also come down to Intel wanting to make chips at TSMC using Intel specific tricks of the trade, that Intel doesn't want TSMC or its competitors to get too much insight into. Time will tell what will come out of this meeting between the two semiconductor giants, but it seems like Gelsinger has changed his mind about Taiwan, as he said that "Intel would continue to invest in Taiwan".

Intel and TSMC are positioning themselves as two competing foundries for a significant period. However, as the difficulties in semiconductor manufacturing rise, the collaboration of the two seems inevitable. Not because Intel is eyeing TSMC's clients, but because of the race to produce the most minor and best possible semiconductor node. We already know that Intel plans to use some of TSMC's nodes for its Ponte Vecchio accelerator that contains 47 tiles. However, we didn't realize just how big the contract between the two companies was. According to the latest report from DigiTimes, Intel is supposed to become one of the top three clients at TSMC.

As the report notes, the collaboration should extend to at least TSMC's 2 nm node, expected in 2025. After that, the state of semiconductors is unknown. Intel has a solid chance to be in the top three customers in 2023 and become one of the primary sources of profit for the Taiwanese giant. We are excited to see how this prediction plays out and hope to hear more from both in the future.

A fight over who can announce the most new chip related investments seem to have broken out between Intel and TSMC, which both companies said to be eyeing Germany for their new foundry expansions. This is despite both companies having said that Europe isn't a particularly interesting market for new foundries, but it appears that the upcoming European Chips Act has changed their minds, despite there being no official word on how much the EU will invest.

Intel has already pledged investments in Europe of up to €80 billion, for as many as eight new foundries. It's not clear if this includes its current investments in Ireland or now, where Intel has already invested over €6 billion over the past couple of years. TSMC on the other hand hasn't promised anything as yet, but the company is in early talks with the German government according to news out of Taiwan. Time will tell if anything comes from this, but Intel is said to be making an announcement soon, possibly before the holiday season on where it's planning on building its next Fab in Europe, with Italy and France also being on the table.

NVIDIA has reportedly pushed midlife refreshes to its GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics card family to beyond January, according to a report by Igor's Lab. The company was supposed to launch as many as three high-end graphics card SKUs in early-Q1, which include a 16 GB variant of the RTX 3070 Ti, which maxes out the GA104 silicon, a refreshed RTX 3080 12 GB variant, which keeps the CUDA core count of the original RTX 3080, but maxes out the 384-bit memory bus width of the GA102; and the RTX 3090 Ti, which maxes out both memory and CUDA cores on the GA102.

It's being reported that while the RTX 3090 Ti launch is on schedule, with announcements slated for NVIDIA's 2022 International CES presentation; the RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB and RTX 3080 12 GB could be launched only after the Chinese New Year (at least mid-February). The three SKUs, we predict, are designed to calibrate NVIDIA's lineup against a possible refresh of AMD's RDNA2 graphics architecture on the TSMC N6 (6 nm) node, which could allow the company to dial up engine clocks across the board, along with faster 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, to better compete against the RTX 30-series. AMD is expected to announce these 6 nm GPUs in its CES presentation.

Pat Gelsinger is planning a trip to Asia next week, where he'll stop over in Taiwan and Malaysia according to Bloomberg. There he's apparently planning to hold talks that show that manufacturing in Asia is a key part to his efforts of turning Intel's fortunes around. It's said that he'll also be meeting with TSMC.

This will be Gelsinger's first trip to Asia as Intel's CEO, largely due to the pandemic, although outside of meeting with TSMC, his schedule wasn't further mentioned, but it's likely he will be meeting with key partners and suppliers. Intel does some of its chip packaging in Malaysia, on the island of Penang to be more specific, where plants have been temporarily closed due to the pandemic, which in turn has hurt supply for the tech companies located there.

AMD is allegedly preparing to announce the Radeon RX 6000S mobile graphics card based on a refreshed RDNA 2 architecture. The new card will be manufactured on TSMC's N6 process which offers an 18% logic density improvement over the N7 process currently used for RDNA 2 products resulting in increased efficiency or performance. The switch to the IP compatible N6 node should also improve yields and shorten production cycles allowing AMD to remain competitive with new cards from NVIDIA and Intel. We have limited information on this alleged card except that it will likely be announced in early 2022 at CES and that AMD may also release discrete RX 6000S series desktop graphics cards.

Not content with his speech at Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference—Intel's CEO—Pat Gelsinger has now written an opinion piece on CNN where he's telling the US congress that it must pass the CHIPS for America Act. It's quite bold for a CEO of any company to make such demands, least not for one that has been less than a year in the position.

The CHIPS Act involves US$52 billion earmarked for chip makers who are willing to produce chips on US soil, although as we already know, Gelsinger wants the bulk of that to go to US companies. To try and win over the House, his opinion piece on CNN is trying to win over the hearts and minds of the US senators by pitching all the positive things that will happen if Intel gets more money than its competitors.

Historically, AMD was working with two semiconductor manufacturing companies: TSMC and GlobalFoundries. According to the latest report coming from Gokul Hariharan, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, AMD could soon tap another semiconductor manufacturer to produce the company's growing list of processors. As the report indicates, AMD could start working with the South Korean giant Samsung and utilize the firm's 4LPP process that represents a second generation of the low-power 4 nm silicon node. This specific node is allegedly the choice for AMD APUs designed to fit inside Google's Chromebook devices, which require low-power designs to achieve excellent battery life.

AMD could realize this move in late 2022, as Samsung's 4LPP node goes into mass production at that point. It means that we could see the first Samsung-made AMD APUs in late 2022 or the beginning of 2023. And apparently, the two company's collaboration could be much more significant as AMD is evaluating Samsung's 3 nm nodes for other products spanning more segments in 2023/2024. There are no official, definitive agreements between the two, so we have to wait for more information and official responses from these parties. Anyways, if AMD decides to produce a part of its lineup at Samsung, the remaining TSMC capacity would ensure that the supply of every incoming chip remains sufficient.

China's technology reliance on 3rd party companies seems to be getting smaller. One of the leading technology companies in China, Huawei, has designed a laptop powered by a custom 5 nm Kirin SoC with DDR5 memory. Called the Dyna Cloud L420, Huawei has prepared this model for the Chinese market to provide a fully functional laptop that will get the job done, with no risk of the potential security backdoors implemented in the processor. Powered by a brand new Kirin 9006C SoC manufactured on TSMC's 5 nm process, it features eight unknown cores running at 3.1 GHz frequency. We assume that those are custom cores designed by Huawei. This SoC is accompanied by 8 GB of LPDDR5 memory, with 256 GB and 512 GB UFS 3.1 configurations storage options.

When it comes to the rest of the laptop, it rocks a 14-inch 2160x1440 display. I/O options are solid as well, as this machine has an HDMI video output, two USB-A, one USB-C, and Gigabit Ethernet using a mini-RJ45 port. Connectivity is provided by Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 4.2. There is a 56 W/h battery that provides the juice to keep it running when it comes to the battery. And to complete all of that, this laptop officially only supports Huawei's proprietary Kirin OS (KOS) and Unity OS (UOS), with expected support for HarmonyOS in the future. Pricing and availability information is a mistery at the present date.

The chip shortage discussion has been very focused on TSMC for some reason and although the company is without a doubt the world's leading foundry, the company is making its living from being a cutting edge foundry, whereas much of the components that there's a shortage of are made on far older nodes at many different foundries. Taiwanese UMC is one of the foundries that makes many of the automotive semiconductors, as well as key components when it comes to power regulation and is considered the world's third largest foundry.

Until 2018, UMC was competing head on with TSMC, although the company was always about a node behind TSMC, which led to a management team decision to slow down its node transition and instead to focus on speciality technologies. The company has done well in this niche, with a revenue of about US$6.2 billion in 2020. However, UMC is starting to feel the pressure from its competitors in China, as the PRC government is making a push for local production of local IC designs.

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.

Prominent chip designers like AMD and NVIDIA could bless consumers with a broader offering of their new products as soon as CES 2022 arrives. AMD should present its rumored Rembrandt-H lineup of processors based on the enhanced Zen 3 core, sometimes referred to as Zen 3+. According to the latest report coming from MyLaptopsGuide, Bluetooth SIG has some data entry about ASUS'es upcoming ROG Zephyrus Duo GX650 laptop that integrates AMD Rembrandt-H processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series graphics. As the website claims, the heart of this laptop will be AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX processor built on TSMC's 6 nm manufacturing process. We don't know much about this model, but we expect it to refine the previous Ryzen 9 5900HX.

We again see the rumored NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card for mobile, powering the graphics side of things. This model is supposedly based on GA103S GPU SKU, which is likely tailor-made for laptops in mind and exclusive to them. ASUS has also paired 16 GB of DDR5-4800 RAM with an AMD Ryzen processor, suggesting that Rembrandt-H has a new memory controller in place. This laptop model also has a 16-inch 300 Hz Full HD screen with anti-glare; however, the amount of information ended there. We have to wait for CES 2022 launch to find out more.