Micron Technology, Inc., today announced that its GDDR6 memory, Micron's fastest and most powerful graphics memory, will be the high-performance memory of choice supporting Achronix's next-generation stand-alone FPGA products built on TSMC 7nm process technology. GDDR6 is optimized for a variety of demanding applications, including machine learning, that require multi-terabit memory bandwidth and will enable Achronix to offer FPGAs at less than half the cost of FPGAs with comparable memory solutions.

Achronix's high-performance FPGAs, combined with GDDR6 memory, are the industry's highest-bandwidth memory solution for accelerating machine learning workloads in data center and automotive applications.

This new joint solution addresses many of the inherent challenges in deep neural networks, including storing large data sets, weight parameters and activations in memory. The underlying hardware needs to store, process and rapidly move data between the processor and memory. In addition, it needs to be programmable to allow more efficient implementations for constantly changing machine learning algorithms. Achronix's next-generation FPGAs have been optimized to process machine learning workloads and currently are the only FPGAs that offer support for GDDR6 memory.

Intel is facing a manufacturing crisis, in which demand has far outstripped supply, and the company is firing up all its silicon fabrication facilities to manufacture 14 nm products, mainly processors under the Core and Xeon brands. We've been hearing reports since early-September of Intel seeking out third-party foundries such as TSMC to manufacture its chipsets. We now get confirmation that TSMC will also manufacture entry-level Intel processors under brands such as Atom, Celeron, and Pentium Silver SoCs, leaving the company's socketed processors to Intel's fabs. DigiTimes does not name the third-party foundry as TSMC, but mentions that the only company that meets Intel's requirements at the moment is TSMC.

TSMC has become the de facto leader when it comes to manufacturing technology. The company is on the forefront of new process technologies, and provides solutions for some of the biggest players in the industry, like Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and AMD, just to name a few. This process leadership means that TSMC is being courted by numerous fabless silicon designers so as to produce their silicon chips with the latest process technologies - part of the reason why TSMC has seen increasing revenues and profits forecasts.

By the end of 2018, TSMC will have taped out 50 7 nm designs, and plans to double that number in 2019. And these design wins don't stand solely on the shoulders of TSMC's first 7 nm technology (which should account for 20% of the company's revenue by 2019); the company will also tape-out chips built upon their 7 nm + EUV process, which will begin production in 2019.

Update: Intel has made an official statement on Twitter denying this and explaining that "Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue. We are making good progress on 10nm. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report."

Intel has been talking for years about the leap to the 10 nm process, a technology whose launch has been delayed time and time again. We were supposed to start seeing these microprocessors in 2016, but that date was postponed to 2017 and later to 2018. The manufacturer assumed the problems once again this year, but made a new promise: you will have 10 nm processors by the end of 2019.

The market seems to continue to trust Intel despite everything. Others, on the other hand, say that Intel is about to announce the total cancellation of this project. You have to take this news of Charlie Demerjian in SemiAccurate not with a grain of salt, but with a lot of grains of salt, because according to their sources, Intel would have already killed the process of 10 nm. This analyst has maintained the theory that Intel would never take that step, and in his analysis indicates that in his opinion this is the right decision. Evidently there has not been any official confirmation or comment from Intel, so for the moment Demerjian's statement raises many doubts and could be mere speculation.

Even as AMD plans to dedicate 7 nm CPU and GPU manufacturing entirely to TSMC, reports are emerging that Apple could make the Taiwanese silicon fabrication giant the sole supplier of its 7 nm A13 SoC, which powers the next generation iPhone and iPad devices. Manufacturing of the A13 could commence in 2019 to keep pace with Apple's roadmaps. TSMC is currently the most strongly placed semiconductor foundry for 7 nm EUV manufacturing, after GlobalFoundries crashed out, and Samsung is trailing behind with a contract to manufacture only a portion of Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon SoCs.

TSMC has quickly (over a span of years, but still) become the de-facto silicon manufacturing giant in the industry. They produce silicon-based solutions for almost all the significant tech companies (NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, including the silicon manufacturing leader of yonder, Intel), and are on the forefront of new fabrication technologies. Just today we've covered how they are already well on their way to their second-gen 7 nm (N7+) fabrication technology with usage of EUV, and carving their path forward for 5 nm (N5).

TSMC, the world's biggest contract semiconductor manufacturer, who is at the forefront of 7 nanometer production has just announced that they are making good progress with their second generation of 7 nm technology "N7+", using EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography). A first design for N7+ from an unnamed customer has been taped out. The company's first-gen 7 nm production is running well already, with final products, like Apple iPhone already in the hands of customers.

While not fully EUV yet, the N7+ process will see limited EUV usage, for up to four non-critical layers, which gives the company an opportunity to figure out how to make best use of the new technology, how to ramp up for mass production and how to fix the little quirks that show up as soon as you move from the lab to the factory.

Intel's mainstream-desktop flagship Core i7-8700K processor is now retailing north of USD $400, a departure from its launch price of $359, which erodes its competitiveness to the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, which can be had for as low as $319. Prices of 8th generation Core processors remain on the boil across the board as reports emerge of the industry facing supply shortages from Intel. In its defense, Intel claims that the shortage is triggered by a spike in demand, and not a drop in supply.

The company raised its capex by $1 billion YoY to increase its manufacturing output, and has even outsourced manufacturing of non-processor components such as chipsets, to other semiconductor foundries such as TSMC. Prices of other popular SKUs are also on the rise. The Core i5-8400, which launched at $184, is now hovering $225, which is supposed to be the launch price of the i5-8600 (non-K). The i5-8600K is fast approaching the $300-mark. Prices of AMD Ryzen processors remain not just stable, but also a touch lower than their launch prices.

Intel's in-house sub-10 nanometer silicon fabrication dreams seem more distant by the day. Raymond James analyst Chris Caso, in an interview with CNBC stated that Intel's 10 nm process development could set the company back by at least 5 years behind TSMC. In its most recent financial results call, Intel revised its 10 nm outlook to reflect that the first 10 nm processors could only come out by the end of 2019. "Intel's biggest strategic problem is their delay on 10nm production - we don't expect a 10nm server chip from Intel for two years," analyst Chris Caso said in a note to clients Tuesday. "10nm delays create a window for competitors, and the window may never again close."

By that time, Intel will have missed several competitive milestones behind TSMC, which is in final stages of quantitatively rolling out its 7 nm process. Caso predicts that by the time Intel goes sub-10 nm (7 nm or something in that nanoscopic ballpark), TSMC and Samsung could each be readying their 5 nm or 3 nm process roll-outs. A Rosenblatt Securities report that came out late-August was even more gloomy about the situation at Intel foundry. It predicted that foundry delays could set the company back "5, 6, or even 7" years behind rivals. Intel is already beginning offload some of its 14 nm manufacturing to TSMC. Meanwhile, AMD is reportedly planning to entirely rely on TSMC to make its future generations of "Zen" processors.

Clues have been popping here and there regarding a possible new Polaris revision being launched by AMD in the (relatively) near future. Speculation first reared its head regarding a revised "Polaris 30" silicon, allegedly being built for TSMC's 12 nm process - not unlike AMD's 2000-series Ryzen CPUs. The company has been enamored with trying out and adapting new foundry processes for its products as soon as possible, now that they've found themselves fabless and not having to directly support the R&D costs necessary for process node development themselves.

Some publications are pointing towards a 15% performance improvement being achieved on the back of this process change for Polaris - which, if achieved only via a new process implementation, would require clock speed increases that are higher than that. AMD has already launched their revised Polaris 20 RX 500 series, which built upon their RX 400 series (and Polaris 10) by upping the clocks as well. A smaller node would likely be associated with higher yields and decreased costs per finished chip, which would allow AMD to further reduce pricing/stabilize pricing while introducing a new product generation to tide users over until Navi is finally ready.

Things seem to be taking turns to the worse at Intel in accordance to Murphy's law. Not only was the company hit with a multitude of security flaws embedded in their CPUs, which puts their michroarchitecture design chops in jeopardy, but now they also have to contend with silicon fabrication snags. That Intel's 14 nm fabs are being hit with overwhelming demand for their output capacity is already a known quantity, with rising prices of Intel mainstream CPUs and reports of the company outsourcing 14 nm chip production to TSMC in a bid to increase availability - a first since the company became vertically integrated with both design and manufacturing of their own chips.

To sustain its meteoric rise at the stock markets, AMD needs to keep investors convinced it has a competitive edge over Intel, even if it means investing heavily on short-term roadmap changes. According to an Elchapuzas Informatico article, AMD could be working on a new 10-core/20-thread processor for the AM4 platform, to compete with the upcoming Core i9-9900K 8-core/16-thread processor from Intel. The said processor is being labeled "Ryzen 7 2800X" and plastered over CineBench nT screenshots, where due to the sheer weight of its 10 cores, it tops the nT test in comparison to Intel's mainstream-desktop processors, including the 2P Xeon X5650 12-core/24-thread.

The Forbes article that cites the Elchapuzas Informatico, however, is skeptical that AMD could make such a short-sighted product investment. It believes that development of a 10-core die on existing "Zen+" architecture could warrant a massive redesign of the CCX (Zen Compute Complex), and AMD would only get an opportunity to do so when working on "Zen 2," which AMD still expects to debut by late-2018 on its EPYC product line. We, however, don't discount the possibility of a 10-core "Zen+" silicon just yet. GlobalFoundries, AMD's principal foundry partner for CPUs, has given up on 7 nm, making the company fall back to TSMC to meet its 7 nm roadmap commitments. TSMC already has a long list of clientele for 7 nm, including high-volume contracts from Apple, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA. This could force AMD to bolster its existing lineup as a contingency for delays in 7 nm volume production.

Try to wrap your head around Intel contracting TSMC to build some of its processors! With its own 14 nanometer silicon fabrication nodes under stress from manufacturing several generations of Core and Xeon processors simultaneously, leading to market shortages, Intel is looking to contract TSMC to manufacture some of its 14 nm products. Among these are certain models of its desktop processors, and several 300-series chipsets, including the H310, which are currently fabbed on Intel's last 22 nm node, that's probably being converted to 14 nm.

The TSMC contract appears to be moving faster than expected, with the Taiwanese fab eager to demonstrate its competence to Intel and secure future orders as the company is closer than ever in going fully or partly fabless. According to industry observers, Intel is staring at a 1:2 supply-demand ratio, for the countless chip it's building on 14 nm; which may have forced it to contract some of these chip designs to TSMC. Motherboard vendors expect Intel to sort out its supply issues by the end of 2018, with big help from TSMC.

Intel was once the shining star in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, with a perfectly integrated, vertical product design and manufacturing scheme. Intel was one of the few companies in the world to be able to both develop its architectures and gear their manufacturing facilities to their design characteristics, ensuring a perfect marriage of design and manufacturing. However, not all is rosy on that field, as we've seen; AMD itself also was a fully integrated company, but decided to spin-off its manufacturing arm so as to survive - thus creating GLOBALFOUNDRIES.But Intel was seen as many as the leader in semiconductor manufacturing, always at the cutting edge of - well - Moore's Law, named after Intel's founding father Gordon Moore. Now, Mehdi Hosseini, an analyst with Susquehanna, has gone on to say that the blue giant has effectively lost its semiconductor leadership. And it has, in a way, even if its 10 nm (which is in development hell, so to speak) is technically more advanced than some 7 nm implementations waiting to be delivered to market by its competitors. However, there's one area where Intel will stop being able to claim leadership: manufacturing techniques involving EUV (Extreme UltraViolet).

A former employee of TSMC, Taiwan's premier silicon fabrication foundry, has been charged with stealing trade-secrets to his next employer across the straits. Mentioned as "Chou" by DigiTimes, the employee has been charged with IP theft and smuggling trade-secrets of vital 10 nanometer and 16 nanometer silicon fabrication technologies over to his next job at Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC).

Before Chou could flee TSMC to HLMC, he was arrested by Taiwan Police, and indicted for breach of trust. With the matter now in the hands of the applicable District Prosecutors' Office, it has become subjudice and TSMC isn't issuing comments. Development of 10 nanometer (and newer) silicon fabrication nodes is proving exceedingly costly and painstaking for foundry companies, and it hurts their future just that much worse when someone does away with billions of dollars worth R&D.

AMD is unique in the world of computing as the only company with both high-performance CPU and GPU products. For the past several years we have been executing our multi-generational leadership product and architectural roadmap. Just in the last 18 months, we successfully introduced and ramped our strongest set of products in more than a decade and our business has grown dramatically as we gained market share across the PC, gaming and datacenter markets.

The industry is at a significant inflection point as the pace of Moore's Law slows while the demand for computing and graphics performance continues to grow. This trend is fueling significant shifts throughout the industry and creating new opportunities for companies that can successfully bring together architectural, packaging, system and software innovations with leading-edge process technologies. That is why at AMD we have invested heavily in our architecture and product roadmaps, while also making the strategic decision to bet big on the 7nm process node. While it is still too early to provide more details on the architectural and product advances we have in store with our next wave of products, it is the right time to provide more detail on the flexible foundry sourcing strategy we put in place several years ago.

It's been a tumultuous few days for AMD, as the company has seen Jim Anderson, Computing and Graphics Group leader after the departure of Raja Koduri, leave the company, at a time of soaring share value for the company (hitting $25.26 and leaving short positions well, short, by $2.67 billion.) However, there's one particular piece of news that is most relevant for the company: Globalfoundries' announcement to stop all ongoing development on the 7 nm node.

This is particularly important for a variety of reasons. The most important one is this: Globalfoundries' inability to execute on the 7 nm node leaves AMD fully free to procure chips and technology from competing foundries. If you remember, AMD's spin-off of GlobalFoundries left the former with the short end of the stick, having to cater to GlobalFoundries' special pricing, and paying for the privilege of accessing other foundries' inventories. Of course, the Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) that is in place will have to be amended - again - but the fact is this: AMD wants 7 nm products, and GlobalFoundries can't provide.To the forumites: this piece is marked as an editorial

It has been a rollercoaster Monday for AMD as it bled yet another bright executive. Jim Anderson, who led Computing and Graphics Group after the departure of Raja Koduri, and who is rumored to have conceived the idea of Threadripper and the client-segment monetization of the "Zen" architecture, left AMD to become CEO of Lattice Semiconductor, a company that designs FPGAs. Anderson will be paid an inducement award of company shares valued up to $2.9 million.

On the same day, AMD stock crossed $25 to close at $25.26 up 5.34 percent, a historic high since way back in 2006 as Intel was beginning to regain its footing with its Core processor family. This raises the company's market cap to $22.9 billion. AMD is better funded than ever (in over 12 years), to start a new GPU project, for example. CTO Mark Papermaster, in a company blog post assured customers that AMD is going all-in with 7 nanometer, and it could bank more heavily on TSMC to achieve its roadmap goals of first-to-market 7 nm CPU and GPU by end of the year.

TSMC's Board of Directors convened yesterday with the intention of defining the company's strategy for future developments and investment. The result was a commitment of $4.5B to investments ranging from construction of fab facilities; installation, expansion, and upgrade of advanced technology capacity; conversion of logic capacity to specialty technology capacity; conversion of mature technology capacity to specialty technology capacity; expansion and upgrade of specialty technology capacity; expansion of advanced packaging technology capacity; and fourth quarter 2018 R&D capital investments and sustaining capital expenditures. These values pale in comparison to Samsung's usual investment applications, of course; but let's not forget is an industry behemoth with more product lines and investment opportunities that TSMC's comparably "specific" domain of the market.

TSMC today provided an update on the Company's computer virus outbreak on the evening of August 3, which affected a number of computer systems and fab tools in Taiwan. The degree of infection varied by fab. TSMC contained the problem and found a solution, and as of 14:00 Taiwan time, about 80% of the company's impacted tools have been recovered, and the Company expects full recovery on August 6.

TSMC expects this incident to cause shipment delays and additional costs. We estimate the impact to third quarter revenue to be about three percent, and impact to gross margin to be about one percentage point. The Company is confident shipments delayed in third quarter will be recovered in the fourth quarter 2018, and maintains its forecast of high single -digit revenue growth for 2018 in U.S. dollars given on July 19, 2018. Most of TSMC's customers have been notified of this event, and the Company is working closely with customers on their wafer delivery schedule.

TSMC is the most popular semiconductor foundry, has been called the "savior of fabless chipmakers," and is also one of Taiwan's most valuable companies. It's also the principal foundry for chipmakers such as NVIDIA and AMD (GPUs). Its most valuable production, however, is that of Apple's A-series application processors that drive the main breadwinners of the company - iPhones. Imagine the cataclysm unleashed if a virus were to spread in the company that contract-manufactures extremely complex chip designs. According to Reuters, that cataclysm is upon TSMC.

According to DigiTimes, a WannaCry-variant ransomware infected not just workstations at TSMC, but also certain fab machines (which are driven by computers). The infection has caused a shutdown of several of TSMC's fabs, including its high-volume 12-inch ones. These machines apparently run on unpatched Windows 7, probably because they're connected to a private network instead of the Internet. TSMC has tasked all of its human resources to disinfect the affected machines. The company hopes to have its fabs fully operational by Monday (13th August), but not before the downtime affects the supply-chains Apple and other high-value clients. An estimated $179 million is wiped from TSMC's Q3 revenues due to this downtime. Although it could affect shipments of APs to Apple, impact on the inventories of Apple products could be minimal, according to market analysts. It remains to be seen if TSMC's other clients see similarly minimal impact; or if TSMC is prioritizing a trillion-dollar client.

Hardware diagnostics and reporting utility HWBot has added preliminary support for AMD's upcoming Threadripper II CPU lineup, the high core-count, up to 32-cores and 64-threads monster CPUs. The 2990X is the cream of the crop with its full configuration, and its TDP is again being reported at 250 W, upwards 70 W from last generation's flagship 1990X - a 100% increase in computing resources that is accompanied by what can only be referred to a "very limited" 38% increase in reported TDP, whilst delivering a 3.4 GHz base clock.

The 2970X, which has a 24-core, 48-thread configuration, maintains the 180 W of the previous 16-core flagship, while the new "mainstream" (isn't it crazy to call a 16-core, 32-thread CU mainstream?) 2950X is rated at only 125 W compared to the same 180 W of previous-gen Threadrippers. Of course, TDPs do mean what they mean - and sometimes that is very little, especially when comparing across manufacturers - but it still puts in perspective how much AMD managed to improve not only core counts and density, but also power envelope, on TSMC's new 12 nm process.

Chinese chipmaker Hygon began mass-producing its first x86 processors codenamed "Dhyana" based on AMD's "Zen" micro-architecture. The processor is the fruition of a deal AMD entered with a Chinese state-owned company back in mid-2016. As part of this deal, a company called Haiguang Microelectronics Company (HMC), in which AMD has a 51 percent stake, would license the "Zen" architecture to another company called Hygon (Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit Design Co.), in which AMD owns a 30 percent stake. Hygon would then design "Dhyana," and a third entity (likely TSMC or some other Chinese foundry), would contract-manufacture the chip.

Such legal gymnastics is necessary to ensure AMD makes good on the $293 million it will take from the Chinese firms to license "Zen," while not breaching the x86 architecture cross-licensing agreement it signed with Intel, the core x86 IP owner. Chinese firms are going through all this trouble to build "Dhyana" instead of simply placing a large order of EPYC processors not just because they want more control over the supply and pricing of these chips, but probably also to ensure that China can keep an eye on all the on-die software that makes the processor tick, and weed out any backdoors to foreign governments (*cough*NSA*cough*).

DigiTimes, citing "sources from the upstream supply chain", is reporting an expected decrease in graphics card pricing for July. This move comes as a way for suppliers to reduce the inventory previously piled in expectation of continued demand from cryptocurrency miners and gamers in general. It's the economic system at work, with its strengths and weaknesses: now that demand has waned, somewhat speculative price increases of yore are being axed by suppliers to spur demand. This also acts as a countermeasure to an eventual flow of graphics cards from ceasing-to-be miners to the second-hand market, which would further place a negative stress on retailers' products.

Alongside this expected 20% retail price drop for graphics cards, revenue estimates for major semiconductor manufacturer TSMC and its partners is being revised towards lower than previously-projected values, as demand for graphics and ASIC chips is further reduced. DigiTimes' sources say that the worldwide graphics card market now has an inventory of several million units that is being found hard to move (perhaps because the products are already ancient in the usual hardware tech timeframes), and that Nvidia has around a million GPUs still pending logistical distribution. Almost as an afterthought, DigiTimes also adds that NVIDIA has decided to postpone launch of their next-gen products (both 12 nm and then, forcibly, 7 nm) until supply returns to safe levels.

At their technology symposium in Taipei, TSMC CEO CC Wei has made remarks, dismissing speculation that their 7 nanometer yield rate was not as good as expected. Rather the company is ramping up production capacity for 7 nm quickly, up 9% from 10.5 million wafers in 2017, to 12 million wafers in 2018. They plan to tape out more than 50 chip designs in 2018, with the majority of the tape outs for AI, GPU and crypto applications, followed by 5G and application processors.

Most of their orders for the 7 nanometer node come from big players like AMD, Bitmain, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Apple's A12 processor for upcoming iPhones is also a major driver for TSMC's 7 nanometer growth. These orders will be fulfilled in early 2019, so it'll be a bit longer before we have 7 nm processors for the masses.

Next-gen 5 nanometer production will kick off next year, followed by mass production in late 2019 or early 2020. The company will invest as much as USD 25 billion in their new production facilities for this process node.