Industry insiders reckon that Samsung Electronics is transitioning to molded underfill (MR-MUF) production techniques—rival memory manufacturer, SK Hynix, champions this chip making technology. A Reuters exclusive has cited claims made by five industry moles—they believe that Samsung is reacting to underwhelming HBM production yields. The publication proposes that: "one of the reasons Samsung has fallen behind (competing producers) is its decision to stick with chip making technology called non-conductive film (NCF) that causes some production issues, while Hynix switched to the mass reflow molded underfill (MR-MUF) method to address NCF's weakness." The report suggests that Samsung is in the process of ordering new MUF-related equipment.

One anonymous source stated: "Samsung had to do something to ramp up its HBM (production) yields... adopting MUF technique is a little bit of swallow-your-pride type thing for (them), because it ended up following the technique first used by SK Hynix." Reuters managed to extract a response from the giant South Korean multinational—a company spokesperson stated: "we are carrying out our HBM3E product business as planned." They indicated that NCF technology remains in place as an "optimal solution." Post-publication, another official response was issued: "rumors that Samsung will apply MR-MUF to its HBM production are not true." Insiders propose a long testing phase—Samsung is rumored to be sourcing MUF materials, but mass production is not expected to start this year. Three insiders allege that Samsung is planning to "use both NCF and MUF techniques" for a new-generation HBM chip.

A 2019-signed export license has allowed Intel to supply laptop processors to Huawei, under an exclusive deal—this US Government approved arrangement was not viewed favorably by AMD. The rival chipmaker apparently missed out on the securing of a similar trade license back in 2021. According to a new Reuters report, Team Red and a handful of supporters have attempted to revoke Intel's license—worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Two anonymous sources allege that: "Intel has survived an effort to halt chip sales to Huawei...giving one of the world's largest chipmakers more time to sell to the heavily sanctioned Chinese telecoms company." Intel and Huawei's symbiosis is set to end later this year—folks on the inside reckon that the current US administration will not approve a renewal. Reports suggest that Qualcomm is not anticipating a renewal either—Huawei is an approved buyer of Snapdragon chips, but industry whispers indicate an eventual shift to in-house fare.

Intel, Huawei, US Commerce Department and the White House have declined to comment on the aforementioned scenario. Reuters also sent a query to AMD, but the publication did not receive a response. Earlier last year, a government official revealed that "Huawei's licensing policy" was under review, alongside a general push to scrap a number of trade deals. According to insiders, the same government official allegedly told companies—in private—that the US Commerce Department would fix "the licensing discrepancy." Another anonymous source believes that the agency shelved these plans late last year, for reasons unknown—they stressed that there is potential for a revival. Given the upcoming expiry of Intel and Huawei's arrangement—within the year—it makes little sense to implement a drastic change.

Various news outlets have been keeping tabs on OpenAI's CEO—Sam Altman—the AI technology evangelist was reported to be pursuing an ambitious proprietary AI chip project in early 2024. Inside sources pointed to late-January negotiations with important investment personnel in the Middle East—many believe that OpenAI leadership is exploring the idea of establishing its own network of semiconductor production plants. Late last week, The Wall Street Journal followed up on last month's AI industry rumors: "(Altman) has another great ambition: raising trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry. The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world's chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI." One anonymous insider reckons that "the project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion."

TSMC is reportedly in the equation—Altman allegedly conducted talks with top brass last month—their expertise in cutting edge fabrication techniques would be of great value, although it is somewhat futile to reveal too many industry secrets given the sheer scale of OpenAI's (reported) aggressive expansion plans. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) suggests that the embryonic venture is far more "open" than previously reported—a collaborative venture could be established once funding is secured, although Altman & Co. face "significant obstacles" en route. WSJ proposes that the somewhat OpenAI-centric fabrication network is best founded by a joint partnership—involving multiple investors, contract chip manufacturers (perhaps TSMC), and energy/power providers. OpenAI appears to be the "primary buyer" of resultant fabricated AI chips, with manufacturing services also offered to other clients. The scale of such an endeavor is put into perspective by WSJ's analysis (via inside sources): "Such a sum of investment would dwarf the current size of the global semiconductor industry. Global sales of chips were $527 billion last year and are expected to rise to $1 trillion annually by 2030. Global sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment—the costly machinery needed to run chip factories—last year were $100 billion, according to an estimate by the industry group SEMI."

LaminiAI appeared to be one of the first customers to receive an initial shipment of AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerators, as disclosed by their CEO posting about functioning hardware on social media late last week. A recent Taiwan Economic Daily article states that the "MI300X is rumored to have begun supply"—we are not sure about why they have adopted a semi-secretive tone in their news piece, but a couple of anonymous sources are cited. A person familiar with supply chains in Taiwan divulged that: "(they have) been receiving AMD MI300X chips one after another...due to the huge shortage of NVIDIA AI chips, the arrival of new AMD products is really a timely rainfall." Favorable industry analysis (from earlier this month) has placed Team Red in a position of strength, due to growing interest in their very performant flagship AI accelerator.

The secrecy seems to lie in Team Red's negotiation strategies in Taiwan—the news piece alleges that big manufacturers in the region have been courted. AMD has been aggressive in a push to: "cooperate and seize AI business opportunities, with GIGABYTE taking the lead and attracting the most attention. Not only was GIGABYTE the first to obtain a partnership with AMD's MI300A chip, which had previously been mass-produced, but GIGABYTE was also one of the few Taiwanese manufacturers included in AMD's first batch of MI300X partners." GIGABYTE is expected to release two new "G593" product lines of server hardware later this year, based on combinations of AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerator and EPYC 9004 series processors.

The Financial Times this weekend has published details about an interesting development project that is currently in-the-works at British semiconductor specialist firm Arm Ltd. The article states that several executives in the industry have divulged (anonymously) that Arm's engineering team is designing a proprietary chip - these insider sources opine that this new creation could be one of the company's most advanced undertakings. The SoftBank-owned chipmaker is having a bumper year in terms of financial success and has invested in its future - it is speculated that their own semiconductor design will be showcased as a prototype product to potential new clients - with the main goal being to drum up more business and growth. Parent group SoftBank is likely pushing for maximum profit margins as it prepares Arm for an initial public offering (IPO) this year.

Arm's modus operandi involves partnering up with other chip manufacturers in order to license out its semiconductor intellectual properties. In turn these partners are expected to deal with the overall design and manufacturing processes of chips (plus sales of). Arm has teamed up with foundries TSMC and Samsung in the past to create prototypes for software testing purposes, but not much has been heard about those proofing projects in the following years. In an unusual turn (from certain industry perspectives) from its traditional working methodologies, it seems that Arm is embracing a different approach by producing its own compelling designs, with the hope of demonstrating greater potential to customers. FT's sources have provided evidence that Arm has expanded its operations and that a newly formed "solutions engineering" team is focused on prototyping new silicon for usage in mobile hardware and related devices.

Last week, NVIDIA systems were compromised by the attack of a hacking group called LAPSUS$. It has been a few days since the attack happened, and we managed to see source code of various software leaks through third-party anonymous tipsters and next-generation GPU codenames making an appearance. Today, NVIDIA issues a statement for the German PC enthusiast website Hardwareluxx, and we manage to see it below fully. The key takeaway from this quote is that NVIDIA believes that the compromised files will not impact the company's business in any meaningful manner, and operations continue as usual for NVIDIA's customers. The company's security team is analyzing the situation, and you can check out the complete statement below.

NVIDIA StatementOn February 23, 2022, NVIDIA became aware of a cybersecurity incident which impacted IT resources. Shortly after discovering the incident, we further hardened our network, engaged cybersecurity incident response experts, and notified law enforcement.

We have no evidence of ransomware being deployed on the NVIDIA environment or that this is related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, we are aware that the threat actor took employee credentials and some NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and has begun leaking it online. Our team is working to analyze that information. We do not anticipate any disruption to our business or our ability to serve our customers as a result of the incident.

Security is a continuous process that we take very seriously at NVIDIA - and we invest in the protection and quality of our code and products daily.

Putting aside discussion of cryptocurrencies, bubbles, and the debated absence of intrinsic value, blockchain itself has a myriad of uses that are still in their exploration infancy. One such usage - one that was arguably first thought of by Philip K. Dick, albeit unknowingly - was the usage of such a system in voting, as a way to provide transparency and trust towards the system which (supposedly) materializes the will of the people.

When asked which country would be the first to implement a Blockchain-based election (which ran at 70% of the voting stations), Sierra Leone would likely be completely absent as an option. The country, which has a population of 7.4 million, has a known history of political and societal unrest, having seen multiple UN interventions in its (relatively) recent history. The company had no technological capacity to build such a blockchain-based voting system - and thus turned to an outside provider. Agora was the chosen company, which aimed to power Sierra Leone's presidential election through anonymously stored votes in an immutable ledger, thereby offering instant access to the election results. The wins come not only in counting speed and actual logistics and state spending improvements, though: the usage of blockchain obviously also ushers in transparency.

To all you out there wondering why you can't get a GPU for gaming at a reasonable rate, or why we are using record numbers in energy usage to mint so called "toy money," depleting our planets energy in the process, I have a bit of a statement to make as a former miner and "part of the problem" so to speak.

I'm sorry, it wasn't supposed to be this way. None of it was supposed to go down like this.

That probably requires some justification, yes? I mean mining is an inherently energy expensive operation, right? Well, yes and no, respectively. Yes, it requires justification, and that's precisely because mining is NOT an inherently energy expensive operation, despite public perception. It has become that way due to human greed, and nearly everything bad to come from cryptocurrency has decidedly come from that group: humans. Cryptocurrency is not inherently responsible. The inventors, pioneers, and early miners such as myself never anticipated what was to come, and we did not intend it to be this way. Bitcoin was intended to do good, and in the end, it wasn't cryptocurrency that screwed it all up, it was humans. Human greed, particularly.

Riding on the success of its GM204 silicon, it looks like NVIDIA won't wait for the 20 nm silicon fab process to build its next big GPU, which powers its enthusiast-segment graphics cards. The GM200 silicon will be built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process. Among other SKUs, NVIDIA's next GeForce GTX TITAN product, the GTX TITAN II, could be based on this chip. A curious-looking data entry was submitted from an anonymous source to SiSoft's hardware database, which gives away some rather glaring details of the GM200.

To begin with, the GM200 will be built on the existing 28 nm node, and will feature a die-area of 551 mm². The chip will be based on the "Maxwell" architecture, and feature 3,072 CUDA cores, cushioned by a 3 MB L3 cache. The chip will likely feature a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, with lossless texture compression algorithms, which work to step up memory bandwidth. The standard memory amount is a staggering 12 GB, double that of the first-generation GTX TITAN. Given how AMD recently gave 8 GB variants of its Radeon R9 290X a coordinated launch, GPU vendors could be seeing a utility in giving their products such massive amounts of video memory, to cope with resolutions such as 4K Ultra HD, and perhaps even 5K 16xHD. The chip features reasonably high clock speeds, with the core running at 1100 MHz, and a staggering 1390 MHz GPU Boost. The memory, however, is clocked at 6.00 GHz.

Yesterday, the website of MegaUpload was shuttered for good by the US Department of Justice over copyright infringement aka 'piracy' and various criminal charges (see the domain seizure graphic). This was done regardless of the many non-infringing files that people were also using it for, so for anyone that had their only copy of a file on the site, this is very bad news. It's also arguably even worse news for the site's operators, as they have been arrested and face extradition from New Zealand to the USA for criminal trial, all their assets seized, including all the domain names and computing infrastructure to run them, plus many personal belongings of very high value, such as fancy cars like Maseratis and Rolls-Royces and huge 100 inch TVs to name just a few.

However, this story, isn't really about this and we have linked to reports below which cover this in great detail (hot beverage recommended). MegaUpload was one of the biggest file sharing sites out there and in fact, one of the biggest sites out there, period. This means, that an awful lot of people all around the world have very much noticed its sudden demise (especially those with their only copy of a file, because they didn't bother to back it up, tsk) and are met with that highly unwelcome Department of Justice graphic, instead. Hence, the chances of an almighty backlash against this shutdown not happening are slim to none. In fact, Anonymous have already hit the websites of the DOJ, RIAA, MPAA & HADOPI (French three strikes) and others in retaliation, with likely much more to come, which is good or bad, depending on one's point of view and how effective one believes it will be.

Famous and very popular media search engine, The Pirate Bay, perpetually in the crosshairs of Big Media to shut it down, is to shift away from torrent files from next month and replace them with Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and Peer Exchange (PEX) technology reports ExtremeTech. They have actually been using these for quite a while now, as this is the technology underlying their Magnet links which have appeared next to the torrent links as an alternative way to download. They have done this, because torrent files are stored centrally on a web server, which makes them vulnerable to aggressive rights holders who want to take them down, while Magnet links are decentralized "trackerless", removing this vulnerability. Also, at the moment, it's impossible for anti-piracy outfits to tell how many files a user is sharing when using Magnet links, or what they are. From next month therefore, only Magnet links will be available. Note that Magnet links are compatible with various anonymizing services, for anonymous downloading, but there can be a significant performance impact on those services. In fact, TPB has been using Magnet links with torrents for some now too, but just did so quietly, without telling anyone.

Popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent already use Magnet links as easily as torrent files, so there won't be much difference to the user experience. The main difference, is that they can take a bit longer to get going, but the final download speed isn't any less, due to the cascading exponential pyramid nature of incoming peer connections guaranteed to max out any internet connection, when there are enough peers.