Construction of Intel's New Albany, Ohio fabrication site started back in late 2022—since then, a series of setbacks have caused anticipated timelines to slip. Team Blue's original plans included a 2025 opening ceremony—last month, this was amended to late 2026 or early 2027. New equipment deliveries have been affected by extreme weather conditions—Intel appears to be shoring up its flood prevention systems at their Licking County location. Ohio's Department of Development received a progress report at the start of this month, authored by Team Blue staffers—revised figures indicate that Fabrication sites 1 and 2 are expected to reach operational status somewhere within "2027-2028."

Jim Evers (Intel's Ohio Site Manager) stated: "we are making great progress growing the Silicon Heartland. In addition to the approximately $1.5 billion investment in completed spends through 12/31/23 referenced in the report, Intel has an additional $3 billion in contractually committed spends underway, totaling $4.5 billion committed toward our Ohio One projects." Intel committed a hefty $20 billion greenfield investment into the two Ohio wafer fab sites, but the latest progress report indicates that just under a quarter of that budget has trickled out of company coffers (so far). Evers's statement continued: "this investment is growing every day as we work to establish a new manufacturing campus to build leading-edge semiconductor chips right here in Ohio." A Tom's Hardware report reminds us about Team Blue's New Albany project receiving "over $2 billion in incentives." Industry rumors posit that the US government is readying a multi-billion dollar grant for Intel's Arizona facility.

Natural disasters, like flooding, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, threatening people's safety and livelihood. It's estimated that flooding affects more than 250 million people globally each year and causes around $10 billion in economic damages.

As part of our work to use AI to address the climate crisis, today we're expanding our flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries. With the addition of 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America, our platform Flood Hub now includes some of the territories with the highest percentages of population exposed to flood risk and experiencing more extreme weather, covering 460 million people globally.

NVIDIA's next generation of graphics cards, codenamed RTX 40 series, Ada Lovelace, is expected to arrive sometime in October. However, the latest information from the YouTube channel "Moore's Law Is Dead" suggests that NVIDIA could postpone the arrival of the new GPU generation to December. Why, you might be wondering? The report claims that the current GPU market is flooded with used GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs. Thus, NVIDIA could postpone the availability of the latest GPUs to keep the demand high and ensure that the market is searching for additional graphics cards.

Retailers are experiencing smaller demand as the used GPU market is full of devices used for cryptocurrency mining, and the recent crypto crash has helped the situation. What we could see is NVIDIA announcing Ada Lovelace GPUs in October, with availability arriving later in December. Of course, these are just the current industry rumors, and we are yet to see how the market and NVIDIA will respond.

Shacknews is reporting Diablo III is pretty popular. So popular, in fact, that the servers have been overloaded by the flood of clickmaniacs trying to play when it launched at midnight. As Diablo III requires players be online to play, even by themselves, there are a lot of sullen faces around this morning, staring glumly at 'Error 37' messages. Still, some are able to play. There's a little good D3 news in that Blizzard is helping out Australian fans who pre-ordered from GAME, after the failing retailer said it wouldn't honour their orders but would keep their money.

"Due to high concurrency the login servers are currently at full capacity. This may cause delays in the login process, account pages and web services," a Blizzard representative said of Error 37. "We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience while this is being resolved." A message on the login screen notes, "We're also aware of issues affecting character creation and are working to resolve them at this time." Hang in there, then. As for the land down under, after GAME entered administration earlier this week, it told Diablo III pre-orders that they wouldn't receive their game, but nor could they get a refund. Blizzard kindly stepped in to save them, explaining that those with proof of preordering can buy a digital copy through Battle.net then submit their GAME receipt for a refund. You'll need to buy before May 21, and send your receipt in by June 30, though.

Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today reported that it has reached an agreement with Toshiba Corporation to divest certain assets to address the requirements of regulatory agencies that have conditionally approved or are continuing to review the company's planned acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST). The asset package covered by the agreement will enable Toshiba to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets and will enhance its ability to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for near-line (business critical) applications. The divestiture transaction is subject to review by regulatory agencies in certain jurisdictions.

WD also reported that it has agreed, subject to completion of the divestiture transaction, to purchase Toshiba Storage Device (Thailand) Company Limited (TSDT). TSDT manufactured hard drives but has not resumed operations after the recent Thailand flooding. The principal assets of TSDT are its Thailand property, facilities and employees. Subject to completion of the transaction, WD plans to integrate these facilities and employees into its Thailand operations. The financial terms of the two agreements were not disclosed.

Well, it seems that the flooding in Thailand has done a lot more than destroy lives, wreck a few factories and cause HDD prices to shoot up. There appears to be a lot of opportunities for changing the terms of business too - to less favourable ones for customers of hard disc drives. First, we had the severe and unwelcome warranty reductions and now we have HDD manufacturers trying to lock branded PC makers into expensive long-term contracts, according to Digitimes. Some PC makers buy hard disk drives on a quarterly basis, at a fixed price, but now that prices have shot up and supplies restricted, HDD manufacturers are trying to coerce them into signing one year contracts at current high prices. However, it looks like it might not be such a good deal for PC makers, because the recovery in supply is continuing, with a full recovery potentially not so far away, which will of course make those prices plummet again. As it is, HDD shipments are projected to be around 140 million units in the first quarter of 2012, while the same quarter last year was 170-180 million units - so the fall isn't really that hugely less than before anyway and should become less severe as 2012 wears on.

One does get the impression that the HDD manufacturers are playing up the difficulty of restoring production volumes in order to give them a better bargaining hand. There's also the fact that recovering from the disaster is hugely expensive for them, so HDD makers will want to charge more to recoup those costs faster, motivating them to use tactics like these.

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

Way back in 2008, we reported that Seagate was lowering warranties of its hard disk drives from 5 years to 3. This trend quickly spread throughout the HDD industry and unsurprisingly, wasn't something that customers were too happy about. Now, Western Digital is lowering the warranty on some of its HDD lines from 3 years to a mere 2, with the affected lines being the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue. Lines not affected are the Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, A/V drives and externals. Also, as the stock feeds through the channel, there will be a transition period where the same model in a store will have either a 2 or 3 year warranty, depending on its serial number, which can be checked on WD's support site. It will be interesting to see if retailers will clearly differentiate to customers which drives have which warranty, as it might be rather convenient for them not to.

Channel partners have received a letter from SelectWD about this:

The recent Thailand floods appear to be taking a bigger toll than expected, with the effects of the shortages to be felt all the way into 2013, according to market research firm IDC. This isn't helped by the fact that the largest manufacturer of HDDs, Western Digital, was hit the hardest. As the situation is so volatile, companies such as HP, Dell & Lenovo are keeping watch on the market daily and are even sometimes having to accept drives of a lower spec if they are to ship some systems at all. As expected, the retail purchaser of hard disk drives comes bottom of the allocation list. IDCs John Rydning said in a statement: "I think the most painful period will occur now through February of next year. We expect the situation will improve, but it won't feel as if things are back to normal until 2013". There's more detail and analysis over at Network World.

Nidec Corp, manufacturer of hard disc drive motors and other HDD components, has reported that after just six weeks since the Thailand floods hit, nine out of its ten factories are operational again, although not all are yet at full capacity. Supplies of HDDs should therefore slowly improve as the parts shortage eases, hopefully with the welcome consequence that the price should drift downwards. Nidec issued this statement about the situation:

We will continue our efforts to further improve the utilization of the factories whose operations have resumed and to bring the company's other flood-stricken factories back into operation to the earliest extent possible. The exact amount of damage and the effect of the floods on the company's performance are being assessed currently. We will continue to report on any actual or potential impact on the company's business performance in a prompt manner.

There's more info in this Nidec update (PDF) and at xbit labs.

The recent dreadful flooding in Thailand has forced the closure of several hard drive factories. The immediate concerns of course, are for the health and wellbeing of the people living and working in the area. The wider concern is the severe restriction in hard drive manufacturing capacity. Already, prices have doubled or tripled, depending on the exact model affected. The biggest HD manufacturer, Western Digital, has been hit the hardest, as IDC predicts that up to 75% of its production will be shut down. This means, that the big corporate HDD customers, those like HP and Dell, who build computer systems in large volumes, will get whatever inventory is available to fully satisfy their needs. Whatever is left is then sold on to the retail channel, for ordinary consumers to buy. IDC believes that hard disk production will reach pre-flood levels by around March, but that HDD levels by then will be very low. The prices should go through the roof then, in the meantime. As expected, this will also increase the prices of complete systems, as such a price hike is too much to absorb fully.