In the season 6 premiere of Showtime’s “Billions,”, financier Michael Prince and his lieutenant are remotely monitoring Wags’ heart rate thanks to an Oura-like smart ring as he works out on a Peloton stationary bike. The remote observers conclude Wags is having a heart attack and dispatch emergency medical technicians to his… Read More
The Apple event today was essentially a reveal of the latest and greatest silicon coming out of the Apple/TSMC partnership and how far ahead of everything else it is. The Mac was simply an aluminum container for the new silicon.
More importantly the event and specs of the TWO new chips, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max demonstrate that the M1… Read More
The big fake news last week came from a report out of China stating that TSMC won a big Intel order for 3nm wafers. We have been talking about this for some time on SemiWiki so this is nothing new. Unfortunately, the article mentioned wafer and delivery date estimates that are unconfirmed and from what I know, completely out of line. … Read More
Apple’s recent Spring Loaded Event brought us M1-based iMacs. After the MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro in the fall, iMacs are the third Mac to jettison Intel processors. With this transition Apple’s T2 chip enters End of Life status, so to speak. The T2 is a bit of an enigma and now it does not have much time left.
We know it performs… Read More
The annual Siemens Digital Industries Software user group event was held virtually on May 26th, which made it easy to attend from my home office, although selecting from the list of speakers was a challenge, because they offered 475 sessions, wow. My focus is EDA, so I listened to Joseph Sawicki, the Executive Vice President, IC … Read More
Semiconductor production can’t be turned on and off like a switch
Semiconductor fabs have to run 24/7 to make money. They have to be running full all the time to fully utilize the high running costs and in the case of new fabs, high capital costs.
Unlike a brake pad factory hat can hire and fire people at will and source readily … Read More
I used to be part of the custom silicon management team at Apple. I’ve seen how great a challenge it is to pull off a custom silicon strategy within a one year product cycle. Apple is the perfect example of this custom silicon model since they develop the best mobile processors in the world for their products. Which also includes other… Read More
The semiconductor foundry business has been front page news of late and for good reason, it’s an exciting time in the semiconductor industry and the foundries are where it all begins. Unfortunately, most of the “exciting” news has been overblown but this topic is of great interest, to me at least. Having been intimately involved… Read More
TSMC is the bellwether for not just the semiconductor industry but the worldwide economy. TSMC makes semiconductors, semiconductors are where electronics begin and electronics are the foundation of modern life, absolutely.
Apple is also a key economic indicator and as we all know Apple is a strategic partner of TSMC. The Apple… Read More
I made it through the Virtual Intel Architecture Day last week and much to my surprise it was very well done. Virtual events have been hit and miss but this one was definitely a hit. Great content, approachable experts, a glitch-free experience. The mainstream media has been redundantly covering it so let me add my many years of experience,… Read More
