The announcement today that Intel will be a Foundry for Altera at 14nm is a significant turning point for the Semiconductor Industry and Intel’s Foundry fortunes of which the full ramifications are not likely to be understood by analysts. As a long time follower of Intel and a former co-founder of an FPGA startup (Cswitch), it has… Read More
Nothing seems to raise the Visceral Ire of Semiwiki readers like the two words: Intel and Foundry. To get maximum steam coming out of the ears make sure you combine the two words in a sentence. Something along the lines like: Intel is Now Going to be a Leader in the Foundry Business. Pause…..Ok catch your breadth and now let’s move on … Read More
The announcement by Intel during their January earnings call that they were going to hike Capex in 2013 over 2012 left many folks scrambling as to the reasons and the what-the hecks? Here was a company that was exiting 2012 with 50% utilization of their advanced 22nm process and yet signaling more building was to come. Furthermore,… Read More
The wreckage that is Apple’s stock is a surprise to many including yours truly but it appears to mark the beginnings of a transition period that will result in freeing the company from the demands of Wall St as it appeals to the broader population of mainsteam America. I call it the Ma Bell Strategy. Unlike Microsoft or Intel, Apple … Read More
The most interesting session at the Linley Tech Data Center Conference last week was the last one, on Designing Power Efficient Servers. What this was really about was whether ARM would have any success in the server market and what Intel’s response might be.
Datacenters are now very focused on power efficiency and many track… Read More
The Linley Group’s Microprocessor conference in Spring is focused on Datacenters now that cloud computing and massive internal datacenters has made them so important. The conference is on February 5th and 6th. It is free to qualified people such as network equipment vendors, network service providers and so on (which … Read More
I came across an interesting white-paper from ST Ericsson on two topics: multi-processors in mobile platforms and FD-SOI. FD-SOI is the ST Microelectronics alternative to FinFETs for 20nm and below. It stands for Fully-Depeleted Silicon-on-Insulator. But I’m going to save that part of the white-paper for another blog… Read More
“It’s not like we started it,” said Larry. “After all the idea of going Thermonuclear was first broached by Steve to Eric at their outdoor café meeting in Palo Alto way back in 2010. We’re just following by example and as Steve was wont to quote Picasso; “good artist copy, great artist steal” so why not go Thermonuclear with our Android… Read More
Time to pack up for the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I will be driving down with my beautiful wife Shushana because she does not like to fly. The drive takes the better part of a day so we will leave early and see the sunrise over the desert. She is great company, the time will fly by. We will be 2 of the more than 150,000 people… Read More
I didn’t attend the International Electronic Device Meeting (IEDM) earlier this month, but there have been a lot of reports on the inter webs especially about 20nm and 14nm processes. Some of this is really geeky stuff but I think that perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve read about is summarized in this chart:
This… Read More
