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Search results

  1. K

    TSMC’s Advanced Packaging Capacity is fully booked for next two years by Nvidia and AMD

    Who the hell is Guanghuida ? From the description they are just packaging NVIDIA H100s and Blackwell chips, not their own.
  2. K

    Huawei Pura 70 smartphone sales start; chip still a mystery

    They were cleared to sell in Malaysia - different than selling in Malaysia. But we’ll see how many Pura 70s Huawei sells this year. If only 10M, as predicted, then they are heavily supply constrained. Right now, the Pura 70 is being sold at a huge premium on the secondhand market, because of...
  3. K

    U.S. ramps up chip production efforts with taxpayers footing part of the bill - Is it worth it?

    Here’s how not to do it - stupid politics just to claim a photo-op. By the time the clowns who put this deal together were out of office, the state and local governments had spent $1B to create a few jobs inside essentially empty buildings doing nothing. The successors were left to pick up the...
  4. K

    Biden-Harris Administration Announces Preliminary Terms with Samsung Electronics to Establish Leading-Edge Semiconductor Ecosystem in Central Texas

    Fun to see the gaggle of politicians who voted against the CHIPs act, especially ones from Idaho, TX, and NY, now scrambling to take credit for it. Ted Cruz leads the pack of the credit-stealers. He should own his opinion and just say, I didn’t want this to happen.
  5. K

    Kirin 9000s Analysis: Should be Made by SMIC's N+2 Process

    Sorry 1.8M P60s. But I was really only focused on the Mate 60s Pros that use the homegrown Kirin 9000, fabricated at SMIC South. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-targets-chinas-top-chipmaking-plant-after-huawei-mate-60-pro-sources-say-2024-02-21/
  6. K

    Kirin 9000s Analysis: Should be Made by SMIC's N+2 Process

    The TechInsights report that SCMP is quoting from says only 1.8M Mate 60s last year (maybe that reflects running out of inventories of the SnapDragon 8+ , or a product transition). It could have 30M units over the life of the 60, but it sounds like it is EOL. And the Mate 60 Pro that was...
  7. K

    Kirin 9000s Analysis: Should be Made by SMIC's N+2 Process

    Thanks Fred. - that would mean that the Kirin 9000 numbers were even more anemic, only 1/3 of projections. Based on the numbers it sure seems like both yield issues and diversion of capacity to AI chips are limiting factors vs. the hype surrounding this “breakthrough“ SoCs. And Huawei is tamping...
  8. K

    Kirin 9000s Analysis: Should be Made by SMIC's N+2 Process

    Pretty good call @hist78 and @Jert. Saw this retrospective on Mate 60 / Mate 60 Pro volumes, in SCMP. Less than half of the hyped volume (I saw 30M another place when the 60 launched. “The Pura 70 line is expected to generate global shipments of around 10.4 million this year, compared to the...
  9. K

    Intel's Guadi 3 Flop

    One other interesting dynamic I heard yesterday is that 90% of the training CPU cycles and hardware for generative AI is concentrated in 9 companies. Seems like it would be very hard to get a foothold in these 9 at any kind of scale, especially with several already developing their own chips as...
  10. K

    Intel's Guadi 3 Flop

    The OpenVino “support” chart below kind of highlights the challenge #2 I mentioned, as well as raising the question you highlight, “is it really a standard outside of Intel ?” It brings together 8 1/2 different hardware architectures, 8 of which are all Intel inference architectures. And where...
  11. K

    Anastasi In Tech: New Transistor Breakthrough Explained: Shrinking beyond 1nm

    Here’s the transistor she’s talking about. Transistor Takes Advantage of Quantum Interference Single-molecule device embraces electrons’ weirdness to improve performance https://spectrum.ieee.org/quantum-interference-transistor
  12. K

    Intel's Guadi 3 Flop

    My view is that Intel has been struggling with 4 concurrent challenges: 1) Historically, the traditional Innovators Dilemma. The same force that enabled Intel (and to some degree AMD) to replace IBM mainframes and Sun servers in the server space with x86, thwarted their success in smartphones...
  13. K

    Why Micron Memory and Storage Matter in Fueling AI Acceleration | Micron Technology Micron Tec

    If we see leading edge AI models continue to progress the way they are going, with exponential growth in model parameter count, with reduced compute for a large percentage of the parameters (FP4, sparsity harvesting), we’re likely to see logic-in-memory approaches that offer lower power and less...
  14. K

    The Biden Administration suspends CHIPS Act R&D funding for the NTSC

    Definitely the least outrageous April Fool’s news article I saw this cycle. I immediately put this one in the possible bucket. Given the fake news social media environment we’re living in, I always look for multiple sourcing of any “news” in a posting. So I only confirmed the “joke” the same way...
  15. K

    The Biden Administration suspends CHIPS Act R&D funding for the NTSC

    Maybe you missed this part... This news brief originally appeared in FYI’s newsletter for the week of April 1.
  16. K

    How China Could Swamp India’s Chip Ambitions

    We’re also living in a world where many poorer countries can no longer look to manufacturing as the playbook for becoming wealthier. Not everyone can “afford” to manufacture in the face of China and other mercantile producers that use their immense scale and industrial policy, including massive...
  17. K

    Huawei Patent Shows 6x Multi-Patterning Surpassing EUV Resolution Without EUV

    Yield, cost, profitability and scale are extremely important, especially in your “China creates an entire completely parallel semiconductor ecosystem” scenario. I just don’t see China building out a trillion dollar money losing ecosystem, especially when local governments, builders and many...
  18. K

    Huawei Patent Shows 6x Multi-Patterning Surpassing EUV Resolution Without EUV

    More Ascend 910Bs means far fewer Kirin chips due yield and capacity issues. Exclusive: AI chip demand forces Huawei to slow smartphone production https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-chip-demand-forces-huawei-slow-smartphone-production-sources-2024-02-05/
  19. K

    Huawei Patent Shows 6x Multi-Patterning Surpassing EUV Resolution Without EUV

    But end-customers Huawei, Samsung, and Apple are in competition so manufacturing/purchase costs for app processors and baseband processors matter.
  20. K

    Huawei Patent Shows 6x Multi-Patterning Surpassing EUV Resolution Without EUV

    But by then, TSMC is making the big profits on 3nm. And smartphones, CPUs and AI chips are riding down the next yield curve with them. It’s no fun to be a node or two back in lower volumes and higher costs for your end customers.
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