Enlarge / Technicians inspect a semiconductor wafer during testing in the cleanroom at the Tower Semiconductor Ltd. plant in Migdal HaEmek, Israel. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens to pile further pressure on chip manufacturing as a squeeze on the supply of rare gasses critical to the production process adds to […]
Enlarge / The Apple Park campus stands in this aerial photograph taken above Cupertino in October 2019. (credit: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Jeff Wilcox, Apple’s director of Mac system architecture who oversaw much of the Apple Silicon transition, has left Apple to join Intel. He will head up Intel’s efforts to develop its own […]
Enlarge (credit: VGG | Getty Images) The British government has launched an in-depth investigation into Nvidia’s takeover of the UK-based technology company Arm on national security grounds, throwing another hurdle in the path of the $54 billion deal. Digital and culture secretary Nadine Dorries has ordered a phase 2 investigation into the transaction on public […]
Valve’s full, hours-long, developer-focused presentation. Valve’s portable Steam Deck hardware may be delayed by a couple of months, but that didn’t stop Valve from discussing plenty of interesting details about the system during a wide-ranging developer-focused livestream Friday. That included a lot of nitty-gritty talk about hardware specs and software interpolation, but also design decisions […]
Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images) The semiconductor industry lives at the cutting edge of technological progress. So why can’t it churn out enough chips to keep the world moving? Nearly two years into pandemic-caused disruptions, a severe shortage of computer chips—the components at the heart of smartphones, laptops, and innumerable other products—continues to affect […]
Enlarge This week Apple introduced a set of new MacBook Pro laptops . During the prerecorded launch event , Apple’s engineers and executives made it clear that the MVPs in these new products are the chips that power them: the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips . With 34 billion and 57 billion transistors, respectively, […]
Enlarge / It’s a bit too early for photos of Alder Lake-S CPUs, much less Raptor Lake-S—so here’s a gorgeous photo of an alder tree on the shore of Llyn Gwynant, in North Wales’ Snowdonia National Park. (credit: R A Kearton via Getty Images ) It looks like big. little CPU design—an architecture that includes […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Samsung is using artificial intelligence to automate the insanely complex and subtle process of designing cutting-edge computer chips . The South Korean giant is one of the first chipmakers to use AI to create its chips. Samsung is using AI features in new software from Synopsys , a leading chip design […]
Enlarge / Intel’s new Core i9-11980HK leads the 11th-gen laptop CPU lineup. (credit: Intel) Intel today announced 10 new 11th-generation CPUs for high-performance laptops like those made for gamers or content creators. Built on the 10nm SuperFin process, the new chips are in the Core i9, Core i7, Core i5, and Xeon families, and they […]
Enlarge / Our test rig is a little more unlovely than usual, due to Asus’ decision to entomb the CPU socket in surrounding high-rise heatsinks, with the system’s RAM closing in just as tightly from the bottom. (Note the empty pair of DIMM slots.) (credit: Jim Salter) Today marks the start of retail availability for […]