US chip company Intel will make high-end semiconductors for Microsoft, the companies announced, as it seeks to compete with TSMC and Samsung to supply the next generation of silicon used in artificial intelligence for customers around the world.
Chief executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event on Wednesday that Intel is set to “rebuild Western manufacturing at scale,” buoyed by geopolitical concerns in Washington about the need to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US.
↫ Michael Acton
Having our entire advanced chip industry built atop one Dutch company and one company on an island China would love to invade is not exactly the recipe for a stable supply chain. I think it’s a great idea to build capacity in the US and Europe, and if Intel’s the one to do it – with lavish government funding, I might add – then so be it. We’d all love for it to be more diverse than that, but the sad reality is that building advanced chip factories is really hard and really expensive, and very few companies have both the knowledge and money to do so.
Eh, it doesn’t really matter that much if the chips are trash. Any idea how good Microsoft’s chips will be? Designing high performance chips is really really difficult, even for the likes of Google & Microsoft. I really want a non Apple chip that allows for more configurability but retains the same price and performance, oh and a pony while were at it. And BeOS to be resurrected along with DEC.
Arm stock designs are pretty good from what I’ve heard, and most companies use the stock design these days.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragons are probably what you’re looking for in a desktop processor. People are pretty excited about the next gen after seeing 8xc Gen 3 in the Thinkpad X13s.
Flatland_Spider,
I also think that MS most effective path forward would be to buy & customize existing IP.
BTW…I’m getting intermittent wordpress wordfense blockages on osnews.com.
I haven’t seen this problem in a long time, so I think maybe something changed?
I’m getting those Wordfence blocks as well.
Well, BeOS has basically been resurrected: https://www.haiku-os.org/
I cannot really help you with DEC.
As for Microsoft, I know they have surface but I am not sure the laptop or desktop is really their ambition with regards to chip design. They seem to be more focused on competing with NVIDIA in AI and Intel on the server. Let’s be honest, the primary driver of that is probably their own in-house use via Azure.
The best information I have on performance is the following quote from Microsoft themselves:
“Our initial testing shows that our performance is up to 40 percent better than what’s currently in our data centers that use commercial Arm servers,” says Borkar. Microsoft isn’t sharing full system specifications or benchmarks yet.
Accelerators (AI, DPU, etc.) for Azure was my first thought. Of course, MS also has the Pluton security processor, and they could release a Windows Dev Kit 20NN/Surface with more MS chips in them.
Qualcomm/Ampere/MS branded stock Arm CPU + MS Pluton + MS accelerator (AI, DPU, etc.)
x86-64 + MS Pluton + MS accelerator (AI, DPU, etc.)
Most of Microsoft’s custom silicon is for Azure.
Intel still depends on ASML’s machines to produce the chips, no? Or am I missing something?
Everybody depends on ASML’s lithography machines for EUV.
It should also be noted, there are many fabs out there. They’re using older nodes, but not all chips need the latest and greatest fab tech.
This was the reason AMD went to a chiplet design. The IO portions didn’t need to be on the latest node. They ran fine on a larger node size which reduced costs.
“Having our entire advanced chip industry built atop one Dutch company and one company on an island China would love to invade is not exactly the recipe for a stable supply chain.”
Fear no more.
Once Intel is done, Russia can wreak havoc on Europe, and China can wipe out Taiwan, as much as they want.
How to quotes even work here, btw ?
[quote] test [/quote]
I keep asking Thom to put this in the FAQ because people ask this all the time, it never gets added 🙁
<blockquote>quote</blockquote>
I was under the impression this was for the next gen xbox?
It’s worth noting that the next most advanced country after Taiwan and the Netherlands is Japan… which has most of the stuff you’d need to get a 7nm line started up so they are only a little behind where TSMC is.
They also have a Joint operating with TSMC for JASM with 6 and 7nm fab lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidus is also aiming for 2nm fab in Japan by 2027. This is a joint effort from IBM and a half dozen other big names. They will have a pilot line open in 2025 (construction begain in sept ’23)
ASML will also have a local office to support this fab in Japan with 40-50 personnel.
The history of American capitalism is the history of lavish government spending. Any view of American history which doesn’t accept that, is ideologically tainted, and therefor, not very useful.