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Will ST Micro Break-up?
ST Microelectronics reportedly is considering breaking itself up in order to offload its system-on-chip (SoC) business.
ST Microelectronics has been losing sales as its traditional customers such as Nokia and Research in Motion struggle in the smartphone market, which has tended to favour chip vendors such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia in recent years. Now Bloomberg is reporting that ST Microelectronics is considering breaking up to allow it to offload its SoC business and concentrate on the profitable analog business.
According to Bloomberg’s report the firm is mulling the division of the company into two distinct parts, the analog business and the digital business that designs chips for use in set-top boxes, televisions and smartphone handsets. ST Microelectronics’ analog business includes chips that end up in cars and white goods, areas where there is expected to be significant growth in the coming years.
ST Microelectronics moved quickly to try to put a lid on the report by denying “the existence of initiatives which can compromise the unity of the company”. Nevertheless, the firm’s stock price rose sharply on the rumour, suggesting that the market would welcome such a move and perhaps giving the firm’s board the incentive it needs to put through such a plan.
Intel’s Core i7 2700K Discontinued
The Core i7 2700K, an unlocked 3.5GHz Sandy Bridge part, will meet its marker even sooner than many expected. Intel has decided that this processor launched in Q4 2011 and currently priced at $342 for boxed version is ready for processor discontinuance notice as soon as Q4 2012.
This means that in this quarter Intel plans to take last orders for the processor and will continue to ship them to customers until the EOL or end of lifecycle for this product that is planned in Q2 2013, or two quarters later.
If Intel ends up with some extra stock, it will surely ship it to customers but these are the official rules.
Core i7 2700K is not alone in PDN and EOL plans. Core i7 2600 and 2500K will also get product discontinuance notice in Q4 2012 and will reach the end of its professional career in Q2 2013 and it’s no coincidence that this happens days before scheduled Haswell launch.
Intel Going High-Performance
Intel has been hinting that it is developing high-performance lower power server chips to speed up cloud services or data-intensive applications like analytic.
Apparently this will involve the integration of a converged fabric controller inside future server chips. This will make server communication faster while helping data centers operate at peak efficiency.
Raj Hazra, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group said that Fabric virtualises I/O and ties together storage and networking in data centres. If you add in an integrated controller you get a wider pipe to scale performance on cloud platforms. He said that the integrated fabric controller will appear in the company’s Xeon server chips in a few years as part of Intel’s cunning plan to bring the controller to the transistor layer.
Intel Goes Wireless
Maho Bay is a desktop platform wrapped around the recently launched Ivy Bridge desktop processor and Intel plans to enrich this platform with a Wireless mini card offer of its own.
The plan is to make new SKUs based on half Minicard (mPCIe) standard and offer it with its boards that have support for PCIe 1X or faster. Maho Bay also allows some combinations with Sandy Bridge processors and will allow the use of these mini Wireless cards on older processors with new boards. It looks like the Panther Point chipset is necessary even for older Sandy Bridge processors on Maho Bay platform.
The top range card with premium performance is Intel Centrino Ultimate N 6300, and the card has virtually the same specification like its mobile brother. It supports Intel Wireless Display as well as Intel My Wifi technology and quick driver connect.
Since it is using 3×3 antennas and MIMO standard it us capable of achieving speeds of 450Mbits per second and it does support multiple streams. It supports dual band 2.4 + 5 GHz and Intel Vpro. This is still a 802.11n based product as Intel hasn’t really jumped the gun to support 802.11ac in 2012.
It looks like it is too early for Intel to embrace this new standard due to its very limited market penetration.
Intel Increasing Supplier Audits
Intel has audited almost five times as many of its suppliers in 2011 than it did the previous year.
Chipzilla set itself a target of visiting 50 on-site, third-party audits of its suppliers during the last year. It had that target last year as well, but missed it by only carrying out 49 audits, while one had to be rescheduled.
In comparison Intel only carried out eight visits in 2010. The company also conducted 249 in-depth assessments and 289 self-assessments by suppliers.
But the findings were not that great. Intel found 426 priority and major findings, the highest class of non-compliance as defined by the company.
Most of the non-compliance related to management systems such as a lack of documentation and systems for CSR, inadequate communication with workers or suppliers and a lack of audits. But there were also 112 instances of labour abuse, which included working hours of more than 60 hours per week, and workers not being given at least one day off a week. There were also 28 issues relating to ethics, such as not having an anonymous reporting line for employees to raise issues or concerns through.
The report was interesting because it must have covered Foxconn, which has been the subject of criticism over its treatment of workers. During 2011, Intel carried out audits at three Foxconn facilities and found them about as bad as others in the region. Most of the breaches of rules were in the areas of labour conditions, safety systems, and management systems.
Is Moore’s Law Dead?
May 11, 2012 by admin
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Physicist Michio Kaku says that Moore’s law will be dead within about 10 years.
Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York told BigThink.com that we are already seeing a slowing down of Moore’s Law. He said that computing power simply cannot maintain this rapid, exponential rise using standard silicon technology.
Kaku said that the latest CPUs from Intel, which use a unique three-dimensional design, do continue roughly doubling processors. But he points out that the new design is nonetheless proof that the Law is winding down.
The two basic problems are heat and leakage and that is why the age of silicon will eventually come to a close.
By continuing to shrink the parts that go into processors, heat becomes concentrated. At a point in the near future, the heat generated will be so intense that the chip will melt. You can literally fry an egg on top of the chip, and the chip itself begins to disintegrate, he said.
Ivy Bridge Chips May Cost Under $100
March 15, 2012 by admin
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We still don’t know the official branding of Ivy Bridge Pentium chips, but we are aware of plans for at least one SKU.
Intel plans to launch a Pentium branded Ivy Bridge and replace the G860 Pentium that currently holds the key position in L3 Legacy market. This 3.0GHz 32nm Sandy Bridge dual-core with two treads is currently available and sells for $86. Let’s not forget the 3MB cache size.
In Q2 2012 the Pentium family gets a new member, the 3.1GHz clocked G870, and both G870 and G860 get replaced in L3 market segment by an unnamed Ivy Bridge Pentium. We know that it should start selling for $86 and that this will be the cheapest of 22nm based desktop Ivy Bridge.
Ivy Bridge Specs Leaked
Intel has inadvertently leaked details of its upcoming Ivy Bridge processors in a sales flipbook uploaded to its website.
Intel’s much delayed Ivy Bridge processors are expected to tip up in the second quarter sporting the firm’s tri-gate transistor technology. Details of the chips had been relatively scant, until that is the firm decided to upload a sales flipbook, which details what appear to be most of its third generation Core i5 processors.
According to Intel’s slides there are only modest frequency bumps, with the quad-core Core i5-2570 and Core i5-2570K topping the range with speeds of 3.4GHz and 3.8GHz in Turbo mode. The addition of the ‘K’ suffix signifies Intel HD 4000 graphics, while the Core i5-3570 plods along with Intel HD 2500 graphics.
Like Chipzilla’s Sandy Bridge Core i5 chips, the Ivy Bridge Core i5 range will be all quad-core chips with 6MB of cache that lack Hyperthreading, with one exception, the Core i5-3470T, which is a dual-core Hyperthreaded processor with 3MB of cache. Previously the ‘T’ suffix was added to signify a 35W TDP chip, though this was not confirmed on the leaked slide.
Intel Unveils 3D Transistor
Intel may have jumped eons ahead of its competitors by redesigning the transistor. Yesterday Intel said the firm will start designing 3D transistors which will let them design smaller and more powerful processors.
The new Tri-gate design apparently will use a 22-nanometer process. The processors using this method will go into production later in the year and should start showing up in computers in 2012 under the code name of “Ivy Bridge”. The new designs should be more eco-friendly since they will consume less power. Intel is saying that a dual-core chip with 22nm tri-gate transistors would use the same amount of power as a 32nm chip. If these specs are valid, the move may give Intel the break it needs to become more competitive in the smartphones and tablet space now dominated by ARM.
IBM Outs Fast Graphene Transistor
Big Blue is in the process of showing of its latest graphene transistor that is capable of executing 155 billion cycles per second. IBM’s test revealed that the transistor is 50 percent faster than previous versions of the experimental transistors.
That said the transistor has a cut-off frequency of 155GHz. The previous transistor had a frequency of 100GHz when IBM showed it off last year.
IBM’s Yu-Ming Lin stated that the research further showed that high-performance, graphene-based transistors can be asembled at an economical cost using standard semiconductor manufacturing processes. Meaning, commercial production of graphene chips should be happening in the near future.