Newsletter Archives

• $52 billion for semiconductor giants — but will we get more chips?

  Posted on August 8, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  SILICON

  

  By Brian Livingston

  President Joe Biden recently signed a $52 billion subsidy program for the semiconductor industry, within an overall $280 billion package called the Chips and Science Act, but will we see an easing of today’s maddening chip shortages any time soon?

  The short answer is “no,” but the reasons might surprise you — and you shouldn’t assume we’ll get no bang for our bucks at all.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.32.0, 2022-08-08).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Silicon AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Legislation, Policy, Semiconductor Manufacturing, Silicon

• Make semiconductor chips without wasting water? Intel says it can.

  Posted on July 25, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Semiconductor manufacturing requires water, and a lot of it. But the Intel Corporation, one of the world’s largest operators of fabrication facilities, announced recently that it’s on track by the year 2030 to deliver to local communities 100% as much clean water as its plants use — and that the company is already generating more than 100% in some countries.

  How is that possible? If fabs require water to run their manufacturing processes, how could a chip maker end up with more water than it uses?

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.30.0, 2022-07-25).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Environment, Public Defender, Silicon

• The hard drive is dead; long live solid-state storage

  Posted on June 27, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  SILICON

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The death of hard disk drives may be greatly exaggerated — after all, HDD manufacturers sold more than 250 million units worldwide in 2021 — but solid-state drives, which store data in semiconductors with no moving parts, finally overtook the unit sales of HDDs last year. The writing is on the wall for ye olde spinning platters.

  SSDs have many advantages over HDDs, including being much smaller in size and offering faster throughput. But even after years of cost improvements, SSDs are still a much more expensive choice.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.26.0, 2022-06-27).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Silicon AskWoody Plus Newsletter, HDD, Silicon, SSD

• Will you be able to run Windows on an Arm processor?

  Posted on June 13, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  SILICON

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The computing scene is up in arms, so to speak, about the latest Arm technology.

  Arm — which began as an acronym but is now more like a religion — is the technology that powers the latest Apple Macs, but it’s made only slight inroads into Windows machines due to software incompatibilities.

  Whether or not you know anything about Arm, you’re probably already using it. Arm-based systems tend to have much lower power requirements than systems using more complex central processing units, such as Intel processors.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.24.0, 2022-06-13).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Silicon ARM, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Silicon, Windows, Windows on ARM

• With its Radeon graphics technology, AMD is a powerhouse

  Posted on May 30, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  SILICON

  

  By Brian Livingston

  At today’s breakneck pace of technological change, the semiconductor industry’s product cycles run faster than a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest. This month, the scrappy multinational chip company AMD tried to kick some butt by claiming that its newest GPUs (graphics processing units) deliver far better price/performance ratios than Nvidia’s.

  The predictable result was a good ol’ pissing match between the two archrivals. But this takes nothing away from the fact that both AMD and Nvidia — as well as the industry’s Old Faithful, Intel — are permanently changing our expectations about how fast our machines can compute for a given fistful of dollars.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.22.0, 2022-05-30).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Silicon AMD, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Radeon, Silicon

• Will Intel be a dominant chip company going forward?

  Posted on May 16, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  SILICON

  

  By Brian Livingston

  All the headlines seem to be bad for Intel lately — poor yields on bleeding-edge technologies, disappointed customers, lagging performance compared with competitors from around the world, and on and on.

  The truth of the matter is a bit more complicated.

  Most of the stories you’ve been reading in the mass media about Intel are telling only half the tale — if that.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.20.0, 2022-05-16).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Silicon Apple Silicon, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Intel, Samsung, Silicon, TSMC

• What technology will run your life a few years from now?

  Posted on April 11, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  SILICON

  

  By Brian Livingston

  “My interest is in the future, because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there,” said Charles Kettering, the head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947.

  I’m sure his statement is true. Time travel into the future isn’t science fiction — we all do it every day at the usual speed. But what kind of a future will it be, and can we head off the worst aspects of it?

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.15.0, 2022-04-11).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Silicon AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Intel, Samsung, Semiconductor Manufacturing, Silicon, TSMC