Bit noise: Chipmakers gear up for Trump's second term
Many chip companies outside the USA are expecting headwinds from the re-election of Donald Trump. AMD cuts jobs despite good business.
The upcoming Trump administration in the USA is casting its shadow: the price of Bitcoin has climbed to a record high and Tesla shares have also shot up. Trump friend Elon Musk wants to personally benefit directly from the change of power. He is certainly turning his task of streamlining the US bureaucracy to his own advantage.
Trump's election success is also sending shockwaves through the international chip industry. During his first term in office, Trump took particular aim at China and the world's largest chip contract manufacturer TSMC, among others, is gearing up for this. A few days before Trump's election, Canadian experts discovered a TSMC chip in a Huawei AI accelerator in China. This is already upsetting the current US government, and will certainly upset the next one even more. It is still unclear how the chip came to China from Taiwan. TSMC claims to comply with all export restrictions, but has so far supplied chips from modern manufacturing processes such as N7 to other Chinese companies. The US government prohibited this at the beginning of November. As a result, TSMC is likely to lose around 5 to 8 percent of its sales volume, according to market observers from the Taiwanese company Trendforce.
Videos by heise
TSMC could also come into conflict with Donald Trump over the upcoming N2 production technology. This is because a Taiwanese doctrine prohibits TSMC from manufacturing the most advanced technology outside of Taiwan. This is intended as a protective shield against China: Western industrialized countries are said to have a strong interest in protecting their contract manufacturer and therefore also Taiwan.
(Image:Â Google)
However, the brand-new TSMC factory in Phoenix, Arizona, is currently being ramped up, with several billion US dollars of taxpayers' money being poured into it. Donald Trump will presumably insist on being given access to the latest technology in return. However, this is not yet the case, as TSMC will not start N2 series production until the end of 2025.
AMD earns and lays off
In the market for processors for notebooks, desktop PCs and servers, AMD gained further ground in the third quarter of 2024 at the expense of Intel. AMD supplied around a quarter of all processors, Intel the rest. Intel was able to slow down AMD's success in servers with significantly stronger sixth-generation Xeons: Epyc market shares continued to grow, but at a slower rate than before.
The turnover of AMD's data center division exceeded that of the corresponding Intel division for the first time in the third quarter of 2024; at around 3.5 billion US dollars, AMD took in around 5.6 percent more than Intel. However, this was not only due to the Epyc server processors, but above all to the AI computing accelerators from the Instinct MI series. Intel is known to have missed out on this market. However, although AMD's turnover has increased significantly year-on-year, around a thousand people are being made redundant. AMD wants to focus even more on the AI business.
On the other hand, Intel's desktop processors fared badly: the last Core i types no longer sold well, especially as their reputation suffered from bugs. And in the fourth quarter, the Core Ultra 200S aka Arrow Lake was launched. So far, there are only expensive K versions of this, and the rest will only follow at the beginning of 2025 and could boost sales again.
Until then, Intel also wants to deliver Windows 11 patches to increase the computing power of the Core Ultra 200S. In the lab, the chips ran somewhat faster than later in independent tests. Similar problems also plagued AMD at the launch of the Ryzen 9000.
For mobile processors, there were only minor shifts from Intel to AMD. The new ARM chips from Qualcomm have not yet made themselves felt either.
The Phoronix website recently ran its Linux benchmarks on the ARM server processors developed in-house by Amazon AWS and Google, i.e. Graviton4 and Axion. Both have CPU cores of the ARM type Neoverse V2. When comparing instances with 48 virtual CPU cores each, the Axion was around 10 percent faster, so both are in the same league. This begs the question: why are the cloud giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft each building their own chip development teams for a lot of money if they end up with very similar processors? They could have just bought them from AMD, Intel or someone else.
Ampere Computing, on the other hand, developed its own ARM-compatible CPU cores for the Ampere One, but the processor has weaknesses. Although it has twice as many cores as the Graviton4, it only has eight instead of twelve DDR5 memory channels. This slows down performance.
There is also a regular podcast on bit noise.
(ciw)
