Bit-Rauschen The Intel chip factory in Magdeburg is on the brink of collapse

Pat Gelsinger is under extreme pressure as Intel CEO. Intel's share price is melting like butter in the sun, it is threatened with expulsion from the Dow Jones and its market capitalization is barely 85 billion US dollars – three years ago it was over 200 billion. Some see Intel as a takeover candidate, and speculation is running rampant. Nvidia has a bulging cash hoard; the contract manufacturers TSMC or Samsung could want to eliminate a potential competitor before it becomes dangerous. The merger with Globalfoundries, on the other hand, would strengthen chip production in the US homeland.

From a German and European perspective, the main point of interest is how the planned chip plant in Magdeburg will proceed, but Intel is tight-lipped about this. Intel has found co-investors for the fabs in Ireland and one in Arizona, such as the investment firm Apollo, which is taking over 49 percent of the shares in each case as a capital investment, thereby reducing the debt burden.

At the time this issue of c't went to press, there were no official statements from Intel, but restructuring scenarios were being discussed internally and by the Board of Directors. The renowned US investor Lip-Bu Tan, who among other things ran the chip design company Cadence for many years, resigned at the end of August. The 64-year-old said goodbye with polite words, but they made it clear: 'I'm wasting my time here. Word leaked out that he considered it necessary to make significantly more redundancies and to focus the company more strongly on its most important goals.

A silver lining on the Intel horizon is the mobile processor Core Ultra 200V aka Lunar Lake, which scores points in many disciplines against Qualcomm Snapdragon X and AMD Ryzen AI 300 (see page 44). However, the most important Lunar Lake chiplets are not manufactured by Intel, but by TSMC. Gelsinger assures us that this will change in 2025 with Intel 18A. But for external customers, the entry into 18A production is tougher than expected because more work is needed on the chip design software than expected.

AMD and the software

AMD has a long history of software glitches. There is no end in sight, even though the company has proclaimed itself a software company. In August, it became apparent that several Ryzen generations benefited significantly from the Windows 11 update KB5041587, especially in PC games. The background to this is probably that Windows 11 previously implemented unnecessarily stringent protective measures against potential malware attacks of the Spectre type that were discovered in 2018. The update is good news. But one wonders why AMD didn't announce it at the launch of the Ryzen 9000.

And the Windows 11 drivers for the Ryzen AI NPU, which was actually developed by Xilinx, are still not working properly. Intel rubbed AMD's nose in this at the presentation of the Core Ultra 200V. Intel gleefully presented slides with AI benchmark bars on which Ryzen AI repeatedly shone as a total failure. Qualcomm got its comeuppance in the gaming discipline: The Adreno GPU (whose name is an anagram of Radeon) in the Snapdragon X, which is based on old ATI technology, certainly has some 3D oomph, but is hardly suitable for games in practice. Intel knows a thing or two about this, as it took a beating itself for the initially botched drivers for the first generation of Arc graphics cards.

Raspi glitch

– Raspbery Pi boss Dr. Eben Upton, who has held the title of Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in addition to other honorary titles – since 2016, is probably pretty angry. This is because the RP2350 microcontroller, which he developed himself and is very proud of, contains a stupid error, which the data sheet lists as Erratum RP2350-E9. It is most likely due to a purchased design module for the I/O circuits and restricts the range of functions of the GPIO pins. In many applications, the bug can be circumvented by connecting external resistors, but in some circuits the older RP2040 cannot be replaced by an RP2350 as easily as planned.

Efficient Computer, a start-up by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, is developing even more frugal chips. This involves reconfigurable logic (Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Array, CGRA) consisting of numerous Processing Elements (PEs), which are manufactured using super-economical ultra-low-power semiconductor technology. Such ULP CGRAs are designed to last ten years on a single battery charge and are therefore suitable for implantable medical technology, for example.

Finally, a farewell to the US online hardware magazine Anandtech, which Anand Lal Shimpi, who has worked for Apple for ten years, founded as a 14-year-old. After 27 years, it is now over because the business is no longer worthwhile for the parent company. (ciw)