TSMC to Spend $100B on Fabs and R&D Over Next Three Years: 2nm, Arizona Fab & More
TSMC this week has announced plans to spend $100 billion on new production facilities as well as R&D over the next three years. The world's largest contract maker of chips says that its fabs are currently working at full load, so to meet demand for its services going forward it will need (much) more capacity. Among TSMC's facilities to go online in the next three to four years are the company's fab in Arizona as well as its first 2nm-capable fab
ASRock Z590 Taichi Review: An Intel Motherboard with Moving Parts (and Thunderbolt 4)
Intel has now launched its latest 11th Generation Core processors for desktop. The highest performing of these is the Core i9-11900K, with 8 cores and 16 threads, and it does have some raw core advancements with an updated microarchitecture. These processors need appropriate motherboards, and although we've seen Intel's Z590 and B560 models already filter into retail channels over the last couple of months, the time is now to start getting to grips
The ASRock Z590 OC Formula Motherboard: By and For Overclockers
ASRock and its in-house extreme overclocker Nich Shih have created the latest in its series of high-end enthusiast-grade motherboards. The OC Formula brand returns, famed for its good extreme overclocking performance, with the ASRock Z590 OC Formula. As a high-end clocking board, it is equipped with two DDR4 memory slots as close to the socket as is feasibly possible with the cooler recommendations for improved memory performance. This means support for DDR4-5600 out of the box
EUV Pellicles Ready For Fabs, Expected to Boost Chip Yields and Sizes
Foundries started limited usage of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) of chips in 2019. At the time, ASML's Twinscan NXE scanners were good enough for production, but the full EUV ecosystem was not quite there. One of the things that impacted EUV was the lack of protective pellicles for photomasks, which limited usage of EUV tools and affected yields. Fortunately, the situation with pellicles has finally improved thanks to the recent introduction of production-ready EUV pellicles,
Computex 2021 Physical Show Cancelled; Virtual Event Still Taking Place
When it comes to technology tradeshows, one of the biggest early victims of the coronavirus outbreak was Computex, the annual PC-centric trade show in Taiwan. After the 2020 show was delayed and then canceled entirely, event organizer TAITRA vowed to come back with a proper tradeshow in 2021. However, even with vaccinations well underway, it’s become clear that it’s not going to be possible to hold the physical show this year either. As a result, the physical Computex tradeshow
Kingston Introduces NV1 Entry-Level NVMe SSD
As previewed at CES , Kingston's newest entry-level consumer NVMe SSD is now shipping. The new NV1 uses a similar strategy to Kingston's entry-level SATA drives like the A400, where Kingston is not guaranteeing a specific set of internal components and expects to mix controllers and NAND to hit the cheapest price points. That results in very conservative performance and endurance specifications: sequential transfers around 2GB/s and endurance ratings around 0.2 DWPD for three years.
| Kingston NV1 |
Mushkin Launches DELTA And GAMMA PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs
Mushkin has announced two new product lines for PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. Following on from last year's introduction of the ALPHA series, the new DELTA and GAMMA drives continue Mushkin's recent trend of using Phison's SSD controllers and reference designs. The ALPHA uses the Phison E12S controller and QLC NAND, the new DELTA uses the Phison E16 controller and QLC NAND, and the new GAMMA uses the Phison E18 controller and TLC NAND.
Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade
Today, as part of Arm’s Vision Day event, the company is announcing the first details of the company’s new Armv9 architecture, setting the foundation for what Arm hopes to be the computing platform for the next 300 billion chips in the next decade.
Intel Rocket Lake (14nm) Review: Core i9-11900K, Core i7-11700K, and Core i5-11600K
Today is the official launch of Intel’s 11 th Generation Core processor family, given the internal name ‘Rocket Lake’. Rocket Lake showcases new performance gains for Intel in the desktop space, with a raw clock-for-clock performance uplift in a number of key workloads. In order to do this, Intel have had to retrofit its 10nm CPU and GPU designs back to 14nm, because only 14nm can achieve the frequency required. In exchange, the new processors to get
Xiaomi Announces Mi 11 Ultra: The Largest Smartphone Camera
Today, within a flurry of device announcements, Xiaomi announced the new Mi 11 Ultra as a higher-end follow-up to the Mi 11, representing the company’s newest top-of-the-line smartphone with new unprecedented camera capabilities.