Dilemmas

Intel has come out with all guns firing. After horrible Q3 figures it has further re-positioned its foundry unit as an independent operation which will make its US rivals like AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm less wary about using it. The US Department of Commerce has been encouraging Nvidia and AMD to get aboard Intel Foundry and is doubtless encouraging more ...

In the same week the EU congratulated itself on winning a couple of court cases (in European courts) against Apple and Alphabet, Mario Draghi presents a report saying Europe is doomed if it sticks to regulation rather than innovation. Draghi says that Europe must spend €800 billion a year to catch up with the US and China in digital technologies. ...

Amid reports about Intel considering selling off its fabs, no one seems to be considering the fact that next year is the year Intel said it will regain industry process leadership. If it succeeds in taking industry process leadership, which is not impossible because it is trying to run a process with more advanced features than the production processes TSMC ...

“Momentum for generative AI is accelerating,” said Jensen Huang at Nvidia’s Q2 earnings call on Wednesday, but not if you look at the company’s numbers. In Q1 revenues were $26bn, in Q2 $30bn and in Q3 they are expected to be $32bn while the  Q2 margin of 75 was below the Q1 margin of 78.  Not accelerating. The share price ...

Two deadly crashes in late 2018 and early 2019 in Ethiopia and Indonesia of Boeing 737 Max planes led to the grounding of all MAX planes for more than 1.5 years. Boeing lost billions from fines and  canceled orders and posted a loss of almost almost $3 billion in Q2 of 2019. The planes were finally cleared to fly again ...

When politicians want to boost their countries’ chip industry  there’s not much they can do except throw money at it. The sort of money politicians like to throw at the chip industry is big money and the only thing the chip industry can do with big money is build fabs. The problem with that is that a fab is more ...

EV fires are causing such public concern in Korea that the Korean government called a public meeting about them on Tuesday. Earlier this month an EV battery fire burnt out 140 cars parked in the underground car park of a Korean apartment building. Last year Korea reported 72 EV battery fires up fron 43 in 2022 and 24 in 2021. ...

The Intel story is the most gripping drama the semiconductor industry has seen for many years. Next year is the year that it plans to regain industry process leadership but this year the USA’s  most influential  chip industry financial analyst Stacy Rasgon says that Intel’s issues are “approaching the existential”. The shares are down from 60 to 20; it made ...

Trainium and Inferentia sound like a couple of Roman matrons you see in tongue-in-the-cheek dramas about Ancient Rome. Trainium maybe a bit of a dom, Inferentia more of a snidey gossip. They are Amazon’s names for its AI chips – one for training AI programmes, the other for inferencing – running the programmes. When the tech evolves a bit more ...

A key reason why people don’t buy an EV is the lack  infrastructure, says a survey by Statista Consumer Insights. In several northern and western European countries, upwards of one in five people said that this was the case. In Norway, which already has a stronger EV infrastructure, only eight percent of respondents said the same. The share of respondents ...