A quick foundry update. While TSMC posted excellent results for the third quarter of 2024 (year over year, revenue increased 39.0% while net income and diluted EPS both increased 54.2%), Samsung Foundry is reportedly struggling with the lack of major customers for its upcoming Taylor, Texas, fab. According to Reuters, this would be the reason why Samsung has postponed taking deliveries of ASML chipmaking equipment for the new factory.
Intel and AMD form the “x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group”
Archrivals Intel and AMD are collaborating for the sake of x86 architecture’s competitiveness. The two companies have created an “x86 ecosystem advisory group”, whose founding members also include Broadcom, Dell, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. The intended outcomes from this initiative will include enhancing customer choice and compatibility across hardware and software, while accelerating their ability to benefit from new, cutting-edge features; simplifying architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and standardize interfaces across x86 product offerings from Intel and AMD; enabling greater and more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating systems, frameworks and applications. According to Reuters, the creation of the x86 advisory group is a reaction to growing competition from Arm, and one of its key goals will be to ensure that software can run on both Intel and AMD x86 processors without any modifications.
Arteris’ NoC tiling enables tile-based SoC architecture
Described as “an innovative evolution of its network-on-chip IP products” based on its “proven, robust network-on-chip IP”, the tiling capabilities announced by Arteris promise to pave the way to tile-based architectures for the SoCs that include AI acceleration blocks. According to Arteris, by allowing the replication of the same tile, tile-based architectures simplify design and verification, make it easy to scale up AI performance, and enable a significant power reduction by turning off individual tiles. The new tiling capability, along with mesh topology, is being offered by Arteris’ FlexNoC and Ncore NoC IP products.
