CES 2019: What to expect from the chipmakers
After a remarkable run for the semiconductor industry, this year's show marks the start of what is likely to be a pivotal year. Here's what I'll be looking for in Las Vegas.
After a remarkable run for the semiconductor industry, this year's show marks the start of what is likely to be a pivotal year. Here's what I'll be looking for in Las Vegas.
At the VLSI Symposia, Samsung gave the first detailed look at its 7nm platform, which is likely to be the first chipmaking process to use a new form of lithography that has been in the works for decades.
The chipmaker already dominates the market for training deep neural networks. At its annual GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia made the case for using GPUs not only to train ever bigger models, but also to run these neural networks in data centers to revolutionize industries.
A recent tour of the company's remarkable fab in upstate New York illustrated both how far the foundry has come and how challenging the future will be for advanced chipmakers.
AMD CEO Lisa Su capped a big year for the company with an opening address at IEDM 2017 where she predicted that a new approach to chip design will deliver another decade of big performance gains.
The mobile version of AMD's more competitive Zen architecture not only reaches a broader slice of the PC market, but is also the first Ryzen processor with on-die graphics. AMD is promising big gains in performance and efficiency.
The development of its own 7nm technology is a significant milestone for customers like AMD and IBM that need the highest performance. But GlobalFoundries has also evolved into a full-service foundry with a range of technology and products.
Moore's Law is slowing at a time when new applications are demanding more muscle. The solution is to offload jobs to specialized hardware but these complex, heterogeneous systems will require a fresh approach.
At its analyst day, the chipmaker revealed new details of upcoming server, PC and graphics products that will make it more competitive, and said it has a plan to stay there for the long haul.
Earlier this year AMD released Ryzen, announced Epyc, unveiled its first Vega graphics card and teased a 16-core desktop chip. Yet it still managed to make some news at Computex, where it also argued the combination of its new CPUs and GPUs can deliver the best overall performance per dollar.