Daily Tech News 22 May 2022

• Semiconductor research group IMEC has published a roadmap taking the industry far beyond 1nm. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The most advanced process currently in production (at TSMC and Samsung) is a nominal 4nm. Nothing about the process is truly 4nm, but it's as much 4nm as the old 14nm process was 14nm, so it's useful for comparison.
  
  The roadmap looks forward to the 3nm and 2nm nodes that are already under development at TSMC, Samsung, and Intel - and then beyond all the way to what they call A2 - a nominal 0.2nm - sometime around 2036.
  
  By which time I hope to be less concerned about annual increments in CPU performance, but faster computers let us solve problems that are too expensive to be practical at the moment, so this is a win even if you don't plan to put together a 26th generation Intel gaming rig with dual RTX 18080 Ti cards to play Minecraft 1.37.
  
  There's not a lot of detail about the sub-1nm nodes, but at 2nm they expect a billion transistors per square millimetre - about 6 times the current 5nm process.

• Some next-gen AMD motherboards appear to have two chipsets. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There will be two chipsets available for Ryzen 7000 when it shows up later this year - the mainstream B650 and the high-end X670. But it seems that they might be the same chip, only the X670 is two B650s.
  
  Which would make complete sense and fits in with AMD's design strategy for the past several years - design one really good chip and then glue a bunch of them together for bigger systems.
  
  A Ryzen desktop CPU consists of one or two CPU chiplets (up to 8 cores each) and an I/O chiplet. The current motherboard chipset is the exact same chip as the I/O chiplet on the CPU itself, just rotated 180 degrees so the two can face each other.
  
  They're probably not going to do that with this generation because the new CPUs will have embedded graphics on the I/O chiplet, so it makes sense to have a generic motherboard chipset and use one on mainstream boards and two on high-end ones.
  
  Or the leaks might all be wrong. One or the other.
  
  
  
• But they're going to show off these motherboards tomorrow so we don't have to wait long to find out.
  
  
  
• Apple is planning to expand manufacturing outside China. (9to5Mac)
  
  The company is looking toward India (where labour relations have been somewhat fraught) and Vietnam.
  
  
  
• Apple is also dumping a Chinese display manufacturer and sourcing from South Korea instead. (WCCFTech)
  
  BOE reportedly decided to adjust the designs for their iPhone 13 screens to cut costs - without bothering to tell Apple.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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