It is a relatively quiet International Supercomputing conference on the hardware front, with no new processors or switch ASICs being announced from the usual suspects. While Trish Damkroger, general manager of Intel’s high performance computing division, gave the keynote opening up ISC 2021, providing a little more insight into the “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SP processor and “Ponte Vecchio” GPU accelerator now due next year, starting with the “Aurora” A21 exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, most of the feeds and speeds of these chips remain a mystery.
No one has officially said that the Aurora machine has slipped from its revised delivery date of the end of 2021, but that has been the suspicion since Intel announced a slip in its 7 nanometer process, which is used to etch parts of the Ponte Vecchio GPU, also known as the Xe HPC device, last July.
At that time, the plan had been to have Aurora in the field at Argonne by the end of 2021, but this seemed unlikely given that then-CEO Bob Swan told Wall Street that initial shipments of Ponte Vecchio would slip to late 2021 to early 2022. Intel revised the Ponte Vecchio plan to use a mix of chiplets etched in its own foundries as well as those of its competitors, in this case Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, which actually has a working 7 nanometer process unlike Intel and GlobalFoundries. (Samsung, the only other 7 nanometer chip supplier and IBM’s partner for Power10, is working on it.)
Damkroger did not mention, by the way, that Intel is actually pushing out the delivery date for the Sapphire Rapids Xeon SP processor, which is being etched using the Enhanced SuperFin tweak of Intel’s 10 nanometer manufacturing process. But Lisa Spelman, general manager of the Xeon and Memory Group in the recently reorganized Intel, did put out a blog post explaining the delay in shipping the server chip at the heart of – well, more like the medulla oblongata of since the Ponte Vecchio GPUs do most of the thinking – the Aurora system. Now both Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio have slipped and it seems highly unlikely that Argonne will get the core parts of the system this year.
In any event, the Sapphire Rapids slippage affects more customers than the Ponte Vecchio slippage does, and now it looks like Ponte Vecchio will beat Sapphire Rapids into the field.
The Sapphire Rapids chip is based on the “Golden Cove” core, which has a new microarchitecture that includes two new accelerators that Spelman talked about. The first is called Advanced Matrix Extensions, or AMX, and we suspect that it is a matrix math overlay on top of the AVX-512 vector engines that pumps up the performance of matrix operations akin to that done by Tensor Core units on Nvidia GPUs as well as matrix overlays for vectors in IBM’s future Power10 chips. Spelman is not spilling the beans on AMX, but says that on early silicon for Sapphire Rapids, machine learning inference and training workloads are running 2X faster than on the current “Ice Lake” Xeon SP processors, which merely sport mixed precision in their vector engines to boost AI throughput.
Another forthcoming feature in the Golden Cove core – at least the variant aimed at servers – is called Data Streaming Accelerator, or DSA, and it was designed for various kinds of high performance workloads to boost the performance of streaming data movement as well as the transformations operations that are often done to streaming data in storage, networking, and analytics workloads.
“Demand for Sapphire Rapids continues to grow as customers learn more about the benefits of the platform,” Spelman said in a blog announcement. “Given the breadth of enhancements in Sapphire Rapids, we are incorporating additional validation time prior to the production release, which will streamline the deployment process for our customers and partners. Based on this, we now expect Sapphire Rapids to be in production in the first quarter of 2022, with ramp beginning in the second quarter of 2022.”
People at AMD must be giggling and snickering. Probably those at Ampere Computing, too. We can hear the “Sapphire Not So Rapids” and a “Ponte Vecchio Too Far” jokes from afar. . . .
It is hard to say when the successor to the current “Ice Lake” Xeon SP was due to come to market because Ice Lake itself bopped around so much. Ice Lake was delayed about three years when it launched in March, so that should have put what became Sapphire Rapids somewhere 18 to 24 months after that. Call it March 2019 to be generous. What this now means is that the 10 nanometer chips are still running three years behind after this delay and have not been able to catch up. Hopefully for Intel’s sake, there won’t be another delay with the “Granite Rapids” Xeon SP that will be etched with 7 nanometer processes. After the July 2020 delay, the Granite Rapids Xeon SP processors slipped to the first half of 2023 compared to the expected launch in early to middle 2022. Which is when Sapphire Rapids is now hitting.
The big reveal at ISC 2021 was that there will be a variant of the Sapphire Rapids processor aimed at HPC and AI workloads that will include HBM memory. “Sapphire Rapids will be out before Sapphire Rapids with HBM, but roughly in the same timeframe,” says Damkroger. “And anybody will be able to buy Sapphire Rapids with HBM. You can use the HBM alone, or you can use it with DRAM.” This is an interesting development indeed. And as Damkroger said, this will not just be a special SKU that only select customers can buy. The question is, what will the HBM addition cost, and how much performance will it add.
There are some rumors running around about what Sapphire Rapids with HBM will look like, one of which you can see here and which seems pretty plausible. This report says that the Sapphire Rapids chip has four 15-core tiles for compute, with one core inactivated, presumably to drive up effective yield. So the maximum core count per socket is going to be four times fourteen or 56 cores, with a possible leap to 60 cores if the 7 nanometer yields get good.
This approach is exactly what IBM is doing with its Power10 chip, which has 16 physical cores and only 15 cores are being activated from the get-go because they know yields on Samsung’s 7 nanometer process will be – how should we put this? – troublesome. And before you start, remember that with the “Pascal” and “Ampere GPU” designs, Nvidia did the same thing with TSMC’s 7 nanometer processes.
It is not clear if these Sapphire Rapids sockets are made of chiplets, which would mean having I/O and memory controllers separated from core blocks, or if they are whole CPUs that are implemented in multichip fashion, as AMD did with the “Naples” Epyc 7001s and earlier Opterons a long time ago and as IBM has been doing since the Power5 in 2005. There are four HBM2 stacks, so they could all have their own memory and it can be an MCM, if this report is correct. The HBM2 stacks are four high with 16 GB of capacity, for a total of 64 GB per socket. And that is a perfectly reasonable amount of main memory for an HPC and AI application, and with a 1 TB/sec bandwidth, that is also pretty reasonable. The HBM capacity could be doubled, we think, to 128 GB pretty easily but not cheaply, with an eight-high stack. It is not clear how much DDR5 memory this Sapphire Rapids socket will address, but it is likely going to be at least 512 GB and probably 1 TB and maybe even 2 TB.
The top end Sapphire Rapids chips are expected to weigh in at 400 watts, including their HBM2 memory. We joked a long time ago that all computing would look like graphics cards in the long run. This has certainly held true for the Fujitsu A64FX and the NEC Aurora processors used in HPC (that’s a different Aurora), and in the long run you can expect an HBM variant of Epyc as well. That, in fact, might be one of the secrets in the exascale systems that the Cray unit of Hewlett Packard Enterprise is building for the US Department of Energy.
We already know that Intel and HPE/Cray are using a two-socket Sapphire Rapids node with six Ponte Vecchio GPU accelerators linked over the PCI-Express 5.0 bus using the CXL 1.1 protocol to the CPUs. Three GPUs per CPU, just like in the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory built by IBM and Nvidia.
The Ponte Vecchio Xe HPC GPU accelerator, shown in the feature image at the top of this story, has 49 tiles and over 100 billion transistors. It is a beast, and it has been powered on and early silicon is going through testing and validation, according to Damkroger, and she also mentioned the other form factors that will be available, as you can see above. There is a four GPU subsystem as shown, based on the Open Compute Project’s Open Accelerator Module, as well as an eight GPU subsystem not shown, which presumably also hews to the OAM specification. Presumably these will have coherent interfaces over CXL between the GPUs and out to the CPUs using a PCI-Express 5.0 switch fabric.
FISHKILL, NEW YORK - JULY 20: IBM workers walk in an IBM 12-inch wafer chip fabricating plant July ... [+]20, 2004 in Fishkill, New York. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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Throughout my career, the United States has faced many competitiveness challenges, but few have alarmed me more than the ramifications of the recent semiconductor shortage. Our society is totally reliant on microelectronic technologies. They are fundamentally integrated into every industry, government, mode of transportation, energy supply and hospital, with bits of data and information constantly moving from one place to another. This exponential increase in their use is also causing a corresponding increase in the total energy consumption in microelectronics.
Unfortunately, with the current semiconductor shortage, 169 American industries are now impacted, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs — and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Our capabilities in microelectronics are eroding and under severe threat, due to both our national overdependence on manufacturing overseas, as well as our lack of policies and effort to make semiconductor production a competitive venture in the U.S. Without significant policy changes and increased investment into a rapidly growing sector of the global economy, the U.S. risks falling behind even further.
“Given the lead time necessary to create and scale new manufacturing infrastructure, the decisions we make now as a country will determine our leadership in the semiconductor industry, help us stay competitive and prosperous in an increasingly digital world,” said Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of high performance computing at Intel. “We must invest to ensure we attract and retain the top minds that will shape our nation’s future as a microelectronics leader.”
Why Isn’t the U.S. Leading in Semiconductor Manufacturing?
The share of global semiconductor manufacturing on U.S. soil has eroded sharply over the last 20 years, from 37% to 12% — and the Semiconductor Industry Association expects it will fall to 10% by 2030. The costs of manufacturing chips in the U.S. are rising too high to be globally competitive: The 10-year cost of a new fab, the factory where semiconductors are produced, on U.S. soil is 30% higher than building the same fab in Taiwan or South Korea, and up to 50% higher than in China. These top microelectronics-producing countries are subsidizing their fabs, causing the U.S. to become increasingly uncompetitive in this sector, which is why Asia’s share of global semiconductor manufacturing will amount to 83% by 2030.
China’s Rise in Manufacturing Microchips. That expansion is already well underway, especially in China. In 2019, four of the six new semiconductor fabs in the world were in China — with none in the U.S. — and government-financed fabs in China are estimated to grow from about 24 to 70 in just the next two years. China is implementing a major, state-led effort to develop a domestic semiconductor industry that leads across all segments of the supply chain by 2030, with the government planning to spend $100 billion to achieve that goal. They are poaching talent from around the world, luring industry experts with exorbitant salaries and acquiring foreign intellectual property, through both licit and illicit means, to advance the country’s capabilities.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. relies on Taiwan and South Korea for leading-edge microchips used in computers, cell phones and revolutionary technologies such as 5G, the internet of things and artificial intelligence. In fact, only Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung produce microchips at the 5nm node, the most advanced processing nodes that exist today.
Finding the Workers. The semiconductor industry also depends on a highly skilled workforce, which the U.S. is failing to cultivate domestically. Foreign students dominate U.S. semiconductor-related graduate programs, accounting for more than two-thirds of graduate degrees in electrical, electronics and communications engineering from American education institutions in 2019.
The Increasing Challenges of Technological Advancement. If these risks weren’t enough, the guiding principle that has allowed the semiconductor industry to flourish for a half-century — Moore’s law — appears to be leveling off. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double within two years, making semiconductors smaller, faster and cheaper; this increased power and decreased cost has revolutionized entire industries, becoming fundamental to human progress. As Ramamoorthy Ramesh, University of California professor of physics and materials science and engineering, confirms, “Major innovations built on new scientific understanding will likely be required to sustain the same relentless pace of advances in computing beyond these limits to ensure U.S. national security, energy security and global competitiveness in this field.”
All of these factors add up to potentially big trouble for the U.S., creating a fragile ecosystem that puts every American industry, along with our economy, society and national security at risk. The global economy knows it must innovate with new microchip architectures, materials, packaging methods, algorithms and software, which will require more investment in R&D and engineering.
Solving the Microchip Manufacturing Challenge.
We are now facing an incredibly important question: How does the U.S. put itself in a strong position for semiconductor manufacturing to connect R&D to the economic benefits these new innovations could generate without depending on other nations who have interests that may conflict with ours?
“For the U.S. to maintain competitiveness today and tomorrow, we need to boost investment in R&D and engineering, alongside a stronger position in manufacturing, so that we can lead not only in making today’s chips but in driving the innovation roadmap as well,” said Om Nalamasu, chief technology officer for Applied Materials.
Through the passage last year of the CHIPS for America Act, which would significantly raise R&D and provide financial incentives to establish semiconductor research and manufacturing stateside, federal policymakers are indicating that they recognize the challenge; significant funding for the bill has already passed in the Senate and awaits a vote in the House. A recent bipartisan proposal for a 25% tax credit for domestic semiconductor manufacturing facilities and equipment would also help counterbalance the subsidies provided by other semiconductor-producing nations. More must be done though. We need a multi-pronged, whole-of-nation strategy to ensure domestic access to all segments of the supply chain, increase R&D investment and increase the talent pipeline of U.S. citizens in order to build our semiconductor ecosystem.
“In order to assert the strengths fundamental to assuring free societies endure and prosper, the U.S. must have a long-term strategy to win the future and invest at a scale appropriate to ensure that outcome,” said Andy Karsner, chairman and CEO of Manifest Energy, and former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
As I’ve seen throughout my career, the U.S. often rises to the occasion of global competitiveness, and I’m confident we have the resources and ability to reemerge as a leader in semiconductors in the coming years. We must act quickly though: Otherwise, today’s temporary shortage could become a permanent decline.
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PeaTos®, the Los Angeles based snack food brand, continues to shake up traditional snacking with the launch of three new crunchy tortilla style chips: Nacho Cheese, Zesty Ranch and a vegan Fiery Nacho. Their mission is to disrupt America’s pantry and redefine America’s go-to snack choice. PeaTos first took on Cheetos® and Funyuns® by reinventing the traditional corn-based classics with peas and clean ingredients—offering a new twist on old formulas that includes 4g of protein and 3g of fiber per serving. With the new tortilla style chip, PeaTos will expand its domain, broadening its reach and appeal to snack fans across the U.S by now taking on the Frito Lay crown jewel, Doritos®.
PeaTos challenges the status quo when it comes to snacking, using peas to add nutritional value and replacing the artificial colors and flavors with natural ingredients—delivering what the brand calls “junk food” without the junk.
“We’re all about the greatest tasting chips of all time,” explained Nick Desai, CEO of PeaTos. “People love chips AND want better options. We deliver on this promise every day, and our fans love the lack of compromise.”
For Doritos fans clamoring for more nutrition and less artificial junk, PeaTos rises to the occasion with three bold flavors that America has come to know and love: Nacho Cheese, Zesty Ranch, and a vegan Fiery Nacho. PeaTos Crunchy Chips speak to an increasingly important consumer expectation that snacks be delicious AND nutritious. PeaTos fans have shown overwhelming support for their vegan Fiery Hot curls, and the brand responded by giving them more of what they love, a new format of their favorite Vegan snack. With the addition of the Spicy Nacho chip, the brand now has two vegan SKUs in its growing portfolio of flavor forward better snacks.
PeaTos’ expanding portfolio of pea-based snacks provides consumers with a delicious alternative to conventional junk foods and a better tasting alternative to the drab and low taste better-for-you choices. PeaTos is changing consumers’ expectations about chips, offering significant nutritional value and uncompromising taste with peas as a key ingredient. Consumers can now have that “junk food” taste and the nutrition they seek for a balanced lifestyle.
About PeaTos®
PeaTos® has created a new class of snack chips, offering all the taste and crunch of America’s top selling snacks, without all the artificial stuff. Snacking fans get all that “junk food” chip taste they crave without any of the junk. PeaTos® is available in over 4,700 retailers, including Kroger and its banner stores like Dillons, Ralphs, Food 4 Less and Smith's at $3.99. PeaTos® are also available at Vons, Pavilions, Albertsons, Safeway, Fairway Market, Sprouts, and online on PeaTos.com, BetterSnacks.com and Amazon.com.
Learn more at peatos.com, and find us on Facebook.com/peatosbrand, Twitter and Instagram @peatosbrand.
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Data Bridge Market research recently released Global Potato Chips Market Research with quite +330 market data tables and figures and an easy to understand TOC in "Global Potato Chips Market Research" This Potato Chips market research report gives business thorough idea about the current scenario of the global market, recent developments, product launches, joint ventures, capacity, production value, mergers and acquisitions based on several market dynamics. This report is sure to help businesses for the informed and better decisions thereby managing marketing of goods and services. It is the best to gain a competitive advantage in this quickly transforming marketplace. Transparent, reliable and extensive market information of this market report will definitely develop the business and improve the return on investment (ROI).
Data Bridge Market Research analyses that the global potato chips market will project a CAGR of 4.40% for the forecast period of 2021-2028. Increasing personal disposable income, emerging trend of westernization of food consumption patterns in addition to growing economy and rise in the demand for snacks globally and others are the major factors attributable to the growth of potato chips market. Therefore, the potato chips market value, which was USD 22.10 billion in 2020, will increase up to USD 31.18 billion by 2028.
A promotional Potato Chips Market Research Report provides an overview of the Potato Chips Market Industry which is gaining momentum in the last few years. The market report uses a range of steps for collecting, recording, analyzing and interpreting market data to make this report all-inclusive. It also offers an overview of the industry that might promote interest among prospective investors, large corporations and everyday users who could participate in the next big opportunity or make their lives just a little easier. Potato Chips Market business report contains the list of leading competitors, strategic industry analysis and the insights of key factors influencing the Potato Chips Market industry.
From the name itself, it is clear Potato chips Market are those chips that are made out of potatoes. Potato chips are one of the most convenient food options when it comes to a quick snack thing. Potato chips are made by deep-frying or baking the potato slices. Rising popularity of potato chips have encouraged the popular food outlets to provide new and innovative potato chips. Potato chips are available in the market in a wide range of flavors.
Rising personal disposable income and rising demand for snack items owing to ever-rising population are the major factors fostering the growth of the potato chips market. Increase in the number of organized retail stores and growth of the organized retail sector are other important factors acting as Potato Chips Market Growth determinant. Introduction of several flavor variants and high demand for convenience food will further create lucrative growth opportunities for the potato chips market. The introduction of healthier alternatives such as low-fat and low-sodium chips, growth and expansion of e-commerce industry especially in the developing economies and rising westernization will further induce growth in the potato chips market value. Rising production capabilities of various players will also induce growth in the potato chips market value.
Potato Chips Market Business Research Report includes a thorough analysis of the market drivers, restraints, threats, and opportunities as well as addresses the lucrative investment options for the market players in the coming years. The market size, revenue generated from the sales and technologies by various application segments are also evaluated in this report. Estimates at a global as well as regional level are offered by the analysts. This advertising report compiles comprehensive intelligence studies that explore almost every aspect of the global market. The data and information is extensively researched and analyzed in the credible Potato Chips Market report to guide market players to improve their business planning and ensure long-term success.
The potato chips market is segmented on the basis of flavor, type and distribution channel. The growth among segments helps you analyses niche pockets of growth and strategies to approach the market and determine your core application areas and the difference in your target markets.
On the basis of flavor, the global potato chips market is segmented into plain/ salted potato chips and flavored potato chips.
On the basis of type, the global potato chips market is segmented into baked potato chips and fried potato chips.
Based on the distribution channel, the potato chips market is segmented into supermarkets and hypermarkets, convenience stores, specialist retailers, online retailer stores and other distribution channels.
Some Points from Table of Content
Global Potato Chips Market Report 2021 by Key Players, Types, Applications, Countries, Market Size, Forecast to 2028
Chapter 1 Report Overview
Chapter 2 Global Potato Chips Market Growth Trends
2.1 Industry Trends
2.1.1 SWOT Analysis
2.1.2 Porter’s Five Forces Analysis
2.2 Potential Potato Chips Market and Growth Potential Analysis
2.3 Industry News and Policies by Regions
2.3.1 Industry News
2.3.2 Industry Policies 2.4 Industry Trends under POST COVID-19
Chapter 3 Value Chain of Potato Chips Market
3.1 Value Chain Status
3.2 Potato Chips Market Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis
3.2.1 Production Process Analysis
3.2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure of Potato Chips
3.2.3 Labor Cost of Potato Chips
3.2.3.1 Labor Cost of Potato Chips under POST COVID-19
3.3 Sales and Marketing Model Analysis
3.4 Downstream Major Customer Analysis (by Region)
3.5 Value Chain Status under POST COVID-19
Chapter 4 Players Profiles
Chapter 5 Global Potato Chips Market Analysis by Regions
5.1 Global Potato Chips Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Regions
5.1.1 Global Potato Chips Sales by Regions (2016-2020)
5.1.2 Global Potato Chips Revenue by Regions (2016-2020)
5.2 North America Potato Chips Sales and Growth Rate (2016-2020)
5.3 Europe Potato Chips Sales and Growth Rate (2016-2020)
5.4 Asia-Pacific Potato Chips Sales and Growth Rate (2016-2020)
5.5 Middle East and Africa Potato Chips Sales and Growth Rate (2016-2020)
5.6 South America Potato Chips Sales and Growth Rate (2016-2020) Chapter 6 North America Potato Chips Market Analysis by Countries Chapter 7 Europe Potato Chips Market Analysis by Countries Chapter 8 Asia-Pacific Potato Chips Market Analysis by Countries Chapter 9 Middle East and Africa Potato Chips Market Analysis by Countries Chapter 10 South America Potato Chips Market Analysis by Countries Chapter 11 Global Potato Chips Market Segment by Types Chapter 12 Global Potato Chips Market Segment by Applications Chapter 13 Potato Chips Market Forecast (2021-2028)
13.1 Global Potato Chips Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate Forecast (2021-2028)
13.2 Potato Chips Market Forecast by Regions (2021-2028)
13.2.1 North America Potato Chips Market Forecast (2021-2028)
13.2.2 Europe Potato Chips Market Forecast (2021-2028)
13.2.3 Asia-Pacific Potato Chips Market Forecast (2021-2028)
13.2.4 Middle East and Africa Potato Chips Market Forecast (2021-2028)
13.2.5 South America Potato Chips Market Forecast (2021-2028)
13.3 Potato Chips Market Forecast by Types (2021-2028)
13.4 Potato Chips Market Forecast by Applications (2021-2028)
13.5 Potato Chips Market Forecast under POST COVID-19
Chapter 14 Appendix
14.1 Methodology
14.2 Research Data Source
Following aspects are kept into view while formulating global Potato Chips Market report and include the market type, organization size, availability on-premises, end-users’ organization type, and the availability in areas such as North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa. The market size, revenue generated from the sales and technologies by various application segments are also evaluated in this marketing report. The winning Potato Chips Market report showcases the trends that are in vogue, the regions that are growing, the various types of products available and the potential of the industry to provide solutions for a large population.
Key Questions answered in the Potato Chips Market Report:
What is the size of the overall Potato Chips market and its segments?
What are the key segments and sub-segments in the market?
What are the key drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges of the Potato Chips market and how they are expected to impact the market?
What are the attractive investment opportunities within the Market?
What is the Potato Chips market size at the regional and country-level?
Who are the key market players and their key competitors?
Market value- chain and key trends impacting every node with reference to companies
What are the strategies for growth adopted by the key players in Potato Chips market?
How does a particular company rank against its competitors with respect to revenue, profit comparison, operational efficiency, cost competitiveness and market capitalization?
How financially strong are the key players in Potato Chips market (revenue and profit margin, market capitalization, expenditure analysis, investment analysis)?
What are the recent trends in Potato Chips market? (M&A, partnerships, new product developments, expansions)
If opting for the Global version of Potato Chips Market analysis is provided for major regions as follows:
North America
(USA, Canada and Mexico)
Europe
(Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Russia, Italy and Rest of Europe)s
Asia-Pacific
(China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, India and Southeast Asia)
South America
(Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, rest of countries etc.)
Middle East and Africa
(Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)
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Potato Processing Market, By Type (Frozen, Chips & Snack Pellets, Dehydrated, Others), Distribution Channel (Foodservice, Retail), Application (Snacks, Ready-to-Cook & Prepared Meals and Others), Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherland, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Vietnam, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, South Africa, Rest of Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2028 https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-potato-processing-market
Sweet Potato Flour Market, By Nature (Organic, Conventional), Distribution Channel (Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer), End Use (Food and Beverage Industry, Nutraceuticals, Foodservice Industry, Retail/Household), Type (Yellow, White, Purple Sweet Potatoes), Product (Sweet Potato Stem, Fresh Sweet Potato), Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherland, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Vietnam, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, South Africa, Rest of Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2028 https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-sweet-potato-flour-market
Potato Starch for Food Industry Market, By Product Type (Native Starch, Modified Starch, Sweeteners), Nature (Organic, Conventional), End Use (Bakery; Dairy and Deserts; Soups, Sauces and Dressings; Meat and Fish; Savory and Snacks; Confectionery; Pet Food; Others), Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherland, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Vietnam, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, South Africa, Rest of Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2028 https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-potato-starch-for-food-industry-market
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AUSTIN (Nexstar) — America needs to think differently when it comes to boosting manufacturing of semiconductor chips, according to the senior Senator from Texas.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a roundtable discussion with tech leaders Monday that China dominated the semiconductor supply during the pandemic and America’s supply fell behind, causing supply chain problems.
“What China is doing is they want to become the dominant economy, and the dominant superpower in the world, and that’s a vulnerability for the United States, both economically and from a national security standpoint,” Cornyn said.
Semiconductors, usually made of silicon wafers cut down to fit the size of the product they’re in, are found in appliances, computers, cars, smartphones, and other technological equipment.
“There’s been a significant gap between the strong demand and the supply in the overall industry for automotive semiconductors,” said Steve Frezon, senior vice president of front end operations at NXP, a semiconductor manufacturing company based in the Netherlands with two Austin facilities.
Touring Samsung’s Austin semiconductor manufacturing site, Cornyn said the problem has gotten worse, not better.
“Employees at car manufacturing facilities are being laid off, because there is not a reliable supply of semiconductors needed to build those cars,” he noted. “All of our cars are becoming more and more like computers on wheels.”
Congress passed legislation last year to incentivize American companies to produce semiconductors. The bipartisan Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act took effect Jan. 1. It created grant programs, established public-private partnerships with the Department of Defense, and grew the Department of Commerce to focus on research, prototyping, and semiconductor industry workforce training.
But Congress still needs to pass a funding mechanism for the legislation, or it remains hollow. The spending bill passed the Senate on June 8, and is awaiting a House vote.
“The pandemic taught us a lot of really important lessons, and to me, this was the number one lesson that we can’t just… import products made overseas, just because it’s cheaper to make it there,” Cornyn explained. “There are some strategic investments we need to make here in the United States and particularly when it comes to semiconductors, I think that’s the start.”
Jon Taylor, the vice president of fab engineering at Samsung Austin Semiconductor, said expansion is critical to future success.
“We’ve optimized our current capacity and the only way for us to meet the demand going forward is through expansion,” he said at the roundtable.
The price tag to fully fund the legislation totals $52 billion, Cornyn conceded, explaining that it will pay off to protect America’s interests.
“We’re working hand in glove with the administration and the Secretary of Commerce, so this is not a partisan issue,” he said. “This is just something we need to get done and maintain our vigilance, so that it does get done before we fall prey to this vulnerability.”
Photojournalist Chris Nelson contributed to this report.
2021 Eater New Guard members Ed Szymanski and Patricia Howard’s pop-up, Dame, was supposed to sell fish and chips to New Yorkers for a few weeks in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic. Just about a year later, they’re still dunking hunks of hake into the deep fryer.
“We thought we’d be doing three or four orders every hour,” says Szymanski. “We didn’t think we’d be selling 100 pounds of fish every week.” The response to the couple’s battered hake, fried to crispy perfection, was explosive, and our video followed the duo as they tested out recipes six weeks before opening the doors to their permanent space in NYC’s West Village.
“The pandemic has left a lot of chefs untethered and that’s allowed pop-ups and people like us to really blossom and start cooking their own food,” Szymanski says, pullying a whole hake out of his fresh daily delivery. He prefers this breed for his fish and chips, as it’s more local to the area than the commonly used cod, but it’s a similar flaky white fish that holds up well to frying.
He debones the fish, adds some lemon zest, salt and sugar, and then dips it straight into batter made with flour, sweet potato starch, rice flour, baking powder, cold beer, and vodka. Szymanski stresses the importance of making the batter to order each time, as he wants the fish to steam inside the fresh, cold batter as it fries in the hot oil. He finishes the dish with a few mists of vinegar from a spray bottle, which adds that signature tangy flavor without causing the crispy fish to get soggy. Szymanski and his team go through about 150 pounds of hake on the weekends alone, and churns out about 100 orders on his busiest days.
“People in England don’t eat fish and chips that much, like it’s not a common part of your diet in the U.K.,” says Szymanski, a U.K. native. “So I was like, ‘there’s no way it’s going to be popular in America,’ and their response was just overwhelming straight off the bat.”
Aside from feeding NYC crispy seafood, Szymanski and Howard have another goal they hope to achieve with the opening of their restaurant: narrowing the pay gap between those who work in the front of the house, and those who work in the back. “It’s part of who we want to be as restaurateurs,” Szymanski says. “We’re going to use our privilege and our position as restaurant owners to help people more than just outside the four walls of the restaurant. Our mission as restaurateurs is to give back to the community in more ways than just cooking them dinner.”
NEW YORK, June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The artificial intelligence (AI) chips market is expected to grow by USD 73.49 billion at over 51% CAGR during 2021-2025, according to the latest market research report by Technavio. The report provides a detailed analysis of the market by analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses.
According to Technavio, the COVID-19 pandemic will have a positive impact on the growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) chips market. The report expects the market value to increase in 2021 as compared to 2020.
Many businesses currently are going through response, recovery, and renewal phases. With the continuing spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, organizations worldwide are focusing on flattening their recessionary curve by leveraging technology. Building business resilience and enabling agility will aid organizations to move forward in their journey out of the COVID-19 crisis towards the Next Normal.
This post-pandemic business planning research will aid clients to:
Adjust their strategic planning to move ahead once business stability kicks in.
Build Resilience by making effective resource and investment choicesfor individual business units, products, and service lines.
Conceptualize scenario-based planning to mitigate future crisis situations.
Related Reports on Information Technology Include:
Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Market - Global artificial intelligence market is segmented by end-user (retail, banking, manufacturing, healthcare, and others) and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).
Global Artificial Intelligence Platforms Market - Global artificial intelligence platforms market is segmented by deployment (on-premise and cloud-based) and geography (North America, APAC, Europe, South America, and MEA).
Major Three Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chips Market Participants:
Alphabet Inc.: The company offers Cloud Tensor Processing Units that accelerate the performance of linear algebra computation, which is used heavily in machine learning applications.
Broadcom Inc.: The company offers Artificial Intelligence through Operational Intelligence, CA Mainframe Resource Intelligence, CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence, Automic Automation Intelligence, and others.
Intel Corp.: The company offers Intel AI Hardware that excels at training massive, unstructured data sets, to extremely low power silicon for on-device inference, Intel AI supports cloud service providers, enterprises, and research teams with a portfolio of multi-purpose, purpose-built, customizable, and application-specific hardware that turn models into reality.
If you purchase a report that is updated in the next 60 days, we will send you the new edition and data extract FREE! Get a report snapshot here for a detailed market share analysis of market participants during COVID-19 lockdown:
Artificial intelligence (AI) chips market is segmented as below:
Product
ASICs
GPUs
CPUs
FPGAs
Geography
North America
Europe
APAC
South America
MEA
The artificial intelligence (AI) chips market is driven by the increasing adoption of AI chips in data centers. In addition, the convergence of AI and IoT and advances in the quantum computing market are expected to trigger the artificial intelligence (AI) chips market toward witnessing a CAGR of over 51% during the forecast period.
Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.
“The only operators are the ones in the ceiling,” says Chris Belfi, wrapped up in a Tyvek bunny suit, tinted yellow under the photo-safe lights. The robots rush by on overhead tracks, blinking and whirring. Every few seconds, one pauses above a giant machine. Out of its laundry-basket-size belly, a plastic box drops on thin wires, like Tom Cruise in a catsuit. It holds precious cargo: up to 25 shiny silicon wafers, each the size of a 12-in. pizza. The process of transforming them into tiny computer brains—call them microchips, semiconductors or just chips—takes nearly three months. “I use an analogy like baking a cake,” says Belfi, an automation engineer at chipmaker GlobalFoundries. “The only difference is our cake is about 66 layers.”
This $15 billion complex tucked away behind trees north of Albany, N.Y., is one of only a handful of advanced semiconductor factories, or “fabs,” in the U.S. Its receiving docks pull in 256 specialty chemicals, like argon and sulfuric acid. Its shipping docks send out finished wafers, ready to be cut up, encased in metal and ceramic shells, and assembled into everything from airbags to blenders, headphones to fighter jets.
Since it opened in 2011, Fab 8, as it’s known, has kept a low profile. But as with toilet paper and chicken wings, the pandemic shocked the global semiconductor supply chain, leading to shortages in surprising places—and pulling the U.S. semiconductor industry to center stage. The car industry has been hardest hit of all. When the initial lockdowns caused car sales to collapse, automakers cut their orders for parts, including semiconductors. (A typical new car can contain more than a thousand chips.) Chip manufacturers saw the slack and shifted their output to serve the surging demand for consumer electronics, like webcams and laptops.
But when car sales snapped back last fall, a dramatic misstep became apparent: the automakers couldn’t get enough chips. They still can’t. Missing chips are now expected to lower global output by 3.9 million vehicles in 2021, or 4.6%. Ford alone expects to produce 1.1 million fewer vehicles, leading to a $2.5 billion earnings hit. (Even before it gets to its silicon-heavy electric F-150.)
The Fabrication Clean room, containing all process tools for the Fab 8 at GlobalFoundries
Thomas Prior for TIME
As automakers and chipmakers scrambled for equilibrium, the White House stepped in to help, urging industry leaders to untangle the supply chain and increase production. The problem wasn’t only that there weren’t enough chips being made in America. The problem was that no one was paying attention to where chips were being made at all—and, more important, how long it took to make them. In June, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill with $52 billion in funding aimed at increasing chip production and cutting-edge research—competing directly with China’s ambitions of becoming the global semiconductor champion. But new chip fabs take years. Analysts now worry that the auto chip shortage will slosh back to consumer electronics, affecting manufacturing all the way to Christmas. “Never seen anything like it,” tweeted Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Microchips, long revered as the brains of modern society, have become its biggest headache. The stakes extend beyond pandemic-era shortages. Because chips are a crucial component of so many strategic technologies—from renewable energy and artificial intelligence to robots and cybersecurity—their manufacturing has become a geopolitical thorn. In the 20th century, oil was the supreme global resource. But this year’s shortages have prompted a 21st century catchphrase among policymakers and diplomats: Chips are the new oil. As the U.S. resets to post-pandemic life, a steady supply of semiconductors has become a high-priority benchmark of preparedness and resilience. Except there’s a bigger problem: semiconductors were invented in the U.S., but fabs like GlobalFoundries have become a dying breed. In 1990, 37% of chips were made in American factories, but by 2020 that number had declined to just 12%. All the new pieces of the growing pie had gone to Asia: Taiwan, South Korea and China. Chip fabs aren’t just factories, but linchpins of American self-reliance.
Jordon Cheung for TIME
Semiconductors are astonishing, with billions of transistors packed into a space the size of a dime, and they are astonishingly hard to make. If Henry Ford imagined an assembly line, a silicon wafer’s path through a factory is more like a labyrinth. At GlobalFoundries, the journey from raw material to finished chip—what engineers like Belfi call the “process flow”—is typically 85 days and encompasses more than a thousand steps. The whole time, the chips travel in sealed pods called FOUPs, entirely untouched by human hands. The robots do the driving, careening on their suspended tracks above machines the size of small RVs. One polishes wafers with a slurry that acts like liquid sandpaper. Another uses lasers to imprint circuits just 12 nanometers wide—about the length your fingernail grows in 12 seconds. Electron microscopes inspect the wafers for imperfections, and a robotic arm immerses them 25 at a time into a chemical bath like a carnival dunk tank. “We basically are bouncing wafers to and from each section of the fab, all day every day,” Belfi says. “It’s a lot of putting things on, taking it off, printing, putting more on, taking more off.” Humans intrude only when something goes wrong. The showstopper is a problem with one of the lithography machines, which set the pace of the whole operation. Each costs more than $100 million. “When one of those go down, it is all hands on deck,” says Belfi.Yet when COVID-19 hit, the fab never stopped. “We never shut down a single factory—not for an hour,” recalls Tom Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries, in his office two levels above the fab floor. Long accustomed to wearing masks and full PPE, the engineers kept their usual watch on the robots. The business shocks proved harder to handle. As in so many industries, Caulfield’s initial financial models left him bracing for the worst. “We told our team, ‘We entered this pandemic together; we’re going to exit together. The world needs us to continue to make semiconductors.'” It was not an understatement. Chips powered the pandemic response—webcams, laptops, COVID-19 testing machines. In New York City alone, the department of education purchased 350,000 iPads.
The only thing it seemed no one needed was a new car, at least at first. Sales were off by a third in April, May and June 2020. Auto-component makers—not the brand-name car companies but their suppliers, and their suppliers’ suppliers—canceled orders.
But a semiconductor fab can’t turn on a dime. Foundry is the chip-industry term for a contract manufacturer, like a $15 billion Kinko’s. GlobalFoundries alone prints chips for more than 250 customers, which in turn supply components to device manufacturers—big, familiar names like Apple or Samsung, as well as industrial brands like Continental or Bosch. The supply chains are long. It takes three months to bake a chip, but it won’t end up in a car engine or smart speaker for months beyond that—and in consumers’ hands for more months still. On any given day at GlobalFoundries, there might be only 10 different kinds of chips in some phase of production. Each unique new chip design arrives on a 6-sq.-in. piece of quartz glass called a reticle. Like an old photographic slide, it contains a map of the chip, ready to be projected onto the silicon wafer with lasers. A reticle is its own trade secret, a protected piece of intellectual property belonging to the company that designed it, and adjusted to the unique specifications of GlobalFoundries’ proprietary process. Switching fabs isn’t easy, and definitely isn’t quick.
Around Thanksgiving, eight months into the pandemic, Caulfield’s phone started ringing. Auto executives who had never heard of GlobalFoundries were realizing they couldn’t make cars without them. “There is no way if you’re a supply-chain owner of an auto-manufacturing company, and you didn’t ship a car because you didn’t have a $5 or $10 chip, that you’re ever going to let this happen again,” Caulfield says. By New Year’s, the implications were alarming. In 2019, the auto industry spent $43 billion on chips—but they made up just 10% of the total chip market. The world’s largest foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), supplies more chips than anyone else to the automotive industry—but the automotive industry makes up just 3% of its revenue. (Apple makes up more than 20%.) At GlobalFoundries, chips destined for cars accounted for less than 10% of its business—enough to matter, but not enough to set the clocks.
That changed this year, when the political stakes for chipmakers rose dramatically. Caulfield called on his engineers to “remix their output,” sidelining some orders and prioritizing car chips. “We made very difficult decisions,” Caulfield says. “Wherever we could create more capacity, we gave it to automotive to make sure we were no longer the gate to manufacture.” The implications were obvious to him. “I didn’t need a letter from the White House to do the right thing.”
The AMHS (Automated Material Handling System), which is responsible for moving the containers of wafers to and from the process tools at the foundry
Thomas Prior for TIME
But the White House was paying attention. Before this year, lawmakers saw chipmaking as a local economic issue. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer championed the construction of GlobalFoundries’ fab in his home state of New York, and lobbied for more. But the pandemic revealed how the decline in chipmaking wasn’t only about jobs and regional economic impacts, but also had strategic implications at a global scale. In February, President Biden signed an Executive Order launching a review of critical supply chains. If a pandemic could cause chip-induced shocks across industries, what else might happen? “We explicitly saw geopolitics as one of the risks to our supply chains,” says a senior Administration official.
In the earliest days of semiconductor manufacturing, in the 1960s, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that he and his colleagues were able to double the number of transistors they could squeeze onto a chip every year. A decade later, that pace of innovation slowed (a little) to a doubling merely every two years. But then, it held. Chips got faster, cheaper and more efficient, eventually achieving a kind of social liftoff—powering computers that fit in a pocket.
But Moore’s law, as it became known, isn’t a fact of nature but the hard-earned result of enormous expenditures on research and development to conceive of new chip designs, and to find ways to manufacture them. Each new generation of semiconductor requires, in effect, a new factory to make it. Each new “process,” as it’s known, is named for the size of the chip’s smallest feature, like a jeweler whose fingertips keep getting finer. In the 1970s, chips were measured in micrometers, or one millionth of a meter. Since the 1980s, “leading edge” fabs have measured their handiwork in nanometers, or one billionth of a meter. Today, the benchmark is set by TSMC, which runs the 5-nanometer fab that makes Apple’s new M1 chips, for its latest computers and tablets. Each step down in process size—and increase in performance—requires the fab to be retooled with the latest generation of lithography machines to “print” the chips, along with the fleet of equipment that rings them. The newest fabs cost at least $12 billion.
Today, the semiconductor industry has predominantly split between the “fabless” companies that design chips and the foundries that make them. “There’s really two giant pieces of fixed costs,” says Chad Bown, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “One set of fixed cost is all of the R&D—you need to come up with the chip’s ideas. The other fixed cost is all of the capital equipment—you need to build one of these fabs.” For decades, the leading companies—like Intel—did both. “Real men have fabs,” Jerry Sanders, former CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, famously insisted in the 1990s, in a comment as sexist as it is now outdated. AMD went fabless in 2009—selling its chip factories to GlobalFoundries.
Jordon Cheung for TIME
But it was TSMC in Taiwan that pioneered the division between fab and fabless, and that dominates the industry today. Its founder, Morris Chang, was born in China and educated in the U.S. When he worked at Texas Instruments in the 1960s and 1970s, his engineering creativity and management acumen were legendary. He helped improve a chip fab’s “yield”—the number of chips good enough to be sold—and drive down prices. But after managing TI’s entire semiconductor division, Chang came to the conclusion that he would never be an American CEO. “I felt that essentially I had been put out in the pasture,” Chang recalled in a published oral history. “My hope of further advancement was gone.”
While at Texas Instruments, Chang had seen the rising cost of chip factories, and the way in which it can hold back innovation. His colleagues were eager to strike out on their own with new innovations, but never could. The barriers to entry were too high, if you had to run your own fab. He seized on the idea of a “pure-play foundry,” as he called it—a merchant semiconductor company focused on making chips for others—and, with support from Taiwan’s government, founded TSMC in 1987.
It was an auspicious moment in global trade policy. The Reagan Administration had enacted policies to counter rising Japanese production of semiconductors—but the first Bush Administration took a more hands-off approach. “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference?” Michael Boskin, an economic adviser to George H.W. Bush, famously said. Along with TSMC in Taiwan, South Korean and Chinese companies began ramping up chip manufacturing, constructing high-tech fabs, often with the help of government subsidies. By the 1990s, even Intel began shifting some production overseas. “And while that’s all happening, we are adhering to our market-economics principles strongly—obsessively,” says John Neuffer, CEO of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a leading trade group. The prevailing attitude was to leave companies alone—to keep government out of business.
When in 2010 Apple announced its first custom-designed chip, the A4, it was self-evident in the semiconductor industry that it would be made by a foundry in Asia. This particularly stung Intel, which until then had both designed and manufactured the chips Apple used in its devices. But that division in the industry had become the norm, and it continues today: the most sophisticated chips are likely to still be designed in America but manufactured overseas. Silicon Valley still deserves its name—but only thanks to the dozens of fabless chip-design startups, not the foundries that once replaced its fruit orchards. Without the government incentives offered by Asian nations, that’s unlikely to change. “The U.S. policy was ‘We don’t create winners; we let capitalism work,'” says GlobalFoundries’ Caulfield. “That’s a great philosophy if everybody around the world plays that way.”
Now U.S. lawmakers are changing course. June’s Senate bill, officially the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, is squarely aimed at competing with China, in part by subsidizing semiconductor manufacturing. “There’s been a growing bipartisan consensus over several years now that the U.S. needs to make more domestic investments to keep our competitive edge, particularly in an era of sort of strategic competition with China,” says a senior Administration official. “It was an easy political oversight,” says Neuffer, of the Semiconductor Industry Association. “It’s not an oversight anymore.”
The aggressive trade policy of the Trump Administration opened the door for Republicans to support greater economic intervention. Now they are clamoring for more. “There really has been a mistake here,” says Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a conservative think tank, who sees semiconductors as the “ultimate case study” for this necessary shift in American economic policy. “They are so obviously high-tech, they were an American area of dominance for so long, they so obviously have national-security implications, and you can so nicely quantify who is ahead or behind,” Cass says. “It crystallizes the issue in a way few other things could.”
For President Biden, semiconductors are an opportunity to stimulate high-tech American industry. “This is infrastructure,” the President said in April, holding up a glinting silicon wafer at the White House.
But bringing leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S. will take years. In March, Intel announced plans for a $20 billion expansion of its factory in Arizona designed specifically to manufacture chips for others, as part of a newly launched division, Intel Foundry Services. But unlike TSMC—itself building a new factory estimated to cost $10 billion to $12 billion in Arizona, and possibly more–it will not be able to manufacture the cutting-edge chips. Smaller means faster, because you can squeeze more transistors into less space. But Intel has struggled to bring even its 7-nanometer node online, while TSMC is moving beyond its 5-nanometer node and preparing a 3-nanometer node for production. (Apple will reportedly again be its major customer.) It’s about “capacity and capability,” says Intel’s Al Thompson, vice president of U.S. government relations. “We’re going to spend a great deal of money in the U.S., creating a lot of jobs, to put us on a path to ensure that we’re doing our part to protect our nation’s economic and national security.” But there is a long way to catch up.
In April, a Silicon Valley startup called Cerebras announced a new computer called the CS-2. It’s meant not for Zoom calls or Netflix parties, but for the most sophisticated research in artificial intelligence—like discovering cancer drugs or simulating fusion reactions. At its heart is a custom-designed chip with a remarkable new design.
Chemical lines in the Globalfoundries fab in Malta, N.Y.
Thomas Prior for TIME
Rather than chop up a 12-in. silicon wafer into hundreds of tiny chips—punching each one out like a gingerbread cookie—Cerebras has found a way to make a single giant chip, like a cookie cake. Today’s smartphone chips contain billions of tiny transistors, etched into silicon like a miniature city. Cerebras’ custom chip contains trillions of transistors. To make it work, Cerebras engineers found a way to work around a basic flaw of silicon wafers. Typically, they are sliced from an ingot, like deli salami. But even the most sophisticated of these crystalline disks have imperfections, which ruin a chip. Semiconductor designers and manufacturers get around this by keeping each chip small, and throwing out the bad ones. (The yield is what’s left.)
The engineers at Cerebras created a design with 850,000 identical blocks, like wallpaper, and a system to turn off any flawed sections without ruining the entire chip. Most supercomputers chain thousands of individual chips together. But moving information between those chips slows things down. Cerebras keeps it all on a single giant chip. “We found a way to use the fact that silicon moves information at nearly the speed of light, and at tiny fractions of the power taken to move bits elsewhere,” says Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman. For customers like the drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and the Argonne National Laboratory, it provides the horsepower needed for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence—a key ambition of U.S. technology policy.
It’s the kind of bold idea that defined the early days of Silicon Valley innovation, and the ongoing creativity of American chip designers. But if in the 1960s and 1970s, chip fabs were all over the valley, when it was time for Cerebras to find a fab for its chip, there were no local options. “There are only two choices if you want to build chips at the cutting edge,” Feldman says portentously. “You can swim to China from one, and you can throw a stone to the DMZ at the other”—meaning Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung. Like Apple—whose headquarters are just a 10-minute drive away—Cerebras uses TSMC for its manufacturing, using its 7-nanometer fab.
If the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act survives its journey through the House and becomes a law, billions of federal dollars will flow into the semiconductor industry—already one of the most profitable. But it will take years to turn that investment into new chip factories, new chip designs and a new pipeline of engineering talent. The challenge for the industry isn’t merely to catch up to where Taiwan is today, and China plans to be by 2025, but to meet them where they’ll be in the future—or go further.
Except chips improve nonlinearly. A 3-nanometer node is more expensive than a 5-nanometer. “The amount of money it takes to stay ahead of that curve keeps going up,” says Alisa Scherer, an independent chip-manufacturing expert. And the time span does too. It is almost impossible to skip a generation. The environmental permitting alone can take years. “These aren’t Taco Bells,” says Feldman. “You don’t knock them out. They don’t arrive in a box.” For his giant AI chips, TSMC and Samsung are the only two choices, “as far as the eye can see.”
Until then, chip manufacturing—and all of the geopolitical and economic reverberations it causes—will continue to depend on a global web, stretched delicately across the oceans.
—With reporting by Barbara Maddux and Simmone Shah
Blum is the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet and The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast
This appears in the July 05, 2021 issue of TIME.
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