President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass the CHIPS Act, a law that would provide chipmakers with $52 billion in subsidies to advance semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, during his State of the Union speech Tuesday. From a report: Biden lauded Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, who last month announced a $20 billion investment for two new chip fabrication facilities, or fabs, that the company will build just west of Columbus, Ohio. Intel plans to spend $100 billion to build the Ohio "megafab" over the next decade, with an eventual total of eight fabs, but the speed of that investment will depend on the US subsidy, Gelsinger has said.

"Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who is here tonight, told me they are ready to increase their investment from $20 billion to $100 billion. That would be one of the biggest investments in manufacturing in American history," Biden said. "And all they're waiting for is for you to pass this bill. ... Send it to my desk. I'll sign it." The Senate passed a bill funding the CHIPS Act in 2021, and the House of Representatives followed suit in February, but the differences in the bills haven't been ironed out in committee and the subsidy hasn't arrived despite some bipartisan support. The funding would help the US compete with government help in Taiwan and South Korea, where leading chipmakers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung have the bulk of their operations. The US subsidies would knock about $3 billion off the $10 billion price tag for a new fab, a subsidy level Intel says matches those in Asia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Italy plans to set aside more than $4.6 billion until 2030 to boost domestic chip manufacturing as it seeks to attract more investment from tech companies such as Intel, a draft decree seen by Reuters showed on Tuesday. The government is trying to persuade the U.S. group to spend billions of euros on an advanced chipmaking plant in Italy that uses innovative technologies to weave full chips.

Rome is ready to offer Intel public money and other favorable terms to fund part of the overall investment, which is expected to be worth around $9 billion over 10 years, Reuters reported in December. To boost domestic chipmaking, Italy is also in talks with French-Italian STMicroelectronics , Taiwanese-controlled MEMC Electronic Materials Inc and Israeli Tower Semiconductor, which is set to be bought by Intel. Negotiations with Intel are complex as the U.S. group has tabled very tough demands, a government source involved in the talks told Reuters.

As part of an 8 billion euro package to support the economy and curb surging energy bills, Italy plans to allocate 150 million euros in 2022 and 500 million euros per year from 2023 until 2030, the decree showed. The Italian government will promote "research and development of microprocessor technology and investments in new industrial applications of innovative technologies," the legislation added. Rome aims to use the funding also to convert existing industrial sites and favor the construction of new plants in Italy.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Lenovo has dumped a whole bunch of new ThinkPads into the world, and there's some exciting stuff in there. We're getting a brand-new ThinkPad X13s powered by Snapdragon chips, a fifth-generation ThinkPad X1 Extreme with a WQXGA 165Hz screen option, and new additions to the P-series and T-series as well. The news I'm personally most excited about is the screen shape. A few months ago, Lenovo told me that much of its portfolio would be moving to the 16:10 aspect ratio this year. They appear to be keeping their word. Across the board, the new models are 16:10 -- taller and roomier than they were in their 16:9 eras. Some news that's a bit more... intriguing is the all-new ThinkPad X13s, which is the first laptop to feature the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform. Qualcomm made some lofty claims about this platform upon its release, including "60 percent greater performance per watt" over competing x86 platforms and "multi-day battery life." The ThinkPad X13s will run an Arm version of Windows 11, with its x64 app emulation support. The P-series models and Intel T-series models will all be here in April, with prices ranging from $1,399 to $1,419.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine by land, air and sea risks reverberating across the global chip industry and exacerbating current supply-chain constraints. Reuters Breakingviews: Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas critical for lasers used in chipmaking and supplies more than 90% of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon, according to estimates from research firm Techcet. About 35% of palladium, a rare metal also used for semiconductors, is sourced from Russia. A full-scale conflict disrupting exports of these elements might hit players like Intel, which gets about 50% of its neon from Eastern Europe, according to JPMorgan. ASML, which supplies machines to semiconductor makers, sources less than 20% of the gases it uses from the crisis-hit countries.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Yahoo Finance: AMD's market cap currently stands at $188 billion after shares rose nearly 2% in Tuesday's session. Intel's market cap is $182 billion. That marks the second time in a week AMD's market value has climbed above Intel -- the first time it happened was a week ago. Followers of this battle may not be surprised to see this one happen (and seeing it continue from here) for several reasons. First, AMD has been winning the battle on Wall Street for sexier investment thesis. AMD last week closed on its $35 billion acquisition for Xilinx. Secondarily, AMD has flat out posted better financials than Intel (for some time) as it has gained market share in key areas (notably in servers). AMD's sales and profits rose 68% and 117%, respectively in 2021. The company outlined 31% revenue growth for 2022 and gross profit margins of 51%. Intel's 2021 sales and earnings increased 2% and 7%, respectively. The company sees sales in 2022 rising about 2%. Profits are expected to drop 36% as Intel further builds out its chip-making capacity.

Intel has acquired Linutronix, the German-based Linux consulting firm that is focused on embedded Linux and real-time computing. From a report: Intel's acquisition of Linutronix appears to be primarily focused as an acqui-hire with getting Linutronix's very talented staff at Intel. Among the prominent Linutronix engineers is their CTO Thomas Gleixner as a longtime kernel maintainer and important contributor on the x86 side, including with Linux's CPU security mitigations and perhaps most notably for the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) work.

Intel launched the first wave of its 12th Gen Alder Lake chips at CES 2022 -- but only for its H-series lineup of chips, destined for the most powerful and power-hungry laptops. And now, it's rolling out the rest of its Alder Lake laptop lineup: the P-series and U-series models it briefly showed off in January, which are set to power the thinner, lighter, and cheaper laptops of 2022. From a report: In total, there are a whopping 20 chips fit for a wide range of hardware across the P-series, U-series (15W), and U-series (9W) categories, with the first laptops powered by the new processors set to arrive in March. Like their more powerful H-series cousins (and the Alder Lake desktop chips that Intel launched in late 2021 and at CES 2022), the new P-series and U-series chips have a lot more cores than 2020's 11th Gen models, with a hybrid architecture approach that combines performance and efficiency cores to maximize both power and battery life. And Intel is promising some big improvements focused around those boosted core counts, touting up to 70 percent better multi-thread performance than previous 11th Gen (and AMD) hardware. The company also says that it wins out in benchmarks against chips like Apple's M1 and M1 Pro (although not the M1 Max), and AMD's Ryzen R7 5800U in tasks like web browsing and photo editing.

Protocol reports that Qualcomm will finally jump on the AV1 video codec bandwagon next year. Ars Technica reports: AV1 is the web's next open, royalty-free video codec, and widespread adoption will require hardware support from the world's chip vendors. Qualcomm's 2022 flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, doesn't support AV1. Samsung's Exynos 2200 managed to ship the video codec this year in international versions of the Galaxy S22, while the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 SoC has been shipping in phones for over a year now with AV1 support. Apple is a founding member of the AV1 Alliance, but its devices also don't support the codec yet.

The report says Qualcomm's "upcoming flagship Snapdragon mobile processor" -- model number "SM8550" -- will support AV1. That would probably be called the "Snapdragon 8 Gen 2" SoC, due out in 2023. Wide adoption of AV1 seems inevitable, though it is taking a while. The codec is a successor to Google's VP8 and VP9 codecs and is being built by the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance's lineup is a who's who of tech companies, with founding members like Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung. Netflix and Google's YouTube are both making AV1 support "a requirement" for future products that want to support either video service. That should motivate just about every hardware and software vendor out there to get the job done. Aside from being open source and royalty-free, the report notes that the newer AV1 codec also has the benefit of being 30% more efficient than H.265.

AnandTech reports: It's no secret that Intel's enterprise processor platform has been stretched in recent generations. Compared to the competition, Intel is chasing its multi-die strategy while relying on a manufacturing platform that hasn't offered the best in the market. That being said, Intel is quoting more shipments of its latest Xeon products in December than AMD shipped in all of 2021, and the company is launching the next generation Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable platform later in 2022. Beyond Sapphire Rapids has been somewhat under the hood, with minor leaks here and there, but today Intel is lifting the lid on that roadmap.

Currently in the market is Intel's Ice Lake 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable platform, built on Intel's 10nm process node with up to 40 Sunny Cove cores. The die is large, around 660 mm2, and in our benchmarks we saw a sizeable generational uplift in performance compared to the 2nd Generation Xeon offering. The response to Ice Lake Xeon has been mixed, given the competition in the market, but Intel has forged ahead by leveraging a more complete platform coupled with FPGAs, memory, storage, networking, and its unique accelerator offerings. Datacenter revenues, depending on the quarter you look at, are either up or down based on how customers are digesting their current processor inventories (as stated by CEO Pat Gelsinger). Further reading: Intel Arc Update: Alchemist Laptops Q1, Desktops Q2; 4M GPUs Total for 2022.

As part of Intel's annual investor meeting taking place today, Raja Koduri, Intel's SVP and GM of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group delivered an update to investors on the state of Intel's GPU and accelerator group, including some fresh news on the state of Intel's first generation of Arc graphics products. AnandTech: Among other things, the GPU frontman confirmed that while Intel will indeed ship the first Arc mobile products in the current quarter, desktop products will not come until Q2. Meanwhile, in the first disclosure of chip volumes, Intel is now projecting that they'll ship 4mil+ Arc GPUs this year. In terms of timing, today's disclosure confirms some earlier suspicions that developed following Intel's CES 2022 presentation: that the company would get its mobile Arc products out before their desktop products. Desktop products will now follow in the second quarter of this year, a couple of months behind the mobile parts. And finally, workstation products, which Intel has previously hinted at, are on their way and will land in Q3.

As Masayoshi Son tried to persuade investors of the wisdom of purchasing one of the most successful chip companies in the world in 2016, the SoftBank chief had one clear message: "For the era of the 'Internet of things,' I think the champion will be Arm." But the concept of connecting billions of everyday and industrial devices to the Internet has been much slower than anticipated to materialize. From a report: Son's drive to capture the chip design market for the Internet of things (IoT) was the first bet he made on Arm that has not paid off. The second was a $66 billion sale of the company to Nvidia that unraveled last week. Arm remains the dominant player in designing chips for smartphones, still the most ubiquitous form of computing but a source of much slower growth in recent years. Ahead of an initial public offering that could come as soon as this year, the company is racing to solidify its position in new markets that it has underexploited to date, while trying to drive up profits to appeal to a new set of investors. Rene Haas, Arm's incoming chief executive, told the Financial Times that its products were now "far more competitive" in data centers and cars than when SoftBank bought the Cambridge-based company.

"Making trade-offs about where to invest, where not to invest...âthose are the trade-offs that public companies and even private companies have to do every day," he said. "The company is in great shape." When Son spearheaded the $31 billion purchase of Arm, he saw it as a wager on the future of the entire technology industry, which was crystallizing at that time around the IoT concept. He proceeded to push the executive team firmly on the course to designing chips for this future of machine connectivity. Five-and-a-half years later, it has become increasingly clear that the IoT gamble was a costly misadventure. Moreover, it distracted Arm from attacking Intel's dominance in the much larger data center market. As Son's vision collided with reality, SoftBank quietly revised its market calculations. A presentation from 2018 forecast that by 2026, the IoT controller market would be worth $24 billion, and the server market $22 billion. But, a similar presentation from 2020 predicted that by 2029, the IoT chip market would reach only $16 billion, while the server market -- of which Arm had so far only captured a 5 percent share -- would reach $32 billion. The Japanese technology group also revised down its estimate of the value of the IoT market, from $7 billion in 2017 to $4 billion in 2019.

In an effort to boost its manufacturing operations, Intel is nearing a deal to buy Israeli chip firm Tower Semiconductor for almost $6 billion, reports Reuters, citing a report from the Wall Street Journal. "A deal could be unveiled as soon as this week assuming the talks do not fall apart, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter." It would likely include a hefty premium, given Tower's market value of roughly $3.6 billion. Following the news, shares of Tower Semiconductor, which specializes in making analog integrated circuits, were up nearly 53% in extended trading while Intel was down 0.8%.

The Linux 5.18 kernel is adding support this spring for the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface to make better decisions about where to place given work among available CPU cores/threads, reports Phoronix.

This is significant because Intel's Alder Lake CPUs "are the first x86-64 processors to embrace a hybrid paradigm with two separate CPU architectures on the same die," explains Hot Hardware: These two separate CPU architectures have different strengths and capabilities. The Golden Cove "performance cores" (or P-cores) feature Intel's latest high-performance desktop CPU architecture, and they are blisteringly fast. Meanwhile, the Gracemont "efficiency cores" (or E-cores) are so small that four of them, along with 2MB of shared L2 cache, can nearly fit in the same space as a single Golden Cove core. They're slower than the Golden Cove cores, but also much more efficient, at least in theory.

The idea is that background tasks and light workloads can be run on the E-cores, saving power, while latency-sensitive and compute-intensive tasks can be run on the faster P-cores. The benefits of this may not have been exactly as clear as Intel would have liked on Windows, but they were even less visible on Linux. That's because Linux isn't aware of the unusual configuration of Alder Lake CPUs.

Well, that's changing in Linux 5.18, slated for release this spring. Linux 5.18 is bringing support for the Intel Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface, or EHFI...

This is essentially the crux of Intel's "Thread Director," which is an intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted scheduler.

Intel is entering the blockchain mining market with an upcoming GPU capable of mining Bitcoin. From a report: Intel insists the effort won't put a strain energy supplies or deprive consumers of chips. The goal is to create the most energy-efficient blockchain mining equipment on the planet, it says. "We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1,000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining," Intel's General Manager for Graphics, Raja Koduri, said in the announcement. (SHA-256 is a reference to the mining algorithm used to create Bitcoins.)

News of Intel's blockchain-mining effort first emerged last month after the ISSCC technology conference posted details about an upcoming Intel presentation titled: "Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC." ASICs are chips designed for a specific purpose, and also refer to dedicated hardware to mine Bitcoin. Friday's announcement from Koduri added that Intel is establishing a new "Custom Compute Group" to create chip platforms optimized for customers' workloads, including for blockchains.

Intel's mysterious Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) mechanism for adding features to Xeon CPUs will be officially supported in Linux 5.18, the next major release of the operating system. Tom's Hardware reports: SDSi allows users to add features to their CPU after they've already purchased it. Formal SDSi support means that the technology is coming to Intel's Xeon processors that will be released rather shortly, implying Sapphire Rapids will be the first CPUs with SDSi. Intel started to roll out Linux patches to enable its SDSi functionality in the OS last September. By now, several sets of patches have been released and it looks like they will be added to Linux 5.18, which is due this Spring. Hans de Goede, a long-time Linux developer who works at Red Hat on a wide array of hardware enablement related projects, claims that SDSi will land in Linux 5.18 if no problems emerge, reports Phoronix. "Assuming no major issues are found, the plan definitely is to get this in before the 5.18 merge window," said de Goede.

Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a mechanism for activating additional silicon features in already produced and deployed server CPUs using the software. While formal support for the functionality is coming to Linux 5.18 and is set to be available this spring, Intel hasn't disclosed what exactly it plans to enable using its pay-as-you-go CPU upgrade model. We don't know how it works and what it enables, but we can make some educated guesses. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A section of the New York Police Department (NYPD) focused on intelligence gathering received a demo of NSO Group's controversial Pegasus spyware product, according to an email obtained by Motherboard. The news provides more insight into Israeli company NSO Group's push into the surveillance market in the United States, and specifically its pitching of the company's technology to American police forces. The findings come after the New York Times reported that the FBI bought a Pegasus license in 2019 for evaluation purposes.

"There will be a demo of the attached investigative software at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice," James Sheehan, a program manager from the Northern New Jersey-Newark/Jersey City UASI, wrote in the August 2015 email. The UASI is the Urban Area Security Initiative, a program administered by the Department of Homeland Security which brings together bodies from law enforcement, fire service, public health, and more to address threats of terrorism and other issues. "The audience is the UASI/CorrStat region and NYPD intel," Sheehan continued. Recipients on Sheehan's email inviting people to attend included representatives from the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, Jersey City's public safety agency, and the Paterson Police Department, a city of just over 150,000.

Attached to Sheehan's email was a brochure for Pegasus, NSO Group's hacking product, which advertised the tool's ability to obtain a target's calls, contacts, emails, WhatsApp messages, track their location, and more. The brochure contains a logo for WestBridge, NSO Group's North American branch. "Turn Your Target's Smartphone into an Intelligence Gold Mine," the Pegasus brochure reads. "NYPD intel" likely refers to the NYPD's Intelligence Bureau. Its mission is to "detect and disrupt criminal and terrorist activity through the use of intelligence-led policing. In combination with traditional policing methods, uniformed officers and civilian analysts in the Intelligence Bureau collect and analyze information from a variety of sources in order to advance criminal and terrorist investigations," according to the NYPD's website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization has announced that Intel has joined RISC-V at the Premier membership level. Let that sink in for a minute. Intel, which has made billions from its closed-source, complex instruction set computer (CISC) x86 processors, is joining forces with RISC-V, the open-source reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU group. What next? Dogs and cats living together!? Dr. David Patterson, co-creator of RISC-V helped create it to be an open lingua franca for computer chips, a set of instructions that would be used by all chipmakers and owned by none. Today, Patterson said, "I'm delighted that Intel, the company that pioneered the microprocessor 50 years ago, is now a member of RISC-V International."

Why? Because Intel sees a future in which ARM, x86, and RISC-V all play major roles. In particular, Intel has already seen strong demand for more RISC-V intellectual property (IP) and chip offerings. Intel's not just giving this idea lip service. Intel also announced a new $1 billion fund to support early-stage foundry startups. Together Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services (IFS) will prioritize investments in chip IP, software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies. Randhir Thakur, IFS President, said this new program will focus on two key strategic industry points: Enabling modular products with an open chiplet platform and supporting design approaches that leverage multiple instruction set architectures including and spanning x86, Arm, and RISC-V.

As part of these initiatives, IFS will sponsor an open-source software development platform. This will provide IP for all three of the leading ISAs chip architectures. RISC-V has always been about providing open modular building blocks. Together Intel and RISC-V will expand the RISC-V ecosystem and help drive its commercialization. [...] Intel is already offering RISC-V chips: It's Nios V processors based on RISC-V. Moving ahead Intel hopes its new RISC-V investment will speed up RISC-V's development. Calista Redmond, RISC-V International's CEO, sees these moves as recognizing that "massive investment in open source has the power to change the course of history." Redmond went on to say that open collaboration with RISC-V has "ignited a profound shift in the semiconductor industry, and this partnership will accelerate innovation in open computing. RISC-V welcomes Intel and looks forward to our collective expansion and the commercial adoption of RISC-V across compute workloads and industries, growing RISC-V everywhere."

Ohio promised Intel roughly $2 billion in tax breaks and incentives to attract its $20 billion chip-making factory to the state, according to the Associated Press. The state's development director tells them it may be the biggest economic development deal in history.

Intel's hoping it creates a powerful new technology hub in the Midwest, while also eventually addressing an ongoing chip shortage, according to the article. Unfortunately, the factory's production isn't expected to come online until 2025, though "The complex could grow much larger and more quickly, Intel executives said, if Congress approves a $52 billion bill that would invest in the chip sector and help ensure more production in the U.S." Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger said the total Ohio investment could top $100 billion over the decade, with six additional factories, making it one of the world's biggest chipmaking sites....

Ohio's offer includes $600 million to help Intel offset the cost of building the factories, which is more expensive than it would be in Asia, said Lydia Mihalik, the state's development director. The state also will pay nearly $700 million for roadwork and water infrastructure upgrades, including a system that will allow the plant to reuse wastewater. The state Legislature this summer approved a 30-year tax break that will allow Intel to save $650 million.

The state's share will be money well spent because the Intel facility will not only create jobs, but also make Ohio more attractive to industries such as auto, aviation and defense that rely on chips, Mihalik said. "These investments will not only ensure that this project is successful here, but will also be supporting the region by increasing local infrastructure to support future growth," Mihalik said.
The article also cites the Semiconductor Industry Association's estimate that America's share of the world's chip manufacturing has declined from 37% in 1990 to 12% today.

"Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers," reports the Register: On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders....

To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower. The disclosure of related flaws has continued since that time, as researchers develop variations on the initial attacks and find other parts of chips that similarly expose privileged data. It is a problem that still is not entirely solved...

[L]awsuits have been consolidated into a multi-district proceeding known as "Intel Corp. CPU Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation" (3:18-md-02828-SI). And since 2018, Intel has been trying to get them to go away. Twice before the judge had dismissed the plaintiffs' complaint while allowing the plaintiffs to amend and refile their allegations. This third time, the judge only partially granted Intel's motion to toss the case. Judge Simon dismissed claims based on purchases up through August 2017 because Intel was unaware of the microarchitecture vulnerabilities up to that point. But he allowed seven claims, from September 2017 onward, to proceed, finding the plaintiffs' contention that Intel delayed disclosure of the flaws to maximize holiday season sales plausible enough to allow the case to move forward.

"Based on plaintiffs' allegations, it is not clear that Intel had a countervailing business interest other than profit for delaying disclosure for as long as it did (through the holiday season), for downplaying the negative effects of the mitigation, for suppressing the effects of the mitigation, and for continuing to embargo further security exploits that affect only Intel processors," the judge wrote in his order. [PDF]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: The next class of Chrome OS devices may be targeted at the gaming market -- more than one Chromebook is set to release with a full RGB keyboard. Similar to how Chrome OS offers support for Linux apps and Android apps, there's been a long-running effort -- codenamed Borealis -- to get Steam and various Linux-compatible PC games running in a virtual machine on your Chromebook. While there's yet to be any formal announcement of Steam games for Chromebooks, work has steadily continued since the project was first discovered.

Whether through Steam games or game streaming services, it seems Google's gaming ambitions for Chrome OS may be coming to fruition in the near future. According to changes to Chrome OS code in the last few weeks, Google has begun working to support Chromebooks with full color RGB keyboards -- you can't have a product for gamers without RGB, right? Right? -- starting with a new feature flag. From what we can find, each keyboard key can be individually customized to your liking to vary the intensity of the red, green, and blue lighting to create different colors and adjust the keyboard's overall backlight brightness. For now, this is only possible through an internal command for Chrome OS developers to use in testing. In time, one would assume there would be a tool within Chrome OS to let gamers change the colors of their keyboards.

At first glance, one could argue that this is just about supporting the many USB and Bluetooth connected keyboards you can buy with RGB lighting built in. However, with a bit more digging, we've found that rather than being a generic feature, Chrome OS's RGB support is being prepared for a select few unreleased devices. So who is going to be making the first gaming Chromebooks? For the time being, there appear to be at least three hardware codenames associated with RGB keyboards. The first two are Vell and Taniks, both of which are based on Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake laptop processors. [...] A third hardware codename attached to RGB keyboards for Chrome OS is Ripple. However, rather than being the name of a particular Chromebook, it seems that Ripple is the internal name of a detachable keyboard, like that of the Pixel Slate.