An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Todd Haselton: Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year. The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring. It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run. Those fears were quickly quelled.

The first M1 Apple chip was launched in 2020 in a MacBook Air laptop. It was more powerful than Intel's chip while offering longer battery life and enabling a fanless design, which helped keep Apple's new MacBook Air even quieter. It proved to be an early success. In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. That quarter, it launched the all-new iMac, which offered a redesigned super-thin metal body that looks like a screen propped up on a stand. It's slimmer than the Intel models that came before it, while offering other benefits, like a much better webcam, great speakers and a much sharper display than the models it replaced. And Apple made the launch more exciting by offering an array of colors for the iMac, which it hadn't done since it shipped the 1999 iMac. There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.

Apple's fiscal Q1 earnings in January will give an indication of how well all its new computers are selling. But it's clear the move from Intel has allowed Apple to move full speed ahead with its own chip development, much like it does for iPhones and iPads, the latter of which has yet to be matched by any other tablet on the market. It's no longer beholden to delays that plagued Intel, which started to lag behind AMD with its new 7nm chips. And Apple has full control over its "stack," which means it can design new computer hardware and software together, instead of letting the power of another company's chips dictate what its computers can and can't do.

AltMachine writes: Intel has apologized in China following a backlash over a directive to suppliers not to source products or labor from the Xinjiang region where "forced labors" are allegedly occurring, though critics pointed out that the claims are based on dubious researches made by groups with backing from China's geopolitical rivals US and NATO. "Although our original intention was to ensure compliance with US laws, this letter has caused many questions and concerns among our cherished Chinese partners, which we deeply regret," the company said in a statement on Weibo, a Twitter-like service. In the statement, Intel explicitly denies taking any position on the controversial matters. Chinese pop star Wang Junkai, the brand ambassador for Intel Core, announced Wednesday that he had cut all ties with Intel over its statement, saying "national interests are above all else." On Thursday, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, said that "claims related to Xinjiang, such as forced labor" are "lies by US's anti-China forces." In an email to CNN Business, an Intel spokesperson said the company would continue to ensure its global sourcing complies with applicable laws and regulations in the United States and in other jurisdictions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Intel has told workers that unvaccinated people who don't get an exemption for religious or medical reasons will be on unpaid leave beginning in April. The California-based semiconductor company told employees last month they had a Jan. 4 deadline to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or seek an exemption, citing a government mandate for federal contractors.

In a Dec. 7 memo to employees, Chief People Officer Christy Pambianchi told employees the Jan. 4 vaccine deadline remains in place. She wrote that employees who aren't vaccinated must seek a medical or religious accommodation and submit to weekly testing, regardless of whether they are still working remotely. Intel will review employees' exemption requests until March 15. Pambianchi said employees who don't receive an exemption will begin unpaid leave on April 4 for at least three months but "will not be terminated." She said Intel will continue providing health care benefits to unvaccinated employees on leave.

Intel is facing criticism in China after it asked suppliers not to use Xinjiang labor or products, threatening to ensnare the U.S. chipmaker in a dispute over human rights in the far western Chinese region. From a report: Users on the Twitter-like Weibo service this week posted a letter sent by Intel in December that said it is required to ensure its supply chain didn't employ labor or procure goods and services sourced in Xinjiang. The nationalist news site Guancha accused the chipmaker of siding with Western governments, which have imposed restrictions on products from the region. A hashtag on the topic has generated more than 250 million views on Weibo.

IBM and Samsung have announced their latest advance in semiconductor design: a new way to stack transistors vertically on a chip (instead of lying flat on the surface of the semiconductor). The Verge reports: The new Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) design is meant to succeed the current FinFET technology that's used for some of today's most advanced chips and could allow for chips that are even more densely packed with transistors than today. In essence, the new design would stack transistors vertically, allowing for current to flow up and down the stack of transistors instead of the side-to-side horizontal layout that's currently used on most chips. Vertical designs for semiconductors have been a trend for a while (FinFET already offers some of those benefits); Intel's future roadmap also looks to move in that direction, too, although its initial work focused on stacking chip components rather than individual transistors. It makes sense, after all: when you've run out of ways to add more chips in one plane, the only real direction (other than physically shrinking transistor technology) is to go up.

While we're still a ways away from VTFET designs being used in actual consumer chips, the two companies are making some big claims, noting that VTFET chips could offer a "two times improvement in performance or an 85 percent reduction in energy use" compared to FinFET designs. And by packing more transistors into chips, IBM and Samsung claim that VTFET technology could help keep Moore's law's goal of steadily increasing transistor count moving forward. IBM and Samsung are also citing some ambitious possible use cases for the new technology, raising the idea of "cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, instead of days," less energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining or data encryption, and even more powerful IoT devices or even spacecraft.

Leading chip-maker Intel has stressed that building Metaverse -- at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time -- will require a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from what we have today. Insider reports: Raja Koduri, a senior vice president and head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said that our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this Metaverse vision, being popularized by Meta (formerly Facebook) and other companies. "We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors," Koduri said in a blog post. To enable these capabilities at scale, the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades, he added.

Open source is no place for secrets. From a report: This is a critical time for the Good Chip Intel. After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance, Captain Pat parachuted into the bridge to grab the helm and bark "Full steam ahead!" Its first berth at Alder Lake is generally seen as a return to competitive form, but that design started well before Gelsinger's return and there's still zero room for navigational errors in the expeditions ahead. At least one of the course corrections looks a bit rum. Intel has long realised the importance of supporting open source to keep its chips dancing with Linux. Unlike the halcyon days of Wintel dominance, though, this means being somewhat more open about the down-and-dirty details of exactly how its chips do their thing. You can't sign an NDA with the Linux kernel.

Chipmakers are notoriously paranoid: Silicon Valley was born in intrigue and suspicion. Despite Intel's iconic CEO Andy Grove making paranoia a corporate mantra, Intel became relatively relaxed. Qualcomm and Apple would throw you into their piranha pools merely for asking questions if they could, while Intel has learned to give as well as take. But it may be going back to bad habits. One of the new things not open to discussion is something called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), about which Intel has nothing to say. Which is odd because it has just submitted supporting code for it to the Linux kernel. The code itself doesn't say anything about SDSi, instead adding a mechanism to control whatever it is via some authorised secure token. It basically unlocks hardware features when the right licence is applied. That's not new. Higher performance or extra features in electronic test equipment often comes present but disabled on the base models, and the punter can pay to play later. But what might it mean in SDSi and the Intel architecture?

It is expensive for Intel and OEMs alike to have multiple physical variants of anything; much better if you make one thing that does everything and charge for unlocking it. It's a variant of a trick discovered by hackish school kids in the late 1970s, where cheaper Casio scientific calculators used exactly the same hardware as the more expensive model. Casio just didn't print all the functions on the keyboards of the pleb kit. Future Intel chips will doubtless have cores and cache disabled until magic numbers appear, and with the SoC future beckoning that can extend to all manner of IO, acceleration, and co-processing features. It might even be there already. From engineering, marketing, and revenue perspectives, this is great. Intel could make an M1-like SoC that can be configured on the fly for different platforms, getting the design, performance, and fab efficiencies that Apple enjoys while making sense for multiple OEMs. There could be further revenue from software upgrades, or even subscription models.

Intel is spending $7 billion to build a new chip packaging facility in Malaysia, a major Asian investment intended to address endemic global semiconductor shortages at a time Washington is advocating domestic production. From a report: The U.S. chipmaker intends to invest 30 billion ringgit on shoring up its advanced chip packaging capabilities in the island state of Penang, Malaysia's main investment promotion agency said in a press invitation distributed Monday. It will elaborate on its plans for the Asian country during a press briefing Wednesday in conjunction with Trade Minister Azmin Ali and Malaysian Investment Development Authority Chief Executive Officer Arham Abdul Rahman, according to the invite.

The event coincides with Secretary of State Antony Blinken's first visit to Southeast Asia. CEO Pat Gelsinger took the helm of the largest American chipmaker in February with a mandate to take back leadership of the industry from Asian giants such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Investors want Gelsinger to staunch market share losses and customer defections stemming in part from stumbles in upgrading technology. At the same time, years of global industry under-investment and a surge in Covid-era demand for computing devices have created an unprecedented shortage of the semiconductors needed in everything from cars to smartphones.

Intel announced that it will take public its self-driving technology company Mobileye, the Israeli company it acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017. The Verge reports: The chipmaker said that by listing Mobileye's shares on the stock market, it hopes to unlock more value for Intel's shareholders. Intel will remain the majority shareholder in Mobileye. In a statement, Intel heralded its acquisition of the company as a noteworthy success, noting that Mobileye's revenue in 2021 was 40 percent higher than the previous year. An IPO "provides the best opportunity to build on Mobileye's track record for innovation and unlock value for shareholders," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said.

Founded in Jerusalem in 1999 by Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram, the company develops systems and chips to help vehicles navigate autonomously and provide warnings for collisions. Tesla originally used Mobileye chips for its Autopilot system but severed ties with the company after a fatal accident where Tesla claims Mobileye's technology was unable to distinguish between a laterally crossing truck and the sky behind it. Its EyeQ4 chip is currently used in the NIO ES6 and ES8, Nissan's ProPilot 2.0, VW's Travel Assistant in the Passat and Golf, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, as well as the F-150 truck.

Mobileye is currently working on four different products that offer varying levels of automation, including an advanced driver assist system (ADAS) that it currently supplies to 25 companies and a "premium" ADAS that will launch with Zeekr, an electric vehicle brand owned by China's Geely. Neither ADAS system will include lidar, the sensor that uses lasers to determine the real-time location of objects on the road. Mobileye's other two products will use lidar and are more advanced in their automation technology. [...] Mobileye also aspires to operate its own robotaxis [...].

Before this year, no one worried too much about the global supply chain, beyond specialists in the field. The role of developing nations like Malaysia or the Philippines warranted little attention. From a report: But the coronavirus outbreak has been a wake-up call for chief executives, prime ministers and consumers around the world, as shortages disrupted production of everything from iPhones and F-150 pickups to Nike sneakers. The tragedy in Muar shows the little-understood human cost of keeping supply chains running in a pandemic. While politicians in Washington and Paris urge suppliers to step up production of semiconductors and government officials in countries like Malaysia give special exemptions to powerful corporations, employees like Hani put their lives at risk.

The duty of the government is to look after the workers' interest more than the country's or the companies' interest," said Zaid Ibrahim, a former law minister in Malaysia. "Of the three -- the government, companies and workers -- the most vulnerable are the workers. I wish we could have avoided these tragedies." Malaysia is a case study in the conflict between people and profit. The government spent decades attracting foreign investment and diversifying its economy beyond rubber and tin. The country now accounts for 13% of the world's chip testing and packaging, a key step in producing the semiconductors that go into automobiles, smartphones and other devices. Some 575,000 people were employed in the electrical and electronics industry in 2020, working with global chipmakers such as STMicro, Infineon Technologies AG, Intel Corp. and Renesas Electronics.

The Performance P650 won't beat a top-end Arm chip in a Samsung or Apple smartphone, but the startup believes its designs eventually could. From a report: It's really hard to get a new chip family to catch on when companies like Intel and Qualcomm ship their products by the millions, but SiFive has a faster new design it hopes will carve a niche. The startup on Thursday announced its Performance P650 design, which comes with a 50% speed boost over the P550 that arrived in June. SiFive is one of the most prominent members of RISC-V International, an alliance collectively developing a family of processors using the new RISC-V architecture. That competes against the x86 architecture from Intel and AMD that dominates in PCs and the Arm architecture used by Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek and others to power all smartphones. Unlike x86 and Arm, though, RISC-V is free to use. It's a fresh start its advocates believe will be more economical and efficient.

SiFive doesn't make chips. Instead, it licenses its designs to others that customize them for their own purposes, an approach that's served Arm well. With performance comparable to Arm's two-year-old midrange Cortex A77 design, the P650 won't be ejecting Qualcomm or other Arm designs out of smartphones any time soon. Customers can start evaluating the design in the first quarter of 2022, SiFive said. But if SiFive succeeds with its longer-term plans for better speed, battery life and cost, you could get a SiFive powered phone in a couple years. "By 2023, you're likely to see the first mobile phone with RISC-V," SiFive Chief Executive Patrick Little said in an October interview. "I think we have an excellent shot at the phone."

According to Margrethe Vestager, EU's Commissioner for Competition, it's unlikely that the EU will ever become completely independent from other countries as far as semiconductor supply is concerned. Tom's Hardware reports: Leading contract makers of semiconductors -- such as Intel, Samsung Foundry, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. -- spend around $30 billion per year on capital expenditures and billions on developing new process technologies. Analysts believe that a country, or a group of countries, that wants to build a competitive semiconductor industry locally would need to spend over $150 billion over a period of five years on direct help, tax breaks, and incentives. However, the chances of success are extremely low.

The EU official believes that such investments are impossible to make, which is why the bloc will continue to rely on internal and external chip supply. "The numbers I hear of, sort of, the upfront investments to be fully self-sufficient, that makes it not doable," said Vestager in an interview with CNBC. "What is important is that there is a different level of production capacity in Europe."

It is noteworthy that Europe does not produce smartphones or PCs, two kinds of applications that need chips made using leading-edge fabrication technologies. Meanwhile, the EU produces cars, consumer electronics, and other things that do not need chips made using the latest nodes. Thus, the bloc wants to expand production of chips for these products to protect its economy. It also does not want supply chains to be disrupted by China or tensions with the U.S. and Germany. At present, about 10% of the global chip supply is produced in Europe, down from 40% in 1990. The current goal that the block has is to expand its global chip production market share to 20% by 2030, which is already a very ambitious goal as chip manufacturing is growing. Vestager admits that to accomplish this goal, the EU needs to support local makers of semiconductors. Unfortunately, Margrethe Vestager does not announce any particular plans at this time.

James Rundle writes via the Wall Street Journal: A few years ago, executives at Intel began to realize they had a problem. The company was making dozens of new products each year, from chips to software platforms, but it didn't have a formal method for cataloging and storing older technology so engineers could test it for security flaws. [...] Intel's answer to this conundrum was to create a warehouse and laboratory in Costa Rica, where the company already had a research-and-development lab, to store the breadth of its technology and make the devices available for remote testing. After planning began in mid-2018, the Long-Term Retention Lab was up and running in the second half of 2019. The lab gives Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and has more than 100,000 employees, a centralized, secure location where security tests can be run from anywhere in the world. Access to the building is strictly controlled and approved by senior managers, while surveillance cameras watch the equipment at all times. Even its location is secret -- Intel representatives declined to say where exactly it is.

The lab brings commercial value to Intel, [said Mohsen Fazlian, general manager of Intel's product assurance and security unit.], citing company research that shows customers are more likely to buy technology from manufacturers that proactively test their products. [...] The lab has changed Intel's product development. All new technology is now built with the facility in mind, with technical documentation created to allow engineers to support it for up to 10 years, and units are sent to the lab before they are released, Mr. Fazlian said. "Hopefully, I will never find myself searching eBay for Intel hardware again," he said.

Samsung Electronics has decided to build an advanced U.S. chip plant in Texas, a win for the Biden administration as it prioritizes supply chain security and greater semiconductor capacity on American soil. From a report: South Korea's largest company has decided on the city of Taylor, roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) from its giant manufacturing hub in Austin, a person familiar with the matter said. Samsung and Texas officials will announce the decision Tuesday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter, asking not to be identified because the news hasn't been made public. A Samsung representative said it hadn't made a final decision and declined further comment. Samsung is hoping to win more American clients and narrow the gap with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Its decision, which came months after de facto leader Jay Y. Lee was released from prison on parole, follows plans by TSMC and Intel Corp. to spend billions on cutting-edge facilities globally. The industry triumvirate is racing to meet a post-pandemic surge in demand that has stretched global capacity to the max, while anticipating more and more connected devices from cars to homes will require chips in future. The plant will cost Samsung $17 billion to set up, according to WSJ.

America's push to manufacturer more products domestically gets an in-depth look from CNET — including a new Intel chip factory outside of Phoenix.

CNET calls it a fork in the road "after squandering its lead because of a half decade of problems modernizing its manufacturing..." With "a decade of bad decisions, this doesn't get fixed overnight," says Pat Gelsinger, Intel's new chief executive, in an interview. "But the bottom is behind us and the slope is starting to feel increasingly strong...." More fabs are on the way, too. In an enormous empty patch of dirt at its existing Arizona site, Intel has just begun building fabs 52 and 62 at a total cost of $20 billion, set to make Intel's most advanced chips, starting in 2024. Later this year, it hopes to announce the U.S. location for its third major manufacturing complex, a 1,000-acre site costing about $100 billion. The spending commitment makes this year's $3.5 billion upgrade to its New Mexico fab look cheap. The goal is to restore the U.S. share of chip manufacturing, which has slid from 37% in 1990 to 12% today. "Over the decade in front of us, we should be striving to bring the U.S. to 30% of worldwide semiconductor manufacturing," Gelsinger says...

But returning Intel to its glory days — and anchoring a resurgent U.S. electronics business in the process — is much easier said than done. Making chips profitably means running fabs at maximum capacity to pay off the gargantuan investments required to stay at the leading edge. A company that can't keep pace gets squeezed out, like IBM in 2014 or Global Foundries in 2018. To catch up after its delays, Intel now plans to upgrade its manufacturing five times in the next four years, a breakneck pace by industry standards. "This new roadmap that they announced is really aggressive," says Linley Group analyst Linley Gwennap. "I don't have any idea how they are going to accomplish all of that...."

Gelsinger has a tech-first recovery plan. He's pledged to accelerate manufacturing upgrades to match the technology of TSMC and Samsung by 2024 and surpass them in 2025. He's opening Intel's fabs to other companies that need chips built through its new Intel Foundry Services (IFS). And he's relying on other foundries, including TSMC, for about a quarter of Intel's near-term chipmaking needs to keep its chips more competitive during the upgrades. This three-pronged strategy is called IDM (integrated design and manufacturing) 2.0. That's a new take on Intel's philosophy of both designing and making chips. It's more ambitious than the future some had expected, in which Intel would sell its factories and join the ranks of "fabless" chip designers like Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm that rely on others for manufacturing...

Shareholders may not like Gelsinger's spending-heavy strategy, but one community really does: Intel's engineers... Gelsigner told the board that Intel is done with stock buybacks, a financial move in which a company uses its cash to buy stock and thereby increase its price. "We're investing in factories," he told me. "That's going to be the use of our cash...."

"We cannot recall the last time Intel put so many stakes in the ground," said BMO Capital Markets analyst Ambrish Srivastava in a July research report after Intel announced its schedule.
Intel will even outpace Moore's law, Gelsinger tells CNET — more than doubling the transistor count on processors every two years. "I believe that you're going to see from 2025 to 2035 a very healthy period for Moore's Law-like behavior."

Although that still brings some risk to Intel's investments if they have to pass the costs on to customer, a Linley Group analyst points out to CNET. "Moore's Law is not going to end when we can't build smaller transistors. It's going to end when somebody says I don't want to pay for smaller transistors."

Many local governments see a silver lining in the shortage of semiconductor chips that has contributed to a slowdown in the global economy. From a report: The shortage of computer chips has zapped energy from the global economy, punishing industries as varied as automakers and medical device manufacturers and contributing to fears about high inflation. But many states and cities in America are starting to see a silver lining: the possibility that efforts to sharply increase chip production in the United States will lead to a busy chip factory in their backyard. And they are racing to get a piece of the potential boom. One of those towns is Taylor, a Texas city of about 17,000 about a 40-minute drive northeast of Austin. Leaders here are pulling out all the stops to get a $17 billion Samsung plant that the company plans to build in the United States starting early next year.

The city, its school district and the county plan to offer Samsung hundreds of millions of dollars in financial incentives, including tax rebates. The community also has arranged for water to be piped in from an adjacent county to be used by the plant. But Taylor is not alone. Officials in Arizona and in Genesee County in upstate New York are also trying to woo the company. So, too, are politicians in nearby Travis County, home to Austin, where Samsung already has a plant. Locations in all three states "offered robust property tax abatement" and funds to build out infrastructure for the plant, Samsung said in a filing. Congress is considering whether to offer its own subsidies to chip makers that build in the United States.

Where Samsung's plant will land remains anyone's guess. The company says it is still weighing where to put it. A decision is expected to be announced any day. The federal government has urged companies like Samsung, one of the world's largest makers of the high-tech components, to build new plants in the United States, calling it an economic and national security imperative. Intel broke ground on two plants in Arizona in September and could announce the location for a planned manufacturing campus by the end of the year. This could just be a warm-up act. The Senate passed a bill to provide chip makers $52 billion in subsidies this year, a plan supported by the Biden administration that would be Washington's biggest investment in industrial policy in decades. The House has yet to consider it. Nine governors said in a letter to congressional leaders that the funding would "provide a new, powerful tool in our states' economic development toolboxes."

Intel has disclosed two high-severity vulnerabilities that affect a wide range of Intel processor families, allowing threat actors and malware to gain higher privilege levels on the device. BleepingComputer reports: The flaws were discovered by SentinelOne and are tracked as CVE-2021-0157 and CVE-2021-0158, and both have a CVSS v3 score of 8.2 (high). The former concerns the insufficient control flow management in the BIOS firmware for some Intel processors, while the latter relies on the improper input validation on the same component. These vulnerabilities could lead to escalation of privilege on the machine, but only if the attacker had physical access to vulnerable devices.

Intel hasn't shared many technical details around these two flaws, but they advise users to patch the vulnerabilities by applying the available BIOS updates. This is particularly problematic because motherboard vendors do not release BIOS updates often and don't support their products with security updates for long. Considering that 7th gen Intel Core processors came out five years ago, it's doubtful that MB vendors are still releasing security BIOS updates for them. As such, some users will be left with no practical way to fix the above flaws. In these cases, we would suggest that you set up a strong password for accessing the BIOS settings. Intel also released a separate advisory for a high-severity elevation of privilege flaw (CVE-2021-0146) that affects several car models that use the Intel Atom E3900. "Intel has released a firmware update to mitigate this flaw, and users will get it through patches supplied by the system manufacturer," the report says.

The world changed on Nov. 15, 1971, and hardly anyone noticed. It is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Intel 4004 microprocessor, a computer carved onto silicon, an element as plentiful on earth as sand on a beach. Microprocessors unchained computers from air-conditioned rooms and freed computing power to go wherever it is needed most. Life has improved exponentially since. From a report: Back then, IBM mainframes were kept in sealed rooms and were so expensive companies used argon gas instead of water to put out computer-room fires. Workers were told to evacuate on short notice, before the gas would suffocate them. Feeding decks of punch cards into a reader and typing simple commands into clunky Teletype machines were the only ways to interact with the IBM computers. Digital Equipment Corp. sold PDP-8 minicomputers to labs and offices that weighed 250 pounds. In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corp. asked Intel to design 12 custom chips for a new printing calculator. Engineers Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor and Ted Hoff were tired of designing different chips for various companies and suggested instead four chips, including one programmable chip they could use for many products. Using only 2,300 transistors, they created the 4004 microprocessor. Four bits of data could move around the chip at a time. The half-inch-long rectangular integrated circuit had a clock speed of 750 kilohertz and could do about 92,000 operations a second.

Intel introduced the 3,500-transistor, eight-bit 8008 in 1972; the 29,000-transistor, 16-bit 8086, capable of 710,000 operations a second, was introduced in 1978. IBM used the next iteration, the Intel 8088, for its first personal computer. By comparison, Apple's new M1 Max processor has 57 billion transistors doing 10.4 trillion floating-point operations a second. That is at least a billionfold increase in computer power in 50 years. We've come a long way, baby. When I met Mr. Hoff in the 1980s, he told me that he once took his broken television to a repairman, who noted a problem with the microprocessor. The repairman then asked why he was laughing. Now that everyone has a computer in his pocket, one of my favorite movie scenes isn't quite so funny. In "Take the Money and Run" (1969), Woody Allen's character interviews for a job at an insurance company and his interviewer asks, "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?" "Yes, I have." "Where?" "My aunt has one."

"Intel's plan to ease the ongoing chip shortage by increasing production in China has reportedly been opposed by the Biden administration," writes PC Magazine, "over concerns about the potential security impact." Bloomberg reports that Intel wanted to manufacture silicon wafers in a factory located in Chengdu, China by the end of 2022. When the company recently shared details of this plan with the U.S. government, however, "Biden administration officials strongly discouraged the move." The report doesn't specify the exact nature of the White House's security concerns. Relations between the U.S. and China have reached the point where it could be anything from a fear of Intel's designs being stolen to the possibility of the processors being compromised in some way.
Bloomberg reports that Intel has also been seeking federal assistance "to ramp up research and production in the U.S.," with Intel adding in a statement that "Intel and the Biden administration share a goal to address the ongoing industrywide shortage of microchips, and we have explored a number of approaches with the U.S. government. Our focus is on the significant ongoing expansion of our existing semiconductor manufacturing operations and our plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in new wafer fabrication plants in the U.S. and Europe."

But PC Magazine points out that "Much of that money is coming from government sources, however, which is part of the reason why the White House was briefed on Intel's plan to increase production in China to begin with."

Bloomberg reports that the Biden administration "is scrambling to address constraints, but it's also trying to bring production of vital components back to the U.S. — a goal Intel's China plan didn't serve..." The episode comes as the White House is debating whether to restrict certain strategic investments into China. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said the administration is considering an outbound investment screening mechanism and is working with allies on what it could look like... A representative for the White House declined to comment on specific transactions or investments, but said the administration is "very focused on preventing China from using U.S. technologies, know-how and investment to develop state-of-the-art capabilities," which could contribute to human rights abuses or activities that threaten U.S. national security...

Following deliberations with the Biden team, Intel has no plans to add the production in China at the moment, a person familiar with the decision said...

The chip industry has a complicated relationship with China, one that became much more difficult during the Trump administration's trade war. China is the biggest consumer of semiconductors for local use, and it serves as the assembly center for much of the world's electronics. To help with logistics and to keep Beijing happy, chipmakers — including Intel — have located plants there. But they face longstanding U.S. government restrictions that prevent them from exporting cutting-edge semiconductors to the country.
At the same time, the article points out, automakers "are losing more than $200 billion in revenue because of the lack of chips," while Apple "expects to miss out on more than $6 billion of sales this quarter because it can't get enough components."

Microsoft is going head to head with Chromebooks with a new $249 Surface Laptop SE, its most affordable Surface yet. While the software giant has attempted to compete with the popularity of Chrome OS in US schools for years, the Surface Laptop SE is the company's first true Chromebook competitor. From a report: Surface Laptop SE will be sold exclusively to schools and students, starting at $249. It's part of a much broader effort with Windows 11 SE, a new student edition designed to compete with Chrome OS that will ship on a range of low-cost laptops in the coming months. Surface Laptop SE is every bit the low-cost Windows device you'd expect to see for $249.

While it retains the same keyboard and trackpad found on Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go, the all-plastic body houses an 11.6-inch display running at just a 1366 x 768 resolution. This is the first 16:9 Surface device in more than seven years, after Microsoft switched to 3:2 for its Surface line with the Surface Pro 3 launch in 2014. The screen looks like the biggest drawback on this device, particularly as we weren't fans of the low-resolution screen (1536 x 1024) found on the $549 Surface Laptop Go. Lenovo's Chromebook Duet ships with a better 10.1-inch (1920 x 1200) display for the same $249 price as the Surface Laptop SE. Intel's Celeron N4020 or N4120 power the Surface Laptop SE, combined with 4GB / 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of eMMC storage.