Posts Tagged ‘AMD’

LinkSwarm for October 30, 2020

Friday, October 30th, 2020

Welcome to the last LinkSwarm before the election! Halloween is tomorrow, and I will actually be handing out candy in the time-honored traditional manner.

  • The economy grew at a white hot 33.1% rate during the third quarter, which is what happens when you lift the counterproductive economic lockdowns Democrats want to keep in place. We’ve still got recovering to do (something that’s not going to happen under a Harris-Biden Administration’s huge tax hikes), but it looks like we’re enjoying the V-shaped recovery that so many economists assured us was impossible.
  • Kurt Schlichter says not to fall for the Psy-Op:

    The next few days will be a Cat 5 hurricane of mainstream media spin and Democrat bullSchiff designed to make you think that you’ve already lost this election. They want your morale shattered, your spirit broken, and you to put a lid on your participation in saving your country from leftist tyranny.

    It’s all a lie.

    It’s a psychological operation designed to keep you on the sidelines.

    We got this.

    All you need to do is vote.

    People reach out to me all the time looking for hope, and I’ve got plenty, because things are breaking our way. You have structural factors like the fact that incumbents tend to win, particularly when the economy is improving and we’re not in some idiotic new war. You have factors like how the Democrat candidate is a desiccated old weirdo who pretty much called a lid on his campaign back in July and whose corruption is being shown to be more corrupting every single day. You have manifest enthusiasm for our guy and tumbleweeds for theirs. You have people moving from Hillary to Trump, but nobody moving from Trump to Grandpa Badfinger. Trump dominated the debate where Oldfinger doubled down on his deeply unpopular program of destroying millions of oil industry jobs, single payer, and Matlock for All. On the inside, the insiders almost unanimously think Trump will win – that’s the real talk behind the scenes among people whose names you know. Early voting numbers are GOP-friendly, and many polls now show Trump moving up or taking the lead.

    We have the heat, we have the momentum, we have this to lose.

    (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)

  • “Wisconsin Republican Party Says Hackers Stole $2.3 Million from Trump Reelection Account.”
  • Another rapper endorses Trump and slams Biden’s tax plan. I do not believe I’ve heard a single song by “Lil Pump,” but that’s because I’m old in and in the way, and Mr. Pump (real name Gazzy Garcia) evidently has some 17 million followers. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of rappers endorsing Trump, Lil Wayne (who I have actually heard of) all but did that as well:

  • “5 Charts That Show Sweden’s Strategy Worked. The Lockdowns Failed.”
  • “Russian Airstrikes Obliterate Turkish-Backed ‘Rebel’ Camp In Idlib, Killing Over 60.” Remind me why S.E. Cupp thinks we should be over there bombing things, again…
  • AMD buys Xilinx for $35 billion in an all-stock transaction. Xilinx dominates Field Programable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and has fingers into a lot of weird verticals I don’t have any visibility into. Like AMD they’re fabless, and like AMD they use TSMC as their foundry. Assuming all the usual merger hurdles (both regulatory and cultural) can be overcome, this is probably a good move for both sides.
  • Leftwingers are really butt-hurt that Joe Rogan interviewed Alex Jones.
  • The owners of a bunch of famous Austin businesses come out against the tax-hiking rail bond. “‘We are not open, we are not going to be open for a long time so no money coming in paying an extra $3000,’ said Shannon Sedwick with Esther’s Follies.” Also opposing the huge tax hike for the bond: Former Democratic State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, who will never be mistaken for a fire-breathing conservative.
  • The Texas House Speaker’s race heats up.

    What GOP insiders hoped would be a quiet race for Speaker of the Texas House got suddenly heated on Thursday, with four establishment Republicans officially in the hunt – and at least one other poised to jump in. Most Texans have never heard of none of them.

    Officially filing declaring their candidacy today are Republican State Reps. Chris Paddie of Marshall, Trent Ashby of Lufkin, John Cyrier of Bastrop, and Geanie Morrison of Victoria joining Democrats Senfronia Thompson of Houston and Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio

    Republican Dade Phelan of Beaumont was also reportedly considering jumping into the race as the “Team Bonnen” candidate.

  • Is Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush considering running against Ken Paxton for Attorney General in 2022?
  • Remember how the New York Times hyped an op-ed by “Anonymous” slamming Trump? Honestly, I barely do, because all the fake “anonymous” #JustTrustMeBro “sources” “familiar with” Trump just blur together in my mind. Well, turns out the “Senior Trump Official” was a minor official turned CNN staffer, so they, and most of the liberal media complex that trusted them, just straight lied to us to smear Trump. You know, just like all their other anti-Trump “bombshells.”
  • “Hospitals gave Gov. Andrew Cuomo a campaign booster shot“:

    It’s bad enough that Gov. Cuomo presided over the needless COVID-19 deaths of thousands of vulnerable people in New York nursing homes.

    It’s bad enough that he wrote a shameful book praising himself for his pandemic response and now is doing a victory lap of self-congratulation in the worst-hit state in the nation.

    It’s bad enough that he is mounting a pre-election scare campaign on COVID vaccines to stir up anti-vax sentiment for political purposes.

    But now we discover that Cuomo got campaign funds from the hospital organizations that lobbied for his lethal policy for the elderly and which then bought TV ads whitewashing his culpability.

    An exclusive audit of campaign donations to Cuomo by OpenTheBooks.com shows disturbing links with industry bodies which demanded the disastrous order forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-infected patients hospitals didn’t want.

  • “Jeremy Corbyn suspended from Labour Party over response to antisemitism report.” Wow, that’s not closing the barn door after the cows have escaped, that’s closing the barn door after the cows have escaped, run off to a different region, been captured, fattened, slaughtered, made into hamburgers, and consumed at a St. Swithun’s Day feast in Wessex.
  • 46 arrested in massive human trafficking bust in Fort Bend County.
  • Commies vandalize Austin Public Library polling place. Because that’s the sort of garbage commies pull.
  • Some uncomfortable facts for #BlackLivesMatter:

  • “$150 MILLION worth of illegal cannabis, weapons, and 3 kangaroos seized by York Police.” That’s York, Ontario, a locale for which I’m reliably informed kangaroos do not constitute native fauna.
  • Old and Busted: The monster in your daughter’s closet. The New Hotness: The pedophile in your daughter’s closet.
  • “More APD officers resigning recently, former officer and Austin Police Association say.” #ThanksMayorAdler
  • Jake Tapper still isn’t over Mucho Grande.
  • Deaderheads. (Hat tip: Ace.)
  • James “The Amazing” Randi, RIP.”
  • “Psychic Already Sick Of Spectral James Randi Ragging On Her From Afterlife.”
  • Huge Trump parade…in Beverly Hills:

  • What. The. Hell.

  • “State That Just Voted To Reduce Penalties For Pedophiles Not Sure Why God Keeps Lighting Them On Fire.”
  • “CNN Mourns ACB Confirmation By Flying Chinese Flag At Half-Mast.”
  • Swing, you sinners!
  • I sort of like this one:

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Media Watch, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Nvidia Surpasses Intel In Market Cap

    Tuesday, July 28th, 2020

    This is some crazy news:

    Nvidia Corp. NVDA, 2.38% surpassed Intel Corp. INTC, -1.38% as the largest U.S. chip maker by market cap for the first time on Wednesday. Nvidia shares closed up 3.5% at $408.64, giving it a market cap of $251.31 billion, while Intel shares finished up 0.5% at $58.61, giving it a market cap of $248.16 billion, according to FactSet data. For the year, Nvidia shares have gained 74% while Intel shares have slipped 2%, compared with a 11% gain in the PHLX Semiconductor Index SOX, 3.14%, a 17% gain in the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, 1.64%, and a 1.9% decline in the S&P 500 index SPX, 0.66%. While it is not the first time a U.S. chip maker has surpassed Intel in market cap, it is the first time for Nvidia. Back in 1999 and 2000, Texas Instruments Inc. TXN, 1.89% surpassed Intel in cap a few times, and between late 2012 and mid-2014 Qualcomm Inc. QCOM, 3.80% and Intel often jockeyed for the No. 1 position, according to Dow Jones data.

    Nvidia is a fabless semiconductor company that designs graphics processor units (GPUs), the chips that drive computer screens, especially those for gaming systems and consoles. They were also popular for Bitcoin and other crypto-currency mining rigs, though that market seems to have played itself out. They earned just over $3 billion in profit in their fiscal Q1.

    Intel, of course, makes CPUs, the central processing units at the heart of pretty much every computer. They’ve had trouble recently as rival AMD has lapped them in a number of markets, Apple is abandoning them as the Mac CPU manufacturer to go with a custom ARM-based system-on-a-chip, and reportedly Intel has had process yield problems with their chips. However all of that hasn’t prevented them from announcing over $5 billion in profits for their last fiscal quarter, though they also announced they’re pushing out their 7mm process node.

    Nvidia, like AMD, has its chips fabbed by TSMC. (AMD is also a competitor to Nvidia in the GPU space, having bought GPU maker ATI back in 2006.) Intel has more than a dozen of it’s own own wafer fabrication plants. But there are reports that even Intel has contracted with TSMC to fab some of its chips next year.

    As of this writing, Nvidia is trading at a share price of about 78 times earnings. Meanwhile, Intel is trading at about nine times earnings. That’s a crazy divergence.

    Owning your own fabs has become a very expensive proposition, but once they’re up and running, the costs are lower and give you full control of the process. So far Nvidia has benefited greatly from having TSMC fab their chips, but it’s rumored that all of TSMC’s cutting edge 5nm fab wafer starts are already spoken for next year (Apple is another customer), and it will take time for more fab capacity to come online. That may start to constrain Nvidia’s growth.

    Nvidia is certainly having a better year than Intel, but 80 times earnings is a pretty crazy P/E ratio. Some market correction is probably in order.

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    Posted in Economics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

    Semiconductor Update: GlobalFoundries Gives Up On 7nm​

    Thursday, August 30th, 2018

    GlobalFoundries has given up work on their 7nm process node. This is a direct result of AMD choosing TSMC over GlobalFoundries to fab their next generation microprocessor.

    GlobalFounderies was always something of an odd duck. It was spun out from AMD in 2009 to turn their manufacturing arm into a foundry because AMD itself could no longer afford the huge upfront capital investment state-of-the-art wafer fabrication plants demanded. As it exists today, GlobalFounderies​ is a Frankenstein’s monster of agglomeration, having gobbled up Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor and what remained of IBM’s fab infrastructure (back in the day, IBM had some of the best semiconductor design capabilities in the world) in New York and Vermont. (SK Hynix, NXP and ON Semiconductor, all integrated device manufacturers rather than foundries, are similar merger-assembled aggregations.) GlobalFounderies actual owner is the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

    With UMC screwing the pooch by letting Chinese spies walk out the door with Micron design IP, there was an opening for a (sorta, kinda) American chip foundry to provide a viable rival to TSMC, but GlobalFoundries evidently found it too difficult to do profitably.

    TSMC has already broken ground on a fab that will theoretically take them down to 5nm and is expected to cost $500 billion NT, which works out to over $16 billion US at current exchange rates. That’s more outlay than all the profit TSMC made all of last year.

    Some thoughts (partially based on scuttlebutt, gossip, etc.):

  • Right now there’s no non-TSMC foundry choice if a fabless chip company wants to attempt a sub 14nm design. It’s Taiwan or nothing.
  • To the best of my knowledge, no one outside TSMC, Intel and Samsung are even attempting 7nm. Word is that TSMC’s 7nm is actually closer to 10nm, and Intel is evidently in a world of hurt getting yields up on its 10nm process.
  • Samsung says they’re going to 7nm in 2019 using Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a long, long awaited technological shift that will probably involve its own painful learning curve. Others have speculated that, despite those plans, Samsung seems pretty happy sitting at 14nm with high yields for most of its own chip needs (as opposed to its foundry customers).

    • What this means is that the cutting edge of wafer fabrication technology is probably going to be centered on the Pacific rim for the foreseeable future. China won’t be on that cutting edge, because they can’t steal technology fast enough or hire enough enough qualified process techs to get it done.

    We may finally have reached a point that building a cutting edge, state-of-the-art wafer fabrication plant is a money-losing proposition for everyone.

    That means fabless chip designers working at the cutting edge will be dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for the foreseeable future, a fact that has a lot of foreign policy relevance, especially in relation to China…

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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy | 1 Comment »