Topps Blog

Wednesday, 4 May 2022

Intel CEO: The Chip Shortage Will Last Until 2024

Back in December of 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger weighed in on when the chip shortage would end. He stated at the time he thought the situation would improve in 2023. Mr. Gelsinger was speaking in Malaysia where he was announcing a $7.1B investment in a new packaging facility. Back in those simpler times, he said it was just a matter of supply and demand. Therefore, as more chip-making capacity comes online, these two market forces would begin to align. Now that we’re deep into 2022, Gelsinger has reassessed the situation. As it turns out, a full recovery won’t be happening soon due to an unforeseen development: now there’s not enough machines available to make silicon wafers.

Intel’s CEO made his revised comments to CNBC this week. His new comments move the goalposts for the end of the chip shortage back by at least a year. Speaking about the current shortage of parts and tools for lithography machines, Gelsinger said, “That’s part of the reason that we believe the overall semiconductor shortage will now drift into 2024, from our earlier estimates in 2023, just because the shortages have now hit equipment and some of those factory ramps will be more challenged.” His mention of “factory ramps” go directly to the heart of the issue. Although Intel has been investing heavily in boosting its production, it won’t do much good without the machines it needs to make chips.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger holds an SRAM wafer built on its bleeding edge 18A process.

Gelisinger’s comments follow recent announcements of massive expansion efforts by the company. It’s unveiled plans for new megafabs in both Ohio and Germany. It also recently expanded its Oregon campus as well. Intel’s CEO says this is part of the company’s strategy to build some redundancy and diversity into its production lines. One of the major causes of the global chip shortage is that 80 percent of the world’s silicon wafer production is based in Asia. Intel hopes to be able to provide an alternative source for advanced wafer technology when all its new fabs come online. Gelsinger expects that to happen around 2025 or so. Obtaining geographic diversity could be a crucial component in determining the success of its Intel Foundry Services business. Along with, you know, having advanced nodes to offer to third parties.

Also, the biggest manufacturer of silicon wafer machine is ASML, which has previously said it can’t produce enough machines. Even worse, it said it will be years before it’s able to catch up with demand. As we reported previously, ASML’s chief executive Peter Wennink said he’s been in direct contact with Gelsinger about the issue. Wennick’s operation is particularly fragile, with over 700 companies in its supply chain.

Regarding the machine shortage, Gelsinger said Intel will certainly be affected. However, he says the company is maneuvering itself into a position to mitigate these issues. “We’ve really invested in those equipment relationships, but that will be tempering the build-out of capacity for us and everybody else, but we believe we’re positioned better than the rest of the industry,” Gelsinger said.

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This California Greenhouse is Run by Robots

(Photo: Iron Ox) A farm technology startup is using robots and artificial intelligence to tackle sustainability concerns in agriculture.

Northern California-based Iron Ox was born from the realization that conventional American agriculture negatively impacts the environment in a multitude of ways. The type of farming most of us are familiar with uses as much as 70 percent of the world’s fresh water supply and produces up to 1.19 gigatons of greenhouse gasses every year. There’s also the issue of wasted produce, with up to 40 percent of fruits and veggies ending up in a landfill before ever reaching a consumer. While companies like Imperfect Foods, Uglies, and Misfits Market aim to offset this by proudly selling produce your typical grocery store won’t, these businesses don’t address the root of the problem: how the produce is grown.

Iron Ox uses two house-designed, AI-supported robots to perform most repetitive farming tasks and ensure resources are used efficiently. The first of these, called Grover, makes up the brawn of Iron Ox’s robotic crew. Able to lift more than 1,000 pounds, Grover helps move plant “modules” (i.e. planter boxes) around the greenhouse. Grover also helps water and harvest crops in tandem with Phil, the company’s brainier robot farmer. Phil monitors and delivers each module’s water, nutrient mix, and pH levels to maximize crop yield and quality while making sure resources aren’t overused.

Grover and Phil are designed to work in greenhouses, meaning Iron Ox has to plop down a facility before bringing its leafy greens, fruit, and other produce to a particular region. But the company itself says this isn’t a problem. While Iron Ox’s first facility sits in the San Francisco Bay Area, it just wrapped up construction on a 535,000-square foot greenhouse in Lockhart, Texas, where it will bring sustainably-grown produce to the entire state.

Iron Ox’s Grover robot. (Photo: Iron Ox)

“Iron Ox’s Lockhart facility is the blueprint for sustainable produce farming near urban centers across the nation and around the world,” Iron Ox spokesperson Ranggin Hedayat told ExtremeTech. “We want to make food a renewable resource for everyone. While our vision is global, we know that everything we achieve will be through our local efforts. Food grown at an Iron Ox facility will stay nearby, ensuring our surrounding communities have access to fresh produce that is grown recently, locally and sustainably.”

As with any other setting, the integration of robots into agriculture raises concerns regarding job displacement. Conventional farming has long presented employment opportunities for lower-income communities and immigrants; while those opportunities are far from perfect, many don’t want to see them disappear altogether. Iron Ox’s perspective is that now is the time for an agricultural revamp. The company says farming is facing a labor crisis as young workers turn away from grueling, environmentally detrimental work, and that its technology may very well present a more positive alternative.

“Agriculture is long overdue for a technology update,” Hedayat said. “By introducing technology to farming, we can not only increase efficiency, become more sustainable, but also we can equip workers with tech skills that are highly beneficial in a digital world.” Whether Iron Ox elects to support such career transitions via internships, training programs, or other means is something we’ll have to wait to find out.

Iron Ox’s produce is currently available at Whole Foods, Mollie Stone’s Markets, and Bianchini’s Market in northern California, with central Texas locations to come later this year.

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Demand for 8K TVs Is Already Falling

You can go out right now and purchase an 8K TV, but you’ll pay quite a premium for being on the bleeding edge. You’re probably not going to do that, and most other people aren’t, either. Market research firm Omdia reports that interest in 8K TVs has fallen, and it is expected to continue sliding. The main driver, as you can imagine, is there’s just nothing to watch in 8K. You can only watch the Olympics opening ceremony so many times.

Omdia reports that ongoing consumer skepticism of 8K has hurt adoption. The firm says that 8K accounted for just 0.15 percent of all TV shipments in 2021, or about 350,000 total units. Samsung shipped 65 percent of those TVs, but its 8K shipments actually decreased by 18 percent year-over-year. With the new sluggish growth, Omdia believes the total number of 8K households worldwide will reach 2.7 million by the end of 2026. Previously, the same firm projected that 8K would be in 9 million homes by that time.

We’ve reached a point where 4K TVs are essentially a commodity — you can pick up a reasonably sized new 4K set for well under a thousand dollars. Even the cheapest 8K models are several times more expensive. And for what? There is almost no 8K content available outside of Japan (which has a single 8K broadcast channel), and consumers in that country don’t seem any more incentivized to purchase an 8K set.

8K quadruples the number of pixels over 4K, but there’s almost nothing to watch in native 8K.

Omdia also notes that it has seen no market demand for 8K content development. Streaming has long since overtaken physical media and broadcast, and 8K has little impact there. Services like Netflix and Hulu already struggle to stream 4K content at acceptable quality — these videos are often heavily compressed to save on bandwidth. There’s simply no appetite to add 8K at this time, which features 7680 x 4320 pixels — four times as many as 4K and 16 times more than 1080p.

The move to 8K may be premature given the developments in 4K sets. For example, OLED panels are finally coming down in price, offering higher brightness and more accurate HDR. The latest 4K TVs also support technologies like variable refresh rates and low-latency mode for gaming. It’s easy to see why consumers are uninterested. Instead of continuing to push resolution, manufacturers have pivoted — at least for now — towards emphasizing a wider range of image quality improvements beyond just resolution.

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Tuesday, 3 May 2022

FBI Searched Potentially Millions of Americans’ Personal Data Without Warrants Last Year

(Photo: Lianhao Qu/Unsplash) The FBI conducted nearly 3.4 million searches of Americans’ data last year—without a single warrant.

Since 2013 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has published its Annual Statistical Transparency Report (ASTR), which discloses the US intelligence community’s “use of national security surveillance authorities.” (The most recognizable of these might be the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which set ground rules for various forms of law enforcement surveillance.) This extensive report covers a wide range of intelligence community updates and data, but this edition is uniquely concerning.

As originally spotted by The Wall Street Journal, the ASTR for calendar year 2021 states the FBI conducted “fewer than 3,394,053” US person queries between December 2020 and November 2021. Though the FBI is legally required to obtain an order from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) prior to accessing the results of each search, none of these searches involved a warrant.

(Photo: FBI)

The searches are allowed under Section 702 of FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which permits the federal government to conduct surveillance of foreign individuals. Section 702 gives the government permission to compel internet service providers and wireless carriers to provide personal data for the sake of foreign intelligence. The DNI’s own Section 702 primer emphasizes that this section only permits targeted electronic surveillance of those outside the US, saying the intelligence community is not provided permission to target US citizens at any time regardless of their location—but the DNI quietly allows the FBI to operate under its own interpretation of the rules.

According to the most recent ASTR, the FBI’s standard for conducting searches under Section 702 is “fundamentally different” from that of other agencies in the intelligence community. “Where NSA, CIA, and NCTC are authorized to query Section 702-acquired contents and noncontents for foreign intelligence information, FBI is authorized to conduct queries that are both reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information and … queries that are reasonably likely to return evidence of a crime,” the report reads. This means the FBI can perform any query it (along with the FISC) deems relevant to a criminal or foreign intelligence investigation, regardless of whether the targeted individual is a US citizen. This special privilege has been available to the domestic-focused FBI since 2009.

The report states multiple queries of the same individual are counted as separate when conducted by the FBI, meaning nearly 3.4 million queries may have covered less than 3.4 million Americans. Still, FBI officials admit the figure is “certainly a large number.” “I am not going to pretend that it isn’t,” one senior official said during a press briefing.

Federal officials have since stated at least half of the searches were related to an investigation involving a Russian threat against US critical infrastructure. As of this writing, officials have not provided any further details on the alleged threat.

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Rumor Mill Downgrades AMD’s RDNA3 GPU Specs

In what is certainly a first in recent times, new RDNA3 rumors indicate its specs might be a tad lower than we expected. Typically these leaks point in the opposite direction, or at least that’s been the case for Nvidia’s GPUs. On the AMD front we actually haven’t heard anything in almost six months. This new round of leaks are a revision of previous leaks. There’s also the possibility they are closer to reality than previous rumors. That’s just because we’re closer to launch now, so it’s plausible the new specs are what AMD has chosen as its final numbers. Its RDNA3 family of GPUs is expected to launch at the end of 2022.

The “revised” update for AMD’s upcoming GPUs comes from Twitter user Redfire via Videocardz. Overall the new numbers mark a reduction in important specs from previous leaks by 22 percent. The flagship Navi 31 card, aka the RX 7900 XT, was previously thought to have 60 Work Group Processors (WGP) with 15,360 stream processors (SP). That’s been downgraded to just 48 WGP and 12,228 SPs. This would afford the card up to 73 teraflops of FP32 performance if the GPU was clocked at 3GHz. This is an interesting development as it was recently reported both Nvidia and AMD were in a race to 100 teraflops. It’s expected that Nvidia’s AD102 die could hit the target first, but AMD might also be prepping a special card too, similar to Nvidia’s Titan GPUs of the past. For context the RTX 3090 Ti is marketed as offering 40 teraflops of performance, so these next-gen GPUs are going to be quite powerful.

In this tweet we see the original leaker, and a cheeky reply from Greymon55. (Image: @redfire75369)

The card below Navi 31 is reportedly going on a similar diet. The RX 7700 XT (Navi 32) was previously thought to have 40 WGP and 10,240 SPs, but is now rumored to offer 32 WGP and 8,192 SPs. The last card, Navi 33, remains unchanged. This was also confirmed by notorious GPU tipster Greymon55, who noted the card would “maintain original specifications.” That card has 16 WGP and 4,096 SPs. We still don’t have any details on memory allocations or clock speeds for these GPUs, unfortunately. Greymon55 also changed his Twitter profile’s bio to reflect these updated specs; a seemingly tacit approval of their veracity.

What’s interesting is Greymon55 also stated that despite AMD lowering the specs for this family of GPUs, its performance goals remain unchanged. In fact, they wrote, they may even be higher. Sadly, we have no idea what this means in the real world. Also it’s important to keep in mind that we do know AMD’s RDNA3 GPUs will be quite intricate. The top SKUs will feature a multi-chip module (MCM) design care of TSMC. These will reportedly be composed of seven chiplets, utilizing TSMC’s 5nm and 6nm processes. The flagship die is rumored to be approximately 800mm squared. For comparison, the RX 6900 XT die is just 520mm squared.

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New Brain Implant Reverses Parkinson’s Symptoms

(Photo: Natasha Connell/Unsplash) A patient in the United Kingdom is the first to receive a new brain implant that appears to “reverse” the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

Tony Howells, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s nine years ago, received the experimental implant in 2019 at Southmead Hospital in Bristol. Howells says the impact the implant has had on his life since then has been “amazing.”

“Before the operation I went for a walk on Boxing Day with my wife and I got 200 yards from the actual car,” Howells told the UK’s South West News Service. “I had to turn around and go back because I just couldn’t walk. Then after the operation, which was 12 months later, I went on Boxing Day again and we went for 2.5 miles and we could’ve went [sic] further.”

A Parkinson’s disease diagnosis usually follows a significant (around 80 percent) loss of nerve cells in the part of the brain known as the substantia nigra, which is tasked with generating dopamine. When nerve cells in this region of the brain experience damage or death, the patient’s dopamine levels drop dramatically, which causes the nervous system to struggle to regulate bodily movement. The nervous system attempts to make up for this by firing abnormal nerve impulses, which is what slows the patient’s movement, stiffens their muscles, or causes bodily tremors.

(Image: Professor Tim Denison/Oxford University)

It goes without saying that these symptoms have the power to massively affect one’s quality of life. “You can’t understand how frustrating [Parkinson’s] is until it happens to you,” Howells said. “The most difficult thing to accept is the decline in daily activities like tying-up shoelaces, taking three or four minutes instead of seconds.”

While there isn’t yet a cure for the disease, some patients elect to receive a treatment called deep brain stimulation, or DBS. Traditionally this has involved surgically implanting a relatively large impulse generator battery (IGB) in the patient’s abdomen or under their collarbone. The IGB then sends electrical impulses to the substantia nigra via wires under the patient’s skin. Given the complicated nature of such a procedure, this form of treatment has typically been reserved for young and otherwise healthy patients.

The implant Howells received may change that. Because it’s far smaller than a traditional IGB, it sits directly on the brain, reducing the need to conduct invasive surgery with multiple parts of the body. This also means surgeons can implant the new device in half the time.

The North Bristol NHS Trust plans to provide the implant to 25 more Parkinson’s patients throughout a trial that will extend into next year. Depending on the trial’s success, the implant may be brought to a broader swath of patients worldwide.

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US Military’s Next-Gen Fighter Expected to Cost Hundreds of Millions Each

The Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II is the US military’s current top-of-the-line fighter aircraft, but its history of cost overruns and technical issues has made it a poster child for government waste. And that may be nothing compared to the next generation of air combat technology. At a recent House Armed Services Committee hearing, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall claims the so-called Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) aircraft could cost hundreds of millions each, reports DefenseNews.

Military hardware is always vastly more expensive than you’d think. Long-time government contractors like Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grumman have become adept at winning low-bid contracts that entitle them to bill the government for cost overruns. Northrop’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber was pitched at a cost of about $500 million each, but the final price tag as of the late 90s was closer to $2 billion. The F-22, which will be replaced by the NGAD, was initially supposed to cost about $80 million, but the fly-away cost eventually soared to more than $130 million, and it’s around $600 million when parts and support are included. The F-35 can run upward of $130 million, depending on the service branch variant.

That puts the statement by Secretary Kendall in a different context. The NGAD program will eventually lead to the production of a sixth-generation fighter, but we’re easily a decade away from seeing a finished model take to the skies (military commanders claim a prototype has already flown). That leaves a lot of time for design changes and engineering challenges to inflate the cost. We may even be looking at total costs in the same range as the Spirit bomber, of which the US only bought 21. The demand for an air superiority fighter is necessarily much greater — the military purchased almost 200 F-22s.

The US has just under 200 F-22 fighters, which will have to last until the NGAD replaces it in the 2030s.

There’s no doubt the NGAD will be a fabulously expensive airplane, but there’s still some hope the total cost of the program won’t be as obscene as many fear. Allegedly, the program is designed to hold down costs more than past contracts, stressing the use of modular components and additional funding controls to keep maintenance and repair costs lower.

Kendall also noted the NGAD will be accompanied by smaller, less expensive combat aircraft. He envisions a small wing of remotely piloted drones flying along with each NGAD. But if the crewed jet is going to cost hundreds of millions (at least) each of its drone wingmen could end up costing as much as the early F-22 airframes.

Until the NGAD arrives, the US will continue flying the F-22. Hopefully its supply holds out — Lockheed-Martin recently told the government that restarting the F-22 production line would boost the price to $206–$216 million per aircraft. That’s NGAD money!

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