Intel’s relatively new foundry division (until earlier today was called Intel Foundry Services) just landed a major order from a major company.according to Bloomberg and wall street journalMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that his company will use Intel’s latest 18A (1.8nm) manufacturing process for upcoming in-house chip designs. But considering Intel’s process roadmap, this means we may not see Microsoft’s new chips until 2025.
While neither company disclosed the nature of the chips, Microsoft did launch a custom Azure Maia AI accelerator and Azure Cobalt 100 CPU server chip in November last year, which is expected to be launched “early” this year to support its own artificial intelligence. Smart service. Cobalt 100 is based on the Arm architecture, and Intel happened to have been optimizing its 18A process for Arm design since April last year (and later even became an Arm investor), so this cooperation is likely to bring about the next generation of cobalt CPUs.
In addition to the usual efficiency improvements that come with node size reduction, Intel 18A offers “the industry’s first backside power solution,” according to the IEEE spectrum, separates the top power interconnect layer from the data interconnect layer and moves the former underneath the silicon substrate – as the name suggests. This obviously improves voltage regulation and reduces resistance, allowing for faster logic and lower power consumption, especially when applied to 3D stacking.
During Intel’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Pat Gelsinger confirmed that “18A is expected to be production ready in the second half of 2024.” Given that Intel’s own 18A-based processors – “Clearwater Forest” for servers and “Panther Lake” for clients – won’t be available until 2025, it’s likely that Microsoft’s next chips will arrive in similar listed within the time frame.
At an Intel event earlier today, the executive shared an expanded Intel foundry process technology roadmap featuring ASML’s “High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet” (High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography system. of the new 14A (1.4nm) node.according to Anand TechnologyAlthough risk production won’t take place until late 2026, this 14A leap could help Intel catch up after its late adoption of EUV at its Intel 4 (7nm) node.
Intel Foundry is the brainchild of Gelsinger, who established the unit immediately after taking over as CEO in February 2021 as part of his ambitious plan to position Intel in the contract chip manufacturing market against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Samsung and other companies contend. Before Microsoft, Intel Foundry’s customer list already included MediaTek, Qualcomm and Amazon. The company still plans to become “the second-largest external foundry by 2030” in terms of manufacturing revenue, which it believes could happen as early as this year.
This article contains affiliate links; if you click on such links and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.
from Tech Empire Solutions https://techempiresolutions.com/microsofts-upcoming-custom-chips-will-be-made-by-intel/
via https://techempiresolutions.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment