The Hot Take: New Micro-FAB? Jim Keller involvement, interesting.
Atomic Semi, the semiconductor tooling startup founded by chip architect Jim Keller and DIY fabrication pioneer Sam Zeloof, has rebranded as Fab2 and moved its operations to Texas, according to the company's new site at fab2.com. The rebrand recasts the company around the idea they're calling a "fab fab," a factory that mass-produces small semiconductor fabs and the tools inside them.Fab2 designs and builds every tool in its fabs in-house, from pumps, valves, and gas lines to lithography and the vacuum chambers that house it. The company…
The company confirmed it in an unusual way, but it seems legit, and as per the announcement, the coolers should arrive soon. Noctua Announces NL-LC1 Chromax.Black AIO Series Despite Exclusion From the Roadmap; The New Variant is Expected to Arrive This Year The Noctua's latest and first-ever AIO cooler series was dropped two weeks ago. The NL-LC1 is what Noctua aims for, superior cooling, which is available in various form factors. Whether you want to cool a mid-range or a high-end CPU, it offers the AIO in various sizes, including 240mm,…
The Hot Take: I really wonder if this will deflate the Ai bubble even a little bit.
The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler support for ACE...
The Hot Take: Intel Ramping things up to play catch up and win volume from TSMC.
Intel this week initiated expansion of its Bowers Campus in Santa Clara, California, in a bid to produce more photomasks (reticles) in the U.S. The company intends to build a new manufacturing facility and a new utility building at the site, which will reinforce the site's position as a key producer of photomasks for Intel.Go deeper with TH Premium: Chipmaking(Image credit: tsmc)A deeper look at the chipmaking supply chainTSMC's $165 billion U.S. investments examinedChina reportedly reverse-engineers EUV toolChina bets on DUV, as EUV blockade…
The Hot Take: Nore more docker on Windows? Interesting.
Windows 11 can now build, run, and manage Linux containers on its own, without Docker Desktop in the background. Microsoft calls this WSL Containers, and after installing the preview and running a few real workloads through it, here is what works, what still needs Docker, and how to get it running on your own PC.
WSL Container should not be confused with the next version of WSL 2, as we already covered how Microsoft shut down the WSL 3 rumors. It has now shipped as a public preview, so we installed it, built a custom container image from…
The Hot Take: Samsung playing catch up and hopefully over take TSMC? Only time will tell.
Korean chip manufacturing giant Samsung is developing simulation technologies for lithography that rely on quantum computing and artificial intelligence, suggests a report from the Korean press. The technology will be used to run simulations of the first stage of the chip manufacturing process, and Samsung will also rely on artificial intelligence to streamline the process. Through the technology, the firm aims to reduce the time and cost of the lithography and etching processes. Samsung Is Developing Algorithms To Boost Its Photolithography,…
The Hot Take: Oh so the Ultra series aren't just crap then? /smh
It's curious to call this one a leak, exactly, since the original source is direct from AMD and live on the web, but here we go: AMD's Vishal Badole submitted a patch for the Linux Kernel that he describes as adding support for "a Low Power core type, in addition to the existing Performance and Efficiency types." That's pretty clear-cut.
Now,
The Hot Take: Software development world is condensing fast with Ai....
Microsoft is expected to announce another round of layoffs soon. Less than 2.5% of the company's workforce will be affected, according to sources that spoke with Business Insider. Due Microsoft's size, even that small percentage means thousands of people will be affected.An SEC filing from June 30, 2025 showed Microsoft had about 228,000 employees. That figure has fluctuated since then, but it gives a gauge of the size of Microsoft's full-time workforce.Division cuts & AI infrastructureThis round of layoffs will affect thousands of roles…
A new class-action lawsuit filed in California accuses SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron of coordinating DRAM production to artificially restrict supply and maintain elevated prices for consumer memory products.