Thread: Anandtech News

Late last year Intel announced massive plans to increase its global chip production capacities by upgrading, expanding, and equipping four of its fabs. As it turns out, the company is not going to stop there and is considering to build a brand new fab in Israel, which will cost $11 billion.
Moshe Kahlon, Israeli Finance Minister, on Tuesday confirmed that Intel had applied for a grant of about $1 billion from the government for its new investment plan to build a fab that would cost $11 billion. If everything goes as planned, the investment will not only be the biggest of its kind in Israel, but Intel will also build the largest semiconductor fab in the region. Furthermore, the expansion will add 1,000 new employees to Intel’s staff of approximately 13,000 in Israel.
“The moment the company comes to Israel and invests $10 billion, and it receives a grant of 9%, that means 91% of it stays here,” said Mr. Kahlon in an interview on Army Radio. “There are always such discounts, there are always incentives.”
Intel and Ministry of Finance reportedly started talks about the new fab several weeks ago, so the production facility is a few years away. In addition to securing incentives from the Israeli government, Intel will have to apply for permissions from various local authorities. That said, peculiarities of the fab as well as process technologies that it will use remain to be seen.
Since Intel is already investing in two fabs in the U.S. (Fab 42 in Arizona and D1X in Oregon), a fab in Ireland, and a fab in Israel, it is unlikely that Intel needs to start building another fab in Israel as soon as possible.
In addition to manufacturing operations, Intel also has rather vast R&D operations in Israel. The company develops CPU microarchitectures, Mobileye advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), RealSense 3D cameras, communication, and other technologies in the country. The addition of an advanced fab will clearly increase significance of Israel for Intel.
Related Reading

• Israeli Parliament Approves Intel Fab 28 Expansion Grant
• Intel to Expand Production Capacities at Multiple Fabs
• Intel Further Boosts CapEx to Meet Demand for 14nm Chips
• Intel: EUV-Enabled 7nm Process Tech is on Track
• Intel Investing $1B to Meet 14nm Demand: Prioritizing High-End Core and Xeon

Sources: Globes, Reuters



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Today Apple announced their first quarter earnings for their 2019 fiscal year, and with the fortunes of the company so tied to the iPhone in a stumbling smartphone market, revenues fell despite some segments outperforming estimates. Revenue for the quarter was down 5% year-over-year to $84.3 billion. Gross margin was 38%, down 0.4% from a year ago. Operating income was down 11.1% to $23.3 billion, but thanks to lower taxes, net income was down only 0.5%, coming in at $19.97 billion. Earnings per share were at an all-time high, thanks to share buybacks, with a diluted EPS of $4.18, up 7.4% from a year ago.

Apple Q1 2019 Financial Results (GAAP)
	Q1'2019	Q4'2018	Q1'2018
Revenue (in Billions USD)	$84.310	$62.900	$88.293
Gross Margin (in Billions USD)	$32.031	$24.084	$33.912
Operating Income (in Billions USD)	$23.346	$16.118	$26.274
Net Income (in Billions USD)	$19.695	$14.125	$20.065
Margins	38.0%	38.5%	38.4%
Earnings per Share (in USD)	$4.18	$2.91	$3.89

iPhone sales struggled, at least by Apple standards, and due to dropping unit sales, Apple has stopped reporting individual unit sales numbers. As such, we can only look at revenue, but this doesn’t paint a great picture either, with revenue down 14.9% year-over-year, to $51.98 billion. It’s still a huge amount of revenue for a single product category of course.
Despite the drop in iPhone revenue, not all news is bad for Apple. Both Mac and iPad had revenue gains this quarter, with the Mac up 8.7% to $7.4 billion, and iPad was up almost 17% to $6.7 billion for the quarter. Those gains definitely helped out when the iPhone took such a big hit.
Apple’s wearables, home, and accessories, which includes the Apple Watch, Beats, and more, also had a good quarter, with revenue up 33.3% over the holiday quarter. Without unit sales, it’s hard to break out what segments are doing well here, and with Apple adding new products to this category it also grows in that regard, but nevertheless, this is solid growth.
Apple’s services segment has quickly become their secondary unit for revenue, with continued growth of just over 19% year-over-year to $10.9 billion.

Apple Q1 2019 Segment Revenue (Billions USD)
	Q1'2019	Q1'2018	Year/Year Change
iPhone	$51.982	$61.104	-14.9%
iPad	$6.729	$5.755	+16.9%
Mac	$7.416	$6.824	+8.7%
Wearables, Home, and Accessories	$7.308	$5.481	+33.3%
Services	$10.875	$9.129	+19.1%

For Q2, Apple is expecting revenues between $55 and $59 billion, with a gross margin of between 37 and 38%.
Source: Apple Investor Relations

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AMD announced their fourth quarter earnings for their 2018 fiscal year today, and the company has continued its upward trajectory, with revenue gains of 6% year-over-year to $1.42 billion. Gross margin, which was long a burden for the company, is now right in the sweet spot at 38%, up 4% from a year ago. Operating income for the quarter was $28 million, compared to an operating loss of $2 million last year, and net income is now in the black as well at $38 million, compared to a net loss of $19 million a year ago. That resulted in earnings per share of $0.04, compared to a $0.02 loss per share in Q4 2017.

AMD Q4 2018 Financial Results (GAAP)
	Q4'2018	Q3'2018	Q4'2017
Revenue	$1419M	$1653M	$1340M
Gross Margin	38%	40%	34%
Operating Income	$28M	$150M	-$2M
Net Income	$38M	$102M	-$19M
Earnings Per Share	$0.04	$0.09	-$0.02

Computing and Graphics has been the main contributor of AMD’s resurgence ever since AMD’s Ryzen CPU was launched, and revenue for this segment was up 8.6% to $986 million. Even more important, operating income for the segment was up 248% to $115 million. AMD sounds to have a busy year for 2019 which should be great news for its investors and customers.

AMD Q4 2018 Computing and Graphics
	Q4'2018	Q3'2018	Q4'2017
Revenue	$986M	$938M	$908M
Operating Income	$115M	$100M	$33M

Enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom didn’t perform quite as well, with revenue more or less flat year-over-year at $433 million. AMD’s APU wins in both the Xbox and PlayStation have contributed a lot to this segment over the last couple of years, but the enterprise CPU space may be a bit tougher nut to crack than the consumer market, but the flat revenue is deceiving, since EPYC sales are offsetting lower semi-custom sales. AMD’s operating loss for this segment did improve though, with a $6 million loss this quarter compared to a $13 million loss a year ago, thanks to the higher margins in enterprise processors.

AMD Q4 2018 Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom
	Q4'2018	Q3'2018	Q4'2017
Revenue	$433M	$715M	$432M
Operating Income	-$6M	$86M	-$13M

AMD’s All Other had a sizeable loss this quarter at $81 million, compared to a $22 million loss a year ago. AMD chalks this up to a $45 million charge related to older technology licenses.
In addition to their earnings, AMD also announced a seventh amendment to their wafer agreement with Global Foundries, outlining costs for the next couple of years.
For Q1 2019, AMD expects revenue to be about $1.25 billion, plus or minus $50 million, which will be a 24% decrease over Q1 2018, due to the lack of cryptocurrency sales, but offset but CPU sales.
Source: AMD Investor Relations

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Intel has always ensured that its high-end server platforms, one where multiple CPUs can act as a single system, have the highest core count processors. These servers go into the most expensive deployments, so they can afford the most expensive silicon to produce. The consumer market by contrast is very price sensitive by comparison, so consumers get fewer cores. However, consumers have always asked for a way of getting all of those cores, preferably in an overclockable chip, at more reasonable prices. Intel has answered your call, with the Xeon W-3175X. All 28-cores, all the time. This is our review.

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Samsung said it had started mass production of its eUFS 2.1 storage solution featuring a 1 TB capacity for smartphones. Apart from its massive capacity, the drive offers a sequential read performance that is two times faster when compared to a typical SATA SSD. Samsung expects the device to be used by high-end smartphones “soon”.

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G.Skill has released the industry’s first hexa-channel DDR4 memory kits designed specifically for Intel’s 28-core Xeon W-3175X processor for extreme workstations. The top-of-the-range kit features a 192 GB capacity and operates at 4000 MT/s data transfer rate, thus combining extreme performance and capacity. To make it even more attractive, the modules use G.Skill’s ‘blingy’ Trident Z Royal heat spreaders.



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Asetek has introduced one of the industry’s first closed-loop liquid cooling solutions specifically designed for Intel’s 28-core Xeon W-3175X processor for extreme workstations. The 690LX-PN cooler can dissipate up to 500 W of heat and therefore enables owners to overclock the CPU beyond its stock frequency.

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Intel today announced that its board of directors had named Robert Swan, its CFO and interim CEO, as full-time chief executive officer. Mr. Swan will be the company’s first CEO with financial background. As the head of the company, Mr. Swan will continue Intel’s transformation from a PC-centric to a data-centric company with a focus on improving execution and aggressive capturing addressable markets using ambitious technologies.

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Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series codenamed Kittson processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel, and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture.
The current-generation octa and quad-core Itanium 9700-series processors were introduced by Intel in 2017, in the process becoming the final processors based on the IA-64 ISA. Kittson for its part was a clockspeed-enhanced version of the Itanium 9500-series ‘Poulson’ microarchitecture launched in 2012, and featured a 12 instructions per cycle issue width, 4-way Hyper-Threading, and multiple RAS capabilities not found on Xeon processors back then. It goes without saying that the writing has been on the wall for Itanium for a while now, and Intel has been preparing for an orderly wind down for quite some time.

At this point, the only systems that actually use Itanium 9700-series CPUs are the HPE Integrity Superdome machines, which are running the HP-UX 11i v3 operating system and launched in mid-2017. So Intel's sole Itanium customer will have to submit their final Itanium orders, as well as orders for Intel’s C112/C114 scalable memory buffers by January 30, 2020. Intel will then ship its last Itanium CPUs by July 29, 2021. HPE for its part will support their systems through at least December 31, 2025, but depending on how much stock HPE wants to keep on hand, they'll presumably stop selling them a few years sooner than that.
With the EOL plan for the Itanium 9700-series CPUs in place, it certainly means that this is the end of the road for the whole Itanium project, both for HPE and Intel. The former has been offering Xeon-based NonStop and Integrity servers for years now, whereas the latter effectively ceased development of new CPUs featuring the IA-64 ISA earlier this decade. The machines running these CPUs will of course continue their operations through at least late 2025 (or until HPE drops HP-UX 11i v3) simply because mission-critical systems are bought for the long-haul, but Intel will cease shipments of Itaniums in 2.5 years from now.
Related Reading:

• Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9500 ‘Poulson’ CPUs
• Intel’s Itanium Takes One Last Breath: Itanium 9700 Series CPUs Released
• Intel to Release New Itanium CPUs in 2012: New Architecture and Up to Eight Cores

Source: Intel

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The Supermicro C9Z390-PGW is the top model from its SuperO range and is the only mainstream Z390 motherboard to encompass a Broadcom PEX8747 PLX chip (one workstation focused board has it also). Also featured is a pair of M.2 slots, two U.2 ports, a dual network ports (one 10G), and Wi-Fi support.

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