Category Archives: News

Article note: Intel's fab situation the last few years has been fascinating.

Intel Skylake die shot, built using the 14nm process. (credit: Intel)

In its earnings conference call, Intel has warned that chip shortages are set to continue into the third quarter of the year, However, the company has also said that its 10nm manufacturing process is improving faster than anticipated and that it will be able to sell more 10nm chips this year than previously predicted.

Intel's troubled migration to its 10nm manufacturing process has had many consequences in the wider computing industry. Gartner and IDC both say that some of the shrinkage of the PC market is due to a lack of processors, and companies such as Microsoft have stated that their financial performance would have been better were it not for the shortages. Intel was expected to be building a wide range of mainstream processors on its 10nm at this point, reducing the pressure on its 14nm facilities. The delay to 10nm has prevented this.

So great is the demand for 14nm manufacturing capacity that in some areas the company has even had to go backwards. Most 300-series chipsets, introduced with Coffee Lake processors, are built on 14nm. In December last year, Intel released a new chipset, B365, aimed at mainstream consumer and corporate desktops. This chipset is built on the previous generation 22nm process to free up 14nm capacity. It's also believed that the company has issued a 22nm version of the H310 chipset, called H310C. These moves both enable the company to use its limited 14nm manufacturing capacity for chips with a higher margin than these chipsets. The company has also invested $1.5 billion on machinery to increase its 14nm output.

Article note: Isn't this an old - like late 80s old - idea?

Article note: Unfortunately I read this as "Bullshit is both rewarded and learned." Professionally, there only seems to be impostor syndrome or bullshitting, and the latter is far more individually rewarded.

Article note: Microsoft has been teasing and failing to deliver mid-90s BeOS feature since the early 2000s.

Article note: Hey look, a serious book on a drum I've been beating for years.

Article note: We "accidentally" vacuumed up and analyzed millions of people's data using the access we demanded. The only question is "Is Facebook criminally incompetent, or simply criminal." Neither is a good look.

Article note: Article isn't wrong about the problem, but doesn't even _consider_ professionalizing teaching faculty. It notices that overworked unstable adjuncts provide an inferior educational experience, but also seems to assume that being taught by people whose attention is largely devoted to scrabbling for the dwindling pool of public funding and metric-gamed publication output that their professional future is almost entirely dependent on is magically educationally superior. To teach enrollments anything like current demand with tenure track primarily-research faculty would require a massive increase in public funding for research (which would be fine too), or you're just changing the problem to a 7-year professional life as each cohort doesn't stand a chance at tenure because of teaching demands and lack of funding. So open up the process. I'd _jump_ at a tenure-track position where my DOE was primarily teaching and only expected to be 20% research. Positions like that would solve the problem without requiring highly improbable external actions.

Article note: There are a whole lot of perverse incentives at work here.

Article note: Kleptocracy anyone?

Enlarge (credit: Ken Teegardin)

Just in time for Tax Day, the for-profit tax preparation industry is about to realize one of its long-sought goals. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are moving to permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.

Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), passed the Taxpayer First Act, a wide-ranging bill making several administrative changes to the IRS that is sponsored by Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Mike Kelly (R-Pa).

In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program, which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it would threaten the industry’s profits.

Article note: Interesting to see non-enthusiast (either high-end/gaming or vintage) folks starting to learn about garbage thermal compounds and their age degradation. I guess the usable lifespans on computers are getting such that it will come up more.