The Hot Take: ASML's monopoly needs get challenged, but not sure if Quantum will just make them invalid. We'll have to wait and see I guess.
Intel has entered high-volume manufacturing using ASML's High NA extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology for a subset of its Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" processors, becoming the first company to ship high-volume logic products manufactured with the technology. ASML announced the milestone in an official press release on Wednesday, July 15, confirming that Intel Foundry is running the qualified High NA layers on its Intel 18A process node in Oregon.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 reshapes chipmakingAccording to ASML, Intel is using High NA EUV to pattern selected Intel 18A layers, with products already shipping to customers at yields matched to those achieved on ASML's existing NXE EUV platform. These layers are dual-qualified, meaning the same layer can be exposed on either an existing 0.33 NA NXE scanner or a 0.55 NA EXE scanner, with the resulting wafers being interchangeable.High NA EUV has long been viewed as the successor to today's EUV lithography, promising to extend semiconductor scaling by enabling manufacturers to print smaller, denser circuit patterns that are becoming difficult to achieve with existing tools. Until now, the platform had been confined to R&D work. ASML’s announcement marks the first time High NA EUV has been used to produce and ship a high-volume commercial logic product. Panther Lake, built on the Intel 18A manufacturing process, is spearheading this transition. Rather than replacing the company's entire lithography flow, Intel is applying High NA EUV to specific layers while the remainder of the chip continues to be manufactured using conventional lithography. High NA EUV builds on the same 13.5-nanometer extreme ultraviolet light used by today's scanners but increases the optical system's numerical aperture (NA) — how much light a lens system can collect and focus onto a silicon wafer — from 0.33 to 0.55. The higher value resolves finer features in a single exposure, allowing chipmakers to print smaller patterns with greater precision and process control.This increased resolution is expected to reduce reliance on complex multi-patterning techniques for some of the industry's most demanding layers, thereby simplifying manufacturing and improving feature fidelity. In the long term, these capabilities are expected to support higher transistor densities and improved performance in future processors, particularly as AI workloads continue driving demand for increasingly advanced semiconductor technologies."With increased resolution and better process control, the introduction of High NA EUV marks a substantial development in semiconductor lithography," said ASML President and CEO Christophe Fouquet. "We are proud to play a role in enabling the smaller, denser patterning that will accelerate advancements in AI and other emerging technologies." Intel and ASML have been working towards this milestone for several years. In 2024, Intel completed installation of one of the industry's first commercial High NA EUV lithography systems, the TWINSCAN EXE:5000, at its Hillsboro, Oregon, research and development facility. The company later became the first to qualify ASML's second-generation TWINSCAN EXE:5200B, which increases wafer throughput and overlay accuracy while incorporating an improved EUV light source over its predecessor.While the announcement represents High NA EUV's commercial debut, it does not mean Panther Lake is manufactured entirely using the new lithography platform. Instead, Intel has qualified High NA for selected layers, an approach that mirrors how new lithography generations are typically introduced into advanced semiconductor production before broader adoption across future nodes.Intel Foundry Executive Vice President and General Manager Naga Chandrasekaran said that qualifying the High NA process option on selected Intel 18A product layers enables the company's existing tool fleet to deliver higher manufacturing output while providing flexibility for future process technologies.Panther Lake itself is not a future product. Intel launched Core Ultra Series 3 at CES on January 5, 2026, opened preorders the following day, and put systems on shelves globally from January 27. The Core Ultra X9 378H followed in April alongside the value-tier Core Series 3, code-named Wildcat Lake, and the handheld-focused Arc G3 parts arrived on May 28.The announcement’s statement that the product is shipping to customers refers to wafer flow from the fab into the supply chain, rather than to a product launch. ASML says the two companies will continue working on High NA readiness, with the flexibility to incorporate the technology into future nodes based on customer needs — most immediately, Intel 14A, which Intel has designed to use High NA on a set of its tightest-pitch layers.
Intel is reportedly making a significant change to the manufacturing strategy for its upcoming Nova Lake processor family by shifting the majority of compute tile production back to Intel Foundry.
The Hot Take: Makes sense, especially if China takes Taiwan....
According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Apple agreed to use Intel's U.S. chipmaking plants after White House officials pressured Tim Cook during tariff-relief talks last summer. MacRumors reports: In August 2025, Apple CEO Tim Cook was in Washington to lobby the Trump administration to drop its proposed 100 percent tariff on semiconductor imports -- a levy that would have raised costs across Apple's product line. Apple reportedly secured an exemption after pledging to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S., although many of those investments were already planned. During the meetings, president Trump and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick are said to have urged Cook to use Intel's fabrication plants to make some of Apple's chips. The link between the tariff talks and the Apple-Intel deal had not been previously reported.
Almost a year later, Trump announced via his Truth Social platform that Apple would begin using Intel-made chips in some products. "We need to design and build our Chips right here in America," the president posted. The news sent Intel shares to record highs. According to a person familiar with the negotiations cited by the WSJ, Apple plans to have Intel make chips for both Mac laptops and iPhones. The report doesn't say which chips or in what volume, and Apple is expected to remain reliant on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, for the majority of its custom silicon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Hot Take: We'll have to see, they just keep milking Ai at the cost of liquidating a whole other industry.
The GeForce RTX 50-series desktop graphics lineup has remained unchanged for just over a year now (since the introduction of the RTX 5050), and none of the conversations we've had at major trade shows suggests that a mid-cycle Super refresh will occur any time soon. But there are still signs that such an update could still happen at some point, and the latest sign comes from Seasonic, which has listed an RTX 5080 Super, an RTX 5070 Ti Super, and RTX 5070 Ti Super in its PSU wattage calculator. Go deeper with TH Premium: GPUs(Image credit: Noctua)Desktop RoadmapEnterprise RoadmapRubin in-depthThe Stout Owl: The ultimate Noctua G2 PCYou can click through the calculator and assemble a hypothetical system with these unannounced products inside. To be useful, this calculator also provides board power numbers for these as-yet-unreleased cards, and that gives us another bit of juicy info. Given that no official specifications for these GPUs exist, it's impossible to say whether these figures are accurate. But it does allow us to speculate a bit on how they might stack up to existing products. Unannounced RTX 50 Super-series TGPsGraphics CardTotal Graphics Power (W)% ChangeRTX 5070250--RTX 5070 Super275*10% RTX 5070 Ti300--RTX 5070 Ti Super350*17%RTX 5080380--RTX 5080 Super415*15% *As listed in Seasonic PSU calculator. Unconfirmed by Nvidia. Seasonic gives this purported RTX 5080 Super a board power of 415W in its calculator, or 15% higher than the existing RTX 5080's 360W envelope. That makes sense, because the RTX 5080's GB203 GPU is already fully enabled, so any Super version of that card would have to lean on higher power limits and more aggressive clock speeds to see any baseline performance benefit. That figure could also partially account for slightly higher power usage from 8 GB more GDDR7 memory on such a card. Past RTX 50 Super-series rumors have suggested that Nvidia will boost VRAM capacity on those products by moving to higher-density GDDR7 modules with 3GB of capacity each. GDDR7's power consumption as part of the overall board picture is relatively small, but more of it will still matter. If Seasonic's figures are accurate, we should also expect a similarly sized TGP increase out of the RTX 5070 Ti Super, whose 350W rating is 17% higher than that of the RTX 5070 Ti. The RTX 5070 Super, meanwhile, gets only a 10% TGP bump over the RTX 5070, from 250W to 275W. Both of these cards rely on GPUs that are slightly cut down from their full available resources, so it's possible that Nvidia could boost their performance through a balance of enabling more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) in addition to boosting clocks through higher power envelopes. Beware of extrapolating performance improvements directly from these percentages, though. Our own testing has shown that any real-world performance benefits from these power limit increases are likely to be smaller than those figures would suggest. As our review of the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z showed, the largest performance boosts from higher power limits are likely to be concentrated in ray-traced and path-traced games, whose computational intensity is significantly higher than pure raster titles and is more likely to run the GPU into its power limits. In any event, we shouldn't expect to see these products any time soon. Nvidia has instead been focused on getting more out of existing Blackwell silicon with software improvements such as DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi-Frame Generation multipliers up to 6X. These technologies enable higher output frame rates and image quality with lower input resolution than past DLSS technologies, and the boost to both performance and image quality from those technologies in tandem has certainly made existing Blackwell products more appealing than they were at launch.But as monitor refresh rates continue to climb thanks to ongoing improvements to OLED and LCD panels, and next-generation HDMI 2.2 connectors looming over 2027, a hardware update of some kind that boosts baseline performance and potentially implements support for those standards seems practical at some point. Given these primarily consumer-focused improvements, an announcement at CES 2027 or Computex 2027 might make sense. As with any future product rumors, however, only time will truly tell.
The Hot Take: Was almost like they were purposefully crippling their processors under past management.
Intel Nova Lake CPUs will mark the return of AVX-512, a feature that has long been abandoned by the company for its client CPUs. AVX-512 Is Coming Back To Intel's Consumer CPUs, Starting With Nova Lake Intel has had a love-hate relationship with AVX-512 on its consumer CPUs. The AVX-512 instruction set was last seen on Intel's Tiger Lake (11th Gen) family, and since then, the company has offered no support for it on its modern-day chips. Meanwhile, AMD has been offering AVX-512 support on its Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips, both client and server platforms. Last year, we […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-nova-lake-cpus-to-bring-back-avx-512-support-six-years-after-it-was-abandoned/
Intel has published a new patent on its XBM memory, which is proposed as a replacement for HBM4, offering much higher bandwidth capabilities. XBM vs HBM: Intel's New Proposed DRAM Solution Extends To 32 GT/s Speeds, While Reducing Costs Through UCIe Links HBM continues to be the standard for AI accelerators, but more recently, we have seen LPDDR memory being used to overcome shortages, prices, and power associated with the standard. Intel's past attempts at DRAM, such as HMC (Hybrid Memory Cube) and MCDRAM, faced various issues and never came to market, but with XBM, Intel is course-correcting its DRAM […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-xbm-memory-takes-aim-at-hbm4-32-gt-s-speeds-lower-costs-through-ucie-links/
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 assembles those components into machines, the machines into complete fabs, and then aims to mass-produce the fabs themselves. It pairs the hardware with Studio, an in-browser, collaborative EDA tool for layout, schematic, and simulation work, previously branded as Atomic Studio.Rather than moving 300mm wafers through ginormous production lines, Fab2 targets small, software-defined fabs that pattern chips far smaller than a wafer and turn prototypes around in hours. Zeloof built the concept's proof point as a teenager, fabricating lithographic chips in his parents' garage down to roughly 300nm features before co-founding this company with Keller in 2022.The method's main constraint, however, is throughput. Electron-beam lithography writes patterns directly rather than projecting them through a mask, which makes it slow: a single patterning step on a small chip can take far longer than an EUV scanner needs to expose an entire 300mm wafer. That's a big tradeoff that only really suits prototyping and low-volume runs rather than high-volume production at commercial foundries.Fab2 now operates three sites: a 120,000 square foot facility in Austin serves as the new headquarters for research and production, a 30,000 square foot site in Lockhart houses the "fab fab" itself, and the original 25,000 square foot "garage fab" remains in San Francisco. Fab2 said it shifted its hiring focus to Texas after four years in California, and Tracxn lists the company at around 84 employees as of May 2026. The startup raised a reported $15 million seed round in 2023, led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, at a valuation of about $100 million, with angel backing from Naval Ravikant, Nat Friedman, and Fred Ehrsam.In moving to Texas, Fab2's model of many small, printable fabs now sits beside the likes of Tesla and SpaceX, which announced Terafab back in March, a single Austin megafab targeting a terawatt of annual compute at a cost of up to $119 billion. The contrasting businesses are clearly not competitors; Fab2 sells small fabs and prototyping speed, while Terafab is built for high-volume AI. But they represent competing answers to the same question of how the U.S. should expand its chipmaking capacity — consolidate everything in massive manufacturing campuses, or distribute production across many small, replicable fabs?
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, 360mm, and 420mm for enthusiast-grade PCs. Built using the […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/noctua-confirms-nl-lc1-chromax-black-aio-series/
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...