October Update: GPTW, Intel Fabs, Apple, and More

27 Oct 2021 • 5 minute read

These monthly updates normally occur on the last Friday of the month, but that is a Cadence Global Recharge Day so I won't be working. It turns out we have a product announcement tomorrow, so today is the last practical day before the last Friday of the month. No offtopic post before the break either, as is my usual habit. I'm taking the whole of Thanksgiving week off, so the November update will be on the 18th.

As always, this update is a collection of various topics, none of which justify an entire Breakfast Bytes post on their own. Some are updates to previous posts, some are just topical items of news.

Great Place to Work

Once again Cadence is honored by Fortune Magazine as "One of the World's Best Workplaces", ranking at #17. It is our sixth year appearing on the list. We also appeared at #7 on Newsweek's list of "100 Most Loved Workplaces". This is the first time Newsweek has assembled this list, so obviously it is our first time on it.

Intel Arizona Fabs

There are fabs being constructed all over the world, of course, but recently few in the US. Since Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel as CEO at the start of this year, he has said that Intel is firmly in the foundry business. To support that, and other production, Intel is building two fabs in Arizona, with an investment of $20B. Groundbreaking took place at the end of September. They are officially Fab 52 and Fab 62 (no, I don't understand the numbering of Intel fabs...nor their processors!). The most significant thing about these fabs is that they are in the US, not Asia.

You can read about Intel's strategy in the Gelsinger era in my posts:

You can watch a video of the whole groundbreaking::

Fab Spending

But it is not just Intel. SEMI's latest report has the headline "Global Fab Equipment Spending Projected to Reach New High of Nearly $100 Billion in 2022". When a modern state-of-the-art fab costs $15-20B, that number is not all that surprising.

You can read Christian Dieseldorff's summary (and, of course, SEMI will sell you the detailed report). The overall summary is:

The World Fab Forecast report lists 1,417 facilities and lines globally, including 129 facilities and lines starting volume production in 2021 and beyond.

That's 129 fabs under construction or equipment move-in. Let's just say a lot.

Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max

Apple announced its new MacBook Pro products. You can read about them all over the internet if you are interested in buying one. But for us at Breakfast Bytes, the chips are the big news. There are two, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max.They are huge and seem to offer performance equivalent to its CPU and GPU competitors at a fraction of the power. The first chip in the series was the M1 (with no suffix, just plain M1). I wrote about that in my post Arm Goes For It. My personal laptop is an M1-based MacBook Air and I love it. It doesn't even have a fan. Both chips are built in 5nm. The Pro has 38 billion transistors and the Max a whopping 57 billion (the difference seems to be mainly that the Pro has a16-core GPU and the Max a 32-core GPU, plus more memory). See the diagrams below for more details on the SoCs.

If you want a detailed review of the chips (to the extent that can be done without actually having run lots of tests on the real silicon), then I recommend AnandTech's Apple's M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated: New Performance and Efficiency Heights.

GlobalFoundries and Arteris

GlobalFoundries has filed to go public, with a valuation of around $25B and if you want to really dig in then here is the S-1. If you'd rather not dig in yourself, but want to read the opinion of someone who has, then I recommend Global Foundries S-1 Breakdown: A tale of two Global Foundries.

To read more about GlobalFoundries, see my posts:

Network-on-chip IP supplier Arteris also filed to go public. Here is their S-1. Arteris has had a weird upbringing. It was started in France, and its products became reasonably widely used, especially at Qualcomm. Qualcomm then purchased rights to the technology...and also the engineering organization. The rest of Arteris supported the non-Qualcomm customers. I assumed it would gradually lose all its customers and fade away, but instead, it rebuilt a new engineering organization and continued to sell its FlexNoc and other products successfully. Recently, in June, Arteris announced its 100th customer. You can read the press release about it.

I interviewed Arteris' VP marketing Kurt Schuler in History of ISO 26262 where he is on the committee.

UPDATE: GF went public on 28th October at $47, giving it a market cap of $25B. Arteris went public on 27th October.

USB-C Connector for All Phones

It looks as if the European Union is going to mandate that all phones must have a USB-C connector so that any power supply will be able to work with any phone. Of course, this is directed almost entirely at Apple, since pretty much all new phones already have a USB-C connector. If the rule becomes law, it won't actually take effect for a couple of years, so my expectation is that Apple phones will switch entirely to wireless charging as they seem to be doing already with the magsafe disc (not to be confused with the old magsafe for laptops, nor the new magsafe announced last week for the new Macbook Pros). Not inconceivable, they could still use the Lightning connector for charging except in Europe where it would be disabled and all charging would be wireless. Touché.

This is probably a bad idea since it will make it next to impossible to introduce a new and better connector. If this standardization had been done a few years ago, we'd all be stuck with some variant on the mini-USB connector and it would have been illegal to add USB-C to a phone (unless it had two charging connectors).

To read more about USB-C, see my post One Connector to Rule Them All: USB Type-C.

Design Automation Conference

I will do a preview post for DAC soon, but in the meantime let me point out that discounted registration for DAC ends on November 1st. You have just a few days.

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