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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Intel Foundry scores $3B for defense chips
    On a busy Monday, Intel also revealed it won up to $3 billion in funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to establish a secretive manufacturing program called the “Secure Enclave.”

    This is probably the saving grace for Intel, USA will not allow to be dependent on production outside USA, and AFAIK there are no other remaining US foundries left that are remotely competitive with a world leading production process.



  • A dispute over how much profit Intel stood to take from each chip sold to the Japanese electronics giant blocked Intel from settling on the price with Sony,

    Yeah that’s what I thought, Intel simply isn’t competitive. For a console SOC the CPU part eats about twice the power of an AMD, and the GPU part cost about twice to make, because it needs twice the die area to compete with AMD on performance. This creates design restrictions, and makes the system more expensive to build.

    I’m surprised Intel was even in the game, they’d obviously have to sell at a deficit to compete. Maybe it was to prevent AMD from getting a sweet deal?
    If Intel were serious about it, and had confidence in their technologies, they’d have taken a bad deal now, and improved their technologies to make it profitable later. But Intel already has problems with profitability, so maybe they won’t take on another loss giving investment.

    When AMD took the console business from Nvidia/Intel, they made a cutthroat offer, that Nvidia refused to compete with, and now AMD is dominant and make good money on consoles.





  • This is one of the economic indicators Russia can’t hide, and it’s not looking good.
    In 2022 when they increased interest rates to 20%, they strengthened the Ruble by a lot, doubling the value of the Ruble.
    But the Ruble has been declining since, and now even with nearly as high an interest rate of 19%, The Ruble is almost as low as the dramatic drop in 2022 that caused the interest hike to 20%.
    This is the second time in a couple of months they increase interest rates, and combined they are a 3% increase in a short time. And the Ruble remains at a low value.

    For anyone in doubt, this is a strong indicator that the Russian economy can’t handle the pressure of the war. Russian wages are losing value fast, and investments are very expensive, so a further decline in the Russian economy is likely. Especially since there is no cheap unemployed labor to draw growth from, which there normally would be in a situation of economic decline, but there is already full employment.

    The Russian economy is in decline and overheating at the same time.