CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, Circuit Packaging, And All That Jazz -- Apple's M4 Was Revolutionary -- June 30, 2024

Locator: 48026CHIPS.

All that jazz, part 1.

All that jazz, part 2.

With regard to tech, chips, and investing, two recurrent themes on the blog this past year:

• chips are not commodities;
• Biden's CHIPS Act was just the beginning.

On the blog:

Chips: link here.

 Chips, semiconductor: link here.

• Home page for tech: link here.
• The cloud: link here.  
• Streaming: link here. Streaming wars.
• Spatial computing: link here.
• Generative AI: link here. 
• AI: Apple intelligence.
  
• Apple Silicon: link here.
• chip count updates.
• chip count.
  
• Supercomputers: link here.
• Data centers: link here. 
• System on a chip (SOC): link here.
• Apple Intelligence (AI), short title, Siri: link here. 
• WWDC24: link here.
  

• Nodes: link here.
  

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So, What' New?

We start here. From yesterday, news on a Saturday:

From the linked article:

• SK Hyinx to invest $75 billion in AI, chips, over the next three years;
• compare: Biden's CHIPS Act -- $39 billion in tax benefits, loan guarantees and grants
• SK Hynix is the world's #2 memory chip maker
• this company has 175 subsidiaries
• SK Hynix group's electric vehicle battery arm suffered heavy losses and the company needs to "re-group"
• the conglomerate owns the country's largest battery maker, SK On
• "at a time of transition, a preemptive and fundamental change is necessary"
• the company will focus on its AI value chain, including high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, AI data centers and AI services such as personalized AI assistants
• South Korea, home to the world's top memory chip makers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, has fallen behind some rivals in areas such as chip design and contract chip manufacturing

This might be a good time to review Hynix. Wiki link here. The article is full of incredibly interesting data points for investors. The company's major customers include:

• Microsoft
• Apple
• Asus
• Dell,
• MSI,
• HP, Inc
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Note which company is / companies are missing.

Now, most interesting, this April 3, 2024, article in The WSJ:

From the linked article:

• an advanced chip-packaging facility (see below) in West Lafayette, IN;
• mass produce high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a critical component to AI
• memory ≠ processing units (GPUs [Nvidia], or CPUs [AMD])
• memory? Think MU (Micron)
  
• to start mass production in 2H28; more than 1,000 jobs
• state and local universities offered huge incentives
• and then this: SK HYNIX currently dominates as the exclusive HBM partner to Nvidia's most advanced graphic-processor units -- the two types of chips get bundled together to enable the faster data-processing speeds needed fro generative AI such at ChatGPT
• can you say M4?
• Biden's CHIPS act is helping leading producers expand beyond the industry's traditional hubs in Texas, California and Oregon
• the U.S. represented 37% of global chip manufacturing, though it had slumped to 12% within three decades.
• now, spurred by incentives linked to 2022’s $53 billion Chips Act, semiconductor giants have envisioned new American production frontiers in the Midwest. Though the region lacks existing infrastructure, officials in Indiana, Ohio, Kansas and elsewhere pitch their lower overall costs, untapped labor forces and proximity to key resources.

Much more at the linked article, but you get the idea.

Chip-packaging: CPU + GPU + NPU = M4, integrated circuit packaging.

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A Contrarian View: Prudence-Signaling

Link here. 

This is from just two days ago, June 28, 2024.