Month: March 2022

Enlarge / Ford Mustang Mach-E GT. (credit: Ford)

Ford announced today that it will be splitting its electric and fossil fuel vehicle business into two separate divisions. The announcement has investors rallying to the stock but leaves plenty of questions unanswered about the future of the 118-year-old company.

The reorganization caps weeks of speculation that the automaker might split into two separate companies. Ford has said that its future lies in electric vehicles, but for now, the vast majority of its profits come from fossil fuel cars and trucks.

“We are going all in, creating separate but complementary businesses that give us start-up speed and unbridled innovation in Ford Model e together with Ford Blue’s industrial know-how, volume and iconic brands like Bronco, that start-ups can only dream about,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.

Enlarge / A sample chiplet design, with the CPU dies made with a more advanced manufacturing process and the chipset and some other functions made on older, cheaper processes. (credit: Universal Chipset Interconnect Express)

Some of the CPU industry’s heaviest hitters—including Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Arm, TSMC, and Samsung—are banding together to define a new standard for chiplet-based processor designs. Dubbed Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe for short), the new standard seeks to define an open, interoperable standard for combining multiple silicon dies (or chiplets) into a single package.

Intel, AMD, and others are already designing or selling chiplet-based processors in some form—most of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs use chiplets, and Intel’s upcoming Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors will, too. But these chips all use different interconnects to enable communication between chiplets. The UCIe standard, if it succeeds, will replace those with a single standard, in theory making it much easier for smaller companies to take advantage of chiplet-based designs or for one company to include another company’s silicon in its own products.

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  The UCIe (which is the name of the specification and the organization) lays out its goals in defining the UCIe standard. [credit:
  Universal Chipset Interconnect Express ]

Chiplet-based designs are advantageous when making large chips on cutting-edge manufacturing nodes partly because they cut down on the amount of silicon manufacturers need to throw out. If a manufacturing defect affects one CPU core, tossing (or binning) a single 8-core chiplet is a whole lot cheaper than having to toss a huge 16- or 32-core processor die. Chiplet designs also let you mix-and-match chips and manufacturing processes. You could, for example, use an older, cheaper process for your chipset and a newer, cutting-edge process for your processor cores and cache. Or you could put an AMD GPU on the same package as an Intel CPU.

Enlarge / Well, we didn’t see this one coming. But based on rumors that Ars Technica is familiar with, maybe we should have. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Epic + Bandcamp)

At some point, Epic Games might need to drop the word “Games” from its moniker and admit what kind of company it wants to be.

Today the game maker moved to acquire Bandcamp, an online music-streaming service that revolves around DRM-free purchases of MP3s, FLACs, and other audio files. The news emerged via press releases from both Bandcamp and Epic on Wednesday. As of press time, neither side of the deal has clarified its financial terms.

The move follows increasingly aggressive steps by Epic to become an entirely new kind of digital media company in the near future.