Shakeup in the top 20 semiconductor suppliers continues in 2016

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Apple's internal chip value puts it at #15

Sales at the top 20 semiconductor companies declined by 6% in the first quarter of this year as the impact of consolidation and the downturn starts to bite. 

The figures from IC Insights show that seven companies displayed a double-digit 1Q16/1Q15 decline and three that registered a dramatic 25% fall (with memory giants Micron and SK Hynix posting the worst results). Half of the top-20 companies had sales of at least $2.0 billion in 1Q16, so it takes $832 million in quarterly sales just to make it into the top 20 list.

Apple is an anomaly in the top-20 ranking with regards to major semiconductor suppliers. The company designs and uses its processors only in its own products—there are no sales of the company’s MPUs to other system makers. Apple’s custom ARM-based SoC processors had a “sales value” of $1,390 million in 1Q16, up 10% from $1,260 million in 1Q15. 

 Apple’s MPUs have been used in 13 iPhone handset designs since 2007 and a dozen iPad tablet models since 2010 as well as in iPod portable media players, smartwatches, and Apple TV units. Apple’s custom processors—such as the 64-bit A9 used in iPhone 6s and 6s Plus handsets introduced in September 2015 and the new iPhone 6SE launched in March 2016—are made by pure-play foundry TSMC and IDM foundry Samsung.

There were some surprises though - despite the doom and gloom around the prospects for growth at Intel, the company still saw significant growth against the declining backdrop. Growth star MediaTek continued to advance, but Infineon also saw healthy growth. In terms of rankings, the biggest moves in the ranking were made by the new Broadcom (Avago/Broadcom) and Nvidia, each of which jumped up three positions in 1Q16 as compared to 1Q15.

There was one new entrant into the top-20 ranking in the first quarter US fabless supplier AMD. AMD had a particularly rough 1Q16 and saw its sales drop 19% year-over-year to $832 million, which was about half the $1,589 million in sales the company logged just over two years ago in 4Q13. Although AMD did not have a good 1Q16, Japan-based Sharp, the only company that fell from the top-20 ranking, faired even worse with its 1Q16/1Q15 sales plunging by 30%

In order to allow for more useful year-over-year comparisons, IC Insights combined the acquired/merged semiconductor company sales results for both 1Q15 and 1Q16, regardless of when the acquisition or merger occurred. For example, although Intel’s acquisition of Altera did not close until late December of 2015, Altera’s 1Q15 sales ($435 million) were added to Intel’s 1Q15 sales ($11,632 million) to come up with the $12,067 million shown in the chart aboe. The same method was used to calculate the 1Q15 sales for Broadcom (Avago/Broadcom), NXP (NXP/Freescale), and GlobalFoundries (GlobalFoundries/IBM).

As would be expected, given the possible acquisitions and mergers over this years such as Microchip/Atmel and ON Semiconductor/Fairchild, as well as any new ones that may develop, the top-20 semiconductor ranking is likely to undergo a significant amount of upheaval over the next few years as the semiconductor industry continues along its path to maturity.

IC Insights will have another update on the market later in the month.

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Mercury ships dual GPU open processor system

Industry’s highest performance OpenVPX, dual-GPU, conduction-cooled subsystem


By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Mercury Computer Systems has started shipping the industry’s highest performance 6U module-based OpenVPX, dual GPU-based conduction-cooled subsystem, using whichever high power GPU is available. This subsystem is currently deployed in an embedded rugged defense surveillance platform, performing processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED).
One of the toughest challenges is to improve the military situational awareness through timely and precise delivery of actionable information by improved PED capabilities. Mercury’s subsystems are designed to provide these Embedded Smart Processing capabilities, enabling sensors to be smarter, able to accept unrelenting streams of data, and extract and deliver situational awareness and other crucial information.
Mercury’s scalable ISR subsystem is powered by the Ensemble 6000 Series GSC6200 – an OpenVPX module powered by GPU technology working in conjunction with Intel-based processing in a conduction-cooled, 6U form factor. The subsystem currently delivers performance in the TeraFLOPS range, and the incorporation of GPUs enables the solution to be delivered in an optimized size, weight, and power (SWaP) footprint. Mercury’s innovative packaging technology on the GSC6200 leverages the easy-to-upgrade MxM GPU form factor, which enables customers to rapidly upgrade and deploy the latest and fastest GPUs from ATI or NVIDIA, resulting in even higher performance.
“Our services and systems integration expertise allows us to offer our latest technology in a subsystem solution. This allows our customers to reduce their development risk while enabling concurrent engineering, ultimately leading to increased product velocity. Also, our approach of using standards-based, open APIs results in a subsystem which is open, a key requirement of our customers and as well as the U.S. Department of Defense,” said Steve Patterson, Vice President of Defense Product Line Management at Mercury.
“Mercury’s new OpenVPX GSC6200 module leverages the best available technologies while providing a clear migration path for customers to implement emerging GPUs from either ATI or NVIDIA in the future. This enables our customers to offer best of breed solutions for the industry’s most demanding high-end signal and image processing applications,” he added.
In addition to the GSC6200, other critical modules and services enabled the successful production of this subsystem. Mercury’s Services and Systems Integration team combined a multi-vendor hardware and software approach with their expert integration services to create the subsystem. The GSC6200 is providing industry-leading processing and exploitation capabilities to enable substantial SWaP improvements and parallel stream computing capabilities.

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SGI puts petaflop hybrid computing in a single cabinet

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Scalable Mixed Technology Uses Open Architecture

 

SGI has developed a breakthrough hybrid computing platform that will deliver a petaflop of performance within a single cabinet using technology from NVIDIA, ATI and Tilera. The platform uses an open software architecture and will scale from tens to hundreds of petaflops, enabling users to tackle the most demanding technical compute requirements.

“We are excited to announce this radically differentiated server technology platform,” said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SGI. “Our innovative technology will enable users to attain new levels of scalability and speed with groundbreaking performance capabilities, culminating in a petaflop in a cabinet.”

The new platform was designed to drive performance to specifically address the growing science and engineering technical markets that rely on high-end software to achieve rapid results. It offers GPU processing capabilities from NVIDIA and ATI, as well as accelerator-based technology from Tilera, and other peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) based solutions. The technology will be seen in SGI products by the end of 2010.

“SGI shows its R&D strength again,” said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for high performance computing. “Following closely on the heels of the Altix UV series, SGI has introduced a highly dense, scalable technology designed for strong sustained performance on very demanding HPC applications.”

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