While the whole market was looking at the appointment of Lip-Bu Tan as Intel chief executive, there was another major development at the company this week: The first 18A (1.8nm-class) wafers are running around Intel's Arizona fab. Intel's Fab 52 and Fab 62 in Arizona are high-volume production facilities, so running 18A fabs there is a major milestone for the company.

AMD's latest additions to its Zen 5 stack include the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 12-core 9900X3D, set to launch on March 12. Just days before the retail embargo, a handful of Ryzen 9 9950X3D samples appear to have been tested in PassMark, a benchmarking utility (via x86deadandback on X).

Micron introduced its 16Gb DDR5 devices made on its new 1γ (1-gamma) fabrication process that uses EUV lithography, a first for Micron, today on March 25. The new IC not only delivers higher performance than its predecessor, but it also consumes less power and is poised to be cheaper to make.

In a flurry of tweets detailing Intel's upcoming processors, avid hardware leaker Jaykihn has shared specifications for Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake. Arriving in H2 this year, Panther Lake is the successor to Arrow Lake-H, which launched at this CES. Meanwhile, Wildcat Lake is rumored to power Intel's next-gen N-series chips, designed for lightweight laptops and mini-PCs.

Hua Hong Semiconductor, China's second-largest chip foundry, has made strategic leadership changes to prioritize logic chip production and develop more advanced process technologies. The company hired Bai Peng, a veteran in logic chip technology, and appointed him president on January 1, 2024, reports Nikkei.

While AMD mainly focused on its forthcoming high-end advances at CES 2025 this year, a new product for the budget market was quietly added to its website. The AMD Ryzen 5 9600 has been confirmed as a slightly down-tuned sibling of the 9600X, with MSRP and release date yet unknown.

As we await budget Arrow Lake chips next year, Intel China has initiated pre-orders for these processors ahead of their global rollout. The official account of Intel Consumer Products on Weibo announced JD as its partner for the pre-sale event, starting tonight with shipping scheduled for January 13, aligning these processors for a CES unveil.

Chinese dynamic random access memory (DRAM) manufacturer Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) could capture as much as 15% of the global memory market in the coming years, according to estimates by Gou Jiazhang, general manager of Silicon Motion Technology, a developer of SSD controllers, as reported by News.Cnyes.com.

The upcoming Threadripper 9000 series, codenamed Shimada Peak, has leaked yet again through shipping manifest data (via @Olrak29_ on X). A different shipping manifest outed the Zen 5-powered high-end desktop CPUs in significant detail back in August. The latest manifest reveals a couple of previously unknown points about the soon-to-be-released CPUs.

Intel's Robert Hallock has confirmed that Intel's Core Ultra 200S series launch did not go as planned. In a live stream with HotHardware on YouTube, Hallock revealed that optimization issues with the Arrow Lake platform were the primary cause of degradation in gaming (versus Intel's previous-gen Raptor Lake chips).