Thanks to the regulation with the great name Federal Immission Control Ordinance (BImSchV), the public now knows a lot of details about the planned new Intel chip plants Fab 29.1 and 29.2 near Magdeburg. Because such a chip factory is actually more of a chemical factory that coats, etches and grinds silicon wafers, Intel has to obtain a lot of approvals. For this purpose, Intel has published 445 megabytes of compressed data in accordance with the aforementioned BImSchV. We combed through them and learned a lot about the structure of modern semiconductor manufacturing plants. There are no really big surprises, but the complexity of the buildings and systems is a delicacy for tech geeks.
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According to the plans, Intel will reside in the Eulenberg industrial area on Ada-Lovelace-Chaussee, which still needs to be built. Whether the street name should just be a tribute to the mathematician Countess of Lovelace or should it also allude to an important customer? Probably the former, because when Intel contract production starts in Saxony-Anhalt at the end of 2027, the Nvidia chip generation Ada will probably already be scrapped.
A chip fab consumes enormous amounts of energy, although significantly less than a large steel mill and still slightly less than the mammoth data centers planned by Microsoft in North Rhine-Westphalia. Intel also chose Magdeburg because of the large supply of wind power and wants to forego diesel generators to bridge power outages, for example. Instead, battery storage should deliver around 200 megawatts (MW) of power. Intel hopes that the plans will be released quickly and will begin construction soon.
Over-Overclocked
In the heated race for the top performance, Intel is raising the top clock speed to 6.2 GHz for the soon-to-be-launched Core i9-14900KS. However, even the slightly slower versions i9-14900K and i9-13900K do not seem to be stable in all situations, see page 46. There are problems in some PC games. A c't reader, whose company uses the Core i-13900K in workstations because of its high single-threading performance, also complains about crashes. If you turn down the maximum clock rate slightly, the problems often disappear.
Such glitches indicate that Intel is turning the clock speed a little too euphorically. Vague specifications regarding the permissible operating conditions of the processors make diagnosis difficult. In order to stand out in benchmark comparisons, motherboard manufacturers turn up some CPU parameters in the BIOS even further, especially the limits for power consumption in turbo mode. If overclocker memory is added, the search for the source of the error can take a long time. After the AMD breakdown with EXPO RAM, this is the second annoying error caused by overclocking functions in the course of a year.
Bootblockade
However, Microsoft has hit a target of a much larger caliber – or is currently shooting, see page 58. It's about UEFI Secure Boot, the poorly specified and sloppily implemented protection function against boot kits, i.e. manipulated boot loaders, by many PC manufacturers. It turns out that UEFI Secure Boot does not work properly on some older PCs and that the subsequent update function against insecure bootloaders is too complicated for reality. Now Microsoft is retrofitting its own lock, which at least has the advantage of not affecting Linux bootloaders. The Linuxers, in turn, are following suit with their own technology, Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT). So in the future we will have at least two bootloader emergency brakes on our computers – what could go wrong?
AMD's plan to integrate HDMI 2.1 functions into open-source Linux drivers also failed. Because the Grail Guardians of the industry committee HDMI Forum forbade this. This means that Radeon graphics cards under Linux are currently limited to HDMI 2.0, meaning they cannot deliver more than 60 frames per second at 4K resolution and cannot use functions such as Variable Refresh Rate (VRR). However, GPUs from Apple, Intel and Nvidia also work with HDMI 2.1 under Linux. Nvidia has integrated the controversial functions into the firmware of the GPUs, while Apple and Intel solve the problem by internally implementing DisplayPort to HDMI. Let's hope that AMD also finds a solution.
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