Both AMD and Intel on Thursday said that the two companies had halted sales of their products to Russia and Belarus, an explicit commitment from the chip industry in taking action against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Microsoft also said it would halt “new” sales of Microsoft products. Nvidia said Friday that it has halted sales to Russia as well.

On Thursday morning, AMD said it was halting all chip shipments. By Thursday afternoon, Intel had joined AMD with a similar statement. Microsoft added its own statement on Friday morning.

According to AMD, the chip ban extends to Belarus, which Russia has used as a staging ground for its attacking forces. “Based on sanctions placed on Russia by the United States and other nations, at this time AMD is suspending its sales and distribution of our products into Russia and Belarus,” an AMD representative said in an email. “It is all AMD products and products we power (PCs, etc) in Russia and Belarus.”

Intel, too, said it had suspended shipments. “Intel condemns the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and we have suspended all shipments to customers in both Russia and Belarus,” Intel said in a statement on its Web site. “Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, including the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends and loved ones in the region.”

Intel said that it had begun to raise funds for relief efforts, too.

“We are working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, especially those with close ties to this region,” Intel added. “We have launched an employee donation and matching campaign through the Intel Foundation that has already raised over $1.2 million for relief efforts, and we are proud of the work our teams in surrounding areas including Poland, Germany and Romania are doing to aid refugees. We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine and the global community in calling for an immediate end to this war and a swift return to peace.”

For its part, Microsoft said that it would halt sales of all “new” Microsoft products. “We are announcing today that we will suspend all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia,” Microsoft president and vice chair Brad Smith wrote. “In addition, we are coordinating closely and working in lockstep with the governments of the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, and we are stopping many aspects of our business in Russia in compliance with governmental sanctions decisions.”

It wasn't clear whether Microsoft would leave in place ongoing subscription services. Microsoft also said that it continues to protect Ukrainian web sites from Russian attacks. “Our single most impactful area of work almost certainly is the protection of Ukraine's cybersecurity,” Smith added. “We continue to work proactively to help cybersecurity officials in Ukraine defend against Russian attacks, including most recently a cyberattack against a major Ukrainian broadcaster.”

On Friday, an Nvidia spokesman said simply, “We are not selling into Russia.”

Finally, clear statements in favor of Ukraine

On Feb. 24, the U.S. Department of Commerce implemented a new Commerce Control List-based license requirement for Russia. This requirement restricts exports to the country for key industries including “microelectronics,” avionics, navigation equipment, and more. Essentially, the new export rules blacklist Russia and businesses operating there from legally buying the restricted goods.

To date, however, the chip industry has been somewhat vague in how it has reacted to the ongoing Ukraine conflict.

On Feb. 26, for example, an Intel representative merely said that “Intel complies with all applicable export regulations and sanctions in the countries in which it operates, including the new sanctions issued by OFAC and the regulations issued by BIS.” At the time, the representative declined to comment further when asked if that indicated a specific ban on sales to Russia. A source close to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest and most important fab, told the Washington Post that the foundry has suspended all sales to Russia and to third parties that supply products to Russia. On the record, however, a TSMC representative told the paper that it would simply comply with the new export rules.

Compared to the overall market, however, chip sales to Russia represent a small fraction of total sales. On Feb. 24, the Semiconductor Industry Association released a statement that characterized Russia as “not a significant direct consumer” of semiconductors.

“While the impact of the new rules to Russia could be significant, Russia is not a significant direct consumer of semiconductors, accounting for less than 0.1% of global chip purchases, according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization,” the SIA said in a statement. “The broader Russian ICT market totaled only about $50.3 billion out of the $4.47 trillion global market, according to 2021 IDC data. 

“In addition, the semiconductor industry has a diverse set of suppliers of key materials and gases, so we do not believe there are immediate supply disruption risks related to Russia and Ukraine,” the SIA added.

The AMD representative echoed what the SIA said, specifically regarding its own supply chain. “Currently, we do not believe that the conflict will impact our ability to provide products, support, and services to our partners and customers,” the AMD representative said in his email.

Representatives for Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

This story was updated at 2:38 PM on Friday, March 6 with a statement from Nvidia.

Both AMD and Intel on Thursday said that the two companies had halted sales of their products to Russia and Belarus, an explicit commitment from the chip industry in taking action against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Microsoft, too, also said it would halt “new” sales of Microsoft products, too.

On Thursday morning, AMD said it was halting all chip shipments. By Thursday afternoon, Intel had joined AMD with a similar statement. Microsoft added its own statement on Friday morning.

According to AMD, the chip ban extends to Belarus, which Russia has used as a staging ground for its attacking forces. “Based on sanctions placed on Russia by the United States and other nations, at this time AMD is suspending its sales and distribution of our products into Russia and Belarus,” an AMD representative said in an email. “It is all AMD products and products we power (PCs, etc) in Russia and Belarus.”

Intel, too, said it had suspended shipments. “Intel condemns the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and we have suspended all shipments to customers in both Russia and Belarus,” Intel said in a statement on its Web site. “Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, including the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends and loved ones in the region.”

Intel said that it had begun to raise funds for relief efforts, too.

“We are working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, especially those with close ties to this region,” Intel added. “We have launched an employee donation and matching campaign through the Intel Foundation that has already raised over $1.2 million for relief efforts, and we are proud of the work our teams in surrounding areas including Poland, Germany and Romania are doing to aid refugees. We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine and the global community in calling for an immediate end to this war and a swift return to peace.”

For its part, Microsoft said that it would halt sales of all “new” Microsoft products. “We are announcing today that we will suspend all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia,” Microsoft president and vice chair Brad Smith wrote. “In addition, we are coordinating closely and working in lockstep with the governments of the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, and we are stopping many aspects of our business in Russia in compliance with governmental sanctions decisions.”

It wasn't clear whether Microsoft would leave in place ongoing subscription services. Microsoft also said that it continues to protect Ukrainian web sites from Russian attacks. “Our single most impactful area of work almost certainly is the protection of Ukraine's cybersecurity,” Smith added. “We continue to work proactively to help cybersecurity officials in Ukraine defend against Russian attacks, including most recently a cyberattack against a major Ukrainian broadcaster.”

Finally, clear statements in favor of Ukraine

On Feb. 24, the U.S. Department of Commerce implemented a new Commerce Control List-based license requirement for Russia. This requirement restricts exports to the country for key industries including “microelectronics,” avionics, navigation equipment, and more. Essentially, the new export rules blacklist Russia and businesses operating there from legally buying the restricted goods.

To date, however, the chip industry has been somewhat vague in how it has reacted to the ongoing Ukraine conflict.

On Feb. 26, for example, an Intel representative merely said that “Intel complies with all applicable export regulations and sanctions in the countries in which it operates, including the new sanctions issued by OFAC and the regulations issued by BIS.” At the time, the representative declined to comment further when asked if that indicated a specific ban on sales to Russia. A source close to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest and most important fab, told the Washington Post that the foundry has suspended all sales to Russia and to third parties that supply products to Russia. On the record, however, a TSMC representative told the paper that it would simply comply with the new export rules.

Compared to the overall market, however, chip sales to Russia represent a small fraction of total sales. On Feb. 24, the Semiconductor Industry Association released a statement that characterized Russia as “not a significant direct consumer” of semiconductors.

“While the impact of the new rules to Russia could be significant, Russia is not a significant direct consumer of semiconductors, accounting for less than 0.1% of global chip purchases, according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization,” the SIA said in a statement. “The broader Russian ICT market totaled only about $50.3 billion out of the $4.47 trillion global market, according to 2021 IDC data. 

“In addition, the semiconductor industry has a diverse set of suppliers of key materials and gases, so we do not believe there are immediate supply disruption risks related to Russia and Ukraine,” the SIA added.

The AMD representative echoed what the SIA said, specifically regarding its own supply chain. “Currently, we do not believe that the conflict will impact our ability to provide products, support, and services to our partners and customers,” the AMD representative said in his email.

Representatives for Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

This story was updated at 9:17 AM on Friday, March 4 with a statement from Microsoft.

Intel launched its 12th-gen mobile and desktop Core processors for businesses today—Alder Lake processors with included vPro technology. And, in the way it continues to segment its processor lineup, Intel has added two new categories of its vPro technologies: vPro Essentials for small businesses, and vPro Enterprise for Chrome devices.

Intel expects its customers to ship 150 commercial designs or more using the new vPro chips, from Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Panasonic.

Intel's new Alder Lake vPro chip follows the 11th-gen Tiger Lake mobile vPro chips Intel announced a year ago, which introduced Intel's premium brand to the vPro product lineup. In Tiger Lake, Intel added what is called Intel Control Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and Intel Threat Detection (TDT) to Hardware Shield, which protects against attacks to the PC's firmware. In Alder Lake, Intel has added additional protections to Hardware Shield, defending against ransomware, cryptomining and supply-chain attacks. Those also include extending CET to desktop processors, Intel said.

Intel

Specifically, the new technology involves anomalous-behavior detection, according to Stephanie Hallford, vice president and general manager of Intel's Client Computing Group's business client platforms, which scans for both “good” and “bad” app behavior. The technology is designed to block “living off the land” attacks, a file-less malware attack that simply injects bad code into existing, legitimate software, which then executes attacks against the system.

The new 12th-gen Alder Lake chips also include what Intel calls Total Memory Encryption Multi-Key (TME-MK) and Intel Virtualization Technology with Redirect Protection (VT-rp), which provides hardware support for new virtualization capabilities that Microsoft plans to add in a future OS release, Intel said.

Intel didn't provide a comprehensive list of the differences between vPro Enterprise and VPro Essentials, but a white paper identified both VT-rp as well as Intel Active Management remote maintenance and control as two features that vPro Essentials doesn't support. Intel Key Locker, “used in select Chrome devices to help protect keys used by AES-NI encryption,” is also specific to the vPro Enterprise for Chrome technologies.

Intel

Intel 12th-gen vPro platforms will include ECC versions of DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory, support for Wi-Fi 6E, wired 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and Thunderbolt 4, Intel said.

Naturally, Intel touted the performance improvements that the new chips offered both on mobile as well as desktop, claiming that its mobile Core i7-1280P processor is 27 percent faster on the CrossMark benchmark than its 11th-gen Core chip and 41 percent faster than the Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U.

For years, the PC industry has embraced the mixing and matching of processors, expansion cards, memory, and more, all to create a modular, expandable platform. Now, a group of companies wants to do that at the chip level in what's called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express, or UCIe.

UCIe takes the concept of “chiplets”—individual pieces of self-contained logic, stitched together inside of a chip package—and opens it up to the semiconductor industry at large. Both AMD and Intel have done this for years: Intel with its co-EMIB and ODI connections, for example, which gave the world its hybrid chip, Alder Lake. A specialized engineering partnership between AMD and Intel also produced an Intel CPU that included an AMD GPU, called “Kaby Lake G“.

Enter UCIe, which is designed to make a future “Kaby Lake G” chip even easier to manufacture. UCIe transfers data using either the existing PCI Express standard or the related CXL (Compute Express Link) interface used by data centers. Essentially, a chip maker could take a CPU core from one company, a graphics core from another, and a WiFi radio or 5G radio front-end from a third chip company, and snap them together like LEGO blocks using UCIe, in much the same way you can drop a graphics card or an SSD into a PC's PCI Express slot. With UCIe, this would simply be done at the chip level. (A UCIe white paper (PDF) has more.)

The membership of UCIe backers includes a who's who of major chip and foundry vendors: AMD, Arm, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (ASE), Google Cloud, Intel, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung and TSMC. The exception? Nvidia, which has yet to formally sign on.

The new standard is also a concession of sorts, one that acknowledges the demands of today's designs simply exceed the industry's ability to physically manufacture them. For decades, the PC industry has tried to design all-in-one PC processors that contain a CPU, GPU, I/O, and more, all on a single chip. But larger and larger chips provide more opportunity for lithography errors that can render the entire chip worthless. Indeed, UCIe is built to anticipate the day when new, hybrid chips might simply be too physically large to manufacture using today's lithographic equipment.

UCIExpress.org

“What we're seeing is that a lot of our designs are hitting the reticle limit as the demand for processing is insatiable, so it's easier for us—and by ‘us' I mean the broader industry—to build smaller chiplets and stitch them together on the package so that they act as a single entity,” UCIe chair and senior Intel fellow Debendra Das Sharma told HPCWire. “So this is a scale up kind of solution.”

Hypothetically, UCIe would mean that essentially anyone with the appropriate licenses and intellectual property could snap together a chip package containing logic from any number of companies. UCIe also suggests that any number of small startups could develop specialized logic, package them up with a UCIe interface, and sell them to other chip companies.

To be fair, the chip industry has already had this capability for decades, with programmable logic and FPGAs from companies like Altera and Xilinx—both recently acquired by Intel and AMD, interestingly enough. Which leads to an interesting speculation: In a decade or so, could Intel and AMD become the new “PC” builders?