Los Angeles.
The International Conference on Integrated Circuit Design and Technology opened as scheduled.
As IEEE's premier conference in IC design, it was both an academic gathering for researchers in the field and a stage for major chip manufacturers to show off their technology.
In an industry like this, which dealt with practical applications, the boundary between academia and industry was not particularly clear.
Many scholars were engineers who also held positions at companies, and many senior corporate engineers served as journal reviewers. Some leading figures even served as chief technology officers while also being listed as editors of IEEE journals. None of this was unusual.
Professor Michael Mayberry, who stood on the stage, was a typical example.
Besides serving as director of Intel's semiconductor research institute, he was also Intel's chief technology officer, or CTO.
At that moment, he was presenting Intel's latest consumer processor chips, next-generation integrated graphics, and a whole range of other technologies to the scholars, engineers, and corporate representatives in attendance.
Of all the dazzling achievements, the most eye-catching was undoubtedly the announcement of Silverlight, a brand-new microarchitecture built on a 7 nm process.
Almost as soon as it appeared on the PowerPoint slides, the listed specifications and conceptual diagrams became the focus of everyone's attention!
According to Intel, the Silverlight architecture, scheduled for release in the second half of this year-2022-would take chip performance another step beyond the Sunny Cove architecture Intel had introduced in 2019! The accompanying new chips would also differ considerably from previous products in their level of integration and manufacturing technology.
Onstage, Michael Mayberry emphasized with excitement and conviction that this was a revolutionary technological leap, and that Intel would redefine the future of chip manufacturing... Although everyone made boasts like that every time, Maybury's remarks genuinely left many people