Timeline February 2021

Events in February 2021 9

• 1929 – 2021 Christopher Plummer (1929-2021) Died 5 February 2021, aged 91 Canadian actor of a seventy-year career, from The Sound of Music to an Academy Award at eighty-two for Beginners.
• 1941 – 2021 Chick Corea (1941-2021) Died 9 February 2021, aged 79 American pianist and composer, a founder of jazz fusion who won twenty-three Grammy Awards.
• 1951 – 2021 Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) Died 17 February 2021, aged 70 American broadcaster whose programme reshaped talk radio and American conservative politics.
• 2021 Severe car crash in Los Angeles Near career-ending leg injuries Woods was seriously injured in a single-car rollover crash in Los Angeles County, suffering open fractures to his right leg and ankle that required emergency surgery, including the insertion of a rod and screws. Doctors initially raised concerns about whether he would walk normally again, let alone return to competitive golf.
• 2021 Myanmar military seizes power Aung San Suu Kyi detained hours before parliament convened Myanmar's military seized power on 1 February 2021, detaining Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected leaders hours before the new parliament was due to sit. Mass protests and a violent crackdown followed.
• 2021 F-15EX Eagle II first flight St. Louis, Missouri Boeing's F-15EX, a heavily updated Eagle, flies at St. Louis — the US Air Force buying new F-15s almost 50 years after the first.
• 2021 AMD acquires Xilinx for $49 billion AMD completes its acquisition of Xilinx — the world's largest FPGA (field-programmable gate array) manufacturer — for $49 billion on 14 February 2022 in stock. The Xilinx acquisition is transformative: it gives AMD a leading position in adaptive computing, used in telecommunications, automotive, defence and data centre applications. It also brings Xilinx's AI inference accelerators (Versal) and an enormous customer base in industrial and embedded markets. The deal makes AMD a complete data centre silicon company — CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and adaptive SoCs.
• 2021 Pat Gelsinger returns as CEO — IDM 2.0 Pat Gelsinger — a former Intel engineer who left to become CEO of VMware — returns to Intel as CEO on 15 February 2021, replacing Bob Swan. Gelsinger is the first engineer to lead Intel since Andy Grove. He announces 'IDM 2.0' — Integrated Device Manufacturer 2.0 — a strategy to restore Intel's manufacturing leadership while simultaneously opening Intel's fabs to manufacture chips for other companies (Intel Foundry Services). The strategy requires $100 billion in capital investment over five years and a complete cultural reinvention.
• 2021 Perseverance lands on Mars Most sophisticated Mars rover arrives NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed in Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. It carried the Ingenuity helicopter, which made the first powered flight on another planet.