Intel today marked one of the most important product launches in company history with the unveiling of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids), the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series (code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM) and the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (code-named Ponte Vecchio), delivering for its customers a leap in data center performance, efficiency, security and new capabilities for AI, the cloud, the network and edge, and the world's most powerful supercomputers.

Working alongside its customers and partners with 4th Gen Xeon, Intel is delivering differentiated solutions and systems at scale to tackle their biggest computing challenges. Intel's unique approach to providing purpose-built, workload-first acceleration and highly optimized software tuned for specific workloads enables the company to deliver the right performance at the right power for optimal overall total cost of ownership. Additionally, as Intel's most sustainable data center processors, 4th Gen Xeon processors deliver customers a range of features for managing power and performance, making the optimal use of CPU resources to help achieve their sustainability goals.

Giga Computing is an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced the next-generation of GIGABYTE servers and server motherboards for the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor to achieve efficient performance gains with built-in accelerators. The new processors have the most built-in accelerators of any processor on the market to help maximize performance efficiency for emerging workloads; and do so while boosting virtualization and AI performance. Generational improvements make this platform ideal for AI, cloud computing, advanced analytics, HPC, networking, and storage applications. For these markets, Giga Computing has announced fourteen new series that constitute seventy-eight configurations for customers to choose from. And all these new GIGABYTE products support the full portfolio of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, including those with high bandwidth memory (HBM) in the Intel Xeon Max Series.

ASUS today announced Zenbook 14 Flip OLED (UP3404), the latest and most powerful 14-inch model in its premium thin-and-light convertible Zenbook Flip series. The elegant and versatile Zenbook 14 Flip OLED offers new levels of performance from its 13th Gen Intel Core processors, Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, up to 1 TB PCIe SSD, 16 GB of RAM and a long-lasting 75 Wh battery. For easy I/O, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, and an HDMI 2.1 (TMDS) port. Fast and stable WiFi 6E (802.11ax) ensures reliable wireless connectivity.

Superb visuals are provided by the enlarged 14-inch 16:10 2.8K OLED touchscreen, which is PANTONE Validated and has a 100% DCI-P3 gamut. It's also TÜV-certified for eye care, and supports an optional ASUS Pen 2.0 MPP 2.0 stylus. The compact Zenbook 14 Flip OLED is just 15.9 mm thin and weighs only 1.5 kg, with a 360° any-position hinge. Thoughtful design features include an ambient light color sensor that automatically adjusts brightness and color temperature, and enables adaptive dimming to help maintain OLED display longevity. There's also an IR camera for fast face login.

Acer today announced refreshed models of its Aspire all-in-ones and laptops, designed to support families' day-to-day productivity and entertainment needs, while adding a touch of style to the home environment. The sleek Acer Aspire S all-in-one PCs come in both 27-inch and 32-inch models and are equipped with up to the latest 13th Gen Intel Core processors and Windows 11 to empower a seamless computing experience. Providing efficiency and reliability for multi-tasking users working from home, the Aspire 5 Series laptops come with the latest 13th Gen Intel Core processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs, while the lightweight Aspire 3 Series notebooks deliver ready-to-go performance.

Acer also introduced the newest member of its smart speaker family with the Acer Halo Swing Smart Speaker with Google Assistant, DTS Sound and features a LED dot display, bringing users quality audio and dazzling lights everywhere they go.

LG Electronics (LG) is introducing an expanded LG gram lineup, which offers more diversity than ever thanks to the arrival of the exciting, new gram Ultraslim and gram Style, at CES 2023. LG gram continues to provide both power and portability, packing premium specs into sleek, ultra-lightweight form factors delivering take-anywhere convenience and exceptional user experiences.

LG gram Ultraslim
Headlining the LG gram showcase at CES 2023 is the brand-new LG gram Ultraslim (model 15Z90RT), the thinnest gram model yet. A laptop designed for users seeking supreme portability, the Ultraslim has an ultra-light weight of just 998 grams and a depth (when closed) of only 10.99 millimeters; around the same thickness of a smartphone or notepad. Even though it is the most svelte gram in the 2023 lineup, the 15Z90RT still supplies impressive image quality and processing power, packing a 15.6-inch OLED display with Anti-glare Low Reflection (AGLR) coating and Intel 's 13th Gen Raptor Lake chip with Performance Cores (P-Cores). Further enhancing the excellent portability of the new model is the inclusion of an ultra-compact adapter.

ASUS today announced Mini PC PL64, an industrial mini PC featuring a fanless design and powered by up to a 12th Generation Intel Core i7 (15 W) processor. Each PL64 unit has been subjected to a battery of reliability tests, and the fanless design ensures optimal performance even in ambient temperatures of up to 50°C. This mini PC features dual LAN ports, including 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, dual COM ports, five USB ports, along with triple 4K display support at 60 Hz.

Mini PC PL64 employs a new, almost-silent fanless design that minimizes dust ingress into the chassis to prolong product life. The fanless design and 15-watt CPU support make PL64 ideal for industrial applications where reliability, durability, and low noise are paramount. The cooling system in PL64 efficiently dissipates heat, enabling this mini PC to be deployed in hot environments reaching 50°C.

Today, Intel announced the 2023 release of the Intel oneAPI tools - available in the Intel Developer Cloud and rolling out through regular distribution channels. The new oneAPI 2023 tools support the upcoming 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Xeon CPU Max Series and Intel Data Center GPUs, including Flex Series and the new Max Series. The tools deliver performance and productivity enhancements, and also add support for new Codeplay plug-ins that make it easier than ever for developers to write SYCL code for non-Intel GPU architectures. These standards-based tools deliver choice in hardware and ease in developing high-performance applications that run on multiarchitecture systems.

"We're seeing encouraging early application performance results on our development systems using Intel Max Series GPU accelerators - applications built with Intel's oneAPI compilers and libraries. For leadership-class computational science, we value the benefits of code portability from multivendor, multiarchitecture programming standards such as SYCL and Python AI frameworks such as PyTorch, accelerated by Intel libraries. We look forward to the first exascale scientific discoveries from these technologies on the Aurora system next year."
-Timothy Williams, deputy director, Argonne Computational Science Division

Adding to its incredibly popular UP Xtreme product line, industry leader AAEON has announced the release of the UP Xtreme i12, the next generation developer board with 12th Generation Intel Core Processors (formerly Alder Lake-P). Improving upon the 11th Generation Intel Core Processor SoC of its predecessor, the UP Xtreme i11, AAEON's next-generation UP Xtreme i12 utilizes the 12 core, 16 thread hybrid architecture of 12th Generation Intel Core Processors, making it more energy-efficient despite possessing double the previous generation's thread count. With these improvements, the UP Xtreme i12 offers up to 20% greater CPU performance, while also hosting 32 GB onboard LPDDR5 system memory, which provides double the bandwidth and memory capacity of the previous generation.

The UP Xtreme i12's configuration of HDMI 2.0b, eDP 1.4, and two DP 1.4 slots give it the necessary tools to host four simultaneous 4K displays, alongside USB 4.0 and 2.5 GbE ports ensuring high-speed connectivity to peripheral cameras. Compounding this powerful, efficient function is the 2.47 x increase in graphics speed provided by Intel Iris Xe graphics, which makes the board an excellent candidate for smart retail deployments.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, brings its upcoming server platforms powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors optimized for HPC and storage markets at SC22 on November 14-17, Booth#2000 in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Dallas.

"Greater availability of new technology like 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors continue driving the changes in the HPC landscape", said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's Server Infrastructure Business Unit. "The advances in chip technology coupled with the rise in cloud computing has brought high levels of compute power within reach for smaller organizations. HPC now is affordable and accessible to a new generation of users."

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced it is making supercomputing accessible for more enterprises to harness insights, solve problems and innovate faster by delivering its world-leading, energy-efficient supercomputers in a smaller form factor and at a lower price point.

The expanded portfolio includes new HPE Cray EX and HPE Cray XD supercomputers, which are based on HPE's exascale innovation that delivers end-to-end, purpose-built technologies in compute, accelerated compute, interconnect, storage, software, and flexible power and cooling options. The supercomputers provide significant performance and AI-at-scale capabilities to tackle demanding, data-intensive workloads, speed up AI and machine learning initiatives, and accelerate innovation to deliver products and services to market faster.

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter 2022 financial results. "Despite the worsening economic conditions, we delivered solid results and made significant progress with our product and process execution during the quarter," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "To position ourselves for this business cycle, we are aggressively addressing costs and driving efficiencies across the business to accelerate our IDM 2.0 flywheel for the digital future."

"As we usher in the next phase of IDM 2.0, we are focused on embracing an internal foundry model to allow our manufacturing group and business units to be more agile, make better decisions and establish a leadership cost structure," said David Zinsner, Intel CFO. "We remain committed to the strategy and long-term financial model communicated at our Investor Meeting."

ASRock today launched its Arc "Alchemist" A770 and A750 custom-design graphics cards. These include the A770 Phantom Gaming OC, and the A750 Challenger OC. The A770 maxes out the 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon, featuring all 32 Xe Cores (4,096 unified shaders); besides 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory; whereas the A750 gets 28 Xe Cores (3,584 unified shaders), and 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. Both of ASRock's cards come with 8 GB of memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, there's no 16 GB version of the A770 Phantom Gaming.

The ASRock A770 Phantom Gaming features a premium, RGB-illuminated cooling solution that's also found in the company's Radeon RX 6000-series Phantom Gaming graphics cards. This card also offers a factory-overclock of 2.20 GHz compared to 2.10 GHz reference. The cooler features a dual fin-stack heatsink with five 6 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat-pipes that make indirect contact with the GPU over a copper base-plate. The dual ball-bearings fans come with idle fan-stop. There's a switch to manually turn off RGB lighting.

ASUS, a global technology leader renowned for continuously reimagining today's technologies for tomorrow, today announced a new Expert series desktop model, the ExpertCenter D7 SFF (D700SD).

The ExpertCenter D7 SFF is designed for long-term use, giving business users in financial, retail, manufacturing, creative fields, and other industries a durable solution. It's designed to suit growing business needs with tool-free expansion, making this model an investment that can evolve with a business. The case is rotatable and can be fully opened for convenient maintenance and upgrades, with side panels on the chassis that are easily removed without a screwdriver, and a 3.5-inch HDD tool-free tray that enables users to quickly replace or upgrade hard drives.

It's the moment you've been waiting for! (And the moment our teams have been working towards!) The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs will be for sale on October 12th starting at $289 and $329 respectively, with the Arc A770 Limited Edition available for $349. After years of price increases in the massive $200-400 GPU segment, Intel is bringing balance back to the GPU market. Pricing seems to have gone off the deep end and we're working to reel it back in with the Intel Arc A-series GPUs. As we've shown in earlier performance blogs, the Arc A750 and A770 trade blows with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060—a popular mainstream GPU. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called out the extreme GPU prices in his Intel Innovation Day 1 keynote, showing that the last four years have seen a nonstop upward trend in prices of mainstream GPUs. By entering the GPU space as a third player, Intel is ready to turn these tides in gamers' favor and disrupt the market.

On average, a new GeForce RTX 3060 will set you back $418. (This number was calculated on Newegg.com, targeting in stock, sold by Newegg, new RTX 3060 cards as of Sept 22, 2022.) Picking up an Intel Arc A750 on October 12th for $289 gets you 53% more performance per dollar on average, or an 8 GB Arc A770 for $329 provides 42% more perf/dollar. Why is that? The Arc A700-series performance beats the 3060 in most modern titles using DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs and our GPUs aren't far behind in most DX11 games—all for much less cash.

Intel expanded its Arc "Alchemist" desktop graphics card series with the entry-level Arc A310. This GPU has specs that enable Intel's AIB partners to build low-profile graphics cards that are possibly even single-slot, or conventional sized with fanless cooling. The A310 is being pushed as a slight upgrade over the iGPU, and an alternative to cards such as the AMD Radeon RX 6400. Its target user would want to build a 4K or 8K HTPC, or even be a workstation/HEDT user with a processor that lacks integrated graphics, and wants to use a couple of high-resolution monitors. There is no reference board design, but we expect it to look similar to the Arc Pro A40 in dimensions (pictured below), except with full-size DP and HDMI in place of those mDP connectors, and a full-height bracket out of the box.

The A310 is carved out of the 6 nm "ACM-G11" silicon by enabling 6 out of 8 Xe Cores (that's 96 out of 128 EUs, or 768 out of 1,024 unified shaders). You also get 96 XMX units that accelerate AI; and 6 ray tracing units. The GPU runs at 2.00 GHz, compared to 2.10 GHz on the A380. The memory sub-system has been narrowed by a third—you get 4 GB of 15.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 64-bit wide memory interface. In comparison, the A380 has 6 GB of memory across a 96-bit memory bus. The card features a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface, and with its typical power expected to be well under the 75 W-mark, most custom cards could lack any power connectors.

Intel's ambitious XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) performance enhancement formally launched, with the latest "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" patch dated September 27. The patch release notes describes this feature addition as "Added XeSS graphics support for DX12-compatible systems." This means that XeSS not only works in its native XMX code-path for Arc "Alchemist" GPUs, but also the agnostic DP4a code. CapFrameX confirmed that XeSS works with Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 GPUs, which means the DP4a fallback has been implemented. The XeSS feature-addition to SoTR comes just in time as reviews of the Arc A770 are expected to go live early next month, with availability slated for October 12. You can learn more about XeSS in our older article.

Intel today announced the pricing for the Arc A770 Limited Edition desktop graphics card, and it is set at USD $329, offering a class of performance comparable to NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards around the $400-range. The A770 is a full-feature DirectX 12 Ultimate-capable graphics cards. The Arc A770 Limited Edition maxes out the 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon, features 32 Xe Cores, 512 XMX matrix processors, and 512 EUs, which work out to 4,096 unified shaders. The card comes with 8 GB or 16 GB of 17.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus. $329 could be the starting price of the A770 for its 8 GB model. Available from October 12.

Here's the first picture of a custom-design Intel Arc A750 "Alchemist" graphics card, in this case, an ASRock Arc A750 Challenger. ASRock showed the card off at its Tokyo Game Show 2022 booth. The strictly 2-slot thick card appears to have a fairly well-endowed aluminium fin-stack cooling solution featuring a pair of large 100 mm fans. Its cooling solution uses two aluminium fin-stacks skewered by a number of copper heat pipes. The card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and features some illumination in the way of an illuminated Arc logo.

The Arc A750 is based on the same 6 nm "DG2-512" silicon as the A770 Limited Edition—which looks increasingly like an Intel-exclusive that will only be sold in its reference design. While the A770 maxes out the chip with all 32 Xe Cores being enabled (512 EUs, or 4,096 unified shaders), the A750 gets 28 Xe Cores (448 EUs, or 3,584 unified shaders). It also gets 8 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface (512 GB/s bandwidth), 448 XMX units (accelerates AI and features like XeSS), and 28 RT units. The reference engine clock of the A750 is set at 2.05 GHz, although it's likely that the ASRock Challenger is a factory-overclocked card.

AAEON's new GENE-ADP6 unlocks the door to elite edge computing, digital signage, and machine vision applications with enhanced features across the board. The GENE-ADP6 provides a 15% improvement in CPU performance through the Intel 12th Generation Core /Celeron CPU (formerly Alder Lake-P), featuring hybrid platform processor architectures with up to 12 cores and 16 threads. Along with an improvement in CPU power, the GENE-ADP6 shows greater AI-readiness, with Intel's Deep Learning Boost AI accelerator providing enhanced inferencing capabilities to make the GENE-ADP6 perfect for 5G and AI edge computing.

For faster, more advanced storage speeds, the GENE-ADP6 introduces 64GB system memory via two dual-channel DDR5 SODIMMs, being AAEON's first 3.5" SubCompact Board to do so. This improvement from DDR4 to DDR5 offers up to 50% faster data transfer speeds and a new, more efficient power management structure. The GENE-ADP6 supports M.2 3052/3042 and M.2 2230 modules, enabling 5G and Wi-Fi for enhanced application connectivity. Additionally, the board's FPC expansion slot provides sophisticated, high-performance PCIe x4 (Gen 4) speed. This also gives users the flexibility to expand the board's additional PCIe x4 slot for machine vision, smart retail and industrial automation applications.

Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake (MTL) processor is set to deliver a wide range of exciting solutions, with the first being the Intel 4 manufacturing node. However, today we have some interesting Linux kernel patches that indicate that Meteor Lake will have a dedicated "Standalone Media" Graphics Technology (GT) block to process video/audio. Moving encoding and decoding off GPU to a dedicated media engine will allow MTL to play back video without the GPU, and the GPU can be used as a parallel processing powerhouse. Features like Intel QuickSync will be built into this unit. What is interesting is that this unit will be made on a separate tile, which will be fused with the rest using tile-based manufacturing found in Ponte Vecchio (which has 47 tiles).

Intel Linux PatchesStarting with [Meteor Lake], media functionality has moved into a new, second GT at the hardware level. This new GT, referred to as "standalone media" in the spec, has its own GuC, power management/forcewake, etc. The general non-engine GT registers for standalone media start at 0x380000, but otherwise use the same MMIO offsets as the primary GT.

Standalone media has a lot of similarity to the remote tiles present on platforms like [Xe HP Software Development Vehicle] and [Ponte Vecchio], and our i915 [kernel graphics driver] implementation can share much of the general "multi GT" infrastructure between the two types of platforms.

Intel Graphics today posted a technological deep-dive video presentation into how XeSS (Xe Super Sampling), the company's rival to NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, works. XeSS is a gaming performance enhancement technology where your game is rendered by the GPU at a lower resolution than what your display is capable of; while a high-quality upscaling algorithm scales it up to your native resolution while minimizing quality losses associated with classical upscaling methods.

The video details mostly what we gathered from our older articles on how XeSS works. A game's raster and lighting is rendered at a lower-resolution, frame-data along with motion vectors are fed to the XeSS upscaling algorithm, and is then passed on to the renderer's post-processing and the native-resolution HUD is applied. The XeSS upscaler takes not just motion vector and the all important frame inputs, but also temporal data from processed (upscaled) frames, so a pre-trained AI could better reconstruct details.

EK Fluid Works, a high-performance workstation manufacturer, is expanding its Compute Series with a rackmount liquid-cooled GPU server, the X7000-RM. The EK Fluid Works Compute Series X7000-RM is tailor-made for high-compute density applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, rendering farms, and scientific compute simulations.

What separates the X7000-RM from similar GPU server solutions is EK's renowned liquid cooling and high compute density. It offers 175% more GPU computational power than air-cooled servers of similar size while maintaining 100% of its performance output no matter the intensity or duration of the task. The standard X7000-RM 5U chassis can be equipped with an AMD EPYC Milan-X 64 Core CPU, up to 2 TB of DDR4 RAM, and up to seven NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPUs for the ultimate heavy-duty GPU computational power. Intel Xeon Scalable single and dual socket solutions are also possible, but such configurations are limited to a maximum of five GPUs.

Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards span both gamer and creator/professional user market sector, where we witnessed Intel announce gamer and pro-vis GPU SKUs. Today, we are seeing the usage of the flagship Arc Alchemist SKU called A770 in Blender rendering with ray tracing enabled. The GPU is designed to have a DG2-512 GPU with 512 EUs, 4096 Shading Units, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, and 32 Xe cores for ray tracing, be a powerhouse for games, and handle some professional software as well. At SIGGRAPH 2022, Bob Duffy, Intel's Director of Graphics Community Engagement, showcased a system with Arc A770 GPU running Blender Cycles with ray tracing and denoising.

While we don't have any comparable data to showcase, the system managed to produce a decent rendering in Blender 3.3 LTS release, using Intel's oneAPI. The demo scene had 4,369,466 vertices, 8,702,031 edges, 4,349,606 faces, and 8,682,950 triangles, backed by ray tracing and live denoising. We are yet to see more detailed benchmarks and how the GPU fares against the competition.

Intel Graphics, with its latest Graphics Drivers 31.0.101.3222, changed the coverage of its latest driver updates. The company would be providing game optimizations and regular driver updates only for its Gen12 (Iris Xe), and Arc "Alchemist" graphics products. Support for Gen9, Gen9.5, and Gen11 iGPUs integrated with 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th generations of Intel processors, namely "Skylake," "Kaby Lake," "Coffee Lake," "Ice Lake," and "Cascade Lake," will be relegated to a separate, quarterly driver update cycle, which only covers critical updates and security vulnerabilities, but not game optimizations.

Intel's regular Graphics Driver cycle that includes Day-0 optimizations timed with new game releases, will only cover the Gen12 Xe iGPUs found in 11th Gen "Tiger Lake," "Rocket Lake," and 12th Gen "Alder Lake" processors; besides the DG1 Iris Xe graphics card; and Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs. Version 31.0.101.3222 appears to be a transitioning point, and so it has drivers from both branches included within a 1.1 GB package (the main branch supporting game optimizations for new GPUs, and the legacy branch for the older iGPUs). You can grab this driver from here.

Remember that Limited Edition card that Intel was teasing at the end of March? Well, it turns out that it could very well be the Arc A750 card, at least based on a quick appearance of a card in Gamer Nexus' review of the Gunnir Arc A380 card. For a few seconds in the review video, Gamers Nexus was showing off a card that looked nigh on identical to the renders Intel showed back in March. There was no mention of any specs or anything else related, except that Gamer Nexus has tested the card and that it will presumably be getting its own video in the near future based on what was said in the video.

Based on leaked information, the Arc A750 GPU should feature 24 Xe cores, 3072 FP32 cores and it's expected to be paired with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus. For reference, the Arc A380 features eight Xe cores, 1024 FP32 cores and the cards ship with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 96-bit bus. In related news, Intel is said to be touring some gaming events in the US promoting its yet unavailable Arc graphics cards. LANFest Colorado is said to be the first stop, so if you're planning on attending, this could be your first chance to get some hands-on time with an Arc graphics card.