For more than a decade, Intel and its partners have been on a mission to virtualize the world's networks, from the core to the RAN (radio access network) and out to the edge, moving them from fixed-function hardware onto programmable, software-defined platforms, making networks more agile while driving down their complexity and cost.

Now operators are looking to cross the next chasm in delivering cloud-native functionality for automating, managing and responding to an increasingly diverse mix of data and services, providing organizations with the intelligence needed at the edge of their operations. Today, Intel announced a range of products and solutions driving this transition and broad industry support from leading operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs).

A new Android tablet has launched today, courtesy of Chinese phone maker OnePlus. However, the name leaves a lot to be desired, as OnePlus decided to call its new tablet, the Pad. There were enough jokes going around when the iPad was launched and we can only guess the OnePlus Pad isn't going to fare much better, although, as it's a much smaller brand, they might get away with it. Regardless of the naff product name, the OnePlus Pad is powered by MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 SoC, which has been paired with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of UFS 3.1 flash memory.

The standout feature of the Pad is its 11.61-inch 2800 x 2000 pixel resolution IPS display, with a refresh rate of up to 144 Hz. The odd resolution means that it has a 7:5 aspect ratio, something never before seen in a tablet and it places it somewhere between a 3:2 and a 4:3 display in terms of the aspect ratio. The panel offers up to 500 nits brightness and a 1400:1 contrast ratio and the Pad is said to have an 88.14 percent screen-to-body ratio. The back of the Pad is home to a 13 Megapixel camera that can shoot 4K video and around the front is an 8 Megapixel camera with 1080p video support. OnePlus has kitted out the Pad with a 9,510 mAh battery which is said to be good for 14 and a half hours of usage and a full charge from empty takes only 80 minutes thanks to support for 67 W SuperVOOC charging. The housing is made of aluminium and OnePlus offers an optional magnetic keyboard and a stylus for the Pad. No pricing was announced.

Samsung Electronics today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year 2022. The Company posted KRW 70.46 trillion in consolidated revenue and KRW 4.31 trillion in operating profit in the quarter ended December 31, 2022. For the full year, it reported 302.23 trillion in annual revenue, a record high and KRW 43.38 trillion in operating profit.

The business environment deteriorated significantly in the fourth quarter due to weak demand amid a global economic slowdown. Earnings at the Memory Business decreased sharply as prices fell and customers continued to adjust inventory. The System LSI Business also saw a decline in earnings as sales of key products were weighed down by inventory adjustments in the industry. The Foundry Business posted a new record for quarterly revenue while profit increased year-on-year on the back of advanced node capacity expansion as well as customer base and application area diversification.

Qualcomm has been working on its Snapdragon SoCs for quite some time now, with massive success in the mobile phone space. However, the company's processors needed to be up to the task regarding laptops. For a user to not look at x86 offerings, the only remaining performant alternatives are Apple's M processors. In 2021 Qualcomm purchased the Nuvia team that was developing massively efficient and high-performance IP for laptops, similar to Apple M processors. Today, according to the insights from Kuba Wojciechowski (@Za_Raczke) on Twitter, we have some potential information about the upcoming Nuvia-powered SoC codenamed Hamoa.

According to the Twitter thread, Qualcomm's Hamoa processors are part of the Snapdragon 8xc Gen 4 compute platform and feature up to eight high-performance P-cores and four low-power E-cores, all based on Nuvia's IP. Allegedly the P-cores are being tested at 3.4 GHz, while the E-cores are tested at 2.5 GHz. The SoC splits CPU cores into blocks, each being a four-core group with 12 MB of shared L2 cache. There is also an 8 MB L3 cache structure; it needs to be clarified whether it is per core block or for the entire SoC. The chip employs 12 MB of system-level cache, with 4 MB of memory for graphics-related tasks handled by iGPU. The iGPU of choice is Adreno 740, with all modern APIs supported. Discrete graphics solutions are supported by the top-end SKUs, which allow eight PCIe 4.0 lanes to be directed toward dGPU, along with an additional four PCIe 4.0 lanes for NVMe SSD. For RAM, the chip uses up to 64 GBs of LPDDR5X eight-channel memory with up to 4.2 GHz speeds. Chip's media engines are structured to support decoding up to 4K120 and encode up to 4K60 with AV1.

AMD announced that its adaptive computing technology is powering leading mobility supplier DENSO Corporation's next-generation LiDAR platform. The new platform will enable over 20X1 improvement in resolution with extremely low latency for increased precision in detecting pedestrians, vehicles, free space and more. The DENSO LiDAR platform, targeted to begin shipping in 2025, will leverage the AMD Xilinx Automotive (XA) Zynq UltraScale+ adaptive SoC and its functional safety suite of developer tools to enable ISO 26262 ASIL-B certification.

DENSO is using the AMD XA Zynq UltraScale+ multi-processor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) platform in its Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) LiDAR system, which generates the highest point-cloud density level of any LiDAR system on the market today. Point-cloud density describes the number of points within a given area and is analogous to image resolution, where richer data ensures that crucial decision-making details are captured.

Back in February 2022 SiFive announced its partnership with Intel Foundry Services (IFS), to bring its "Horse Creek" SoC to market and now SiFive has announced that it's getting ready to launch its first development board on said SoC. This summer, SiFive will launch the HiFive Pro P550 development board, which will kick things up a serious notch when it comes to embedded SoC development boards, regardless of the CPU core the SoC is built around. The HiFive Pro P550 will be one of few microATX based embedded SoC development boards out there and so far, to our knowledge, the only one with a RISC-V based SoC. The Horse Creek SoC sports quad core, 2.2 GHz, 13-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline RISC-V RV64GBC CPU built on the Intel 4 node. The SoC also has a DDR5 5600 MHz memory interface, support for eight lanes of PCIe 5.0 and comes in a 19 x 19 mm FBGA package.

The HiFive Pro P550 will offer 16 GB of DDR5 memory, but based on the render of the motherboard, this is soldered to the board, rather than relying on standard DDR5 DIMMs. Furthermore, the board has two x16 PCIe 3.0 expansion slots, although it's unclear how many PCIe each slot features, as well as a PCIe 3.0 M.2 2280 M-key slot for NVMe SSDs and a PCIe 3.0 M.2 E-key slot for a WiFi/Bluetooth module. The board also sports multiple USB/USB 3.0 ports and even a pair of USB-C ports. The press release also mentions both Gigabit and 10 Gbps Ethernet support, as well as support for onboard graphics and remote system management, without going into any further details. It'll be interesting to see if the Horse Creek SoC can deliver on its expected performance target, especially as SiFive has a lot to prove, especially as the company calls the RISC-V architecture inevitable.

On the day of TSMC's celebration of the mass production start of its 3 nm node, news out of Taiwan suggests that all of its top 10 customers have cut their orders for 2023. However, the cuts are unlikely to affect its new node, but rather its existing nodes, with the 7 and 6 nm nodes said to be hit the hardest, by as much as a 50 percent utilisation reduction in the first quarter of 2023. The 28 nm and 5 and 4 nm nodes are also said to be affected, although it's unclear by how much at this point in time.

Revenue is expected to fall by at least 15 percent in the first quarter of 2023 for TSMC, based on numbers from DigiTimes. The fact that TSMC has increased its 2023 pricing by six percent should at least help offset some of the potential losses for the company, but it all depends on the demand for the rest of the year. Demand for mobile devices is down globally, which is part of the reason why so many of TSMC's customers have cut back their orders, as Apple, Qualcomm and Mediatek all produce their mobile SoCs at TSMC. Add to this that the demand for computers and new computer components are also down, largely due to the current pricing and TSMC is in for a tough time next year.

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce reports that the revenue generation momentum of the global IC design industry slowed down in 3Q22. The main factors behind this development were the Russia-Ukraine military conflict, the recent COVID-19 lockdowns in China, the ongoing inflation, and clients undergoing inventory corrections. The total revenue of the global top 10 IC design houses came to US$37.38 billion for 3Q22, showing a QoQ decline of 5.3%. Qualcomm remained first place in the ranking of the global top 10 IC design houses by revenue for 3Q22. Broadcom returned to second place by overtaking NVIDIA and AMD, who slipped to third and fourth respectively due to weakening demand for PCs and cryptocurrency mining machines.

Regarding US-based IC design houses that were in the top 10 group for 3Q22, Qualcomm recorded a QoQ increase for the sales of smartphone SoCs and 5G modem chips. It also made gains in the automotive electronics market by expanding its collaborations with partners in the automotive industry. As a result, Qualcomm's 3Q22 revenue figures for mobile and automotive offerings reflected QoQ increases of 6.8% and 22.0% respectively. The revenue growth of these two major product categories offset the marginal decline in the revenue for RF front-end chips. Qualcomm's IC design revenue as a whole climbed up by 5.6% QoQ to US$9.90 billion for 3Q22. The company sat firmly at the top of the ranking.

CAES, a leader in advanced mission-critical electronics for aerospace and defense, has announced that its GR740 quad-core LEON4FT SPARC V8 Microprocessor has been launched onboard the Rashid Rover on December 11 and is now heading to the moon. The Rashid Rover was developed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center and is traveling to the moon onboard the Mission 1 lunar lander as part of the HAKUTO-R lunar exploration program. The mission of the four-wheel rover, weighing only 10 kilograms or 22 pounds, will last one lunar day, or 14 Earth days. Its objective is to study the properties of lunar soil, the petrography and geology of the moon, dust movement, and the lunar surface plasma condition and photoelectron sheath.

The GR740 Microprocessor is embedded in the Camera Interface Board (CIB) that is used to control the four cameras onboard the Rashid Rover through an embedded SpaceWire router switch. The GR740 board has been developed by CAES together with AAC Clyde Space. The CIB is connected to a Sirius TCM board, also developed by AAC Clyde Space, which stores and manages the captured and processed images before downloading them to ground.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, and storage solutions innovator, today launched the TS-x62 NAS series. Powered by Intel Celeron dual-core processors, the series includes the 2-bay TS-262 and 4-bay TS-462 models. Both models feature a 2.5GbE port and two M.2 PCIe slots for SSD caching, enabling higher transfer speeds and faster data access to supercharge diverse storage applications. There is also a PCIe Gen 3 slot allowing users to expand NAS functionality with a range of QNAP PCIe cards. Multimedia stored on the TS-x62 can be streamed throughout the home, an enjoyed directly on a TV or monitor with the HDMI 2.1 output.

"We are pleased to have worked with QNAP to release the TS-x62 series which covers various use scenarios for home users, such as 4K media streaming, centralized storage, and efficient file backup. The Intel Celeron N4505 processor delivers attractive performance for home NAS models with its greater collaboration and multitasking capability," said Jason Ziller, General Manager, Client Connectivity Division at Intel Corporation.

According to TrendForce's research, the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries rose by 6% QoQ to US$35.21 billion for 3Q22 as the release of the new iPhone series during the second half of the year generated significant stock-up activities across Apple's supply chain. However, the global economy shows weak performances, and factors such as China's policy on containing COVID-19 outbreaks and high inflation continue to impact consumer confidence. As a result, peak-season demand in the second half of the year has been underwhelming, and inventory consumption is proceeding slower than anticipated. This situation has led to substantial downward corrections to foundry orders as well. For 4Q22, TrendForce forecasts that the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries will register a QoQ decline, thereby terminating the boom of the past two years—when there was an uninterrupted trend of QoQ revenue growth.

Regarding individual foundries' performances in 3Q22, the group of the top five was led by TSMC, followed by Samsung, UMC, GlobalFoundries, and SMIC. Their collective global market share (in revenue terms) came to 89.6%. Most foundries were directly impacted by clients slowing down their stock-up activities or significantly correcting down their orders. Only TSMC was able to make a notable gain due to Apple's strong stock-up demand for the SoCs deployed in this year's new iPhone models. TSMC saw its revenue rise by 11.1% QoQ to US$20.16 billion, and the corresponding market share expanded to 56.1%. The growth was mainly attributed to the ≤7 nm nodes, whose share in the foundry's revenue had kept climbing and reached 54% in the third quarter. Conversely, Samsung actually experienced a slight QoQ drop of 0.1% in foundry revenue even though it had also benefited from the component demand related to the new iPhone series. Partially impacted by the weakening of the Korean won, Samsung's market share fell to 15.5%.

According to TrendForce's latest research, global smartphone production totaled around 289 million units for 3Q22, showing a slight QoQ drop of 0.9% and a YoY drop of 11%. The smartphone market thus exhibited an extremely weak demand situation as the "iron law" of positive growth in the third quarter was broken after being in effect for years. The contraction of smartphone production during this year's peak season was mainly attributed to smartphone brands giving priority to consumption of channel inventory for whole devices and maintaining a fairly conservative production plan for 3Q22. Moreover, they had kept lowering their production targets due to strong global economic headwinds.

Regarding the performances of the major smartphone brands in 3Q22, Samsung posted around 64.2 million units in device production, showing a QoQ increase of just 3.9%. This was the result of the brand scaling back production since 2Q22 and maintaining a conservative outlook on the future market situation. Due to persistent inventory pressure, Samsung is expected to again post a QoQ decline for 4Q22. In the aspect of product development, Samsung has been the leader in foldable smartphones. This year, the global market share of foldable smartphones is estimated to reach 1.1%; and within this segment, Samsung is expected to hold a market share of almost 90%. As for 2023, the global market share of foldable smartphones is forecasted to climb to 1.5%, and Samsung is forecasted to retain a market share of almost 80% in the segment.

MediaTek today launched the Pentonic 1000, its latest flagship smart TV system-on-chip (SoC) designed for 4K 120 Hz displays. Pentonic 1000 integrates Wi-Fi 6/6E support, MEMC for smoother video, a powerful AI processor, Dolby Vision IQ with Precision Detail, and 8-screen Intelligent View so users can watch or preview multiple streams of content at once. The chipset also supports the most advanced video codecs and global TV broadcast standards in a single platform.

The MediaTek Pentonic 1000 combines a powerful multi-core CPU, dual-core GPU, dedicated AI processing unit (APU) and video decoding engines into a single chip. The chipset provides resolution support up to 4K at 120 Hz and is capable of VRR up to 4K at 144 Hz for gaming applications. In addition to supporting super-fast frame rates for smoother gaming, it provides a lag-free experience with Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM).

Eliyan Corporation, credited for the invention of the semiconductor industry's highest-performance and most efficient chiplet interconnect, today announced two major milestones in the commercialization of its technology for multi-die chiplet integration: the close of its Series A $40M funding round, and the successful tapeout of its technology on an industry standard 5-nanometer (nm) process.

Eliyan's NuLink PHY and NuGear technologies address the critical need for a commercially viable approach to enabling high performance and cost-effectiveness in the connection of homogeneous and heterogenous architectures on a standard, organic chip substrate. It has proven to achieve similar bandwidth, power efficiency, and latency as die-to-die implementations using advanced packaging technologies, but without the other drawbacks of specialized approaches.

MediaTek today launched the Dimensity 9200, its latest 5G chipset powering the next era of flagship smartphones. Boasting extreme performance and intelligent power efficiency, the new SoC brings immersive all-day gaming experiences, ultra-sharp image capturing and support for both mmWave 5G and sub-6 GHz connectivity to consumers around the globe.

"MediaTek's Dimensity 9200 combines ultimate performance with significant power savings, extending battery life and keeping smartphones cool," said JC Hsu, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of MediaTek's wireless communications business unit at MediaTek. "With notably brighter image capturing and improved gaming speeds, along with the latest display enhancements, the Dimensity 9200 will bring new possibilities for next-gen smartphones that come in a variety of stylish and foldable form factors."

Over the past few weeks, the legal dispute between Arm Ltd. and Qualcomm Inc. has been warming up the eyes of the entire tech community. However, as per the latest court filing, Arm could change its licensing strategy and shift its whole business model into a new direction that would benefit the company directly. Currently, the company provides the intellectual property (IP) that chip makers can use and add to designs mixed with other IPs and custom in-house solutions. That is how the world of electronics design (EDA) works and how many companies operate. However, in the Qualcomm-Arm legal battle, Qualcomm's counterclaim has brought new light about Arm's plans for licensing its hardware designs past 2024.

According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, who examined court documents, Arm will reportedly change terms to use its IP where the use of other IP mixed with Arm IP is prohibited. If a chip maker plans to use Arm CPU IP, they must also use Arm's GPU/NPU/ISP/DSP IPs. This would result in devices that utilize every design the UK-based designer has to offer, and other IP makers will have to exclude their designs from the SoC. By doing this, Arm directly stands against deals like the Samsung-AMD deal, where AMD provides RDNA GPU IP and would force Samsung to use Arm's Mali GPU IP instead. This change should take effect in 2025 when every new license agreement has to comply with new rules.

Alphawave IP (LSE: AWE), a global leader in high-speed connectivity for the world's technology infrastructure, today announced the successful tapeout of its ZeusCORE100 1-112 Gbps NRZ/PAM4 Serialiser-Deserialiser ("SerDes"), Alphawave's first testchip on TSMC's most advanced N3E process. Alphawave IP will be exhibiting this new product alongside its complete portfolio of high-performance IP, chiplet, and custom silicon solutions at the TSMC OIP Forum on October 26 in Santa Clara, CA as the Platinum sponsor.

ZeusCORE100 is Alphawave's most advanced multi-standard-SerDes, supporting extra-long channels over 45dB and the most requested standards such as 800G Ethernet, OIF 112G-CEI, PCIe GEN6, and CXL 3.0. Attendees will be able to visit the Alphawave booth and meet the company's technology experts including members of the recently acquired OpenFive team. OpenFive is a longstanding partner of TSMC through the OIP Value Chain Aggregator (VCA) program. OpenFive is one of a select few companies with an idea-to-silicon methodology in TSMC's latest technologies, and advanced packaging capabilities, enabling access to the most advanced foundry solution available with the best Power-Performance-Area (PPA). With Alphawave's industry-leading IP portfolio and the addition of OpenFive's capabilities, designers can create systems on a chip (SoCs) that pack more compute power into smaller form factors for networking, AI, storage, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

In December of 2021, we covered the appearance of Russia's home-grown Baikal-S processor, which has 48 cores based on Arm Cortex-A75 cores. Today, thanks to the famous chip photographer Fritzchens Fritz, we have the first die shows that show us exactly how Baikal-S SoC is structured internally and what it is made up of. Manufactured on TSMC's 16 nm process, the Baikal-S BE-S1000 design features 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores running at a 2.0 GHz base and a 2.5 GHz boost frequency. With a TDP of 120 Watts, the design seems efficient, and the Russian company promises performance comparable to Intel Skylake Xeons or Zen1-based AMD EPYC processors. It also uses a home-grown RISC-V core for management and controlling secure boot sequences.

Below, you can see the die shots taken by Fritzchens Fritz and annotated details by Twitter user Locuza that marked the entire SoC. Besides the core clusters, we see that a slum of cache connects everything, with six 72-bit DDR4-3200 PHYs and memory controllers surrounding everything. This model features a pretty good selection of I/O for a server CPU, as there are five PCIe 4.0 x16 (4x4) interfaces, with three supporting CCIX 1.0. You can check out more pictures below and see the annotations for yourself.

Yesterday Intel announced its 13th generation Raptor Lake processor lineup. The top-of-the-line model, Core i9-13900KS, features eight P-cores and 16 E-cores for a total of 24 cores in the SoC. However, that may not represent the maximum for Raptor Lake, as there appears to be another segment equipped with a Raptor Lake processor with 34 cores. According to findings of Tom's Hardware, the Intel Innovation event in San Jose had a surprise for everyone, as there was a booth to display Raptor Lake silicon wafers. After closer examination, the wafer had cutouts for dies that contained as many as 34 cores.

With all cores being the same size, it is assumed that those are P-cores interconnected on a mesh, unlike the traditional ring bus that the rest of Raptor Lake processors use. On the back of the wafer was a label stating, "Raptor Lake-S, 34 core". This suggests that the CPU is perhaps a part of the HEDT offerings that Intel will soon update with the 13th generation designs and that the company showcased a production wafer for those SKUs. We expect to hear more about this unknown 34-core configuration sometime in the future as the new Intel Core generation begins its rollout.

According to TrendForce research, due to steady weakening of overall demand for consumer electronics, inventory pressure has increased among downstream distributors and brands. Although there are still sporadic shortages of specific components, the curtain has officially fallen on a two-year wave of shortages in general, and brands have gradually suspended stocking in response to changes in market conditions. However, stable demand for automotive and industrial equipment is key to supporting the ongoing growth of foundry output value. At the same time, since the creation of a marginal amount of new capacity in 2Q22 led to growth in wafer shipments and a price hike for certain wafers, this drove output value among top ten foundries to reach US$33.20 billion in 2Q22. Quarterly growth fell to 3.9% on a weakening consumer market.

A prelude to inventory correction was officially revealed in 3Q22. In addition to intensifying severity in the initial wave of order slashing for LDDI/TDDI, and TV SoC, diminishing order volume also extended to non-Apple smartphone APs and peripheral IC PMIC, CIS, and consumer electronics PMICs, and mid-to-low-end MCUs, posing a challenge for foundry capacity utilization. However, the launch of the new iPhone in 3Q22 is expected to prop up a certain amount of stocking momentum for the sluggish market. Therefore, top ten foundry revenue in 3Q22 is expected to maintain a growth trend driven by high-priced processes and quarterly growth rate is expected to be slightly higher than in 2Q22.

According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis sources, Apple is moving its embedded cores from Arm to RISC-V. In Apple's Silicon designs, there are far more cores than the main ones that power the operating system and end-user applications. For example, embedded cores are present, and there are 30+ in M1 SoCs responsible for all kinds of workloads not related to the operating system. These tasks are usually associated with other functions such as WiFi/BlueTooth, ThunderBolt retiming, touchpad control, NAND chips having their own core, etc. They run their own firmware and power everything around the central cores that run the OS, so the whole SoC functions appropriately.

It appears that a lot of these cores are based on Arm M-series or lower-end A-series IP that Apple is currently looking to replace with RISC-V. Given that a large portion of software runs on the main big.LITTLE configuration, other secondary SoC tasks can migrate to a different ISA like RISC-V, with a small firmware adjustment. Given that these cores can be placed with custom IPs, Apple would save licensing fees if custom RISC-V cores were used. Additionally, developing firmware for these cores at an Apple engineering team size shouldn't be a problem. Of course, we have no information about when these custom cores will appear inside Apple Silicon. Even when they are used, no formal announcement is expected given that the main cores remain to be powered by Arm ISA, with everything else invisible to the end-user.

Kinara, Inc., developer of unrivaled Edge AI solutions that accelerate and optimize real-time decision making, today announced that it has partnered with Arcturus Networks Inc., provider of edge AI analytics and enablement for smart city applications, to help customers deliver high-performance, cost-optimized AI solutions.

The partnership combines the Kinara Ara-1 Edge AI processor with Arcturus Brinq edge AI and vision analytics software to drive leading-edge detection, tracking and characterization solutions. The partnership delivers the critical software and hardware platforms required by OEMs to build sophisticated real-time edge applications for public safety, transportation, healthcare, retail, and industrial markets. For example, Kinara and Arcturus can deliver a real-time solution for road condition monitoring, allowing public transportation buses retrofitted with smart cameras to detect road obstructions such as potholes and report them directly to city operations.

Intel has announced the availability of its 12th Gen Intel Core SoC processors for IoT Edge. Representing a new lineup of purpose-built edge products optimized for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, this first-of-its-kind socketed system-on-chip (SoC) delivers high performance integrated graphics and media processing for visual compute workloads, a compact footprint to enable smaller innovative form factor designs, and a wide operating thermal design power (TDP) that enables fanless designs and helps customers achieve product sustainability goals.

"As the digitization of business processes continues to accelerate—fueled by workforce demand, supply chain constraints and changing consumer behavior—the amount of data created at the edge and the need for it to be processed and analyzed locally continues to explode. Intel understands the challenges that businesses face—across a wide range of vertical industries—and is committed to help them continue to deliver innovative use cases," said Jeni Panhorst, Intel vice president and general manager of the Network and Edge Compute Division.

Microsoft is reportedly planning to merge its ARM-powered Surface Pro X brand into the main Surface Pro line starting with the upcoming Surface Pro 9. This would see the Surface Pro 9 being offered with the upcoming Microsoft SQ3 processor which is derived from the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3. Microsoft has previously announced a desktop ARM developer kit codenamed "Project Volterra" featuring the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 SoC and a neural processing unit that should offer similar performance. The Surface Pro 9 is also expected to gain 5G connectivity when it is announced alongside updated Surface Studio, and Surface Laptop products in the coming weeks.

MIPS, a leading developer of highly scalable RISC processor IP, announced it is working with Intel to accelerate innovation in open computing. As part of this effort, MIPS' eVocore is being incorporated into the new Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V, a platform designed to deliver new capabilities for pre-silicon development. Intel Pathfinder allows new ways for System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architects and system software developers to define new products and pursue pre-silicon software development on RISC-V.

"MIPS is thrilled to be part of the Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V platform, providing high performance cores with support for multi-cluster, multi-core and multi-threading to accelerate innovation," said Desi Banatao, MIPS CEO. "These multiprocessors have unique features and a high level of scalability that make them ideal for compute-intensive tasks across a broad range of markets and applications."