IC Insights' November Update to the 2020 McClean Report, released later this month, includes a discussion of the forecasted top-25 semiconductor suppliers in 2020. This research bulletin covers the expected top-15 2020 semiconductor suppliers (Figure 1).

The November Update also includes a detailed five-year forecast through 2024 of the IC market by product type (including dollar volume, unit shipments, and average selling price) and a forecast of the major semiconductor industry capital spenders for 2020. A five-year outlook for total semiconductor industry capital spending is also provided.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the global leading motherboard, Mini-PC, Notebooks, mobile device and smart city solutions provider, is pleased to announce the elegant yet powerful All-in-One PC—E22-MH410/E24-MH410. It features up to Intel 10th Generation Core i processor and DDR4-2666 MHz memory for uncompromising performance. The space-saving and streamlined design fits perfectly for any business application such as government and public institutions, healthcare, bank and hotel counter that require computers remain in the office all the times and also ideal for home entertainment.

E22-MH410/E24-MH410 AiO PC showcases the remarkable Nano-edge screen by 21.5-inch and 23.8-inch accordingly. The 21.5-inch screen is suitable for limited area such as hotel or bank counter and office and 23.8-inch screen is ideal for home entertainment. Both of them support Full HD resolution that delivers stunning visuals with outstanding color. With 178˚ wide-viewing technology, you can enjoy lifelike visuals from almost every direction. And the great ergonomic stand offers tilt adjustment for users to relax and stretch body but not missing any important information while working.

Eluktronics today announced the first world laptops equipped with high quality IPS, 1440p, high refresh rate laptops. The new laptops feature displays built by BOE, and current estimates place panel costs for these 1440p panels at just $50 higher than comparable 1080p panels. The panels offer a maximum brightness of 318 nits (so no HDR capability at least for now), but also offer 100% sRGB coverage and 87% Adobe RGB coverage.

Eluktronics is offering three distinct laptops with the new panels: the Mech-15 G3 QHD, Max-15 HQD, and Max7-17 QHD. All of these are based on Intel platforms powered by a Core i7-10870H processor. Currently, the only graphics card option is the NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER (there is no RTX 2080 SUPER option). Prices range from $2,199 to $2,299, and Eluktronics is currently running a promo which shaves $300 off the price with code BFQHD. Eluktronics says these will ship before Christmas. It remains to be seen whether AMD-based options will be introduced as well as when will the graphics card options be updated.

We're happy and excited to announce that we are partnering with Intel to provide the best possible performance and optimization for our PC players in HITMAN 3. Together with Intel, we are working to optimize the game for launch and beyond, with updates, tweaks and improvements coming throughout 2021 that will improve the experience of playing on a high-end PC and multi-core CPUs.

These optimizations include enhancing HITMAN 3 for PC players with 8+ core CPUs, for example you'll be able to spot more crowds in Dubai or experience more complex destructibility in Dartmoor. We're also introducing Variable Rate Shading (VRS), a technique that allows us to prioritize GPU resources where they have the biggest impact. On top of that, we will also implement raytracing after the launch of the game, later in 2021.

OWC, the premier zero-emissions Mac and PC technology company, and a respected provider of Memory, External Drives, SSDs, Mac & PC docking solutions, and performance upgrade kits, announced Mac compatibility and certification of its new OWC Thunderbolt Hub. Previously certified for Thunderbolt 4 PCs, the OWC Thunderbolt Hub is now available for new M1 Macs and all Thunderbolt 3 equipped Macs once upgraded to the new Apple MacOS 11 "Big Sur". The OWC Thunderbolt Hub will give both Mac and PC users the additional Thunderbolt ports they've always wanted.

The OWC Thunderbolt Hub offers the new Thunderbolt hubbing technology. You can now have four Thunderbolt ports, plus one USB port on your new Apple M1 Mac, Apple "Intel" Mac with Thunderbolt 3, or any Thunderbolt 4 PC with this compact hub. You can connect and charge any device with a USB-C or USB-A connector. Support up to two 4K displays or a single 5K/6K/8K display. Add high-performance storage, including NVMe solutions, and generally make your workflow work for you by adding A/V mixers, phone or tablet, even desktop accessories like a keyboard or mouse—all through a single Thunderbolt port. Accessories with past, present, or future USB or Thunderbolt interfaces connect to the OWC Thunderbolt Hub.

The Intel NUC M15 Laptop Kit (formerly code-named "Bishop County") brings Intel's technical expertise to the whitebook market, with the goal of providing Intel's channel customers with a premium, precision engineered laptop kit. Intel provides its broad channel members the best building blocks to create innovative laptops for their customers.

The M15 Laptop Kit includes an 11th Gen Intel Core mobile processor and Intel Iris Xe graphics and is designed to exceed the stringent requirements of the new Intel Evo platform brand. Ultimately, the Intel Evo platform brand is earned by each channel partner, but the M15 Laptop Kit offers the right foundation to build an Intel EVO-qualified laptop.

BittWare, a Molex company, today unveiled the IA-840F, the company's first Intel Agilex -based FPGA card designed to deliver significant performance-per-watt improvements for next-generation data center, networking and edge compute workloads. Agilex FPGAs deliver up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower power, depending on application requirements. BittWare maximized I/O features using the Agilex chip's unique tiling architecture with dual QSFP-DDs (4× 100G), PCIe Gen4 x16, and three MCIO expansion ports for diverse applications. BittWare also announced support for Intel oneAPI, which enables an abstracted development flow for dramatically simplified code re-use across multiple architectures.

"Modern data center workloads are incredibly diverse, requiring customers to implement a mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures," said Craig Petrie, vice president of marketing for BittWare. "The IA-840F ensures that customers can quickly and easily exploit the advanced features of the Intel Agilex FPGA. For those customers who prefer to develop FPGA applications at an abstracted level, we are including support for oneAPI. This new unified software programming environment allows customers to program the Agilex FPGA from a single code base with native high-level language performance across architectures."

Intel continues to "shed fat" on its business portfolio. After last year's sale of its smartphone modem chip business to Apple, the company is now parting ways with its power management circuitry division - Enpirion - and offloading it to Richtek, a division of Taiwanese MediaTek. The sale price of $85 million is a drop in the bucket for Intel's overall bottom line, so it's not a way for the company to cash in some desperately needed money - all accounts of Intel's troubles in the wake of its semiconductor manufacturing issues and AMD's market resurgence pale in comparison to Intel's revenues.

This actually looks like a company that's actually streamlining its R&D expenditures and focusing on execution for the markets Intel sees as most important for today and for tomorrow. Intel's Enpirion focuses on building power management chips for FPGA circuits, SoCs, CPUs, and ASICs, and will now serve to bolster MediaTek's SoC business while allowing the Taiwanese company to expand and diversify its business portfolio, even as Intel focuses on their core competencies.

Intel and Argonne National Laboratory are collaborating on the co-design and validation of exascale-class applications using graphics processing units (GPUs) based on Intel Xe-HP microarchitecture and Intel oneAPI toolkits. Developers at Argonne are tapping into Intel's latest programming environments for heterogeneous computing to ensure scientific applications are ready for the scale and architecture of the Aurora supercomputer at deployment.

"Our close collaboration with Argonne is enabling us to make tremendous progress on Aurora, as we seek to bring exascale leadership to the United States. Providing developers early access to hardware and software environments will help us jumpstart the path toward exascale so that researchers can quickly start taking advantage of the system's massive computational resources." -Trish Damkroger, Intel vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing.

The security of PCs has been an issue in the past few years as cyber-attack methods have been undergoing a transformation to hardware-specific malware that exploits different vulnerabilities of CPUs. That is why Microsoft, the developer of the most popular operating system, Windows 10, decided to engineer a hardware processor that will protect the OS and its user by having a specific job of maintaining the platform security. In collaboration with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, Microsoft is today introducing the Pluton security processor. The collaborator companies are going to integrate the new Pluton processor inside their CPUs and thus embed a new level of security in their PCs.

MicrosoftOur vision for the future of Windows PCs is security at the very core, built into the CPU, where hardware and software are tightly integrated in a unified approach designed to eliminate entire vectors of attack. This revolutionary security processor design will make it significantly more difficult for attackers to hide beneath the operating system, and improve our ability to guard against physical attacks, prevent the theft of credential and encryption keys, and provide the ability to recover from software bugs.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today launched three high-capacity rackmount QuTS hero NAS: the 18-bay TS-h1886XU-RP with a quad-core Intel Xeon D-1622 processor, and the 16-bay TS-h1683XU-RP and 24-bay TS-h2483XU-RP with six-core Intel Xeon E-2236 processors. Featuring server-grade DDR4 ECC memory, multiple 10GbE ports, and abundant PCIe slots for greater I/O potential and performance, these ZFS-based NAS support inline data deduplication and compression, near-limitless snapshots, and real-time SnapSync - delivering the performance and features to excel in the Big Data era.

QuTS hero focuses on data integrity and features self-healing capabilities. It supports read/write cache technology to boost performance and provides multiple RAID configurations with RAID Triple Parity and Triple Mirror to enhance data protection. Individual shared folders allow for up to 1 PB capacity, enabling enterprises to tackle storage-demanding applications including Big Data analysis, edge computing, and AI.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

Der8auer has picked up Intel's latest TEC cooler, built in conjunction with EKWB, and unceremoniously plopped it right into an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. Well, not completely unceremoniously - there were many accommodations that had to be made in order to achieve this. For one, as this is a solution designed specifically for Intel CPUs and sockets, Der8auer had to Frankenstein his way through a number of cooling parts to be able to adapt the TEC solution to the AM4 socket. Not only that, but Intel's TEC requires deep software control for it to work properly - software control which only works with Intel silicon, of course. Der8auer thus had to have a second machine running an Intel 10900K CPU to control the software on the Intel cryo cooler.

All in all, the results were interesting, to say the least. The 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X saw single-core-load CCD temperatures in the 90 °C department with the TEC solution disabled - which promptly dropped down to only 50 °C with the cryo cooler actually operating. With a game load, the 5959X achieved up to 5.050 GHz in single-cores on its automatic boost profile. The entire chip often boosted to 4.8 - 4.9 GHz on all cores at once (with variances between the CCDs) whilst under this cooling solution and workload. With the TEC operating in its unregulated mode - which means, with no considerations for CPU operating temperature and power usage for the cooling process - saw the Ryzen 9 5950X achieving 2 °C core temperature results, and boosted frequencies up to a staggering 5323 MHz on all cores - before crashing. An interesting piece of work which you catch on video after the break; one can rest assured that most PC cooling specialists are already working on their own TEC-based cooling solutions following Intel's achievement in this field.

Intel today announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will leverage Intel Xeon Scalable processors in "Ruby," its latest high performance computing cluster. The Ruby system will be used for unclassified programmatic work in support of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) stockpile stewardship mission, for researching therapeutic drugs and designer antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and for other open science work at LLNL.

Ruby was built in collaboration with Intel, LLNL, Supermicro and Cornelis Networks. The system consists of more than 1,500 nodes, each outfitted with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and features 192 gigabytes of memory. Ruby will deliver 6 petaflops of peak performance and is expected to rank among the world's top 100 most powerful supercomputers.

Intel has launched its Tiger Lake-U lineup of products back in September, with the availability of the first products in October. The launched lineup was part of the "U" variant of ultra-portable devices that stretched only to four core, eight threaded configurations. However, given that the new competitor in mobile space, AMD, has a wide portfolio of offerings that are coming with up to 8C/16T variants, Intel needs a proper response to that. Despite having a better single-threaded performance, the multi-threaded capability of the Ryzen 4000 series is delivering better performance. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker, TUM APISAK, we have the first appearance of Intel's 11th generation Tiger Lake-H processor.

Appearing in Userbenchmark, the processor was tested on a platform codenamed "Insyde TigerLake". The processor was spotted running 8 cores and 16 threads, at the average frequency of 2.75 GHz. This is only an engineering sample, meaning that these clocks do not represent the final frequencies of the processor. As a reminder, Intel's Tiger Lake CPU is a Willow Cove based design manufactured on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin silicon node. We are yet to see the capabilities of the new node and how the chip performs once the reviews arrive.

Intel today announced key milestones in its multiyear journey to deliver a mix of architectures with a unified software experience. The company announced the gold release of Intel oneAPI toolkits coming in December, and new capabilities in its software stack as part of the Intel's combined hardware and software design approach. Intel also debuted its first discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) for the data center, Intel Server GPU, based on the Xe-LP microarchitecture and designed specifically for high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming.

"Today is a key moment in our ambitious oneAPI and XPU journey. With the gold release of our oneAPI toolkits, we have extended the developer experience from familiar CPU programming libraries and tools to include our vector-matrix-spatial architectures. We are also launching our first data center GPU based on Xe-LP microarchitecture focused on the fast-growing cloud gaming and media streaming segments," said Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president, chief architect and general manager of Architecture, Graphics and Software.

Cooler Master has recently announced the MasterLiquid ML360 Sub-Zero AIO with Intel Cryo Cooling Technology. This AIO features the same Intel Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC) found in the EK QuantumX Delta water block to achieve sub-ambient temperatures. The ML360 Sub-Zero features a 52.52 mm TEC unit and Intel software to enable maximum cooling. The AIO features a 360 mm radiator equipped with three SF120R fans and a second-generation pump. The unit is only compatible with 10th and 11th generation Intel processors due to the deep software integration. The MasterLiquid ML360 Sub-Zero will be available to purchase from the end of November for 349.99 Euro.

EK, the leading computer cooling solutions provider, announces the release of their EK-QuantumX Delta TEC water block. With more than 15 years of experience as a leader of premium quality cooling solutions, EK, in collaboration with Intel, has developed a next-level solution for enthusiasts seeking consistent thermal performance and enhanced overclocking on unlocked 10th Gen Intel Core desktop processors.

"Since the start of EK, our goal was to create innovative and viable solutions for gaming and PC enthusiasts," said Edvard König, Founder of EK. "I am proud to merge the consistent and proven performance of the EK Quantum cooling engine with Intel's sub-ambient cooling technology to achieve the best computing and gaming experience imaginable." The EK-QuantumX Delta TEC is exclusively powered by Intel Cryo Cooling Technology, a unique combination of hardware, software, and firmware designed to help unleash elite performance for gamers and overclockers.

EK, the premium liquid cooling gear manufacturer, is updating EK-Classic Kits by rolling out a special Black Nickel Edition, and that's not where the magic ends. These new, special edition, Classic kits are available for the same price as the previous Classic kits, even though there are now more fittings included.

EK-Classic CPU Water Block 115x/20xx/AM4 D-RGB - a high-end, nickel-plated copper CPU water block for modern Intel and AMD processors. It uses addressable RGB LEDs to light up your CPU area. It features a classic, market-proven design that will perfectly fit the needs of enthusiasts and demanding users. The tool-less mounting system makes the installation process a breeze even for beginners. This block comes with a pre-installed Intel mounting system while the AMD AM4 mounting system is in the packaging and needs to be installed if needed.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced the all-new Razer Book 13, a new high-performing productivity laptop built for the go-getters, side-hustlers, and spirited entrepreneurs of today's mobile world. With its ultra-mobile design, the world's thinnest 13.4" display bezels, powerful 11th Gen Intel Core processor with Intel Iris Xe graphics, and robust connectivity, the 13-inch ultraportable enables users to do more, faster.

"Since the launch of the first Razer Blade in 2011, Razer has built a legacy on delivering the highest performing gaming laptops to the delight of our fans worldwide. Today we are excited to announce Razer is breaking into the productivity space the same way we broke into laptop gaming: With a bang," said Brad Wildes, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Razer' Systems business unit. "The new Razer Book 13 is the culmination of a decade's worth of experience in developing and crafting high-end gaming machines. Sleek, powerful, and compact, the Razer Book 13 breaks out from the boring crowd and delivers prosumers an experience not yet realized in a work laptop."

Intel is preparing to flood the market with its Xe GPU lineup, covering the entire vector from low-end to high-end consumer graphics cards. Just a few days ago, the company has announced its Iris Xe MAX GPU, the first discrete GPU from Intel, aimed at 1080p gamer and content creators. However, that seems to be only the beginning of Intel's GPU plan and just a small piece of the entire lineup. Next year, the company is expected to launch two GPU families - Xe-HP and Xe-HPG. With the former being a data-centric GPU codenamed Arctic Sound, and the latter being a gaming-oriented GPU called DG2. Today, thanks to the GeekBench listing, we have some information on the Xe-HP GPU.

Being listed with 512 EUs (Execution Units), translating into 4096 shading units, the GPU is reportedly a Xe-HP variant codenamed "NEO Graphics". This is not the first time that the NEO graphics has been mentioned. Intel has called a processor Neo graphics before, on its Architecture day when the company was demonstrating the FP32 performance. The new GeekBench leak shows the GPU running at 1.15 GHz clock speed, where at the Architecture day the same GPU ran at 1.3 GHz frequency, indicating that this is only an engineering sample. The GPU ran the GeekBench'es OpenCL test and scored very low 25,475 points. Compared to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070 GPU that scored 140,484, the Intel GPU is at least four times slower. That is possibly due to the non-optimization of the benchmark, which could greatly improve in the future. In the first picture below, this Xe-HP GPU would represent the single-tile design.

Intel has just recently announced its next-generation Rocket Lake-S processor specifications designed to bring improved performance and newer platform technologies like PCIe 4.0. However, we are yet to see the first 10 nm CPU for desktop users. Today, thanks to the sources over at VideoCardz, we have the first look at Intel's next-next-generation processor called Alder Lake. The Alder Lake-S is a platform that brings many of the "firsts" for Intel. It will be the first architecture being built on the company's 10 nm SuperFin architecture. Alongside the new node, the platform will transition to the next-generation of technologies. Rumored are the transitions to PCIe 5.0 and perhaps, most importantly - DDR5.

Another new approach will be Intel's adaptation of Arm's big.LITTLE heterogeneous core structure. The processor will feature a few of the "little" cores for light tasks, and fire up the "big" cores for heavy computing. All of that will require a new socket to house the processor, which is the LGA1700. You can see the new processor below, compared to LGA1200 CPU from the previous generation.

Apple late Monday sent out a public invite to an online launch event dated November 10, without revealing what it is. With new generation iPhones and Watches and iPads already announced it's likely that the November 10 event could deal with Macs, specifically, the company's very first MacBooks powered by a non-Intel processor since the company embraced x86 some decade-and-a-half ago.

Apple, having gained in-house expertise in designing powerful Arm-based SoCs, is likely to debut a new Arm-based processor with sufficient muscle to drive MacBooks, in what will be a "client-first" strategy of replacing x86 with Arm for Apple. This will likely see the most client-segment products, such as MacBooks and Mac Mini, get the processor, followed by MacBook Pros, iMacs, and lastly workstation-segment products such as the Mac Pro and iMac Pro. The November 10 event will likely only cover the very first Arm-powered MacBooks. Apple has been selling Arm-powered Mac Minis to ISVs along with a special version of macOS "Big Sur," so they could port their Mac software to the new platform. Arm-powered Macs could also see some form of unification between the iOS and macOS software ecosystems.

Just a few days ago, Intel has decided to surprise us and give out information about its upcoming Rocket Lake-S platform designed for desktop users. Arriving early next year (Q1) the Rocket Lake-S platform is yet another iteration of the company's 14 nm node. However, this time we are getting some real system changes with a new architecture design. Backporting its Golden Cove core to 14 nm, Intel has named this new core type Cypress Cove. What used to be the heart of Ice Lake CPUs, is now powering the Rocket Lake-S platform. Besides the new core, there are other features of the platform like PCIe 4.0, new Xe graphics, and updated media codecs. You can check that out here.

Today, we have gotten the first benchmarks of the Intel Rocket Lake-S system. In the Userbenchmark bench, an unknown eight-core Rocket Lake CPU has been compared to Intel's 10th generation Comet Lake-S processors. The Rocket Lake engineering sample ran at 4.2 GHz while scoring a single-core score of 179. Compared to the Core i9-10900K that runs at 5.3 GHz, which scored 152 points, the Cypress Cove design is 18% faster. And if the new design is compared to the equivalent 8C/16T Compet Lake CPU like Core i7-10700K clocked at 5.1 GHz and scoring 148 points, the new CPU uarch is up to 22% faster. This represents massive single-threaded performance increases, however, please take the information with a grain of salt, as we wait for the official reviews.

Today, Intel has decided to surprise us and give an update to its upcoming CPU lineup for desktop. With the 11th generation, Core CPUs codenamed Rocket Lake-S, Intel is preparing to launch the new lineup in the first quarter of 2021. This means that we are just a few months away from this launch. When it comes to the architecture of these new processors, they are going to be based on a special Cypress Cove design. Gone are the days of Skylake-based designs that were present from the 6th to 10th generation processors. The Cypress Cove, as Intel calls it, is an Ice Lake adaptation. Contrary to the previous rumors, it is not an adaptation of Tiger Lake Willow Cove, but rather Ice Lake Sunny Cove.

The CPU instruction per cycle (IPC) is said to grow in double-digits, meaning that the desktop users are finally going to see an improvement that is not only frequency-based. While we do not know the numbers yet, we can expect them to be better than the current 10th gen parts. For the first time on the Intel platform for desktops, we will see the adoption of PCIe 4.0 chipset, which will allow for much faster SSD speeds and support the latest GPUs, specifically, there will be 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes coming from the CPU only. The CPU will be paired with 12th generation Xe graphics, like the one found in Tiger Lake CPUs. Other technologies such as Deep Learning Boost and VNNI, Quick Sync Video, and better overclocking tuning will be present as well. Interesting thing to note here is that the 10C/20T Core i9-10900K has a PL1 headroom of 125 W, and 250 W in PL2. However, the 8C/16T Rocket Lake-S CPU also features 125 W headroom in PL1, and 250 W in PL2. This indicates that the new Cypress Cove design runs hotter than the previous generation.