Jon Peddie Research, the industry's market research firm for the graphics industry, has updated it's quarterly Market Watch report. Overall, the report finds the crypto-currency market is continuing to influence the PC graphics market, though its influence is waning. Market watch found that year-to-year total GPU shipments increased 3.4%, desktop graphics increased 14%, notebooks decreased -3%. GPU shipments decreased -10% from last quarter: AMD decreased -6%, Nvidia decreased -10%, and Intel decreased -11%.

AMD increased its market share again this quarter benefiting from new products for workstations, and crypto-currency mining, Nvidia held steady, and Intel decreased. Over three million add-in boards (AIBs) were sold to cryptocurrency miners worth $776 million in 2017, and an additional 1.7 million were sold in the quarter.

GIGABYTE has released a compelling new choice in storage servers with a unique combination of performance, capacity and flexibility: the S451-3R0. Powered by dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors and with a capacity of 36 x 3.5" + 2 x 2.5" SSD / HDD, the S451-3R0 provides the best balance of throughput and density, making it extremely suitable for block or object storage, streaming media and big data.

Dual Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
The S451-3R0 features dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with up to 28 cores per CPU, making it extremely suitable for storage applications where high performance or heavy workloads are required. Each CPU socket supports the highest CPU thermal design power requirement of 205W, as well as Intel's Omni-Path connection technology to eliminate CPU to network latency. Six memory channels per CPU with two DIMM slots per channel are supported for DDR4 memory. Maximum memory capacity will depend on your CPU model with a maximum of 1.5TB per CPU.

Micron Technology Inc. and Intel Corporation today announced production and shipment of the industry's first 4bits/cell 3D NAND technology. Leveraging a proven 64-layer structure, the new 4bits/cell NAND technology achieves 1 terabit (Tb) density per die, the world's highest-density flash memory. The companies also announced development progress on the third-generation 96-tier 3D NAND structure, providing a 50 percent increase in layers. These advancements in the cell structure continue the companies' leadership in producing the world's highest Gb/mm2 areal density.

Both NAND technology advancements-the 64-layer QLC and 96-layer TLC technologies -utilize CMOS under the array (CuA) technology to reduce die sizes and deliver improved performance when compared to competitive approaches. By leveraging four planes vs the competitors' two planes, the new Intel and Micron NAND flash memory can write and read more cells in parallel, which delivers faster throughput and higher bandwidth at the system level. The new 64-layer 4bits/cell NAND technology enables denser storage in a smaller space, bringing significant cost savings for read-intensive cloud workloads. It is also well-suited for consumer and client computing applications, providing cost-optimized storage solutions.

Intel's woes with their 10 nm process have been well documented by now (and even if they hadn't, the absence of any real product on store shelves would be a dead giveaway). And as Intel struggles to get its process up and running - and is now ramping up production on comparatively simple Core i3 chips, which are smaller and less prone to costly silicon defects - AMD and other Intel rivals are gaining traction over the once too-slumbering giant.

As a result of Intel's 10 nm difficulties, analyst firm Susquehanna, who recently downgraded AMD and NVIDIA shares on the expected lowered demand for graphics products from these companies in the wake of the first ever Ethereum ASIC, has now revised AMD's share strategy. Previously set at "Sell", the firm now rates AMD's shares as "Neutral" - specifically citing Intel's difficulties in ramping up the new process as simply giving AMD more chances to catch-up and surpass its blue counterpart. Susquehanna's Christopher Rolland published a note to clients stating basically that - that "We believe Intel's delay will help to maintain/improve AMD's competitiveness for their next generation of EPYC and Ryzen products", adding that "(...) for the first time in memory, AMD will compete at a similar process technology as Intel, a strong multi-year tailwind".

Intel's Mobileye, the AI and self-driving feature the blue giant acquired last year for a cool $15.3 billion, has just announced, via an exclusive report to Reuters, that they've secured a contract to provide some 8 million self-driving systems to an European automaker. The deal is a future-focused one, and will see, by 2021, distribution for Intel's EyeQ5 chip, which is designed for fully autonomous driving - an upgrade to the EyeQ4 that will be rolled out in the coming weeks, Reuters reports, according to senior vice president for advanced development and strategy at Mobileye Erez Dagan.

Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's chief executive, said that "By the end of 2019, we expect over 100,000 Level 3 cars [where the car is self-driving but still allows for user intervention should the system be unable to progress for more than 10 seconds] with Mobileye installed." This deal is sure to make Intel even more of a player in the automotive space, where NVIDIA and a number of other high-profile companies have been making strides in recent years.

Intel updated the ARK information page for its stealthily launched 10 nm production chip, the Core i3-8121U "Cannon Lake," to confirm that the chip supports the new AVX-512 instruction-set. This is the first "mainstream" client-segment processor by the company to feature the extremely advanced instruction-set that, if implemented properly on the software side, can double performance/Watt compared to tasks that can take advantage of AVX2.

The instruction-set made its debut with the Xeon Phi "Knights Landing" HPC processor, and made its client-segment debut with the Core X "Skylake X" HEDT processors. It remains to be seen if the implementation of AVX-512 on "Cannon Lake" is complete, or if some instructions found on HPC processors such as the Xeon Phi are omitted due to irrelevance to the client platform.

The Israeli Government revealed that chipmaker Intel plans to expand its presence in the country for manufacturing and R&D. The company is reportedly preparing an ILS 18 billion (around USD $5 billion) investment toward expanding its Kiryat Gat manufacturing facility in southern Israel. The expansion will also include an ILS 3 billion expenditure by Intel on local suppliers. In return, Israel is giving Intel tax-breaks running up to 2027, where the company will be taxed at a reduced rate of 5 percent. The Government is also considering an ILS 700 million grant to the company. Intel is one of the largest employers and manufacturers in Israel. The company exported $3.5 billion worth goods and services from the country in 2017.

The potential impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has never been greater - but we'll only be successful if AI can deliver smarter and more intuitive answers. A key barrier to AI today is that natural data fed to a computer is largely unstructured and "noisy."

It's easy for humans to sort through natural data. For example: If you are driving a car on a residential street and see a ball roll in front of you, you would stop, assuming there is a small child not far behind that ball. Computers today don't do this. They are built to assist humans with precise productivity tasks. Making computers efficient at dealing with probabilities at scale is central to our ability to transform current systems and applications from advanced computational aids into intelligent partners for understanding and decision-making.

The White House today is hosting executives from 38 companies for a grueling, embattled day of trying to move through the as of yet murky waters of AI development. The meeting, which includes representatives from Microsoft, Intel, Google, Amazon, Pfizer, and Ford, among others, aims to gather thoughts and ideas on how to supercharge AI development in a sustainable, safe, and cost-effective way.

Fields such as agriculture, healthcare and transportation are being spearheaded as areas of interest (military applications, obviously, are being discussed elsewhere). The Washington Post quotes Michael Kratsios, deputy chief technology officer at the White House, as saying in a recent interview that "Whether you're a farmer in Iowa, an energy producer in Texas, a drug manufacturer in Boston, you are going to be using these techniques to drive your business going forward."

A report straight out of DigiTimes, citing industry sources, says that Intel has discontinued production of its H310 chipset. The decision has apparently stemmed from lower than expected production capacity for chipsets on the 14 nm process. When that happens, production focus must shift to a specific part: in this case, Intel obviously went with the option with the lower opportunity cost, and increased production of the Z370 chipset: the one with the increased feature-set, and, most likely than not, higher margins.

After a single month of tight supply for the H310 chipset, motherboard makers are now forced to use Intel's B360 chipset in their more cost-conscious options as well - a part which carries higher cost, and thus precludes manufacturers from hitting all the price points they usually would with a fully vertical Intel chipset lineup. Speculation has emerged claiming Intel suspended the supply of H310 because they have chosen to conduct a manufacturing process change from the tight-supply 14 nm (used across almost all of Intel's production stack, both consumer and enterprise) to a 22 nm fabrication technology. Further speculation places this constrained 14 nm supply as existent because of the delay in advancing to 10 nm, a process that Intel expected to be producing in volume by now (and since a while back, to be fair).

HP Inc. today introduced a new class of thin clients that will enable the next generation of virtualized computing and cloud-first application adoption across industries. The latest HP Thin Client innovations set new standards for customers seeking modern design, robust security, ease of management and attractive value. Spending on Cloud IT infrastructure is expected to have double digit growth and surpass spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure by 2022, according to IDC.

"As the cloud continues to reshape the way information is created, maintained and shared, HP Thin Client devices are delivering modern workflows with superior security and low-touch maintenance," said Joanne Bugos, vice president and general manager, Thin Clients, HP Inc. "Our newest thin client solutions provide customers with a convenient and secure option to deploy both virtual and cloud-based computing environments while delivering a great user experience, stylish design, and the versatility needed to support today's workforce both in and out of the office."

GIGABYTE, an industry leader in server hardware for high performance computing, has released two new powerful 4U GPU servers to bring massive parallel computing capabilities into your datacenter: the 8 x SXM2 GPU G481-S80, and the 10 x GPU G481-HA0. Both products offer some of the highest GPU density of this form factor available on the market.

As artificial intelligence is becoming more widespread in our daily lives, such as for image recognition, autonomous vehicles or medical research, more organizations need deep learning capabilities in their datacenter. Deep learning requires a powerful engine that can deal with the massive volumes of data processing required. GIGABYTE is proud to provide our customers with two new solutions for such an engine.

It looks like Intel is designing its discrete graphics processor at a breakneck pace, by a team put together by Raja Koduri. Its development is moving so fast, that the company could be ready with a working product to show the world by the 2019 International CES, held in early-January next year. Intel's development of a graphics processor is likely motivated by the company's survival instinct to not fall behind NVIDIA and AMD in making super-scalar architectures to cash in on two simultaneous tech-booms - AI and blockchain computing.

A blessing in disguise for gamers is the restoration of competition. NVIDIA has been ahead of AMD in PC graphics processor performance and efficiency since 2014, with the latter only playing catch-up in the PC gaming space. AMD's architectures have proven efficient in other areas, such as blockchain computing. NVIDIA, on the other hand, has invested heavily on AI, with specialized components on its chips called "tensor cores," which accelerate neural-net building and training.

An anonymous user from VideoCardz shared two PowerPoint slides from an Intel 'Saudi Conference' containing information on Intel's upcoming Cascade Lake server architecture. Cascade Lake will support processors with up to 28 cores, which seems pretty weak considering that AMD's second-generation EPYC processors are rumored to be packing 64 cores. However, AMD only offers dual socket support for EPYC processors which means that a system can house up to 128 physical cores at best. Intel, on the other hand, will not only be offering dual and quad, but also octa-socket support with Cascade Lake to bring the maximum physical core count to 224 for a single system. On another note, Cascade Lake will also support up to six channels of DDR4 memory and 48 PCIe lanes per processor.

Bluechip computer, a German IT distribution company, has inadvertently spilled the beans on AMD and Intel's plans for the remainder of this year, shedding some more light on a number of products whose existence was still somewhat marred in fog. The information comes straight from a webinar Bluechip presented to its industry partners - a 30-minute presentation which made its way to YouTube.

The information gleaned is a confirmation, of sorts, of AMD's planned launch of their Z490 platform in June; the B450 chipset coming a little bit later, in July (an expected product, in every sense); and AMD's second-gen Threadripper, a known-quantity already, which should accompany a X399 platform refresh.

At CES 2018 in January, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich predicted that quantum computing will solve problems that today take months or years for our most powerful supercomputers to resolve. Krzanich then unveiled Intel's 49-qubit superconducting quantum test chip, code-named "Tangle Lake."

Quantum computing is heralded for its potential. Leaders in scientific and industrial fields are hopeful quantum computing will speed advances in chemistry, drug development, financial modeling and climate change.

AKITIO, in a partnership with Intel will be releasing a special edition of the popular Node Lite PCIe box, bundled with the recently announced Intel Optane 905P, 960GB SSD as well as other higher capacity drives as they become available.

The Intel Optane 905P SSD is a new technology that is different from NAND flash memory. The Optane is a hybrid between DRAM and typical storage memory. By connecting the Intel Optane drive inside the Akitio Node Lite via Thunderbolt 3, we are able to fully utilize the Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth to achieve incredibly fast performance of up to 2200MB/s in both read and write. Unlike NAND flash based SSD's that provide fast performance in only large sized random read/write operations, the Optane drive provides the same phenomenal speeds in both large and small file transfers.

Ahead of its launch, Intel's upcoming Optane 905P SSD surfaced on Newegg, with 960 GB capacity, and an insane $1,600 price (pre-launch price), and a glowing shroud. The retailer put out close to no technical details of the drive, but leaked documents from Intel website do that job for us. Apparently, the Optane 905P comes in both PCI-Express 3.0 x4 add-on card (up to 960 GB) and 15 mm-thick 2.5-inch 32 Gbps U.2 (up to 480 GB) form-factors.

The drive offers sequential transfer rates of up to 2600 MB/s reads, with up to 2200 MB/s writes. The 4K random access numbers are stellar - up to 575,000 IOPS random reads, and up to 550,000 IOPS random writes, with under 10 µs (micro-seconds) latencies. Drives from both form-factors have a rated endurance of 10 DWPD (drive writes per day). These make the 905P slightly faster than the 900P, which clocks in at 2500/2000 MB/s sequential reads/writes, and 550,000/500,000 IOPS 4K random access.

With less than a year after their release, Intel are already retiring their Kaby Lake-X processors. Initially introduced with the X299 platform, the Intel Core i5-7640X and Intel Core i7-7740X were quad-core entry models into the HEDT platform. Unfortunately, they never really took off as planned. Intel openly admitted that market demand for the Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7740X has shifted to other Intel products. Therefore, the two aforementioned models will reach end-of-life status on May 7, 2018. Retailers, suppliers, and OEMs can still order these processors up to November 30 of this year with the last shipments scheduled for May 31 of next year. Goodbye, Kaby Lake-X. It was nice knowing you.

Ahead of its launch, a curious-looking Optane 905P PCI-Express add-in card (AIC) SSD, bearing model number SSDPED1D960GAX1, showed up on Newegg, confirming its imminent launch. The model listed offers 960 GB of storage based on 3D XPoint memory, and unless we're mistaken, an illuminated shroud, unlike its predecessor, the Optane 900P.

The capacity here is the star-attraction, as the Optane 900P only comes in capacities up to 480 GB (that's 280 GB and 480 GB), which had been the biggest complaint of its target audience, PC enthusiasts. The added capacity should also increase the drive's endurance numbers, although the Newegg listing puts out no performance numbers from the manufacturer. The Optane 905P 960 GB commands a US $1,602 price, for now.

Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter 2018 financial results. "Coming off a record 2017, 2018 is off to a strong start. Our PC business continued to execute well and our data-centric businesses grew 25 percent, accounting for nearly half of first-quarter revenue," said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. "The strength of Intel's business underscores my confidence in our strategy and the unrelenting demand for compute performance fueled by the growth of data."

"Compared to the first-quarter expectations we set in January, revenue was higher, operating margins were stronger and EPS was better," said Bob Swan, Intel CFO. "Our data-centric strategy is accelerating Intel's transformation, and we're raising our earnings and cash flow expectations for the year." In the first quarter, the company generated approximately $6.3 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.4 billion and used $1.9 billion to repurchase 41 million shares of stock.

Jim Keller, the VLSI guru who led the team behind AMD's spectacular comeback in the x86 processor market with "Zen," has reportedly quit his job at Tesla to join AMD's bête noire, Intel. Following his work on "Zen," Keller had joined Tesla to work on self-driving car hardware. Keller joins Raja Koduri at Intel, the other big former-AMD name, who led Radeon Technologies Group (RTG).

PC Perspective comments that big names like Keller and Koduri joining Intel could provide clues as to Intel's current state and the direction it's heading in. The company appears to be in a state of shake-up from a decade of complacency and lethargy in its core business. Koduri could be putting together a team of people familiar to him for a new clean-slate project. The last time Intel had a clean slate was ten years ago, with "Nehalem."

Intel unintentionally confirmed the existence of two of its upcoming client platform chipsets, the Z390 Express, and the X399 Express. The latest release-notes documentation of its Rapid Storage Technology driver, mentions Z390 and X399, alongside the CPU micro-architectures they support. The Z390 supports current-generation "Coffee Lake" and upcoming "Cannon Lake" processors, while the X399 supports HEDT derivatives based on the two architectures, namely "Coffee Lake-X" and "Cannon Lake-X," with no mention of "Skylake-X."

What happens to the X299, you ask? The table mentions the chipset as supporting SKL-X (Skylake-X) and KBL-X (Kaby Lake-X), but it's not clear if Intel is only referring to the forgettable i7-7740X and i5-7640X with "KBL-X." The Z390 is rumored as being Intel's next top mainstream-desktop chipset, with a long overdue update to onboard audio standards, in being a departure from the "Azalia" HD audio specification, onward to the new Programmable Quad-Core Audio with new SoundWire digital audio interface. The chipset is also rumored to feature 10 Gbps USB 3.1 ports.

Intel, via its internal documentation that is, routinely, the source of new information on unreleased products, has revealed their next low-power architecture. Codenamed Tremont, the new architecture is expected to be developed on the company's 10 nm process (not unlike Ice Lake) and bring some performance improvements to the company's options for the embedded market.

Tremont will thus replace Intel's Goldmont Plus, which is still being manufactured on the company's 14 nm process (it hasn't been side-graded to the company's 14 nm + or ++ processes, due to these being less suited for denser chip designs). The new architecture will likely receive some specific performance improvements that mirror some of Intel's Core architecture's improvements, alongside support for new instruction sets - CLWB, GFNI (SSE-based), ENCLV, Split Lock Detection instruction set extensions are all extensions that will also be introduced in the company's Ice Lake cores, which increases the likelihood of the same process. Other functions introduced specifically for Tremont include CLDEMOTE, direct store, and user wait instructions.

Photographs of Intel's Crimson Canyon NUC have finally surfaced. WinFuture managed to get their hands on one that's powered by an Intel Core i3-8121U dual-core processor based on the Cannon Lake architecture. The NUCs come with 4 GB or 8 GB of memory, a 2.5-inch hard drive, built-in Wi-Fi 802.11ac, and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity. The Crimson Canyon NUC also features a discrete AMD Radeon graphics card. The "Radeon 500-series" reference in one of the screenshots along with the "2GB of GDDR5" on the packaging takes us to the conclusion that Intel is most likely integrating a Polaris-based graphics card into the Crimson Canyon NUC. It's highly unlikely that we will find the CPU and GPU on the same chip like the one in the Hades Canyon NUC. Instead, the GPU will probably be soldered directly to the motherboard itself. The Intel Core i3-8121U models (NUC8I3CYSM2 and NUC8I3CYSM3) start around 450 euros, which roughly translates to $550. There was no mention when they will be available though.