Momomo_us posted on Twitter about their finding of a BIOS firmware update for an Intel chipset motherboard from AsRock, others soon pointed out that ASUS had quietly revised a higher-end model as well. Both boards share the same socket platform - LGA 1700 - and currently support Team Blue's 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPU series, but new details presented on pages for the ROG Maximus Z790 APEX and B760M PG Sonic WiFi suggests that these models are pre-prepared for the (still heavily rumored) launch of Raptor Lake Refresh. The changelogs for their respective BIOS updates mention "compatibility for the next-gen" and "support for next-generation" processors. TPU community member, Nater, has pointed out that his ASUS ProArt Z790-CREATOR WIFI board is also eligible for 14th gen support.

Leaks suggest that the Intel 14th Gen Core lineup is expected to launch around October time this year. Raptor Lake Refresh is likely going to serve as a sort of interim release, since insiders think that desktop Meteor Lake-S SKUs are no longer on the menu, and a full-fledged next-gen upgrade - Arrow Lake-S - is not due until Q4 2024 or Q1 2025. Not much is known about how much more performant the RPL refresh will be when compared to the existing range, but more leaks are expected in the coming months. Mobile Meteor Lake examples have been spotted in the wild recently, in official and less official capacities, so keep your eyes peeled.

Intel and the German federal government have signed a revised letter of intent for Intel's planned leading-edge wafer fabrication site in Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt state in Germany. The agreement encompasses Intel's expanded investment in the site, now expected to be more than 30 billion euros for two first-of-a-kind semiconductor facilities (also known as "fabs") in Europe, along with increased government support that includes incentives, reflecting the expanded scope and change in economic conditions since the site was first announced.

Intel acquired the land for the project in November 2022, and the first facility is expected to enter production in four to five years following the European Commission's approval of the incentive package. Given the current timeline and scale of the investment, Intel plans to deploy more advanced Angstrom-era technology in the facilities than originally envisioned. The Magdeburg site will serve Intel products and Intel Foundry Services customers.

Chinese tech tipster Enthusiast Citizen (ECSM) has posted on Bilibili about future Intel product refreshes with a rough timeline spanning from late to 2023 to early 2024. We have been hearing a lot lately about Team Blue's Raptor Lake Refresh, with reports from this week suggesting that this lineup will be the last to sport Team Blue's traditional naming scheme—as 14th Gen Core. ECSM claims that Raptor Lake Refresh-K SKUs are due for launch this October, and non-K units will follow them a month or two later. Team Blue will likely be happy to keep LGA 1700 and 1800 sockets alive for another generation.

ECSM also brings up seemingly new information with an alleged Sapphire Rapids Refresh lined up for early 2024—suggesting that updated HEDT Xeon W2500 and W3500 series processors are incoming. The Intel W790 chipset should be able to run this rumored replacement lineup. ECSM's proposed product roadmap also presents wholly new product ranges including Meteor Lake offerings, albeit with desktop MTL-S SKUs cancelled—mobile-oriented Meteor Lake-H seems to be alive and well with an alleged Q4 2023 launch window. Finally Arrow Lake-S is predicted to launch in the final quarter of 2024 or early 2025—so we will likely have to wait another year and a half for upgraded Intel mainstream desktop SKUs.

Intel has been planning to build its next-generation semiconductor manufacturing plant in Germany for a long time. Today, we have more information thanks to the Handelsblatt business and financial newspaper. According to the Handelsblatt, Intel is in talks with the German government to get as much as 9.9 billion Euros in state subsidies, a target price much higher than the previously agreed 6.8 billion Euros. Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck has been reportedly working intensively to get the amount of state aid for Intel to be this high. Intel's CEO Patrick Gelsinger is supposed to seal the deal on Monday when he will sign the agreement in the Chancellery.

As reported, the location of the next-generation facility will be Saxony-Anhalt, with the more precise location to be known on Monday. Also, we expect to hear what manufacturing node will the upcoming facility produce at the beginning.

Intel today announced that it has selected an area near Wrocław, Poland, as the site of a new cutting-edge semiconductor assembly and test facility. This facility will help meet critical demand for assembly and test capacity that Intel anticipates by 2027. Intel expects to invest up to $4.6 billion in the facility, which will have the capacity to expand. When completed, the facility will support approximately 2,000 Intel employees. The construction of the facility is also expected to create several thousand more jobs, in addition to eventual hiring by suppliers. Design and planning for the facility will begin immediately, with construction to commence pending European Commission approval.

Intel's planned investment in Poland, combined with its existing wafer fabrication facility in Leixlip, Ireland, and its planned wafer fabrication facility in Magdeburg, Germany, will help create a first-of-its-kind end-to-end leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing value chain in Europe. It will also serve as a catalyst for additional ecosystem investments and innovation in Poland and across the European Union.

Dynabook Americas, Inc., a leading provider of professional-grade laptops, today introduced its refreshed ultralight Portégé X30L-K which includes the new hybrid-architecture 13th Gen Intel Core P-Series 28 W processors. Weighing a mere 904 grams1, this professional grade laptop is configurable with 14 core CPUs, up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 memory, ultra-fast SSD, Wi-Fi 6E and choice of a vivid IGZO or multitouch 13.3-inch displays driven by Intel Iris Xe graphics, the Portégé X30L-K delivers uncompromising performance all day long.

The Portégé X30L-K comes standard with Windows 11 Pro to provide enhanced productivity features that deliver users a more personalized and intuitive user experience than previous generations of the operating system. The Portégé X30L-K is among the most secure laptops in the world and meets Microsoft's strict Secured-core PC requirements and addresses the security and manageability challenges posed by the accelerated shift towards flexible working patterns.

Intel is giving its "Raptor Lake" client processor architecture an update in the second half of 2023, called simply "Raptor Lake Refresh." When we first heard about this development back in December 2022, there were two theories on how Intel could name these processors. The first one suggested that it would take the same path as "Coffee Lake Refresh" (9th Gen Core), and give "Raptor Lake Refresh" a whole new generational number scheme (14th Gen Core); while the other held that it would try to carve out new processor model numbers within the 13th Gen, like it did with "Haswell Refresh" (4th Gen Core).

Channel vendors in Taiwan are being communicated that the desktop "Raptor Lake Refresh-S" and mainstream notebook "Raptor Lake Refresh-H" will be the final generation of Core i processors (to retain the current nomenclature), and will be slotted as 14th Gen Core. The top desktop SKU could be named "Core i9-14900K," for example. The ultraportable "Raptor Lake Refresh-U" will be the first generation with the new nomenclature Core branding, while "Meteor Lake" will receive the Core Ultra branding, as it has next-generation CPU cores, iGPU, and an on-package AI accelerator.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced its selection of Intel as one of 15 organizations tasked with developing high-performance, energy-efficient cooling solutions for future data centers. The award, announced in May, is part of the COOLERCHIPS program - Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems - supported by DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Intel's project, anticipated to be a three-year agreement with $1.71 million in funding, will enable the continuation of Moore's Law by allowing Intel to add more cores and transistors to its highest performance processors, while managing the heat on future devices.

Tejas Shah, principal engineer and lead thermal architect for Intel's Super Compute Platforms Group said: "Immersion cooling is used for its simplicity, sustainability and ease of upgrades. This proposal will enable two-phase immersion cooling to align with the exponential increase in power expected by processors over the next decade."

Tech tipster momomo_us yesterday spotted that ASRock Rack had listed a new and interesting looking motherboard on its product website, albeit in a "preliminary" category—so pricing and availability have "to be determined" status currently. The W790D8UD-1L1N2T/BCM is a new addition to the company's selection of compact workstation boards, but it distinguishes itself by being the first example of a W790 chipset Deep Micro ATX mainboard with platform support for Intel's latest "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 processors. The single E-type socket (LGA 4677) looks absolutely huge relative to the overall dimensions of its surroundings (264 × 266 mm). The Deep Micro ATX form factor is exclusive to AsRock Rack so it could be tricky to build with a W790D8UD-1L1N2T/BCM board, given that mainstream PC cases may not provide full compatibility with this proprietary configuration.

ASRock Rack W790D8UD-1L1N2T/BCM is capable of running up to 56 cores (the minimum being 6) and 2 TB of DDR5-4800 modules (eight DIMM slots) with a peak bandwidth of 307.2 GB/s, via the platform's advanced memory subsystem. Sapphire Rapids Xeon W processors can control up to 112 PCIe Gen 5 lanes (W-3400) and 64 PCIe Gen 5 lanes (W-2400). Tom's Hardware has kindly collated the rest of the specifications into sentence form: "As for the physical connectivity, the motherboard is equipped with four PCIe x16 slots, one M.2-2280 slot with a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface attached to the W790 PCH, and two OCuLink connectors for SSDs. Network connectivity includes two 10GbE ports controlled by Broadcom BCM57416, a GbE connector managed by the Intel I226, and another GbE handled by the Intel I210. In addition, it has a dedicated GbE port for remote management with the support of Aspeed AST2600 BMC, that is handled by the Realtek RTL8211F. The board also has an SPI connector for TPM modules, USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a COM port, and a D-Sub VGA display connector."

We've made some serious claims around Framework Laptop 13 battery life improvements with the new 13th Gen Intel Core version, and now it's time to put the product to the test! We've hosted a YouTube livestream to test the battery life of the Framework Laptop 13 (13th Gen Intel Core) vs the Framework Laptop 13 (12th Gen Intel Core). The livestream started at 6 am PT yesterday (June 14) and ran until the batteries died. Both systems were set up to be a typical Performance configuration, and both were running a 1080p video in a loop in Windows 11. Full system specs are listed below, and in the YouTube description.

The two key factors to the improved battery life with the latest Framework Laptops are the new 61 Wh Battery included on i7 configurations, offering 11% greater capacity, and the designed-in efficiency improvements that 13th Gen Intel Core processors deliver.

Today, Intel announced the release of its newest quantum research chip, Tunnel Falls, a 12-qubit silicon chip, and it is making the chip available to the quantum research community. In addition, Intel is collaborating with the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) at the University of Maryland, College Park's Qubit Collaboratory (LQC), a national-level Quantum Information Sciences (QIS) Research Center, to advance quantum computing research.

"Tunnel Falls is Intel's most advanced silicon spin qubit chip to date and draws upon the company's decades of transistor design and manufacturing expertise. The release of the new chip is the next step in Intel's long-term strategy to build a full-stack commercial quantum computing system. While there are still fundamental questions and challenges that must be solved along the path to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, the academic community can now explore this technology and accelerate research development."—Jim Clarke, director of Quantum Hardware, Intel

Intel today announced its first major branding change for its client-segment Core desktop and mobile processor family in over 15 years (since the introduction of the very first Core "Nehalem"). "Core" still remains Intel's main client-segment processor brand, but the way the company draws its processor model numbers, is being significantly changed. The company is also introducing the Core Ultra brand of premium processors. The new nomenclature also sees Intel discontinue the use of "generations" within the SKU name.

The current Intel naming scheme sees the company mention processor generation before the main brand Core. For example, the 13th Gen Core is Intel's current line of client-segment products. Right next to Core, Intel places the brand extension "i" followed by the product tiering number 3, 5, 7, or 9. The product model number follows, and even this model number tends to begin with the processor generation. For example, the "i9-13900" already conveys that it is a processor from Intel's 13th Gen Core family. This is where Intel is making its two main changes.

To help bridge the growing gap between modern systems and the legacy technology still in use around the world, global industrial computing specialists, OnLogic (www.onlogic.com), have released the Helix 511 Edge Computer. Designed for use in manufacturing, automation, energy management, and other edge and IoT applications, the Helix 511 easily interfaces with on-site systems thanks to a broad selection of modern and legacy connectivity options.

"We frequently have conversations with customers who are struggling to update their technology infrastructure simply because they can't connect existing systems to newer, more powerful and more capable devices," says OnLogic Product Manager, Hunter Golden. "The embedded computing space has traditionally lagged behind when it comes to adopting new technologies. We want to shift that paradigm while still allowing innovators to access and exchange data with their existing equipment. In many cases, you don't need to rip and replace everything, you just need a Helix 511."

Details of ASUS' upcoming Prime N100I-D D4 Mini-ITX motherboard has made an appearance in official pictures posted over at Fanlesstech, although the board was apparently shown at Computex. The interesting part here is that it's under ASUS' Prime branding, which suggests that this will be a retail product, rather than something that would only be available to OEM partners. The Intel Processor N100 is a quad core 3.4 GHz chip based on Intel's Alder Lake-N and it has a 6 W TDP, which means it can be passively cooled.

Although the SoC supports DDR4 and DDR5 memory, at least for this specific SKU, ASUS went with DDR4 support in the shape of a single SO-DIMM slot which accepts up to 3200 MHz memory. The board also sports a single PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 slot, an M.2 slot for an optional WiFi module, a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot and a single SATA connector and a USB 3.0 header. The odd thing here is that the SoC supports a total of nine PCIe lanes, but ASUS only appears to have made use of four of them. Around the back is a pair of 10 Gbps USB Type-A ports, a pair of 5 Gbps USB Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port, a serial port, a D-Sub VGA connector, a DisplayPort and an HDMI port of unknown version—although the SoC supports DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1—a Gigabit Ethernet jack and three audio jacks.

Intel Graphics today released the latest version of Arc GPU Graphics Drivers. Version 101.4499 beta adds optimization for F1 23, Aliens: Dark Descent, Forever Skies, and Counter Strike 2. There are major performance uplifts to be had. Counter Strike 2 sees up to 8% uplift at 1440p with high settings, and up to 10% at 1080p with Very High settings. F1 23 players can expect up to 33% uplift at 1080p with Ultra High settings and RT on, and an 18% uplift with RT off; and a 27% uplift at 1440p with high settings. Intel also updated its Destiny 2 optimization, with a neat 11% uplift to be had at 1080p with the highest settings. An error or black screen seen on applications embedding WebView2 frames, has been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: Intel GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4499 Beta

The U.S. Patent Office tribunal has ruled in favor of Intel Corp in a significant $2.2 billion case against VLSI Technology LLC. Intel's bid to nullify a patent that constituted $1.5 billion of a $2.18 billion verdict it previously lost to VLSI in 2021 was accepted. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board invalidated the computer chip-related patent and another VLSI patent, accounting for the rest of the Texas federal court verdict. An Intel spokesperson expressed their satisfaction with the decision, criticizing the invalidated VLSI patents as "low-quality."

VLSI, the company holding the patent that has filed several infringement lawsuits against Intel, retains the option to appeal both decisions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In a separate case last year, VLSI secured a verdict worth $949 million against Intel in Texas. VLSI is a subsidiary of Fortress Investment Group, which is managed by investment funds from SoftBank Group. The patent board proceeding was initiated by South Dakota-based Patent Quality Assurance LLC, while another patent from the $2.18 billion verdict was contested by OpenSky Industries LLC. Despite initial sanctions for attempting to extort both Intel and VLSI, OpenSky was permitted to continue the proceeding with Intel at the helm.

ASUS today announced ProArt Station PD500TE, an all-new tower PC meticulously designed to deliver seamless professional content creation. Powered by an up to 13th Generation Intel Core i9-13900 CPU and NVIDIA RTX A4000 graphics, plus support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards, PD500TE delivers robust and stable performance for processor-intensive tasks like video editing and 3D modelling. This latest addition to the popular ProArt Station lineup also has a new thermal design for efficient, quieter cooling.

To maximize its creator-friendly credentials, PD500TE has undergone an extensive Independent Software Vendor (ISV) certification process to assure compatibility with leading creative tools. It also features customizable ASUS Lumiwiz LED indicators, a power-button shield to prevent accidental shutdowns, and even rendering-progress email notifications.

Reuters has been informed this week by a trusted insider source that the higher-ups at Intel Corporation are holding talks with Japan's SoftBank about becoming a possible anchor investor in the latter's initial public offering (IPO) of Arm. The British semiconductor and software design company was wholly acquired by the Japanese multinational investment holding firm in 2016. This was followed by a failed takeover bid by NVIDIA—six years later. Arm is aiming to sell its shares via Nasdaq in Q3 or Q4 2023, with a goal of raising around $8 - $10 billion. It also formulated plans to adjust pricing models earlier this year, with news reports labelling the strategic act as an attempt to rake in more royalties.

Intel and Arm have already formed a relationship in recent times—thanks to the development of the former's low-power compute system-on-chips (SoCs). These are set to be built on Intel Foundry's 18A process. The two companies have signed a multi-generation agreement to collaborate on the design of a series of mobile chipsets as an opening product range—diversified options will follow in the future. Arm is rumored (according to Reuters) to be working on its own proprietary chip, but the deal with Intel allows it to use its partner's "open system foundry model."

Intel's marketing machine is not always all-encompassing with new product launches—case in point the recent whisper quiet appearance of a trio of "Arizona Beach" Atom SKUs on the market. It took a ServeTheHome reader to inform the publication about edge-based solutions becoming available to clients—mosty notably Silicom's Valencia Network Appliance. Ark site information from 2022 suggested that Team Blue launched its Arizona Beach series last summer, but zero marketing (at their end) has resulted in publications only taking notice a year later. Silicom started advertising its Valencia network models just before Christmas.

The Intel Atom C1100 (dual-core), C1110 (quad-core), and C1130 (octa-core) have been compared to the Alder Lake-N series—at first glance somebody could assume that the new platform is related to older E-core solutions. The site is already familiar with the previous generation since a staffer recently reviewed a Fanless Intel N100 Firewall. The top-end C1130 has a TDP rating of 32 W which comes as mild surprise—this is an Intel 7 part with a 2.5 GHz base and turbo frequency clock, alongside 6 MB L3 cache and 4 MB L2 cache. ServeTheHome compiled their own spec infographic of the Atom SKUs side-by-side, and soon discovered key selling points: support for dual-channel LPDDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 4 in "either 1x x16 + 1x x4 or 2x x8 + 1x x4 configurations." They conclude that the new Atom series has the potential to become an excellent platform for low-power edge devices, the author also hopes that a Mini-ITX option will turn up eventually.

With the launch of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors in January 2023, Intel delivered significant advancements in performance with industry-leading Intel accelerator engines and improved performance per watt across key workloads like AI, data analytics, high performance computing (HPC) and others. The industry has taken notice: 4th Gen Xeon has seen a rapid ramp, global customer adoption and leadership performance on a myriad of critical workloads for a broad range of business use cases.

Today, after weeks of rigorous and comprehensive head-to-head testing against the most comparable competitive processors, Intel is sharing compelling results that go far beyond simple industry benchmarks.

Intel Arc graphics have dedicated AI hardware built-in. Leveraging those capabilities for gaming gets the most performance possible out of Arc GPUs, and that's exactly what Xe Super Sampling does. Let's look closer: when you turn on XeSS, every frame the GPU renders starts at a lower size than your target resolution. That smaller image renders quickly, then XeSS steps in. XeSS uses a trained AI model combined with motion vectors and frame history to intelligently upscale frames to full HD, 1440p, or 4K. Got all that? The sausage-making can get pretty technical, but the important thing is turning XeSS on scales games to high resolutions faster than traditional rendering could.

FPS numbers aren't the only thing we're increasing: over fifty games now include XeSS, from the biggest franchises to your niche favorites. When we launched the Intel Arc A750 and A770, we showed how XeSS works to boost FPS in nine popular games with over a dozen more on the way. Now with our high-performance desktop GPUs out for half a year, our game developer friends have helped deliver even more AI-fueled upscaling to over fifty new and existing games. A full list of every game and demo with XeSS included is at the bottom of this article.

According to the report coming from Bloomberg, European Union has approved as much as 8.1 billion Euros (about 8.6 billion USD) for research of advanced semiconductors. Accompanied by the 13.7 billion Euros in private funds, the total investment for boosting domestic semiconductor manufacturing in the EU is almost 22 billion Euros. As part of the European CHIPS Act, the project aims to develop Europe as the world's semiconductor powerhouse, with as much as 20% of all semiconductors produced in the EU by 2030. This ambitious goal is backed by state subsidies, as well as investors creating private pools of funds to aid companies in creating semiconductor manufacturing facilities on European soil.

This Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI) on Microelectronics and Communication Technologies is an essential step for Europe's semiconductor independence. Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton noted, "In a geopolitical context of de-risking, Europe is taking its destiny into its own hands. By mastering the most advanced semiconductors, the EU will become an industrial powerhouse in markets of the future." Companies like Intel, Infineon, STMicroelectronics, GlobalFoundries, and Wolfspeed announced European investments, with TSMC considering a production facility in Germany. German Economy Minister Robert Habeck has noted that Germany has 31 projects in 11 regions, adding, "We can thus increase resilience across Europe in this important field and secure value creation and jobs."

According to The Financial Times, the German Finance Minister—Christian Lindner—is not interested in giving Intel more money than already agreed upon. Lindner stated to the news outlet that "There is no more money available in the budget," and went on to say "We are trying to consolidate the budget right now, not expand it." This is bad news for Intel, as the company was hoping to get a total of €10 billion in subsidies from the German government for its new fab in Magdeburg.

Now it looks like Intel will have to make do with the already promised €6.8 billion that the German government has already agreed upon. Intel was hoping to get some additional funds due to higher energy and construction costs, which appears to be something the company now has to cover out of its own pocket. Considering the estimated cost for the first plant in Magdeburg is estimated at €17 billion, it seems only fair that Intel should cover most of the cost of its new fab. Intel is planning to invest around US$88 billion in Europe over the next few years, which includes further expansions to its fab in Ireland, a packaging and assembly plant in Italy and an R&D facility in France.

ASUS today announced ESC N8-E11, its most advanced HGX H100 eight-GPU AI server, along with a comprehensive PCI Express (PCIe) GPU server portfolio—the ESC8000 and ESC4000 series empowered by Intel and AMD platforms to support higher CPU and GPU TDPs to accelerate the development of AI and data science.

ASUS is one of the few HPC solution providers with its own all-dimensional resources that consist of the ASUS server business unit, Taiwan Web Service (TWS) and ASUS Cloud—all part of the ASUS group. This uniquely positions ASUS to deliver in-house AI server design, data-center infrastructure, and AI software-development capabilities, plus a diverse ecosystem of industrial hardware and software partners.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments in the add-in board (AIB) market decreased in Q1 2023 by -12.6% and decreased by -38.2% year to year. Intel increased its add-in board market share by 2% during the first quarter.

The percentage of AIBs in desktop PCs is referred to as the attach rate. The attach rate grew from last quarter by 8% but was down -21% year to year. Approximately 6.3 million add-in boards shipped in Q1 2023. The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter, as AMD's market share remained flat from last quarter. Intel, which entered the AIB market in Q3'22 with the Arc A770 and A750, gained 2% in market share, while Nvidia retains its dominant position in the add-in board space with an 84% market share.