Intel has published a highly involved and extensive whitepaper on the topic of streamlining its CPU architectures, most notably by focusing on a purely 64-bit specification, and consequently dropping legacy 32-bit operating modes (as well as 16-bit!). Team Blue's key proposal states: "This whitepaper details the architectural enhancements and modifications that Intel is currently investigating for a 64-bit mode-only architecture referred to as x86S (for simplification). Intel is publishing this paper to solicit feedback from the ecosystem while exploring the benefits of extending the ISA transition to a 64-bit mode-only solution."

The paper provides a bit of background context: "Since its introduction over 20 years ago, the Intel 64 architecture became the dominant operating mode. As an example of this evolution, Microsoft stopped shipping the 32-bit version of their Windows 11 operating system. Intel firmware no longer supports non UEFI64 operating systems natively. 64-bit operating systems are the de facto standard today. They retain the ability to run 32-bit applications but have stopped supporting 16-bit applications natively. With this evolution, Intel believes there are opportunities for simplification in our hardware and software ecosystem."

Intel is preparing to expand its NUC mini-PC product line into the rugged industrial PC and signage PC segments with the NUC 13 Rugged. These are characteried by an IP50 dust-resistant chassis that is fanless, and relies on an extruded aluminium body that doubles up as a heatsink. The PC has an operational ambient temperature range of 0°C to 50°C, making them fit for industrial PC (IPC), and digital signage use-cases.

The chassis has several features relevant to its specific form-factor that allow it to be deployed in the field over extended periods. The NUC 13 Rugged comes in three SoC options—Atom x7425E, x7211E, and N50, all three of which feature 6 W to 12 W TDP, and IPUs (infrastructure processing units). You also get a DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM slot, and connectivity that includes dual 2.5 GbE wired LAN, Wi-Fi 6E, 64 GB eMMC storage, an M.2-2280 NVMe slot, and provision for a 4G/5G MODEM. Intel is backing these with 3-year warranties, and assures market availability of 5 years (so companies planning large-scale deployments of these have a stable supply over that period).

In its recent Second Quarter of the Fiscal Year 2023 conference, Synopsys issued interesting information about the recent moves of chip developers and their usage of artificial intelligence. As the call notes, over 200+ chips have been taped out using Synopsys DSO.ai place-and-route (PnR) tool, making it a successful commercially proven AI chip design tool. The DSO.ai uses AI to optimize the placement and routing of the chip's transistors so that the layout is compact and efficient with regard to the strict timing constraints of the modern chip. According to Aart J. de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, "By the end of 2022, adoption, including 9 of the top 10 semiconductor vendors have moved forward at great speed with 100 AI-driven commercial tape-outs. Today, the tally is well over 200 and continues to increase at a very fast clip as the industry broadly adopts AI for design from Synopsys."

This is an interesting fact that means that customers are seeing the benefits of AI-assisted tools like DSO.ai. However, the company is not stopping there, and a whole suite of tools is getting an AI makeover. "We unveiled the industry's first full-stack AI-driven EDA suite, sydnopsys.ai," noted the CEO, adding that "Specifically, in parallel to second-generation advances in DSO.ai we announced VSO.ai, which stands for verification space optimization; and TSO.ai, test space optimization. In addition, we are extending AI across the design stack to include analog design and manufacturing." Synopsys' partners in this include NVIDIA, TSMC, MediaTek, Renesas, and IBM Research, all of which used AI-assisted tools for chip design efforts. A much wider range of industry players is expected to adopt these tools as chip design costs continue to soar as we scale the nodes down. With future 3 nm GPU costing an estimated $1.5 billion, 40% of that will account for software, and Synopsys plans to take a cut in that percentage.

The Intel Design tools webpage has this week once again provided an early preview of upcoming processors - following on from an LGA1851-MTL-S CPU interposer appearing on the site late last month - indicating that a Meteor Lake-S desktop CPU range was due at some point later in 2023. Intel's latest webpage entry features the "BGA2114-ARL-HX Interposer for the Gen 5 VR Test Tool" with an SKU code that reads: "Q6B2114ARLHX."

The BGA 2114 design points to a mobile processor platform, and industry analysts are fairly certain that Intel is preparing next generation high-end laptop CPUs in the form of its rumored Arrow Lake-HX lineup. This range is set to succeed the 13th generation Core-HX Raptor Lake family of mobile processors. The new BGA package looks to be slightly larger than the closest predecessor, possibly accommodating Intel's new "disaggregated" tile-based (tile is their term for chiplet) internal layout.

Last year, the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series introduced customers to a flexible, general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPU) for the data center and the intelligent visual cloud. Since its introduction, Intel has expanded the Intel Flex Series GPU's production-level software capabilities, including new support for Windows cloud gaming, AI inference and digital content creation.

As Flex Series GPU adoption grows in the market, customers, solution providers and developers are utilizing the hardware's capabilities across many real-world scenarios:

• Cloud service providers are deploying instances of Windows cloud gaming alongside streaming and media acceleration.
• Media studios are testing and deploying Flex Series GPUs for high-density streaming and transcoding.
• Digital content creators are using the platform for fast, real-time rendering using ray tracing hardware acceleration.

In particular, the addition of Windows cloud gaming allows the Flex Series GPU to address the growing gaming market. The rapid growth of the global cloud gaming market is estimated to reach a targeted market value of about $13.3 billion by 2028, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 42.5% from 2022 to 2028. Game service providers must continually innovate to deliver first-rate playing experiences to their subscribers while operating the most efficient infrastructure possible.

Intel has published its latest blog post, announcing the Intel Arc Balanced Builds, an initiative that pairs up Intel Arc GPUs with Intel Core CPUs, creating balanced configurations that match Intel Arc graphics cards to the "best-fitting" Intel Core CPU. Starting at $423 for the GPU and CPU and $899 for the full system, Intel claims these combinations come from thousands of test runs and hundreds of hours in the lab, leading up to 15,000 datapoints and 22 GB of data.

According to Intel's own testing, which includes a wide variety of Intel Core processors in different configurations and games, there is a perfect CPU range for both its entry level Intel Arc A380 graphics card, as well as the Intel Arc A750 and Arc A770 graphics cards. Of course, for those with a big or unlimited budget, there is always the best configuration that money can buy, but making a balanced build is what makes sense for many others.

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices, is thrilled to announce the launch of its latest H610MH D5 motherboard. Based on Intel H610 single-chip architecture, the H610MH D5 flawlessly supports 12th/13th Generation Intel Core processors thanks to BIOSTAR's globally renowned design and manufacturing prowess.

The H610MH D5 motherboard is versatile. Engineered to cater both business and leisure, this motherboard brings BIOSTAR's cutting-edge technology, including the energy-efficient A.I FAN, informative Debug LED, and high-performing Intel GbE LAN to transform mundane tasks like web browsing, sending emails, and running office applications into a seamless experience.

Chinese company Loongson, specializing in creating processors for usage in mainland China, has been steadily working on enabling its next-generation Loongson 3A6000 CPUs. Aiming to provide the performance level of Intel Willow Cove and AMD Zen 3, these new CPUs will use Loongson's custom LoongArch Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) with a new set of 64-bit superscalar LA664 cores. Today, thanks to the report from Phoronix, we find out that Loongson has submitted some Linux patches that enable the upcoming 3A6000 CPUs to work with Linux-based operating systems at launch. Interestingly, as the new CPU generation gets closer to launch, more Linux kernel patches begin to surface.

Today's kernel patches focus on supporting the hardware page table walker (PTW). As PTW can handle all fast paths of TLBI/TLBL/TLBS/TLBM exceptions by hardware, software only needs to handle slow paths such as page faults. Additionally, in the past, LoongArch utilized "dbar 0" as a complete barrier for all operations. However, this full completion barrier severely impacted performance. As a result, Loongson-3A6000 and subsequent processors have introduced various alternative hints. Loongson plans to ship samples to select customers in the first half of 2023, so we could see more information surfacing soon.

Intel and SAP SE today announced a strategic collaboration to deliver more powerful and sustainable SAP software landscapes in the cloud. Designed to help customers derive greater scalability, agility and consolidation of existing SAP software landscapes, the collaboration deepens Intel's focus on delivering extremely powerful and secure instances for SAP, powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Using SAP Application Performance Standard benchmarks, Intel's 4th Gen Xeon processors enable significantly higher performance numbers when compared to previous generations of Xeon processors, and these impressive results will be passed along to SAP customers around the globe. Additionally, Intel enables current virtual machine (VM) sizes up to 24 TB with a goal to ramp up to VM sizes of 32 TB with the RISE with SAP solution.

AAEON has today announced the release of the MAX-Q670A, its first Micro-ATX industrial motherboard to incorporate the new 13th Generation Intel Core Processor platform (formerly Raptor Lake). The MAX-Q670A supports a diverse range of CPUs from both the 12th and 13th Generation Intel Core Processor ranges, from 35 W i3 to 65 W i9 SKUs, with the most advanced of these offering 8 P-cores, 16 E-cores, and 32 threads. Advanced technologies available on this platform include Intel TCC for real-time computing, Intel vPro Enterprise for robust security and stability, and Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 for targeted workload management.

In designing the MAX-Q670A, AAEON focused heavily on providing substantial upgrades in storage, hardware-based security features, and increased speed and bandwidth via both onboard interfaces and expansion modules. Equipped with two 16-lane PCIe Gen 5 slots, the MAX-Q670A can accommodate multiple expansion modules such as graphic cards, with a further option of installing two 8-lane cards per slot while still benefiting from PCIe Gen 5 speed. Consequently, the board provides users with a far more sophisticated and diverse range of options when compared to the PCIe Gen 3 performance offered by earlier products from its Micro-ATX line.

Intel Graphics releases Arc GPU Graphics Drivers version 101.4369 WHQL. These drivers significantly improve performance for "The Outlast Trials," with gains of up to 65% and 52% to be had at 1080p and 1440p, respectively, compared to the previous 101.4355 drivers. The drivers also offer 4% to 11% uplifts for "Starship Troopers: Extermination" Early Access. The drivers introduce an all new version of Arc Control, which adds fan speed settings, VRR control, a new Search bar that finds features and settings; improved background replacement for virtual camera, and the ability to select more than one device for telemetry. It also fixes UAC requirements to launch Arc Control, improved Resizable BAR status reporting, and live performance monitoring.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Arc GPU Graphics Drivers 101.4369 WHQL

Last year, Crucial canned its Ballistix brand of gaming focused memory, but it seems like the company still wants to offer its customers a more premium product, as Crucial has just introduced its new Pro series of memory products. Crucial will offer its new Pro series in both DDR5 and DDR4 flavours at either DDR5-5600 or DDR4-3200 speeds. It should be noted that the DDR4 modules still rely on a green PCB, while the DDR5 modules get the same black PCB as Crucial's regular DDR5 modules. Beyond the heatsink, there isn't much that differs between the Pro series and Crucial's regular modules, but there is one thing that might matter to potential buyers.

Crucial has added support for AMD EXPO and Intel XMP 3.0 to its Pro series of modules. In the case of AMD EXPO this only applies to DDR5 modules, whereas the DDR4 modules support Intel XMP 2.0, in this case a feature its standard DDR4 modules lack. This should make it easier for end users to take advantage of the extra performance offered by some of these modules. That said, as Crucial has stuck to JEDEC timings, taking the Pro DDR5-5600 UDIMM kit as an example, you end up with timings of 46-46-45-45 at 1.1 Volts, where competing products have timings in the range of 36-36-36-36, although usually at 1.25 Volts or higher. Even as far as JEDEC timing goes, Crucial has chosen the middle ground for DDR5 5600, as there is a timing option from JEDEC that supports 40-40-40-40, which would make more sense for a more premium product. Price wise, a 32 GB kit with two 16 GB modules of DD5-5600 modules carries an $11 price premium over Crucials standard modules, with a retail price of US$114.99 versus US$103.99, but there are better options out there at this price point.

Hackboard today announced the launch of Hackboard 2, an affordable single-board computer (SBC) about the size of a smartphone but with the power of a desktop computer and one of the lowest-priced Intel-powered and Windows-based single-board computers ever made. It's ideal for Makers and Hobbyists, IoT, Edge Computing, and Embedded Solutions with customizable Hackboards, contact Support@Hackboard.com for more info. Soon, Hackboard will ship Personal Computer Kits, ideal for work-from-home users, remote learners and the classroom.

The Hackboard 2 allows users to create their ideal computing environment at an affordable price, while taking advantage of the benefits of industry standard technology. With optional 4G or 5G modules, users can connect to the internet from almost anywhere. Users can plug the system into nearly any monitor with an HDMI input, including their TV.

CD Projekt RED has released the newest update for The Witcher 3 Next-Gen, bringing performance improvements for ray tracing, adding support for Intel XeSS, and fixing some issues seen earlier.

According to the update release notes, the latest The Witcher 3 Next-Gen Update 4.03 introduces general performance improvements for ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections, and fixes some issues seen with ray-traced shadows. It also addresses issue with DirectX 11 crashing on certain AMD GPUs, adds support for Intel Xe Super Sampling, and fixes lighting issues with Screen Space Reflection when ray-traced global illumination is off. There are also plenty of visual, quest, and gameplay fixes on both the PC and other platforms.

Three years ago, Intel announced a goal to increase global annual spending with diverse suppliers to $2 billion by 2030. We are proud to announce we reached $2.2 billion in diverse supplier spending in 2022, eight years ahead of schedule. This $2.2 billion represents nearly 15 times the annual total when our supplier diversity program launched in 2015 and double our 2019 results.

According to data from Mercury Research posted on Twitter, AMD has gained CPU market share against Intel over the past year. AMD has gone from a 27.7 percent market share in Q1 2022 to a 34.6 percent market share in the first quarter of 2023, which is an increase of 6.9 percent, whereas Intel has gone from 72.3 percent to 65.4 percent, still placing Intel at almost two thirds of the market of x86 CPUs. It should be noted that this includes all types of CPUs, but it's unclear if it includes the chips AMD sells to Microsoft and Sony for their respective consoles.

A separate screenshot posted by @firstadopter details server CPU market share, excluding IoT, although it's unclear what that means in this specific case. Here, AMD has gained 6.3 percent market share, but the company has only gone from a meager 11.6 percent last year, to 18 percent this year, with Intel holding a massive 82 percent market share. AMD's gain here was lower than overall, but it shows that larger corporations are starting to adopt more and more AMD hardware on the server side, where in all fairness, AMD has taken something of a lead over Intel when it comes to the maximum amount of CPU cores each company can offer, even though the per core performance still lags behind Intel to a degree. It'll be interesting to see if AMD can maintain its momentum in market share gain once Intel launches more competitive products later this year, especially in the server market space.

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices today, is excited to introduce the latest B760NH-E motherboard. Designed based on the Intel B760 chipset, the B760NH-E motherboard supports all Intel 12th/13th Generation Intel Core processors in the LGA1700 package. Excellent for business and casual use, the B760NH-E motherboard features advanced BIOSTAR technology such as A.I FAN, A.I TP Control, Digital PWM, and Dr. MOS. It is ideal for users who enjoy running basic tasks such as Web browsing the web, business operations, casual content consumption or even gaming.

Furthermore, the B760NH-E motherboard supports 2-DIMM DDR5 up to 64 GB Memory, PCIe 5.0, PCIe M.2 4.0 (64 Gb/s), HDMI 4K resolution, 2.5GbE LAN, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type C, and supports WiFi 6 & 6E modules (No WiFi card included). These features make the B760NH-E extremely efficient and reliable for businesses requiring reliability and stable performance.

Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and an industry leader in high-performance servers, workstations, and mini-PCs, today announced a newly designed ultra-compact, mainstream mini-PCs for the BRIX lineup, and they adopt the 13th Gen Intel Core U-series mobile processor. With Intel's 7 nm manufacturing process that produces Performance-core (P-core) and Efficient-core (E-core) architectures, users can benefit not only in a performance boost, but also compute with greater efficiency. Besides its lightweight, compact footprint, all new mainstream BRIXs still deliver powerful computing that fits perfectly in any IoT employment, whether for office use, education use, home use, digital signage, medical care, or KIOSK.

Upgrade to the future: Minimalism meets power
The most recent generation of mainstream BRIX products in 2023 adopts an all-new chassis design. Computing performance has increased, but the design does not require an increase in the size of the chassis. Its appearance has curved, soft, and twisted lines with a liveliness that makes it very unobtrusive. By the way it was assembled and layered, and designing oblique angles around the base, a sense of simplicity is created to achieve a lightweight design. This allows users to enjoy ultimate computing performance while also having a stylish and elegant product.

Intel Corporation and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) today announced a strategic collaboration to enable generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) using end-to-end Intel AI hardware and software. The GenAI solution delivers fully custom and proprietary solutions to enterprise clients while keeping private data in the isolation of their trusted environments.

BCG leveraged Intel's AI supercomputer powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors and AI-optimized Habana Gaudi hardware accelerators, as well as production-ready hybrid cloud-scale software. The Intel system powers BCG's GenAI model that delivers insights based on over 50 years' worth of highly confidential and proprietary data. In addition, all AI training and inferencing was completed within BCG's security perimeter.

Implementing state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models requires large amounts of computation, both to train the underlying models, and to serve those models once they're trained. Given the demands of these workloads, a one-size-fits-all approach is not enough - you need infrastructure that's purpose-built for AI.

Together with our partners, we offer a wide range of compute options for ML use cases such as large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and diffusion models. Recently, we announced G2 VMs, becoming the first cloud to offer the new NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs for serving generative AI workloads. Today, we're expanding that portfolio with the private preview launch of the next-generation A3 GPU supercomputer. Google Cloud now offers a complete range of GPU options for training and inference of ML models.

IBASE Technology Inc., a leading provider of industrial motherboards and embedded computing solutions, has announced the release of its latest ET880 COM Express CPU module designed to meet the demands of embedded applications that require low power consumption and fanless operation. The module integrated Intel Atom x6000 series processors that are built on 10 nm technology support clock speeds of up to 3.2 GHz and Intel's Time Coordinated Computing (TCC) technology, which enables precise clock synchronization across multiple devices.

The ET880 delivers robust performance and reliability, with features that make it an ideal choice for a variety of industrial and IoT applications. The module boasts onboard 8 GB DDR4 memory and a DDR4 SO-DIMM slot for a total RAM capacity of 24 GB to ensure efficient system operation. It is equipped with a range of connectivity options, such as a I226IT PCI-E 2.5G LAN controller, two USB 3.1, four USB 2.0, two SATA III, two UART (Tx/Rx only), and three independent displays via the DisplayPort / DVI-D / LVDS or eDP interfaces on the IBASE IP419 carrier board.

Leading global motherboard manufacturer ASRock proudly announces its new series of Alder Lake-N motherboards. The new motherboards will be featuring the latest N100 SoC processor, 4 E-cores with a turbo frequency up to 3.4 GHz and Intel UHD Graphics supporting 4K@60Hz resolution, this passively cooled motherboard provides adequate performance as well as outstanding heat management.

The N100M is a M-ATX sized motherboard designed for smart buyers who is looking for a simple yet capable solution, with onboard USB Type-C, M.2 for both SSD & WiFi, the N100M can be easily built into a system that suits your need, and thanks to the onboard XXL CPU heatsink and fan-less design, it is able to perform a low noise ultra-silent computing experience.

Supermicro, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is introducing the most powerful server in its lineup for large-scale database and enterprise applications. The Multi-Processor product line includes the 8-socket server, ideal for in-memory databases requiring up to 480 cores and 32 TB of DDR5 memory for maximum performance. In addition, the product line includes a 4-socket server, which is ideal for applications that require a single system image of up to 240 cores and 16 TB of high-speed memory.

These powerful systems all use 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Compared with the previous generation of 8-socket and 4-socket servers, the systems have 2X the core count, 1.33X the memory capacity, and 2X the memory bandwidth. Also, these systems deliver up to 4X the I/O bandwidth compared to previous generations of systems for connectivity to peripherals. The Supermicro 8-socket system has attained the highest performance ratings ever for a single system based on the SPECcpu2017 FP Rate benchmarks, for both the base and peak results. In addition, the Supermicro 8-socket and 4-socket servers demonstrate performance leadership on a wide range of SPEC benchmarks.

Today, Lenovo unveiled its latest ThinkStation and ThinkPad workstation solutions designed to provide the high levels of power and performance needed to run sophisticated workloads with ISV certifications. Lenovo workstations are engineered to push the boundaries of performance that help unleash users' potential while maintaining the reliability, usability and configurability needed across a variety of industries. End users can configure tailor-made workstations built using state-of-the-art components such as 13th Generation Intel Core processors and professional NVIDIA RTX GPUs and supporting the industry's latest operating systems including Windows 11 and several distributions of Linux.

ThinkStation P3 series desktop workstations provide the value users need while reaping the benefits of performance or versatility. An all-new Tower form factor built for mission-critical tasks is an ideal solution for value-conscious designers, engineers, and students who seek flexibility and expandability without compromising on compute power. The ThinkStation P3 Tower with its expanded chassis supports larger power supplies up to 1100 W to handle more demanding configurations and multiple storage options up to 26 TB for data-heavy applications. ThinkStation P3 Ultra enhances a revolutionary form factor that packs power and performance in a space-saving chassis that is less than four liters in volume. An intelligently compact workstation, P3 Ultra is designed to handle demanding workflows and easily adapt to changing hybrid workspaces. ThinkStation P3 Tiny is engineered to go where other workstations can't. Its class leading size of one liter allows the P3 Tiny to fit into virtually any location.

Following the recent Q1 2023 financial report with declining revenue, Intel is restructuring its Client Computing Group (CCG) and Data Center Group (DCG). These two units were hit the hardest, with 38 and 39% downturns, respectively. According to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, and a statement from Tom's Hardware, we have information that Intel will be conducting budget cuts to CCG and DCG, with some layoffs. As Dylan Patel notes, Intel will cut CCG and DCG budgets by 10%, resulting in as much as a 20% reduction of the workforce inside those two groups. Additionally, this was supported by Intel's spokesperson, who issued a statement for Tom's Hardware stating the following:

Intel SpokespersonIntel is working to accelerate its strategy while navigating a challenging macro-economic environment. We are focused on identifying cost reductions and efficiency gains through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company.

We continue to invest in areas core to our business, including our U.S.-based manufacturing operations, to ensure we are well-positioned for long-term growth. These are difficult decisions, and we are committed to treating impacted employees with dignity and respect.