ASUS today announced ASUS Chromebook CX1, an all-new lightweight and sustainable laptop with trendy aesthetics, and designed to empower modern on-the-go lifestyles. With up to a bright, clear FHD 14-inch display, ASUS Chromebook CX1 is powered by up to a quad-core Intel Pentium Silver processor. It's also engineered with WiFi 6 (802.11ax) and a long-lasting battery that delivers up to 12 hours of productivity on a single charge, handing users the freedom to breeze through everyday tasks. A 180° hinge allows it to be fully opened and laid completely flat on a desk or table, making it easy to share ideas, visuals, samples and designs when working with friends, colleagues or clients.

With smooth performance, robust security and convenient features, ASUS Chromebook CX1 is perfect for empowering seamless entertainment and productivity for everyone—and primed for the post-pandemic world of hybrid work and learning. ASUS Chromebook CX1 embodies pure style with a distinctively trendy look and feel. The lightweight, 1.47 kg design also embraces sustainability, incorporating recycled materials to make it more environmentally friendly. The 180° hinge allows the device to be laid completely flat on a desk, table or lap, making it easy to collaborate and share content with nearby friends or colleagues.

Intel's pioneering 3D X-point Memory, which sought to bridge the gap between non-volatile Flash memory, and volatile DRAM, stares at an untimely demise, as Intel plans to wind up both its Optane Memory business, as well as further development of 3D XPoint. The industry's reception of Optane Memory has been lukewarm; while cheap NVMe SSDs have driven Optane out of the client segment. Intel in its Q2-2022 Financial Results release, announced that it has initiated the winding down of the Optane Memory business, and that the company is incurring a $559 million "Optane Memory Impairment" charge this quarter.

3D XPoint faces technological competition from the latest crop of 3D-stacked Flash memory, which is achieving over 200 layers of density; while the latest generation of PCI-Express Gen 5.0 controllers enable data-rates in excess of 10 GB/s, and certain enterprise-relevant features of PCIe Gen 5. In a statement released to AnandTech, Intel says: "We continue to rationalize our portfolio in support of our IDM 2.0 strategy. This includes evaluating divesting businesses that are either not sufficiently profitable or not core to our strategic objectives. After careful consideration, Intel plans to cease future product development within its Optane business. We are committed to supporting Optane customers through the transition."

ASUS today announced the refreshed 13-inch ExpertBook B5, an ultralight, kilogram-class laptop series available in both traditional clamshell and 360° convertible forms for the ultimate in portability and flexibility, plus the added versatility enabled by stylus support in B5 Flip. The new ExpertBook B5 laptops are built for business success in style, with a precision-crafted and minimalist chassis that pushes the limits of lightness. They're also set for stress-free travel with an amazing 11-hour battery life, and are engineered with many cutting-edge technologies to improve on-the-go work efficiency. These include a 12th Gen Intel Core processor with vPro support, AI noise cancelation, dual-SSD RAID support, ASUS NumberPad 2.0 and ASUS ExpertWidget.

The all-new ExpertBook B5 models are also packed with features to protect personal privacy and business data, including a built-in fingerprint sensor and TPM 2.0 chip. ASUS ExpertBook B5 laptops are sleek, stylish and crafted for the ultimate mobility. Both the top and bottom cover are cut from pure aluminium, while the area around the keyboard area is formed using magnesium-aluminium alloy. These premium materials and careful construction keep the weight down to as little as a feather-light 1.1 kg, while also ensuring that the machines are ready for the rigors of everyday use in the office or on the go. ExpertBook B5 laptops are also remarkably thin, with a profile that measures just 16.9 mm, so they're easy to slip into a bag or briefcase, ready to travel anywhere. B5 Flip also offers stylus support.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, is announcing future Total IT Solutions for availability with Android Cloud Gaming and Media Processing & Delivery. These new solutions will incorporate the Intel Data Center GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound-M, and will be supported on several Supermicro servers. Supermicro solutions that will contain the Intel Data Center GPUs codenamed Arctic Sound-M, include the 4U 10x GPU server for transcoding and media delivery, the Supermicro BigTwin system with up to eight Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M in 2U for media processing applications, the Supermicro CloudDC server for edge AI inferencing, and the Supermicro 2U 2-Node server with three Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M per node, optimized for cloud gaming. Additional systems will be made available later this year.

"Supermicro will extend our media processing solutions by incorporating the Intel Data Center GPU," said Charles Liang, President, and CEO, Supermicro. "The new solutions will increase video stream rates and enable lower latency Android cloud gaming. As a result, Android cloud gaming performance and interactivity will increase dramatically with the Supermicro BigTwin systems, while media delivery and transcoding will show dramatic improvements with the new Intel Data Center GPUs. The solutions will expand our market-leading accelerated computing offerings, including everything from Media Processing & Delivery to Collaboration, and HPC."

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, the global leading brand of PC, launches GIGABYTE Gaming G5/G7 gaming laptops equipped with 10nm Intel 12th Gen Processor today. A laptop to meet the wide range of needs in multitasking, gaming, and entertainment, with 12th Gen Intel Core i5-12500H laptop CPU, which is comprised of 12-core, 16 threads, and a maximum clock rate of 4.5GHz, to meet the needs for telecommuting and online classes, the purchase of high-performance laptops has been made easier with the adoption of Core i5-12500H, the Core i5 processor is powerful enough to effortlessly handle users' routines. Equipped with the graphics cards of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series, also introduces MUX switch graphics card switching technology, discrete GPU can be directly output to the display with just one click, which can easily improve the game performance and increase the frame rate in fierce game battles. For offering authentic gaming specifications and flexible expandability of hardware. The series can satisfy the user's needs for playing multiple roles in life.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $51.9 billion and increased 12% (up 16% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $20.5 billion and increased 8% (up 14% in constant currency)
• Net income was $16.7 billion and increased 2% (up 7% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.23 and increased 3% (up 8% in constant currency)

"We see real opportunity to help every customer in every industry use digital technology to overcome today's challenges and emerge stronger," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "No company is better positioned than Microsoft to help organizations deliver on their digital imperative - so they can do more with less."

Durabook, the global rugged mobile solutions brand owned by Twinhead International Corporation, today announced significant updates to its R11 fully rugged tablet, achieving a world-first with its 11.6" fully rugged tablet featuring the latest 12th Gen Intel processor and architectural innovations to elevate the user experience.

"Durabook designs devices to meet the demanding needs of field service workers who rely on rugged technology to streamline workflows and improve productivity in even the harshest environments," said Twinhead CEO Fred Kao. "The updated R11 employs the latest technology to meet the ever-changing needs of workforces operating in some of the most demanding sectors, including warehouse, field service, law enforcement, and logistics."

AIC Inc., (from now on referred to as "AIC"), a leading provider in enterprise storage and server solutions, today announced its new product family of mainstream dual socket storage servers. Powered by 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors, these rackmount storage servers are high-performance and designed with high flexibility to support various storage devices. This new product family provides options ranging from cost-efficiency servers to high performance all-flash NVMe platforms and can fulfill wide range of data storage applications from storage tiering, virtualization to cloud datacenters and high performance computing (HPC).

This new product family includes three models, SB101-A6, SB202-A6 and SB201-A6. These dual socket server systems are with AIC server board (codename: A6) that is based on 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors. By leveraging 3rd Gen. Intel Xeon Scalable processors 'great features, including CPU TDP supports up to 270 W, DDR4 memory, PCIe Gen4 ready, built-in AI and enhanced security, the new server systems provide excellent performances and low latency while maintaining the cost-effective benefits. Customers can utilize the enhanced Intel CPU performances, memory capabilities and doubled PCIe Gen4 I/O bandwidth to tackle the challenges in data storage workloads. Besides, the new server systems are designed with universal (tri-mode) backplanes and are able to support SAS, SATA, and NVMe, providing great flexibility for customers to load either 3.5"or 2.5" HDDs/SSDs. With tool-less features, the new server systems can save operators significant amount of maintenance resources, which is crucial for hyper-scaler and cloud environments.

Apple has removed the final remaining Intel components from its latest M2 MacBooks with the Intel JHL8040R USB4 timer chips being replaced with a pair of custom U09PY3 chips. This change was discovered by iFixIt during a recent teardown and documented by Twitter user SkyJuice with the exact reason for the change unknown. This move towards alternative USB4 chips is also present with AMD's latest Rembrandt laptops switching to retimers such as the KB8001 'Matterhorn' from Swiss startup Kandou who claim to supply five of the six largest PC OEMs with such chips.

ASRock has signed up as one of Intel's board partners for its Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards, and is ready with its custom-design Arc A380 Challenger card, pictured below. The company joins the likes of China's Gunnir, in bringing to market some of the first graphics cards from the yet-elusive GPUs from Intel. The ASRock-branded custom A380 card surfaced on Chinese social-media site Bilibili, revealing a cost-effective design, with a simple aluminium mono-block fan-heatsink. The board draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, and like Gunnir's A380 card, has a spartan-looking PCB. There's still no word on global availability, and ASRock could stick to the China-first rollout of Arc.

Intel and MediaTek today announced a strategic partnership to manufacture chips using Intel Foundry Services' (IFS) advanced process technologies. The agreement is designed to help MediaTek build a more balanced, resilient supply chain through the addition of a new foundry partner with significant capacity in the United States and Europe. MediaTek plans to use Intel process technologies to manufacture multiple chips for a range of smart edge devices. IFS offers a broad manufacturing platform with technologies optimized for high performance, low power and always-on connectivity built on a roadmap that spans production-proven three-dimensional FinFET transistors to next-generation breakthroughs.

"As one of the world's leading fabless chip designers powering more than 2 billion devices a year, MediaTek is a terrific partner for IFS as we enter our next phase of growth," said IFS President Randhir Thakur. "We have the right combination of advanced process technology and geographically diverse capacity to help MediaTek deliver the next billion connected devices across a range of applications."

A post on Chinese forum Bilibili has revealed more exact details with regards to when Intel's Raptor Lake series of processors will launch and if nothing changes between now and then, the K and KF SKU's should be announced as previously thought, at the Intel Innovation '22 event that kicks off on the 27th of September. Retail availability, alongside Z790 motherboards should be about a month later, starting the week of the 17th of October. We've confirmed these dates with our own sources, but as always with early information, these things can change.

The rest of the Raptor Lake family of CPUs, as well as the H770 and B760 chipsets are expected to launch at CES 2023 in January and the poster on Bilibili claims that retail sales should be sometime in the second half of January. We've not been able to confirm the latter information here. As per older rumours, Intel is expected to change the PCIe lane allocation for the Z790 chipset compared to Z690 and based on the information posted, Z790 will have 20 PCIe 4.0 and eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, vs. 12 PCIe 4.0 and 16 PCIe 3.0 for the Z690 chipset. Raptor Lake is also said to get native support for faster DDR5 5600 memory, rather than just 4800 MHz DDR5 for Alder Lake. There are apparently no changes to the CPU PCIe lanes and DDR4 support is still here, but once again, no changes have been made to the DDR4 memory controller.

Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors will not only be present in the server sector but will also span the high-end desktop (HEDT) platform. Today, according to the findings of a Twitter user, @InstLatX64, we have an appearance of Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids HEDT SKU in Kernel.org boot logs. Named Intel Xeon W9-3495, this model features 56 cores and 112 threads. While there is no specific information about base and boost frequencies, we know that the SKU supports AVX-512 and AMX instructions. This is a welcome addition, as we have seen Intel disable AVX-512 on consumer chips altogether.

With a high core count and additional instructions for Deep Learning, this CPU will power workstations sometimes in the future. With the late arrival of Sapphire Rapids for servers, a HEDT variant should follow.

It's a busy day when it comes to Intel Raptor Lake benchmark leaks and this time around, we're looking at a pair of Core i5-13600K CPUs, but in two different motherboards. The first CPU sits in an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme board and is paired with 32 GB of DDR5 memory, whereas the second CPU is in an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi 6E board, this one also paired with 32 GB of RAM, but DDR4 rather than DDR5. Both systems are running Windows 10 and unlike the Core i9-13900K results that we saw a couple of weeks ago, these two results are both valid according to the Geekbench results browser.

Courtesy of @harukaze5719 we have a nice graph with the results below, even comparing them to the average Geekbench results for a Core i5-12600K, as well as a Ryzen 9 5950X and a Ryzen 5 5600X. The Core i5-13600K beats everything in the single threaded results and the ASUS system is not far behind the Ryzen 9 5950X in the multithreaded tests. The ASUS system is significantly faster than the ASRock one though, so it seems like Raptor Lake is really making the most out of DDR5 memory. As we don't know the memory clocks, it's hard to say if that is also a contributing factor here, but it's likely that the ASUS system uses much faster memory, as in some of the sub-tests like Rigid Body Physics, the two systems are on par in terms of performance. It'll be interesting to see how Intel prices these upcoming CPUs, especially considering that the company has already warned it'll raise its prices in time for the retail availability of Raptor Lake.

The Chinese technology giant, SMIC, has managed to advance its semiconductor manufacturing technology and shipped the first 7 nm silicon manufactured on China's soil. According to analyst firm TechInsights, who examined the 7 nm Bitcoin mining SoC made for MinerVa firm, there are doubts that SMIC 7 nm process is somewhat similar to TSMC's 7 nm process. Despite having no access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing tools, and US restrictions placed around it, SMIC has managed to produce what resembles an almost perfect 7 nm node. This could lead to a true 7 nm logic and memory bitcells sometimes in the future, as the node advances in SMIC's labs.

Having done an in-depth die analysis, the TechInsights report indicates that TSMC, Intel, and Samsung have a more advanced 7 nm node and are two nodes ahead of the Chinese SMIC. The results are not great regarding the economics and yield of this SMIC 7 nm process. While we have no specific data, the report indicates that the actual working chips made with older DUV tools are not perfect. This is not a problem for the Chinese market as it seeks independence from Western companies and technology. However, introducing a China-made 7 nm chip is more critical as it shows that the country can manufacture advanced nodes with restrictions and sanctions in place. The MinerVa SoC die and the PCB that houses those chips are pictured below.

More details of Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake CPUs have tipped up online, as someone submitted the results of a CPU-Z benchmark to the CPU-Z database. The CPU in question is most likely one of the by now, many ES samples of what should be the Core i9-13900K, which means the multiplier is still limited to 50x, which means the clock speeds can't go beyond 5 GHz. Even so, the extra E-cores helps it best the Core i9-12900K in the multithreaded test over 1400 points, using the average results for all 12900K CPUs in the database. It's also faster than the average Core i9-12900KF in the single-threaded test, but it doesn't quite manage to beat the Core i9-12900K results here.

The test system was admittedly not the very best possible hardware, as an MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 motherboard was used and the CPU was paired with 32 GB of CAS19 DDR4 2666 MHz memory, so there's clearly potential for improvement here. The test system was also using Windows 10, which is potentially another bottleneck when it comes to taking advantage of all the extra E-cores. The E-Cores reached a top speed of 2.99 GHz, with the P-cores peaking at 4.99 GHz. The CPU was hitting 100 degrees C during the test, which suggests that some serious cooling is going to be needed for these CPUs. Intel is likely to reveal its Raptor Lake CPU's during the Intel Innovation '22 event in San Jose, which kicks off on the 27th of September.

Gateway, the beloved computer brand with cow-spotted boxes, introduces the latest addition to join its lineup of affordable devices, the All-in-One computer. The new Gateway All-in-One is loaded with Windows 11 Home and is powered by Intel Pentium for faster connectivity and exceptional performance. The Gateway All-In-One computer is affordably priced at $399, making it perfect for any home office or remote learning environment. The new Gateway All-in-One is available exclusively at Walmart and Walmart.com.

"The demand for affordable computing devices continues to increase as remote and hybrid work becomes more common," said Rodney Rad, executive vice president, GPU Company, licensee of the Gateway brand. "Consumers need home computing devices that are fast, reliable, and built with technology that helps to improve productivity. Gateway continues to meet these growing demands and offer devices that won't break the bank."

Minisforum is going to launch two new Intel chip mini PCs which are named NUCXI5 and NUCXI7. Both of them will share the same case design, equipped with a discrete graphics card, and will come with a thunderbolt port to perform ultimate gaming performance. The Minisforum NUCXI5 is equipped with Intel Core i5-11400H CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU. The Intel Core i5-11400H is a high-end Hexa-core SoC that was announced in mid-2021. It belongs to the Tiger Lake H45 family. It has 6 cores and 12 threads and can be boosted up to 4.5 GHz. The CPU offers a 12 MB L3 cache and supports DDR4-3200 memory. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile is an Ampere graphics card that was announced in 2021. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 6 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory.

The other one, Minisforum NUCXI7, uses an even more powerful CPU and GPU which is Intel Core i7-11800H and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070. The Intel Core i7-11800H is a high-end Octa-core SoC that was also announced in mid-2021. It has 8 cores, and 16 threads that can be boosted up to 4.6 GHz. The CPU offers 24 MB of Level 3 cache and supports DDR4-3200 memory. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile was also announced in 2021. It offers 8 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory with a 256 Bit memory bus.

Akasa, a leading provider of active cooling solutions, has released their latest AIO watercoolers under the SOHO range. These coolers come with addressable RGB lighting and premium SOHO AR fans to light up your PC and accentuate its best features. The cooler is compatible with the latest LGA 1700 processors from Intel (e.g. Intel Core i9 12900K) and AMD's AM4 processors (e.g. AMD Ryzen 9 5900X).

Create your unique aesthetic using the Dusk Black or Dawn White editions of Akasa's SOHO 240 AIO watercooler. The sleek, clean design provides a great base for a stealthy build, or use the high-performance SOHO AR12 fans (included) to add splashes of colour and highlights. With over 16 million combinations of colours, the aRGB can bring your build to life; the lights are compatible with all major RGB software such as Gigabyte RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light, ASUS AURA, ASRock Polychrome and Razer Chroma RGB. A convenient controller is included in the package, which can be used to sync the lighting effects together.

Kingston FURY, the gaming division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, announced today the release of Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5 and Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5 RGB memory. The Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5 family is engineered to maximize the performance of your system.

Kingston FURY Renegade DDR5 family pushes the performance of next-gen DDR5 platforms to the extreme with ultra-fast memory up to 6400MT/s1and quick CL32 timings. With premium components hand-tuned by engineers, rigorously tested for compatibility across the industry's leading motherboards, backed by 100% factory testing at speed, and Intel XMP 3.0 Certified, customers can enjoy the ultimate overclock experience.

Intel's 13th Gen Core i5 "Raptor Lake" desktop processor lineup could see the top Core i5-13600K and i5-13600KF feature a 6P+8E core-configuration (that's six performance cores and eight efficiency cores). Each of the six P-cores has HyperThreading enabled, making this a 14-core/20-thread processor. Each of the six "Raptor Cove" P-cores has 2 MB of dedicated L2 cache. The eight "Gracemont" E-cores are spread across two E-core clusters with four cores, each. Each cluster shares 4 MB of L2 cache among the four E-cores (increased from 2 MB per cluster on "Alder Lake"). The P-cores and E-cores share 24 MB of L3 cache, increased from 20 MB on the i5-12600K.

A qualification sample (QS) of the Core i5-13600K made its way to social media, where it was put through a bunch of synthetic tests. In CPU-Z Bench, the i5-13600K QS scores 830 points in single-thread, compared to 648 points of the Ryzen 9 5950X "Zen 3," and trails it in the multi-threaded tests, with 10031.8 points, compared to 11906 points for the Ryzen. The QS comes with a Processor Base Power (PBP) value of 125 W, same as that of the i5-12600K. "Raptor Lake" is backwards compatible with Intel 600-series chipset motherboards, although it launches alongside the Intel 700-series chipset. It shares the LGA1700 socket with 12th Gen "Alder Lake," and is built on the same Intel 7 node (10 nm Enhanced SuperFin) as its predecessor.

Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, will soon release the BIOS update for Intel 600 series motherboards to bolster the new generation Intel Core processors. GIGABYTE has been working closely with Intel to provide users the optimal performance, compatibility, and user experiences. Along with the coming new generation Intel Core processors, GIGABYTE R&D team has prepared well-verified BIOS code exclusively for Z690, B660, and H610 motherboards. This ensures users a perfect articulation for platform upgrade once the new processor hit the market. Users can flash a BIOS file without installing a CPU, RAM, and even GPU by GIGABYTE ＠BIOS, Q-Flash, or Q-Flash Plus technology. Please visit the GIGABYTE official website for the latest BIOS update.

It's been a busy couple of days when it comes to Intel and its Arc graphics cards, as not only has the company showed off the Arc A770—which looks identical to the Arc A750—but the company has also refuted that it was ever planning to release an Arc A780 card, despite the existence of the A380 and supposedly an A580. A leak with price brackets and performance tiering has also leaked, which gives us a much better understanding of how Intel is planning on positioning its Arc graphics cards versus NVIDIA and AMD and it doesn't look like Intel is as confident as it sounded just a few months ago.

LinusTechTips got the honour to reveal the Arc A770 card, although there appear to be minuscule differences to the physical appearance between it and the Arc A750. The only thing noticeable is a 3-pin header, possibly for some kind of RGB syncing, next to the 8- and 6-pin power connectors, something not present on the A750 card that Gamers Nexus showed off earlier this week. The good news is that the Arc A770 seems to be running cool, as the card was reportedly only hitting 69 degrees C during some hands-on time, although this will apparently be covered in a separate video next week.

MSI announced BIOS support and updates on our motherboards for the upcoming series of next-gen Intel CPUs. As a world-leading motherboard brand, MSI is the commitment to keep updating and improving to deliver the best optimizing performance for gamers. BIOS updates are always great news and improvements for users. With MSI M-Flash or Flash BIOS button, allows users to update the BIOS with ease. MSI 600-Series motherboards will receive support for the next generation of Intel's Processors. BIOS updates will be available on its respective motherboard support pages, which can be accessed via the MSI Support website.

Intel has decided to share some more details on its upcoming Arc A750 graphics card, the one and same that appeared briefly in a Gamer Nexus video just the other day. The exact product being previewed is the Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics card, but the company didn't reveal any specifications of the card in the video it posted. What is revealed, is that the card will outperform a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 card at 1440p in the five titles that Intel provided performance indications and average frame rates for. The five games are F1 2021, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, Borderlands 3 and Fortnite, so in other words, mostly quite demanding games with F1 2021 and Fortnite being the exceptions.

The only game we get any kind of insight into the actual performance of in the video, is Cyberpunk 2077, where Ryan Shrout details the game settings and the actual frame rate. At 2560 x 1440, using high settings, the Arc A750 delivers 60.79 FPS, with a low of 50.54 FPS and a max of 77.92 FPS. Intel claims this is 1.17 times the performance of an EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Gaming 12G graphics card. At least Intel didn't try to pull a fast one, as the company provided average frame rates for all the other games tested as well, not just how many times faster the Intel card was and you can see those results below. The test system consisted of an Intel Core i9-12900K fitted to an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero board, 32 GB of 4800 MHz DDR5 memory and a Corsair MP600 Pro XT 4 TB NVMe SSD, as well as Windows 11 Pro. According to the video, the Arc graphics cards should launch "this summer" and Intel will be releasing more details between now and the launch.