SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced it has raised $175 million in a Series F financing round, valuing the company at over $2.5 billion. The Series F round was led by Coatue Management, a global technology investment firm that invests in companies at all stages - from venture to growth through public markets. SiFive is substantially accelerating the development of the company's RISC-V products, future roadmap, and ecosystem to achieve the unlimited potential that RISC-V has for SiFive's customers and partners.

Founded six years ago by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive introduced the world to the open standard ISA and transformed the future of compute. Today, RISC-V is firmly established as one of the major global compute platforms, with adoption all around the world, as evidenced by recent industry announcements including the Intel $1B innovation fund, featuring a goal of catalyzing the RISC-V ecosystem. SiFive has design wins with more than 100 customers including several of the world's largest hyperscale companies and 8 of the top 10 semiconductor companies, in applications ranging from automotive, AR/VR, client computing, data center, and intelligent edge.

Intel's ambitious new flagship desktop processor, the Core i9-12900KS, started shipping to early customers before retail embargo. By this we don't mean enthusiasts with privileged ties to the company, but retailers. PC enthusiast DAGINATSUKO was able to purchase one online for roughly USD $790, before the store they purchased from took down the listing.

Pictures of the retail i9-12900KS reveal a darker-themed box than that of the i9-12900K, with "Special Edition" written on the front-face. The chip features an S-Spec code "SRLDD." We also learn a few interesting tidbits about the i9-12900KS from this source. Apparently, its processor base power (PBP) is set at 150 W, and its maximum turbo power (MTP) at 260 W. The standard i9-12900K comes with 125 W PBP and 241 W MTP. The increased power limits support a more aggressive boosting algorithm, with the maximum Turbo Boost clocks on the P-cores set at 5.50 GHz, compared to 5.20 GHz on the i9-12900K. The P-core base frequency is increased by 200 MHz, too, now at 3.40 GHz.

[Editor's note: We have posted our HYTE Y60 review here.]

HYTE, the new PC components, peripherals, and lifestyle brand of iBUYPOWER, today launched the new Y60 mid-tower PC case. Taking a new angle on design, the Y60 boasts a style unlike any other case available on the market.

The uniquely constructed Y60 ATX case features a three-part, bezel-less, tempered glass front and side panel that provides an unobstructed internal view from a left, right, or center orientation. When the glass panels are removed, chamfered molding on the ceiling and floor of the case draw the eye inward, creating a modern aesthetic and allowing the system to be displayed in an open-air format. Users will have the option to choose from three colorways, white and black, black and black, and red and black, to best fit the aesthetic of their setup.

Today Lenovo announced the latest additions to the ThinkPad portfolio: the X13 and X13 Yoga Gen 3, plus refreshed third generation ThinkPad L series laptops designed to empower a hybrid workforce with enhanced collaboration and connectivity features. Following the unveiling of the latest ThinkPad X1 and all-new Z series at CES, and more recently the innovative ThinkPad X13s and updated workhorse T series, refreshing ThinkPad X series and L series completes one of the most comprehensive business laptop portfolios available. Devised to offer customers the best choice, ThinkPad is built leveraging the core tenets of design, innovation and quality. Focused on enhancing the fundamental features that power hybrid working, the latest laptops deliver enhancements including Dolby Voice, FHD cameras, Wi-Fi 6E1, 5G sub6 and 4G LTE wireless WAN, and battery options on select models for the best choice between lightweight mobility and the flexibility of extended battery life.

With more distributed workforces, security remains the number one concern amongst IT decision makers. ThinkShield hardware and software protection that integrates a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) with Windows 11 Secured core PCs enhances security from every angle. Complementary security features embedded in Intel Hardware Shield available exclusively on Intel vPro platform-based devices or AMD Ryzen PRO 6000 Series processors with AMD PRO Security demonstrate the ThinkPad "secure by design" philosophy. Furthermore, ThinkPad is integrating the optional fingerprint reader into the power button for added convenience.

Intel today announced the first phase of its plans to invest as much as 80 billion euros in the European Union over the next decade along the entire semiconductor value chain - from research and development (R&D) to manufacturing to state-of-the art packaging technologies. Today's announcement includes plans to invest an initial 17 billion euros into a leading-edge semiconductor fab mega-site in Germany, to create a new R&D and design hub in France, and to invest in R&D, manufacturing and foundry services in Ireland, Italy, Poland and Spain. With this landmark investment, Intel plans to bring its most advanced technology to Europe, creating a next-generation European chip ecosystem and addressing the need for a more balanced and resilient supply chain.

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, said: "Our planned investments are a major step both for Intel and for Europe. The EU Chips Act will empower private companies and governments to work together to drastically advance Europe's position in the semiconductor sector. This broad initiative will boost Europe's R&D innovation and bring leading-edge manufacturing to the region for the benefit of our customers and partners around the world. We are committed to playing an essential role in shaping Europe's digital future for decades to come."

The output value of the world's top 10 foundries in 4Q21 reached US$29.55 billion, or 8.3% growth QoQ, according to TrendForce's research. This is due to the interaction of two major factors. One is limited growth in overall production capacity. At present, the shortage of certain components for TVs and laptops has eased but there are other peripheral materials derived from mature process such as PMIC, Wi-Fi, and MCU that are still in short supply, precipitating continued fully loaded foundry capacity. Second is rising average selling price (ASP). In the fourth quarter, more expensive wafers were produced in succession led by TSMC and foundries continued to adjust their product mix to increase ASP. In terms of changes in this quarter's top 10 ranking, Nexchip overtook incumbent DB Hitek to clinch 10th place.

TrendForce believes that the output value of the world's top ten foundries will maintain a growth trend in 1Q22 but appreciation in ASP will still be the primary driver of said growth. However, since there are fewer first quarter working days in the Greater China Area due to the Lunar New Year holiday and this is the time when some foundries schedule an annual maintenance period, 1Q22 growth rate will be down slightly compared to 4Q21.

After months of rumors and speculations, it looks like we are finally going to receive official information from Intel regarding the exact country the company plans to do semiconductor R&D and manufacturing in within Europe. Today, the company published its media alert post, showing that we are finally going to receive exact information tomorrow. As we have previously reported, the current round of suggestions led to Intel building a fab inside Germany; however, it still remains to be confirmed. Once the information is out, we are going to report on it and finally see where team blue is headed next. You can find the announcement below.

As part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel is committed to investing in research and development (R&D) capabilities and manufacturing capacity to meet the surging demand for advanced semiconductors and to build a more resilient, globally balanced supply chain.

Join a webcast with CEO Pat Gelsinger where he will share details of Intel's latest plans for in semiconductor R&D and manufacturing in Europe.

When: 6 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. CET), Tuesday, March 15
Where: Watch live on the Intel Newsroom.
Event Replay: A video replay will be available on the Intel Newsroom following the webcast.

Less than 24 hours after Apple's launch event, the first Geekbench numbers for the new Apple M1 Ultra CPU are out and the numbers are interesting to say the least. For starters, the system the Geekbench numbers are from, is the top of the range 20 Core SKU with 128 GB of RAM. This helps us get some additional insight into Apple's new CPUs. As Apple didn't provide much in technical terms yesterday, nor on its website, we now know that the clock speed of the M1 Ultra is the same 3.2 GHz as the regular M1. It also appears that the CPU cache remains the same, even though Geekbench is only listing the cache of the efficiency cores for some reason.

Although Geekbench isn't a reliable cross-platform benchmark, we do at least get an idea of how the new SoC from Apple performs. The single core performance is more or less on par with the Apple M1 Max, but loses out quite easily to Intel's Alder Lake processors. However, once we move to the multi-threaded test, the M1 Ultra really shows what it's capable of. Surprisingly the performance scaling is almost linear with the double of performance CPU cores compared to the M1 Max, which suggests that Apple's multi-chip module design is extremely capable. The interesting thing will be to see how well this design scales for GPU intensive applications. Stepping outside of the Apple ecosystem, the M1 Ultra ends up somewhere around an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X in terms of multi-core performance. Scaling over some of the detailed tests aren't somewhere between 80-90 percent depending on the particular test compared to the M1 Max, if we compare to the faster results on Geekbench, which is still quite impressive considering we're looking at two M1 Max CPUs that are technically glued together.

In-person events are slowly getting back together, and Intel is one of the first to grab tech media's attention with the Intel Vision 2022 conference announcement. Schedule for two days in a row, May 10th and May 11th, Intel's 2022 Vision conference looks like a teaser for some exciting news. The company is expected to present some business insights, hold keynotes, breakout sessions, technology showcases, demos, and exhibitions from sponsors and partners. It requires registration, which is a paid fee of $899 until April 11th, and $1499 after that for in-person seats; however, it is free for digital visitors.

Earlier today, we reported about Intel's plans to release Arc Alchemist discrete graphics card lineup sometime between May and June, so this could be one of the days the company selects for official product launch. We are still not sure about that, so please take those thoughts with a grain of salt. Be sure to tune in and see what Intel plans to do in the future.

Intel is reportedly targeting early-Summer (May-June) for the launch of its ambitious attempt at AAA gaming graphics cards for desktops, the Arc "Alchemist" series, based on the Xe-HPG graphics architecture, according to a report by Igor's Lab. Product launches are expected anywhere between May 2 and June 1, so one could expect some market availability within Summer. The Arc "Alchemist" series is designed to be sold through a handful board partners Intel already has strong industry relations with. The Arc "Alchemist" lineup will initially target four market segments, including the performance segment, meant for maxed out AAA gaming, with XeSS possibly even enabling 4K Ultra HD gameplay. Intel's entry to the gaming graphics space is expected to introduce an element of competitive pressure against both NVIDIA and AMD, as the company has the financial muscle to keep investing in this market if it tastes success with "Alchemist."

ASRock Industrial launches a new range of industrial motherboards powered by 12th Gen Intel Core Processors (Alder Lake-S) with up to 16 cores and 24 threads, supporting the new Intel 600 Series W680, Q670, and H610 chipsets. Featuring high computing power with performance hybrid architecture and enhanced AI capabilities, rich IOs and expansions for up to quad displays 4K@60 Hz, USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbit/s), triple Intel 2.5 GbE LANs with real-time TSN, multi M.2 Key M, ECC memory, plus TPM 2.0, and wide voltage support. The new series covers comprehensive form factors, including industrial Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX, and ATX motherboards for diverse applications, such as factory automation, kiosks, digital signage, smart cities, medical, and Edge AIoT applications.

With the exponential growth of data in the world today, coupled with the shift from centralized clusters of compute and data storage to a more distributed architecture that processes data everywhere—in the cloud, at the edge, and at all points in between—Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are taking on an increasingly important role in modern applications from the data center to the network to the edge. The flexibility, power efficiency, massively parallel architecture, and huge input/output (I/O) bandwidth make FPGAs attractive for accelerating a wide range of tasks from high-performance computing (HPC) to storage and networking. Many of these applications put enormous demands on memory, including capacity, bandwidth, latency and power efficiency.

To handle these high-demand applications, Intel today introduced product details for the Intel Agilex M-Series FPGAs, built on Intel 7 process technology, the industry's highest memory bandwidth FPGAs with in-package HBM DRAM. The Intel Agilex M-Series incorporates several new functional innovations and features that provide the industry with the high-speed networking, computing and memory acceleration required to meet ever-more ambitious performance and capability goals for networks, cloud and embedded edge applications.

Intel and AMD will be releasing new CPUs that support DDR5 DRAM solutions for PCs and servers this year. In response, the DRAM industry led by South Korean suppliers is developing solutions to complement the arrival of the new CPUs. In the midst of the gradual shift to DDR5, DRAM suppliers will also scale back the supply of DDR3 solutions, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. With Korean suppliers accelerating their withdrawal from DDR3 production, Taiwanese suppliers yet to kick off mass production using newly installed capacities, and Chinese suppliers falling short of their expected yield rate, the global supply of DDR3 solutions will undergo an impending decline. With respect to the demand side, however, not only has the supply of networking chips been ramping up, but material shortage issues are also gradually easing. As such, buyers are now procuring DDR3 solutions ahead of time, resulting in a tight supply and demand situation in the DDR3 market. TrendForce therefore expects DDR3 DRAM prices to recover from a bearish first quarter and undergo a 0-5% QoQ increase in 2Q22.

Unless you have been living under a rock, chances are you are following the news about the Russia-Ukraine war disputes. Not to get too political, we are here to report about your favorite rivals—AMD and Intel—officially stopping the delivery of processors to Russia and Belarus. Firstly, an AMD representative told PCWorld that "Based on sanctions placed on Russia by the United States and other nations, at this time AMD is suspending its sales and distribution of our products into Russia and Belarus. It is all AMD products and products we power (PCs, etc) in Russia and Belarus." Additionally, Intel posted an official quote, which you can find below.

IntelIntel condemns the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and we have suspended all shipments to customers in both Russia and Belarus. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, including the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends and loved ones in the region.

"We are working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, especially those with close ties to this region. We have launched an employee donation and matching campaign through the Intel Foundation that has already raised over $1.2 million for relief efforts, and we are proud of the work our teams in surrounding areas including Poland, Germany and Romania are doing to aid refugees. We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine and the global community in calling for an immediate end to this war and a swift return to peace.

Intel today launched its 12th Gen Core Processors with vPro. Released across the company's mobile and desktop product lines, these processors are targeted at pre-built commercial desktops and commercial notebooks that companies typically issue their employees, which come with a host of security and remote-management features suitable to a large corporate environment. With this generation, Intel is bringing vPro to even more market segments, including ultraportables designed under the Intel Evo banner; a new breed of enterprise-grade Chromebooks for businesses built entirely on the Chrome OS platform and cloud-based apps; and for the first time, an SMB version of vPro called vPro Essentials, which will make it to entry-level Core i5 processors with vPro.

Security, Productivity, and Future-readiness form the three areas in which Intel innovated for 12th Gen Core processors with vPro. The company added new capabilities for Threat Detection Technology, which can detect ransomware and supply-chain attacks, and can work with various endpoint security software. Intel Hardware Shield technology prevents attacks from "below" the software (below ring-0, or at the firmware, microcode, or hardware levels). This is achieved through hardware-accelerated virtualization and encryption of the entire software environment. Hardware-based protections extend to vPro Enterprise for Chrome.

Dynabook Americas, Inc., formerly Toshiba PC Company, today announced the all-new Portégé X40L-K, a hyperlight 14-inch modern laptop that takes premium, high-performance computing to new extremes. The Portégé X40L-K is among the first wave of new laptops from Dynabook to benefit from the enhanced performance, efficiency and security offered by hybrid architecture 12th Gen Intel Core P-Series 28 W processors, LPDDR5 memory and Windows 11 Pro.

"The all-new Intel Evo based Portégé X40L-K is truly a masterpiece every way you look at it and serves as an impressive demonstration of Dynabook's nearly four decades of experience in engineering premium laptops for mobile professionals," said James Robbins, General Manager, Dynabook Americas, Inc. "It's compact, powerful, durable, uniquely stylish, and secure. While all impressive, none of these qualities sum up the magic of this laptop. You must hold it to truly appreciate the incredible engineering and craftsmanship that went into making it the lightest and highest-performing 14-inch laptop in our history."

With Intel still not having announced where in Europe they'll set up shop next, but with Magdeburg, Germany being the hot ticket, Italy is now trying to figure out how they can win over some chip makers, least not Intel. The country is working on a €4 billion chip fund of its own to entice chip makers to set up shop in the nation. However, it seems like the fund is going to spread out over time, as it'll run until 2030, the same time frame as the EU's €15 billion chip fund is going to run. Italy will apparently divide the money in chunks of €500 million per year from 2023 to 2030.

Italy was apparently considering giving it all to Intel, according to Reuters, plus another €4 billion in other incentives, over a 10 year period. If that is still the case, isn't clear, especially as the nation is said to be in talks with STMicroelectronics, MEMC Electronic Materials, Tower Semi (now Intel) and others. Reuters claims that negotiations with Intel are very tough, as the company has a lot of demands. The Italian government is also said to be promoting "research and development of microprocessor technology and investments in new industrial applications of innovative technologies".

UP! Bridge the Gap, a brand belonging to a leading manufacturer of AI Edge hardware solutions, AAEON, has unveiled the UP Squared 6000 Edge Computing Kit - a compact, industrial turnkey solution featuring an innovative software package to ease and simplify the development process for system integrators, independent software vendors (ISVs), and IoT developers.

Based on the latest Intel Atom x6000E series processors (formerly Elkhart Lake), the UP Squared 6000 Edge Computing Kit delivers upgraded single-thread, multi-thread, and graphical performances to accelerate computer vision and deep learning applications and enables the features of the Intel Programmable Services Engine (Intel PSE).

Intel is reforming the ATX specification in a big way with ATX 3.0, and power supplies shipping with new 16-pin power connectors for the next generation PCI-Express Gen 5 graphics cards. The 16-pin 12VHPWR (12-Volt High Power). The need for a new connector standard is arising from the growing power demand from graphics cards, as contemporary high-end GPUs crossing the 375 W barrier (two 8-pin PCIe inputs), and some of today's high-end cards even shipping with typical board power values of 450 W at stock frequencies. Custom-design cards based on these GPUs create cable-spaghetti in your case, as they come with three or more 8-pin connectors. To solve these problems and more, Intel innovated the 12VHPWR.

The 12VHPWR connector has 12 electrical pins and 4 side-band pins, for a total of 16 pins. The side-band pins enable low-fi communication between the power-supply and the graphics card, and two of these pins, labeled "SENSE0" and "SENSE1," let the graphics card know what kind of connector is plugged in, so it can accordingly adjust its power-management. There are four variants of the 16-pin connector based on the electrical capability offered by the PSU. These include 600 W, 450 W, 300 W, and 150 W. The arrangement of the two SENSE pins is how the graphics card tells the four apart.

If you have already bought a 12th gen Intel Alder Lake CPU, you could be sitting on a collectors item, as according to Tom's Hardware, Intel is now fusing off AVX-512 support in production. It's possible this could be in preparation for the arrival of the Core "W" series of CPUs that might be replacing the Xeon-W series of processors for Intel. It should be noted that this isn't a rumour, as Tom's Hardware has had an official statement on the matter from Intel.

The statement reads, "Although AVX-512 was not fuse-disabled on certain early Alder Lake desktop products, Intel plans to fuse off AVX-512 on Alder Lake products going forward." As to exactly when this will go into full effect isn't clear, but according to Tom's Hardware, they've already had reports of batches of non-K Alder Lake CPUs that are lacking AVX-512 support. In all fairness to Intel, the company never claimed that its Alder Lake CPUs would support AVX-512 and the support has never been guaranteed to be flawless on the chips that have shipped with it enabled. Intel has also disabled AVX-512 via a microcode update that shipped to motherboard makers in January, but at least some motherboard makers have added a toggle to allow people to re-enable AVX-512 support. It's unlikely that this will affect many potential customers, since AVX-512 instructions aren't widely used in consumer facing software.

Although Intel's upcoming 13th generation of desktop CPUs that goes under the code name of Raptor Lake, are expected to retain support for DDR4 memory, it has come to our attention that Intel will make a big push towards DDR5 when the platform launches later this year. Intel is apparently already asking motherboard makers to avoid using DDR4 in combination with the upcoming 700-series chipsets and the only reason for this would be to speed up the transition to DDR5. According to various leaks and rumors we should expect to see support for DDR5 at 5600 MHz for Raptor Lake, which is at least a step in the right direction.

What this doesn't mean, is that Intel has removed support for DDR4 in the CPUs, as it's still very much present and is expected to work fine in 600-series chipset motherboards. As such, there shouldn't be any issues upgrading to a new CPU, at least not after a quick UEFI update. From our understanding, it's partially related to the fact that DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards have quite different UEFI code when it comes to the memory support and in turn it means that the board makers are going to end up spending a lot more time getting their boards working, as is already the case with the 600-series chipsets. We can sort of understand Intel's sentiment here, but we're also expecting to see some motherboards based on the 700-series chipsets with DDR4 support, least not from the likes of ASRock that has always liked to create non-conforming motherboards. However, this also looks like it's the end for DDR4 support from Intel, which wasn't entirely unexpected.

Intel, along with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE), AMD, Arm, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., have announced the establishment of an industry consortium to promote an open die-to-die interconnect standard called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). Building on its work on the open Advanced Interface Bus (AIB), Intel developed the UCIe standard and donated it to the group of founding members as an open specification that defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package, enabling an open chiplet ecosystem and ubiquitous interconnect at the package level.

"Integrating multiple chiplets in a package to deliver product innovation across market segments is the future of the semiconductor industry and a pillar of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy," said Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Artificial Intelligence Group at Intel. "Critical to this future is an open chiplet ecosystem with key industry partners working together under the UCIe Consortium toward a common goal of transforming the way the industry delivers new products and continues to deliver on the promise of Moore's Law."

A leaked chipset block-diagram for the upcoming Intel W680 chipset platform sheds light on a possible major change in the way Intel sells workstation-grade processors. The Socket LGA1700-based W680 motherboards will support 12th Gen Core processors for Workstation, and the company makes no mention of the Xeon-W series. Tech enthusiast Wild Cracks points to a possibility we agree with—that Intel is upcycling the Xeon-W series to premium workstation-grade processors, possibly derived from the enterprise-segment silicon, such as the upcoming "Sapphire Rapids," and away from being just a client "Alder Lake" processor with ECC memory support enabled when paired with a W680 chipset motherboard.

If this theory holds true, then the Xeon W (2-channel memory platform) could make way for the "W" brand extension for 12th Gen Core processors. At this point we don't know how the "W" is used, whether it's something along the lines of "Core W9-12900" or "Core i9-12900W." The former sounds more plausible, as "12900W" could have a negative connotation with regards to its power. In terms of connectivity, the W680 offers much of what the top Z690 does, except x8/x8 multi-GPU support. The diagram doesn't give out any information about CPU overclocking support, although memory overclocking support is very likely.

RockitCool is a new entrant towards the deliding and IHS replacement game, and the company is offering new delid kits that allow users to replace the Integrated Heatspreader (IHS) on their CPUs in an attempt to achieve better operating temperatures - and potentially improve performance. Considered by some to be one of the most daring quests towards extracting the most performance possible from a given chip, the deliding process is, however, not without its dangers, and will void CPU warranties irrespective of the tool - or care - employed in the operation.

RockItCool's website sprung up earlier this year, and the website doesn't count with many user reviews - but those that are there seem to be glowing. The company specializes in providing complete delid and pure-copper IHS replacement kits, taking advantage of copper's higher thermal conductivity as a way to increase the amount of heat that can be pulled away from the CPU - improving its operating temperatures and power profiles. The copper IHS themselves have guidance markings to ease concerns regarding the application of liquid metal itself, which is a particularly risky substance to misapply around electrical circuitry.

In an updated datasheet, which is currently still available online, Intel seemingly forgot to remove the specs of its upcoming Z790, H770 and B760 chipsets. The changes are fairly minor, although we obviously don't know if Intel are planning any changes on the CPU side in terms of connectivity. However, this is a surprising slipup from Intel's side and we've confirmed that the specs listed are indeed correct for the upcoming 700-series chipsets. The H610 chipset won't be getting an updated replacement though, but this seems to be par for course when it comes to Intel and its chipset updates.

Starting from the top, the Z790 chipset will see a move from 12 to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes, while at the same time seeing a reduction in PCIe 3.0 lanes by half, from 16 to eight. Intel will also add an additional USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) lane. The H770 gets a bump from 12 to 16 PCIe 4.0 and drops from 12 to eight PCIe 3.0 lanes. Finally the B760 chipset gets a bump from six to 10 PCIe 4.0 lanes, but also has its PCIe 3.0 lane count cut in half, from eight to four. No other changes seem to be planned, at least not based on the Intel spec sheet. It's worth pointing out that we're talking maximum lane count here, since the HSIO is flexible and it's up to the motherboard makers how to implement the various options. Out of the 38 HSIO lanes, the Z690 chipset has 10 dedicated lanes for USB 3.2, with the rest supporting PCIe in combination with either SATA and/or Gigabit Ethernet on a further 10 and this doesn't seem to change for the Z790 chipset.