The new normal ushered in by the pandemic will not only become the driving force of digital transformation but will also continue to drive the server market in 2022, according to TrendForce's investigations. It is worth noting that potential unmet demand in 2021 and the risk of future server component shortages will become medium and long-term variables that influence the market. Analyzing the shipment volume of completed servers, a growth rate of approximately 4-5% in completed server shipments is expected next year with primary shipment dynamics remaining concentrated in North American data centers with an annual growth rate of approximately 13-14%. From the supply chain perspective, the ODM Direct business model has gradually replaced the business model of the traditional server market, giving cloud service providers the ability to respond quickly to market changes. However, based on the unpredictability of the market, TrendForce assumes two forecasts for server growth trends. One, the supply situation of key components is effectively improved. Two, the supply situation of key components is exacerbated.

The pricing for Intel's upcoming 65 W 12th Generation Core Alder Lake-S desktop processors has recently been confirmed by BestBuy when they prematurely updated the pricing on their website. The listings do not include some previously leaked products so some models may be delayed and not immediately available to purchase at launch. The Intel Core i9-12900 is listed for 529.99 USD which is 60 USD less than the unlocked Core i9-12900K, while the Core i7-12700 will retail for 359.99 USD.

We can see three mid-range Core i5 products listed with the i5-12600 for 239.99 USD, i5-12500 for 219.99 USD, and the i5-12400 at 209.99 USD. The entry-level segment includes the i3-12100 listed at 139.99 USD and the Pentium G7400/G6900 for 79.99 USD and 59.99 USD respectively. These new processors are expected to be available immediately after their announcement on January 5th. The complete leaked price list with comparisons to the current retail pricing for the comparable 11th Generation Core chip can be found below.

The upcoming stock coolers for the Intel 12th Generation Core Alder Lake desktop processors were recently uncovered showing the Laminar RH1, Laminar RM1, and Laminar RS1. The Laminar RH1 will be bundled with the 65 W 12th Gen Core i9 desktop series and has recently been pictured showing its full metal design. The RH1 will include integrated LED lighting however it is currently unclear if this will be an RGB setup. This is the second leaked cooler to be pictured after the mid-range RM1 which will be bundled with Core i3, i5, and i7 processors while the RS1 should be included with Pentium and Celeron products. The Alder Lake-S processors featuring these new coolers are expected to launch on January 5th.

Ahead of its early-January announcement, sales of "locked" Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors have started in Peru, with the Core i5-12400F reportedly selling for the equivalent of USD $222. Assuming it has a similar pricing to its predecessor, the i5-11400F, the i5-12400F should have a pre-tax price of around $180, about $15 less than the i5-12400. The retail package is a simple paperboard fare. Inside, you'll get one of Intel's new Laminar RM1 stock coolers.

The i5-12400F is expected to be a 6-core/12-thread processor that only features six "Golden Cove" P-cores, and no "Gracemont" E-core clusters. The CPU cores tick at a boost frequency of 4.40 GHz. These cores are paired with 18 MB of shared L3 cache, and the same I/O as the i5-12600K. As an "F" SKU, this chip lacks integrated graphics. The processor base power of these chips is rated at 65 W, with 117 W maximum turbo power. Intel is expected to launch these alongside the value-ended B660 and H610 chipsets in January.

LG Electronics USA today unveiled its first gaming laptop, expanding its premium UltraGear lineup and bringing exciting news to gamers worldwide. A powerful performer with a seriously sleek design, the CES 2022 Innovation Award-winning laptop delivers sublime gaming experiences that can be enjoyed anywhere, at any time. LG's take-anywhere gaming rig features an 11th Gen Intel Tiger Lake H processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q graphics card, dual-channel memory and an ultra-fast dual SSD setup. In addition to a 17-inch IPS panel with a 1 millisecond response time and a 300 Hz refresh rate, the LG UltraGear gaming laptop ensures immersive, fluid gameplay for even the most graphically demanding PC games thanks to the latest top-of-the-line hardware. Also, LG's cooling system with vapor chamber keeps the laptop running cool, even when pushed to the limits.

Sharing DNA with LG's lightweight gram laptops, the 17G90Q has a streamlined, highly-portable design. The new, slim laptop features a large screen and 93Wh battery while maintaining a thickness of under 0.84 inches and a weight of less than 5.952 pounds. The LG UltraGear gaming laptop's aluminium casing offers style and durability, while the winged UltraGear badge on its exterior clearly communicates the power and quality for which LG's premium gaming brand is known.

In recent years, government institutions have been funding the development of home-grown hardware that will power the government infrastructure. This trend was born out of a desire to design chips with no back doors implemented so that no foreign body could monitor the government's processes. Today, Russian company Baikal Electronics managed to boot up the Baikal-S processor with 48 cores based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The processor codenamed BE-S1000 manages to operate 48 cores at a 2.0 GHz base frequency, with a maximum boost of 2.5 GHz clock speed. All of that is achieved at the TDP of 120 Watts, making this design very efficient.

When it comes to some server configurations, the Baikal-S processor run in up to four sockets in a server board. It offers a home-grown RISC-V processor for safe boot and management, so the entire SoC is controlled by a custom design. Baikal Electronics provided some benchmark numbers, which you can see in the slides below. They cover SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack performance. Additionally, the company claims that Baikal-S is in line with Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake design and AMD EPYC 7351 CPU based on Zen1 core. Compared to Huawei's Kunpeng 920, the Baikal-S design provides 0.86x performance.

According to the latest round of rumors coming from tech media VideoCardz, Intel could be preparing an answer to AMD's 3D V-cache in the form of... pre-binned Core i9-12900KS? As per the report, Intel could be making a pre-binned, pre-overclocked Core i9-12900KS processor with an all-core turbo boost frequency of 5.2 GHz. This alleged clock speed will push the processor to some fantastic heights and increase the overall performance of the regular Core i9-12900K processor. With AMD's Ryzen processors with 3D V-cache incoming, Intel has prepared this solution to keep up with the increasing pressure from AMD.

So far, we don't know the specific requirements for Core i9-12900KS to reach 5.2 GHz. However, we assume that Voltage needs a big boost, making cooling and power supply requirements increase. This special edition Alder Lake design should launch around the same time frame that AMD reveals its 3D V-cache enabled Ryzen processors, so Intel doesn't let AMD steal the performance crown.

Today marks the simultaneous launch of three XPC cubes on the market on the European continent. The "XPC" series from the Taiwanese Mini-PC manufacturer has been impressing users since 2001 with its compact design and wide range of possible applications. The SH570R6, SH570R6 Plus and SH570R8 models are based on the Intel H570 chipset, which is suitable for Intel Core processors of the 11th generation (Rocket Lake) and 10th generation (Comet Lake). Shuttle states that the current top-performing model is the Intel Core i9-11900K with 125 Watt TDP, 8 cores, 16 threads, 16 MB cache and a turbo frequency of 5.3 GHz.

To match the comprehensive processor support, up to 128 GB of RAM, spread across four slots, can be installed. There are also very few upper limits when it comes to suitable mass storage devices. Fast NVMe SSDs can be fitted in the M.2-2280 slot and, thanks to the four SATA ports, so can the corresponding number of hard drives or SSDs. The R6 chassis provides space for two 3.5" data carriers (one internal, one external) and a 5.25" drive; the R8 model, by contrast, can be fitted with four internal 3.5" data carriers - with a corresponding adapter 2.5" formats are of course also suitable.

Intel was expected to announce the location of its next fabs before the end of the year, but the company has decided to delay the announcements until sometime in "early 2022". This is not just related to its European expansion, but also its US expansion and it's possible that this has something to do with the so-called CHIPS acts that both the EU and the US government are expected to announce.

It's also possible that Intel is still negotiating with multiple parties, to see where the company can get the best deal, as well as making sure that the right partners are willing to set up their supporting infrastructure within a reasonable distance from Intel's new fabs. As Intel is looking at investing upwards of US$100 billion per site over multiple years, it's not hard to see why they want to make sure they're making the right, long term decision. A few extra months might make a big difference a few years down the line, least not to make sure Intel can hire qualified staff to run its fabs, outside of everything else that goes into planning something like this.

CORSAIR, a world leader in enthusiast components for gamers, creators, and PC builders, today announced new kits of its acclaimed DOMINATOR PLATINUM RGB DDR5 high-performance memory reaching frequencies up to a blistering 6,400 MHz. Available in kits of 2x16GB, DOMINATOR PLATINUM RGB 6,200 MHz and 6,400 MHz hit a new milestone with these unprecedented speeds, and are now more customizable than ever thanks to the new XMP Manager in CORSAIR iCUE software.

CORSAIR led the charge in next-generation memory with the release of DOMINATOR PLATINUM RGB DDR5 and VENGEANCE DDR5 for the Intel Z690 platform earlier this year, delivering higher frequencies in greater capacities than previously possible. Now the ceiling for DDR5 performance has risen again, with DOMINATOR PLATINUM RGB once more pushing the boundaries for the most powerful systems leveraging 12th Generation Intel Core Processors.

Demand for NAND Flash products will undergo a noticeable and cyclical downward correction in 1Q22 as major smartphone brands wind down their procurement activities for the peak season and ODMs prepare for the New Year holidays, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. As such, the NAND Flash market will remain in an oversupply situation, with prices continuing to undergo downward corrections accordingly. However, PC OEMs have been reinstating certain orders for client SSDs since early November in response to improvements in the supply of upstream semiconductor materials. By fulfilling these orders, suppliers are able to keep their inventory level relatively low, meaning they are not under as much pressure as previously expected to reduce inventory by lowering prices. Taking these factors into account, TrendForce expects NAND Flash ASP to undergo a 10-15% QoQ decline in 1Q22, during which NAND Flash prices will experience the most noticeable declines compared to the other quarters in 2022.

Regarding the price trend of NAND Flash products across the whole 2021, TrendForce further indicates that suppliers have actively transitioned their output to higher-layer technologies, resulting in a bit supply growth that noticeably outpaces demand, though the tight supply of components such as controller ICs and PMICs has constrained the production of NAND Flash end-products. Hence, the decline in contract prices of NAND Flash products has not been as severe as previously expected. Moving ahead to 2022, however, the supply of relevant components is expected to gradually improve, so the market for various NAND Flash products will also likely shift towards a noticeable oversupply. As a result, prices of NAND Flash products will steadily decline before the arrival of the peak season in 3Q22.

According to reports out of Taiwan, Intel's meeting with TSMC might not have ended up in favour of Intel, as TSMC has apparently asked Intel to pay up a deposit in advance to get access to its upcoming 3 nanometer node. This is unlikely to be what Intel had hoped for, but at the same time, the 3 nanometer node is likely to be popular among many of TSMC's customers, unless the cost becomes prohibitive.

Intel was apparently hoping to be able to get a dedicated production line, much in the way of what Apple has at TSMC, but it seems like this is going to cost and the question is if Intel is willing to pay or not. The reason for a dedicated production line could also come down to Intel wanting to make chips at TSMC using Intel specific tricks of the trade, that Intel doesn't want TSMC or its competitors to get too much insight into. Time will tell what will come out of this meeting between the two semiconductor giants, but it seems like Gelsinger has changed his mind about Taiwan, as he said that "Intel would continue to invest in Taiwan".

The first 65 W Alder Lake desktop processors have recently surfaced including the i3-12100F, i5-12400F, and i7-12700F which are expected to launch in January. The i3-12100F and i5-12400F are expected to be the first Alder Lake-S processors without any Gracemont high-efficiency cores instead of relying solely on Golden Cove high-performance cores. The i3-12100F will feature 4 cores and 8 threads with a max boost speed of 4.3 GHz while the i5-12400F will include 6 cores and 12 threads running at a max clock speed of 4.4 GHz.

The i7-12700F will feature the same core configuration as the i7-12700KF just with lower clock speeds and a reduced TDP of 65 W compared to 125 W. The packaging for these three processors along with marketing materials have been leaked revealing that the retail versions will include the Laminar RM1 stock cooler. These new Alder Lake CPUs along with various other models are expected to launch sometime in January after CES 2022.

Intel and TSMC are positioning themselves as two competing foundries for a significant period. However, as the difficulties in semiconductor manufacturing rise, the collaboration of the two seems inevitable. Not because Intel is eyeing TSMC's clients, but because of the race to produce the most minor and best possible semiconductor node. We already know that Intel plans to use some of TSMC's nodes for its Ponte Vecchio accelerator that contains 47 tiles. However, we didn't realize just how big the contract between the two companies was. According to the latest report from DigiTimes, Intel is supposed to become one of the top three clients at TSMC.

As the report notes, the collaboration should extend to at least TSMC's 2 nm node, expected in 2025. After that, the state of semiconductors is unknown. Intel has a solid chance to be in the top three customers in 2023 and become one of the primary sources of profit for the Taiwanese giant. We are excited to see how this prediction plays out and hope to hear more from both in the future.

We already know that Intel will be visiting TSMC in Taiwan and that the team from Intel would also be heading over to Malaysia for what was as yet an unknown reason, but new reports are coming in that Intel is planning to announce an investment of US$7 billion which will be used to build a new chip packaging plant in Penang. The announcement is said to take place in Kuala Lumpur, together with Malaysian Minister of International Trade and Industry Azmin Ali and Malaysian Investment Development Authority chief executive Arham Abdul Rahman.

Intel already has multiple locations on the island of Penang, alongside many other technology companies, such as ASE, Bosch, Osram and Western Digital to name a few. While the trip to Malaysia seems to at least involve a meet and greet, as well as a press conference with representatives for the Malaysian government, it seems like Gelsinger's time in Taiwan will not involved any meetings with government members, as Taiwan's Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua has said that Gelsinger is in Taiwan strictly for business and won't be meeting with her. However, Taiwan will at least not force Gelsinger to waste two weeks in quarantine, as he'll get the special treatment that some foreign enterprises are given for short business trips to Taiwan.

A fight over who can announce the most new chip related investments seem to have broken out between Intel and TSMC, which both companies said to be eyeing Germany for their new foundry expansions. This is despite both companies having said that Europe isn't a particularly interesting market for new foundries, but it appears that the upcoming European Chips Act has changed their minds, despite there being no official word on how much the EU will invest.

Intel has already pledged investments in Europe of up to €80 billion, for as many as eight new foundries. It's not clear if this includes its current investments in Ireland or now, where Intel has already invested over €6 billion over the past couple of years. TSMC on the other hand hasn't promised anything as yet, but the company is in early talks with the German government according to news out of Taiwan. Time will tell if anything comes from this, but Intel is said to be making an announcement soon, possibly before the holiday season on where it's planning on building its next Fab in Europe, with Italy and France also being on the table.

We've had remote gaming for several years now—where your laptop with a basic iGPU can stream gameplay as it's being rendered on your gaming desktop, either across your home network, or across the Internet. We've also seen cloud-gaming, where you pay a provider like NVIDIA GeForce NOW to host your digital game licenses, and render your game in datacenters, to stream it across to your device. What if this idea is turned on its head—what if your laptop holds your software or games, and it simply streams close-to-metal data over network, to use their hardware resources? Intel thinks this is possible.

Intel today pulled off a fascinating presentation titled "Powering Metaverses," along the sidelines of the Real-Time Conference 2021 (RTC 2021) virtual summit. Dubbed "resource abstraction," Intel is working on a technology that intelligently senses compute resources available to a device across other devices on the network; accounts for network bandwidth and latency; and treats these resources as if they are available to a local machine. The company put out a conceptual demo of a laptop with a basic iGPU dramatically improving gaming performance by roping in hardware resources of a gaming desktop on the network; without the game actually being installed on that desktop. If latency-sensitive applications like games could be pulled off on this system, it bodes really well for applications that aren't as latency-sensitive, or even as bandwidth-sensitive. Resource Abstraction will feature a lot as Intel steers toward Web 3.0 and metaverses. The concept video can be found here.

All six Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processor models launched to date are unlocked (K or KF) SKUs, which lack a boxed cooling solution. This is expected to change early next year when Intel fleshes out the lineup with at least 10 new SKUs for the retail segment; and with "Alder Lake" marking the first major change to the mainstream desktop processor cooling mount in over a decade; Intel has the opportunity to radically change its cooling design. We got our first hint at what these could look like back in September, and we now have a clear picture of one of them.

There are three stock coolers Intel is preparing. The RH1 (high) will likely go with the top Core i9-12900 and i9-12900F parts. The RM1 (mid) could be bundled with various Core i7 and Core i5 SKUs; while the RS1 (small) could go with entry-level Core i3 SKUs. Here we have the RM1. Back in the September article, we were staring at low-resolution pictures and trying to guess what the heatsink design could look like. At the time we thought that the pointy structures into which the fan is nestled, are metallic extensions of the heatsink's fins, designed to make use of lateral bleed airflow from the fan. The new picture puts this theory to rest. Turns out, those are little more than an aesthetic touch.

In its relentless pursuit of Moore's Law, Intel is unveiling key packaging, transistor and quantum physics breakthroughs fundamental to advancing and accelerating computing well into the next decade. At IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) 2021, Intel outlined its path toward more than 10x interconnect density improvement in packaging with hybrid bonding, 30% to 50% area improvement in transistor scaling, major breakthroughs in new power and memory technologies, and new concepts in physics that may one day revolutionize computing.

"At Intel, the research and innovation necessary for advancing Moore's Law never stops. Our Components Research Group is sharing key research breakthroughs at IEDM 2021 in bringing revolutionary process and packaging technologies to meet the insatiable demand for powerful computing that our industry and society depend on. This is the result of our best scientists' and engineers' tireless work. They continue to be at the forefront of innovations for continuing Moore's Law," said Robert Chau, Intel Senior Fellow and general manager of Components Research.

As much as we love teasers of new products, it's frustrating when said teasers give away zero information about the actual product and that is sadly what Intel's first Arc video manages to do. The only conclusion we can draw is that the in-game footage, at least in some games, was recorded at 1440p, as the video was uploaded in 1440p rather than 1080p.

The games being showcased are Riders Republic, Age of Empires IV, Back 4 Blood, Rift Breaker, Hitman III and Arcadegeddon. No frame rates are being displayed and only a few games have any comments to go with the footage. Rift Breaker for example, has a notification saying it's using AI-enhanced upscaling and Hitman III is supposed to be using "next-gen graphics with ray tracing" although no obvious ray tracing effects are noticed in the three second clip. The end of the video shows off a rendered PC and laptop, both with Intel ARC displayed on them, suggesting that Intel hasn't decided if it's Arc or ARC that its new graphics cards are going to be called. At least the Q1 2022 date gives us an idea on when some more information should be revealed.

Pat Gelsinger is planning a trip to Asia next week, where he'll stop over in Taiwan and Malaysia according to Bloomberg. There he's apparently planning to hold talks that show that manufacturing in Asia is a key part to his efforts of turning Intel's fortunes around. It's said that he'll also be meeting with TSMC.

This will be Gelsinger's first trip to Asia as Intel's CEO, largely due to the pandemic, although outside of meeting with TSMC, his schedule wasn't further mentioned, but it's likely he will be meeting with key partners and suppliers. Intel does some of its chip packaging in Malaysia, on the island of Penang to be more specific, where plants have been temporarily closed due to the pandemic, which in turn has hurt supply for the tech companies located there.

Microsoft today announced the release of H264 and H265 encoding through its DX12 API. The move brings GPU acceleration support for several video applications such as Video Decoding, Video Processing and Motion estimation. Theoretically, this should ease the burden on developers, who instead of having to implement video encoding acceleration according to the graphics vendor (be it AMD, Intel or NVIDIA), can now work through the DX12 API to achieve the same effect throughout all providers, simplifying programming and efficiency efforts - though Microsoft was coy about potential advantages and disadvantages of the new feature.

While the implementation will eventually reach all platforms, the DX12 API encoding integration is currently only available for both Intel and NVIDIA. Work still has to be done on AMD's implementation, which generally uses fixed-hardware function blocks to allow for higher performance whilst encoding and transcoding - at the loss of some flexibility. There are graphics cards driver requirements that have to be fulfilled to enable the full encoding capabilities (and these can also be only partially supported, though performance will undoubtedly suffer).

Not content with his speech at Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference—Intel's CEO—Pat Gelsinger has now written an opinion piece on CNN where he's telling the US congress that it must pass the CHIPS for America Act. It's quite bold for a CEO of any company to make such demands, least not for one that has been less than a year in the position.

The CHIPS Act involves US$52 billion earmarked for chip makers who are willing to produce chips on US soil, although as we already know, Gelsinger wants the bulk of that to go to US companies. To try and win over the House, his opinion piece on CNN is trying to win over the hearts and minds of the US senators by pitching all the positive things that will happen if Intel gets more money than its competitors.

Intel Labs recently opened the Intel Research Center for Integrated Photonics for Data Center Interconnects. The center's mission is to accelerate optical input/output (I/O) technology innovation in performance scaling and integration with a specific focus on photonics technology and devices, CMOS circuits and link architecture, and package integration and fiber coupling.

"At Intel Labs, we're strong believers that no one organization can successfully turn all the requisite innovations into research reality. By collaborating with some of the top scientific minds from across the United States, Intel is opening the doors for the advancement of integrated photonics for the next generation of compute interconnect. We look forward to working closely with these researchers to explore how we can overcome impending performance barriers," said James Jaussi, senior principal engineer and director of the PHY Research Lab in Intel Labs.

There has been a lot of discourse about the cost of Z690 motherboards, so we decided to ask around to find out what has changed compared to the previous generation of Intel motherboards. There are obviously several factors that have come together to create something like the perfect storm, as the simple answer is that all parts combined have resulted in more expensive motherboards, but there are a few key components that are major contributing factors.

A lot of speculation has been about the cost of the PCB itself and although it's correct that the PCB is a contributing factor, we're talking about a couple of dollars in extra cost, not only for the higher quality PCB materials themselves but also the fact that boards with DDR5 memory are more costly to produce, as more care needs to be taken with the overall design. However, the big surprise to us is that the single part that has driven up the cost the most is the physical LGA-17xx CPU socket and retention mechanism, which is apparently around four times as expensive as the LGA-12xx socket.