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.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the global leading motherboard, Mini-PCs, Notebooks, mobile device and smart city solutions provider, is proud to present the high performance, power efficient and multi-tasking mini PC - LIVA Z3 & Z3E. They build in powerful and multi-functional Intel Jasper Lake Pentium & Celeron processors with up to 16 GB DDR4 dual-channel memory technology, and is expandable through the M.2 socket to meet various needs. LIVA Z3 & Z3E also equip with the latest 802.11ax technology to effortlessly support your wireless connection. They support dual-screen output via HDMI 2.0 and mini DisplayPort both up to 4K high-quality resolution. It is not only suitable for commercial office, remote office, online learning and home entertainment, but also an alternative option for smart digital signage, smart education and self-service kiosk and so forth to broaden your business!

The LIVA Z3 & Z3E feature Intel Pentium & Celeron processors, up to 35% higher processing power than the previous generation. They adopt eMMC 5.1 128 GB as the storage capacity and DDR4 dual-channel 16 GB memory, which accelerate system performance and improve response speed as well. Furthermore, the M.2 PCIE 2280 interface for SSD and 2.5" SATA interface for HDD/ SSD assist users to easily tackle the daily tasks by experiencing a compact PC.

Based on the Intel 600-series chipset leak earlier today, it was easy to conclude that all 600-series motherboards would be getting PCIe 5.0 support, but alas, that is not the case. We've already seen some rock bottom Z690 without PCIe 5.0 and thanks to Videocardz we now know that Gigabyte's B660 Gaming X DDR4 will also lack PCIe 5.0 support.

How do we know this board doesn't support PCIe 5.0? First of all, the x16 slot closest to the CPU uses one of Gigabyte's older reinforced PCIe 4.0 slots, whereas all of its Z690 boards with PCIe 5.0 support uses a new, white type of slot. These slots use a visually different kind of reinforcement as well, even if it's only marginally different. However, Gigabyte doesn't appear to be silk screening PCIe 5.0 on supported boards and it's possible that they're using a different slot vendor for the B660 boards.

Unlike Intel and Qualcomm, Samsung seems to be far more pessimistic about the current chip supply issues, as the company isn't expecting the chip shortage to be resolved next year. Admittedly this information comes via a meeting of its mobile divisions top brass, but considering that the mobile division is using a significant amount of various chips for its products, it would seem that the information is reliable.

The two biggest shortages for Samsung's mobile division will continue to be application processors (also known as SoCs) and radio frequency (RF) components. Considering that these are key components of any modern smartphone, it's not hard to see why Samsung would be concerned. What we don't know is how much of an advantage Samsung's various business units have when they work with Samsung's foundries and we might have reached a point where the highest bidder wins the allocation.

Intel is preparing to significantly expand its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" desktop processor series next January, alongside more motherboard chipset choices for the client-desktop segment. These include the H670, the B660, and the H610. The H670 offers most of the I/O features of the top Z690 chipset, but you lose out on CPU overclocking. The B660 is the mid-tier option, and while you still get a formidable I/O feature-set, the chipset bus is narrower. The H610 is the entry-level chipset with very basic I/O, and no CPU-attached NVMe slots. The interesting thing is that all these chipsets support PCI-Express 5.0 x16 (PEG) from the CPU, but leave it to the motherboard vendors whether they want to implement it. There do exist Z690 motherboard that lack Gen 5 PEG (and only feature Gen 4).

The chipset-attached downstream PCIe also varies greatly across the lineup. The top Z690 part puts out 12 Gen 4 lanes besides 16 Gen 3 lanes; while the H670 puts out 12 each of Gen 4 and Gen 3. The B660 puts out 6 Gen 4 lanes and 8 Gen 3 lanes. The H610 completely lacks downstream Gen 4, and only puts out 8 Gen 3 lanes. The H670 and B660 put out up to two 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports; while the H610 lacks 20 Gbps ports. All chipset models put out at least two 10 Gbps Gen 2x1 ports; and at least four 5 Gbps Gen 1x1 ports. An interesting aspect of the lineup is that Intel is allowing memory overclocking across H670 and B660 chipsets, provided the CPU supports it.

With the full support of Intel's board of directors, Intel today announced its intention to take Mobileye public in the United States in mid-2022 via an initial public offering (IPO) of newly issued Mobileye stock. The move will unlock the value of Mobileye for Intel shareholders by creating a separate publicly traded company and will build on Mobileye's successful track record and serve its expanded market.

Intel will remain the majority owner of Mobileye, and the two companies will continue as strategic partners, collaborating on projects as they pursue the growth of computing in the automotive sector. The share of semiconductors is expected to be 20% of a premium vehicle's total bill-of-materials (BOM) by 20301. The Mobileye executive team will remain, with Prof. Amnon Shashua continuing as the company's CEO. Recently acquired Moovit as well as Intel teams working on lidar and radar development and other Mobileye projects will be aligned as part of Mobileye.

January 4, 2022 could be a date of major product announcements by both AMD and Intel as part of their International CES 2022 plans. Both companies will host virtual press-meets on that day, and are expected to unveil several product lines. AMD could shed more like on its Ryzen "Vermeer-S" Socket AM4 desktop processors, possible updates to its Ryzen 5000 mobile product stack; as well as put out some juicy nuggets of info on its future "Zen 4" processors; while Intel will significantly expand its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" family across both its desktop and mobile segments, along with more info on its Arc "Alchemist" gaming GPU. The AMD event is slated for 8 AM Pacific, while the Intel one goes up two hours later, at 10 AM Pacific. We will be live-blogging both.

Intel is reportedly in talks with TSMC to secure foundry allocation to meet its product roadmap execution. The company is sending an executive delegation to meet with TSMC later this month, to secure foundry capacity for the N3 (3 nm) silicon fabrication node, and ensure that Intel's allocation isn't affected by other customers such as Apple. As part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel has decided to build its products essentially as multi-chip modules with each block of IP built on a silicon fabrication node most optimal to it, so the company maximizes cutting-edge foundry nodes only on the technology that benefits from it the most. N3 will play a vital role with logic/compute tiles in products bound for 2023, as N3 hits critical volume in the first half of the year.

In related news, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, stressed on the importance for American chip designers to seek out semiconductor manufacturing in America, and cautioned against investing in Taiwan (without naming TSMC). This comes in the wake of geopolitical uncertainty in the region. In response to this statement issued to DigiTimes, TSMC CEO Mark Liu downplayed the matter, and said that Gelsinger's statement wasn't worth responding to, and that he doesn't slander industry colleagues. TSMC and Samsung have each announced multi-billion Dollar foundry investments in the US, in attempts to make the global semiconductor supply chains resilient to any security situation that may emerge in East Asia.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments of add-in boards increased in Q3'21 from last year. AMD saw a one-percent increase in market share while Nvidia remained the dominant market share leader with 78.2%. Year over year, total AIB shipments increased by 25.7% this quarter compared to last year at 12.7 million units, and up quarter-to-quarter from 11.47 million units in Q2'21.

Add-in boards (AIBs) use discrete GPUs (dGPU) with dedicated memory. Desktop PCs, workstations, servers, rendering and mining farms, and scientific instruments use AIBs. Consumers and enterprises buy AIBs from resellers or OEMs. They can be part of a new system or installed as an upgrade to an existing system. Systems with AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry. Entry-level systems use integrated GPUs (iGPU) in CPUs that share slower system memory.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build its third-generation, high performance computing (HPC) system, called Kestrel. Named for a falcon with keen eyesight and intelligence, Kestrel's moniker is apropos for its mission—to rapidly advance the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) energy research and development (R&D) efforts to deliver transformative energy solutions to the entire United States.

Installation of the new system will begin in the fall of 2022 in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) data center. Kestrel will complement the laboratory's current supercomputer, Eagle, during the transition. When completed—in early 2023—Kestrel will accelerate energy efficiency and renewable energy research at a pace and scale more than five times greater than Eagle, with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power.

Since Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joined the company earlier this year, the messaging language from Intel has changed radically, as it has become a no-nonsense message of Intel going back to its roots as a leading foundry and a leading chip maker. However, Gelsinger might've overstepped a little bit as of lately, as during a conference in California, he went on record saying that Intel deserves special treatment by the US government, in favor of some of its competitors.

At the same time, it's not hard to see why Intel thinks the US government should favor it and other US companies like Micron and Texas Instruments, over Samsung and TSMC. However, Intel's selling argument here is that investing in non-US companies means that the R&D money and IP ends up abroad, which isn't entirely true when it comes to foundries. Gelsinger also complained about the fact that Samsung and TSMC was getting large government subsidies in their home countries and claimed that because of those subsidies, Intel was competing with Korea and Taiwan, rather than with Samsung and TSMC.

Intel's next entry-level processor for the Socket LGA1700 platform is the Core i3-12100. Carved out of the "Alder Lake-S" H0 silicon, this processor features 4 "Golden Cove" performance cores with HyperThreading enabling 8 logical processors, and no E-cores. The processor ticks at 3.30 GHz, with 4.30 GHz Turbo Boost 2.0 frequency. Each of the four cores has 1.25 MB of L2 cache, and they share 12 MB of L3 cache. The i3-12100 gets a Gen12 Xe LP-based iGPU, while a variant of the processor, the i3-12100F, lacks integrated graphics. Intel is rating the processor base power value at 60 W, with 77 W maximum turbo power.

XFastest scored an i3-12100 engineering sample, and wasted no time in comparing it with the Ryzen 3 3300X. The i3-12100 was tested on an ASRock Z690 Steel Legend motherboard that has DDR4 memory slots. 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4-3600 memory and RTX 3060 Ti were used on both the Intel and AMD test-beds. A Ryzen 3 3100 was also used on the AMD side. Right off the bat, we see the i3-12100 take a significant lead over the AMD chips at PCMark, posting a roughly 15% performance lead. Cinebench R23 is another test where the little "Alder Lake" scores big, posting a roughly 26% performance lead in the multi-threaded test, and 27% in the single-threaded test. This is mainly because the 3300X is based on "Zen 2" while the i3-12100 uses the cutting-edge "Golden Cove" cores. AMD hasn't bothered with "Zen 3" based Ryzen 3 desktop processors in the retail market.

MinisForum, a small mini PC manufacturer, is famous for its Ryzen series mini PC. Earlier this month they released information about their upcoming Ryzen 5000X series mini PC which will comes with a dedicated graphics card. It is still not sure when they will launch this Ryzen mini PC. But we can expect that there is Intel chip mini PC coming soon from them.

The previous Intel chip mini PC from MinisForum was TL50, which is equipped with Intel core i5-1135G7 processor and was launched in May. The new model, called TH50, is going to be more powerful which will come with Intel Core i5-11320H Processor. It is 4-core/8-thread. Base clock can vary from 2.5 to 3.2 GHz based on the TDP setting and can be boosted up to 4.5 GHz (while i5-1135G7 can run from 0.9/2.4 GHz to 4.2 GHz).

Here are some of the first pictures of the 12th Gen Intel Core "Alder Lake" desktop processor models that are expected to join the lineup in January 2022. Intel debuted the series with unlocked "K" and "KF" SKUs, with "locked" SKUs saved for next year. Pictured here are the Core i9-12900, the Core i5-12600, the i5-12500, and the i5-12400. The S-SPEC codes for these processors are SRL4E, SRL4F, SRL4G, and SRL4P, respectively. Our older article details their possible specifications. The lineup isn't limited to these models. Others include the Core i7-12700, and the "F" variants of many of these SKUs, which lack integrated graphics, allowing those with discrete graphics cards to save a little.

Besides these processors, Intel is expected to expand its motherboard chipset options. Currently, Z690 is the only chipset option for the LGA1700 socket. Upcoming chipset models are likely to include the H670, W680, B660, and perhaps even the H610. Intel could use platform I/O for segmentation of these chipsets, besides lack of CPU overclocking support. A big change with the 12th Gen desktop processor lineup concerns Core i5. While the i5-12600K and i5-12600KF feature 6 P-cores and 4 E-cores, the other Core i5 SKUs, including the i5-12600, lack E-cores. The source installed these processors to confirm that the i5-12600 is indeed based on the "H0" silicon and lacks E-cores.

Today, MSI announced the latest lineup of gaming desktops equipped with Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake processor. Based on a new hybrid architecture, the 12th generation Intel Core processor combines a mix of Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficiency cores (E-cores) to maximize performance, increases multi-thread performance by up to 55%, the gaming performance has more than 13% increase compared to the previous generation.

The full lineup of K Series gaming desktops adopted DDR5 memory with read speed up to 60% higher than the previous generation equipped with DDR4. Support for PCIe 5 which is primed to provide speedy and improved transmission. Additionally, MSI has also upgraded MSI Center and MSI App Player. The new MSI Center helps to control and customize your system. With innovation in MSI App Player, it is easier to play mobile games on the PC. The lineup also features 2.5G Ethernet LAN and Wi-Fi 6E to offer faster data transfer speeds. MSI launched 3 models of gamer-oriented desktops, including Aegis Series, Trident Series and Codex X5 series to cater towards all types of gamers.

The growth of the NAND Flash market in 3Q21 was primarily driven by strong demand from the data center and smartphone industries, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. More specifically, NAND Flash suppliers' hyperscaler and enterprise clients kept up their procurement activities that began in 2Q21 in order to deploy products based on new processor platforms. Major smartphone brands, on the other hand, likewise expanded their NAND Flash procurement activities during the quarter as they prepared to release their new flagship models. As such, clients in both server and smartphone industries made significant contributions to the revenue growth of the NAND Flash industry for 3Q21. At the same time, however, suppliers also warned that orders from PC OEMs began showing signs of decline. On the whole, the industry's quarterly total NAND Flash bit shipment increased by nearly 11% QoQ for 3Q21, and the overall NAND Flash ASP rose by nearly 4% QoQ for the same quarter. Thanks to rising prices and expanding shipments, the quarterly total NAND Flash revenue increased by 15% QoQ to a new record high of US$18.8 billion in 3Q21.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today released the new NVR network surveillance server - QVP-41B - that integrates a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) switch with sixteen 30-watt Gigabit PoE ports, two RJ45/SFP combo ports, and two 2.5GbE host management ports, supporting all kinds of PoE devices and creating an intelligent surveillance infrastructure. Powered by an Intel Celeron J4125 quad-core processor, the QVP-41B comes with four 3.5-inch SATA drive bays, providing great storage potential and high-speed networking to meet the requirements of monitoring small/medium-sized environments.

"With built-in 140 W PoE and supporting up to 24 cameras, the QVP-41B provides complete network surveillance server capabilities. Surveillance feeds can also be simultaneously recorded and monitored using QNAP's QVR Smart Client application." said Alan Kuo, adding "recorded footage can be intelligently analyzed by using QVR Smart Search, and for large-scale deployments (such as retail) all QVR Pro servers including the QVP-41B can be centrally managed through QNAP's QVR Center."