In its 2021 Architecture Day presentation, Intel revealed that its first performance gaming GPU, the Arc "Alchemist," is built on the TSMC N6 silicon fabrication node (6 nm). A more advanced node than the N7 (7 nm) used by AMD for its current RDNA2 GPUs, TSMC N6 leverages EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography, and offers 18% higher transistor density, besides power improvements. "With N6, TSMC provides an optimal balance of performance, density, and power-efficiency that are ideal for modern GPUs," said Dr Kevin Zhang, SVP of Business Development at TSMC.

With working prototypes of "Alchemist" already internally circulating as the "DG2," Intel has beaten AMD to 6 nm. Team Red is reportedly planning optical-shrinks of its RDNA2-based "Navi 22" and "Navi 23" chips to TSMC N6, and assigning them mid-range SKUs in the Radeon RX 7000 series. The company will build two higher-segment RDNA3 GPUs on the more advanced TSMC N5 (5 nm) process, which will release in 2022, and power successors to the RX 6700 series and RX 6800/6900 series.

Intel in its Architecture Day presentation Thread Director, a hardware component present on the "Alder Lake" silicon, which makes the Hybrid architecture of the processor work flawlessly. "Alder Lake-S" is the first desktop processor with two kinds of x86 CPU cores—the larger Performance P-cores, and the smaller Efficient E-cores, which work in a setup not unlike big.LITTLE by Arm.

The x86-based "Alder Lake" processor has a much more complex ISA, and the E-cores don't have all of the instruction sets or hardware capabilities that the P-cores do. The two cores operate at very different performance/Watt bands, and are optimized for vastly different workloads. At the same time, sending a workload to the wrong kind of core could not only impact performance, but also crash, due to an ISA mismatch. Intel realized that it will take a lot more than mere OS-level awareness to solve the problem, and so innovated the Thread Director.

Intel plans to go full tilt with gaming graphics, with its newly announced Arc line of graphics processors designed for high-performance gaming. The top Arc "Alchemist" part meets all requirements for DirectX 12 Ultimate logo, including real-time raytracing. The company, during the technology's reveal, earlier this week, also said that it's working on an AI-accelerated supersampling technology. The company is calling it XeSS (Xe SuperSampling). It likely went with Xe in the name, as it possibly plans to extend the technology to even its Xe LP-based iGPUs and the entry-level Iris Xe MAX discrete GPU.

Intel claims that XeSS cuts down 4K frame render-times by half. By all accounts, 1440p appears to be the target use case of the top Arc "Alchemist" SKU. XeSS would make 4K possible (i.e., display resolution set at 4K, rendering at a lower resolution, with AI-accelerated supersampling restoring detail). The company revealed that XeSS will use a neural network-based temporal upscaling technology that incorporates motion vectors. In the rendering pipeline, XeSS sits before most post-processing stages, similar to AMD FSR.

While AMD's FSR technology is purely shader based, the Intel algorithm can either use XMX hardware units (new in Intel Xe HPG), or DP4a instructions (available on nearly all modern AMD and NVIDIA GPUs). XMX stands for Xe Matrix Extensions and is basically Intel's version of NVIDIA's Tensor Cores, to speed up matrix math, which is used in many AI-related tasks. The Intel XeSS SDK will be available this month, in open source, using XMX hardware, the DP4a version will be available "later this year".

Intel's 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake-S" desktop processor could come with core counts as high as 24, overtaking AMD's number for mainstream desktops, for the first time since 2017. There is, however, a big catch, The 24-core chip could comprise of 8 "big" P-cores, and 16 "little" E-cores, according to a report by AdoredTV. The silicon features 8 "Raptor Cove" P-cores, which succeed "Golden Cove," introducing IPC and instruction-set improvements; while the type of low-power E-cores remains to be determined. AdoredTV predicts that the Core i9 brand extension could max out the silicon with 8+16 cores, while lower Core i7 SKUs could be 8+8 cores, and Core i5 6+8 cores. The TDP of Unlocked K SKUs could be rated at 125 W, and the other "locked" ones at 65 W.

Intel today announced AWS customers can access the latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors via the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M6i instances. Optimized for high-performance, general-purpose compute, the latest Intel-powered Amazon EC2 instances provide customers increased flexibility and more choices when running their Intel-powered infrastructure within the AWS cloud. Today's news is a further continuation of Intel and AWS' close collaboration, giving customers scalable compute instances in the cloud for almost 15 years.

"Our latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors are our highest performance data center CPU and provide AWS customers an excellent platform to run their most critical business applications. We look forward to continuing our long-term collaboration with AWS to deploy industry-leading technologies within AWS' cloud infrastructure." -Sandra Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager, Datacenter and AI Group.

Intel has recently released a promotional video teasing the dual-fan cooler design of their upcoming Arc gaming graphics card with 1000 drones. The company used 1000 drones fitted with lighting to create various shapes including a dual-fan desktop graphics card which has a strong resemblance to the previously leaked design for a DG2-512EU engineering sample. The two images also both include 9 blades on the fans giving further authority to the previous rumor. The first Intel Arc "Alchemist" products will begin shipping in Q1 2022 with the flagship desktop graphics card rumored to feature 512 Execution Units paired with 16 GB GDDR6 memory targeting RTX 3070 Ti performance. Intel is also preparing a NVIDIA DLSS/AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution competitor codenamed XeSS and will include hardware-accelerated raytracing support with the Arc lineup.

Intel today surprised us with the reveal of its new high-performance gaming graphics brand, Intel Arc. Competing with the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce brands, Arc enables Intel to take a stab at the gaming graphics market that's been a duopoly for the past 2 decades; and the company doesn't intend to only make low-cost e-sports chips. As if a statement of intent, the company revealed the codenamed of the first three generations of Arc: "Battlemage," "Celestial," and "Druid."

Of these "Battlemage" is likely the fancy new codename for the Xe HPG graphics architecture, which has been implemented in a working prototype referred to as the DG2, and which Intel is now referring to as "Alchemist." Intel revealed that "Battlemage" is being designed to meet DirectX 12 Ultimate requirements, which means it will support hardware-accelerated real-time raytracing; mesh shaders, sampler feedback, and variable-rate shading. Intel also announced that the chips will feature an AI-accelerated supersampling feature. This will rival NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Intel announced that the first consumer products based on the "Alchemist" silicon will release in the first quarter of 2022, the company will put out more specifics throughout 2021, in the run-up to this launch.

The upcoming 12th Generation hybrid Intel Core i9-12900K has recently made an appearance in the BaseMark database. The i9-12900K is a rumored 16 core, 24 thread processor with a combination of 8 high-performance and 8 high-efficiency cores. The BaseMark entry reports the processor as featuring only 12 cores which may be an error with the software not recognizing the hybrid processor or simply derived by halving the 24 threads. The chip was running at 3.2 GHz on an unknown Z690 motherboard from Acer codenamed Z69H6-AM with the latest Windows 11 22000.132 beta build. The processor was paired with an RTX 3080 and 16 GB ram achieving a score of 17,744 inline with other results with the RTX 3080. The 12th Generation Intel Core series is expected to launch in October with qualification samples already ready for board partners and OEMs.

While the server industry transitions to the latest generation of processors based on the x86 platform, the Intel Ice Lake and AMD Milan CPUs entered mass production earlier this year and were shipped to certain customers, such as North American CSPs and telecommunication companies, at a low volume in 1Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. These processors are expected to begin seeing widespread adoption in the server market in 3Q21. TrendForce believes that Ice Lake represents a step-up in computing performance from the previous generation due to its higher scalability and support for more memory channels. On the other hand, the new normal that emerged in the post-pandemic era is expected to drive clients in the server sector to partially migrate to the Ice Lake platform, whose share in the server market is expected to surpass 30% in 4Q21.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, launches the U12 rackmount enterprise cloud storage server equipped with a powerful quad-core Intel Xeon processor.TheTerraMaster U12 is a 12-bay networked storage server with high scalability. The U12 is designed to meet the requirements of enterprise virtualizations, data-intensive applications, and service continuity.

The new TerraMaster U12 Series rackmount storage server is the ideal solution for business cloud storage servers, providing high-speed data storage for multiple sharing users. The latest TerraMaster U12 rackmount server features an upgraded processor, up to a quad-core Intel Xeon, and 8 GB of DDR4 memory that's upgradeable to 64 GB maximum. The rackmount server also comes with two PCIe X16 Gen3 slots offering upgrade options such as 10 GbE NIC cards and RAID cards. Also, users can configure and upgrade the CPU and memory to enhance performance as required.

Intel has recently unveiled that their technology powered the 8K 60 FPS Tokyo Olympics broadcast which was available to select customers in Japan. The games were recorded in 8K at 60 FPS with 4:2:2 Chroma subsampling and 10-bit HDR which resulted in a bitrate of 48 Gbps. This uncompressed stream was then encoded on servers each featuring quad 28 core Xeon 8380H processors and 384 GB of ram into two HEVC distribution streams at 250 Mbps and 50-100 Mbps bitrates. These streams were then distributed to users over the internet where the 8K stream could be decoded and displayed on an 8K TV over HDMI 2.1. Intel used a workstation PC with an 18-core Xeon W-2295 and 64 GB of ram to decode and play the video stream on the TV. This 8K service was only made available to select NHK subscribers in Japan while most international broadcasts offered a maximum resolution of 4K.

Xiaomi today took another bold step in the exploration of future technology with its new bio-inspired quadruped robot - CyberDog. The launch of CyberDog is the culmination of Xiaomi's engineering prowess, condensed into an open source robot companion that developers can build upon.

CyberDog is Xiaomi's first foray into quadruped robotics for the open source community and developers worldwide. Robotics enthusiasts interested in CyberDog can compete or co-create with other like-minded Xiaomi Fans, together propelling the development and potential of quadruped robots.

Now that most negotiations over contract prices of PC DRAM for 3Q21 have concluded, DRAM suppliers' low inventories and the arrival of the peak season for DRAM procurement have resulted in a 3-8% QoQ increase in PC DRAM contract prices for 3Q21, although this is a relatively muted growth compared to the 25% increase experienced in 2Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. However, demand for PC DRAM in the spot market began to show signs of bearish movement in early July ahead of time, as DRAM suppliers continued to lower prices in order to adjust their DRAM inventories. Regarding the contract market, PC OEMs currently carry relatively high levels of DRAM inventory because they substantially stocked up on PC DRAM beforehand in anticipation of an upcoming shortage. Not only has PC OEMs' high DRAM inventory put downward pressure on possible price hikes for PC DRAM, but the gradual lifting of COVID-related restrictions in Europe and the US will also likely lower the overall demand for notebook computers, thereby pulling down the overall demand for PC DRAM. TrendForce therefore forecasts a 0-5% QoQ decline in PC DRAM contract prices for 4Q21.

PC components major GIGABYTE has reportedly been hacked, with the attacker group, which goes by the name RansomEXX, stealing 112 GB in data that contains confidential technical documents from Intel, AMD, and others; which are released to GIGABYTE under strict NDAs, to help it design motherboards, notebooks, desktops, servers, and graphics cards. The group also deployed ransomware to encrypt GIGABYTE's data, which includes these documents. The attack allegedly occurred in the week of August 2, and GIGABYTE was forced to shut down its systems in its Taiwan headquarters. This even caused some downtime for its websites.

While it's conceivable that a company of GIGABYTE's scale would maintain timely cold backups of its data, and can recover almost everything RansomEXX encrypted, there's another aspect to this attack, and it's the data the attackers stole. They threaten to leak the data if a ransom isn't paid in time. This would put a large amount of confidential documents, including motherboard designs, UEFI/BIOS/TPM data/keys, etc., out in the public domain. GIGABYTE didn't comment on the issue beyond stating that it has isolated the affected servers from the rest of its network and notified law enforcement.

For most people, a tool is something you hold in your hand: pliers, hammer, screwdriver. Inside an Intel chip factory, a tool is a whole different deal. Fab tools are huge and hugely costly and take entire teams to muscle into place and install. As Intel aggressively ramps its worldwide manufacturing footprint, a construction milestone recently passed at Intel's Ronler Acres factory in Hillsboro, Oregon.

At the company's massive $3 billion Mod3 factory expansion, the first tool rolled in. The honor went to a thin film deposition tool. It arrived not in a leather tool belt, but aboard two semitractor-trailers. Once completed and hooked up, it will weigh 10 tons. And by the time the Mod3 project is done in about six months, the thin film deposition tool will be joined by more than a dozen like it. A typical Intel fab, once built out, is stuffed with about 1,200 chipmaking tools, many of them costing millions of dollars apiece.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger shared some details on the company's plans to expand its foundry operations in the US. As part of the company's IDM 2.0 plan, the company aims to construct a new cutting edge fabrication complex that will cover both wafer manufacturing and advanced packaging technologies. While the final factory location still hasn't been disclosed, the company said it plans to build the complex in close proximity to universities - a way to facilitate the hiring process of qualified personnel and, perhaps, of establishing joint research and development. Intel expects this foundry complex to cost between $60 and $120 billion.

Intel CEO Pat GelsingerWe are looking broadly across the U.S.. This would be a very large site, so six to eight fab modules, and at each of those fab modules, between 10- and $15 billion. It's a project over the next decade on the order of $100 billion of capital, 10,000 direct jobs. 100,000 jobs are created as a result of those 10,000, by our experience. So, essentially, we want to build a little city."

Intel's upcoming Alder Lake family of processors, more specifically the desktop ALD-S SKUs, are supposedly going to require a higher peak current for the upcoming processors. In the table provided by the Chinese tech media outlet, FCPOWERUP, we are seeing that ALD-S processors have different power requirements for the ATX12V rails on their power supplies. The listed table shows the previous generation of Intel processors, the 10th and 11th generation, as available in 165 Watt variants. Even though there are no 165 Watt Comet Lake and Rocket Lake SKUs, this is only a placeholder for their PSU recommendations in case those SKUs were to be released.

According to the table, the peak current recommendation for the upcoming Alder Lake is higher at least 5 Amps across all SKUs. The 165 Watt SKUs have the requirement of 45 Amps (compared to the 40 A of Comet Lake and Rocket Lake), while the 125 Watt SKUs require 39 Amps, which is higher than the previous 34 Amp requirement. For 65 Watt models, the new peak recommendation is 38.5 Amps, a jump from the previous 30 Amp choice. The lowest rated 35 Watt SKUs are recommended to use 20.5 A, while the previous generations used 16.5 A current. It should be noted that the continuous rating has not been changed (new generation 35 Watt models actually use less current), which indicates that Alder Lake could have higher peak usages of power, meaning that PSU choice should be made with a 50-100 Watt higher rating.

It is often a dilemma for business users to choose between performance and portability when buying a laptop, but MSI is now offering the best of both worlds. If you're looking for a commercial laptop that is convertible, with pen support, and has excellent graphics, MSI Summit E16 Flip may be the solution for someone like you who demand performance on the go.

After its announcement in CES 2021, MSI Summit E16 Flip, this powerful yet beautifully-designed laptop, is finally on the market. Not only has it exemplified the law of "Golden Ratio" with the 16:10 QHD+ Display, the performance will not disappoint mobile commercial users. Moreover, the Dynamic Cooler Boost design will help users to distribute its CPU and GPU performance to the tasks accordingly. If you are engineer, architect, designer, or even startup ownerwho needs to pitch and show proposals, you will no longer have to struggle with loading and editing the files on the spot with the 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics.Along with the support of the MSI Pen, the first award-winning stylus on 2021 CES, it will be a booster for your productivity and allows you to work more modernly with its low latency, stable connection, long battery life, and customizable functions.

Worldwide revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services, is estimated to grow 15.2% year over year in 2021 to $341.8 billion, according to the latest release of the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Tracker. The market is forecast to accelerate further in 2022 with 18.8% growth and remain on track to break the $500 billion mark by 2024. Among the three technology categories, AI Software occupied 88% of the overall AI market. However, in terms of growth, AI Hardware is estimated to grow the fastest in the next several years. From 2023 onwards, AI Services is forecast to become the fastest growing category.

Within the AI Software category, AI Applications has the lion's share at nearly 50% of revenues. In terms of growth, AI Platforms is the strongest with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.2%. The slowest will be AI System Infrastructure Software with a five-year CAGR of 14.4% while accounting for roughly 35% of all AI Software revenues. Within the AI Applications market, AI ERM is expected to grow slightly stronger than AI CRM over the next five years. Meanwhile, AI Lifecycle Software is forecast to grow the fastest among the markets within AI Platforms.

Intel Client Computing Group Executive Vice President & GM Gregory Bryant has recently published and deleted an image that appears to show the specifications of a next-generation Thunderbolt technology. The photo was taken at an Intel R&D facility in Israel and shows a poster highlighting "80G PHY Technology" which signifies that Intel is working on an 80 Gbps physical layer. This speed represents a doubling of the existing Thunderbolt 3/4 which runs at 40 Gbps while still working over a USB-C connection. These speeds can be achieved with novel PAM-3 Pulse Amplitude Modulation technology which allows for 50% more bits to be sent per cycle compared to the NRZ technology currently used while limiting the increased complexity that would be introduced with PAM-4. Intel appears to have a working test chip manufactured on the N6 node at TSMC which is showing promising results however we don't expect this technology to reach consumer devices for some time.

Intel has reportedly decided to launch their DG2 Xe-HPG discrete graphics cards at CES 2022 according to Hardware Academy on Weibo. Intel has already begun sampling these new GPUs to partners so this launch date appears feasible. The DG2 Xe-HPG discrete graphics cards are designed specifically for gaming and will offer up to 512 Execution Units paired with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Intel appears to be planning five separate DG2 Xe-HPG SKUs covering a large lineup of market segments with the top product competing with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 and AMD Radeon RX 6800. While these products won't be released until CES 2022 Intel may announce gaming processors with integrated Xe-HPG graphics sometime earlier.

Today, Intel announced the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit (code-named "Beast Canyon"), a highly modular desktop PC engineered to provide a phenomenal experience for gaming, streaming and recording. With the latest 11th Gen Intel Core processors, support for full-size discrete graphics cards and a full range of I/O ports, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit delivers high performance gameplay and smooth, immersive visuals.

Compact Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kits are designed to provide powerful, immersive gaming experiences. For performance, connectivity, and modularity, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme kit delivers massive performance with a small footprint.

The highest-performing Intel NUC yet delivers a premium and size-optimized PC package for creating innovative desktops suited to gamers' unique performance needs. Packing the latest hardware components into a tiny 8-liter case, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit is loaded with features typically found in much larger gaming rigs and offers customizable design options.

Intel today launched its newest generation Intel Xeon W-3300 processors, available today from its system integrator partners. Built for advanced workstation professionals, Intel Xeon W-3300 processors offer uncompromised performance, expanded platform capabilities, and enterprise-grade security and reliability in a single-socket solution.

Intel Xeon W-3300 processors are intelligently engineered to push the boundaries of performance, with a new processor core architecture that transforms for what expert workstation users can accomplish on a workstation.

The Intel Xeon W-3300 processors are designed for next-gen professional applications with heavily threaded, input/output-intensive workloads. Use cases stretch across artificial intelligence (AI), architecture, engineering, construction (AEC), and media and entertainment (M&E). With a new processor core architecture to transform efficiency and advanced technologies to support data integrity, Intel Xeon W-3300 processors are equipped to deliver uncompromising workstation performance.

The ramp-up of the Intel Ice Lake and AMD Milan processors is expected to not only propel growths in server shipment for two consecutive quarters from 2Q21 to 3Q21, but also drive up the share of high-density products in North American hyperscalers' enterprise SSD purchases, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In China, procurement activities by domestic hyperscalers Alibaba and ByteDance are expected to increase on a quarterly basis as well. With the labor force gradually returning to physical offices, enterprises are now placing an increasing number of IT equipment orders, including servers, compared to 1H21. Hence, global enterprise SSD procurement capacity is expected to increase by 7% QoQ in 3Q21. Ongoing shortages in foundry capacities, however, have led to the supply of SSD components lagging behind demand. At the same time, enterprise SSD suppliers are aggressively raising the share of large-density products in their offerings in an attempt to optimize their product lines' profitability. Taking account of these factors, TrendForce expects contract prices of enterprise SSDs to undergo a staggering 15% QoQ increase for 3Q21.

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su, in the company's Q2-2021 financial results call, confirmed that the company is on-track to launch the Zen 4 CPU microarchitecture and RDNA3 graphics architecture, in 2022. Zen 4 would herald the first major desktop platform change since the original Zen architecture, with the introduction of a new CPU socket, and support for DDR5 memory. The RDNA3 graphics architecture, meanwhile, is expected to nearly triple SIMD resources over the previous generation, and introduce even more fixed-function hardware for raytracing.

In the meantime, AMD is preparing a counter to Intel's 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" processor, in the form of Zen 3 with 3D Vertical Cache, which is also being referred to as the Zen 3+ architecture. These processors feature additional last-level cache, and the company claims a 15% gaming performance uplift, which should help it close the gaming performance gap with Intel, and win on sheer core-count of its big cores. It remains to be seen if Zen 3+ remains on Socket AM4 or if it debuts AM5, as AMD will be under pressure to match "Alder Lake" in platform I/O, which includes DDR5. Dr Su also confirmed that AMD has started shipping the Instinct MI200 "Aldebaran" compute accelerator based on the CDNA2 architecture. AMD's first MCM GPU with two logic dies, "Aldebaran" takes the fight to NVIDIA's top A100 series compute accelerators, and has already scored wins with ongoing HPC/supercomputing projects.