Intel's Alder Lake processors have two types of cores present, with two distinct sets of features and capabilities enabled. For example, smaller E-cores don't support the execution of AVX-512 instructions, while the bigger P-cores have support for AVX-512 instructions. So Intel has decided to remove support for it altogether not to create software errors and run into issues with executing AVX-512 code on Alder Lake processors. This happened just months before the launch of Alder Lake, making us see some initial motherboard BIOSes come with AVX-512 enabled from the box. Later on, all motherboard makers pulled the plug on it, and it is a rare sight to see support for it.

However, it seems like MSI is unhappy with the lack of AVX-512, and the company is reenabling partial support for it. According to Xaver Amberger, editor at Igor's Lab, MSI reintroduces selecting microcode version with its MEG Z690 Unify-X motherboard. There is an option for AVX-512 enablement in the menu, and it is indeed a functional one. With BIOS A22, MSI enabled AVX-512 instruction execution, and there are benchmarks to prove it works. This shows an advantage of 512-bit wide execution units of AVX-512 over something like AVX2, which offers only 256-bit wide execution units. In applications such as Y-Cruncher, AVX-512 enabled the CPU to reach higher performance targets while consuming less power.

The world's leading computer brand, GIGABYTE, launched its new generation of AORUS professional gaming laptops featuring Intel's 12th generation processors and Nvidia's RTX 30Ti series graphics cards. The upgraded dual-chip approach has resulted in a great leap in performance and smoother gaming experience, with a 11% increase in gaming performance. In addition to an upgraded performance, AORUS has pushed the limits of size dimensions of notebooks in order to improve visual enjoyment for gamers.

The AORUS 17, GIGABYTE's flagship model laptop debuted at CES 2022, changed the rules of the game by introducing a 17-inch screen panel inside a 15-inch tall laptop chassis. By adopting an extremely narrow four-sided frame design, AORUS increased the screen-to-body ratio to 90%, so you see more while carrying less. Without compromising any performance, the screen still boasts a 360 Hz refresh rate, allowing players to see more frames and win more games.

Global semiconductor sales revenue grew by a more than comfortable 25% in 2021, hitting a new record above $500 Billion for the first time. The data, part of Gartner's preliminary report on the state of the industry in 2021, bookends yet another year plagued with shortages and too little supply for the thirst of the consumer and business sectors. Naturally, supply constraints have led to higher ASP (Average Selling Prices) for the hardware that does get manufactured and distributed, as we've seen all too well in the graphics card market.

"As the global economy bounced back in 2021, shortages appeared throughout the semiconductor supply chain, particularly in the automotive industry," said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner. "The resulting combination of strong demand as well as logistics and raw material price increases drove semiconductors' average selling price higher (ASP), contributing to overall revenue growth in 2021.

3DMark Fire Strike Hall of Fame is where overclockers submit their best hardware benchmark trials and try to beat the very best. For years, one record managed to hold, and today it just got defeated. According to an extreme overclocker called "biso biso" from South Korea and a part of the EVGA OC team, the top spot now belongs to the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. The previous 3DMark Fire Strike world record was set on April 22nd in 2020, when Vince Lucido, also known as K|NGP|N, set a record with four-way SLI of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs. However, that record is old news since January 27th, when biso biso set the history with AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU.

The overclocker scored 62389 points, just 1,183 more from the previous record. He pushed the Navi 21 XTX silicon that powers the Radeon RX 6900 XT card to an impressive 3,147 MHz. Paired with a GPU memory clock of 2370 MHz, the GPU was probably LN2 cooled to achieve these results. The overclocker used EVGA's Z690 DARK KINGPIN motherboard with Intel Core i9-12900K processor as a platform of choice to achieve this record. You can check it out on the 3DMark Fire Strike Hall of Fame website to see yourself.

Raja Koduri, Intel's Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, has responded via Twitter to an open letter from PC Gamer that addressed the nightmare-like state for GPU pricing and availability, classifying it as "a huge issue for PC gamers and the industry at large". Intel says they are looking to put millions of Arc GPUs into PC Gamer's hands as the company fast approaches the end of the reaffirmed Q1 launch window for its new high-performance discrete graphics products. The reading on this is that Intel plans to add to the available mass of GPUs that consumers can buy, thus alleviating the strain from overwhelming consumer demand, and bringing about a much healthier market - with real and acceptable pricing for graphics products.

That Intel plans to ship millions of Arc GPUs to consumers is no surprise; the company definitely wants to recoup its investment in developing consumer-oriented, high-performance graphics architectures. However, any claims or expectations of improved GPU supply in the market should be taken with a grain of salt, as the bottleneck for graphics products stands not at the GPU design level, but at the semiconductor manufacturing one: namely, there are only so many GPU wafers that graphics chips designers can secure from foundry company TSMC, which also serves customers like Apple, Qualcomm, and other technology industry giants.

MAINGEAR—an award-winning PC system integrator of custom gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations—today announced that new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics cards are now available to configure within MAINGEAR's product line of award-winning custom gaming desktop PCs and workstations. Featuring support for real-time ray tracing effects and AI technologies, MAINGEAR PCs equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 offer gamers next-generation ray-traced graphics and performance comparable to the latest consoles.

Powered by Ampere, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 features NVIDIA's 2nd gen Ray Tracing Cores and 3rd generation Tensor Cores. Combined with new streaming multiprocessors and high-speed G6 memory, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 can power the latest and greatest games. NVIDIA RTX on 30 Series GPUs deliver real-time ray tracing effects—including shadows, reflections, and Ambient Occlusion (AO). The groundbreaking NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) 2.0 AI technology utilizes Tensor Core AI processors to boost frame rates while producing sharp, uncompromised visual fidelity comparable to high native resolutions.

Intel Corporation today reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 financial results. The company also announced that its board of directors approved a cash dividend increase of five percent to $1.46 per share on an annual basis. The board declared a quarterly dividend of $0.365 per share on the company's common stock, which will be payable on March 1 to shareholders of record as of February 7.

"Q4 represented a great finish to a great year. We exceeded top-line quarterly guidance by over $1 billion and delivered the best quarterly and full-year revenue in the company's history," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "Our disciplined focus on execution across technology development, manufacturing, and our traditional and emerging businesses is reflected in our results. We remain committed to driving long-term, sustainable growth as we relentlessly execute our IDM 2.0 strategy."

Remember that €1.06 billion antitrust lawsuit that Intel was slapped with by the European Commission back in 2009? It's ok if you don't, but it involved Intel being accused of "market malpractice, by influencing computer hardware manufacturers to postpone and/or cancel launches of their products that use CPUs made by its rival AMD" based on our own reporting from 2009. As these thing goes, Intel appealed to a higher court and that higher court handed back the case to the lower court who has now withdrawn the fine and the judges went as far as to say "The (European) Commission's analysis is incomplete and does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard that the rebates at issue were capable of having, or likely to have, anticompetitive effects,".

The European Commission has said it will study the new judgement and will consider its next steps, but it seems unlikely that they'll be able to bring this case to court again, without some additional proof of wrongdoing. The end result of this is also likely to make it tougher to bring cases like to court in the future for the European Commission, as they will have to provide more detailed cases where they prove that things like MDF and rebates to their customers cause real, anti-competitive damages to other companies in the same line of business, in this case AMD. The case can still be appealed to the CJEU, so this 13 year saga might still not be over.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is thrilled to announce the achievement of a new overclocking world record for fastest memory frequency at DDR5-8888 CL88-88-88-88, in cooperation with ASUS. This amazing frequency speed was achieved by the extreme overclocker "lupin_no_musume" with G.SKILL Trident Z5 DDR5 memory, ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 APEX motherboard, and Intel Core i9-12900K processor. To see the moment this amazing overclocking world record was set, please click the following video link: https://youtu.be/OgQFbUOs6i8

DDR5-8888 CL88-88-88-88 - Pushing the Speed to the Limit
At the dawn of the DDR5 era, G.SKILL and ASUS have been constantly exploring the memory speed limitations of the latest Intel Z690 platform. Surpassing the previous DDR5-8704 world record in November 2021, a new memory frequency world record is achieved at DDR5-8888 under liquid nitrogen extreme cooling. The memory speed has been validated by CPU-Z. Please refer to the screenshot and validation link below: https://valid.x86.fr/qgvylc

You may, or may not have noticed that in certain parts of the interweb, groups of people that are generally referred to as "Overclockers" have managed to get their cheap Celeron G6900's and Core i3-12100's to run at much higher clock speeds than Intel intended and now the company is unhappy about it, as they're anticipating that they're going to lose sales of more expensive CPUs. As such, Intel has issued a warning via Tom's Hardware
"Intel's 12th Gen non-K processors were not designed for overclocking. Intel does not warranty the operation of processors beyond their specifications. Altering clock frequency or voltage may damage or reduce the useful life of the processor and other system components, and may reduce system stability and performance."

Jokes aside, the lower end SKU's of Intel's 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs seem to be phenomenal overclockers, if you have the right motherboards. If the motherboard doesn't have an external clock gen, plus support for adjusting the BCLK on non-K CPUs, then you're not going to have much luck. This means, at least at the moment, that you're looking at fairly pricey Z690 motherboard, although there are rumors that we can expect the odd B660 motherboard that will get an external clock gen, with at least three models already reported to have BCLK adjustment support via beta UEFI updates. Pro Overclockers have already managed to hit speeds in excess of 5.3 GHz with the Celeron G6900 and that is only by adjusting the BCLK and the Voltage, which is no mean feat, as the CPU has fixed clock speed of 3.4 GHz, which makes this a 57 percent boost in clock speed. Intel is said to be looking into this unintended ability to overclock these CPU SKUs and is apparently looking at locking down this ability with a new microcode update in a future UEFI release.

Update: Added a screenshot from TPU's upcoming Core i3-12100F review, showing 5.2 GHz at 130 MHz BCLK.

Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist lineup of discrete graphics cards generates a lot of attention from consumers. Leaks of these cards' performance and detailed specifications appear more and more as we enter the countdown to the launch day, which is sometime in Q1 of this year. Today, we managed to see a slide from @9950pro on Twitter that shows the laptop memory configuration of Intel's DG2 GPU. As the picture suggests, we can see that the top-end SKU1 with 512 EUs supports a 16 GB capacity of GDDR6 memory that runs at 16 Gbps speeds. The memory runs on a 256-bit bus and generates 512 GB/s bandwidth while having eight VRAM modules present.

When it comes to SKU2, which is a variant with 384 EUs, this configuration supports six VRAM modules on a 192-bit bus, running at 16 Gbps speeds. They generate a total capacity of 12 GBs and a bandwidth of 384 GB/s. We have SKU3 DG2 GPU going down the stack, featuring 256 EUs, four VRAM modules on a 128-bit bus, 8 GB capacity, and a 256 GB/s bandwidth. And last but not least, the smallest DG2 variants come in the form of SKU4 and SKU5, feating 128 EUs and 96 EUs, respectively. Intel envisions these lower-end SKUs with two VRAM modules on a 64-bit bus, and this time slower GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps. They are paired with 4 GB of total capacity, and the total bandwidth comes down to 112 GB/s.

Not all products are launched with an accompanying press release or even at a trade show and ASUS' new PL63 mini PC is one of those products. It might not be the most unique mini PC on the market, but as far as we're aware, it's the first with Thunderbolt 4 support, that is as long as you get the right SKU, as most seem to support USB 3.2 instead. The PL63 is built around Intel's 11th gen mobile processors and the three CPU options available are the Core i3-1115G4, Core i5-1135G7 and the Core i7-1165G7, all with Iris Xe graphics..

Other features include support for two SO-DIMMs, one PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive, 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, an HDMI 2.0 port, DP 1.4 as well as DP output through both the USB-C ports, regardless of if you get the USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 4 version. As per the pictures, WiFi is also supported, with various options depending on the SKU. An external 19 V power brick rated at 90 W is included to power the 166.2 x 119.7 x 33.9 mm (WxDxH) system. Pricing for a barebone model seems to be US$508 for the Core i5-1135G7 based model, although it's unclear if this is with or without Thunderbolt 4 support. Bump that up to US$650 and you get 4 GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD and Windows 10 Pro included.

Rather unusually, Intel announced its latest chip fab plans not via a press release, but via an exclusive article in TIME magazine. It seems like an unusual strategy, as these kinds of things are normally not announced in this kind of fashion, especially as TIME doesn't exactly have close ties with Intel, nor the semiconductor industry as a whole, but maybe this is Intel's new way of trying to change the image of the company. Either which way, Intel is apparently planning on building no less than two fabs on the 1,000 acre (~4 square kilometer) site in New Albany, Ohio, which should be the workplace of some 3,000 people once it stands ready in 2025.

The article quotes Pat Gelsinger saying "Our expectation is that this becomes the largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet," as Intel has the option to double the land for its new fab site and apparently has plans for as many as eight fabs at the location. Additional fabs obviously depends on demand and crucially if Intel manages to full off its contract foundry business, since without it, it seems unlikely that Intel is going to need the additional six fabs in the foreseeable future, especially as Intel is in the final stages of finishing its new fab in Ireland, while also planning to announce a location for yet another fab somewhere in Europe and let's not forget Arizona. The TIME article goes into a lot more details as to what the new fabs mean for Ohio, but doesn't go into much more detail about Intel's plans for its future fabs there.

Update: Official press release below.

Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete lineup of graphics cards is scheduled for launch this quarter. We are getting some performance benchmarks of the DG2-512EU silicon, representing the top-end Xe-HPG configuration. Thanks to a discovery of a famous hardware leaker TUM_APISAK, we have a measurement performed in the SiSoftware database that shows Intel's Arc Alchemist GPU with 4096 cores and, according to the report from the benchmark, just 12.8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. This is just an error on the report, as this GPU SKU should be coupled with 16 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The card was reportedly running at 2.1 GHz frequency. However, we don't know if this represents base or boost speeds.

When it comes to actual performance, the DG2-512EU GPU managed to score 9017.52 Mpix/s, while something like NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti managed to get 8369.51 Mpix/s in the same test group. Comparing these two cards in floating-point operations, Intel has an advantage in half-float, double-float, and quad-float tests, while NVIDIA manages to hold the single-float crown. This represents a 7% advantage for Intel's GPU, meaning that Arc Alchemist has the potential for standing up against NVIDIA's offerings.

Worldwide semiconductor revenue increased 25.1% in 2021 to total $583.5 billion, crossing the $500 billion threshold for the first time, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc.

"As the global economy bounced back in 2021, shortages appeared throughout the semiconductor supply chain, particularly in the automotive industry," said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner. "The resulting combination of strong demand as well as logistics and raw material price increases drove semiconductors' average selling price higher (ASP), contributing to overall revenue growth in 2021.

Just a few days ago, we reported that Intel is preparing to unveil the company's first application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) dedicated to mining cryptocurrency. To be more specific, Intel plans to show off its "Bonanza Mine" ASIC at the 2022 ISSCC Conference, describing the chip as "ultra low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC." We have yet to see how this competes with other industry-made ASICs like the ones from Bitmain. However, it seems like the startup company GRIID, valued at around $3.3 billion, thinks that the Bonanza Mine ASIC is the right choice and has entered a definitive supply agreement with Intel.

According to the S-4 filing, GRIID has "entered into a definitive supply contract with Intel to provide ASICs that we expect to fuel our growth. The initial order will supply units to be delivered in 2022 and GRIID will have access to a significant share of Intel's future production volumes." There are a few other mentions of Intel in the document, and you can see another exciting tidbit below.

Intel Ireland last week chalked up a milestone in its $7 billion Fab 34 construction project: A team rolled in the new plant's first huge chipmaking tool. The machine, a lithography resist track, arrived by truck at Intel's Leixlip, Ireland, plant after a flight across the Atlantic Ocean from an Intel Oregon plant.

Ireland's new lithography tool runs in conjunction with an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scanner, a crown jewel in Intel's manufacturing capability. The new tool provides precision coating of silicon wafers before alignment and exposure inside the EUV scanner. The wafer then returns to the lithography tool for a series of precision oven bakes, photo development and rinsing. A typical Intel fab contains about 1,200 advanced tools, many of them costing millions of dollars a piece.

Today, ASML Holding and Intel Corporation announced the latest phase of their longstanding collaboration to advance the cutting edge of semiconductor lithography technology. Intel has issued its first purchase order to ASML for the delivery of the industry's first TWINSCAN EXE:5200 system - an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) high-volume production system with a high numerical aperture and more than 200 wafers per hour productivity - as part of the two companies' long-term High-NA collaboration framework.

"Intel's vision and early commitment to ASML's High-NA EUV technology is proof of its relentless pursuit of Moore's Law. Compared to the current EUV systems, our innovative extended EUV roadmap delivers continued lithographic improvements at reduced complexity, cost, cycle time and energy that the chip industry needs to drive affordable scaling well into the next decade," said ASML President and CTO Martin van den Brink.

Intel is reportedly looking to disrupt the cryptocurrency mining hardware business with fixed-function ASICs that either outperform GPUs, or end up with lower enough performance/Watt or performance/Dollar to take make GPUs unviable as a mining hardware option. The company is planning to unveil its first such product, codenamed "Bonanza Mine," an ASIC purpose-built for Bitcoin mining.

Since it's an ASIC, "Bonanza Mine" doesn't appear to be a re-purposed Xe-HPC processor, or even an FPGA that's been programmed to mine Bitcoin. It's a purpose-built piece of silicon. Intel will unveil "Bonanza Mine" at the 2022 ISSCC Conference. It describes the chip as being an "ultra low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC," putting power-guzzling GPUs on notice. If Intel can clinch Bitcoin with "Bonanza Lake," designing ASICs for other cryptocurrencies is straightforward. With demand from crypto-miners slashed, graphics cards will see a tremendous fall in value, forcing scalpers to cut prices.

Intel's 600-series motherboards have barely made it into retail and we're now looking at a list of upcoming 700-series motherboards from Biostar that has leaked courtesy of the Eurasian Economic Commission via @harukaze5719 in Twitter. The list of boards suggests that Biostar will only be using the Z790 and B760 chipsets, although it's unclear at this point if there will be an H770 and a H710 chipset, as Intel has skipped those SKUs in the past for second generation CPUs using the same socket.

The boards in question are the Z790 Valkyrie, Z790GTA- SILVER, B760GTQ, B760M-SILVER, B760GTN, B760T-SILVER, B760MX5-E PRO, B760MX-PRO, B760MX-C, B760MX-E, B760MH. We'd hazard a guess that the Z790 Valkyrie will replace the Z690 Valkyrie, but the models with silver in the model name are currently missing from Biostar's 600-series lineup, but there are some 500-series silver models. In addition to the Z790 SKUs, there are also some B660 boards with a BTC suffix that Biostar hasn't announced yet and these would appear to be boards designed for mining, as this is the naming Biostar has used in the past for such boards. Intel's 700-series chipset and Raptor Lake CPUs are expected to launch later this year.

Although not available in retail quite yet, Intel has officially launched its NUC 11 Essential models built around its Jasper Lake SoCs and thanks to the new processor options, Intel's entry level NUC models are looking quite promising. Not only are we looking at much better GPUs, with a 78 percent increase of execution units at the high-end, but even the low-end CPUs have had a 33 percent increase, when comparing Jasper Lake to Gemini Lake, which some older NUC models were based on. This is quite a jump, but it's hardly surprising, as Gemini Lake was launched at the tail end of 2017.

There's also official support for up to 32 GB of RAM and a boost in memory speed from 2400 MHz to 2933 MHz. Processor speeds have obviously been bumped somewhat as well between the processor generations, alongside with the GPU speeds, but we're mostly looking at a few hundred MHz here, depending on the CPU model. All the new NUC models appear to be using the 10 W TDP Jasper Lake CPU SKUs and all of them should also come with 64 GB of eMMC soldered down, plus an M.2 2280 SATA and NVMe capable slot for SSDs.

Server processors tend to be one of the most profitable businesses for AMD and Intel. Thus, investment groups and analysts closely monitor happenings in the server and data center world. A report from Mizuho Securities (investment bank) Managing Director Jordan Klein states that many upcoming changes on the server processor front are coming this year. Mr. Klein cites sources over at Insupur Systems, one of the most prominent server vendors. More precisely, Dolly Wu is the VP and GM of Datacenter/Cloud at Inspur. According to the report, AMD and Intel will change their strategy in the server market going forward in 2022.

As far as AMD is concerned, the company plans to increase the pricing of its EPYC processors by 10-30%. This increase should be a bit easier on the strategic cloud customers. The report also indicates that as the demand far exceeds the supply of EPYC processors, AMD increases prices and makes a "take it or leave it" offer, resulting in most customers accepting the increased costs. Another interesting tidbit from the report was the talk about Intel. The blue team laid out its strategy to launch highly-anticipated Sapphire Rapids Xeons in Q2 of 2022. However, it will maybe get delayed to Q3 of 2022. Intel doesn't plan to increase prices to remain competitive with AMD, so the server space will see Intel fighting to regain the lost market share.

It took a while for this discovery as it's probably rare for people with modern PCs to also have Blu-ray optical drives. Apparently PCs with Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake," and older 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" processors, as well as the latest Windows 11 OS, are unable to playback protected 4K Blu-ray video discs, as the DRM component is broken in the absence of Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). Intel introduced SGX with 6th Gen Core "Skylake," and deprecated it with "Rocket Lake." To be clear, playback of Blu-ray discs at 1080p isn't affected.

CyberLink, makers of the PowerDVD software that's bundled as an OEM application with optical drives to play back protected Blu-ray video; put out a statement on its website confirming that they're unable to help with this situation, as they don't control the DRM, the Blu-ray Association does. "The removal of the SGX feature, and its compatibility with the latest Windows OS and drivers, has caused a substantial challenge for CyberLink to continue supporting Ultra HD Blu-ray movie playback in our player software," it stated. Just to clarify, this only affects playback of Blu-Ray content at 4K—1080p is not affected.Many Thanks to Steevo for the tip.

Large on-die caches are expected to be a major contributor to IPC and gaming performance. The upcoming AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor triples its on-die last-level cache using the 3D Vertical Cache technology, to level up to Intel's "Alder Lake-S" processors in gaming, while using the existing "Zen 3" IP. Intel realizes this, and is planning a massive increase in on-die cache sizes, although spread across the cache hierarchy. The next-generation "Raptor Lake-S" desktop processor the company plans to launch in the second half of 2022 is rumored to feature 68 MB of "total cache" (that's AMD lingo for L2 + L3 caches), according to a highly plausible theory by PC enthusiast OneRaichu on Twitter, and illustrated by Olrak29_.

The "Raptor Lake-S" silicon is expected to feature eight "Raptor Cove" P-cores, and four "Gracemont" E-core clusters (each cluster amounts to four cores). The "Raptor Cove" core is expected to feature 2 MB of dedicated L2 cache, an increase over the 1.25 MB L2 cache per "Golden Cove" P-core of "Alder Lake-S." In a "Gracemont" E-core cluster, four CPU cores share an L2 cache. Intel is looking to double this E-core cluster L2 cache size from 2 MB per cluster on "Alder Lake," to 4 MB per cluster. The shared L3 cache increases from 30 MB on "Alder Lake-S" (C0 silicon), to 36 MB on "Raptor Lake-S." The L2 + L3 caches hence add up to 68 MB. All eyes are now on "Zen 4," and whether AMD gives the L2 caches an increase from the 512 KB per-core size that it's consistently maintained since the first "Zen."

It looks like Intel and TSMC have a deal in place to manufacture 3 nm chips. The world-leading Taiwanese fab is setting up a new facility exclusively to cater to Intel, according to DigiTimes, citing industry sources. This facility will be located in the Baoshan area of Hsinchu, in northern Taiwan. The 3 nm node will enable Intel to keep its newfound cadence of launching new CPU microarchitectures with IPC increases each year. The annual IPC increase cadence in particular, would be faster than even the "Tick-Tock" cadence prior to 2015, as the company pushed IPC increases and foundry nodes each alternating year. The company faces stiff competition from AMD, which has been posting IPC increases each year since 2017, and leveraged TSMC 7 nm nodes to beat Intel in the IPC game for the first time in over 17 years.