Intel will debut its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop processors either toward the end of 2021, or early 2022, introducing the LGA1700 socket, 600-series chipset, and more importantly, hybrid CPU core architecture to the desktop space. The 10 nm "Alder Lake-S" silicon features up to eight "Golden Cove" performance cores (P-cores), and up to eight "Gracemont" efficiency cores (E-cores), in a heterogenous CPU core setup rivaling Arm big.LITTLE. Specifications of the top Core i9, fairly-top Core i7, and mid-tier Core i5 parts were leaked to the web on Chinese social media.

The 12th Gen Core lineup will be led, predictably, by the Core i9-12900K, which succeeds the i9-11900K with a maxed out 8+8 (P+E) configuration, unlocked multipliers, the most cache, and the highest clock speeds. The P-cores ("Golden Cove" cores) are clocked up to 5.30 GHz (1-2 cores boost), and up to 5.00 GHz all-core / 8 cores; while the E-cores ("Gracemont" cores), are clocked up to 3.90 GHz (1-4 cores boost), with 3.70 GHz all-core / 8 cores boost. The total L3 cache on the silicon is 30 MB. The i9-12900K has a TDP of 125 W (PL1), with 228 W PL2. Intel will introduce several new overclocking features, including multiple memory gear ratios.

Lenovo today announced the next generation of its family of entry-level desktop workstations - the ThinkStation P350 Tower, Small Form Factor (SFF) and Tiny. This trio of workstations hosts a technology upgrade - each one is equipped with support for PCIe Gen 4 for faster access to cutting-edge storage technologies, as well as enhanced professional graphics support. This latest generation of desktop workstations becomes Lenovo's most powerful entry-level offering and delivers a complete package of size options that can scale across a variety of industries and their respective workflows. From engineering and architecture, to finance, STEM/higher education and medical, these new desktop workstations offer versatile, flexible and ISV-certified performance at whatever size is best suited for users' needs and working environment.

Built with the latest high-performance Intel Core or Xeon processors with support up to 11th Gen Intel Core or Intel Xeon W processors, the ThinkStation P350 Tower and SFF are tailored for mission-critical tasks that require superior reliability and powerful performance. Both the Tower and SFF also offer NVIDIA RTX professional graphics, with the Tower now able to support up to the NVIDIA RTX A5000 graphics card. In addition to the 500 W power supply, the tower chassis now boasts a new 750 W PSU option - enabling high-end GPU users with the power needed to tackle sophisticated workflows. The ThinkStation P350 Tiny is the industry's smallest workstation at less than 1L and offers uncompromising performance within a form factor 96% smaller than a traditional desktop. Powered by 11th Gen Intel Core processors, it is uniquely qualified for enabling OEM solutions, and can be used as a host for like-local remote workstation power.

Intel has recently announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger and Dr. Ann Kelleher (senior vice president and general manager of Technology Development) will be hosting a webcast on July 26th to provide a deeper look at Intel's process and packaging roadmaps. These updates will focus on the companies IDM 2.0 Strategy which seeks to increase the companies manufacturing capabilities through the creation of new fabs and the development of more advanced processes. Intel will also offer manufacturing capabilities to external companies using these foundries which it hopes will allow it to better compete with the likes of TSMC, Globalfoundries, and Samsung. You can watch the webcast on July 26th at 2 PM PDT, Intel will publish a link to it on their Newsroom website.

Intel is exploring a massive €20 billion ($23.7 billion) manufacturing investment in the European Union that aims to produce "20% of the world's logic chips" by 2030, reports the Financial Times. This is likely to be separate from the company's ongoing investments in Ireland. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently met with the leaders of France and Italy in a bid to "rebalance the semiconductor manufacturing landscape to make supply chains more resilient." Reading between the lines it becomes clear that they are referring to the world's overdependence on Asia, particularly Taiwan, for cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing.

The location of Intel's new mega-fab remains undecided, as the company is still sitting down with the various EU member states to work out a favorable deal. Regardless of where it lands, the investment would align with the EU's grand-strategy to localize semiconductor manufacturing on a large scale, with the goal of making the EU a net-exporter of semiconductors.

Armed with up to 8 "Golden Cove" high-performance CPU cores and up to 8 "Gracemont" low-power cores in a hybrid x86 processor setup, the "Alder Lake" silicon enables Intel to carve out some interesting SKUs in the mobile space, by creating numerous combinations of the big and small CPU core counts, and more importantly, by adjusting the ratio of big cores to small ones. The two core types operate at significantly different performance/Watt bands, which allows Intel to target the various TDP-defined mobile processor SKU categories with just the right big:small core ratios, as revealed by a leaked "Alder Lake" mobile SKU roadmap, leaked to the web by HXL.

Intel is looking to spread the silicon across six mobile segments defined by TDP—the 5 W tablet/handheld; the 9 W ultra-thin, the 15 W mainstream tablet/laptop, the 28 W performance tablet/laptop, the 35-45 W thin enthusiast laptop, and the 45-55 W "muscle" laptop. With Intel recently announcing the discontinuation of its 1+4 (big+small) core "Lakefield" hybrid processor, its mantle in the 5 W segment will be picked up by "Alder Lake-M5," with 1 "Golden Cove" and 4 "Gracemont" cores. There will be two product tiers segmented by iGPU execution units (EUs), one with 48 EU, and the other with 64.

Intel on Tuesday issued product-change notifications (PCNs) to announce the discontinuation of its first Hybrid processors, codenamed "Lakefield," besides 15-Watt U-segment variants of its "Ice Lake" and "Comet Lake" mobile processors. With the product discontinuation notice put out, it sets the ball rolling toward a year-long process where Intel solicits its final orders for these chips from OEMs and distributors, fulfills these orders last by 2022, and marks these parts "End of Life" (EOL).

Intel's mobile processor segment is dominated by the "Tiger Lake" microarchitecture on the 10 nm SuperFin node. Quad-core variants of the architecture cover the 15 W Y- and U-segments, while 8-core variants span the 35 W to 55 W H-segments for mainstream notebooks. Intel's next hybrid mobile processor, the "Alder Lake-P," is expected arrive in Q4-2021.

Valve has released its Steam Hardware Survey results for the month of June, and as always, it is a pretty good indication of the gaming market and market trends, showing us just how well the companies providing hardware are doing. On the CPU front, there are two companies constantly fighting for market domination: Intel and AMD. A bit over a month ago, we reported that AMD made serious progress in taking the market share away from Intel, using its latest Ryzen 5000 series of processors. However, this time, the effect seems to be reversed by its competitor, Intel.

All the gains AMD has made in the past few months have been sort of "erased" by Intel, as team blue managed to get back to a point where AMD now holds 28.41% of the CPU market, while Intel is back to over 70% share, more specifically 71.58%. What this means is that there are some fluctuations happening right now, and we are eager to see more reports to analyze in what direction is the market moving and how the two competing companies are performing. AMD seems to be held back by their ability to produce enough CPUs, while Intel is happily filling that void, fueled by a more aggressive pricing strategy.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced an intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology. The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. As the first project governed by the new foundation, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The Open 3D Engine enables developers and content creators to build 3D experiences unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events. A developer preview of O3DE is available on GitHub today. For more information and/or to contribute, please visit: https://o3de.org

3D engines are used to create a range of virtual experiences, including games and simulations, by providing capabilities such as 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing. Many developers are seeking ways to build their intellectual property on top of an open source engine where the roadmap is highly visible, openly governed, and collaborative to the community as a whole. More developers look to be able to create or augment their current technological foundations with highly collaborative solutions that can be used in any development environment. O3DE introduces a new ecosystem for developers and content creators to innovate, build, share, and distribute immersive 3D worlds that will inspire their users with rich experiences that bring the imaginations of their creators to life.

Intel is slowly preparing to launch its 4th generation of Xeon Scalable processors, with it being the first arrival of the 10 nm designs to the server market. Codenamed Sapphire Rapids, these processors are expected to bring much-needed IPC and platform improvements so Intel can keep up with AMD's EPYC processors. Today, we are getting some first performance results as well as some information about a specific 20 core, 40 threaded Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids SKU. In a leaked Geekbench 4 submission, the latest Xeon processor was tested and we get to see even more details about the processor.

Featuring 20 cores and 40 threads, the CPU has a base clock speed of 1.5 GHz. It features as much as 40 MB of L2 cache and 75 MB of L3 cache spread across the die. The system was tested on an Intel reference platform called VulcanCity, with this configuration carrying 32 GB of DDR5 memory. The reported results of the benchmarks that this processor went through are not very impressive. These numbers are easily beaten by AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, however, this is only an engineering sample with low clock speed and it could be possible that Geekbench is not optimized to run on this processor. You can check out some of the performance numbers below, and see the submitted results here.

We haven't seen any new prosumer HEDT processors since AMD launched their Ryzen Threadripper 3000 lineup in early 2020. Intel has had a very weak HEDT offering over the past few years with their 14 nm Cascade Lake processors and X299 chipset where the flagship Core i9-10980XE offered just 18 cores. Intel appears to be preparing to launch an updated HEDT offering in Q2 2022 with 10 nm Sapphire Rapids processors and a new W790 chipset. The new W790 chipset may launch alongside Raptor Lake which is expected to support the Z790 chipset. We still have a while until these products launch with Intel not yet having released their Alder Lake predecessors while AMD is expected to announce Threadripper 5000 in the coming months.

Intel's struggles with semiconductor manufacturing have been known for a very long time. Starting from its 10 nm design IP to the latest 7 nm delays, we have seen the company struggle to deliver its semiconductor nodes on time. On the other hand, Intel's competing companies are using 3rd party foundries to manufacture their designs and not worry about the yields of semiconductor nodes. Most of the time, that 3rd party company is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Today, thanks to some reporting from Nikkei Asia, we are learning that Intel is tapping TSMC's capacities to manufacture some of the company's future processors.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, Nikkei notes that: "Intel, America's biggest chipmaker, is working with TSMC on at least two 3-nm projects to design central processing units for notebooks and data center servers in an attempt to regain market share it has lost to Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia over the past few years. Mass production of these chips is expected to begin by the end of 2022 at the earliest." This means that we could expect to see some of the TSMC manufactured Intel processors by the year 2023/2024.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, announced that the BIOS of their series motherboards, including Intel X299, C621, C232, C236, C246, 200, 300, 400, 500 lineups, as well as AMD TRX40, 300, 400, 500 motherboards are TPM 2.0 function ready, which can pass the upgraded Windows 11 OS. verification.

Windows 11 is the latest operating system from Microsoft, and features dozens of exciting new functions and Android APP support to effectively improve productivity, system security, and gaming performance. However, most of the users might be confusing that Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 support means they need a TPM module on board for Windows 11 upgrade.

Intel has begun sampling its Xe-HPG (High performance Gaming) products to ecosystem partners, which will allow them to verify performance, power, stability and board characteristics that are necessary variables in product development and launch. The information comes courtesy of Intel, who has updated its graphics product roadmap regarding DG2 sampling and for its Xe-HPC (High Performance Computing) products as well. Xe HPC products (codenamed Ponte Vecchio after a beautiful Florentine bridge) have now achieved power-on capabilities and are undergoing validation before subsequent steps in the hardware development workflow.

Intel's Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president and general manager of the Xeon and Memory Group at Intel Corporation, has yesterday published a blog post talking about Intel's next-generation server platform codenamed Sapphire Rapids. The SPR platform is Intel's biggest step-up in the server processor space, and it is the exact CPU that will power the Aurora exascale supercomputer. Besides improvements to the CPU microarchitecture, the platform itself is bringing many benefits with it as well. It will use the latest industry protocols like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. This is making a strong combination designed even for exascale supercomputers to be powered by this processor. However, the availability of this CPU was a bit of a mystery until yesterday. Below, you can see the quote from Ms. Lisa Spelman about the availability of said processors.

Lisa SpelmanDemand for Sapphire Rapids continues to grow as customers learn more about the benefits of the platform. Given the breadth of enhancements in Sapphire Rapids, we are incorporating additional validation time prior to the production release, which will streamline the deployment process for our customers and partners. Based on this, we now expect Sapphire Rapids to be in production in the first quarter of 2022, with ramp beginning in the second quarter of 2022.

EVGA Corporation, or simply EVGA as it is known in the community, is the maker of various PC components and peripherals. As many of you are aware, EVGA has historically been focused on making products based on silicon coming from NVIDIA and Intel. The company has used NVIDIA products exclusively for its GPU portfolio and used Intel chipsets for its motherboard solutions. In the past, EVGA made motherboards for AMD processors, however, these boards used NVIDIA's chipset so they weren't technically full AMD motherboards. Starting today, that is about to change as we got some very juicy teasers from EVGA. In the nine-second video teaser on YouTube titled "A new Darkness is coming...", EVGA showcased a simple animation showing the AMD Ryzen logo surrounding EVGA's.

And of course, that only means one thing. EVGA will officially be joining the ecosystem of AMD and offering motherboards for their Ryzen processors. While the company is "one of the top NVIDIA authorized partners" in GPUs, on the CPU front it is officially joining Team Red and marking an important milestone for everyone. It is still not clear what kind of motherboard we will be getting, however, we can expect to see EVGA's best engineering applied in the form of a possible X570 Dark motherboard.Below, you can see the video teaser.

AAEON, a leader in industrial PC solutions, announces the BOXER-6642-CML fanless industrial box PC. Powered by 10th Generation Intel Core desktop processors, this innovative solution delivers higher performance with greater value in a low-profile form factor perfect for deploying in tight spaces.
The BOXER-6642-CML is the first fanless industrial PC from AAEON to offer the 10th Generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7/i9 and Intel Celeron processors (formerly Comet Lake) up to 35 W TDP. Utilizing a desktop socket-type chipset, the system delivers greater performance value compared with systems deploying mobile chipsets. Additionally, the system the system can be easily scaled or upgraded to match the performance needs of any application. With up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory, the BOXER-6642-CML ensures top end processing performance to support a wide range of industrial applications.

One key feature of the BOXER-6642-CML is its low-profile industrial design. At only 54 mm in height, the system can fit into any tight space, making it easier to deploy right where it's needed. The system also features a wide voltage input (10 to 35 V) and provides consistent operation without loss of performance in temperatures from 0°C up to 45°C. The BOXER-6642-CML is built with fanless construction, keeping dust and other contaminants out, allowing for reliable, long lasting operation.

In more reason why Microsoft's requirement for hardware trusted platform modules for its upcoming Windows 11 operating system is arbitrary, the company revealed that it is willing to tweak the hardware TPM system requirements to accommodate platforms from 2017, which include the very first generation of AMD "Zen" (Ryzen 1000 series), and Intel 7th Gen Core "Kaby Lake." In a Windows Insider blog posted dated June 28, Microsoft explained in brief why Windows 11 needs TPM 2.0 hardware, and that the "PC Health Check App," the software tool Microsoft is giving users to check whether their PCs measure up to Windows 11, has been temporarily removed from the website while they work on getting its accuracy right.

"The intention of today's post is to acknowledge and clarify the confusion caused by our PC Health Check tool, share more details as to why we updated the system requirements for Windows 11 and set the path for how we will learn and adjust. Below you will find changes we are making based on that feedback, including ensuring we have the ability for Windows Insiders to install Windows 11 on 7th generation processors to give us more data about performance and security, updating our PC Health check app to provide more clarity, and committing to more technical detail on the principles behind our decisions. With Windows 11, we are focused on increasing security, improving reliability, and ensuring compatibility. This is what drives our decisions.

On the sidelines of its 2021 International Supercomputing Conference announcements that mostly covered the HPC-relevant portions of the company's Xe scalar compute architecture, the company also put out a couple of nuggets on Xe HPG, the gaming-grade consumer graphics architecture by Intel, which is expected to power graphics cards capable of AAA gaming at high resolutions. Without mentioning dates, the company announced that Xe HPG will see the light of the day soon.

It's a long march for Intel to break into the gaming graphics card business, and Intel is calling this project "Odyssey." A select few (Intel employees, ISVs, hardware partners, etc.,), have access to greater information and merchandise, as they hold the "Odyssey Card." The company called for them to "redeem" this card for the goodies. "We are soon heading toward a milestone moment, the pending release of the Xe HPG microarchitecture from Intel. Some of you received an Odyssey card and were the first to engage with Intel on this journey. Now is the time to redeem this card, which is one in many steps we hope to formally take forward with you. We have a few required fields here to confirm you have received a card from us," stated Intel.

Intel has partnered with Sabrent to ship NUC 11 Pro Mini PCs with pre-installed Sabrent Rocket 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs, on the NUC11TNKv7. The drives feature Toshiba 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, and are capable of up to 5 GB/s sequential reads, and up to 4.4 GB/s sequential writes, taking advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface. On machines with PCIe Gen 3, the drives can attain up to 3.4 GB/s reads, with up to 2.75 GB/s writes. Lower models of the pre-built NUC 11 Pro feature Transcend TS512GMTS430S M.2 SATA drives.

Intel today, in its 2021 International Supercomputing Conference presentation, revealed that certain next-generation Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" SKUs come with on-package high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Given the context of its presentation, these could be special SKUs designed for high-density HPC setups, in which the processor package includes certain amount of "PMEM" (package memory), besides the processor's 8-channel DDR5 memory interface.

The size of the HBM PMEM, and its position in the memory hierarchy, were detailed, too. Given its high-density applications, PMEM may not serve as a victim cache for the processor, but rather be capable of serving as main memory, with none of the DDR5 DRAM channels populated with DIMMs. On machines with DIMMs, the PMEM will serve as a victim cache for the processor's on-die last-level cache, accelerating the memory I/O. "The next-generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named "Sapphire Rapids) will offer integrated High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), providing a dramatic boost in memory bandwidth and a significant performance improvement for HPC applications that operate memory bandwidth-sensitive workloads. Users can power through workloads using just High Bandwidth Memory or in combination with DDR5," says Intel.

At the 2021 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) Intel is showcasing how the company is extending its lead in high performance computing (HPC) with a range of technology disclosures, partnerships and customer adoptions. Intel processors are the most widely deployed compute architecture in the world's supercomputers, enabling global medical discoveries and scientific breakthroughs. Intel is announcing advances in its Xeon processor for HPC and AI as well as innovations in memory, software, exascale-class storage, and networking technologies for a range of HPC use cases.

"To maximize HPC performance we must leverage all the computer resources and technology advancements available to us," said Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. "Intel is the driving force behind the industry's move toward exascale computing, and the advancements we're delivering with our CPUs, XPUs, oneAPI Toolkits, exascale-class DAOS storage, and high-speed networking are pushing us closer toward that realization."

NVIDIA's $40 billion takeover of Arm Holdings plc from SoftBank, got a shot in the arm, as three major licensees of the IP came out in support of the bid. These include Broadcom, MediaTek, and Marvell Technology Group. This development is key for NVIDIA to fight the perception built up by a rival faction, that the democratized nature of the Arm IP would get lost if a chipmaker like NVIDIA owns it. This rival faction is primarily led by Qualcomm.

It's interesting to note the individual backers of the NVIDIA takeover. There is nothing but love between Broadcom and Qualcomm, especially after the former's failed bid to acquire the latter. MediaTek is a major smartphone and IoT SoC maker, dominating the low-cost and mainstream smartphone segments. Marvell is big in datacenter and storage IP. Each of the three are results of huge IP consolidation over the past decade.

The Intel LGA1700/LGA1718 sockets have featured prominently in recent leaks for the upcoming 12th Generation Core Series Alder Lake processors and their Raptor Lake successors we have seen very little mention of the LGA18XX socket. The socket cover for LGA17XX has recently been pictured and it lists also being compatible with LGA18XX which would suggest the two sockets will be somewhat similar. We don't know what products may feature the LGA18XX socket but the most likely option would be the 7 nm Meteor Lake architecture. Intel has developed a new mounting solution for the two sockets with updated hole patterns indicating they are similar.

We have been receiving several leaks for Intel's upcoming DG2 GPUs with a 256 Execution Unit model recently appearing on Geekbench paired with a 14-core Alder Lake mobile CPU. The Alder Lake mobile processor featured an integrated Xe GPU with 96 Execution Units which were also benchmarked. The 256 Execution Unit graphics card tested is likely derived from the mid-range DG2-384 GPU. The 96 EU DG2 iGPU featured a maximum frequency of 1.2 GHz while the 256 EU variant increased that to 1.4 GHz. The DG2-256 scored an OpenCL score of 18,450 points in the Geekbench 5 benchmark which places it at GTX 1050 performance level. The DG2-96 integrated GPU scored 6,500 points which is comparable to a GTX 460. While these performance numbers are low it is important to keep in mind that these are just early results from a mid-range mobile offering and Intel is planning to release cards with 512 Execution Units which should compete with the RTX 3070 Ti and 6700 XT.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced launched the new SiFive Performance family of processors. The SiFive Performance family debuts with two new processor cores, the P270, SiFive's first Linux capable processor with full support for the RISC-V vector extension v1.0 rc, and the SiFive Performance P550 core, SiFive's highest performance processor to date. The new SiFive Performance P550 delivers a SPECInt 2006 score of 8.65/GHz, making it the highest performance RISC-V processor available today, and comparable to existing proprietary solutions in the application processor space.

"SiFive Performance is a significant milestone in our commitment to deliver a complete, scalable portfolio of RISC-V cores to customers in all markets who are at the vanguard of SOC design and are dissatisfied with the status quo," said Dr. Yunsup Lee, Co-Founder and CTO of SiFive. "These two new products cover new performance points and a wide range of application areas, from efficient vector processors that easily displace yesterday's SIMD architectures, to the bleeding edge that the P550 represents. SiFive is proud to set the standard for RISC-V processing and is ready to deliver these products to customers today."