At an Intel Labs virtual event today, Intel unveiled Horse Ridge II, its second-generation cryogenic control chip, marking another milestone in the company's progress toward overcoming scalability, one of quantum computing's biggest hurdles. Building on innovations in the first-generation Horse Ridge controller introduced in 2019, Horse Ridge II supports enhanced capabilities and higher levels of integration for elegant control of the quantum system. New features include the ability to manipulate and read qubit states and control the potential of several gates required to entangle multiple qubits.

"With Horse Ridge II, Intel continues to lead innovation in the field of quantum cryogenic controls, drawing from our deep interdisciplinary expertise bench across the Integrated Circuit design, Labs and Technology Development teams. We believe that increasing the number of qubits without addressing the resulting wiring complexities is akin to owning a sports car, but constantly being stuck in traffic. Horse Ridge II further streamlines quantum circuit controls, and we expect this progress to deliver increased fidelity and decreased power output, bringing us one step closer toward the development of a 'traffic-free' integrated quantum circuit."-Jim Clarke, Intel director of Quantum Hardware, Components Research Group, Intel.

Today, at Intel Labs Day, Intel highlighted industry-leading technological advances toward the realization of the company's long-standing vision of integrating photonics with low-cost, high-volume silicon. The advancements represent critical progress in the field of optical interconnects, which address growing challenges around the performance scaling of electrical input/output (I/O) as compute-hungry data workloads increasingly overwhelm network traffic in data centers. Intel demonstrated advances in key technology building blocks, including miniaturization, paving the way for tighter integration of optical and silicon technologies.

"We are approaching an I/O power wall and an I/O bandwidth gap that will dramatically hinder performance scaling. The rapid progress Intel is making in integrated photonics will enable the industry to fully re-imagine data center networks and architectures that are connected by light. We have now demonstrated all of the critical optical technology building blocks on one silicon platform, tightly integrated with CMOS silicon. Our research on tightly integrating photonics with CMOS silicon can systematically eliminate barriers across cost, power and size constraints to bring the transformative power of optical interconnects to server packages." -James Jaussi, senior principal engineer and director of PHY Lab, Intel Labs.

An alleged Ashes of the Singularity (AotS) benchmark results page for the top 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" processor leaked to the web courtesy TUM_APISAK. It's official now that Intel will keep its lengthy processor model number schemes, with the top part being the Core i9-11900K, a successor to the i9-10900K. It also confirms that the "Rocket Lake" silicon caps out at 8-core/16-thread, with performance on virtue of the IPC gains from the new "Cypress Cove" CPU cores."Cypress Cove" is believed to be a back-port of "Willow Cove" to the 14 nm silicon fabrication process that "Rocket Lake-S" is built on.

The screenshot also confirms the nominal clocks (base frequency) of the i9-11900K to be 3.50 GHz, as Intel tends to put base frequency in the name-string of its processors. Paired with a GeForce RTX 3080 and 32 GB of RAM, the i9-11900K-powered machine yielded 62.7 FPS CPU frame-rate at 1440p resolution, and 64.7 FPS CPU frame-rate at 1080p (a mere 3.18% drop in frame-rates from the increase in resolution). These numbers put the i9-11900K in the same league as the Ryzen 7 5800X in CPU frame-rates tested under similar conditions.

Today at AWS re:Invent 2020, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced EC2 instances that will leverage up to eight Habana Gaudi accelerators and deliver up to 40% better price performance than current graphics processing unit-based EC2 instances for machine learning workloads. Gaudi accelerators are specifically designed for training deep learning models for workloads that include natural language processing, object detection and machine learning training, classification, recommendation and personalization.

"We are proud that AWS has chosen Habana Gaudi processors for its forthcoming EC2 training instances. The Habana team looks forward to our continued collaboration with AWS to deliver on a roadmap that will provide customers with continuity and advances over time." -David Dahan, chief executive officer at Habana Labs, an Intel Company.

When AMD introduced its Smart Access Memory technology, everyone was wondering will other GPU and CPU providers, namely Intel and NVIDIA, develop a similar solution to complement their offerings. The SAM technology is just AMD's way of naming PCIe resizable Base Address Register (BAR) technology, which has been present in PCI specifications for years as an optional feature. Why it's emerging now you might wonder. Well, the currently used PCIe revision has reached enough bandwidth on the bus to complement the complex data movement that GPU requires and now supports the use of the wider VRAM frame buffer.

It appears that not only AMD has this technology in its portfolio. ASUS has updated its BIOS firmware for its ROG Maximus XII Apex motherboard based on the Intel Z490 chipset, with some pretty interesting features. According to Tom's Hardware, we have information that the next release of BIOS firmware update 1003 for the ROG Maximus XII Apex motherboard will bring support for resizable BAR, making it a first on an Intel platform. For now, the beta 1002 BIOS supports it, however, a stable version will roll out in BIOS 1003. With the motherboard using PCIe 3.0 standard, a lower-bandwidth revision compared to AMD's platform, it will be interesting to see how resizable BAR is performing once the first tests come.

Update 09:45 am UTC: Chris Wefers, ASUS PR Germany, has announced that resizable BAR will be coming to all ASUS motherboards with Intel Z490/H470/B460 chipset, with alleged 13.37% performance increase in Forza Horizon 4, per ASUSes testing. You can see the test configuration in the image below.

As a world leader in computer memory, TEAMGROUP understands the importance of getting ahead in the next generation of DDR technology, hence it will be releasing ELITE series DDR5 memory in 2021. With over 20 years of experience developing DDR3 and DDR4 products, the company has dazzled the world with its advanced R&D capabilities and excellent product quality. After the JEDEC announced the DDR5 memory standard, TEAMGROUP has been actively designing and working together with our IC manufacturing partners to pioneer and prepare for this new generation.

TEAMGROUP is leading the way with its first DDR5 memory under its global top-selling ELITE memory product line. It plans to release a 16 GB 4800 MHz module operating at 1.1 V, down from the 1.2 V of the previous generation. The data transfer rate is increased to 4,800-5,200 Mbps, an increase of up to 1.6 times while reducing power consumption by 10%. Today's DDR4 memory with error correction code (ECC) requires an additional chip installed on the PCB, whereas DDR5 supports on-die ECC, a feature that self-corrects single-bit errors, greatly improving system stability. Anticipation is high for the efficiency improvements brought by the new generation, which can be utilized for big data and AI computing and other related applications.

Total NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion in 3Q20, a 0.3% increase QoQ, while total NAND Flash bit shipment rose by 9% QoQ, but the ASP fell by 9% QoQ, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. The market situation in 3Q20 can be attributed to the rising demand from the consumer electronics end as well as the recovering smartphone demand before the year-end peak sales season. Notably, in the PC market, the rise of distance education contributed to the growing number and scale of Chromebook tenders, but the increase in the demand for Chromebook devices has not led to a significant increase in NAND Flash consumption because storage capacity is rather limited for this kind of notebook computer. Moreover, clients in the server and data center segments had aggressively stocked up on components and server barebones during 2Q20 due to worries about the impact of the pandemic on the supply chain. Hence, their inventories reached a fairly high level by 3Q20. Clients are now under pressure to control and reduce their inventories during this second half of the year. With them scaling back procurement, the overall NAND Flash demand has also weakened, leading to a downward turn in the contract prices of most NAND Flash products.

AMD's main competitor to Intel's 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processor in the mobile space, the Ryzen 5800U, will introduce the same kind of generational IPC improvements over the Ryzen 4800U "Renoir" as the Ryzen 5000 desktop processors introduced over their Ryzen 3000 predecessors. Based on the 7 nm "Cezanne" silicon, the new Ryzen 7 5800U processor was put through Geekbench 5.1.1, where it yielded performance numbers of 1491 points single-threaded, and 6450 points multi-threaded. HotHardware comments that these numbers reflect a major IPC increase.

With the Ryzen 5000U series, AMD is taking a very confusing approach to the processor model stack, with half the parts based on the older "Zen 2" microarchitecture and "Lucienne" silicon, and the other half "Zen 3." The model number scheme goes as 5x00U, where if "x" is an odd number, the chip is "Zen 2" based, and if it's an even number, it is "Zen 3" based. For example, the 5800U is based on "Zen 3," whereas the 5700U is based on "Zen 2." Find the 5800U Geekbench 5 validation here. The Geekbench database listing also confirms that much like with the 8-core "Zen 3" chiplets on the Ryzen 5000 "Vermeer" desktop processors, "Cezanne" features an 8-core "Zen 3" CPU that does away with the 4-core CCX arrangement, and features a single 8-core CCX with a monolithic 16 MB L3 cache—a doubling in overall L3 cache amount compared to "Renoir," and a quadrupling in addressable L3 cache by each core.

ASRock Rack, a branch of ASRock focused on making server products, has today launched a new motherboard that can accommodate up to 64 core AMD EPYC CPU. Built on the new, proprietary form factor called "Deep Mini-ITX", the ROMED4ID-2T motherboard is just a bit bigger than the standard ITX board. The standard ITX boards are 170 x 170 mm, while this Deep Mini-ITX form extends the board by a bit. It measures 170 x 208.28 mm, or 6.7" x 8.2" for all of the American readers. ASRock specifies that the board supports AMD's second-generation EPYC "Rome" 7002 series processors. Of course, the socket for these CPUs is socket SP3 (LGA4094) with 4094 pins.

The motherboard comes with 4 DDR4 DIMM slots, of any type. Supported DIMM types are R-DIMM, LR-DIMM, and NV-DIMM. If you want the best capacity, LR-DIMM use enables you to use up to 256 GB of memory. When it comes to expansion, you can hook-up any PCIe 4.0 device to the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. There is also an M.2 2280 key present, so you can fit in one of those high-speed PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSDs. For connection to the outside world, the board uses an Intel X550-AT2 controller that controls two RJ45 10 GbE connectors. There are also two Slimline (PCIe 4.0 x8 or 8 SATA 6 Gb/s), and four Slimline (PCIe 4.0 x8) storage U.2 ports.

IC Insights' November Update to the 2020 McClean Report, released later this month, includes a discussion of the forecasted top-25 semiconductor suppliers in 2020. This research bulletin covers the expected top-15 2020 semiconductor suppliers (Figure 1).

The November Update also includes a detailed five-year forecast through 2024 of the IC market by product type (including dollar volume, unit shipments, and average selling price) and a forecast of the major semiconductor industry capital spenders for 2020. A five-year outlook for total semiconductor industry capital spending is also provided.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the global leading motherboard, Mini-PC, Notebooks, mobile device and smart city solutions provider, is pleased to announce the elegant yet powerful All-in-One PC—E22-MH410/E24-MH410. It features up to Intel 10th Generation Core i processor and DDR4-2666 MHz memory for uncompromising performance. The space-saving and streamlined design fits perfectly for any business application such as government and public institutions, healthcare, bank and hotel counter that require computers remain in the office all the times and also ideal for home entertainment.

E22-MH410/E24-MH410 AiO PC showcases the remarkable Nano-edge screen by 21.5-inch and 23.8-inch accordingly. The 21.5-inch screen is suitable for limited area such as hotel or bank counter and office and 23.8-inch screen is ideal for home entertainment. Both of them support Full HD resolution that delivers stunning visuals with outstanding color. With 178˚ wide-viewing technology, you can enjoy lifelike visuals from almost every direction. And the great ergonomic stand offers tilt adjustment for users to relax and stretch body but not missing any important information while working.

Eluktronics today announced the first world laptops equipped with high quality IPS, 1440p, high refresh rate laptops. The new laptops feature displays built by BOE, and current estimates place panel costs for these 1440p panels at just $50 higher than comparable 1080p panels. The panels offer a maximum brightness of 318 nits (so no HDR capability at least for now), but also offer 100% sRGB coverage and 87% Adobe RGB coverage.

Eluktronics is offering three distinct laptops with the new panels: the Mech-15 G3 QHD, Max-15 HQD, and Max7-17 QHD. All of these are based on Intel platforms powered by a Core i7-10870H processor. Currently, the only graphics card option is the NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER (there is no RTX 2080 SUPER option). Prices range from $2,199 to $2,299, and Eluktronics is currently running a promo which shaves $300 off the price with code BFQHD. Eluktronics says these will ship before Christmas. It remains to be seen whether AMD-based options will be introduced as well as when will the graphics card options be updated.

We're happy and excited to announce that we are partnering with Intel to provide the best possible performance and optimization for our PC players in HITMAN 3. Together with Intel, we are working to optimize the game for launch and beyond, with updates, tweaks and improvements coming throughout 2021 that will improve the experience of playing on a high-end PC and multi-core CPUs.

These optimizations include enhancing HITMAN 3 for PC players with 8+ core CPUs, for example you'll be able to spot more crowds in Dubai or experience more complex destructibility in Dartmoor. We're also introducing Variable Rate Shading (VRS), a technique that allows us to prioritize GPU resources where they have the biggest impact. On top of that, we will also implement raytracing after the launch of the game, later in 2021.

OWC, the premier zero-emissions Mac and PC technology company, and a respected provider of Memory, External Drives, SSDs, Mac & PC docking solutions, and performance upgrade kits, announced Mac compatibility and certification of its new OWC Thunderbolt Hub. Previously certified for Thunderbolt 4 PCs, the OWC Thunderbolt Hub is now available for new M1 Macs and all Thunderbolt 3 equipped Macs once upgraded to the new Apple MacOS 11 "Big Sur". The OWC Thunderbolt Hub will give both Mac and PC users the additional Thunderbolt ports they've always wanted.

The OWC Thunderbolt Hub offers the new Thunderbolt hubbing technology. You can now have four Thunderbolt ports, plus one USB port on your new Apple M1 Mac, Apple "Intel" Mac with Thunderbolt 3, or any Thunderbolt 4 PC with this compact hub. You can connect and charge any device with a USB-C or USB-A connector. Support up to two 4K displays or a single 5K/6K/8K display. Add high-performance storage, including NVMe solutions, and generally make your workflow work for you by adding A/V mixers, phone or tablet, even desktop accessories like a keyboard or mouse—all through a single Thunderbolt port. Accessories with past, present, or future USB or Thunderbolt interfaces connect to the OWC Thunderbolt Hub.

The Intel NUC M15 Laptop Kit (formerly code-named "Bishop County") brings Intel's technical expertise to the whitebook market, with the goal of providing Intel's channel customers with a premium, precision engineered laptop kit. Intel provides its broad channel members the best building blocks to create innovative laptops for their customers.

The M15 Laptop Kit includes an 11th Gen Intel Core mobile processor and Intel Iris Xe graphics and is designed to exceed the stringent requirements of the new Intel Evo platform brand. Ultimately, the Intel Evo platform brand is earned by each channel partner, but the M15 Laptop Kit offers the right foundation to build an Intel EVO-qualified laptop.

BittWare, a Molex company, today unveiled the IA-840F, the company's first Intel Agilex -based FPGA card designed to deliver significant performance-per-watt improvements for next-generation data center, networking and edge compute workloads. Agilex FPGAs deliver up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower power, depending on application requirements. BittWare maximized I/O features using the Agilex chip's unique tiling architecture with dual QSFP-DDs (4× 100G), PCIe Gen4 x16, and three MCIO expansion ports for diverse applications. BittWare also announced support for Intel oneAPI, which enables an abstracted development flow for dramatically simplified code re-use across multiple architectures.

"Modern data center workloads are incredibly diverse, requiring customers to implement a mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures," said Craig Petrie, vice president of marketing for BittWare. "The IA-840F ensures that customers can quickly and easily exploit the advanced features of the Intel Agilex FPGA. For those customers who prefer to develop FPGA applications at an abstracted level, we are including support for oneAPI. This new unified software programming environment allows customers to program the Agilex FPGA from a single code base with native high-level language performance across architectures."

Intel continues to "shed fat" on its business portfolio. After last year's sale of its smartphone modem chip business to Apple, the company is now parting ways with its power management circuitry division - Enpirion - and offloading it to Richtek, a division of Taiwanese MediaTek. The sale price of $85 million is a drop in the bucket for Intel's overall bottom line, so it's not a way for the company to cash in some desperately needed money - all accounts of Intel's troubles in the wake of its semiconductor manufacturing issues and AMD's market resurgence pale in comparison to Intel's revenues.

This actually looks like a company that's actually streamlining its R&D expenditures and focusing on execution for the markets Intel sees as most important for today and for tomorrow. Intel's Enpirion focuses on building power management chips for FPGA circuits, SoCs, CPUs, and ASICs, and will now serve to bolster MediaTek's SoC business while allowing the Taiwanese company to expand and diversify its business portfolio, even as Intel focuses on their core competencies.

Intel and Argonne National Laboratory are collaborating on the co-design and validation of exascale-class applications using graphics processing units (GPUs) based on Intel Xe-HP microarchitecture and Intel oneAPI toolkits. Developers at Argonne are tapping into Intel's latest programming environments for heterogeneous computing to ensure scientific applications are ready for the scale and architecture of the Aurora supercomputer at deployment.

"Our close collaboration with Argonne is enabling us to make tremendous progress on Aurora, as we seek to bring exascale leadership to the United States. Providing developers early access to hardware and software environments will help us jumpstart the path toward exascale so that researchers can quickly start taking advantage of the system's massive computational resources." -Trish Damkroger, Intel vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing.

The security of PCs has been an issue in the past few years as cyber-attack methods have been undergoing a transformation to hardware-specific malware that exploits different vulnerabilities of CPUs. That is why Microsoft, the developer of the most popular operating system, Windows 10, decided to engineer a hardware processor that will protect the OS and its user by having a specific job of maintaining the platform security. In collaboration with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, Microsoft is today introducing the Pluton security processor. The collaborator companies are going to integrate the new Pluton processor inside their CPUs and thus embed a new level of security in their PCs.

MicrosoftOur vision for the future of Windows PCs is security at the very core, built into the CPU, where hardware and software are tightly integrated in a unified approach designed to eliminate entire vectors of attack. This revolutionary security processor design will make it significantly more difficult for attackers to hide beneath the operating system, and improve our ability to guard against physical attacks, prevent the theft of credential and encryption keys, and provide the ability to recover from software bugs.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today launched three high-capacity rackmount QuTS hero NAS: the 18-bay TS-h1886XU-RP with a quad-core Intel Xeon D-1622 processor, and the 16-bay TS-h1683XU-RP and 24-bay TS-h2483XU-RP with six-core Intel Xeon E-2236 processors. Featuring server-grade DDR4 ECC memory, multiple 10GbE ports, and abundant PCIe slots for greater I/O potential and performance, these ZFS-based NAS support inline data deduplication and compression, near-limitless snapshots, and real-time SnapSync - delivering the performance and features to excel in the Big Data era.

QuTS hero focuses on data integrity and features self-healing capabilities. It supports read/write cache technology to boost performance and provides multiple RAID configurations with RAID Triple Parity and Triple Mirror to enhance data protection. Individual shared folders allow for up to 1 PB capacity, enabling enterprises to tackle storage-demanding applications including Big Data analysis, edge computing, and AI.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

Der8auer has picked up Intel's latest TEC cooler, built in conjunction with EKWB, and unceremoniously plopped it right into an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. Well, not completely unceremoniously - there were many accommodations that had to be made in order to achieve this. For one, as this is a solution designed specifically for Intel CPUs and sockets, Der8auer had to Frankenstein his way through a number of cooling parts to be able to adapt the TEC solution to the AM4 socket. Not only that, but Intel's TEC requires deep software control for it to work properly - software control which only works with Intel silicon, of course. Der8auer thus had to have a second machine running an Intel 10900K CPU to control the software on the Intel cryo cooler.

All in all, the results were interesting, to say the least. The 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X saw single-core-load CCD temperatures in the 90 °C department with the TEC solution disabled - which promptly dropped down to only 50 °C with the cryo cooler actually operating. With a game load, the 5959X achieved up to 5.050 GHz in single-cores on its automatic boost profile. The entire chip often boosted to 4.8 - 4.9 GHz on all cores at once (with variances between the CCDs) whilst under this cooling solution and workload. With the TEC operating in its unregulated mode - which means, with no considerations for CPU operating temperature and power usage for the cooling process - saw the Ryzen 9 5950X achieving 2 °C core temperature results, and boosted frequencies up to a staggering 5323 MHz on all cores - before crashing. An interesting piece of work which you catch on video after the break; one can rest assured that most PC cooling specialists are already working on their own TEC-based cooling solutions following Intel's achievement in this field.

Intel today announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will leverage Intel Xeon Scalable processors in "Ruby," its latest high performance computing cluster. The Ruby system will be used for unclassified programmatic work in support of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) stockpile stewardship mission, for researching therapeutic drugs and designer antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and for other open science work at LLNL.

Ruby was built in collaboration with Intel, LLNL, Supermicro and Cornelis Networks. The system consists of more than 1,500 nodes, each outfitted with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and features 192 gigabytes of memory. Ruby will deliver 6 petaflops of peak performance and is expected to rank among the world's top 100 most powerful supercomputers.

Intel has launched its Tiger Lake-U lineup of products back in September, with the availability of the first products in October. The launched lineup was part of the "U" variant of ultra-portable devices that stretched only to four core, eight threaded configurations. However, given that the new competitor in mobile space, AMD, has a wide portfolio of offerings that are coming with up to 8C/16T variants, Intel needs a proper response to that. Despite having a better single-threaded performance, the multi-threaded capability of the Ryzen 4000 series is delivering better performance. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker, TUM APISAK, we have the first appearance of Intel's 11th generation Tiger Lake-H processor.

Appearing in Userbenchmark, the processor was tested on a platform codenamed "Insyde TigerLake". The processor was spotted running 8 cores and 16 threads, at the average frequency of 2.75 GHz. This is only an engineering sample, meaning that these clocks do not represent the final frequencies of the processor. As a reminder, Intel's Tiger Lake CPU is a Willow Cove based design manufactured on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin silicon node. We are yet to see the capabilities of the new node and how the chip performs once the reviews arrive.

Intel today announced key milestones in its multiyear journey to deliver a mix of architectures with a unified software experience. The company announced the gold release of Intel oneAPI toolkits coming in December, and new capabilities in its software stack as part of the Intel's combined hardware and software design approach. Intel also debuted its first discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) for the data center, Intel Server GPU, based on the Xe-LP microarchitecture and designed specifically for high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming.

"Today is a key moment in our ambitious oneAPI and XPU journey. With the gold release of our oneAPI toolkits, we have extended the developer experience from familiar CPU programming libraries and tools to include our vector-matrix-spatial architectures. We are also launching our first data center GPU based on Xe-LP microarchitecture focused on the fast-growing cloud gaming and media streaming segments," said Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president, chief architect and general manager of Architecture, Graphics and Software.