Dynabook today announced two new laptops weighing less than one kilogram - the Portégé X30W-J and Portégé X30L-J. Both laptops will feature the 11th Gen Intel Core processor and Intel Iris Xe graphics engine to deliver speed, efficiency and discrete-level graphics. The Portégé X30W-J is part of Intel's Project Athena innovation program and targeted for design verification to utilize the Intel Evo platform badge.

"The launch of the Intel Evo platform is a significant milestone for the industry and embodies our own commitment to the evolution of device innovation to meet the requirements of the modern mobile professional," said Philip Osako, vice president, marketing and engineering, Dynabook Americas, Inc. "The Portégé X30W-J and Portégé X30L-J are great examples of our shared philosophies to provide users with everything professionals need for uninterrupted productivity, creativity and collaboration."

Acer today announced the availability of the new Swift 5 and Swift 3 notebook models featuring new 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Iris Xe graphics. The new Acer Swift 5 notebook is one of the industry's first to be verified through Intel's Project Athena innovation program, as Intel Evo platform laptop design, and designed to deliver incredibly responsive mobile performance and immersive features that improve the overall experience, including instant wake, Intel Iris Xe graphics, vibrant displays and the latest in connectivity. In addition, it features an all-day battery that can be fast-charged, yielding four hours of use from only a 30-minute charge.

The Acer Swift 3 notebook designs are a part of Intel's Project Athena innovation program and targeting verification, pending further tuning, to utilize the Intel Evo platform badge. "The new Acer Swift notebook lines represent a substantial leap forward in performance, responsiveness and usability for our customers who are cultivating a unique blend of work, life and passion-projects on-the-go," said James Lin, General Manager, Notebooks, IT Products Business, Acer Inc. "Acer took meticulous care to ensure that all aspects of the design were elevated to match the best-in-class experience the Intel Evo platform provides to help our customers achieve more."

ASUS today announced a full lineup of new and upgraded PCs at the Built for Brilliance virtual launch event, including laptops featuring the power of 11th Generation Intel Core processors and the debut laptop verified as an Intel Evo platform laptop design. Groundbreaking laptops in the lineup include ZenBook Flip S (UX371), the world's thinnest OLED convertible laptop and the first ASUS laptop to be verified on the Intel Evo platform; ZenBook S (UX393), world's thinnest and lightest 3:2 3.3K laptop; ZenBook 14 (UX435EA/EG), the world's smallest 14-inch laptop with ScreenPad; ZenBook 14 Ultralight (UX435EAL/EGL), the lightest 14-inch ZenBook, weighing as light as 980 g; ZenBook Pro 15 (UX535), the world's smallest 15-inch 4K OLED laptop; and ExpertBook B9 (B9400), the world's lightest 14-inch business laptop. The 2020 PC lineup incorporates ASUS and industry leading-edge solutions to provide ultimate productivity and user experiences.

"ASUS is known for leading PC design and innovation. Year after year, ASUS is the first to provide new PCs with each new Intel generation," said ASUS co-CEO Samson Hu in his opening remarks at the event. "This year's lineup of laptops creates new experiences for users by placing cutting-edge technology at their fingertips. By empowering users with the latest display, audio, software and network connection technology, ASUS delivers incredible innovations and changes the way users relate to their devices."

Intel today launches its 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" mobile processors that introduce several new technologies on the backs of new IP. As described in the Architecture Day, "Tiger Lake" is built on the 10 nm SuperFin process, and combines new "Willow Cove" CPU cores with the first commercial debut of the Xe Gen12 graphics architecture that Intel is betting big on, to make a stab at the consumer graphics and scalar compute markets. Join us in this live-blog.Update 16:00 UTC: GB (Gregory Bryant, EVP Client), leads the event from the comfort of his home.Update 16:04 UTC: Here it is, the "world's best processor for thin and light laptops. You'll notice that like most Intel U-segment chips, this is an MCM of the processor and PCH die. Intel bases its "world's best" claims on a per-segment basis.

Intel today unleashed a new era of laptop performance with the launch of its next-generation mobile PC processors and the evolution of its broad ecosystem partnerships that are propelling the mobile PC industry forward. New 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics (code-named "Tiger Lake") are the world's best processors for thin-and-light laptops with unmatched capabilities for real-world productivity, collaboration, creation, gaming and entertainment across Windows and ChromeOS-based laptops.

Leveraging Intel's new SuperFin process technology, 11th Gen Intel Core processors optimize power efficiency with leading performance and responsiveness while running at significantly higher frequencies versus prior generations. More than 150 designs based on 11th Gen Intel Core processors are expected from partners including Acer, ASUS, Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI, Razer, Samsung and others.

When Apple announced their transition form Intel processors to Apple Silicon, we were left wondering how the silicon will perform and what characteristics will it bring with it. According to the latest report from The China Times, the Apple custom GPU found inside the new Apple Silicon will bring better performance and energy efficiency compared to Intel iGPU it replaces. The 5 nm GPU manufactured on TSMC's N5 semiconductor manufacturing node is supposedly codenamed "Lifuka" and it brings Apple's best to the table. Planned to power a 12-inch MacBook, the GPU will be paired with a custom CPU based on Arm ISA as well. The same chips powering iPhone and iPad devices will go into MacBook devices, with the TDP increased as MacBook will probably have much higher cooling capacity. The first Apple Silicon MacBook will come in H2 of 2021.Here is the copy of a full report from The China Times below:

Promotional videos of Intel 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processors leaked to the web courtesy h0x0d on Twitter. It confirms the new corporate identity of Intel, along with its new logo artistic language. It also confirms the new EVO Powered by Core brand extension, along with a separate case badge for notebooks that use Iris Xe discrete graphics (DG1) in addition to the Xe Gen12 iGPU of "Tiger Lake." Intel has a technology that can get the Xe LP iGPU and dGPU to work in tandem. VideoCardz compiled some interesting frames from the promotional videos, revealing bits such as clock speeds of up to 4.80 GHz (boost), 3.11 GHz (base), the first "Tiger Lake" parts being 4-core/8-thread, the new 10 nm SuperFin transistor, wafer- and die shots of "Tiger Lake" 4c+96EU die, and unless we're mistaken, pictures of a "Tiger Lake" package that uses a DRAM (HBM?) stack on-package, using EMIB. h0x0d also posted videos of the Lenovo Yoga 9i and HP Spectre notebooks based on "Tiger Lake."

TSMC had been working super hard in the past few years and has been investing in lots of new technologies to drive the innovation forward. At TSMC's Technology Symposium held this week was, the company has presented various things like the update on its 12 nm node, as well as future plans for node development. One of the most interesting announcements made this week was TSMC's state and ownership of Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) machines. ASML, the maker of these EUV machines used to etch the pattern on silicon, has been the supplier of the Taiwanese company. TSMC has announced that they own an amazing 50% of all EUV machine installations.

What is more important is the capacity that the company achieves with it. It is reported that TSMC achieves 60% of all EUV wafer capacity in the world, which is a massive achievement of what TSMC can do with the equipment. The company right now has only two nodes on EUV in high-volume manufacturing, the 7 nm+ node and 5 nm node (which is going HVM in Q4), however, that is more than any of its competitors. All of the future nodes are to be manufactured using the EUV machines and the smaller nodes require it. As far as the competitors go, only Samsung is currently making EUV silicon on the 7 nm LPP node. Intel is yet to release some products on a 7 nm node of its own, which is the first EUV node from the company.

The NAND Flash industry benefitted from strong demand for PCs and servers in 2Q20 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused a demand surge for cloud services and technologies that are related to working from home, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. This, in turn, kept demand high for SSDs. However, the smartphone and consumer electronics markets had not recovered from the impact of the pandemic. The demand for these products therefore declined compared to the previous quarter. In 2Q20, total NAND Flash bit shipment and ASP both experienced a minor increase of about 3% QoQ, while NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion, a 6.5% increase QoQ.

The Eisbaer LT 92 is the little sister of the classic Eisbaer LT. It is without quick release fasteners and is delivered with only 25 cm long hoses. This ensures it fits perfectly into SFF cases. SFF stands for "Small Form Factor" and describes extremely compact housings. Despite its small dimensions, the 92 mm copper radiator offers enough cooling power for powerful processors. Alphacool uses hoses and fittings from the Enterprise Solution series for the Eisbaer LT 92. The TPV hoses are particularly robust and do not kink as easily as the usual PVC hoses. Bend protection is therefore not necessary. The Eisbaer LT 92 is compatible to all mainstream sockets, the appropriate mounting material for various Intel and AMD sockets is included, also a set of fan screws for 25 mm fans. Fans are not included with this unit and must be purchased separately. The Eisbaer LT 92 costs €73.09 (inc. VAT) from the Alphacool web shop.

As part of its ongoing research on the PC graphics market, Jon Peddie Research (JPR) has released its Market Watch report for the second quarter of 2020. Before 2020, the PC market was showing signs of improvement and settling into a new normal. JPR's Market Watch report confirms that trend for the second quarter of 2020, but with some surprises results for this very unusual year. Overall GPU shipments increased 2.5% from last quarter, AMD shipments increased by 8.4%, Intel's shipments, decreased by -2.7%, and NVIDIA's shipments increased by 17.8%.

Intel today announced that it is among the leading U.S. quantum technology companies included in Q-NEXT, one of five new national quantum research centers established by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Q-NEXT, National Quantum Information Science Research Center, is led by Argonne National Laboratory and brings together world-class researchers from national laboratories, universities and leading technology companies to ensure U.S. scientific and economic leadership in this advancing field. The collaboration will enable Intel to actively contribute to the industry's efforts on quantum computing.

"Advancing quantum practicality will be a team sport across the ecosystem, and our partnership with Argonne National Laboratory on Q-NEXT will enable us to bring our unique areas of expertise to this cross-industry effort to drive meaningful progress in the field. At Intel, we are taking a broad view of quantum research that spans hardware and software with a singular focus on getting quantum out of labs and into the real world, where it can solve real problems," said James Clarke, director of Quantum Hardware at Intel.

With more people gaming than ever before, Intel is teaming up with leading PC manufacturers and retailers to offer some of the best PC deals of the year. The third-annual Intel Gamer Days kicks off Aug. 28 and continues through Sept. 6. Also, for the first time, Intel is taking Gamer Days international with deals open to gamers in 10 countries. This year, Intel pulled out all the stops in building the Intel Gamer Days showcase PC. The experienced system modding team at PCjunkieMods showed what they could do with this unbelievable gaming and streaming rig. This one-of-a-kind creation contains not one, but two total PCs - one fully devoted to gaming, and another built for streaming.

Inside, you'll find fully custom water cooling and 10th Gen Intel Core i9-10900K and 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10700K processors. Two Intel Optane 660p SSDs keep storage snappy while providing plenty of capacity. A custom paint job and etching ensure that this is a truly unique PC. SteelSeries peripherals complete the bundle.

MSI today rolled out the MAG B460 Torpedo, a Socket LGA1200 motherboard based on the Intel B460 chipset. This marks the debut of the new "Torpedo" brand extension that's part of the MSI Arsenal Gaming (MAG) product family, positioned a notch below the MAG Tomahawk. MSI has been giving the Tomahawk extension value additions over the past few generations, pushing its typical pricing up, along with features such as dual Ethernet, rear I/O shroud, etc. The MAG B460 Torpedo keeps things simple within the ATX form-factor. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors, and uses a 13-phase VRM to power the CPU. The VRM heatsinks appear slightly smaller than the ones on the MAG B460 Tomahawk. The tiny heatsink over the PCH is hard to miss, too.

Expansion slots on the MSI MAG B460 Torpedo include one PCI-Express 3.0 x16 reinforced slot wired to the CPU, a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (electrical x4) slot wired to the B460 PCH, and two other PCIe x1 slots. Storage connectivity includes two M.2 NVMe slots, both PCI-Express 3.0 x4 wiring, one of which includes a heatsink; and six SATA 6 Gbps ports. Networking features one 2.5 GbE interface driven by a Realtek 8125B controller. The onboard audio solution uses a Realtek ALC1200 codec with audio grade capacitors, 8-channel jacks, and headphones amp. As part of the CoreBoost feature set, you get to eke out more performance from your non-K 10th Gen Core processors by relaxing power limits. MSI is pricing the MAG B460 Torpedo at USD $109.99, about $30 cheaper than the Tomahawk.

Intel Corporation today announced it is entering into accelerated share repurchase (ASR) agreements to repurchase an aggregate of $10 billion of Intel's common stock. Following completion of these agreements, Intel will have repurchased a total of approximately $17.6 billion in shares as part of the planned $20 billion share repurchases announced in October 2019.

"We achieved record financial results in the first half of 2020 and raised our full-year outlook as customers rely on Intel technology for delivering critical services and enabling people to work, learn and stay connected. As the ongoing growth of data fuels demand for Intel products to process, move and store, we are confident in our multiyear plan to deliver leadership products," said Intel CEO Bob Swan. "While the macro-economic environment remains uncertain, Intel shares are currently trading well below our intrinsic valuation, and we believe these repurchases are prudent at this time."

Under the terms of the ASR agreements, Intel will receive an initial share delivery of approximately 166 million shares, with the final settlement scheduled to occur by the end of 2020. The final number of shares to be repurchased by Intel will be based on the volume-weighted average stock price of Intel's common stock during the term of the agreements, less a discount and subject to adjustments.

Intel recently announced its 10th Gen Core KA line of Socket LGA1200 desktop processors that are co-branded by Marvel's Avengers, complete with fancy retail channel packaging that's sure to attract collectors from the Marvel fanbase. Turns out, that the box doesn't actually include the game by Square Enix, as discovered by momomo_us. A fine-print on the bottom left corner of the front face of the retail box reads "Game Not Included." All you really do get is a fancy box that's been designed by artist Tristan Eaton. Some retailers may include plushies such as the one pictured below, which obviously cost less than a copy of the game. Marvel's Avengers (the game) releases on September 4, 2020, and is up for pre-order on Steam for $59.99.

Lenovo unveiled five new Yoga consumer laptops combining style, power and portability. Designed to deliver premium experiences and refined craftsmanship through bold innovation, Lenovo Yoga is our top-of-the-line consumer PC sub-brand at the forefront of making smarter technology an everyday reality for the most discerning consumers. So, whether you want to binge videos, enjoy the summer's hottest tunes, or need a fully-equipped multimedia experience as you create content, you can do it all and more with powerful Windows 10 performance and a range of smart features including Alexa, optimized battery life, rapid charging, and super-fast Wi-Fi 6.

Building on successful thin and light laptops to create a better interconnected world takes attention to design details and offering consumers their choice of the latest processors. The ultra-slim Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i5 (13-inch), next-gen Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Pro (14-inch), and new portable 2-in-1 Lenovo Yoga 7i5 laptop available in 14-inch and 15.6-inch, feature the next-gen Intel Core processors (coming soon) and are designed for people who want high performance, immersive visuals, great connectivity, and long-lasting battery life so they don't have to feel anchored to an outlet. The 14-inch sleek Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro is packed with performance too, as is our first-gen Lenovo Yoga 6 (13.3-inch) convertible laptop—both offering AMD Ryzen 4000 Series Mobile Processor options for amazing responsiveness to fuel creative and productivity tasks, even on-the-go.

Raja Koduri, Intel's chief architect and senior vice president of Intel's discrete graphics division, has today held a talk at HotChips 32, the latest online conference of 2020, that shows off the latest architectural advancements in the semiconductor industry. So Intel has prepared two talks, one about Ice Lake-SP server CPUs and one about Intel's efforts in the upcoming graphics card launch. So what has Intel been working on the whole time? Raja Koduri took over the talk and has benchmarked the upcoming GPU and recorded how much raw power the GPUs posses, possibly counting in PetaFLOPs.

When Mr. Koduri got to talk, he pulled the 4-tile Xe HP GPU out of his pocket and showed for the first time how the chip looks. And it is one big chip. Featuring 4 tiles, the GPU represents Intel's fastest and biggest variant of Xe HP GPUs. The benchmark Intel ran was made to show off scaling on the Xe architecture and how the increase in the number of tiles results in a scalable increase in performance. Running on a single tile, the GPU managed to develop the performance of 10588 GFLOPs or around 10.588 TeraFLOPs. When there are two tiles, the performance scales almost perfectly at 21161 GFLOPS (21.161 TeraFLOPs) for 1.999X improvement. At four tiles the GPU achieves 3.993 times scaling and scores 41908 GFLOPs resulting in 41.908 TeraFLOPS, all measured in single-precision FP32.

Intel in the opening presentation of the Hot Chips 32 virtual conference detailed its next-generation Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake-SP" enterprise processor. Built on the company's 10 nm silicon fabrication process, "Ice Lake-SP" sees the first non-client and non-mobile deployment of the company's new "Sunny Cove" CPU core that introduces higher IPC than the "Skylake" core that's been powering Intel microarchitectures since 2015. While the "Sunny Cove" core itself is largely unchanged from its implementation in 10th Gen Core "Ice Lake-U" mobile processors, it conforms to the cache hierarchy and tile silicon topology of Intel's enterprise chips.

The "Ice Lake-SP" die Intel talked about in its Hot Chips 32 presentation had 28 cores. The "Sunny Cove" CPU core is configured with the same 48 KB L1D cache as its client-segment implementation, but a much larger 1280 KB (1.25 MB) dedicated L2 cache. The core also receives a second fused multiply/add (FMA-512) unit, which the client-segment implementation lacks. It also receives a handful new instruction sets exclusive to the enterprise segment, including AVX-512 VPMADD52, Vector-AES, Vector Carry-less Multiply, GFNI, SHA-NI, Vector POPCNT, Bit Shuffle, and Vector BMI. In one of the slides, Intel also detailed the performance uplifts from the new instructions compared to "Cascade Lake-SP".

We previously reported on the leaked listings for the upcoming Intel KA series processors from a Vietnamese retailer. Intel has now officially unveiled the chips and provided some extra details on the collaboration. The Intel KA series of processors are identical to their K series siblings apart from the Marvel Avengers box branding. Intel is reportedly launching five models from their i5, i7, and i9 lineups the Intel Core i5-10600KA, i7-10700KA, i9-10850KA, and i9-10900KA. The box artwork was designed by painter/muralist Tristan Eaton, Intel didn't announce pricing or availability for the lineup.

Intel on Thursday at its 2020 Architecture Day event announced a high performance gaming variant of its Xe graphics architecture, which it calls Xe HPG. The Xe architecture is designed to scale between tiny iGPUs and mobile discrete GPUs as Xe LP, up to scalar compute processors under Xe HP, and beyond to HPCs and supercomputers, under Xe HPC. The combination of the client graphics feature-set of Xe LP, with the scale of Xe HP, results in Xe HPG. Intel is designing Xe HPG for a third-party semiconductor foundry, and hopes to debut it in 2021.

In our older graphics detailing the Xe LP, we tried to explain just how easy it is for Intel scale up the iGPU to a discrete GPU SoC. This is done by simply dialing up the Xe slices, and dropping in dGPU ancillaries such as a PCI-Express host interface and memory controllers for the prevalent client-segment discrete graphics, namely GDDR6. There will be additional components, such as ray-tracing hardware. Intel is gunning for DirectX 12 Ultimate logo compliance, and ray-tracing forms a big part of that.

A lot is riding for Intel on its 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" system-on-chip (SoC), which will launch exclusively on mobile platforms, hoping to dominate the 7 W thru 15 W ultraportable form-factors in 2020, while eventually scaling up to the 25 W thru 45 W H-segment form-factors in 2021, with a variant that is rumored to double core-counts. The chip is built on Intel's new 10 nm SuperFin silicon fabrication node that enables a double digit percentage energy efficiency growth over 10 nm, allowing Intel to significantly dial up clock speeds without impacting the power envelope. The CPU and iGPU make up the two key components of the "Tiger Lake" SoC.

The CPU component on the "Tiger Lake" processors that launch in a few weeks from now features four "Willow Cove" CPU cores. Coupled with HyperThreading, this ends up being a 4-core/8-thread setup, although much of Intel's innovation is in giving these cores significant IPC increases over the "Skylake" core powering "Comet Lake" processors, and compared to the "Sunny Cove" cores powering "Ice Lake" a minor IPC (although major net performance increase from clock speeds). The "Willow Cove" CPU core appears to be a derivative of the "Sunny Cove" core, designed to take advantage of the 10 nm SuperFin node, along with three key innovations.

Intel on Thursday made several technological disclosures about its latest silicon fabrication process, the 10 nm SuperFin. With this, the company is changing the nomenclature of its node refinements, away from the ## nm++ naming scheme (with each "+" denoting a refinement, or internode), to a more descriptive naming scheme. The new 10 nm SuperFin node is the first refinement of the company's 10 nm node that debuted with the company's 10th Gen Core "Ice Lake" processors last year, and promises energy efficiency in the ballpark of 7 nm-class nodes by competitors TSMC and Samsung. While past generations of internodes (refinements) delivered energy efficiency improvements of around 3-5%, 10 nm SuperFin offers the kind of improvements expected from a brand new node, according to Intel.

The 10 nm SuperFin node is composed of two key innovations, the SuperMIM capacitor and a redesigned FinFET transistor. The new SuperMIM (metal insulator metal) capacitor offers a 5x increase in capacitance compared to devices in this class. The redesigned FinFET introduces a new barrier that reduces via resistance by 30%. Combined, the 10 nm SuperFin node affords chips a V/F curve comparable to a die-shrink to a whole new silicon fabrication node, without any change in transistor density. The first product built on 10 nm SuperFin is the upcoming Core "Tiger Lake" processor addressing the client-segment. The company is already working on enhancements of this node relevant for data-center processors.

Lenovo Group (HKSE: 992) PINK SHEETS: LNVGY) today announced Group revenue in the first quarter of US $13.3 billion, up almost 7% year-on-year (up 10% year-on-year excluding currency impact). Pre-tax income grew 38% compared to the same quarter a year earlier, to US $332 million, while net income also increased by 31% year-on-year to US$213 million. Basic earnings per share for the first quarter were 1.80 US cents or 13.95 HK cents.

"Our outstanding performance last quarter proves that Lenovo has quickly regained momentum from the impact of the pandemic and is capturing the new opportunities emerging from remote working, education and accelerated digitalization," said Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Chairman and CEO. "While the world continues to face challenges, Lenovo is focused on delivering sustainable growth through our core businesses as well as the new services and solutions opportunities presented by our service-led intelligent transformation."

Intel has been focusing its resources on data center and high-performance computing lately and the company has made some interesting products. Today, Intel has released its latest creation - mOS operating system. Created as a research project, Intel has made an OS made for some extreme-scale HPC systems, meaning that the OS is created for hyper scalers and ones alike. The goal of mOS is to deliver a high-performance environment for software with low-noise, scalability, and the concept of lightweight kernels (LWK) that manage the system.. Being based on the Linux kernel, the OS is essentially another distribution, however, it has been modified so it fits the HPC ecosystem the best way. The mOS is a product in the pre-alpha phase, however, it can already be used in supercomputers like ASCI Red, IBM Blue Gene, and others. Intel is aiming to develop a stable release by the time the Aurora exascale system is ready so it can deploy mOS there.