The Hot Take: Hopefully better implemented to prevent all the exploits of the past.
Hyper-Threading is what Intel calls its implementation of what is more academically known as "Simultaneous Multi-Threading" (SMT). This describes a method where a single processor core can interleave processing of two or more separate program threads, usually delivering an overall performance uplift on multi-threaded tasks. Intel killed off
The Hot Take: Mobile market consolidation it seems.
Last week, OnePlus announced what was rumored for months: its exit from the North American and European markets. Now a new report claims Nothing will follow suit, exiting 12 "or more" global markets.
This includes the Middle East, Japan, and "parts of Europe". Unfortunately, the report doesn't go into any more detail about specific countries. Nothing is also said to be reducing its workforce by 40%, while its R&D unit is facing layoffs of around 50% in China and 30-40% in London.
Nothing Phone (4a) Pro
Obviously, Nothing is impacted by the rising memory prices, and seems to want to...
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has acknowledged that the semiconductor giant must catch up to rivals AMD and Arm, and said it now assumes edge AI and robotics will be a business as big as PCs. Tan made those remarks during Intel’s Q2 earnings call, which saw the company report $16.1 billion revenue – a 25 percent year-on-year increase. “Q2 was another quarter of solid execution,” the CEO said. “Revenue, gross margin, and earnings per share were above our guidance. This marks the seventh consecutive quarter of exceeding our financial expectations.” Yet it didn’t deliver a profit as Intel reported a GAAP loss of $11 billion (and a non-GAAP loss of $2.2 billion). Tan remained optimistic about Intel’s prospects, thanks to the AI boom spurring demand for many of its products, and its foundry service. “Our core server CPU franchise is growing faster than ever,” the CEO said, before observing the Xeon 6 range “continues to be one of the fastest-ramping products in Intel's history.” That may be the case, but Intel’s hyperscale customers have designed their own Arm-powered CPUs and are deploying so many that analyst firm IDC recently found non-x86 servers now account for almost half of all sales. Intel’s great rival, AMD, has grown its market share to a third of the x86 server market. During the earnings call, Morgan Stanley analyst Joe Moore asked Tan how he plans to regain market share. Tan pointed to Intel’s forthcoming Clearwater Forest, Diamond Rapids, and Coral Rapids processors as evidence the company is creating products that can compete with anyone. “Some areas we are still behind,” he admitted, “but we are catching up very fast and we try to leapfrog some of the CPU architecture, and we are putting major effort into it. Time will tell.” Tan is also pondering time in terms of how component shortages impact the company’s sales and revenue. “The industry is facing one of the most severe supply constraints in its history, across leading-edge logic silicon wafers, memory, and substrates,” he said. “These shortages will persist for the foreseeable future.” Intel is of course a big player in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tan offered the happy news that wafer output across its major manufacturing nodes exceeded expectations from 90 days ago, and that yields from its leading-edge 18A process “are trending ahead of targets.” The CEO also said, “supply remains very tight and the near-term linearity of our supply growth is more skewed towards the end of Q3 and into Q4, especially for servers.” He had slightly better news about Intel’s foundry business, which is developing an advanced manufacturing process called 14A that could make Chipzilla a more formidable competitor to TSMC. “We remain on track for 14A risk production for our internal products in the second half of 2027, and we made the decision in Q2 to fully commit to high volume ramp in 2028,” Tan said. Intel’s current flagship 18A process is also going well. “In our core PC client segment, Intel 18A is now in volume production across multiple commercial and consumer products,” Tan said. “Our factory output continues to increase sequentially every month. The successful high volume ramp of 18A for our internal products provides important validations as Intel Foundry engages with external customers.” The CEO added his view that “We still have work to do to establish a strong footprint in the edge and physical AI ecosystem but see this opportunity as an important future growth driver.” So important that Intel recently renamed its PC business the “Client Computing and Physical AI Group” (CCPG). That change is more than cosmetic, because CFO David Zinsner said Intel believes “the edge and physical AI opportunity is likely to at least match the client TAM [total addressable market] over time.” That would make edge and physical AI an $8 billion business, given that in this quarter Intel said ten percent of CCPG’s $8.9 billion revenue came from edge products. Overall CCPG revenue rose 13 percent year-over-year, growth that Intel found pleasantly surprising. Zinsner said the PC market is “softer” in part due to “the memory dynamics in the marketplace,” and predicted Q3 performance will fall. ®
The Hot Take: USA domestic manufacturing is blowing up and saving Intel.
Intel Foundry might be heading into a big deal with NVIDIA, as the company is expected to offer packaging and wafer support for next-gen Feynman GPUs. NVIDIA Feynman GPUs Could Be Intel Foundry's Biggest Win To Date With Chipzilla Providing Both Packaging & Wafer Supply A deal between Intel and NVIDIA won't be a major surprise for those following our previous reports, but it is definitely a big win for Intel's Foundry business. Earlier this year, we reported that NVIDIA might be looking into Intel's upcoming process & advanced packaging technologies for its next-generation GPUs, codenamed Feynman. Well, according to […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-foundry-nvidia-feynman-gpu-wafer-packaging-deal/
The Hot Take: M$ is the only one to give us Ads on Windows 11....
LG is removing a McAfee pop-up ad from its LG Monitor App Installer after criticism that some LG monitors were silently installing the app through Windows Update and showing ads on every boot. Microsoft says LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up, but the broader issue remains: Windows allows certain peripheral companion apps to install automatically without notifying users. Ars Technica reports: Following Gamers Nexus' video, a Microsoft representative stated that the LG Monitor App Installer will no longer show pop-up ads for McAfee. In response to a social media post about the app, Pavan Davuluri, EVP of Windows and devices at Microsoft, said this week: "We've connected with the team at LG and as an immediate next step, they have agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up from their app. We appreciate LG working with us toward a shared goal of a better experience for our mutual customers. We will keep improving here with our ecosystem partners."
As mentioned, some LG monitors appear to have been installing LG Monitor App Installer onto Windows computers for months. Publication Windows Latest noted that the app recently got an update, "and its changelog mentions McAfee as an additional app," which could be what prompted more people to see the ads... and then complain about them. However, the removal of McAfee doesn't address the problem of a peripheral installing ad-pushing software onto people's computers.
Users have been finding LG Monitor App Installer and its ads on their systems without LG ever showing a prompt or asking for permission. LG has some of the most expensive computer monitors available. Paying, in some cases, over $1,000 for a monitor that ends up forcing ads onto Windows is disruptive and a privacy concern. Once the app is installed, "LG technically possesses permission to use 'all system resources,'" as well as to "collect geolocation, device data, online activity, contacts, user credentials, transactions, and more," [editor-in-chief of Gamers Nexus, Steve Burke] said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Intel and AMD are signing long term agreements with Chinese data center firms to provide them with CPUs for AI computing, says a report from Reuters. CPUs in AI computing rose to prominence earlier this year after agentic AI demand reshaped the market. Agentic computing places a greater emphasis on CPUs, and according to the sources, the deals are motivated by the rapid price rise due to high demand. AMD & Intel Set To Cover A Year's Worth Of CPU Supplies To Chinese AI Data Centers, Says Report The surge in AI demand for CPUs has also led to Intel […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-and-amd-lock-in-year-long-cpu-deals-with-chinese-ai-firms-as-prices-surge-40/
The Hot Take: Will have to take this with a bit rock of salt until we see the benches and real world performance. Just a price grab or actual performance?
AMD is apparently no longer satisfied with being perceived as a perennial underdog, and is reportedly choosing to make a bold statement by pricing its Helios rackscale solution at a hefty premium to NVIDIA's Rubin. What's more, AMD has reportedly managed to rope in Microsoft as the product's first confirmed client, demonstrating the utility that Helios offers even at its supposedly elevated price point. Futurum believes AMD will price Helios at $5 million to $5.5 million per rack, versus an expected retail price of $3.5 million to $4 million for the second-gen NVIDIA Rubin rack As we explained in a […]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-is-reportedly-pricing-its-helios-rack-40-above-nvidias-second-gen-rubin-confident-that-customers-will-pay-the-premium/
The Hot Take: The more the merrier and helps Intel get back to track making and developing x86 CPUs. Hopefully GPUs too.
Fortinet on Tuesday revealed it will use Intel Foundry to fab its sixth-gen Security Processor (SP6), a nice win for Chipzilla's sputtering chipmaking biz. The chips feature dedicated accelerators designed specifically for the security and cryptographic operations required by modern hardware firewalls. The custom chips are one of Fortinet's defining features. Many cybersecurity hardware players build appliances around commodity hardware like x86 and Arm CPUs, but Fortinet prefers custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The two companies haven't said when the chips will enter production, much less what the SP6's speeds and feeds will entail, though we imagine it'll have a bit more pep than Fortinet's SP5 chips. The SP5 launched in 2023 and boasted support for layer 7 firewalling and IPsec VPN connectivity at speeds exceeding 30 Gbps. Throughput fell when advanced threat protection or SSL inspection was enabled, but Fortinet still claimed a speedy 4.3 Gbps and 3.3 Gbps, respectively. As you might have already figured out, Fortinet's SP line is designed primarily for smaller appliances like SD-WAN gateways, rather than larger datacenter-centric appliances built around its beefier NP and CP-series parts. While Intel couldn't offer much detail on the chip itself, we're told it will use the older Intel 4 process node rather than the leading-edge 18A process tech. Chipzilla also suggested Fortinet will draw on its experience in disaggregated semiconductor design and advanced packaging, which could mean a chiplet architecture with greater scalability. With so little detail, we can only speculate. Intel declined to say which technologies beyond Intel 4 the chip will use. The x86 giant also declined to comment on the availability of the product, noting only that "details regarding the Fortinet Security Processor 6 availability will be announced at a later date." While SP6 won't use the latest chipmaking tech, it will be built in an American fab by an American company, offering a level of supply chain security that remains difficult to find. If you want even remotely leading-edge silicon, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are your only options. US-based production can still mean settling for a less advanced process, although TSMC's first Arizona fab has already begun churning out 4 nm silicon and Samsung aims to bring its new Texas plant online this year. Fortinet would not be the first to enlist Intel's manufacturing might for sensitive workloads. Under DARPA's HIVE program, the chipmaker built an eight-core, 528-thread processor with 1 TB/s silicon-photonics interconnects specifically to accelerate graph analytics workloads. But it doesn't stop at the DoD. Supply chain security is something Intel has leaned into as it has sought to reinvent itself from an integrated device manufacturer serving mainly itself, and occasionally the US government, into a full-fledged foundry ready to compete with Samsung and, ultimately, TSMC. In mid-2024, Uncle Sam awarded Intel $3 billion to establish a secure enclave for manufacturing chips for government agencies. Since then, the US government has taken a 9.9 percent stake in the American chip biz. ®
The Hot Take: Hope it makes it past the finish line before the can all the devs.
As is tradition, Ubisoft is playing catch-up with leaks concerning its games. The company has told fans to expect new announcements about the Ghost Recon franchise next month on the series' 25th anniversary. This comes the same day that leaks reportedly revealed some of what Ubisoft will share.