Intel

TSMC says it’ll start production of 1.6-nm chips by 2026 in a move that should “greatly improve logic [chip] density and performance,” according to Nikkei. Meanwhile Intel is targeting 2-nm and 1.8-nm technologies by 2025, with Samsung targeting 1.4-nm in 2027.

Intel has been investigating games crashing on its Core i9 13th and 14th Gen processors. Now, Asus has started issuing BIOS updates for its latest Z790 motherboards that include a new “Intel Baseline Profile” option that should improve stability in certain games. We’re still waiting on Intel to comment, but it looks like some motherboards have been pushing Intel’s chips to their limits.

Final shipments to vendors end on June 28th, 2024. I doubt this has anything to do with certain PC games crashing, but my partner did recently exchange his brand new Core i9-13900K because he was having the same issue. The 12th-gen K-series chips seem to be sticking around, too, at least for now. Curious...

Intel first introduced its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator last year, but now the company has revealed more details on performance. When compared to the H100 GPU, Intel says its Gaudi 3 accelerator can deliver “50% faster time-to-train on average across the Llama2 models” with better efficiency.

The company also says the Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator will be a “fraction of the cost” of Nvidia’s pricey H100. It will become available to companies like Dell, HPE, and Lenovo in the second quarter of this year.

Intel has released an updated version of its XeSS upscaling technology that will improve frame rates thanks to a new AI model. Intel has provided benchmarks of XeSS 1.3 running on its latest Core Ultra 7155H chip as well as its Arc A750 GPU, showing modest improvements over the previous version of XeSS. More than 100 games now support XeSS, and it’s up to game developers to now support this improved version.

Intel was awarded a $3.5 billion grant to build chips for the US military as part of a spending bill President Biden signed last weekend, but now the Pentagon no longer wants to foot the bill, according to a report from Bloomberg.

This could reportedly force the Department of Commerce to dip into CHIPS Act funding to pay Intel, which could come with some consequences, Bloomberg reports:

The change could mean a greater share of Intel’s Chips Act funds is devoted to military uses, rather than commercial ones... It’s unclear whether the Secure Enclave funding will be swallowed into Intel’s total awards — meaning the company gets less overall money than expected — or come on top of what Intel was already set to receive, leaving less for everyone else.

Intel launched a special edition of its Core i9-13900K processor last year, and it looks like it’s about to unveil a 14900KS successor soon. Overclocking enthusiasts have already got their hands on the unannounced processor, which looks set to offer 6.2GHz boost clocks. That’s up from the 6GHz boosts found on last year’s 13900KS. Intel hasn’t officially announced the Core i9-14900KS yet, but that’s probably about to change real soon.

I showed you Intel’s new public roadmap last Wednesday — when it confirmed Intel 14A was coming by 2027. But it turns out the company quietly announced Intel 10A as well. It’ll start production in 2027, after 14A begins production in 2026. That’s different than consumer availability, of course.

Intel told Tom’s Hardware that each new node it makes should normally offer a 14 to 15 percent power/performance improvement.

Intel vice president David Feng said during Mobile World Congress that as part of the push to put AI into everything it builds, it will produce 40 million CPUs for AI PCs this year and 60 million in 2025, reports Nikkei Asia.

The “AI PC” concept includes Microsoft’s new CoPilot button plus Intel Core Ultra processors with built-in GPUs and neural processing units for AI models, which are now available as part of its vPro platform for business laptops.

With over 600 statements of interest received, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo acknowledged today that the amount requested is more than twice the $28 billion the government has budgeted to invest.

We have decided to prioritize projects that will be operational by 2030. There are worthy proposals with plans to come online after 2030 that we say no to in order to maximize our impact in this decade...We anticipate that our investments in leading-edge logic chip manufacturing will put us on track to produce roughly 20% of the world’s leading-edge logic chips by 2030, up from the zero percent we produce today.

The CHIPS Act originally had $52 billion in subsidies to boost US semiconductor manufacturing, but it’s not nearly enough to catch up by itself — industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) earmarked $44 billion in 2022 just to expand its existing capacity.

Intel has said 2025 is the year it leads the world in chips again (TSMC begs to differ).

Beyond that lies Intel 14A — the company’s smallest node yet, thanks to High-NA EUV. But Intel is hedging its bets with a tick-tock 18A successor, where the P in “18A-P” stands for performance jump. What does 14A stand for? Intel didn’t say. “We think this is the next leadership technology and we don’t want to give anyone something to shoot at,” Intel VP Craig Orr tells me.

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation added notes to over 2,600 benchmark results (here’s an example) accusing Intel of cheating one of its tests by tuning compilers mostly from Xeon server CPUs to overperform on a pair of specific benchmarks, according to Tom’s Hardware.

As PCWorld noted yesterday, companies’ decisions on spending “millions, sometimes billions of dollars” often hinge on third-party benchmark results like those SPEC supplies.

Billed as the largest silicon manufacturing site in the world, the plant was originally slated to start production in 2025 will now be delayed until late 2026.

Intel planned a groundbreaking at the plant in 2022 but postponed it due to lack of government funding. The Journal quotes an unnamed Intel spokesperson citing “business conditions and market dynamics” for this delay. Intel previously said it depended heavily on the CHIPS Act to finish construction.

Not only did Intel’s consumer chips see 33 percent gains ($8.8B revenue), the CFO said on today’s earning call that “customer inventory levels have normalized” and Intel saw “record performance notebook shipments in the quarter.”

While PCs were down in 2023 overall, they got close to pre-pandemic numbers of 260-270M shipments globally, and Intel’s bullish on AI upgrades.

Intel says it hit its goal of $3B in cost-cutting in 2023, and made $2.66B in profit in Q4 (up from $796M loss this time last year).

AMD held its “advancing AI PCs” CES yesterday, and now Intel is ready to also talk about AI-powered PCs. You can watch the entire keynote over at Intel’s website, where it kicks off at 5PM PT / 8PM ET / 1AM GMT. Stay tuned to The Verge for all the latest news from Intel at CES.

There are still many unknowns about this new handheld Windows gaming PC, but Sean Hollister reports from CES 2024 that MSI’s Claw device feels comfier than competitors like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.

MSI says the Claw will ship this year, priced at $699 to start, or more if you’re willing to pay for an Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU.

Monday was quite the whirlwind! Let’s take a step back and recap all of the fun surprises:

• Apple dropped the launch date for the Vision Pro.

• Both LG and Samsung are getting into transparent TVs.

• Samsung’s Ballie AI robot now doubles as a projector.

• MSI has a new Steam Deck competitor called the Claw.

• Nvidia revealed its RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super.

• Intel and AMD showed off new chips.

• There are a lot of new laptops (and I mean a lot).

There’s still more to come! Stay tuned to The Verge for more CES coverage from the show floor.

The Information: “Intel is working with multiple consulting firms to build ChatGPT-like apps for customers that don’t have the expertise to do it on their own.”

Boston Consulting Group: “with a custom natural language chatbot interface powered by Intel AI hardware and software, BCG employees were able to retrieve and summarize information via semantic search that was previously buried in long lists of multi-page documents.”

Maybe a new business for Intel, maybe just prep for Windows 12.

Framework has begun shipping out AMD mainboards for its 13-inch laptop, which was previously Intel-only. The component experts over at Tom’s Hardware have popped open their 13-inch model and swapped its Intel Core i7 out for an AMD Ryzen chip. The process took less than 30 minutes. Less than 30 minutes!

“All upgrades should be this easy,” editor Andrew E. Freedman writes.

Microsoft’s spec sheet shows it’s a “Intel Gen3 Movidius 3700VC VPU AI Accelerator.” Intel’s website reveals that it’s a discrete chip roughly the size of my pinky’s fingertip at 14mm x 14mm.

It’s a PCIe Gen 3 device, so don’t be surprised if it comes on its own tiny SSD-sized M.2 expansion card. Here’s a whitepaper about its siblings. Meteor Lake won’t need a separate NPU like this: