Intel

The announcement follows Intel’s rough Q2 2024 earnings and its decision to make massive job cuts.

Asus is the first OEM to release BIOS updates for its range of Z790 motherboards. The latest beta BIOS includes Intel’s new microcode fix to address stability and crashing issues with its 13th and 14th Gen processors. This won’t fix chips that are already damaged, though. You’ll need to swap your CPU, with Intel or a PC maker, if it has degraded.

After introducing the Arc brand a few years ago, Intel announced in China that cars with the GPUs could arrive “as soon as 2025.”

The company says it was able to boot up and load operating systems on Intel 18A-based processors, including Panther Lake AI PC chips. 18A is part of Intel’s roadmap to regain its footing in the processor market.

Intel added two years of additional warranty coverage for its 13th and 14th Gen Core processors last week, and now it’s clarifying this will also apply to processors sold without a box to OEMs or system integrators. If you’re having crashing issues you can contact Intel if you purchased a boxed CPU, or your OEM or system builder otherwise. Intel has also supplied a list of processors that will get the warranty extension, found below.

Puget Systems writes it’s indeed seeing higher failure rates with 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core processors — so it’ll extend warranty to three years for affected buyers. Normally, Puget only warranties parts for one year.

I love a scheduled social media post right in the middle of a major PC outage. IT admins certainly aren’t enjoying the CrowdStrike 2024 PC era.

IDC and Canalys disagree whether this is the second or third consecutive quarter of growth, but either way, the slump is definitively behind us — and we haven’t even seen the impact of this year’s Qualcomm, AMD and Intel chip launches yet.

You can find the whole thing in PCWorld’s YouTube video at the 34-minute mark: with 3DMark Wildlife Extreme locked to 60fps, Lunar Lake (and its integrated memory!) is consuming 10 watts less than Meteor Lake.

We know Intel’s new Lunar Lake processors are on track for later this year, so we’re expecting the chip maker to detail its next generation of Core Ultra processors for Copilot Plus PCs at Computex. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will present a keynote titled “Bringing AI Everywhere” at 11PM ET / 8PM PT / 4AM UK (June 4th). You’ll need to head to Intel’s website to tune in.

The Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group, will work to create an open standard to help AI accelerators “communicate more effectively” within data centers and boost performance. Other members include AMD, HP, Broadcom, and Cisco — but not Nvidia, which has AI chip-linking tech of its own.

The Aurora supercomputer, which Intel built in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprises and the Argonne National Laboratory, is now the fastest computer in the world for AI, reaching 1.012 exaflops. An exaflop is equal to one quintillion floating point calculations per second.

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.

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.