7th Gen Intel Core processors are manufactured on silicon wafers at Intel production facilities. New 7th Gen Intel Core processors deliver richer experiences, incredible performance and responsiveness, and true ultra HD 4K entertainment in stunning new devices. (Credit: Intel Corporation) (Credit: Intel)Over the past year, Intel has announced aggressive plans to increase the number of fabs it operates while spreading them across Europe (and America). This plan would help it achieve its “five nodes in four years” IDM 2.0 goal and offer the company some resiliency. Intel announced plans for new ..read more

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger holds an 18A SRAM wafer. (Credit: Intel) Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger holds an 18A SRAM wafer (Credit: Intel)In today’s edition of “Intel Roadmap Watch,” we’re learning the company has finalized plans for its most advanced nodes. If you recall, the company’s roadmap ends with 18A, an evolution of 20A. That’s when the company finally says goodbye to FinFET and moves into the Ångström Era of transistor design. Intel’s President and Chairman for China, Rang Wui, confirmed to Chinese media outlet UDN that it’s completed the prep work on these two nodes. That includes figuring o ..read more

(Credit: AMD)Both Intel and AMD are almost done battling with their new desktop architectures. One more X3D V-Cache CPU is still coming out in April, but aside from that, both companies have all their chips on the table [Seriously? -Ed.]. With the desktop portion of this battle wrapped up, the next front in this skirmish is on mobile. Intel has already launched its high-powered HX series of mobile CPUs. AMD has taken a bit more time, though, and is just now starting to send laptops to reviewers with its latest silicon. Now we have the first benchmarks for AMD’s mobile flagship. Although it los ..read more

RTX 3050 partner cards. As 2023 plods along, more bad news for the PC hardware industry has arrived from Jon Peddie Research. The market analysis firm has tallied up shipments of CPUs as well as discrete GPUs for the fourth quarter of 2022, and it’s not pretty. The numbers haven’t been this bad for GPUs since 2011. In addition, the firm predicts the GPU market will grow very slowly over the next five years. The banner news from the report is the massive drop in GPU shipments in the past year. That’s not just for discrete GPUs either, but for all GPUs. The report claims that overall shipments ..read more

Intel recently announced its lineup of Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs for workstations. They’re still a month or two away, but in the lead-up to the on-sale date, Intel invited German overclocker de8auer to its labs for a quick overclocking test. That some Sapphire Rapids workstation CPUs are overclockable is both a first for Intel and a big selling point. To demonstrate the possibilities, de8auer and an Intel employee showed some impressive preliminary results, despite it being on pre-release hardware. However, the performance comes at the cost of serious power consumption. The chip being tested ..read more

Now that Intel has announced its workstation-grade Sapphire Rapids CPUs, we’re beginning to see the arrival of the motherboards they will plug into. The first out of the gate is Asus, with a pair of “Pro” motherboards containing more ports and connections than the West Coast. The company has unveiled its Ace and Sage SE models, which are ready for the W-3400 and W-2400 CPUs. Pricing is unknown at this time, but judging by their specs, they’ll cost a pretty penny. By glancing at these motherboards, we get an idea of what the final builds will be for Intel’s newest CPUs. Both LGA4677 motherboar ..read more

Today, Intel is pulling the wraps off its newest lineup of Xeon processors bound for professional workstations. The company is announcing two product lines dubbed Xeon W-3400 and W-2400. The 3400 series are for “experts” and carry a TDP of 350W. The 2400 CPUs are labeled “mainstream” and have a 225W TDP. One new “feature” is Intel is segregating them into classes as it does for its consumer CPUs. The 3400 series includes W9, W7, and W5 variants. The 2400 class gets W7, W5, and W3 SKUs. These CPUs will bridge the gap between its consumer and the data center versions of Sapphire Rapids. However ..read more

Deep in the bowels of Intel’s Portland, Oregon facilities, the company operates an overclocking laboratory. (We know; we’re already polishing our resumes.) It recently invited German overclocker de8auer to its offices to show off some of its testing and validation tools. As expected, he showed off all kinds of software and hardware the general public will never be able to use. The most interesting is an internal overclocking tool Intel uses that offers granular control over a ton of normally inaccessible attributes. This level of control allowed de8auer to overclock a mobile chip all the way ..read more

Credit: John Burek (Photo: John Burek)If you’re an executive at Intel or AMD and in charge of sales forecasts, you likely projected some big numbers for the end of 2022. Both companies had unveiled their new platforms, promising next-gen performance and features. Since many people could not upgrade their PCs during the pandemic, all the ingredients of a booming holiday sales period were present. Added to the mixture were all-new, high-powered GPUs as well. Overall, it seemed like the perfect time to build or buy a new PC. Oddly, that did not come to pass. Instead, Q4 ended up being the worst ..read more

Intel’s CPU roadmap is a bit murky. We’ve all seen various forms of it and generally know what to expect. However, in silicon manufacturing, many details are always TBD until the day it launches. For example, we know Meteor Lake will follow Raptor Lake, and Arrow Lake comes after that. The fly in the ointment is Meteor Lake might be mobile-only. If that happens, the true successor to Raptor Lake is Arrow Lake in 2024. Now a new leak suggests that is the case, and Arrow Lake will offer big gains across the board for desktop users, especially in efficiency. If we take this step-by-step,  h ..read more