Big U.S. tech companies have flocked to the World Artificial Intelligence Conference that opened Thursday in Shanghai, drawing a stark contrast with Washington's ongoing efforts to distance itself economically from China. From a report: The opening ceremony included a virtual address by Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who said the company will supply the most complete and comprehensive technology and solutions in China and the world. Apple, Advanced Micro Devices, Facebook parent Meta and GE HealthCare also have executives or booths at the event, according to Chinese media. Europe's semiconductor industry is represented as well, with executives from Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors, a major supplier of automotive chips, and Germany's Infineon Technologies discussing development plans.

The strong American showing is good news for China, which needs advanced chip technology to power its AI development and is keen to win over companies that can provide it. The business opportunities afforded by the massive Chinese market remain essential to many American companies. China is a leading information technology production hub, as well as the world's top auto production center -- an increasingly important field for chipmakers as the number of semiconductors used in vehicles continues to rise. Qualcomm generated roughly two-thirds of its sales last year in China, a major production base for many of the smartphone manufacturers that are among its main customers. The country accounts for just under 30% of sales at AMD and Intel, 20% at Micron Technology and over 30% at NXP.

AMD unveiled its 5nm Ryzen 7000 lineup today, outlining the details of four new models that span from the 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X flagship, which AMD claims is the fastest CPU in the world, to the six-core $299 Ryzen 5 7600X, the lowest bar of entry to the first family of Zen 4 processors. Tom's Hardware reports: Ryzen 7000 marks the first 5nm x86 chips for desktop PCs, but AMD's newest chips don't come with higher core counts than the previous-gen models. However, frequencies stretch up to 5.7 GHz - an impressive 800 MHz improvement over the prior generation -- paired with an up to 13% improvement in IPC from the new Zen 4 microarchitecture. That results in a 29% improvement in single-threaded performance over the prior-gen chips. That higher performance also extends out to threaded workloads, with AMD claiming up to 45% more performance in some threaded workloads. AMD says these new chips power huge generational gains over the prior-gen Ryzen 5000 models, with 29% faster gaming and 44% more performance in productivity apps. Going head-to-head with Intel's chips, AMD claims the high-end 7950X is 11% faster overall in gaming than Intel's fastest chip, the 12900K, and that even the low-end Ryzen 5 7600X beats the 12900K by 5% in gaming. It's noteworthy that those claims come with a few caveats [...].

The Ryzen 7000 processors come to market on September 27, and they'll be joined by new DDR5 memory products that support new EXPO overclocking profiles. AMD's partners will also offer a robust lineup of motherboards - the chips will snap into new Socket AM5 motherboards that AMD says it will support until 2025+. These motherboards support DDR5 memory and the PCIe 5.0 interface, bringing the Ryzen family up to the latest connectivity standards. The X670 Extreme and standard X670 chipsets arrive first in September, while the more value-oriented B650 options will come to market in October. That includes the newly announced B650E chipset that brings full PCIe 5.0 connectivity to budget motherboards, while the B650 chipset slots in as a lower-tier option. The Ryzen 7000 lineup also brings integrated RDNA 2 graphics to all of the processors in the stack, a first for the Ryzen family.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate for the Linux kernel version 6.0, but he says the major number change doesn't signify anything especially different about this release. ZDNet: While there is nothing fundamentally different about this release compared with 5.19, Torvalds noted that there were over 13,500 non-merge commits and over 800 merged commits, meaning "6.0 looks to be another fairly sizable release." According to Torvalds, most of the updates are improvements to the GPU, networking and sound. Torvalds stuck to his word after releasing Linux kernel 5.19 last month, when he flagged he would likely call the next release 6.0 because he's "starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again."

On Sunday's release of Linux 6.0 release candidate version 1 (rc-1), he explained his reasoning behind choosing a new major version number and its purpose for developers. Again, it's about avoiding confusion rather than signaling that the release has major new features. His threshold for changing the lead version number was .20 because it is difficult to remember incremental version numbers beyond that. "Despite the major number change, there's nothing fundamentally different about this release - I've long eschewed the notion that major numbers are meaningful, and the only reason for a 'hierarchical; numbering system is to make the numbers easier to remember and distinguish," said Torvalds. Torvalds lamented some Rust-enabling code didn't make it into the release. The Register adds: "I actually was hoping that we'd get some of the first rust infrastructure, and the multi-gen LRU VM, but neither of them happened this time around," he mused, before observing "There's always more releases. This is one of those releases where you should not look at the diffstat too closely, because more than half of it is yet another AMD GPU register dump," he added, noting that Intel's Gaudi2 Ai processors are also likely to produce plenty of similar kernel additions. "The CPU people also show up in the JSON files that describe the perf events, but they look absolutely tiny compared to the 'asic_reg' auto-generated GPU and AI hardware definitions," he added.

Version 9.3 of NetBSD is here, able to run on very low-end systems and with that authentic early-1990s experience. The Register reports: Version 9.3 comes some 15 months after NetBSD 9.2 and boasts new and updated drivers, improved hardware support, including for some recent AMD and Intel processors, and better handling of suspend and resume. The next sentence in the release announcement, though, might give some readers pause: "Support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga." This is your clue that we are in a rather different territory from run-of-the-mill PC operating systems here. A notable improvement in NetBSD 9.3 is being able to run a graphical desktop on an Amiga. This is a 2022 operating system that can run on late-1980s hardware, and there are not many of those around.

NetBSD supports eight "tier I" architectures: 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and Arm, plus MIPS, PowerPC, Sun UltraSPARC, and the Xen hypervisor. Alongside those, there are no less than 49 "tier II" supported architectures, which are not as complete and not everything works -- although almost all of them are on version 9.3 except for the version for original Acorn computers with 32-bit Arm CPUs, which is still only on NetBSD 8.1. There's also a "tier III" for ports which are on "life support" so there may be a risk Archimedes support could drop to that. This is an OS that can run on 680x0 hardware, DEC VAX minicomputers and workstations, and Sun 2, 3, and 32-bit SPARC boxes. In other words, it reaches back as far as some 1970s hardware. Let this govern your expectations. For instance, in VirtualBox, if you tell it you want to create a NetBSD guest, it disables SMP support.

The preliminary Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the second quarter of 2022, arriving during what is becoming a more dire situation for the PC market as sales cool after several years of stratospheric growth. From a report: According to the recent earnings report from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, the recovery will be a long one. Still, for now, AMD appears to be weathering the storm better than its opponents as it continued to steal market share from Intel in every segment of the CPU market. The desktop PC market is still on fire, but it isn't a good kind of fire. Intel issued a dire earnings report last week -- the company lost money for the first time in decades, partially driven by PC declines. Intel also announced it was delaying its critical Xeon Sapphire Rapids data center chips and killing off another failing business unit, Optane; the sixth unit retired since new CEO Pat Gelsinger took over.

In contrast, AMD's revenue was up 70% year-over-year as the company continued to improve its already-great profitability. AMD is firing on all cylinders and will launch its Ryzen 7000 CPUs, RDNA 3 GPUs, and EPYC Genoa data center processors on schedule. That consistent execution continues to pay off. AMD continued to take big strides in the mobile/laptop market, setting another record for unit share in that segment with 24.8%. AMD also gained in the server market for the 13th consecutive quarter, reaching 13.9% of the market. Notably, AMD's quarterly gain in servers is the highest we've seen with our historical data, which dates back to 2017.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has published a knowledge base article acknowledging a problem with encryption acceleration in the newest versions of Windows that could result in data corruption. The company recommends installing the June 2022 security updates for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 "to prevent further damage," though there are no suggested solutions for anyone who has already lost data because of the bug.

The problems only affect relatively recent PCs and servers that support Vector Advanced Encryption Standard (VAES) instructions for accelerating cryptographic operations. Microsoft says affected systems use AES-XTS or AES-GCM instructions "on new hardware." Part of the AVX-512 instruction set, VAES instructions are supported by Intel's Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, and Alder Lake architectures -- these power some 10th-generation Core CPUs for laptops, as well as all 11th- and 12th-gen Core CPUs. AMD's upcoming Zen 4 architecture also supports VAES, though by the time these chips are released in the fall, the patches will have had plenty of time to proliferate. Microsoft says that the problem was caused when it added "new code paths" to support the updated encryption instructions in SymCrypt, Windows' cryptographic function library. These code paths were added in the initial release of Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022, so the problem shouldn't affect older versions like Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019.

The initial fix for the problem, provided in Windows' June 2022 security update package (Windows 11 build 22000.778), will prevent further damage at the cost of reduced performance, suggesting that the initial fix was to disable encryption acceleration on these processors entirely. Using Bitlocker-encrypted disks or the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol or accessing encrypted storage on servers will all be slower with the first patch installed, though installing the July 2022 security updates (Windows 11 build 22000.795) should restore performance to its previous level.

With the 2022 Flash Memory Summit taking place this week, not only is there a slew of solid-state storage announcements in the pipe over the coming days, but the show is also increasingly a popular venue for discussing I/O and interconnect developments as well. Kicking things off on that front, on Monday the OpenCAPI and CXL consortiums issued a joint announcement that the two groups will be joining forces, with the OpenCAPI standard and the consortium's assets being transferred to the CXL consortium. From a report: With this integration, CXL is set to become the dominant CPU-to-device interconnect standard, as virtually all major manufacturers are now backing the standard, and competing standards have bowed out of the race and been absorbed by CXL. Pre-dating CXL by a few years, OpenCAPI was one of the earlier standards for a cache-coherent CPU interconnect. The standard, backed by AMD, Xilinx, and IBM, among others, was an extension of IBM's existing Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) technology, opening it up to the rest of the industry and placing its control under an industry consortium. In the last six years, OpenCAPI has seen a modest amount of use, most notably being implemented in IBM's POWER9 processor family. Like similar CPU-to-device interconnect standards, OpenCAPI was essentially an application extension on top of existing high speed I/O standards, adding things like cache-coherency and faster (lower latency) access modes so that CPUs and accelerators could work together more closely despite their physical disaggregation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel is slowly moving into the dedicated graphics market, and its graphics driver releases are looking a lot more like Nvidia's and AMD's than they used to. For its dedicated Arc GPUs and the architecturally similar integrated GPUs that ship with 11th- and 12th-generation Intel CPUs, the company promises monthly driver releases, along with "Day 0" drivers with specific fixes and performance enhancements for just-released games. At the same time, Intel's GPU driver updates are beginning to de-emphasize what used to be the company's bread and butter: low-end integrated GPUs. The company announced yesterday that it would be moving most of its integrated GPUs to a "legacy support model," which will provide quarterly updates to fix security issues and "critical" bugs but won't include the game-specific fixes that newer GPUs are getting.

The change affects a wide swath of GPUs, which are not all ancient history. Among others, the change affects all integrated GPUs in the following processor generations, from low-end unnumbered "HD/UHD graphics" to the faster Intel Iris-branded versions: 6th-generation Core (introduced 2015, codenamed Skylake), 7th-generation Core (introduced 2016, codenamed Kaby Lake), 8th-generation Core (introduced 2017-2018, codenamed Kaby Lake-R, Whiskey Lake, and Coffee Lake), 9th-generation Core (introduced 2018, codenamed Coffee Lake), 10th-generation Core (introduced 2019-2020, codenamed Comet Lake and Ice Lake), and various N4000, N5000, and N6000-series Celeron and Pentium CPUs (introduced 2017-2021, codenamed Gemini Lake, Elkhart Lake, and Jasper Lake).

Intel is still offering a single 1.1GB driver package that supports everything from its newest Iris Xe GPUs to Skylake-era integrated graphics. However, the install package now contains one driver for newer GPUs that are still getting new features and a second driver for older GPUs on the legacy support model. The company uses a similar approach for driver updates for its Wi-Fi adapters, including multiple driver versions in the same download package to support multiple generations of hardware. "The upshot is that these GPUs' drivers are about as fast and well-optimized as they're going to get, and the hardware isn't powerful enough to play many of the newer games that Intel provides fixes for in new GPU drivers anyway," writes Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham. "Practically speaking, losing out on a consistent stream of new gaming-centric driver updates is unlikely to impact the users of these GPUs much, especially since Intel will continue to fix problems as they occur."

AMD looks to be on the cusp of releasing a competitor to RTX Voice, a feature for Nvidia graphics cards that cancels out background noise when you're on a call or otherwise using your mic. From a report: That's according to a trailer that AMD posted to its YouTube channel (apparently in error), Tom's Hardware reports. Thankfully, a copy of the trailer was downloaded before it was deleted by Reddit user u/zenobian and uploaded to the AMD subreddit. The leaked trailer suggests that AMD's Noise Suppression feature will work very similarly to Nvidia's RTX Voice (which has subsequently been rolled into Nvidia's Broadcast app). It uses "a real-time deep learning algorithm" to offer "two-way noise-reduction" that filters background noise out of both outgoing and incoming microphone audio, and is apparently built into AMD's existing Adrenalin software.

A senior systems administrator at the Free Software Foundation points out that they're running free software in two data centers and over a hundred virtual machine — each and every one with "a freedom-respecting BIOS."

But the "how" is surprisingly intricate: [E]arlier this week, we replaced "Columbia", the last of any FSF-run machines running a nonfree BIOS....

At FSF, our current standard is ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboards with AMD CPUs 6200 series CPUs released in 2012. For the BIOS, we install Libreboot, the easy-to-install, 100% free software replacement for proprietary BIOS/boot programs, or a version of Coreboot that is carefully built to avoid including any nonfree blobs. They are fast enough for our needs, and we expect this to be the case for many more years to come. They are also very affordable systems. We are also working toward supporting Raptor Computer Systems' newer and more powerful Talos II, as well as Blackbird motherboards that use IBM POWER9 CPUs. The POWER9 CPU architecture is called "PowerPC 64-bit little endian," abbreviated "ppc64el...." The Raptor motherboards come with entirely free firmware — and even have free hardware designs!

However, this type of migration has its challenges. For example, the first thing we needed to address before using these motherboards is that the main operating system we use, Trisquel GNU/Linux, didn't previously run on pp64el. So, earlier this year, we set up a Raptor POWER9 computer running Debian (without using any nonfree parts of Debian repositories) and loaned it to the maintainers of Trisquel for as long as needed. And now, we are proud to say that the upcoming Trisquel 11 release will support POWER9...!

Before I decommissioned Columbia, I ran a dmidecode, which told me that the BIOS program fit within a single megabyte of space. Often, very simplistic firmware becomes more complicated in later models, and that also usually means it has a growing significance for a user's software freedom. Some newer nonfree BIOSes have grown into operating systems in their own right, sometimes with large programs such as a full Web browser.

There is no fully-free BIOS available for x86 Intel and AMD CPUs released after about 2013. The key blocking factor is that those CPUs require certain firmware in the BIOS, like Intel Management Engine. Those CPUs will also refuse to run firmware that hasn't been cryptographically signed by private keys controlled by AMD and Intel, and AMD and Intel will only sign their own nonfree firmware. At the FSF, we refuse to run that nonfree firmware, and we applaud the many people who also avoid it. For those people who do run those Intel or AMD systems, running Coreboot or Osboot is still a step up the Freedom Ladder for the software freedom of your BIOS.

The road to freedom is a long road. We hope our dedication to achieve milestones like these can inspire the free software movement.

Lenovo has released a security advisory to inform customers that more than 70 of its laptops are affected by a UEFI/BIOS vulnerability that can lead to arbitrary code execution. SecurityWeek reports: Researchers at cybersecurity firm ESET discovered a total of three buffer overflow vulnerabilities that can allow an attacker with local privileges to affected Lenovo devices to execute arbitrary code. However, Lenovo says only one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-1892) impacts all devices, while the other two impact only a handful of laptops. "The vulnerabilities can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution in the early phases of the platform boot, possibly allowing the attackers to hijack the OS execution flow and disable some important security features," ESET explained. "These vulnerabilities were caused by insufficient validation of DataSize parameter passed to the UEFI Runtime Services function GetVariable. An attacker could create a specially crafted NVRAM variable, causing buffer overflow of the Data buffer in the second GetVariable call," it added.

Lenovo has also informed customers about Retbleed, a new speculative execution attack impacting devices with Intel and AMD processors. The company has also issued an advisory for a couple of vulnerabilities affecting many products that use the XClarity Controller server management engine. These flaws can allow authenticated users to cause a DoS condition or make unauthorized connections to internal services.

Some microprocessors from Intel and AMD are vulnerable to a newly discovered speculative execution attack that can covertly leak password data and other sensitive material, sending both chipmakers scrambling once again to contain what is proving to be a stubbornly persistent vulnerability. Ars Technica reports: Researchers from ETH Zurich have named their attack Retbleed because it exploits a software defense known as retpoline, which was introduced in 2018 to mitigate the harmful effects of speculative execution attacks. Speculative execution attacks, also known as Spectre, exploit the fact that when modern CPUs encounter a direct or indirect instruction branch, they predict the address for the next instruction they're about to receive and automatically execute it before the prediction is confirmed. Spectre works by tricking the CPU into executing an instruction that accesses sensitive data in memory that would normally be off-limits to a low-privileged application. Retbleed then extracts the data after the operation is canceled. [...] The ETH Zurich researchers have conclusively shown that retpoline is insufficient for preventing speculative execution attacks. Their Retbleed proof-of-concept works against Intel CPUs with the Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake microarchitectures and AMD Zen 1, Zen 1+, and Zen 2 microarchitectures.

In response to the research, both Intel and AMD advised customers to adopt new mitigations that the researchers said will add as much as 28 percent more overhead to operations. [...] Both Intel and AMD have responded with advisories. Intel has confirmed that the vulnerability exists on Skylake-generation processors that don't have a protection known as enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (eIBRS) in place. "Intel has worked with the Linux community and VMM vendors to provide customers with software mitigation guidance which should be available on or around today's public disclosure date," Intel wrote in a blog post. "Note that Windows systems are not affected given that these systems use Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) by default which is also the mitigation being made available to Linux users. Intel is not aware of this issue being exploited outside of a controlled lab environment." AMD, meanwhile, has also published guidance. "As part of its ongoing work to identify and respond to new potential security vulnerabilities, AMD is recommending software suppliers consider taking additional steps to help guard against Spectre-like attacks," a spokesman wrote in an email. The company has also published a whitepaper.

[Research Kaveh Razavi added:] "Retbleed is more than just a retpoline bypass on Intel, specially on AMD machines. AMD is in fact going to release a white paper introducing Branch Type Confusion based on Retbleed. Essentially, Retbleed is making AMD CPUs confuse return instructions with indirect branches. This makes exploitation of returns very trivial on AMD CPUs." The mitigations will come at a cost that the researchers measured to be between 12 percent and 28 percent more computational overhead. Organizations that rely on affected CPUs should carefully read the publications from the researchers, Intel, and AMD and be sure to follow the mitigation guidance.

Magic Leap's next AR headset is coming this fall, and it's not cheap. The self-contained Magic Leap 2 glasses, which CNET tried earlier this year, will cost at least $3,299, and be available Sept. 30. From a report: Unlike the first Magic Leap headset, which launched back in 2018 and aspired to be for creative consumers, the Magic Leap 2 is entirely business-focused. The smaller glasses have their own dedicated AMD hip-worn processor puck. They offer a wider field of view than any other AR headset we've tried recently, and a unique feature that dims parts of the real world to make virtual objects seem less ghostly. The headset will come in three variations: the $3,299 Magic Leap 2 Base is the hardware plus a one-year warranty; while the Magic Leap 2 Developer Pro comes with extra developer-focused software and sample projects for $4,099. A Magic Leap 2 Enterprise version, with two-year support for enterprise-ready software, costs $4,999. Magic Leap's website will indicate where headsets will be available to buy: in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia on Sept. 30, and Japan and Singapore by the end of the year.

In the last two weeks, six new Linux laptops have hit the market (or were announced). "The Linux hardware scene is getting better by the day," writes the site FOSS Weekly:

• Star Labs teases its new StarFighter Linux Laptop with a 4K (10-bit IPS) display.

• MNT Research introduces a "more affordable" 7-inch mini Linux laptop, the MNT Pocket Reform.

• KDE's Slimbook 4 is here with AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor and a better battery, starting from $1,000. "Buying from Slimbook supports KDE development too," notes Gaming on Linux, adding that there's a choice of 14 or 15.6 inch displays.

• TUXEDO's Pulse 15 — Gen2 (also with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor) has a 15-inch HiDPI WQHD 165Hz display, along with eight cores and 16 threads. (And the Register notes its twin cooling fans, "allowing them to overclock the chip and run it at 35W," and a choice of distros.)

• Pre-orders have opened for the Roma — the first RISC-V Laptop (which may ship in September). Ars Technica reports they're offering "free Silicon upgrades" — that is free system-on-a-chip and system-on-module upgrades for its quad-core RISC-V CPU. And there's also a companion NPU/GPU, notes a blog post at RISCV.org, "for the fastest, seamless RISC-V native software development available." (As well as "early access to next-generation laptop and accessory upgrades at generous discounts or for free.") The blog post calls it a "Web3-friendly platform with NFT creation and publication plus integrated MetaMask-style wallet."

• System 76's "Lemur" Alder Lake- and coreboot-powered laptop arrives with 14 hours of battery life.

Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance. The Register reports: The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC. This trend has created a quandary for Intel. The semiconductor giant has traditionally manufactured the chips it designs as part of its integrated device manufacturing model but the company is now increasingly reliant on TSMC and other foundries for certain components, while expanding its own manufacturing capacity in the West.

The kicker is that Intel plans to use this increased capacity to produce more of its own chips while also supporting its revitalized foundry business, which hopes to take business from TSMC and South Korea's Samsung, the industry's other leading-edge chipmaker, in the future. This new strategy by Intel is called IDM 2.0, and it means the chipmaker will have to juggle two somewhat conflicting objectives:

- taking foundry market share away from TSMC and Samsung by convincing various fabless chip designers to use its plants;
- and using leading-edge nodes from TSMC and Samsung for certain components to compete with fabless companies like AMD and Nvidia. "Samsung has already surpassed Intel as the largest semiconductor company by revenue, so TSMC potentially growing larger than the x86 giant further underscores the tentative position Intel is in," concludes the report.

AMD said it is investigating a potential data breach after RansomHouse, a relatively new data cybercrime operation, claims to have extorted data from the U.S. chipmaker. From a report: An AMD spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company "is aware of a bad actor claiming to be in possession of stolen data," adding that "an investigation is currently underway." RansomHouse, which earlier this month claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Shoprite, Africa's largest retailer, claims to have breached AMD on January 5 to steal 450 GB of data. The group claims to be targeting companies with weak security, and claimed it was able to compromise AMD due to the use of weak passwords throughout the organization.

"An era of high-end technology, progress and top security... there's so much in these words for the crowds. But it seems those are still just beautiful words when even technology giants like AMD use simple passwords to protect their networks from intrusion," RansomHouse wrote on its data leak site. "It is a shame those are real passwords used by AMD employees, but a bigger shame to AMD Security Department which gets significant financing according to the documents we got our hands on -- all thanks to these passwords." Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, told TechCrunch there's no reason to doubt the group's claims.

Intel is seeking to be paid interest of $624 million on the overturned $1.1 billion fine it received from the European Commission back in 2009. From a report: The antitrust ruling was overturned at the beginning of the year, and so Intel has gone to EU General Court seeking compensation and interest on the fine. In fact, Intel is claiming back almost half of that original fine, based on the European Central Bank's refinancing rates. In case you need a reminder on all of this: Intel allegedly took part in anti-competitive practices that saw it offer conditional rebates to key OEMs such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, making it difficult for competitors (read AMD, or ARM if you prefer, but really AMD) to compete with their own CPUs. The European Commission concluded in 2009 that Intel had indeed behaved in such a way between October 2002 and December 2007 and hit it with one of the largest ever fines at the time at a cool $1.1 billion. Intel appealed the decision unsuccessfully in 2012, but in 2014 it brought the case to the European Court of Justice, which sent it back to the General Court in 2017. The case has been going back and fourth ever since.

Microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and other companies contain a newly discovered weakness that remote attackers can exploit to obtain cryptographic keys and other secret data traveling through the hardware, researchers said on Tuesday. From a report: Hardware manufacturers have long known that hackers can extract secret cryptographic data from a chip by measuring the power it consumes while processing those values. Fortunately, the means for exploiting power-analysis attacks against microprocessors is limited because the threat actor has few viable ways to remotely measure power consumption while processing the secret material. Now, a team of researchers has figured out how to turn power-analysis attacks into a different class of side-channel exploit that's considerably less demanding.

The team discovered that dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) -- a power and thermal management feature added to every modern CPU -- allows attackers to deduce the changes in power consumption by monitoring the time it takes for a server to respond to specific carefully made queries. The discovery greatly reduces what's required. With an understanding of how the DVFS feature works, power side-channel attacks become much simpler timing attacks that can be done remotely. The researchers have dubbed their attack Hertzbleed because it uses the insights into DVFS to expose -- or bleed out -- data that's expected to remain private. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-24436 for Intel chips and CVE-2022-23823 for AMD CPUs. The researchers have already shown how the exploit technique they developed can be used to extract an encryption key from a server running SIKE, a cryptographic algorithm used to establish a secret key between two parties over an otherwise insecure communications channel.

Slashdot reader MojoKid writes: AMD unveiled new details of its technology roadmap Thursday at its 2022 Financial Analyst Day. Chief among them were disclosures on the company's next-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture, Zen 4 CPU architecture and Phoenix Point laptop SoC. AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU architecture for Radeon graphic cards and mobile will be a chiplet-based design, much like the company's Ryzen CPU offering. AMD also confirmed that RDNA 3 GPUs would be fabricated on a 5nm process, likely TSMC N5. The company continued to note that an "optimized graphics pipeline" will enable yet higher clock rates, while the GPU's "rearchitected compute unit" will have ray-tracing performance improvements over RDNA 2 as well. AMD says that RDNA 3 GPUs are coming later this year, with RDNA 4 arriving likely in late 2023.

Meanwhile, AMD's Zen 4 is set to be the "world's first 5nm CPU," arriving later this year with an 8 to 10 percent instructrions per clock lift and greater than 15 percent single-threaded performance gain. Zen 4 will also support DDR5, AVX-512 extensions for AI workloads and a massive 125 percent increase in memory bandwidth. AMD is claiming a 35% multithreaded performance lift for Zen 4.

And, its Phoenix Point laptop platform SoC will be both Zen 4 and RNDA 3 infused. This is a first for AMD, since typically its laptop product's integrated graphics trail the company's current-gen GPU architecture by at least a generation. Phoenix point is set to arrive likely in the first half of 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can't is run operating systems written for Intel or AMD processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple Silicon Macs can, however, run operating systems written for Arm processors inside of virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Arm-compatible versions of Linux. And those Linux VMs are getting a new feature in macOS Ventura: the ability to run apps written for x86 processors using Rosetta, the same binary translation technology that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run apps written for Intel Macs.

Apple's documentation will walk you through the requirements for using Rosetta within a Linux guest operating system -- it requires creating a shared directory that both macOS and Linux can access and running some terminal commands in Linux to get it set up. But once you do those steps, you'll be able to enjoy the wider app compatibility that comes with being able to run x86 code as well as Arm code. Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @never_released, have already found that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM CPUs as long as they're modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm instruction set. As Martin points out, this isn't strictly legal because of macOS's licensing restrictions, and there are some relatively minor Apple-specific hardware features needed to unlock Rosetta's full capabilities.