Neowin notes growing support for the "very efficient, potent, royalty-free video codec" AV1, including Microsoft's adding of support for hardware acceleration of AV1 on Windows.

But AV1 even turned up in Intel's announcement this week of the Arc A-series, a new line of discrete GPUs, Neowin reports: Intel has been quick to respond and the company has become the first such GPU hardware vendor to have full AV1 support on its newly launched Arc GPUs. While AMD and Nvidia both offer AV1 decoding with their newest GPUs, neither have support for AV1 encoding.

Intel says that hardware encoding of AV1 on its new Arc GPUs is 50 times faster than those based on software-only solutions. It also adds that the efficiency of AV1 encode with Arc is 20% better compared to HEVC. With this feature, Intel hopes to potentially capture at least some of the streaming and video editing market that's based on users who are looking for a more robust AV1 encoding solution compared to CPU-based software approaches.
From Intel's announcement: Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We've worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.

Tom's Guide tested a Mac Studio workstation equipped with an M1 Ultra with the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarks "to get a sense of how effectively it handles single-core and multi-core workflows."

"Since our M1 Ultra is the best you can buy (at a rough price of $6,199) it sports a 20-core CPU and a 64-core GPU, as well as 128GB of unified memory (RAM) and a 2TB SSD."

Slashdot reader exomondo shares their results: We ran the M1 Ultra through the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarking test multiple times and after averaging the results, we found that the M1 Ultra does indeed outperform top-of-the-line Windows gaming PCs when it comes to multi-core CPU performance. Specifically, the M1 Ultra outperformed a recent Alienware Aurora R13 desktop we tested (w/ Intel Core i7-12700KF, GeForce RTX 3080, 32GB RAM), an Origin Millennium (2022) we just reviewed (Core i9-12900K CPU, RTX 3080 Ti GPU, 32GB RAM), and an even more 3090-equipped HP Omen 45L we tested recently (Core i9-12900K, GeForce RTX 3090, 64GB RAM) in the Geekbench 5.4 multi-core CPU benchmark.

However, as you can see from the chart of results below, the M1 Ultra couldn't match its Intel-powered competition in terms of CPU single-core performance. The Ultra-powered Studio also proved slower to transcode video than the afore-mentioned gaming PCs, taking nearly 4 minutes to transcode a 4K video down to 1080p using Handbrake. All of the gaming PCs I just mentioned completed the same task faster, over 30 seconds faster in the case of the Origin Millennium. Before we even get into the GPU performance tests it's clear that while the M1 Ultra excels at multi-core workflows, it doesn't trounce the competition across the board. When we ran our Mac Studio review unit through the Geekbench 5.4 OpenCL test (which benchmarks GPU performance by simulating common tasks like image processing), the Ultra earned an average score of 83,868. That's quite good, but again it fails to outperform Nvidia GPUs in similarly-priced systems.
They also share some results from the OpenCL Benchmarks browser, which publicly displays scores from different GPUs that users have uploaded: Apple's various M1 chips are on the list as well, and while the M1 Ultra leads that pack it's still quite a ways down the list, with an average score of 83,940. Incidentally, that means it ranks below much older GPUs like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 (85,639) and AMD's Radeon VII (86,509). So here again we see that while the Ultra is fast, it can't match the graphical performance of GPUs that are 2-3 years old at this point — at least, not in these synthetic benchmarks. These tests don't always accurately reflect real-world CPU and GPU performance, which can be dramatically influenced by what programs you're running and how they're optimized to make use of your PC's components.
Their conclusion? When it comes to tasks like photo editing or video and music production, the M1 Ultra w/ 128GB of RAM blazes through workloads, and it does so while remaining whisper-quiet. It also makes the Mac Studio a decent gaming machine, as I was able to play less demanding games like Crusader Kings III, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Total War: Warhammer II at reasonable (30+ fps) framerates. But that's just not on par with the performance we expect from high-end GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090....

Of course, if you don't care about games and are in the market for a new Mac with more power than just about anything Apple's ever made, you want the Studio with M1 Ultra.

Alongside their spring driver update, AMD this morning is also unveiling the first nugget of information about the next generation of their FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology. From a report: Dubbed FSR 2.0, the next generation of AMD's upscaling technology will be taking the logical leap into adding temporal data, giving FSR more data to work with, and thus improving its ability to generate details. And, while AMD is being coy with details for today's early teaser, at a high level this technology should put AMD much closer to competing with NVIDIA's temporal-based DLSS 2.0 upscaling technology, as well as Intel's forthcoming XeSS upscaling tech.

AMD's current version of FSR, which is now being referred to as FSR 1.0, was released last summer by the company. Implemented as a compute shader, FSR 1.0 was a (relatively) simple spatial upscaler, which could only use data from the current frame for generating a higher resolution frame. Spatial upscaling's simplicity is great for compatibility but it's limited by the data it has access to, allowing for more advanced multi-frame techniques to generate more detailed images. For that reason, AMD has been very careful with their image quality claims for FSR 1.0, treating it more like a supplement to other upscaling methods than a rival to NVIDIA's class-leading DLSS 2.0.

"News of a fresh Spectre BHB vulnerability that only impacts Intel and Arm processors emerged this week," reports Tom's Hardware, "but Intel's research around these new attack vectors unearthed another issue.

"One of the patches that AMD has used to fix the Spectre vulnerabilities has been broken since 2018." Intel's security team, STORM, found the issue with AMD's mitigation. In response, AMD has issued a security bulletin and updated its guidance to recommend using an alternative method to mitigate the Spectre vulnerabilities, thus repairing the issue anew....

Intel's research into AMD's Spectre fix begins in a roundabout way — Intel's processors were recently found to still be susceptible to Spectre v2-based attacks via a new Branch History Injection variant, this despite the company's use of the Enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (eIBRS) and/or Retpoline mitigations that were thought to prevent further attacks. In need of a newer Spectre mitigation approach to patch the far-flung issue, Intel turned to studying alternative mitigation techniques. There are several other options, but all entail varying levels of performance tradeoffs. Intel says its ecosystem partners asked the company to consider using AMD's LFENCE/JMP technique. The "LFENCE/JMP" mitigation is a Retpoline alternative commonly referred to as "AMD's Retpoline."

As a result of Intel's investigation, the company discovered that the mitigation AMD has used since 2018 to patch the Spectre vulnerabilities isn't sufficient — the chips are still vulnerable. The issue impacts nearly every modern AMD processor spanning almost the entire Ryzen family for desktop PCs and laptops (second-gen to current-gen) and the EPYC family of datacenter chips....

In response to the STORM team's discovery and paper, AMD issued a security bulletin (AMD-SB-1026) that states it isn't aware of any currently active exploits using the method described in the paper. AMD also instructs its customers to switch to using "one of the other published mitigations (V2-1 aka 'generic retpoline' or V2-4 aka 'IBRS')." The company also published updated Spectre mitigation guidance reflecting those changes [PDF]....

AMD's security bulletin thanks Intel's STORM team by name and noted it engaged in the coordinated vulnerability disclosure, thus allowing AMD enough time to address the issue before making it known to the public.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for submitting the story...

Slashdot reader katydid77 shares a report from the supercomputing site The Next Platform: If you need any proof that it doesn't take the most advanced chip manufacturing processes to create an exascale-class supercomputer, you need look no further than the Sunway "OceanLight" system housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. Some of the architectural details of the OceanLight supercomputer came to our attention as part of a paper published by Alibaba Group, Tsinghua University, DAMO Academy, Zhejiang Lab, and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, which is running a pretrained machine learning model called BaGuaLu, across more than 37 million cores and 14.5 trillion parameters (presumably with FP32 single precision), and has the capability to scale to 174 trillion parameters (and approaching what is called "brain-scale" where the number of parameters starts approaching the number of synapses in the human brain)....

Add it all up, and the 105 cabinet system tested on the BaGuaLu training model, with its 107,250 SW26010-Pro processors, had a peak theoretical performance of 1.51 exaflops. We like base 2 numbers and think that the OceanLight system probably scales to 160 cabinets, which would be 163,840 nodes and just under 2.3 exaflops of peak FP64 and FP32 performance. If it is only 120 cabinets (also a base 2 number), OceanLight will come in at 1.72 exaflops peak. But these rack scales are, once again, just hunches. If the 160 cabinet scale is the maximum for OceanLight, then China could best the performance of the 1.5 exaflops "Frontier" supercomputer being tuned up at Oak Ridge National Laboratories today and also extend beyond the peak theoretical performance of the 2 exaflops "Aurora" supercomputer coming to Argonne National Laboratory later this year — and maybe even further than the "El Capitan" supercomputer going into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2023 and expected to be around 2.2 exaflops to 2.3 exaflops according to the scuttlebutt.

We would love to see the thermals and costs of OceanLight. The SW26010-Pro chip could burn very hot, to be sure, and run up the electric bill for power and cooling, but if SMIC [China's largest foundry] can get good yield on 14 nanometer processes, the chip could be a lot less expensive to make than, say, a massive GPU accelerator from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. (It's hard to say.) Regardless, having indigenous parts matters more than power efficiency for China right now, and into its future, and we said as much last summer when contemplating China's long road to IT independence. Imagine what China can do with a shrink to 7 nanometer processes when SMIC delivers them — apparently not even using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light — many years hence....

The bottom line is that the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (known as NRCPC), working with SMIC, has had an exascale machine in the field for a year already. (There are two, in fact.) Can the United States say that right now? No it can't.

A number of industry stalwarts including Intel, AMD, Arm, TSMC, and Samsung on Wednesday introduced a new Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium. AnandTech: Taking significant inspiration from the very successful PCI-Express playbook, with UCIe the involved firms are creating a standard for connecting chiplets, with the goal of having a single set of standards that not only simplify the process for all involved, but lead the way towards full interoperability between chiplets from different manufacturers, allowing chips to mix-and-match chiplets as chip makers see fit. In other words, to make a complete and compatible ecosystem out of chiplets, much like today's ecosystem for PCIe-based expansion cards.

The comparisons to PCIe are apt on multiple levels, and this is perhaps the best way to quickly understand the UCIe group's goals. Not only is the new standard being made available in an open fashion, but the companies involved will be establishing a formal consortium group later this year to administer UCIe and further develop it. Meanwhile from a general technology perspective, the use of chiplets is the latest step in the continual consolidation of integrated circuits, as smaller and smaller transistors have allowed more and more functionality to be brought on-chip. In essence, features that have been on an expansion card or separate chip up until now are starting to make their way on to the chip/SoC itself. So like PCIe moderates how these parts work together as expansion cards, a new standard has become needed to moderate how these parts should work together as chiplets.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Yahoo Finance: AMD's market cap currently stands at $188 billion after shares rose nearly 2% in Tuesday's session. Intel's market cap is $182 billion. That marks the second time in a week AMD's market value has climbed above Intel -- the first time it happened was a week ago. Followers of this battle may not be surprised to see this one happen (and seeing it continue from here) for several reasons. First, AMD has been winning the battle on Wall Street for sexier investment thesis. AMD last week closed on its $35 billion acquisition for Xilinx. Secondarily, AMD has flat out posted better financials than Intel (for some time) as it has gained market share in key areas (notably in servers). AMD's sales and profits rose 68% and 117%, respectively in 2021. The company outlined 31% revenue growth for 2022 and gross profit margins of 51%. Intel's 2021 sales and earnings increased 2% and 7%, respectively. The company sees sales in 2022 rising about 2%. Profits are expected to drop 36% as Intel further builds out its chip-making capacity.

Intel launched the first wave of its 12th Gen Alder Lake chips at CES 2022 -- but only for its H-series lineup of chips, destined for the most powerful and power-hungry laptops. And now, it's rolling out the rest of its Alder Lake laptop lineup: the P-series and U-series models it briefly showed off in January, which are set to power the thinner, lighter, and cheaper laptops of 2022. From a report: In total, there are a whopping 20 chips fit for a wide range of hardware across the P-series, U-series (15W), and U-series (9W) categories, with the first laptops powered by the new processors set to arrive in March. Like their more powerful H-series cousins (and the Alder Lake desktop chips that Intel launched in late 2021 and at CES 2022), the new P-series and U-series chips have a lot more cores than 2020's 11th Gen models, with a hybrid architecture approach that combines performance and efficiency cores to maximize both power and battery life. And Intel is promising some big improvements focused around those boosted core counts, touting up to 70 percent better multi-thread performance than previous 11th Gen (and AMD) hardware. The company also says that it wins out in benchmarks against chips like Apple's M1 and M1 Pro (although not the M1 Max), and AMD's Ryzen R7 5800U in tasks like web browsing and photo editing.

AnandTech reports: It's no secret that Intel's enterprise processor platform has been stretched in recent generations. Compared to the competition, Intel is chasing its multi-die strategy while relying on a manufacturing platform that hasn't offered the best in the market. That being said, Intel is quoting more shipments of its latest Xeon products in December than AMD shipped in all of 2021, and the company is launching the next generation Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable platform later in 2022. Beyond Sapphire Rapids has been somewhat under the hood, with minor leaks here and there, but today Intel is lifting the lid on that roadmap.

Currently in the market is Intel's Ice Lake 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable platform, built on Intel's 10nm process node with up to 40 Sunny Cove cores. The die is large, around 660 mm2, and in our benchmarks we saw a sizeable generational uplift in performance compared to the 2nd Generation Xeon offering. The response to Ice Lake Xeon has been mixed, given the competition in the market, but Intel has forged ahead by leveraging a more complete platform coupled with FPGAs, memory, storage, networking, and its unique accelerator offerings. Datacenter revenues, depending on the quarter you look at, are either up or down based on how customers are digesting their current processor inventories (as stated by CEO Pat Gelsinger). Further reading: Intel Arc Update: Alchemist Laptops Q1, Desktops Q2; 4M GPUs Total for 2022.

AMD on Monday completed the acquisition of Xilinx, creating a company that can offer various types of compute devices, including CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Tom's Hardware reports: AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su told analyst Patrick Moorhead that the first processor combining Xilinx technologies will arrive in 2023, which is in contrast to the company's previous integration efforts. After AMD bought ATI Technologies in 2006, it took the company five years to build its first accelerated processing units (which included AMD's x86 cores and ATI's GPU). This time AMD inked a long-term development pact with Xilinx and was able to work collaboratively even before the regulators approved the transaction. It remains to be seen what exactly AMD plans to offer, but it is reasonable to expect the new processor to feature AMD's x86 cores and Xilinx's programmable engines.

The move will help AMD to continue expanding its presence in the datacenter sector and offer unique solutions that will combine IP ingredients designed by the two companies. Interestingly, the first fruits of the deal are expected to materialize next year. [...] The Xilinx business will become AMD's Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG), led by former Xilinx CEO Victor Peng. As a result, Xilinx will maintain its leadership for at least a while. Furthermore, AMD's embedded business will cease to be a part of the company's enterprise and semi-custom unit and will merge into AECG, which might be good news as executives from the enterprise division will now spend more time on EPYC CPUs. "The acquisition of Xilinx brings together a highly complementary set of products, customers and markets combined with differentiated IP and world-class talent to create the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader," said Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD. "Xilinx offers industry-leading FPGAs, adaptive SoCs, AI inference engines and software expertise that enable AMD to offer the strongest portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing solutions in the industry and capture a larger share of the approximately $135 billion market opportunity we see across cloud, edge, and intelligent devices."

Intel won a historic victory in its court fight over a record 1.06 billion-euro ($1.2 billion) competition fine, in a landmark ruling that upends one of the European Union's most important antitrust cases. From a report: The EU General Court ruled on Wednesday that regulators made key errors in a landmark 2009 decision over allegedly illegal rebates that the U.S. chip giant gave to PC makers to squeeze out rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). While the surprise ruling can be appealed one more time, it's a stinging defeat for the European Commission, which hasn't lost a big antitrust case in court for more than 20 years. The Luxembourg-based EU court said the commission provided an "incomplete" analysis when it fined Intel, criticizing it for failing to provide sufficient evidence to back up its findings of anti-competitive risks.

AMD's GPU technology is returning to mobile handsets with Samsung's Exynos 2200 system-on-chip, which was announced on Tuesday. The Register reports: The Exynos 2200 processor, fabricated using a 4nm process, has Armv9 CPU cores and the oddly named Xclipse GPU, which is an adaptation of AMD's RDNA 2 mainstream GPU architecture. AMD was in the handheld GPU market until 2009, when it sold the Imageon GPU and handheld business for $65m to Qualcomm, which turned the tech into the Adreno GPU for its Snapdragon family. AMD's Imageon processors were used in devices from Motorola, Panasonic, Palm and others making Windows Mobile handsets. AMD's now returning to a more competitive mobile graphics market with Apple, Arm and Imagination also possessing homegrown smartphone GPUs.

Samsung and AMD announced the companies were working together on graphics in June last year. With Exynos 2200, Samsung has moved on from Arm's Mali GPU family, which was in the predecessor Exynos 2100 used in the current flagship Galaxy smartphones. Samsung says the power-optimized GPU has hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which simulates lighting effects and other features to make gaming a better experience. [...] The Exynos 2200 has an image signal processor that can apparently handle 200-megapixel pictures and record 8K video. Other features include HDR10+ support, and 4K video decoding at up to 240fps or 8K decoding at up to 60fps. It supports display refresh rates of up to 144Hz.

The eight-core CPU cluster features a balance of high-performing and power-efficient cores. It has one Arm Cortex-X2 flagship core, three Cortex-A710 big cores and four Cortex-A510s, which is in the same ballpark as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Mediatek's Dimensity 9000, which are the only other chips using Arm's Armv9 cores and are made using a 4nm process. An integrated 5G modem supports both sub-6GHz and millimeter wave bands, and a feature to mix LTE and 5G signals speeds up data transfers to 10Gbps. The chip also has a security processor and an AI engine that is said to be two times faster than its predecessor in the Exynos 2100.

ArsTechnica: So here's a crazy story. Samsung was supposed to have a big SoC launch on Tuesday, but that launch did not happen. Samsung didn't cancel or delay the event. The January 11 date was announced, but when the time for the event came, nothing happened! Samsung pulled a no-call no-show for a major product launch. [...] The Exynos 2200 was (?) shaping up to be a major launch for Samsung. It is, after all, the first Samsung SoC with the headline-grabbing feature of having an AMD GPU. The two companies announced this deal a year ago, and we've been giddy about it ever since. The Exynos 2200 is (or was) going to debut in the Galaxy S22. That launch event is currently scheduled for February 8, assuming Samsung doesn't ghost everyone again.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple hasn't stopped selling Intel Macs just yet, but it's safe to say that we'll never see a Mac with one of Intel's 12th-generation Core processors in it. But that minor detail isn't stopping the Hackintosh community from supporting new Intel and AMD processors and platforms. The developers behind OpenCore, the most powerful and actively maintained bootloader for loading macOS on standard PC hardware, improved its Alder Lake support in this month's release, version 0.7.7. In a blog post over the weekend, the developers also detailed their efforts to update OpenCore and its associated software to work with Intel's Z690 chipset.

The key to building a functional Hackintosh is normally to build a PC that's as close as possible to actual Intel Mac hardware -- most crucially, the CPU, GPU, and chipset. OpenCore's job is to bridge whatever gap is left between your PC and real Mac hardware so that macOS boots and works properly. It adds support for reading and booting macOS filesystems, loads kernel extensions to support additional hardware, tells macOS how to handle your system's audio outputs and USB ports, and spoofs hardware to take advantage of macOS's built-in support (if, for example, your PC has a GPU that is similar to but not quite identical to a GPU included in a real Intel Mac). As OpenCore has developed and matured, it has gotten better at bridging larger and larger gaps between PC hardware and "real" Macs. It can get old versions of macOS like Tiger (10.4) and Snow Leopard (10.6) up and running on old hardware, and it can even be used to run newer macOS versions on real Macs that Apple has dropped from the official support list. It can even run macOS on AMD processors, albeit with some caveats for software that relies on Intel-specific functionality. The still-active Hackintosh Reddit community is full of people running macOS on all kinds of different hardware.

It's that sort of flexibility that will keep macOS working on 12th-generation Intel CPUs and the Z690 chipset. All of that said, running macOS on newer hardware isn't for the faint of heart, and some things just aren't going to work. Trying to use 12th-gen processors' new efficiency cores (or E-cores) can also cause general slowdowns because macOS doesn't know how to best distribute work between the different types of cores -- macOS doesn't (and never will) support Intel's "Thread Director" technology, which needs to be baked into your operating system to get the best performance. The GPUs from 11th- and 12th-generation Intel processors also won't work in Hackintoshes because they were never supported in real Macs, so you would need to rely on a dedicated AMD GPU to handle display output and other tasks (in real Intel Macs, even iMacs and MacBook Pros with dedicated GPUs still use the integrated Intel GPUs for video and photo encoding and decoding). Apple is still adding support for newer AMD GPUs in macOS releases, presumably so those cards can work in the Mac Pro -- the Radeon RX 6900 series, 6800 series, and RX 6600 XT are all supported -- but Apple could easily decide to stop supporting newer GPUs whenever it wants. And Nvidia GPUs aren't supported at all.

In November 2020, Microsoft took the wraps off its Pluton security chip, with the goal of bringing it to all Windows 10 PCs. It wasn't until this week, that any of Microsoft's OEMs announced their first Pluton-powered PCs. From a report: At CES, Lenovo unveiled its Ryzen-6000-based ThinkPad Z series laptops running Windows 11, which will integrate the Microsoft Pluton processor. The coming ThinkPad Z series laptops will begin shipping in May 2022. Thanks to Pluton, these devices will be able to receive updated firmware using Windows Update. In the ThinkPad Z13 and Z16, Pluton will help protect Windows Hello credentials, according to Microsoft, by further isolating them from attackers. These new ThinkPads will use Pluton as their TPMs to protect encryption keys from physical attacks, Microsoft officials said. Microsoft pioneered Pluton first in Azure Sphere, its Linux-based microcontroller, and in Xbox. In a January 4 blog post, Microsoft officials noted that Pluton can be configured in three ways: As the Trusted Platform Module (TPM); as a security processor for non-TPM scenarios like platform resiliency; or inside a device where OEMs have opted to ship with the chip turned off.

Reader segaboy81 shares a report: When Microsoft announced Windows 11 in June of 2021, it was greeted with mixed reactions by the tech press. Some outlets praised the round corners and modern design elements, while others conjectured that visual elements from the remains of Windows 10x had simply been transplanted onto a stable, familiar base. All the while, Microsoft had been gaining a loyal following with what was purported to be last version on Windows. Windows, like Arch Linux, had essentially become a rolling release. That all changed with the announcement of the Surface Pro 8, Surface Go 3, and Surface Laptop Studio.

The road has been long for many users, mired with controversy regarding TPM 2.0, AMD Ryzen performance pitfalls, and more. We are a full two months into the official release of Windows 11, but driver support for Microsoft's Surface line of devices listed on the official compatibility list is still incomplete. Counting AMD and Intel variants of the Surface Laptop and the 2021 lineup of new hardware, there are 16 base Surface configurations that support Windows 11. Five of them still don't have a Windows 11 driver package two months after release. They are as follows: Surface Go 2, Surface Pro 6, Surface Laptop 2, Surface Laptop 3 (Ryzen), and Surface Studio 2.

AnandTech: The notebook market is a tough nut to crack with a single solution. People want that mix of high performance at the top, cost effectiveness at the bottom, and throughout there has to be efficiency, utility, and function. On the back of a successful ramp last year, AMD is striking the notebook market hot again in 2022 with the launch of its new Ryzen 6000 Mobile processors. These 'Rembrandt' APUs feature AMD's latest RDNA2 graphics, up to eight Zen3+ cores with enhanced power management features, and it uses TSMC's N6 manufacturing process for performance and efficiency improvements. Yesterday AMD disclosed that they would be launching the new Ryzen 6000 Mobile series today -- updated cores, better graphics, more features, all in a single monolithic package a little over 200 mm2.

There will be 10 new processors, ranging from the traditional portable 15 W and 28 W hardware, up to 35 W and 45 W plus for the high-end gaming machines. AMD is expecting 200+ premium systems in the market with Ryzen Mobile in 2022. At the heart of the design is AMD's Zen 3+ core, which affords an improvement in power management between the cores, but keeps the Zen 3 performance characteristics. The focus here is mainly to improve idle power consumption and power when using accelerators, to help extend the life of ultraportable devices -- AMD is claiming 15-40% lower power between web browsing and video streaming. There is a frequency uplift as well, with the top processors going up to 5.0 GHz. AMD is claiming up to 1.3x single thread performance for the Ryzen 7 6800U.

AMD's $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx is now expected to close in the first quarter of 2022, which is a few months after AMD and Xilinix's originally proposed closing of the deal before the end of 2021. Tom's Hardware reports: AMD has cleared regulatory hurdles in all but China. News filtered out earlier this month that AMD has filed certain undefined 'behavioral remedies' to appease Chinese regulators, and mid-month found news that China's antitrust agency, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), was still market-testing AMD's proposed remedies.

Here's AMD's statement on the matter: "We continue making good progress on the required regulatory approvals to close our transaction. While we had previously expected that we would secure all approvals by the end of 2021, we have not yet completed the process and we now expect the transaction to close in the first quarter of 2022. Our conversations with regulators continue to progress productively, and we expect to secure all required approvals. There are no additional changes to the previously announced terms or plans regarding the transaction and the companies continue to look forward to the proposed combination creating the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Todd Haselton: Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year. The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring. It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run. Those fears were quickly quelled.

The first M1 Apple chip was launched in 2020 in a MacBook Air laptop. It was more powerful than Intel's chip while offering longer battery life and enabling a fanless design, which helped keep Apple's new MacBook Air even quieter. It proved to be an early success. In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. That quarter, it launched the all-new iMac, which offered a redesigned super-thin metal body that looks like a screen propped up on a stand. It's slimmer than the Intel models that came before it, while offering other benefits, like a much better webcam, great speakers and a much sharper display than the models it replaced. And Apple made the launch more exciting by offering an array of colors for the iMac, which it hadn't done since it shipped the 1999 iMac. There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.

Apple's fiscal Q1 earnings in January will give an indication of how well all its new computers are selling. But it's clear the move from Intel has allowed Apple to move full speed ahead with its own chip development, much like it does for iPhones and iPads, the latter of which has yet to be matched by any other tablet on the market. It's no longer beholden to delays that plagued Intel, which started to lag behind AMD with its new 7nm chips. And Apple has full control over its "stack," which means it can design new computer hardware and software together, instead of letting the power of another company's chips dictate what its computers can and can't do.

The Performance P650 won't beat a top-end Arm chip in a Samsung or Apple smartphone, but the startup believes its designs eventually could. From a report: It's really hard to get a new chip family to catch on when companies like Intel and Qualcomm ship their products by the millions, but SiFive has a faster new design it hopes will carve a niche. The startup on Thursday announced its Performance P650 design, which comes with a 50% speed boost over the P550 that arrived in June. SiFive is one of the most prominent members of RISC-V International, an alliance collectively developing a family of processors using the new RISC-V architecture. That competes against the x86 architecture from Intel and AMD that dominates in PCs and the Arm architecture used by Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek and others to power all smartphones. Unlike x86 and Arm, though, RISC-V is free to use. It's a fresh start its advocates believe will be more economical and efficient.

SiFive doesn't make chips. Instead, it licenses its designs to others that customize them for their own purposes, an approach that's served Arm well. With performance comparable to Arm's two-year-old midrange Cortex A77 design, the P650 won't be ejecting Qualcomm or other Arm designs out of smartphones any time soon. Customers can start evaluating the design in the first quarter of 2022, SiFive said. But if SiFive succeeds with its longer-term plans for better speed, battery life and cost, you could get a SiFive powered phone in a couple years. "By 2023, you're likely to see the first mobile phone with RISC-V," SiFive Chief Executive Patrick Little said in an October interview. "I think we have an excellent shot at the phone."