Intel is officially going to kill the Pentium and Celeron brandings 30 years after the former was first introduced. The company said its mobile SKUs will lose this branding next year.

Our understanding of Intel's 13th-generation Core CPUs, codenamed "Raptor Lake," continues to take shape ahead of their planned launch this fall. Motherboards for current-gen Alder Lake chips have been adding preliminary support for them, and now a supposed list of the desktop CPU lineup (as reported by Tom's Hardware) suggests that Intel will be leaning on its CPUs' small efficiency cores (E-cores) for much of their performance gains.

ANALYSIS Intel is ending its Optane product line of persistent memory and that is more disastrous for the industry than is visible on the surface. The influence of ideas from the late 1960s and early 1970s is now so pervasive that almost nobody can imagine anything else, and the best ideas from the following generation are mostly forgotten.

Italy is close to clinching a deal initially worth $5 billion with Intel (INTC.O) to build an advanced semiconductor packaging and assembly plant in the country, two sources briefed on discussions told Reuters on Thursday. Intel's investment in Italy is part of a wider plan announced by the U.S. chipmaker earlier this year to invest $88 billion in building capacity across Europe, which is striving to cut its reliance on Asian chip imports and ease a supply crunch that has curbed output in the region's strategic car sector.

Intel's Q2 2022 earnings report today was uncharacteristically disappointing, but it also hid a new announcement: Intel is ending its Optane business entirely. During the earnings call, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger clarified the vaguely worded announcement in the earnings documents, confirming that Intel will wind down its Optane business. The move incurs a $559 million inventory impairment/write-off.

In the M2 MacBook Air, Apple has replaced an Intel-made component responsible for controlling the USB and Thunderbolt ports with a custom-made controller, meaning the last remnants of Intel are now fully out of the latest Mac.

Intel launched a new range of processors at its Vision event on Tuesday, May 10. The new 55W HX-series CPUs are part of Intel’s 12th-gen family, and they’re built to deliver the highest performance possible in a mobile form factor, at least according to Intel. The flagship Core i9-12950HX lends some credibility to the claim of being the first 16-core laptop CPU ever. Like other 12th-gen Alder Lake processors, it splits the cores across performance and efficient cores, and the chip can boost up to 5GHz. Like other HX-series processors, it comes with a 55-watt power limit, as well.

Spectre-v2 isn't going anywhere soon. VUSec, a group of researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, recently discovered Branch History Injection (BHI), a byproduct of Spectre-v2 that affects Intel and Arm processors. According to Phoronix's latest report, while Intel has taken a performance hit up to 35%, AMD's processors got off easy.

Intel is awash in cash, spending billions on stock buybacks that made shareholders even richer. Yet the Biden administration is poised to give the company a no-strings-attached bailout that could further enrich those same shareholders.

Intel has teased new Xeon chips that will collect CPU and GPU hardware into one socket to maximize performance across high performance computing (HPC) use cases. Codenamed Falcon Shores, the new line of processors will combine x86 CPU cores with Xe-HPC GPU cores, with varying ratios depending on the intended workload. These cores will connect up to shared “high-bandwidth memory developed by Intel”.

The semiconductor company has announced what will be the 'largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet' in New Albany, Ohio, fighting the chip shortage stateside.

Once upon a time, you could watch a keynote presentation from any major computer chip company and rest easy in the confidence that the name “Apple” would never pass the lips of any presenter. The message always seemed to be, as per the classic Mad Men meme, “I don’t think of you at all.”

Intel has removed support for SGX (software guard extension) in 12th Generation Intel Core 11000 and 12000 processors, rendering modern PCs unable to playback Blu-ray disks in 4K resolution. This technical problem arises from the fact that Blu-ray disks require Digital Rights Management (DRM), which needs the presence of SGX to work.

In 2020, Apple managed the impossible: it made chipsets sexy. People actually talked about processors. But the release of the M1 did more than get public attention, it also shook up the whole computing industry. The chip helped Apple’s Macbooks deliver incredibleperformance and battery life — outstripping its competitors along the way.

Intel’s Alder Lake Intel Core i7-12800H processor continues to impress, with the CPU showcasing impressive performance levels when put up against Apple’s M1 Max chip. An insight into the CPU initially emerged in November when it was tested in a Gigabyte Aorus 15 YE4 laptop. The Alder Lake chip performed extremely well when compared to Intel’s Core i7-11800H and AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processors.

With its switch to its own M1 series of processors, Apple is closing in on the market share of its larger PC rivals in the notebook space, according to the latest research data. Apple’s MacBook Air and MacBook Pro now command 24% of the household laptop market, which places it slightly behind Dell’s 27% and approximately 10 points ahead of Acer and Lenovo.

Apple's comparisons between the new MacBook Pro models and other high-performance notebooks used the MSI GP66 Leopard for some of its comparisons. Here's how MSI's notebook and the 14-inch MacBook Pro compare across a broader selection of features.

When it comes to Intel's recent manufacturing problems, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger places the blame squarely on his predecessors — many of whom he notes were not engineers deeply steeped in chip technology, as he is.

A request made by Intel to overturn an order requiring the chip maker to pay $2.18bn to VLSI Technology has been rejected by a US judge. As reported by Reuters, US District Judge Alan Albright in Waco, Texas has denied the company's motion for a new trial in a recent sealed order.

In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. In it, he noted that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development – he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley – he said that for the next decade...