The first processors to include Intel's ninth-generation Core branding came out last year with a limited line-up: just a handful of high-end desktop processors in the Coffee Lake family. Today, the company has unveiled a bumper crop of new ninth-gen chips. There's a set of H-series processors for laptops and a complete range of desktop processors across the Celeron, Pentium, and Core brands, from i3 all the way to i9.

Yesterday brought a dramatic end to a long-running series of lawsuits between Apple and Qualcomm – with Intel news following close behind. Here’s a look at likely happened between Apple, Qualcomm and Intel …

Several reports have suggested that the iPhone won’t feature support for true 5G until 2020, and now Intel itself has addressed those concerns. As reported by Reuters, Intel executives have said they don’t expect 5G modem chips to be ready for consumer phones until 2020. Sandra Rivera, head of Intel’s networking chip business, said at an event this week that 5G modems won’t appear in consumer “products in the market” until 2020. This suggests that while Intel might have the technology ready at some point this year, it won’t be early enough for its 5G modems to appear in 2019 phones.

On Nov. 27, the world’s second-largest semiconductor chip maker, Intel, was granted a patent for a processing system that mines Bitcoin but utilizes more “energy-efficient hardware accelerators.” According to the patent called the “Optimized SHA256 Datapath,” the newly invented “high-performance” Bitcoin mining process could reduce overall power consumption by 15 percent.

Although Intel added more cores to its previous-gen Coffee Lake processors in an effort to keep up with AMD's Ryzen CPUs, struggles with its 10nm node obviously delayed a more significant response. The company's ninth-generation Core processors, otherwise known as the Coffee Lake refresh, represent another step forward in a contentious battle for desktop supremacy.

Intel unveiled a range of new processors aimed at the performance-desktop segment today. For the mainstream market, there are three new K-series overclockable chips branded as ninth-generation parts; seven new Core X-series chips are launching for the high-end desktop market, and for those who need still more performance, there's an overclockable Xeon chip.

Intel now offers SSD performance by the inch.

Intel's CEO, Brian Krzanich, resigned on Thursday, according to an announcement by the company. CFO Bob Swan will take over as interim CEO, according to the release. Intel said that it found that Krzanich had a "past consensual relationship with an Intel employee" that ended up being a "violation" of company policies. Krzanich had been an Intel employee since 1982. He first became CEO in 2013.

Apple customers waiting for a MacBook Pro with 32 gigabytes of memory may have to wait until 2019 before they can buy the notebook, after Intel's warning that its 10nm "Cannon Lake" processors won't be shipping in high volumes in 2018, pushing the wider availability of the chip into 2019.

Chip giant Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) currently dominates the market for processors that go into notebook and desktop computers, but its last attempt to become a key vendor of applications processors for smartphones and tablets failed miserably. Intel also tried to enter the wearable computing market by buying smartwatch maker Basis, but that didn't seem to end well, either, as the company laid off most of the members of its wearable computing group.

A report from Bloomberg this week has made public something that should already have been apparent to tech industry observers: Apple is planning to replace Intel processors in Mac computers with its own chips starting sometime around 2020. The two California companies have enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership ever since Apple made the switch to Intel CPUs with the 2006 MacBook Pro and iMac, but recent trends have made the breakup between them inevitable.

Despite being de facto leader of processors for desktops and laptops, Intel never made a large impression in the smartphone SoC market. The company spent around $10 billion attempting to compete with Qualcomm and other companies, but ultimately gave up in 2016. According to The Wall Street Journal, Intel is reportedly looking into purchasing Broadcom, assuming Broadcom's hostile takeover of Qualcomm works out.

There was "no indication that any of these vulnerabilities had been exploited by malicious actors," the chipmaker said. Intel has confirmed to Rep. Greg Walden that the company withheld information about security weaknesses in its computer chips from U.S. national security officials until after news of the vulnerabilities leaked out online.

Intel has already started looking for other Spectre-like flaws, but it won't be able to move on from the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities anytime soon. A team of security researchers from NVIDIA and Princeton University have discovered new ways to exploit Meltdown and Spectre outside of those idenfitied in the past. The researchers developed a tool to explore how else cyber criminals could take advantage of the CPU flaws and found new techniques that could be used to extract sensitive info like passwords from devices.

Linus Torvalds is not happy about the patches that Intel has developed to protect the Linux kernel from the Spectre and Linux flaws. In a posting on the Linux kernel mailing list, the Linux creator criticised differences in the way that Intel approached patches for the Meltdown and Spectre flaws. He said of the patches: "They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense."

Intel hasn’t had the best of times recently. Meltdown and Spectre security flaws have helped reveal fundamental issues with processor designs over the past 20 years, and the software updates to protect PCs will have performance impacts. Even as I write this, it’s still not clear to anyone exactly how bad these performance impacts will be for older desktop systems, or how significant they’ll be to server-based cloud platforms. It’s all a bit of a mess, and Intel hasn’t helped with its lack of transparency. It’s time for Intel to stop hiding behind cleverly worded statements.

If the last week has led you to be wary of having an Intel CPU powering your PC then you might want to get excited, because it seems like AMD might have started actually making CPUs you’d want instead of having Intel inside. It started last year with the announcement of Ryzen desktop CPUs. We found them to be cheaper and faster than comparably priced CPUs from Intel. Then late in the fall AMD announced a new line of mobile-based APUs—which is what they call their CPUs with integrated graphics.

Back in November, longtime rivals Intel and AMD shocked the computing world when the two companies announced that they’d be teaming up to create laptop chips that combined Intel’s Core line of processors with AMD’s Radeon graphics. And now at CES 2018, the first fruits of that partnership have been revealed, in the form of a pair of Intel Core i5 and i7 chips powered by discrete AMD Radeon RX Vega M GPUs. Along with the processor and GPU, each unit also has 4GB of HMB2 VRAM onboard, which Intel says should help drastically save space internally for laptops while increasing battery life.

Intel is facing at least three class-action lawsuits over massive security vulnerabilities in its computer chips that came to light this week. The lawsuits were filed in California, Oregon and Indiana, according The Guardian. The three cases focus on the delay in Intel disclosing the Meltdown and Spectre cyber-flaws, which make it and others firms' chips vulnerable to hackers.

Tech companies are still working overtime on patching two critical vulnerabilities in computer chips that were revealed this week. The flaws, dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” could let hackers get hold of passwords, encryption keys, and other sensitive information from a computer’s core memory via malicious apps running on devices. How many chips are affected? The number is something of a moving target.