Intel plans to sponsor the Olympics through 2024 in the company's latest bid to show off its technology through high-profile sports events. The chipmaker said it will partner with the International Olympic Committee to bring Intel's technology, such as virtual reality, 360-degree video, artificial intelligence and drones, to enhance the Olympic Games.

Unfixed Skylake and Kaby Lake processors could, in some situations, dangerously misbehave when hyper-threading is enabled. Disable hyper-threading immediately in BIOS/UEFI to work around the problem. Read this advisory for instructions about an Intel-provided fix.

Power Consumption & The Verdict. After comparing Intel's new Core i7-7800X and AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 in productivity workloads, we're back by popular request to learn whether Intel still takes the cake when it comes to high-end gaming.

Samsung announced its quarterly results yesterday, and became the most profitable company in the world. However, the company broke a few other records as well. It ended Intel’s 24-year reign as the largest semiconductor-based chipmaker in the world. Samsung has now leapfrogged Intel by posting a higher revenue as well as operating profits during Q2 2017.

It seems some government customers can request Intel's always-on Management Engine (ME) 'master controller' for its CPUs to be disabled.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. surged in early trading after a report that Intel Corp., its only remaining rival in the market for personal computer processors, has a flaw in its products that makes commonly used operating systems vulnerable to hackers.

There’s small screwups and big screwups. Here is tremendously huge screwup: Virtually all Intel processors produced in the last decade have a major security hole that could allow “normal user programs—from database applications to JavaScript in web browsers—to discern to some extent the layout or contents of protected kernel memory areas,” the Register reported on Tuesday.

Both Windows and Linux are receiving significant security updates that can, in the worst case, cause performance to drop by half, to defend against a problem that as yet hasn't been fully disclosed. Patches to the Linux kernel have been trickling in over the past few weeks. Microsoft has been testing the Windows updates in the Insider program since November, and it is expected to put the alterations into mainstream Windows builds on Patch Tuesday next week. Microsoft's Azure has scheduled maintenance next week, and Amazon's AWS is scheduled for maintenance on Friday—presumably related.

Linus Torvalds, the inventor and founder of the Linux operating system, is not known for holding back strong opinions he has about computers, and he is now one of the loudest voices critical of Intel's handling of "Meltdown," the flaw revealed Wednesday that could enable an attacker to steal confidential information including passwords.

In case you’ve been blissfully unaware — I’m jealous — this week we learned about two different exploits discovered in just about every computer ever. (Or at least since 1995.) Called Spectre and Meltdown, the vulnerabilities leave what you thought was secure information wide open to hackers. And now we know that includes all of Apple’s Mac and iOS devices. The company confirmed the affected devices in a blog post on Thursday.

Intel has been hit with at least three class-action lawsuits over the major processor vulnerabilities revealed this week. The flaws, called Meltdown and Spectre, exist within virtually all modern processors and could allow hackers to steal sensitive data although no data breaches have been reported yet. While Spectre affects processors made by a variety of firms, Meltdown appears to primarily affect Intel processors made since 1995.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.