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      Intel, Microsoft discuss plans to run Copilot locally on PCs instead of in the cloud

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 2 days ago - 18:45 · 1 minute

    The basic requirements for an AI PC, at least when it's running Windows.

    Enlarge / The basic requirements for an AI PC, at least when it's running Windows. (credit: Intel)

    Microsoft said in January that 2024 would be the year of the "AI PC," and we know that AI PCs will include a few hardware components that most Windows systems currently do not include—namely, a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) and Microsoft's new Copilot key for keyboards. But so far we haven't heard a whole lot about what a so-called AI PC will actually do for users.

    Microsoft and Intel are starting to talk about a few details as part of an announcement from Intel about a new AI PC developer program that will encourage software developers to leverage local hardware to build AI features into their apps.

    The main news comes from Tom's Hardware , confirming that AI PCs would be able to run "more elements of Copilot," Microsoft's AI chatbot assistant, "locally on the client." Currently, Copilot relies on server-side processing even for small requests, introducing lag that is tolerable if you're making a broad request for information but less so if all you want to do is change a setting or get basic answers. Running generative AI models locally could also improve user privacy, making it possible to take advantage of AI-infused software without automatically sending information to a company that will use it for further model training.

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      Entre la Chine et les États-Unis, la guerre des puces est déclarée

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · 4 days ago - 12:46

    Intel Chine Cpu

    En réponse au CHIPS Act, la Chine a décidé d'interdire l'usage des CPU Intel et AMD dans les ordinateurs et les serveurs de ses fonctionnaires. Et ce n'est peut-être que le début.
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      AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 21 March - 17:20

    AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1

    Enlarge (credit: AMD)

    Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology . While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD's "Fluid Motion Frames," which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.

    Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1 , which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available "later this year" in games whose developers choose to implement it.

    Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia's equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.

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      Intel receives $8.5 billion from US for expanding high-end fab capacity

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 20 March - 13:35

    Intel sign

    Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg )

    Intel will receive $8.5 billion in direct funding and $11 billion in loans from the US government to expand its capacity to make high-end chips as it seeks to reinvent itself as a national champion in the sector and compete with the likes of Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung.

    US President Joe Biden will travel to Intel’s site in Chandler, Arizona, on Wednesday to announce the package, which will go toward building new facilities for the company in the south-western state, as well as in Ohio, New Mexico and Oregon.

    Biden’s intervention in Arizona—one of a handful of swing states that will decide the US presidential election pitting him against Donald Trump—comes as the Democratic president is trying to boost his languishing approval ratings on the economy.

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      Intel revives the MHz race with 6.2 GHz power-guzzling Core i9-14900KS

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 14 March - 19:08 · 1 minute

    Intel revives the MHz race with 6.2 GHz power-guzzling Core i9-14900KS

    Enlarge (credit: Intel)

    PC enthusiasts who have been around the block a couple of times might remember the stretch from the '90s into the early 2000s when ever-increasing clock speeds were Intel's primary metric for increasing processor performance. AMD participated, too—it managed to beat Intel to 1 GHz in what was considered a major coup at the time—but Intel's Pentium 4 processors specifically prioritized boosting clock speeds at the cost of instructions-per-clock.

    Today, the company is ever so briefly revisiting those old days with the $689 Core i9-14900KS, its newest flagship desktop processor. The i9-14900KS can hit speeds of 6.2 GHz out of the box, a small push past the last-generation i9-13900KS and the i9-14900K that topped out at 6.0 GHz. Like other recent high-end Intel desktop chips, it also features Intel's " Adaptive Boost Technology ," which will allow the chip to increase its power consumption and performance until it hits 100° Celsius.

    This kind of clock speed boosting is both impressive and impractical. On the one hand, Intel has managed to push clock speeds even higher without changing its architecture or manufacturing process, a culmination of years of iteration across the 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation processor families. On the impractical side, the i9-14900KS can use a ridiculous amount of power to achieve marginally faster performance, reminding us of the laws of physics that helped shut down the megahertz wars in the first place.

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      Contact publication

      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · Wednesday, 28 February - 21:38 edit · 1 minute

    Intel's previously-unannounced Intel 10A (analogous to 1nm) will enter production/development in late 2027, marking the arrival of the company's first 1nm node, and its 14A (1.4nm) node will enter production in 2026. The company is also working to create fully autonomous AI-powered fabs in the future. Tom's Hardware: Intel's Keyvan Esfarjani, the company's EVP and GM and Foundry Manufacturing and Supply, held a very insightful session that covered the company's latest developments and showed how the roadmap unfolds over the coming years. Here, we can see two charts, with the first outlining the company's K-WSPW (thousands of wafer starts per week) capacity for Intel's various process nodes. Notably, capacity typically indicates how many wafers can be started, but not the total output -- output varies based on yields. You'll notice there isn't a label for the Y-axis, which would give us a direct read on Intel's production volumes. However, this does give us a solid idea of the proportionality of Intel's planned node production over the next several years. Intel did not specify the arrival date of its coming 14A node in its previous announcements, but here, the company indicates it will begin production of the Intel 14A node in 2026. Even more importantly, Intel will begin production/development of its as-yet-unannounced 10A node in late 2027, filling out its roster of nodes produced with EUV technology. Intel's 'A' suffix in its node naming convention represents Angstroms, and 10 Angstroms converts to 1nm, meaning this is the company's first 1nm-class node. Intel hasn't shared any details about the 10A/1nm node but has told us that it classifies a new node as at least having a double-digit power/performance improvement. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has told us the cutoff for a new node is around a 14% to 15% improvement, so we can expect that 10A will have at least that level of improvement over the 14A node. (For example, the difference between Intel 7 and Intel 4 was a 15% improvement.)

    Read more of this story at Slashdot.

    Intel Puts 1nm Process (10A) on the Roadmap For 2027
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      Intel will make chips for Microsoft

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 22 February - 14:35

    Intel CEO speaking

    Enlarge / Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger speaks during the "AI Everywhere" event on December 14, 2023, in New York, NY. (credit: Intel Corporation )

    US chip company Intel will make high-end semiconductors for Microsoft, the companies announced, as it seeks to compete with TSMC and Samsung to supply the next generation of silicon used in artificial intelligence for customers around the world.

    Chief executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event on Wednesday that Intel is set to “rebuild Western manufacturing at scale,” buoyed by geopolitical concerns in Washington about the need to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US.

    Since Gelsinger took the helm three years ago, Intel has been attempting to reinvent itself as a foundry business, building chips designed by other companies, regaining an edge in making the most advanced semiconductors. Demand for them is soaring, driven by the rise of generative AI.

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      Your current PC probably doesn’t have an AI processor, but your next one might

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 7 February - 20:01 · 1 minute

    Intel's Core Ultra chips are some of the first x86 PC processors to include built-in NPUs. Software support will slowly follow.

    Enlarge / Intel's Core Ultra chips are some of the first x86 PC processors to include built-in NPUs. Software support will slowly follow. (credit: Intel)

    When it announced the new Copilot key for PC keyboards last month, Microsoft declared 2024 "the year of the AI PC." On one level, this is just an aspirational PR-friendly proclamation, meant to show investors that Microsoft intends to keep pushing the AI hype cycle that has put it in competition with Apple for the title of most valuable publicly traded company .

    But on a technical level, it is true that PCs made and sold in 2024 and beyond will generally include AI and machine-learning processing capabilities that older PCs don't. The main thing is the neural processing unit (NPU), a specialized block on recent high-end Intel and AMD CPUs that can accelerate some kinds of generative AI and machine-learning workloads more quickly (or while using less power) than the CPU or GPU could.

    Qualcomm's Windows PCs were some of the first to include an NPU, since the Arm processors used in most smartphones have included some kind of machine-learning acceleration for a few years now (Apple's M-series chips for Macs all have them, too, going all the way back to 2020's M1). But the Arm version of Windows is a insignificantly tiny sliver of the entire PC market; x86 PCs with Intel's Core Ultra chips, AMD's Ryzen 7040/8040-series laptop CPUs, or the Ryzen 8000G desktop CPUs will be many mainstream PC users' first exposure to this kind of hardware.

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      Intel’s CPU branding was already confusing, and today’s new CPUs made it worse

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 8 January - 23:00 · 1 minute

    Intel's Core chips are here, and they have dropped the i and the 14th-generation branding. But unlike the Core Ultra, they are fundamentally "14th-generation" processors.

    Enlarge / Intel's Core chips are here, and they have dropped the i and the 14th-generation branding. But unlike the Core Ultra, they are fundamentally "14th-generation" processors. (credit: Intel)

    Intel usually uses CES to fill out the processor lineups that it launched late the year before, and that hasn't changed this year. The company has announced a full range of 14th-generation Core desktop CPUs, some new 14th-generation Core CPUs for high-end gaming and workstation laptops, and the first non-Ultra chips to bear the new "Core 3/5/7" branding that sheds the generational branding entirely. We'll go over the updates shortly.

    But my main takeaway, as a long-time observer of processor branding, is that Intel had made its new naming system even more confusing for people who actually want to know what kind of processor they're getting.

    Intel said in October that it was sticking with the 14th-generation branding for its new desktop CPUs because they were so similar to the 13th-generation chips (they all use the same underlying Raptor Lake architecture, itself a minor revision of the 12th-gen Alder Lake). It makes some degree of sense that it's being extended to the HX-series laptop chips, because these have always been desktop silicon repackaged for laptop use. So far so good.

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