Enlarge / The Framework Laptop 13. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Since Framework showed off its first prototypes in February 2021 , we've generally been fans of the company's modular, repairable, upgradeable laptops.

Not that the company's hardware releases to date have been perfect—each Framework Laptop 13 model has had quirks and flaws that range from minor to quite significant , and the Laptop 16's upsides struggle to balance its downsides. But the hardware mostly does a good job of functioning as a regular laptop while being much more tinkerer-friendly than your typical MacBook, XPS, or ThinkPad.

But even as it builds new upgrades for its systems, expands sales of refurbished and B-stock hardware as budget options , and promotes the re-use of its products via external enclosures , Framework has struggled with the other side of computing longevity and sustainability: providing up-to-date software.

Enlarge / An Intel handout photo of the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator. (credit: Intel )

On Tuesday, Intel revealed a new AI accelerator chip called Gaudi 3 at its Vision 2024 event in Phoenix. With strong claimed performance while running large language models (like those that power ChatGPT ), the company has positioned Gaudi 3 as an alternative to Nvidia's H100 , a popular data center GPU that has been subject to shortages , though apparently that is easing somewhat .

Compared to Nvidia's H100 chip, Intel projects a 50 percent faster training time on Gaudi 3 for both OpenAI's GPT-3 175B LLM and the 7-billion parameter version of Meta's Llama 2 . In terms of inference (running the trained model to get outputs), Intel claims that its new AI chip delivers 50 percent faster performance than H100 for Llama 2 and Falcon 180B , which are both relatively popular open-weights models.

Intel is targeting the H100 because of its high market share , but the chip isn't Nvidia's most powerful AI accelerator chip in the pipeline. Announcements of the H200 and the Blackwell B200 have since surpassed the H100 on paper, but neither of those chips is out yet (the H200 is expected in the second quarter of 2024—basically any day now).

Enlarge / Intel's high-end Core i9-13900K and 14900K are reportedly having crashing problems in some games. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you own a recent high-end Intel desktop CPU and you've been running into weird game crashes lately, you're not alone.

Scattered reports from Core i9-13900K and i9-14900K users over the last couple of months have pointed to processor power usage as a possible source of crashes even in relatively undemanding games like Fortnite . Games like Hogwarts Legacy , Remnant 2 , Alan Wake 2 , Horizon: Zero Dawn , The Last of Us Part 1 , and Outpost: Infinity Siege have also reportedly been affected ; the problem primarily seems to affect titles made with Epic's Unreal Engine. Intel said in a statement to ZDNet Korea (via The Verge ) that it's looking into the problems, escalating it from an "isolated issue" to something that may be more widespread and could require a more systemic fix.

Related CPUs like the i9-13900KF, i9-14900KF, i9-13900KS, and i9-14900KS may be affected, too, since they're all the same basic silicon. Some user reports have also indicated that the i7-13700K and i7-14700K series may also be affected.

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.

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.

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.

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.