Enlarge / Intel's Core i9-13900K. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For several months, Intel has been investigating reports that high-end 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs (mainly, but not exclusively, the Core i9-13900K and 14900K) were crashing during gameplay. Intel partially addressed the issue by insisting that third-party motherboard makers adhere to Intel's recommended default power settings in their motherboards, but the company said it was still working to identify the root cause of the problem.

The company announced yesterday that it has wrapped up its investigation and that a microcode update to fix the problem should be shipping out to motherboard makers in mid-August "following full validation." Microcode updates like this generally require a BIOS update, so exactly when the patch hits your specific motherboard will be up to the company that made it.

Intel says that an analysis of defective processors "confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor." In other words, the CPU is receiving too much power, which is degrading stability over time.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 9000 launch lineup. (credit: AMD)

AMD has released more information about its next-generation Ryzen 9000 processors and their underlying Zen 5 CPU architecture this week ahead of their launch at the end of July. The company reiterated some of the high-level performance claims it made last month—low- to mid-double-digit performance increases over Zen 4 in both single- and multi-threaded tasks. But AMD also bragged about the chips' power efficiency compared to Ryzen 7000, pointing out that they would reduce power usage despite increasing performance.

Prioritizing power efficiency

AMD said that it has lowered the default power limits for three of the four Ryzen 9000 processors—the Ryzen 5 9600X, the Ryzen 7 9700X, and the Ryzen 9 7900X—compared to the Ryzen 7000 versions of those same chips. Despite the lower default power limit, all three of those chips still boast double-digit performance improvements over their predecessors. AMD also says that Ryzen 9000 CPU temperatures have been reduced by up to 7º Celsius compared to Ryzen 7000 chips at the same settings.

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  Ryzen 9000's low-double-digit performance gains are coming despite the fact that the company has lowered most of its chips' default TDPs. These TDP settings determine how much power one of AMD's CPUs can use (though not necessarily how much they will use). [credit: AMD ]

It's worth noting that we generally tested the original Ryzen 7000 CPUs at multiple power levels, and for most chips—most notably the 7600X and 7700X—we found that the increased TDP levels didn't help performance all that much in the first place. The TDP lowering in the Ryzen 9000 may be enabled partly by architectural improvements or a newer manufacturing process, but AMD already had some headroom to lower those power usage numbers without affecting performance too much. TDP is also best considered as a power limit rather than the actual amount of power that a CPU will use for any given workload, even when fully maxed out.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

As the Intel Mac era has wound down over the last couple of years, we've been painstakingly tracking the amount of software support that each outgoing model is getting. We did this to establish, with over 20 years' worth of hard data, whether Intel Mac owners were getting short shrift as Apple shifted its focus to Apple Silicon hardware and to software that leveraged Apple Silicon-exclusive capabilities.

So far, we've found that owners of Intel Macs made in the mid-to-late 2010s are definitely getting fewer major macOS updates and fewer years' worth of security updates than owners of Intel Macs made in the late 2000s and early 2010s but that these systems are still getting more generous support than old PowerPC Macs did after Apple switched to Intel's processors.

The good news with the macOS 15 Sequoia release is that Apple is dropping very few Intel Mac models this year, a much-needed pause that slows the steady acceleration of support-dropping we've seen over the last few macOS releases.

Enlarge / A high-level breakdown of Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake's changes while reverting others. (credit: Intel)

Given its recent manufacturing troubles, a resurgent AMD , an incursion from Qualcomm , and Apple’s shift from customer to competitor , it’s been a rough few years for Intel’s processors. Computer buyers have more viable options than they have in many years, and in many ways the company’s Meteor Lake architecture was more interesting as a technical achievement than it was as an upgrade for previous-generation Raptor Lake processors.

But even given all of that, Intel still provides the vast majority of PC CPUs—nearly four-fifths of all computer CPUs sold are Intel’s, according to recent analyst estimates from Canalys . The company still casts a long shadow, and what it does still helps set the pace for the rest of the industry.

Enter its next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Lunar Lake. We’ve known about Lunar Lake for a while—Intel reminded everyone it was coming when Qualcomm upstaged it during Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC reveal—but this month at Computex the company is going into more detail ahead of availability sometime in Q3 of 2024.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 9 AI 300 series is a new chip and a new naming scheme. (credit: AMD)

Less than two years ago, AMD announced that it was overhauling its numbering scheme for laptop processors. Each digit in its four-digit CPU model numbers picked up a new meaning which, with the help of a detailed reference sheet, promised to inform buyers of exactly what it was they were buying.

One potential issue with this, as we pointed out at the time, was that this allowed AMD to change over the first and most important of those four digits every single year that it decided to re-release a processor, regardless of whether that chip actually included substantive improvements or not. Thus a “Ryzen 7730U” from 2023 would look two generations newer than a Ryzen 5800U from 2021, despite being essentially identical.

AMD is partially correcting this today by abandoning the self-described “decoder ring” naming system and resetting to something more conventional.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

On Thursday, several major tech companies, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, Meta, AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and Broadcom, announced the formation of the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group to develop a new interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips in data centers. The group aims to create an alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology, which links together multiple servers that power today's AI applications like ChatGPT .

The beating heart of AI these days lies in GPUs , which can perform massive numbers of matrix multiplications—necessary for running neural network architecture—in parallel. But one GPU often isn't enough for complex AI systems. NVLink can connect multiple AI accelerator chips within a server or across multiple servers. These interconnects enable faster data transfer and communication between the accelerators, allowing them to work together more efficiently on complex tasks like training large AI models.

This linkage is a key part of any modern AI data center system, and whoever controls the link standard can effectively dictate which hardware the tech companies will use. Along those lines, the UALink group seeks to establish an open standard that allows multiple companies to contribute and develop AI hardware advancements instead of being locked into Nvidia's proprietary ecosystem. This approach is similar to other open standards, such as Compute Express Link (CXL)—created by Intel in 2019—which provides high-speed, high-capacity connections between CPUs and devices or memory in data centers.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is using its new Surface launch and this week’s Build developer conference as a platform to launch its new “Copilot+" PC initiative, which comes with specific hardware requirements that systems will need to meet to be eligible. Copilot+ PCs will be able to handle some AI-accelerated workloads like chatbots and image generation locally instead of relying on the cloud, but new hardware will generally be required to run these workloads quickly and power efficiently.

At a minimum, systems will need 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, to accommodate both the memory requirements and the on-disk storage requirements needed for things like large language models (LLMs; even so-called “small language models” like Microsoft’s Phi-3, still use several billion parameters). Microsoft says that all of the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite-powered PCs being announced today will come with the Copilot+ features pre-installed, and that they'll begin shipping on June 18th.

But the biggest new requirement, and the blocker for virtually every Windows PC in use today, will be for an integrated neural processing unit, or NPU. Microsoft requires an NPU with performance rated at 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), a high-level performance figure that Microsoft, Qualcomm, Apple, and others use for NPU performance comparisons. Right now, that requirement can only be met by a single chip in the Windows PC ecosystem, one that isn't even quite available yet: Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus , launching in the new Surface and a number of PCs from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, Acer, and other major PC OEMs in the next couple of months. All of those chips have NPUs capable of 45 TOPS, just a shade more than Microsoft's minimum requirement.