An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The 12VO power standard (PDF), developed by Intel, is designed to reduce the number of power cables needed to power a modern PC, ultimately reducing cost. While industry uptake of the standard has been slow, a new slew of products from MSI indicates that 12VO is gaining traction.

MSI is gearing up with two 12VO-compliant motherboards, covering both Intel and AMD platforms, and a 12VO Power Supply that it's releasing simultaneously: The Pro B650 12VO WiFi, Pro H610M 12VO, and MSI 12VO PSU power supply are all 'coming soon,' which presumably means they'll officially launch at CES 2024. HardwareLux got a pretty good look at MSI's offerings during its EHA (European Hardware Awards) tech tour, including the 'Project Zero' we covered earlier. One of the noticeable changes is the absence of a 24-pin ATX connector, as the ATX12VO connectors use only ten-pin connectors. The publications also saw a 12VO-compliant FSP power supply in a compact system with a thick graphics card.

A couple of years ago, we reported on FSP 650-watt and 750-watt SFX 12VO power supply. Apart from that, there is a 1x 6-pin ATX12VO termed 'extra board connector' according to its manual and a 1x 8-pin 12V power connector for the CPU. There are two smaller 4-pin connectors that will provide the 5V power needed for SATA drives. It is likely each of these connectors provides power to two SATA-based drives. Intel proposed the ATX12VO standard several years ago, but adoption has been slow until now. This standard is designed to provide 12v exclusively, completely removing a direct 3.3v and 5v supply. The success of the new standard will depend on the wide availability of the motherboard and power supplies.

Velcroman1 writes: Intel's new generation of "Meteor Lake" mobile CPUs herald a new age of "AI PCs," computers that can handle inference workloads such as generating images or transcribing audio without an Internet connection. Officially named "Intel Core Ultra" processors, the chips are the first to feature an NPU (neural processing unit) that's purpose-built to handle AI tasks. But there are few ways to actually test this feature at present: software will need to be rewritten to specifically direct operations at the NPU.

Intel has steered testers toward its Open Visual Inference and Neural Network Optimization (OpenVINO) AI toolkit. With those benchmarks, Tom's Hardware tested the new Intel chips against AMD -- and surprisingly, AMD chips often came out on top, even on these hand-selected benchmarks. Clearly, optimization will take some time!

Intel unveiled new computer chips on Thursday, including Gaudi3, an AI chip for generative AI software. Gaudi3 will launch next year and will compete with rival chips from Nvidia and AMD that power big and power-hungry AI models. From a report: The most prominent AI models, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, run on Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. It's one reason Nvidia stock has been up nearly 230% year-to-date while Intel shares are up 68%. And it's why companies like AMD and, now Intel, have announced chips that they hope will attract AI companies away from Nvidia's dominant position in the market.

While the company was light on details, Gaudi3 will compete with Nvidia's H100, the main choice among companies that build huge farms of the chips to power AI applications, and AMD's forthcoming MI300X, when it starts shipping to customers in 2024. Intel has been building Gaudi chips since 2019, when it bought a chip developer called Habana Labs.

Overclocking AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series blows a fuse, indicating modification. However, AMD has told Tom's Hardware that this does not automatically invalidate the warranty of these top-tier workstation CPUs. From the report: "Threadripper 7000 Series processors do contain a fuse that is blown when overclocking is enabled. To be clear, blowing this fuse does not void your warranty. Statements that enabling an overclocking/overvolting feature will 'void' the processor warranty are not correct. Per AMD's standard Terms of Sale, the warranty excludes any damage that results from overclocking/overvolting the processor. However, other unrelated issues could still qualify for warranty repair/replacement," an AMD representative told Tom's Hardware.

In summation, overclocking your Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000 or non-Pro processor will not void the warranty -- only damages directly resulting from overclocking will. As always, AMD isn't against overclocking. If it was, the chipmaker wouldn't advertise overclocking support as one of the features of the WRX90 and TRX50 platforms. Only OEM systems lack overclocking support.

Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event today that they will use AMD's newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X, as an alternative to Nvidia's expensive graphic processors. "If AMD's latest high-end chip is good enough for the technology companies and cloud service providers building and serving AI models when it starts shipping early next year, it could lower costs for developing AI models and put competitive pressure on Nvidia's surging AI chip sales growth," reports CNBC. From the report: "All of the interest is in big iron and big GPUs for the cloud," AMD CEO Lisa Su said Wednesday. AMD says the MI300X is based on a new architecture, which often leads to significant performance gains. Its most distinctive feature is that it has 192GB of a cutting-edge, high-performance type of memory known as HBM3, which transfers data faster and can fit larger AI models. Su directly compared the MI300X and the systems built with it to Nvidia's main AI GPU, the H100. "What this performance does is it just directly translates into a better user experience," Su said. "When you ask a model something, you'd like it to come back faster, especially as responses get more complicated."

The main question facing AMD is whether companies that have been building on Nvidia will invest the time and money to add another GPU supplier. "It takes work to adopt AMD," Su said. AMD on Wednesday told investors and partners that it had improved its software suite called ROCm to compete with Nvidia's industry standard CUDA software, addressing a key shortcoming that had been one of the primary reasons AI developers currently prefer Nvidia. Price will also be important. AMD didn't reveal pricing for the MI300X on Wednesday, but Nvidia's can cost around $40,000 for one chip, and Su told reporters that AMD's chip would have to cost less to purchase and operate than Nvidia's in order to persuade customers to buy it.

On Wednesday, AMD said it had already signed up some of the companies most hungry for GPUs to use the chip. Meta and Microsoft were the two largest purchasers of Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2023, according to a recent report from research firm Omidia. Meta said it will use MI300X GPUs for AI inference workloads such as processing AI stickers, image editing, and operating its assistant. Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott, said the company would offer access to MI300X chips through its Azure web service. Oracle's cloud will also use the chips. OpenAI said it would support AMD GPUs in one of its software products, called Triton, which isn't a big large language model like GPT but is used in AI research to access chip features.

"Researchers have identified a large number of bugs to do with the processing of images at boot time," writes longtime Slashdot reader jd. "This allows malicious code to be installed undetectably (since the image doesn't have to pass any validation checks) by appending it to the image. None of the current secure boot mechanisms are capable of blocking the attack." Ars Technica reports: LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux. The vulnerabilities are the product of almost a year's worth of work by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware. The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs. The researchers unveiled the attack on Wednesday at the Black Hat Security Conference in London.

As its name suggests, LogoFAIL involves logos, specifically those of the hardware seller that are displayed on the device screen early in the boot process, while the UEFI is still running. Image parsers in UEFIs from all three major IBVs are riddled with roughly a dozen critical vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed until now. By replacing the legitimate logo images with identical-looking ones that have been specially crafted to exploit these bugs, LogoFAIL makes it possible to execute malicious code at the most sensitive stage of the boot process, which is known as DXE, short for Driver Execution Environment. "Once arbitrary code execution is achieved during the DXE phase, it's game over for platform security," researchers from Binarly, the security firm that discovered the vulnerabilities, wrote in a whitepaper. "From this stage, we have full control over the memory and the disk of the target device, thus including the operating system that will be started." From there, LogoFAIL can deliver a second-stage payload that drops an executable onto the hard drive before the main OS has even started. The following video demonstrates a proof-of-concept exploit created by the researchers. The infected device -- a Gen 2 Lenovo ThinkCentre M70s running an 11th-Gen Intel Core with a UEFI released in June -- runs standard firmware defenses, including Secure Boot and Intel Boot Guard. LogoFAIL vulnerabilities are tracked under the following designations: CVE-2023-5058, CVE-2023-39538, CVE-2023-39539, and CVE-2023-40238. However, this list is currently incomplete.

"A non-exhaustive list of companies releasing advisories includes AMI (PDF), Insyde, Phoenix, and Lenovo," reports Ars. "People who want to know if a specific device is vulnerable should check with the manufacturer."

"The best way to prevent LogoFAIL attacks is to install the UEFI security updates that are being released as part of Wednesday's coordinated disclosure process. Those patches will be distributed by the manufacturer of the device or the motherboard running inside the device. It's also a good idea, when possible, to configure UEFIs to use multiple layers of defenses. Besides Secure Boot, this includes both Intel Boot Guard and, when available, Intel BIOS Guard. There are similar additional defenses available for devices running AMD or ARM CPUs."

Aaron Klotz, reporting for Tom's Hardware: Intel recently published a new playbook titled "Core Truths" that put AMD under direct fire for utilizing its older Zen 2 CPU architecture in its latest Ryzen 7000 mobile series CPU product stack. Intel later removed the document, but we have the slides below. The playbook is designed to educate customers about AMD's product stack and even calls it "snake oil."

Intel's playbook specifically talks about AMD's latest Ryzen 5 7520U, criticizing the fact it features AMD's Zen 2 architecture from 2019 even though it sports a Ryzen 7000 series model name. Further on in the playbook, the company accuses AMD of selling "half-truths" to unsuspecting customers, stressing that the future of younger kid's education needs the best CPU performance from the latest and greatest CPU technologies made today. To make its point clear, Intel used images in its playbook referencing "snake oil" and images of used car salesmen.

The playbook also criticizes AMD's new naming scheme for its Ryzen 7000 series mobile products, quoting ArsTechnica: "As a consumer, you're still intended to see the number 7 and think, 'Oh, this is new.'" Intel also published CPU benchmark comparisons of the 7520U against its 13th Gen Core i5-1335U to back up its points. Unsurprisingly, the 1335U was substantially faster than the Zen 2 counterpart.

"As of this year, all new Mac computers are powered by Apple's own silicon, ending the company's 15-plus years of reliance on Intel," according to a new report from CNBC.

"Apple's silicon team has grown to thousands of engineers working across labs all over the world, including in Israel, Germany, Austria, the U.K. and Japan. Within the U.S., the company has facilities in Silicon Valley, San Diego and Austin, Texas..." The latest A17 Pro announced in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in September enables major leaps in features like computational photography and advanced rendering for gaming. "It was actually the biggest redesign in GPU architecture and Apple silicon history," said Kaiann Drance, who leads marketing for the iPhone. "We have hardware accelerated ray tracing for the first time. And we have mesh shading acceleration, which allows game developers to create some really stunning visual effects." That's led to the development of iPhone-native versions from Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage, The Division Resurgence and Capcom's Resident Evil 4.

Apple says the A17 Pro is the first 3-nanometer chip to ship at high volume. "The reason we use 3-nanometer is it gives us the ability to pack more transistors in a given dimension. That is important for the product and much better power efficiency," said the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji . "Even though we're not a chip company, we are leading the industry for a reason." Apple's leap to 3-nanometer continued with the M3 chips for Mac computers, announced in October. Apple says the M3 enables features like 22-hour battery life and, similar to the A17 Pro, boosted graphics performance...

In a major shift for the semiconductor industry, Apple turned away from using Intel's PC processors in 2020, switching to its own M1 chip inside the MacBook Air and other Macs. "It was almost like the laws of physics had changed," Ternus said. "All of a sudden we could build a MacBook Air that's incredibly thin and light, has no fan, 18 hours of battery life, and outperformed the MacBook Pro that we had just been shipping." He said the newest MacBook Pro with Apple's most advanced chip, the M3 Max, "is 11 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro we were making. And we were shipping that just two years ago." Intel processors are based on x86 architecture, the traditional choice for PC makers, with a lot of software developed for it. Apple bases its processors on rival Arm architecture, known for using less power and helping laptop batteries last longer.

Apple's M1 in 2020 was a proving point for Arm-based processors in high-end computers, with other big names like Qualcomm — and reportedly AMD and Nvidia — also developing Arm-based PC processors. In September, Apple extended its deal with Arm through at least 2040.
Since Apple first debuted its homegrown semiconductors in 2010 in the iPhone 4, other companies started pursuing their own custom semiconductor development, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.

CNBC reports that Apple is also reportedly working on its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip. Apple's Srouji wouldn't comment on "future technologies and products" but told CNBC "we care about cellular, and we have teams enabling that."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (an entity blacklisted in the U.S.) launched its new supercomputer based on the enhanced China-designed Sunway SW26010 Pro processors with 384 cores. Sunway's SW26010 Pro CPU not only packs more cores than its non-Pro SW26010 predecessor, but it more than quadrupled FP64 compute throughput due to microarchitectural and system architecture improvements, according to Chips and Cheese. However, while the manycore CPU is good on paper, it has several performance bottlenecks.

The first details of the manycore Sunway SW26010 Pro CPU and supercomputers that use it emerged back in 2021. Now, the company has showcased actual processors and disclosed more details about their architecture and design, which represent a significant leap in performance, recently at SC23. The new CPU is expected to enable China to build high-performance supercomputers based entirely on domestically developed processors. Each Sunway SW26010 Pro has a maximum FP64 throughput of 13.8 TFLOPS, which is massive. For comparison, AMD's 96-core EPYC 9654 has a peak FP64 performance of around 5.4 TFLOPS.

The SW26010 Pro is an evolution of the original SW26010, so it maintains the foundational architecture of its predecessor but introduces several key enhancements. The new SW26010 Pro processor is based on an all-new proprietary 64-bit RISC architecture and packs six core groups (CG) and a protocol processing unit (PPU). Each CG integrates 64 2-wide compute processing elements (CPEs) featuring a 512-bit vector engine as well as 256 KB of fast local store (scratchpad cache) for data and 16 KB for instructions; one management processing element (MPE), which is a superscalar out-of-order core with a vector engine, 32 KB/32 KB L1 instruction/data cache, 256 KB L2 cache; and a 128-bit DDR4-3200 memory interface.

Nvidia's fiscal third-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's predictions, with revenue growing 206% year over year. However, Nvidia shares are down after the company called for a negative impact in the next quarter due to export restrictions affecting sales in China and other countries. CNBC reports: Nvidia's revenue grew 206% year over year during the quarter ending Oct. 29, according to a statement. Net income, at $9.24 billion, or $3.71 per share, was up from $680 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The company's data center revenue totaled $14.51 billion, up 279% and more than the StreetAccount consensus of $12.97 billion. Half of the data center revenue came from cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, and the other from consumer internet entities and large companies, Nvidia said. Healthy uptake came from clouds that specialize in renting out GPUs to clients, Kress said on the call.

The gaming segment contributed $2.86 billion, up 81% and higher than the $2.68 billion StreetAccount consensus. With respect to guidance, Nvidia called for $20 billion in revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter. That implies nearly 231% revenue growth. [...] Nvidia faces obstacles, including competition from AMD and lower revenue because of export restrictions that can limit sales of its GPUs in China. But ahead of Tuesday report, some analysts were nevertheless optimistic.

This week the Microsoft Security Response Center celebrated the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates.

In a blog post they call the updates "an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world's approach to cybersecurity." Originating from the Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative announced this month. Each month, we deliver security updates on the second Tuesday, underscoring our pledge to cyber defense. As we commemorate this milestone, it's worth exploring the inception of Patch Tuesday and its evolution through the years, demonstrating our adaptability to new technology and emerging cyber threats...

Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner. Senior leaders of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at the time spearheaded the idea of a predictable schedule for patch releases, shifting from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence...

This led to a shift from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence. In addition to consolidating patch releases into a monthly schedule, we also organized the security update release notes into a consolidated location. Prior to this change, customers had to navigate through various Knowledge Base articles, making it difficult to find the information they needed to secure themselves. Recognizing the need for clarity and convenience, we provided a comprehensive overview of monthly releases. This change was pivotal at a time when not all updates were delivered through Windows Update, and customers needed a reliable source to find essential updates for various products.

Patch Tuesday has also influenced other vendors in the software and hardware spaces, leading to a broader industry-wide practice of synchronized security updates. This collaborative approach, especially with hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel, aims to provide a united front against vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture of our ecosystems. While the volume and complexity of updates have increased, so has the collaboration with the security community. Patch Tuesday has fostered better relationships with security researchers, leading to more responsible vulnerability disclosures and quicker responses to emerging threats...

As the landscape of security threats evolves, so does our strategy, but our core mission of safeguarding our customers remains unchanged.

The Top500 organization released its semi-annual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with the AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer retaining its spot at the top of the list with 1.194 Exaflop/s (EFlop/s) of performance, fending off a half-scale 585.34 Petaflop/s (PFlop/s) submission from the Argonne National Laboratory's Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer. From a report: Argonne's submission, which only employs half of the Aurora system, lands at the second spot on the Top500, unseating Japan's Fugaku as the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. Intel also made inroads with 20 new supercomputers based on its Sapphire Rapids CPUs entering the list, but AMD's EPYC continues to take over the Top500 as it now powers 140 systems on the list -- a 39% year-over-year increase.

Intel and Argonne are currently still working to bring Arora fully online for users in 2024. As such, the Aurora submission represented 10,624 Intel CPUs and 31,874 Intel GPUs working in concert to deliver 585.34 PFlop/s at a total of 24.69 megawatts (MW) of energy. In contrast, AMD's Frontier holds the performance title at 1.194 EFlop/s, which is more than twice the performance of Aurora, while consuming a comparably miserly 22.70 MW of energy (yes, that's less power for the full Frontier supercomputer than half of the Aurora system). Aurora did not land on the Green500, a list of the most power-efficient supercomputers, with this submission, but Frontier continues to hold eighth place on that list. However, Aurora is expected to eventually reach up to 2 EFlop/s of performance when it comes fully online. When complete, Auroroa will have 21,248 Xeon Max CPUs and 63,744 Max Series 'Ponte Vecchio' GPUs spread across 166 racks and 10,624 compute blades, making it the largest known single deployment of GPUs in the world. The system leverages HPE Cray EX â" Intel Exascale Compute Blades and uses HPE's Slingshot-11 networking interconnect.

Nvidia, the world's most valuable chipmaker, is updating its H100 artificial intelligence processor, adding more capabilities to a product that has fueled its dominance in the AI computing market. From a report: The new model, called the H200, will get the ability to use high-bandwidth memory, or HBM3e, allowing it to better cope with the large data sets needed for developing and implementing AI, Nvidia said Monday. Amazon's AWS, Alphabet's Google Cloud and Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure have all committed to using the new chip starting next year.

The current version of the Nvidia processor -- known as an AI accelerator -- is already in famously high demand. It's a prized commodity among technology heavyweights like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, who boast about their ability to get their hands on the chip. But the product is facing more competition: AMD is bringing its rival MI300 chip to market in the fourth quarter, and Intel claims that its Gaudi 2 model is faster than the H100. With the new product, Nvidia is trying to keep up with the size of data sets used to create AI models and services, it said. Adding the enhanced memory capability will make the H200 much faster at bombarding software with data -- a process that trains AI to perform tasks such as recognizing images and speech.

A a report from TechSpot says AMD has recently increased its market share in the CPU sector for desktops, laptops, and servers: According to Mercury Research (via Tom's Hardware), AMD gained 5.8% unit share in desktops, 3.8% in laptops, and 5.8% in servers. In terms of revenue share, Team Red gained 4.1% in desktops, 5.1% in laptops, and 1.7% in servers. The report does not mention competitors by name, but the global PC industry only has one other major CPU supplier, Intel, which has a major stake in all the market segments.

While Intel and AMD make x86 processors for PCs, Qualcomm offers Arm-based SoCs for Windows notebooks, but its market share is minuscule by comparison. So, while the report doesn't say anything about the market share of Intel or Qualcomm, it is fair to assume that most of AMD's gains came at Intel's expense.
Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD's remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. From a report: In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well. Under AMD's extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and "functionality updates as available."

For AMD users keeping a close eye on their driver releases, they'll likely recognize that AMD already began this process back in September -- though AMD hasn't officially documented the change until now. As of AMD's September Adrenaline 23.9 driver series, AMD split up the RDNA and GCN driver packages, and with that they have also split the driver branches between the two architectures. As a result, only RDNA cards are receiving new features and updates as part of AMD's mainline driver branch (currently 23.20), while the GCN cards have been parked on a maintenance driver branch - 23.19.

Officially, Intel's Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture died back in 2021, when the company shipped its last processors. But failed technology often dies a million little deaths. From a report: To name just a few: Itanium also died in 2013, when Intel effectively decided to stop improving it; in 2017, when the last new Itanium CPUs shipped; in 2020, when the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped getting updates; and in 2003, when AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn't break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications.

Itanium is dying another death in the next version of the Linux kernel. According to Phoronix, all code related to Itanium support is being removed from the kernel in the upcoming 6.7 release after several months of deliberation. Linus Torvalds removed some 65,219 lines of Itanium-supporting code in a commit earlier this week, giving the architecture a "well-earned retirement as planned."

Researchers have devised an attack that forces Apple's Safari browser to divulge passwords, Gmail message content, and other secrets by exploiting a side channel vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices. From a report: iLeakage, as the academic researchers have named the attack, is practical and requires minimal resources to carry out. It does, however, require extensive reverse-engineering of Apple hardware and significant expertise in exploiting a class of vulnerability known as a side channel, which leaks secrets based on clues left in electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or other manifestations of a targeted system. The side channel in this case is speculative execution, a performance enhancement feature found in modern CPUs that has formed the basis of a wide corpus of attacks in recent years. The nearly endless stream of exploit variants has left chip makers -- primarily Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD -- scrambling to devise mitigations.

The researchers implement iLeakage as a website. When visited by a vulnerable macOS or iOS device, the website uses JavaScript to surreptitiously open a separate website of the attacker's choice and recover site content rendered in a pop-up window. The researchers have successfully leveraged iLeakage to recover YouTube viewing history, the content of a Gmail inbox -- when a target is logged in -- and a password as it's being autofilled by a credential manager. Once visited, the iLeakage site requires about five minutes to profile the target machine and, on average, roughly another 30 seconds to extract a 512-bit secret, such as a 64-character string.

Qualcomm unveiled a new laptop processor designed to outperform rival products from Intel and Apple on Tuesday, stepping up its long-running effort to break into the personal computer market. From a report: Qualcomm formally launched the Snapdragon X Elite, the flagship platform of its Snapdragon X family that leverages its Oryon CPU core, and promises to double -- yes, double -- the performance of some of the most popular 13th-gen Core chips from AMD and Intel. Sound familiar? It should. Qualcomm promised the same with its earlier Snapdragon 8-series chips, and really didn't deliver. But after buying chip designer Nuvia in 2021, Qualcomm is trying again, hoping that its superpowered Arm chips can once again make Windows on Arm PCs a competitor to conventional X86 PCs when they launch in mid-2024. And they'e talking some big numbers to prove it.

Qualcomm sees Oryon first going into PCs (as the engine of the Snapdragon X Elite platform) but then moving into smartphones, cars, "extended reality" devices, and more, Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon is expected to say today. [...] To begin with, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is manufactured on a 4nm process node, versus the Intel 4 process node of Intel's Meteor Lake. (The two process technologies aren't directly comparable, though they're close enough for most purposes.) Oryon is a tri-cluster design. Historically, that has meant prime, performance, and efficiency cores, with each type of core taking on their own role depending upon the task. However, it appears that Qualcomm and its X86 rivals may have swapped strategies; as Intel adopts performance and efficiency cores, Qualcomm has chosen AMD's path. There are twelve cores within the Snapdragon X Elite, all running at 3.8GHz. Well, most of the time. If needed one or two of the cores can boost to 4.3GHz, the turbo boost strategy that's become common on the PC. The 64-bit Oryon CPU will be paired with 42Mbytes of total cache, and a memory controller that can access eight channels of LPDDR5x memory (64GB in total) with 130GBps memory bandwidth, executives said. It will be a single die, not a chiplet design.

According to Reuters, Nvidia is designing ARM-based processors that would run Microsoft's Windows operating system. While they're not expected to be ready until 2025, it poses a major new challenge to Intel which has long dominated the PC industry. From the report: The AI chip giant's new pursuit is part of Microsoft's effort to help chip companies build Arm-based processors for Windows PCs. Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers, according to preliminary third-quarter data from research firm IDC. Advanced Micro Devices also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology, according to two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm's efforts could shake up a PC industry that Intel long dominated but which is under increasing pressure from Apple. Apple's custom chips have given Mac computers better battery life and speedy performance that rivals chips that use more energy. Executives at Microsoft have observed how efficient Apple's Arm-based chips are, including with AI processing, and desire to attain similar performance, one of the sources said. Microsoft has been encouraging the involved chipmakers to build advanced AI features into the CPUs they are designing. The company envisions AI-enhanced software such as its Copilot to become an increasingly important part of using Windows. To make that a reality, forthcoming chips from Nvidia, AMD and others will need to devote the on-chip resources to do so. "Microsoft learned from the 90s that they don't want to be dependent on Intel again, they don't want to be dependent on a single vendor," said Jay Goldberg, chief executive of D2D Advisory, a finance and strategy consulting firm. "If Arm really took off in PC (chips), they were never going to let Qualcomm be the sole supplier."

Long-time Slashdot reader Noryungi writes: OpenBSD 7.4 has been officially released. The 55th release of this BSD operating system, known for being security oriented, brings a lot of new things, including dynamic tracer, pfsync improvements, loads of security goodies and virtualization improvements. Grab your copy today! As mentioned by Phoronix's Michael Larabel, some of the key highlights include:

- Dynamic Tracer (DT) and Utrace support on AMD64 and i386 OpenBSD
- Power savings for those running OpenBSD 7.4 on Apple Silicon M1/M2 CPUs by allowing deep idle states when available for the idle loop and suspend
- Support for the PCIe controller found on Apple M2 Pro/Max SoCs
- Allow updating AMD CPU Microcode updating when a newer patch is available
- A workaround for the AMD Zenbleed CPU bug
- Various SMP improvements
- Updating the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver support against the upstream Linux 6.1.55 state
- New drivers for supporting various Qualcomm SoC features
- Support for soft RAID disks was improved for the OpenBSD installer
- Enabling of Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) on x86_64 and Branch Target Identifier (BTI) on ARM64 for capable processors

You can download and view all the new changes via OpenBSD.org.