Intel

The Information: “Intel is working with multiple consulting firms to build ChatGPT-like apps for customers that don’t have the expertise to do it on their own.”

Boston Consulting Group: “with a custom natural language chatbot interface powered by Intel AI hardware and software, BCG employees were able to retrieve and summarize information via semantic search that was previously buried in long lists of multi-page documents.”

Maybe a new business for Intel, maybe just prep for Windows 12.

Framework has begun shipping out AMD mainboards for its 13-inch laptop, which was previously Intel-only. The component experts over at Tom’s Hardware have popped open their 13-inch model and swapped its Intel Core i7 out for an AMD Ryzen chip. The process took less than 30 minutes. Less than 30 minutes!

“All upgrades should be this easy,” editor Andrew E. Freedman writes.

Microsoft’s spec sheet shows it’s a “Intel Gen3 Movidius 3700VC VPU AI Accelerator.” Intel’s website reveals that it’s a discrete chip roughly the size of my pinky’s fingertip at 14mm x 14mm.

It’s a PCIe Gen 3 device, so don’t be surprised if it comes on its own tiny SSD-sized M.2 expansion card. Here’s a whitepaper about its siblings. Meteor Lake won’t need a separate NPU like this:

It’s a convoluted story! Intel paid a $1.4B fine in 2009, lost its challenge in 2014, won its challenge in 2022, and today the EU says it still owes a fine of $400 million (via AP).

Intel’s future chips will sit on a substrate made of glass instead of resin — allowing 10x the connections, less warping, larger chips, better power transfer, higher temps, and less mechanical breakage because silicon and glass expand at the same rate, reports CNET’s Stephen Shankland.

One analyst told him the whole industry will go glass — a way to keep Moore’s Law going, perhaps.

VideoCardz:

Our sources indicate that Intel plans to launch the new series on October 17th, which is when the CPUs will become available for purchase, and reviews are expected to go live.

These may not be the Starfield chips you’re looking for: MSI’s big Intel leak suggests the gains are primarily in multithreaded workloads, and the game isn’t well-optimized for Intel there yet.

The White House asked AI companies to develop a watermark identifying AI-generated content. Some tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Adobe may have their answer in an internet protocol called C2PA, named after the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.

C2PA offers some critical benefits over AI detection systems, which use AI to spot AI-generated content and can in turn learn to get better at evading detection. It’s also a more standardized and, in some instances, more easily viewable system than watermarking, the other prominent technique used to identify AI-generated content. The protocol can work alongside watermarking and AI detection tools as well, says Jenks. 

Q2 2023 earnings are down 15 percent to $12.9 billion, but Intel’s stopped the bleed — it’s actually making profit of $1.5 billion, after consecutive $2.8B and $0.7B quarterly losses. (Revenue dipped 36 percent last quarter.) Even PC chips are only down 12 percent, compared to the 16.6 percent or 13.4 percent decline in global PC shipments that Gartner and IDC reported two weeks back.

Intel says its slightly rebranded Meteor Lake chips are still coming in 2H 2023 — at least one of them in Q3 specifically.

The company says the new Intel Arc Pro A60 and A60M are “ideal for computer-aided design and modeling (CAD/CAM), AI inferencing tasks and media processing in dedicated business environments.” It launched the A40 and A50 GPUs for professional users last year.

OBS Studio 29 just went live today with support for real-time AV1 — letting the latest Nvidia and possibly AMD and Intel graphics cards stream way higher quality video to YouTube using the same amount of data.

The OBS changelog does note that AV1 streaming is currently only a “beta feature” for YouTube, as it has been since March. Discord has supported AV1 since January. Chrome recently improved video calls with AV1 as well.

For over a decade, Intel’s CPUs have followed a (relatively) consistent “Core i” naming scheme. But that could be about to change with its upcoming 14th-generation Meteor Lake processors.

After a mysterious “Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H” popped up on Ashes of the Singularity’s benchmark database, Intel global communications director Bernard Fernandes teased that “brand changes” are on the way.

Q1 results are out (PDF). We knew the PC market was still struggling and Intel’s actually under the 40 percent revenue dip it forecast alongside January’s $0.7 billion loss, but that’s still a lot of money to lose! Intel says it’s still on track to ship five nodes in four years.

Intel announced two years ago that it would happily begin manufacturing Arm chips for other chipmakers, so it’s no surprise that it will begin doing so on its upcoming low-power 18A process coming late 2024. But Intel couldn’t tell me if it actually has any interested customers lined up.

Apple and AMD are sticking with TSMC for now.

Maybe the DoD?

Or so Nvidia says, promoting DLSS AI scaling technology while AMD touts the hand-coded algorithms behind FSR 2. Watch this video below to see Hardware Unboxed pit man vs. machine learning in 26 games.

Still, if you prefer more AI, check today’s Cyberpunk 2077 update — besides the new Overdrive Mode lighting, it also adds Nvidia DLAA AI-powered anti-aliasing, as well as XeSS AI scaling for Intel GPUs.

I promise I didn’t make up any of those words.