Intel's first Arc graphics cards were underwhelming on launch, and if you believed certain sources, the company was going to can the whole project as a result. Of course, that's not how things have played out—Intel has put considerable effort into improving those first Arc graphics cards, to the point that your author...Read more...
PC gamers and power users sometimes sneer at Intel's E-cores because they aren't as fast on a single thread as the company's powerful P-cores. Demanding client tasks—like many operations in creative applications as well as, of course, games—tend to be single-threaded, or at least held up by a single slow thread. In...Read more...
Sparkle has posted a product page for an Arc A770 Titan OC Edition graphics card claiming it is the "best choice of the series." Time will tell if that is truly the case, but at the very least the card makes a strong case for the best Arc A770 option around—it sports a respectable overclock and does not skimp on VRAM...Read more...
Intel's efforts to improve its graphics drivers continue apace. We probably don't have to tell an audience of enthusiasts that Arc launched in a less than ideal state, and that lead to a sub-optimal first impression for the brand. Intel has been working hard ever since to correct course, and its regular driver...Read more...
All of the intelligent upsamplers that we have now—including NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS—are fundamentally algorithms at their core, and like any algorithm, they can be tuned and optimized. All three companies continue to do so, which is why game modders and enthusiasts frequently tell folks to update...Read more...
Hyper-Threading is one of those concepts that's been around a long time, and which everyone takes for granted. Despite that, relatively few enthusiasts really understand how it works or what the point of it is. In short, simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)—the academic name for what Intel calls Hyper-Threading—isn't...Read more...
The NFL season is just around the corner and so is the release of Madden 24 with some exciting upgrades, including smarter AI for more realistic player behavior, niftier passing and catching, and more. To get ready for the release, Intel has made available a new Arc graphics driver—versions 31.0.101.4644 WHQL—that...Read more...
Intel and Tower Semiconductor have mutually agreed to abandon plans for the former to acquire the Israeli chip manufacturer at $53 per share in cash, which would have valued the now-nixed deal at $5.4 billion. However, it's not as simple as just parting ways—as part of the merger agreement that was signed in February...Read more...
Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake CPUs aren't that far from its 13th-gen Raptor Lake chips. There are lots of changes, of course, but from an end-user perspective, the biggest difference is the upgrade in L2 cache. Raptor Cove P-cores sport 2MB, and the E-core clusters have 4MB. That's up from 1.25MB and 2MB on Alder...Read more...
It's been a bit of a rough stretch for the PC processor market, with CPU shipments falling to the lowest point in a decade during the first quarter of 2023. The thing about hitting rock bottom, though, is there's no way to go by up. Or so the saying goes—sideways is another possible direction. Looking at the latest...Read more...
Drop everything—there's a new hardware security vulnerability in Intel's processors! Or don't, really, because this vulnerability is only rated at a "medium" severity by Intel itself, and it's even arguably a good thing for the company. That's because it only affects older processors based on the "Skylake"...Read more...
When Intel originally introduced the Arc graphics card family to us, it was described as including three tiers of cards, just like the company's Core i- family of CPUs originally did. The Arc 3 were to be entry-level GPUs, the Arc 5 were to be mid-range gaming parts, and the Arc 7 were to be performance-class parts...Read more...
Baldur's Gate III has just exited a lengthy early access period, and it already runs well on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. That may be why neither company bothered to release a graphics driver for the game's 1.0 release today. We didn't hear any specific complaints about BG3 on Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics cards, but we bet...Read more...
Three months ago, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was upbeat about the company's IDM 2.0 strategy and what he said was a $1 trillion market opportunity for Intel Foundry Service (IFS) to grow into, even as overall earnings plummeted to an all-time low. Now we know why he was so optimistic. After two consecutive quarters of...Read more...
You may have noticed that technology firms are not real keen on addressing leaks and rumors, choosing instead to stay mum no matter what gets thrown out there. Sometimes, however, they make an exception. Such is the case with Intel responding to rumors that its 13th Gen Core processors based on Raptor Lake are about...Read more...
Modern scientific breakthroughs aren't solely relegated to a lab these days, but also come by way of the massive compute resources that modern data centers full of servers can muster. For researchers, maintaining open access to these invaluable complexes has been vital. The Stampede and Stampede2 supercomputer...Read more...
Regular readers will recall that we wrote about Intel's X86S proposal awhile back. That was merely in the concept stages, but it's an idea to shed a lot of the legacy cruft from x86-compatible processors. It looks like Intel's engineers aren't done fiddling around in the instruction set, though, because the company's...Read more...
It's getting increasingly difficult to find an Intel Arc A770 graphics card that's both in stock and being sold from a first-party seller. That's a shame because the Arc A770 is a cost-effective solution for 1080p and 1440p gaming (and it's gotten better with time thanks to continued driver optimizations). ASRock...Read more...
The folks over at at Chinese tech site BenchLife have posted up what they purport to be the key specifications for Intel's upcoming 14th-generation Raptor Lake Refresh processors. There aren't any surprises here, as this is fundamentally the same silicon as seen in the extant Raptor Lake processors. However, we do...Read more...
It turns out Intel is not abandoning its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) initiative wholesale and leaving the branding to wither away into the footnotes of tech history. Instead, it's hammered out an agreement with ASUS to "manufacturer, sell, and support" 10th to 13th Gen NUC devices, while also giving the green light...Read more...
Do you remember Valve's Steam Machine initiative? A Chinese mini-PC and laptop maker appears to have rekindled the Steam Machine aesthetic and teleported it to 2023. Inside the new Thunderobot MIX is a thoroughly modern partnership between an Intel 13th Gen Core 'Raptor Lake' HX mobile processor and an NVIDIA GeForce...Read more...
In comparison to the Golden Cove and Raptor Cove P-cores featured on Intel's recent desktop CPUs, the Gracemont E-cores are downright puny. However, they're not slow processors in comparison to "CPUs in general." In fact, the per-clock integer performance of Gracemont is not far off of the Skylake core used in every...Read more...