U.S. states are now "doling out more cash than ever to lure multibillion-dollar microchip, electric vehicle and battery factories," reports the Associated Press, "inspiring ever-more competition as they dig deeper into their pockets to attract big employers and capitalize on a wave of huge new projects." Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas have made billion-dollar pledges for a microchip or EV plant, with more state-subsidized plant announcements by profitable automakers and semiconductor giants surely to come. States have long competed for big employers. But now they are floating more billion-dollar offers and offering record-high subsidies, lavishing companies with grants and low-interest loans, municipal road improvements, and breaks on taxes, real estate, power and water....

The projects come at a transformative time for the industries, with automakers investing heavily in electrification and chipmakers expanding production in the U.S. following pandemic-related supply chain disruptions that raised economic and national security concerns. One of the driving forces behind them are federal subsidies signed into law last summer that are meant to encourage companies to produce electric vehicles, EV batteries, and computer chips domestically. Another is that states are flush with cash thanks to inflation-juiced tax collections and federal pandemic relief subsidies. The number of big projects and the size of state subsidy packages are extraordinary, said Nathan Jensen, a University of Texas professor who researches government economic development strategies.

"It is kind of a Wild West moment," Jensen said. "It's wild money and every state seems to be in on it."

Many of the companies drawing the biggest subsidy offers — such as Intel, Hyundai, Panasonic, Micron, Toyota, Ford and General Motors — are profitable and operate around the globe. Some lesser-known names in the nascent EV field are getting big offers too, such as Rivian, Volkswagen-backed Scout Motors and Vietnamese automaker VinFast. The subsidy offers are generally embraced by politicians from both major parties and the business elite, who point to promises of hundreds or thousands of jobs, massive investments in construction and equipment, and what they contend are immeasurable trickle-down benefits.

Still, academics who study such subsidies find them to be a waste of money and rarely decisive in a company's choice of location.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has been two years and four months since the first Apple Silicon Mac hit the market, and now Autodesk has finally updated some of its massively popular professional applications (AutoCAD and Maya) to run natively on M1 and M2 chips. The availability of AutoCAD for Mac 2024 was announced in a blog post on Autodesk's website on March 28. Like other major AutoCAD updates, it adds new features like expanded automation tools and easier workflows, but the announcement that "for the first time, AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 now run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, including M1 and M2 chips in the M-series chips" is clearly the headlining feature.

Autodesk claims that Apple Silicon support "can increase overall performance by up to two times" compared to the 2023 version of AutoCAD. A day later, on March 29, Autodesk revealed the 2024 update for Maya, its 3D modeling software chiefly used in game development, film production, and visual effects. Maya 2024 brings native Apple Silicon support in addition to a slew of new features, including the LookDevX material editor, Hydra support, and so on. But in contrast to many other makers of widespread professional software in similar industries, such as Adobe and Unity, Autodesk's efforts to support Apple Silicon -- which were announced two years ago -- have been ongoing for an interminably long time. Even open source Maya competitor Blender beat Autodesk to the punch.

U.S. chip giant Intel said on Wednesday its first semiconductor for data center customers focused on power efficiency, Sierra Forest, would be delivered in the first half of next year, as it outlined a chip release schedule after prior delays. From a report: "It's been a challenging few years as we had introduced a lot of innovation but also a lot of complexity and our product release dates had pushed out," Intel Data Center and AI Group head Sandra Rivera told Reuters ahead of an investor event. Intel still dominates the markets for PC and server processing chips, with a market share greater than 70%, tech research firm IDC has calculated. But that is down from more than 90% in 2017. Intel's most powerful fourth-generation Xeon processor for data centers, Sapphire Rapids, had faced delays that gave competitor Advanced Micro Devices time to catch up. But Rivera said Intel's "roadmap is on track" and was "hitting all of our key engineering milestones."

Intel announced Friday that Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, has died at the age of 94: Moore and his longtime colleague Robert Noyce founded Intel in July 1968. Moore initially served as executive vice president until 1975, when he became president. In 1979, Moore was named chairman of the board and chief executive officer, posts he held until 1987, when he gave up the CEO position and continued as chairman. In 1997, Moore became chairman emeritus, stepping down in 2006.

During his lifetime, Moore also dedicated his focus and energy to philanthropy, particularly environmental conservation, science and patient care improvements. Along with his wife of 72 years, he established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has donated more than $5.1 billion to charitable causes since its founding in 2000....

"Though he never aspired to be a household name, Gordon's vision and his life's work enabled the phenomenal innovation and technological developments that shape our everyday lives," said foundation president Harvey Fineberg. "Yet those historic achievements are only part of his legacy. His and Betty's generosity as philanthropists will shape the world for generations to come."

Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO, said, "Gordon Moore defined the technology industry through his insight and vision. He was instrumental in revealing the power of transistors, and inspired technologists and entrepreneurs across the decades. We at Intel remain inspired by Moore's Law and intend to pursue it until the periodic table is exhausted...."

Prior to establishing Intel, Moore and Noyce participated in the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor, where they played central roles in the first commercial production of diffused silicon transistors and later the world's first commercially viable integrated circuits. The two had previously worked together under William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor, which was the first semiconductor company established in what would become Silicon Valley.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Framework has delivered on the promise of its original 13-inch laptop. Three product generations in, the company has made a respectable competitor for the Dell XPS 13 or MacBook Air that can be repaired, modified, and upgraded, and owners of the original laptop can easily give themselves a significant performance boost by upgrading to the new 13th-generation Intel or AMD Ryzen-based boards the company announced today. Framework is now looking to build on that track record with an all-new Framework Laptop 16. It's a larger-screened model that can fit more powerful processors, dedicated GPUs, and a range of different keyboard modules, all with the same commitment to repairability and upgradeability seen in the original Framework Laptop (now retroactively dubbed the Framework Laptop 13).

Framework isn't discussing many details yet; preorders won't open until "this spring," and shipments won't begin until "late 2023." Today, the company provided a preview of the laptop's features, along with developer documentation to encourage the creation of new Input Modules -- components that allow for keyboard customization much like the current Expansion Card system allows for port customization.

Intel and other semiconductor companies have joined together with industrial materials businesses to fight US clampdowns on "forever chemicals," substances used in myriad products that are slow to break down in the environment. From a report: The lobbying push from chipmakers broadens the opposition to new rules and bans for the chemicals known as PFAS. The substances have been found in the blood of 97 per cent of Americans, according to the US government. More than 30 US states this year are considering legislation to address PFAS, according to Safer States, an environmental advocacy group. Bills in California and Maine passed in 2022 and 2021, respectively.

"I think clean drinking water and for farmers to be able to irrigate their fields is far more important than a microchip," said Stacy Brenner, a Maine state senator who backed the state's bipartisan legislation. In Minnesota, bills would ban by 2025 certain products that contain added PFAS -- which is short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances -- in legislation considered to be some of the toughest in the country. The Semiconductor Industry Association -- whose members include Intel, IBM and Nvidia -- has cosigned letters opposing the Minnesota legislation, arguing its measures are overly broad and could prohibit thousands of products, including electronics. Chipmakers also opposed the California and Maine laws.

After five years attempting to make Intel into a competitor for Nvidia and AMD in the realm of discrete graphics for gamers and beyond -- with limited success -- Raja Koduri is leaving Intel to form his own generative AI startup. The Verge reports: Intel hired him away from AMD in 2017, where he was similarly in charge of the entire graphics division, and it was an exciting get at the time! Not only had Intel poached a chief architect who'd just gone on sabbatical but Intel also revealed that it did so because it wanted to build discrete graphics cards for the first time in (what would turn out to be) 20 years. Koduri had previously been poached for similarly exciting projects, too -- Apple hired him away from AMD ahead of an impressive string of graphics improvements, and then AMD brought him back again in 2013.

Intel has yet to bring real competition to the discrete graphics card space as of Koduri's departure. [...] But the company has a long GPU roadmap, so it's possible things get better and more competitive in subsequent gens. It took a lot longer than five years for Nvidia and AMD to make it that far. By the time Koduri left, he wasn't just in charge of graphics but also Intel's "accelerated computing" initiatives, including things like a crypto chip.

Liliputing.com has an update about the System76 Meerkat, which they describe as "a compact desktop computer with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to two storage devices (for as much as 16TB of total storage), and up to an Intel Core i7 mobile processor. It's basically a rebranded Intel NUC." (Escept that System76 offers a choice of Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.)

"Previously available with a choice of 10th or 11th-gen Intel Core processor options, the Meerkat now also supports 12th-gen Intel chips." That means there are a total of 9 different processor options available. Prices start at $499 for an entry-level model with a Core i3-10110U processor, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The prices rises by $50 if you want to go with a Core i3-1135G4 model, while prices start at $599 for a Meerkat mini PC with a 12th-gen Intel Core processor....

But the biggest difference is that Intel's 12th-gen processors introduce a hybrid architecture that pairs Performance and Efficiency cores, leading to much higher core counts for better multi-core performance.

Intel has completed development of its Intel 18A (1.8nm-class) and Intel 20A (2nm-class) fabrication processes that will be used to make the company's own products, as well as chips for clients of its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) division, reports UDN. From a report: Wang Rui, president and chairman of Intel China, said at an event that the company had finalized the development of its Intel 18A (18 angstroms-class) and Intel 20A (20 angstroms-class) fabrication processes. This does not mean that the production nodes are ready to be used for commercial manufacturing, but rather that Intel has determined all specifications, materials, requirements, and performance targets for both technologies.

Intel's 20A fabrication technology will rely on gate-all-around RibbonFET transistors and will use backside power delivery. Shrinking metal pitches, introducing all-new transistor structure and adding backside power delivery at the same time is a risky move, but it is expected that 20A will allow Intel to leapfrog the company's competitors -- TSMC and Samsung Foundry. Intel plans to start using this node in the first half of 2024. Intel's 18A manufacturing process will further refine the company's RibbonFET and PowerVia technologies, as well as shrink transistor sizes. Development of this node is apparently going so well that Intel pulled in its introduction from 2025 to the second half of 2024. Intel originally planned to use ASML's Twinscan EXE scanners with a 0.55 numerical aperture (NA) optics for its 1.8 angstroms node, but because it decided to start using the technology sooner, it will have to rely on extensive use of existing Twinscan NXE scanners with 0.33 NA optics, as well as EUV double patterning.

Microsoft is getting ready to publicly test major new Windows features even earlier. While the software giant has been previewing changes to Windows for nearly a decade, a new Canary channel for Windows Insiders will allow anyone to try out "hot off the presses" builds of Windows that include major changes to the kernel, APIs, and other big parts of Windows. From a report: It feels like this new Canary channel is preparation work for Windows 12, which Intel and Microsoft have both been hinting at recently. "The new Canary Channel is going to be the place to preview platform changes that require longer-lead time before getting released to customers," says Amanda Langowski, Microsoft's head of the Windows Insider program, in a blog post today. "Some examples of this include major changes to the Windows kernel, new APIs, etc." We've seen Microsoft test underlying platform changes to Windows before that eventually shipped in a future version of Windows. Microsoft tested some display changes to Windows 10 preview builds before Windows 11 was announced, and the changes only ended up shipping in what became Windows 11. Likewise, x64 emulation for Windows 10 on Arm was tested early on and only ever shipped in Windows 11.

Apple is moving to in-house 5G modem chips for its 2024 iPhones, as far as the chief executive of Qualcomm -- which currently produces them for the tech giant -- is aware. From a report: "We're making no plans for 2024, my planning assumption is we're not providing [Apple] a modem in '24, but it's their decision to make," Cristiano Amon told CNBC at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Apple's most recent iPhone 14 models use Qualcomm modems, but the company has been looking to go solo in the wireless connectivity market for some years.

It bought Intel's modem business in 2019 and there had been speculation it would begin using in-house parts this year. In an interview with CNBC's Karen Tso and Arjun Kharpal, Amon said Qualcomm had told investors back in 2021 that it did not expect to provide modems for the iPhone in 2023, but Apple then decided to continue for another year. Amon did not confirm whether Apple would pay Qualcomm QTL licenses if it moves to its own modems, but said royalty was "independent from providing a chip."

Intel on Tuesday released a software platform for developers to build quantum algorithms that can eventually run on a quantum computer that the chip giant is trying to build. From a report: The platform, called Intel Quantum SDK, would for now allow those algorithms to run on a simulated quantum computing system, said Anne Matsuura, Intel Labs' head of quantum applications and architecture. Matsuura said developers can use the long-established programming language C++ to build quantum algorithms, making it more accessible for people without quantum computing expertise. "The Intel Quantum SDK helps programmers get ready for future large-scale commercial quantum computers," Matsuura said in a statement. "It will also advance the industry by creating a community of developers that will accelerate the development of applications."

The Biden administration is considering revoking export licenses issued to U.S. suppliers for sales to Chinese telecom company Huawei, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter, part of a broader tightening of technology trade over national security concerns. From a report: The administration previously indicated that it was considering not granting any new export licenses to companies such as Qualcomm and Intel, which provide chips needed for smartphones and other devices. The action would cover products that use advanced 5G technology as well as older 4G products. The new action would take that a step further by revoking existing licenses. It comes amid heightened U.S.-China tensions triggered by a suspected Chinese spy balloon traversing the U.S. and intelligence suggesting Beijing is considering provision of lethal aid to Russia for its Ukraine war.

"The policy that had allowed exports to Huawei, notwithstanding the entity listing, is being wound down," said a former senior security official familiar with the administration's policy deliberations. "The White House is now telling Commerce, 'Cut off the 4G sales, the time has come to do more pain to Huawei, to try to finish their demise,'" the former official said. Huawei was placed on the Commerce Department's so-called entity list in 2019 by the office that oversees export controls, the Bureau of Industry and Security. The BIS cited potential national-security threats when it issued the punitive listing, which requires exporters to secure special licenses approving the sale of U.S. technology to the firm. U.S. officials say they are concerned China's government could use Huawei's telecommunications tech for spying.

From an opinion piece in the Register: Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies — Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft....

Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were calculated using Google Big Query analysis of PushEvents on public GitHub data. The company found that Microsoft and Google were neck-and-neck for the top spot. Red Hat is in third place, followed by Intel, then AWS, just ahead of IBM.... Red Hat is following closely behind and is currently contributing more commits than Google, with 125,012 in Q4 2022 compared to Google's 94,961. Microsoft is ahead of both, with 128,247 commits. However, regarding contributed staff working on projects, Google is leading the way with 5,757 compared to Microsoft's 5,513 and Red Hat's 3,656....

Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven CTO and co-founder, commented: "An unexpected result of our research was seeing Amazon overtake IBM to become the fifth biggest contributor." They "came late to the open source party, but they're now doubling down on its open source commitments and realizing the benefits that come with contributing to the open source projects its customers use." So, yes, open source certainly started with individual contributors, but today, and for many years before, it's company employees that are really making the code....

Aiven is far from the only one to have noticed that companies are now open source's economic engine. Jonathan Corbet, editor-in-chief of Linux Weekly News (LWN), found in his most recent analysis of Long Term Support Linux Kernel releases from 5.16 to 6.1 that a mere 7.5 percent of the kernel development, as measured by lines changed, came from individual developers. No, the real leaders were, in order: AMD; Intel; Google; Linaro, the main Arm Linux development organization; Meta; and Red Hat.
The article also includes this thought-provoking quote from Aiven CTO's. "Innovation is at the heart of the open source community, but without a strong commitment from companies, the whole system will struggle.

"We can see that companies are recognizing their role and supporting all who use open source."

Semiconductor companies, which united to get the CHIPS Act approved, have set off a lobbying frenzy as they argue for more cash than their competitors. From a report: In early January, a New York public relations firm sent an email warning about what it characterized as a threat to the federal government's program to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry. The message, received by The New York Times, accused Intel, the Silicon Valley chip titan, of angling to win subsidies under the CHIPS and Science Act for new factories in Ohio and Arizona that would sit empty. Intel had said in a recent earnings call that it would build out its facilities with the expensive machinery needed to make semiconductors when demand for its chips increased. The question, the email said, was whether officials would give funding to companies that outfitted their factories from the jump "or if they will give the majority of CHIPS funding to companies like Intel."

The firm declined to name its client. But it has done work in the past for Advanced Micro Devices, Intel's longtime rival, which has raised similar concerns about whether federal funding should go to companies that plan to build empty shells. A spokesman for AMD said it had not reviewed the email or approved the public relations firm's efforts to lobby for or against any specific company receiving funding. "We fully support the CHIPS and Science Act and the efforts of the Biden administration to boost domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing," the spokesman said. Rival semiconductor suppliers and their customers pulled together last year as they lobbied Congress to help shore up U.S. chip manufacturing and reduce vulnerabilities in the crucial supply chain. The push led lawmakers to approve the CHIPS Act, including $52 billion in subsidies to companies and research institutions as well as $24 billion or more in tax credits -- one of the biggest infusions into a single industry in decades.

Comparatively few people follow the Crown channel or participate in its chats -- suggesting they aren't engaging with the programming. From a report: When Amazon launched the Crown Channel on its livestreaming platform Twitch in 2019, the e-commerce giant was looking to flex its entertainment chops in the buzzy world of video games -- an arena the company had been trying to break into for years. Resembling a traditional television network, Crown offers a range of ad-supported original programming, including "Screen Invaders!," a show about mobile gaming. Amazon says Crown is among Twitch's top 10 entertainment channels, luring tens of thousands of viewers -- a feat typically equaled only by Twitch's top personalities -- and is attracting such big-name advertisers as chipmaker Intel and insurer Progressive. But a Bloomberg analysis of Crown audience metrics shows the channel isn't as popular as Amazon says it is. That has potential implications for brands, which according to internal documents, may have paid anywhere from $150,000 to $500,000-plus to promote themselves on the channel.

A pitch deck for advertisers from January 2022 said the Crown channel then reached 43 million viewers and had a "highly engaged audience." But most of the viewers Crown cites are what the advertising industry calls "junk views," people who aren't actively watching the programming. Although Crown appears to draw in thousands of viewers each livestream, comparatively few people follow the channel or participate in its chats -- suggesting they aren't engaging with the content. Amazon sometimes pays Twitch tens of thousands of dollars to promote Crown programs on the site's home page, where they end up in a digital carousel that viewers scroll through, typically zipping past shows until they find something they want to watch. Audience inflation has been a long-standing issue for video and social-media sites.

Thomas Claburn writes via The Register: GitHub has a lot of code to search -- more than 200 million repositories -- and says last November's beta version of a search engine optimized for source code that has caused a "flurry of innovation." GitHub engineer Timothy Clem explained that the company has had problems getting existing technology to work well. "The truth is from Solr to Elasticsearch, we haven't had a lot of luck using general text search products to power code search," he said in a GitHub Universe video presentation. "The user experience is poor. It's very, very expensive to host and it's slow to index." In a blog post on Monday, Clem delved into the technology used to scour just a quarter of those repos, a code search engine built in Rust called Blackbird.

Blackbird currently provides access to almost 45 million GitHub repositories, which together amount to 115TB of code and 15.5 billion documents. Shifting through that many lines of code requires something stronger than grep, a common command line tool on Unix-like systems for searching through text data. Using ripgrep on an 8-core Intel CPU to run an exhaustive regular expression query on a 13GB file in memory, Clem explained, takes about 2.769 seconds, or 0.6GB/sec/core. [...] At 0.01 queries per second, grep was not an option. So GitHub front-loaded much of the work into precomputed search indices. These are essentially maps of key-value pairs. This approach makes it less computationally demanding to search for document characteristics like the programming language or word sequences by using a numeric key rather than a text string. Even so, these indices are too large to fit in memory, so GitHub built iterators for each index it needed to access. According to Clem, these lazily return sorted document IDs that represent the rank of the associated document and meet the query criteria.

To keep the search index manageable, GitHub relies on sharding -- breaking the data up into multiple pieces using Git's content addressable hashing scheme and on delta encoding -- storing data differences (deltas) to reduce the data and metadata to be crawled. This works well because GitHub has a lot of redundant data (e.g. forks) -- its 115TB of data can be boiled down to 25TB through deduplication data-shaving techniques. The resulting system works much faster than grep -- 640 queries per second compared to 0.01 queries per second. And indexing occurs at a rate of about 120,000 documents per second, so processing 15.5 billion documents takes about 36 hours, or 18 for re-indexing since delta (change) indexing reduces the number of documents to be crawled.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Red Hat is perhaps best known as a Linux operating system vendor, but it is the company's OpenShift platform that represents its fastest growing segment. Today, Red Hat announced the general availability of OpenShift 4.12, bringing a series of new capabilities to the company's hybrid cloud application delivery platform. OpenShift is based on the open source Kubernetes container orchestration system, originally developed by Google, that has been run as the flagship project of the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) since 2014. [...] With the new release, Red Hat is integrating new capabilities to help improve security and compliance for OpenShift, as well as new deployment options on ARM-based architectures. The OpenShift 4.12 release comes as Red Hat continues to expand its footprint, announcing partnerships with Oracle and SAP this week.

The financial importance of OpenShift to Red Hat and its parent company IBM has also been revealed, with IBM reporting in its earnings that OpenShift is a $1 billion business. "Open-source solutions solve major business problems every day, and OpenShift is just another example of how Red Hat brings business and open source together for the benefit of all involved," Mike Barrett, VP of product management at Red Hat, told VentureBeat. "We're very proud of what we have accomplished thus far, but we're not resting at $1B." [...]

OpenShift, like many applications developed in the last several decades, originally was built just for the x86 architecture that runs on CPUs from Intel and AMD. That situation is increasingly changing as OpenShift is gaining more support to run on the ARM processor with the OpenShift 4.12 update. Barrett noted that Red Hat OpenShift announced support for the AWS Graviton ARM architecture in 2022. He added that OpenShift 4.12 expands that offering to Microsoft Azure ARM instances. "We find customers with a significant core consumption rate for a singular computational deliverable are gravitating toward ARM first," Barrett said.

Overall, Red Hat is looking to expand the footprint of where its technologies are able to run, which also new cloud providers. On Jan. 31, Red Hat announced that for the first time, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be available as a supported platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). While RHEL is now coming to OCI, OpenShift isn't -- at least not yet. "Right now, it's just RHEL available on OCI," Mike Evans, vice president, technical business development at Red Hat, told VentureBeat. "We're evaluating what other Red Hat technologies, including OpenShift, may come to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure but this will ultimately be driven by what our joint customers want."

"A Chinese spy balloon is floating over the continental United States," writes Slashdot reader q4Fry. "As it headed over Montana, 'civilian flights in the area were halted and U.S. military aircraft, including advanced F-22 fighter jets, were put in the air.'" The Washington Post reports: The balloon's flight path takes it over "a number of sensitive sites," the senior [Pentagon] official said, but it appears it does not have the ability collect information that is "over and above" other tools at China's disposal, like low-orbit satellites. Nevertheless, the Pentagon is taking undisclosed "mitigation steps" to prevent Beijing from gathering additional intelligence.

"We put some things on station in the event that a decision was made to bring this down," the official said. "So we wanted to make sure we were coordinating with civil authorities to empty out the airspace around that potential area. But even with those protective measures taken, it was the judgment of our military commanders that we didn't drive the risk down low enough. So we didn't take the shot." "The US believes Chinese spy satellites in low Earth orbit are capable of offering similar or better intelligence, limiting the value of whatever Beijing can glean from the high-altitude balloon, which is the size of three buses," reports CNN, citing a defense official.

"It does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low Earth orbit," the senior defense official said. Nevertheless, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called for a briefing of the "Gang of Eight" -- the group of lawmakers charged with reviewing the nation's most sensitive intelligence information.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As the PC industry flounders, Intel suffered from such disastrous sales last quarter that it instituted pay cuts and other extreme measures going forward. AMD's client PC sales also dropped dramatically -- a whopping 51 percent year-over-year -- but the company managed to eke out a small profit despite the sky falling. So why aren't CPU and GPU prices falling too? In a call with investors Tuesday night, CEO Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has been "undershipping" chips for a while now to balance supply and demand (read: keep prices up). "We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters," Su said, as spotted by PC Gamer. "We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1."

With the pandemic winding down and inflation ramping up, far fewer people are buying CPUs, GPUs, and PCs. It's a hard, sudden reverse from just months ago, when companies like Nvidia and AMD were churning out graphic cards as quickly as possible to keep up with booming demand from cryptocurrency miners and PC gamers alike. Now that GPU mining is dead, shelves are brimming with unsold chips. Despite the painfully high price tags of new next-gen GPUs, last-gen GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards are still selling for very high prices considering their two-year-old status. Strategic under-shipping helps companies maintain higher prices for their wares.