In the last two weeks, six new Linux laptops have hit the market (or were announced). "The Linux hardware scene is getting better by the day," writes the site FOSS Weekly:

• Star Labs teases its new StarFighter Linux Laptop with a 4K (10-bit IPS) display.

• MNT Research introduces a "more affordable" 7-inch mini Linux laptop, the MNT Pocket Reform.

• KDE's Slimbook 4 is here with AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor and a better battery, starting from $1,000. "Buying from Slimbook supports KDE development too," notes Gaming on Linux, adding that there's a choice of 14 or 15.6 inch displays.

• TUXEDO's Pulse 15 — Gen2 (also with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor) has a 15-inch HiDPI WQHD 165Hz display, along with eight cores and 16 threads. (And the Register notes its twin cooling fans, "allowing them to overclock the chip and run it at 35W," and a choice of distros.)

• Pre-orders have opened for the Roma — the first RISC-V Laptop (which may ship in September). Ars Technica reports they're offering "free Silicon upgrades" — that is free system-on-a-chip and system-on-module upgrades for its quad-core RISC-V CPU. And there's also a companion NPU/GPU, notes a blog post at RISCV.org, "for the fastest, seamless RISC-V native software development available." (As well as "early access to next-generation laptop and accessory upgrades at generous discounts or for free.") The blog post calls it a "Web3-friendly platform with NFT creation and publication plus integrated MetaMask-style wallet."

• System 76's "Lemur" Alder Lake- and coreboot-powered laptop arrives with 14 hours of battery life.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a (paywalled) article from Bloomberg: There has been a sense in financial circles that the fever among American executives to shorten supply lines and bring production back home would prove short-lived. As soon as the pandemic started to fade, so too would the fad, the thinking went.

And yet, two years in, not only is the trend still alive, it appears to be rapidly accelerating.

"This is just economics," says one executive who made the move
National Review shared some telling excerpts from the article: The construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year... There are massive chip factories going up in Phoenix: Intel is building two just outside the city; Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is constructing one in it. And aluminum and steel plants that are being erected all across the south... Scores of smaller companies are making similar moves, according to Richard Branch, the chief economist at Dodge.

Not all are examples of reshoring. Some are designed to expand capacity. But they all point to the same thing — a major re-assessment of supply chains in the wake of port bottlenecks, parts shortages and skyrocketing shipping costs that have wreaked havoc on corporate budgets in the US and across the globe....

In January, a UBS survey of C-suite executives revealed the magnitude of this shift. More than 90% of those surveyed said they either were in the process of moving production out of China or had plans to do so. And about 80% said they were considering bringing some of it back to the US. (Mexico has also become a popular choice.)

EU antitrust regulators are investigating the video licensing policy of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Alphabet Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta , the European Commission said on Thursday. Reuters reports: Founded in 2015, the group aims to create a new standard software for streaming higher-quality 4K video on browsers, devices, apps, and gaming, known as AV1. While the AV1 software is not yet adopted widely, Netflix and YouTube have started using it for some customers, and browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox have started to support the new format. Intel, Huawei, Mozilla, Samsung and Nvidia are also AOM members, according to its website.

In a questionnaire sent to some companies earlier this year and seen by Reuters, the EU watchdog said it was investigating alleged anti-competitive behavior related to the license terms of AV1 by AOM and its members in Europe. "The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications," the paper said. It said this action may be restricting the innovators' ability to compete with the AV1 technical specification, and also eliminate incentives for them to innovate.

The questionnaire also asked about the impact of an AOM patent license clause in which licensees would have their patent licenses terminated immediately if they launched patent lawsuits asserting that implementation infringes their claims. Companies risk fines of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules.

System76, the Colorado-based Linux laptop, desktop, and server specialist, has announced a new highly portable laptop with an Intel Alder Lake processor inside. Tom's Hardware reports: The new Lemur Pro(opens in new tab) is a "lighter than Air" 14-inch form factor laptop with excellent battery life and attractions such as open firmware (powered by Coreboot) and a 180-degree hinge. In addition, buyers can choose to go with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pre-installed. The new Lemur Pro has many attractive modern features you might see advertised in many rival mainstream thin and light designs. However, the special sauce here is the "System76 Open Firmware with Coreboot." Coreboot, known initially as LinuxBIOS, is significant as it is an open-source BIOS implementation embraced by Linux users. It is lightweight, flexible, and feature-rich. [...]

System76 has designed the Lemur Pro with monitor-based docking in mind. It envisions users connecting to a big screen using the USB-C connection to benefit from the more expansive workspace and laptop charging. Like Windows, Linux had to have some serious tinkering under the hood to prepare for the mix of Performance and Efficiency cores in Alder Lake chips. However, rest assured, efficient hybrid scheduling is taken care of with the two OS options that can be pre-installed on the Lemur Pro.

System76 allows customers to configure and buy Lemur Pro laptops right now. There are many RAM and storage configurations to pick through, and you can add external keyboards and monitors to the bundle. The entry price with an Intel Core i5-1235U, 8GB RAM, 240GB of storage, and no extras is $1,149. However, the Core i7-1255U model is a bit of a stretch, adding $200 to the base price for the faster CPU clocks.

Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance. The Register reports: The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC. This trend has created a quandary for Intel. The semiconductor giant has traditionally manufactured the chips it designs as part of its integrated device manufacturing model but the company is now increasingly reliant on TSMC and other foundries for certain components, while expanding its own manufacturing capacity in the West.

The kicker is that Intel plans to use this increased capacity to produce more of its own chips while also supporting its revitalized foundry business, which hopes to take business from TSMC and South Korea's Samsung, the industry's other leading-edge chipmaker, in the future. This new strategy by Intel is called IDM 2.0, and it means the chipmaker will have to juggle two somewhat conflicting objectives:

- taking foundry market share away from TSMC and Samsung by convincing various fabless chip designers to use its plants;
- and using leading-edge nodes from TSMC and Samsung for certain components to compete with fabless companies like AMD and Nvidia. "Samsung has already surpassed Intel as the largest semiconductor company by revenue, so TSMC potentially growing larger than the x86 giant further underscores the tentative position Intel is in," concludes the report.

Intel has told lawmakers and officials that it is delaying indefinitely the groundbreaking ceremony for a planned multibillion-dollar chip-manufacturing facility in Ohio, signaling frustration over uncertainty in Congress about legislation that would provide support for the U.S. chip industry. From a report: The ceremony had been tentatively scheduled for July 22. Intel informed the office of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and members of Ohio's congressional delegation on Wednesday that it was delaying the groundbreaking "due in part to uncertainty around" the chips-related legislation, known as the Bipartisan Innovation Act, according to an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Intel still plans to build the facility and hasn't pushed back the start of construction, said Intel spokesman Will Moss. Intel, which announced the plant plans in January, said it intended to invest at least $20 billion in the Ohio facility, with construction expected to begin in late 2022 and production to start in 2025. The company said in its announcement that spending on the Ohio project could reach around $100 billion over the next decade, but that the expansion depends in part on progress on the U.S. chips legislation.

Intel is seeking to be paid interest of $624 million on the overturned $1.1 billion fine it received from the European Commission back in 2009. From a report: The antitrust ruling was overturned at the beginning of the year, and so Intel has gone to EU General Court seeking compensation and interest on the fine. In fact, Intel is claiming back almost half of that original fine, based on the European Central Bank's refinancing rates. In case you need a reminder on all of this: Intel allegedly took part in anti-competitive practices that saw it offer conditional rebates to key OEMs such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, making it difficult for competitors (read AMD, or ARM if you prefer, but really AMD) to compete with their own CPUs. The European Commission concluded in 2009 that Intel had indeed behaved in such a way between October 2002 and December 2007 and hit it with one of the largest ever fines at the time at a cool $1.1 billion. Intel appealed the decision unsuccessfully in 2012, but in 2014 it brought the case to the European Court of Justice, which sent it back to the General Court in 2017. The case has been going back and fourth ever since.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Indian Express: The US should do more to attract overseas chipmakers to build plants on its territory as a matter of national security, former Google chief Eric Schmidt wrote in an opinion piece published Monday. Pointing to China's accelerating investment in chip fabrication technology and capacity, Schmidt urged the US to reduce its dependence on Taiwan and South Korea for the most advanced semiconductors powering everything from smartphones to ballistic missiles and build out its own capabilities. Instead, it should be incentivizing national champions Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. to partner with US chip designers and build more on US soil, he said.

International relations scholar Graham Allison, who shares the byline on the Wall Street Journal article with Schmidt, previously warned that the US and China could be on a path to war that neither country wants. The two men set out policy recommendations for improving American competitiveness in the chipmaking race so as to avoid a drastic imbalance between the two superpowers. "If Beijing develops durable advantages across the semiconductor supply chain, it would generate breakthroughs in foundational technologies that the U.S. cannot match," they wrote. "The U.S. can't spend its way out of this predicament."

In addition to President Joe Biden's proposed $52 billion investment plan -- which is still under consideration by US legislators -- the US should lean into its strengths of research and development, manufacturing less-advanced but more widely used slower chips through the likes of Intel Corp. and GlobalFoundries Inc., and redouble its efforts to bring TSMC and Samsung on shore. Both Asian companies are constructing fabs in the US, but Schmidt and Allison's message is that more needs to be done to ensure long-term US prosperity. "America is on the verge of losing the chip competition," they said, urging that "the U.S. government mobilizes a national effort similar to the one that created the technologies that won World War II."

Microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and other companies contain a newly discovered weakness that remote attackers can exploit to obtain cryptographic keys and other secret data traveling through the hardware, researchers said on Tuesday. From a report: Hardware manufacturers have long known that hackers can extract secret cryptographic data from a chip by measuring the power it consumes while processing those values. Fortunately, the means for exploiting power-analysis attacks against microprocessors is limited because the threat actor has few viable ways to remotely measure power consumption while processing the secret material. Now, a team of researchers has figured out how to turn power-analysis attacks into a different class of side-channel exploit that's considerably less demanding.

The team discovered that dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) -- a power and thermal management feature added to every modern CPU -- allows attackers to deduce the changes in power consumption by monitoring the time it takes for a server to respond to specific carefully made queries. The discovery greatly reduces what's required. With an understanding of how the DVFS feature works, power side-channel attacks become much simpler timing attacks that can be done remotely. The researchers have dubbed their attack Hertzbleed because it uses the insights into DVFS to expose -- or bleed out -- data that's expected to remain private. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-24436 for Intel chips and CVE-2022-23823 for AMD CPUs. The researchers have already shown how the exploit technique they developed can be used to extract an encryption key from a server running SIKE, a cryptographic algorithm used to establish a secret key between two parties over an otherwise insecure communications channel.

U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm on Wednesday won its fight against a 997 million euro ($1.05 billion) fine imposed by EU antitrust regulators four years ago, dealing a major setback to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager's crackdown on Big Tech. From a report: The European Commission in its 2018 decision said Qualcomm paid billions of dollars to Apple from 2011 to 2016 to use only its chips in all its iPhones and iPads in order to block out rivals such as Intel. Qualcomm's fine is one of several imposed by Vestager on companies ranging from Alphabet unit Google to banks and truckmakers over anti-competitive practices.

Intel's chip manufacturing technology has been outpaced by rivals like TSMC and Samsung in recent years, but the company is looking to put its troubles behind it. From a report: The first step forward will be the Intel 4 manufacturing process, which Intel has shared more details about at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' annual VLSI Technology Symposium (as reported by AnandTech and Tom's Hardware). The new manufacturing tech is on track to be used in consumer chips starting in 2023, starting with Intel's "Meteor Lake" CPU architecture. Meteor Lake will likely come to market as Intel's 14th-generation Core CPU sometime next year. Intel 4's biggest improvement is its integration of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light to etch tiny patterns into silicon wafers. TSMC and Samsung use EUV technology in their most advanced manufacturing processes. Intel says that compared to the Intel 7 process, Intel 4 will enable either 21.5 percent better clock speeds using the same amount of power or the same speeds using 40 percent less power.

After Intel 4, Intel will move on to Intel 3, which is a higher-density iteration of Intel 4 using the same EUV technology. Notably, chipmakers will be able to port designs made for Intel 4 directly to Intel 3 without having to make changes, which will hopefully allow both Intel and third-party chip designers to start using it quickly (Intel 3 will be offered to third parties through Intel Foundry Services). By making smaller jumps between process technologies -- introducing EUV lithography in Intel 4 and then optimizing for maximum density in Intel 3, rather than trying to do both at once -- Intel hopes to avoid the delays and yield problems that held the 10nm/Intel 7 process back for so many years.

Intel, one of the world's leading chipmakers, has responded to global headwinds by joining a string of other tech companies in placing a freeze on new hires as it seeks ways to cut costs. Fortune reports: "Increased focus and prioritization in our spending will help us weather macroeconomic uncertainty, execute on our strategy, and meet our commitments to customers, shareholders, and employees," Intel said in a statement provided to Fortune on Thursday, a day after Reuters reported a leaked internal memo announcing the hiring freeze at Intel.

According to the memo, Intel is placing a two-week hiring freeze on its client computing group, which creates PC chips for desktop and laptop computers. Client computing is Intel's largest division by sales, generating just over 50% of the manufacturer's revenue last quarter. In April, Intel issued weaker-than-expected profit guidance for the second quarter, citing reduced PC chip sales. But Citi's semiconductor analyst, Christopher Danely, predicts Intel will miss its weak second-quarter guidance, following negative comments Intel CFO David Zinsner made at a Bank of America conference on Tuesday.

"Weaker" macroeconomic conditions are "clearly going to impact" Intel's earnings, Zinsner said, adding that "the circumstances at this point are much worse than what we had anticipated coming into the quarter."

Apple plans to expand the lineup of laptops using its new, speedier in-house chips next year, aiming to grab a bigger share of the market, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the matter said. From the report: The company is working on a larger MacBook Air with a 15-inch screen for release as early as next spring, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't public. This would mark the first model of that size in the MacBook Air's 14-year history. Apple is also developing what would be its smallest new laptop in years. The new models underscore Apple's strategy to use homegrown processors to make gains in a market led by Lenovo and HP. The company began splitting from longtime partner Intel in 2020 and announced its latest chip, the M2, at a developers conference earlier this week. Better performance and new designs have helped spur a resurgence for the Mac lineup, which accounts for about 10% of Apple's sales.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can't is run operating systems written for Intel or AMD processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple Silicon Macs can, however, run operating systems written for Arm processors inside of virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Arm-compatible versions of Linux. And those Linux VMs are getting a new feature in macOS Ventura: the ability to run apps written for x86 processors using Rosetta, the same binary translation technology that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run apps written for Intel Macs.

Apple's documentation will walk you through the requirements for using Rosetta within a Linux guest operating system -- it requires creating a shared directory that both macOS and Linux can access and running some terminal commands in Linux to get it set up. But once you do those steps, you'll be able to enjoy the wider app compatibility that comes with being able to run x86 code as well as Arm code. Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @never_released, have already found that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM CPUs as long as they're modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm instruction set. As Martin points out, this isn't strictly legal because of macOS's licensing restrictions, and there are some relatively minor Apple-specific hardware features needed to unlock Rosetta's full capabilities.

At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling. Ars Technica reports: The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming "XeSS" system from Intel. Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since Apple has yet to announce a way for MetalFX Upscaling to leverage its custom-made "Neural Engine" system.

By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction -- even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones. The report notes that Metal 3 also includes "a new 'resource-loading' API designed to streamline asset-loading processes in video games." The same Metal 3 API benefits will also come to iPadOS 16 later this year.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a featured TechCrunch article, written by Christine Hall: Where the Olentangy and Scioto rivers come together lies the city of Columbus, Ohio, a bedrock town famously known as "Test City, USA," boasting demographics that mirrored the country's population, and the home of The Ohio State University. It is steadily becoming an emerging tech scene in the Midwest where startups are finding all the tools needed to develop burgeoning businesses.

Venture capitalists injected over $3 billion into the city over the past 20 years, particularly in healthcare and insurance startups, according to Crunchbase data. Investment into the city startups started picking up around 2017 and really peaked in 2021. That's when investment essentially doubled, going from $583 million in 2020 to just over $1 billion, with half of those dollars going into two companies: healthcare technology company Olive and autonomous robotics company Path Robotics. So far in 2022, $110 million has gone into Columbus startups. Olive is now valued at over $4 billion and is among Columbus success stories like CoverMyMeds, a healthcare software company that was acquired by the McKesson Corp. in 2017 for $1.4 billion, which represents Central Ohio's first $1 billion exit. Root Insurance, which raised over $800 million since 2015, went public in 2020. Other notable raises include Forge Biologics' $120 million Series B round, which was thought to be Ohio's largest Series B to date. Forge plans to add 200 new jobs by 2023.

Columbus has also caught the eye of enterprises, including Facebook, Amazon and now Intel, which announced earlier this year that it will build two chip factories outside of the city that will provide 3,000 company jobs and many more thousands of indirect jobs. Meanwhile, therapeutics company Amgen announced last November that it is building a new biomanufacturing facility in New Albany, one of Columbus' suburbs, providing 400 jobs for assembling and packaging medicines. All of this activity, plus a low cost of living, availability of a young, skilled talent pool and public/private partnerships eager to support entrepreneurs, research and innovation, is why TechCrunch has chosen to spotlight Columbus' growing startup scene with a special episode of TechCrunch Live.

Microsoft looks set to announce an updated version of its compact Surface Laptop Go, if an early retailer listing from Korea is to be believed. From a report: The biggest change with the Surface Laptop Go 2 appears to be its newer 11th-gen Intel CPU (an i5-1135G7), which replaces the 10th-gen model found in the original 2020 laptop. The Go 2 will ship with Windows 11 this time around, and a Google Translate of the retailer page says its webcam will have "improved HD camera performance." Preorders are set to open on June 2nd, so an official announcement might not be far away. WinFuture previously reported that the laptop could have a starting price of $650. Otherwise, the new laptop appears to be very similar to its predecessor. It still has a 12.4-inch display with a 3:2 aspect ratio, the same selection of ports (USB-A, USB-C, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a port for Microsoft's proprietary charger), and a fingerprint sensor that's still built into the power button on select models. There's no sign of a backlit keyboard, which was an unfortunate omission on the first Laptop Go.

UnknowingFool writes: The current Linux kernel in development, 5.19, added 495,793 new lines of code for graphic driver updates. David Airlie sent in the new lines as part of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem of Linux. The majority of additions were for AMD's RDNA and CDNA platforms but Intel also submitted changes for their DG2 graphics as well. Updates also came from Qualcomm and MediaTek for their GPU offerings.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: For five years, Foxconn promised and spectacularly failed to build a much-hyped sprawling factory near Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Now, the area's leaders may be saddled with $300 million in bond repayments that the Taiwanese iPhone maker had promised to repay. According to the Wall Street Journal, Foxconn agreed to pay $36 million annually across a 20-year term to pay for the surrounding infrastructure supporting the now-abandoned 3,000-acre site. Those payments are scheduled to start next tax year, and local leaders told the newspaper they're counting on Foxconn's cash to maintain the site while they try to attract another occupant.

Finding an occupant hasn't been easy. Intel, which announced a $20 billion investment in two chip factories in Ohio in January, was also considering Wisconsin for the project, with its focus on Racine, the nearest large city to the proposed Foxconn plant. The other option to cover the costs would be a total Foxconn pullout, which state officials said would let the government sell the land, assessed at a value of over $500 million. Ultimately, we're told, Foxconn promised to cough up $300 million to cover bonds for the infrastructure, whether the plant went ahead or not, but with that deal in tatters, it's now not clear if the money will be paid.

Today at Build 2022, Microsoft unveiled Project Volterra, a device powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform that's designed to let developers explore "AI scenarios" via Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (SNPE) for Windows toolkit. From a report: The hardware arrives alongside support in Windows for neural processing units (NPUs), or dedicated chips tailored for AI- and machine learning-specific workloads. Dedicated AI chips, which speed up AI processing while reducing the impact on battery, have become common in mobile devices like smartphones. But as apps like AI-powered image upscalers come into wider use, manufacturers have been adding such chips to their laptop lineups. M1 Macs feature Apple's Neural Engine, for instance, and Microsoft's Surface Pro X has the SQ1 (which was co-developed with Qualcomm). Intel at one point signaled it would offer an AI chip solution for Windows PCs, but -- as the ecosystem of AI-powered Arm apps is well-established, thanks to iOS and Android -- Project Volterra appears to be an attempt to tap it rather than reinvent the wheel.

It's not the first time Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm to launch AI developer hardware. In 2018, the companies jointly announced the Vision Intelligence Platform, which featured "fully integrated" support for computer vision algorithms running via Microsoft's Azure ML and Azure IoT Edge services. Project Volterra offers evidence that, four years later, Microsoft and Qualcomm remain bedfellows in this arena, even after the reported expiration of Qualcomm's exclusivity deal for Windows on Arm licenses. Arriving later this year, Microsoft says (somewhat hyperbolically) that Project Volterra will come with a neural processor that has "best-in-class" AI computing capacity and efficiency. The primary chip will be Arm-based, supplied by Qualcomm, and will enable developers to build and test Arm-native apps alongside tools including Visual Studio, VSCode, Microsoft Office and Teams. Project Volterra is the harbinger of an "end-to-end" developer toolchain for Arm-native apps from Microsoft, as it turns out, which will span the full Visual Studio 2022, VSCode, Visual C++, NET 6, Windows Terminal, Java, Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android (for running Android apps).