Google is launching the "Chromebook X" program, aiming to differentiate high-quality laptops and tablets from standard Chromebooks by improving hardware specifications and adding exclusive features such as enhanced video conferencing capabilities and unique wallpapers. Chromebook X devices, expected to be priced between $350 and $500, will provide users with an elevated experience beyond the basic functionality of traditional Chromebooks. The devices are anticipated to be available in stores by the end of the year, coinciding with the release of ChromeOS version 115 or newer. 9to5Google reports: For the past few months, Google has been preparing new branding for above average devices from various Chromebook makers. Notably, we haven't yet seen any signs of Google making a Chromebook X device of its own, which is honestly a shame considering how long it's been since a Pixelbook has been released. The Chromebook X brand, which could change before launch, will appear somewhere on a laptop/tablet's chassis, with a mark that could be as simple as an "X" next to the usual "Chromebook" logo. There should also be a special boot screen instead of the standard "chromeOS" logo that's shown on all machines today.

Aside from the added "X," what actually sets a Chromebook X apart from other devices is the hardware inside. Specifically, Google appears to require a certain amount of RAM, a good-quality camera for video conferencing, and a (presumably) higher-end display. Beyond that, Google has so far made specific preparations for Chromebook X models to be built on four types of processors from Intel and AMD (though newer generations will likely also be included): AMD Zen 2+ (Skyrim), AMD Zen 3 (Guybrush), and Intel Core 12th Gen (Brya & Nissa).

To further differentiate Chromebook X models from low-end Chromebooks, Google is also preparing an exclusive set of features. As mentioned, one of the key focuses of Chromebook X is video conferencing, with Google requiring an up-to-spec camera. Complementing that hardware, Google is bringing unique features like Live Caption (adding generated captions to video calls), a built-in portrait blur effect, and "voice isolation." Earlier this year, we reported that ChromeOS was readying a set of "Time Of Day" wallpapers and screen savers that would change in appearance throughout the day, particularly to match the sunrise and sunset. We now know that these are going to be exclusive to Chromebook X devices. To ensure that those wallpapers only appear on Chromebook X and can't be forcibly enabled, Google is preparing a system it calls "feature management." At the moment, feature management is only used to check whether to enable Chromebook X exclusives. Based on that, some other exclusive features of Chromebook X include: Support for up to 16 virtual desks; "Pinned" (available offline) files from Google Drive; and A revamped retail demo mode.

SUSE's latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) has a focus on security, claiming it as the first distro to offer full support for confidential computing to protect data. From a report: According to SUSE, the latest version of its enterprise platform is designed to deliver high-performance computing capabilities, with an inevitable mention of AI/ML workloads, plus it claims to have extended its live-patching capabilities. The release also comes just weeks after the community release openSUSE Leap 15.5 was made available, with the two sharing a common core. The Reg's resident open source guru noted that Leap 15.6 has now been confirmed as under development, which implies that a future SLE 15 SP6 should also be in the pipeline.

SUSE announced the latest version at its SUSECON event in Munich, along with a new report on cloud security issues claiming that more than 88 percent of IT teams have reported at least one cloud security incident over the the past year. This appears to be the justification for the claim that SLE 15 SP5 is the first Linux distro to support "the entire spectrum" of confidential computing, allowing customers to run fully encrypted virtual machines on their infrastructure to protect applications and their associated data. Confidential computing relies on hardware-based security mechanisms in the processor to provide this protection, so enterprises hoping to take advantage of this will need to ensure their servers have the necessary support, such as AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) and Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. chipmaker Intel will spend $25 billion on a new factory in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, calling it the largest-ever international investment in the country. The factory in Kiryat Gat is due to open in 2027, to operate through 2035 at least and to employ thousands of people, Israel's Finance Ministry said. Under the deal Intel will pay a 7.5% tax rate, up from the current 5%, the ministry added.

During its almost five decades of operations in Israel, Intel has grown to become the country's largest privately held employer and exporter and a leader of the local electronics and information industry, according to the company's website. In 2017, Intel bought Israel-based Mobileye, which develops and deploys advanced driver-assistance systems, for $15 billion. Intel took Mobileye public last year.

Intel will invest more than 30 billion euros ($33 billion) in Germany as part of its expansion push in Europe, the U.S. company said on Monday, marking the biggest investment by a foreign company in Europe's top economy. From a report: The deal to build two leading-edge semiconductor facilities in the eastern city of Magdeburg involves 10 billion euros in German subsidies, a person familiar with the matter said. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said he was grateful to the German government and the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where Magdeburg is located, for "fulfilling the vision of a vibrant, sustainable, leading-edge semiconductor industry in Germany and the EU." Under Gelsinger, Intel has been investing billions in building factories across three continents to restore its dominance in chipmaking and better compete with rivals AMD, Nvidia and Samsung.

Long-time Slashdot reader waspleg shared this story from Hot Hardware: Red Hat Linux developer Richard WM Jones has shared an eyebrow raising tale of Linux bug hunting. Jones noticed that Linux 6.4 has a bug which means it will hang on boot about 1 in 1,000 times. Jones set out to pinpoint the bug, and prove he had caught it red handed. However, his headlining travail, involving booting Linux 292,612 times (and another 1,000 times to confirm the bug) apparently "only took 21 hours." It also seems that the bug is less common with Intel hardware than AMD based machines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel does a lot of things, but it's mostly noted for making and shipping a lot of processors, many of which have been named after bodies of water. So, saying that the company is set to start sending out a processor called Tunnel Falls would seem unsurprising if it weren't for some key details. Among them: The processor's functional units are qubits, and you shouldn't expect to be able to pick one up on New Egg. Ever. Tunnel Falls appears to be named after a waterfall near Intel's Oregon facility, where the company's quantum research team does much of its work. It's a 12-qubit chip, which places it well behind the qubit count of many of Intel's competitors -- all of which are making processors available via cloud services. But Jim Clarke, who heads Intel's quantum efforts, said these differences were due to the company's distinct approach to developing quantum computers.

Intel, in contrast, is attempting to build silicon-based qubits that can benefit from the developments that most of the rest of the company is working on. The company hopes to "ride the coattails of what the CMOS industry has been doing for years," Clarke said in a call with the press and analysts. The goal, according to Clarke, is to make sure the answer to "what do we have to change from our silicon chip in order to make it?" is "as little as possible." The qubits are based on quantum dots, structures that are smaller than the wavelength of an electron in the material. Quantum dots can be used to trap individual electrons, and the properties of the electron can then be addressed to store quantum information. Intel uses its fabrication expertise to craft the quantum dot and create all the neighboring features needed to set and read its state and perform manipulations.

However, Clarke said there are different ways of encoding a qubit in a quantum dot (Loss-DiVincenzo, singlet-triplet, and exchange-only, for those curious). This gets at another key difference with Intel's efforts: While most of its competitors are focused solely on fostering a software developer community, Intel is simultaneously trying to develop a community that will help it improve its hardware. (For software developers, the company also released a software developer kit.) To help get this community going, Intel will send Tunnel Falls processors out to a few universities: The Universities of Maryland, Rochester, Wisconsin, and Sandia National Lab will be the first to receive the new chip, and the company is interested in signing up others. The hope is that researchers at these sites will help Intel characterize sources of error and which forms of qubits provide the best performance. "Overall, Intel has made a daring choice for its quantum strategy," concludes Ars' John Timmer. "Electron-based qubits have been more difficult to work with than many other technologies because they tend to have shorter life spans before they decohere and lose the information they should be holding. Intel is counting on rapid iteration, a large manufacturing capacity, and a large community to help it figure out how to overcome this. But testing quantum computing chips and understanding why their qubits sometimes go wrong is not an easy process; it requires highly specialized refrigeration hardware that takes roughly a day to get the chips down to a temperature where they can be used."

"The company seems to be doing what it needs to overcome that bottleneck, but it's likely to need more than three universities to sign up if the strategy is going to work."

As first hinted at by Intel back in late April, Intel is embarking on a journey to redefine its client processor branding, the biggest such shift in the previous 15 years of the company. From a report: Having already made waves by altering its retail packaging on premium desktop chips such as the Core i9-11900K and Core i9-12900K, the tech giant aims to introduce a new naming scheme across its client processors, signaling a transformative phase in its client roadmap. This shift is due to begin in the second half of the year, when Intel will launch their highly anticipated Meteor Lake CPUs. Meteor Lake represents a significant leap forward for the company in regards to manufacturing, architecture, and design -- and, it would seem, is prompting the need for a fresh product naming convention.

The most important changes include dropping the 'i' from the naming scheme and opting for a more straightforward Core 3, 5, and 7 branding structure for Intel's mainstream processors. The other notable inclusion, which is now officially confirmed, is that Intel will bifurcate the Core brand a bit and place its premium client products in their own category, using the new Ultra moniker. Ultra chips will signify a higher performance tier and target market for the parts, and will be the only place Intel uses their top-end Core 9 (previously i9) branding.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have devised a novel attack that recovers the secret encryption keys stored in smart cards and smartphones by using cameras in iPhones or commercial surveillance systems to video record power LEDs that show when the card reader or smartphone is turned on. The attacks enable a new way to exploit two previously disclosed side channels, a class of attack that measures physical effects that leak from a device as it performs a cryptographic operation. By carefully monitoring characteristics such as power consumption, sound, electromagnetic emissions, or the amount of time it takes for an operation to occur, attackers can assemble enough information to recover secret keys that underpin the security and confidentiality of a cryptographic algorithm. [...]

On Tuesday, academic researchers unveiled new research demonstrating attacks that provide a novel way to exploit these types of side channels. The first attack uses an Internet-connected surveillance camera to take a high-speed video of the power LED on a smart card reader -- or of an attached peripheral device -- during cryptographic operations. This technique allowed the researchers to pull a 256-bit ECDSA key off the same government-approved smart card used in Minerva. The other allowed the researchers to recover the private SIKE key of a Samsung Galaxy S8 phone by training the camera of an iPhone 13 on the power LED of a USB speaker connected to the handset, in a similar way to how Hertzbleed pulled SIKE keys off Intel and AMD CPUs. Power LEDs are designed to indicate when a device is turned on. They typically cast a blue or violet light that varies in brightness and color depending on the power consumption of the device they are connected to.

There are limitations to both attacks that make them unfeasible in many (but not all) real-world scenarios (more on that later). Despite this, the published research is groundbreaking because it provides an entirely new way to facilitate side-channel attacks. Not only that, but the new method removes the biggest barrier holding back previously existing methods from exploiting side channels: the need to have instruments such as an oscilloscope, electric probes, or other objects touching or being in proximity to the device being attacked. In Minerva's case, the device hosting the smart card reader had to be compromised for researchers to collect precise-enough measurements. Hertzbleed, by contrast, didn't rely on a compromised device but instead took 18 days of constant interaction with the vulnerable device to recover the private SIKE key. To attack many other side channels, such as the one in the World War II encrypted teletype terminal, attackers must have specialized and often expensive instruments attached or near the targeted device. The video-based attacks presented on Tuesday reduce or completely eliminate such requirements. All that's required to steal the private key stored on the smart card is an Internet-connected surveillance camera that can be as far as 62 feet away from the targeted reader. The side-channel attack on the Samsung Galaxy handset can be performed by an iPhone 13 camera that's already present in the same room. Videos here and here show the video-capture process of a smart card reader and a Samsung Galaxy phone, respectively, as they perform cryptographic operations. "To the naked eye, the captured video looks unremarkable," adds Ars.

"But by analyzing the video frames for different RGB values in the green channel, an attacker can identify the start and finish of a cryptographic operation."

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday is expected to reveal new details about an AI "superchip" that analysts believe will be a strong challenger to Nvidia, whose chips dominate the fast-growing artificial intelligence market. From a report: AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su will give a keynote address at an event in San Francisco on the company's strategy in the data center and AI markets. Analysts expect fresh details about a chip called the MI300, AMD's most advanced graphics processing unit, the category of chips that companies like OpenAI use to develop products such as ChatGPT. Nvidia dominates the AI computing market with 80% to 95% of market share, according to analysts.

Last month, Nvidia's market capitalization briefly touched $1 trillion after the company said it expected a jump in revenue after it secured new chip supplies to meet surging demand. Nvidia has few competitors working at a large scale. While Intel and several startups such as Cerebras Systems and SambaNova Systems have competing products, Nvidia's biggest sales threat so far is the internal chip efforts at Alphabet's Google and Amazon's cloud unit, both of which rent their custom chips to outside developers.

20 miles west of Portland, engineers at an Intel lab are dunking expensive racks of servers "in a clear bath" made of motor oil-like petrochemicals, reports the Oregonian, where the servers "give off a greenish glow as they silently labor away on ordinary computing tasks." Intel's submerged computers operate just as they would on a dry server rack because they're not bathing in water, even though it looks just like it. They're soaking in a synthetic oil that doesn't conduct electricity. So the computers don't short out.

They thrive, in fact, because the fluid absorbs the heat from the hardworking computers much better than air does. It's the same reason a hot pan cools off a lot more quickly if you soak it in water than if you leave it on the stove.

As data centers grow increasingly powerful, the computers are generating so much heat that cooling them uses exorbitant amounts of energy. The cooling systems can use as much electricity as the computers themselves. So Intel and other big tech companies are designing liquid cooling systems that could use far less electricity, hoping to lower data centers' energy costs by as much as a third — and reducing the facilities' climate impact. It's a wholesale change in thinking for data centers, which already account for 2% of all the electricity consumption in the U.S... Skeptics caution that it may be difficult or prohibitively expensive to overhaul existing data centers to adapt to liquid cooling. Advocates of the shift, including Intel, say a transition is imperative to accommodate data centers' growing thirst for power. "It's really starting to come to a head as we're hitting the energy crisis and the need for climate action globally," said Jen Huffstetler, Intel's chief product sustainability officer...

Cooler computers can be packed more tightly together in data centers, since they don't need space for airflow. Computer manufacturers can pack chips together more tightly on the motherboard, enabling more computing power in the same space. And liquid cooling could significantly reduce data centers' environmental and economic costs. Conventional data centers' evaporative cooling systems require tremendous volumes of water and huge amounts of electricity...

Many other tech companies are backing immersion cooling, too. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all helping fund immersion cooling research at Oregon State... [T]he timing may finally be right for data centers operators to make the shift away from air cooling to something far more efficient. Intel's Huffstetler said she expects to see liquid cooling become widespread in the next three to five years.
The article notes other challenges:

• liquid adds more weight than some buildings' upper floors can support
• Some metals degrade faster in liquid than they do in air.
• And the engineers had to modify the servers by removing their fans — "because they serve no purpose while immersed."

"Kairan Quazi will probably need someone to drive him to work at SpaceX," writes the Los Angeles Times — because "He's only 14." The teen is scheduled to graduate this month from the Santa Clara University School of Engineering before starting a job as a software engineer at the satellite communications and spacecraft manufacturer... The soft-spoken teen said working with Starlink — the satellite internet team at SpaceX — will allow him to be part of something bigger than himself. That is no small feat for someone who has accomplished so much at such a young age...

The youngster jumped from third grade to a community college, with a workload that he felt made sense. "I felt like I was learning at the level that I was meant to learn," said Kairan, who later transferred to Santa Clara University... Kairan's family told BrainGain Magazine that when he was 9, IQ tests showed that his intelligence was in the 99.9th percentile of the general population. Asked if he's a genius, he recalled his parents telling him, "Genius is an action â it requires solving big problems that have a human impact." Once accepted to the engineering school at Santa Clara University as a transfer student, Kairan felt that he had found his freedom to pursue a career path that allowed him to solve those big problems.

While in college, Kairan and his mother made a list of places where he could apply for an internship. Only one company responded. Lama Nachman, director of the Intelligent Systems Research Lab at Intel, took a meeting with 10-year-old Kairan, who expected it to be brief and thought she would give him the customary "try again in a few years," he said. She accepted him. "In a sea of so many 'no's' by Silicon Valley's most vaunted companies, that ONE leader saying yes ... one door opening ... changed everything," Kairan wrote on his LinkedIn page...

Asked what he plans to wear on his first day, Kairan joked in an email that he plans "to show up in head to toe SpaceX merch. I'll be a walking commercial! Joking aside, I'll probably wear jeans and a t-shirt so I can be taken seriously as an engineer."

Next year Intel introduces a new transistor — RibbonFET — and a new way of powering it called "PowerVia."

This so-called "backside power" approach "aims to separate power and I/O wiring, shifting power lines to the back of the wafer," reports Tom's Hardware, which "eliminates any possible interference between the data and power wires and increases logic transistor density." IEEE Spectrum explains this approach "leaves more room for the data interconnects above the silicon," while "the power interconnects can be made larger and therefore less resistive."

And Intel has already done some successful powering tests using it on Intel's current transistors: The resulting cores saw more than a 6 percent frequency boost as well as more compact designs and 30 percent less power loss. Just as important, the tests proved that including backside power doesn't make the chips more costly, less reliable, or more difficult to test for defects. Intel is presenting the details of these tests in Tokyo next week at the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits...

[C]ores can be made more compact, decreasing the length of interconnects between logic cells, which speeds things up. When the standard logic cells that make up the processor core are laid out on the chip, interconnect congestion keeps them from packing together perfectly, leaving loads of blank space between the cells. With less congestion among the data interconnects, the cells fit together more tightly, with some portions up to 95 percent filled... What's more, the lack of congestion allowed some of the smallest interconnects to spread out a bit, reducing parasitic capacitance that hinders performance...

With the process for PowerVia worked out, the only change Intel will have to make in order to complete its move from Intel 4 to the next node, called 20A, is to the transistor... Success would put Intel ahead of TSMC and Samsung, in offering both nanosheet transistors and backside power.

Intel has announced Intel One Mono, a new font catering to "the needs of developers" with an "expressive" monospace for clarity and legibility" It's easier to read, and available for free, with an open-source font license.

Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, Frere-Jones Type designed the Intel One Mono typeface in partnership with the Intel Brand Team and VMLY&R, for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors. A panel of low-vision and legally blind developers provided feedback at each stage of design.
The Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu calls the new font "pretty decent," adding that "Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great.

"Still, there's always room for more, right...?" Better yet, it's not only free to download and use but free to edit, and free to redistribute... Overall, I think Intel One Mono looks great, especially in a text editor (GUI or CLI). There's a noticeable upper and lower margin to the font that in dense text situations allows text to breathe, but in some terminal tools, like Neofetch, the gaps can seem a bit too happy.
The Intel One Mono repository on GitHub includes instructions for activating the font in VSCode and Sublime Text, and lists some extra features accessible in some applications and via CSS:

• There is an option for a raised colon, either applied contextually between numbers or activated generally.

• Superior/superscript and inferior/subscript figures are included via their Unicode codepoints, or you can produce them from the default figures via the sups (Superscript), subs (Subscript), and si (Scientific Inferior) features.

• Fraction numerals are similarly available via the numr (Numerator) and dnom (Denominator) features. A set of premade fractions is also available in the fonts.

At WWDC today, Apple announced a new Mac Pro powered by the M2 Ultra chip. 9to5Mac reports: The chassis design of the machine appears to be the same as the 2019 Intel Mac Pro. The Mac Pro features eight Thunderbolt ports and six PCI slots for modular expansion. The base model config Mac Pro starts at $6999. Mac Pro with M2 Ultra features a 24-core CPU, up to 76-core GPU and 192 GB RAM. It also features two HDMI ports, dual 10-gigabit Ethernet, and a 32-core Neural Engine for machine learning tasks. It also features the latest wireless connectivity with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. You'll be able to order the new Mac Pro today via Apple.com.

At WWDC today, Apple announced macOS Sonoma, the latest version of its Mac operating system that includes new features like desktop widgets, aerial screensavers, a new Game mode, and enhancements to apps like Messages and Safari. MacRumors reports: The first feature that Apple detailed was new interactive widgets, which can now be placed right on your desktop. Widgets blend into your desktop wallpaper to not be obtrusive when you're working, and with Continuity you can use the same widgets from your iPhone on your Mac. macOS Sonoma also introduces enhanced video conferencing features, including Presenter Overlay to allow a user to display themselves in front of the content they are sharing. Reactions let users share how they feel within a video session, and Screen Sharing has been improved with a simplified process.

As is usual with macOS updates, Safari is getting numerous new features within Sonoma. There's an update to Private Browsing that provides greater protection from trackers and from people who might have access to the user's device. Profiles within Safari offer a way to separate browsing between topics, like having one for work and one for personal browsing. There's also a new way to create web apps that work like normal apps and let you get to your favorite website faster.

When you're not actively using macOS Sonoma, the new screen savers feature slow-motion videos of various locations worldwide. They shuffle between landscape, Earth, underwater, or cityscape themes, similar to what you'll see on tvOS. For gamers, there's a new Game Mode in macOS Sonoma that delivers an optimized gaming experience with smoother and more consistent frame rates. It dramatically lowers audio latency with AirPods and reduces input latency with game controllers, and it works with any game on Mac. A beta version of macOS Sonoma is now available via the Apple Developer Program, with a public beta launching next month.

As Ars Technica notes, the macOS Sonoma update will only run on a couple generations of Intel Macs. "[I]f you're using anything made before 2018 or anything without an Apple T2 chip in it, you won't be able to run the new OS."

Apple announced the M2 Ultra processor, a new chip for its Mac Studio workstation for professional users. From a report: The chip has 134 transistors and 24 central processing unit (CPU) cores with 20% faster performance. It has up to 76 graphics processing unit (GPU) cores at up to 30% faster performance. Apple made the announcement at its WWDC event today on the Apple campus in Cupertino, California.

The chip will go into the Mac Studio product, which previously used Intel silicon. These are machines like those used by engineers to deliver Saturday Night Live or create blockbuster movies, said Jennifer Munn at Apple. Apple said this completes the transition to Apple silicon. Developers can build new versions of apps at warp speed, with up to 25% faster performance than in the past, Munn said. The 32-core neural engine is 40% faster at AI calculations. It supports 192 gigabytes of unified memory, which is 50% more than M1 Ultra.

Linux computer vendor System76 shared some news in a recent blog post. "We prefer to disable the Intel Management Engine wherever possible to reduce the amount of closed firmware running on System76 hardware. We've resolved a coreboot bug that allows the Intel ME (Management Engine) to once again be disabled."

Phoronix reports that the move will "benefit their latest Intel Core 13th Gen 'Raptor Lake' wares as well as prior generation devices." Intel ME is disabled for their latest Raptor lake laptops and most older platforms with some exceptions like where having a silicon issue with Tiger Lake. System76 has also added a new firmware setup menu option for enabling/disabling UEFI Secure Boot. The motivation here with making it easier to toggle Secure Boot is for allowing Windows 11 support with SB active while running System76 Open Firmware.

ARM has joined the Linux Foundation's Open Programmable Infrastructure project, "a community-driven initiative focused on creating a standards-based open ecosystem for next-generation architectures and frameworks" based on programmable processor technologies like DPUs (Data Processing Units) and IPUs (Infrastructure Processing Units).

From the Linux Foundation's announcement: Launched in June 2021 under the Linux Foundation, the project is focused on utilizing open software and standards, as well as frameworks and toolkits, to enable the rapid adoption of DPUs. Arm joins other premier members including Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, Nvidia, Red Hat, Tencent, and ZTE. These member companies work together to create an ecosystem of blueprints and standards to ensure that compliant DPUs work with any server.

DPUs are used today to accelerate networking, security, and storage tasks. In addition to performance benefits, DPUs help improve data center security by providing physical isolation for running infrastructure tasks. DPUs also help to reduce latency and improve performance for applications that require real-time data processing. As DPUs create a logical split between infrastructure compute and client applications, the manageability of workloads within different development and management teams is streamlined.

"Arm has been contributing to the OPI Project for a while now," said Kris Murphy, Chair of the OPI Project Governing Board and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. "Now, as a premier member, we are excited that they're bringing their leadership to the Governing Board and expertise to the technical steering committee and working groups. Their participation will help to ensure that the DPU components are optimized for programmable infrastructure solutions."

"Across network, storage, and security applications, DPUs are already proving the power efficiency and capex benefits of specialized processing technology," said Marc Meunier, director of ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm and member of OPI Governing Board. "As a premier member of the OPI project, we look forward to contributing our expertise in heterogeneous computing and working with other leaders in the industry to create solution blueprints and standards that pave the way for successful deployments."

"The DPU market offers an opportunity for us to change how infrastructure services can be deployed and managed," Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. "With collaboration across software and hardware vendors representing silicon devices and the entire DPU software stack, the OPI Project is creating an open ecosystem for next generation data centers, private clouds, and edge deployments."

Linux Foundation Europe "has announced the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) Project to help facilitate more performant, commercial-ready software for the RISC-V processor architecture," reports Phoronix.

"Among the companies joining the RISE Project on their governing board are Andes, Google, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Mediatek, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Red Hat, Rivos, Samsung, SiFive, T-Head, and Ventana."

It's top goal is "accelerate the development of open source software for RISC-V," according to the official RISE web site. The project's chair says it "brings together leaders with a shared sense of urgency to accelerate the RISC-V software ecosystem readiness in collaboration with RISC-V International." The CEO of RISC-V International, Calista Redmond, said "We are grateful to the thousands of engineers making upstream contributions and to the organizations coming together now to invest in tools and libraries in support of the RISC-V software ecosystem." RISE Project members will contribute financially and provide engineering talent to address specific software deliverables prioritized by the RISE Technical Steering Committee (TSC). RISE is dedicated to enabling a robust software ecosystem specifically for application processors that includes software development tools, virtualization support, language runtimes, Linux distribution integration, and system firmware, working upstream first with existing open source communities in accordance with open source best practices.

"The RISE Project is dedicated to enabling RISC-V in open source tools and libraries (e.g., LLVM, GCC, etc) to speed implementation and time-to-market," said Gabriele Columbro, General Manager of Linux Foundation Europe.
Google's director of engineering on Android said Google was "excited to partner with industry leaders to drive rapid maturity of the RISC-V software ecosystem in support of Android and more."

And the VP of system software at NVIDIA said "NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform — which includes GPUs, DPUs, chiplets, interconnects and software — will support the RISC-V open standard to help drive breakthroughs in data centers, and a wide range of industries, such as automotive, healthcare and robotics."

Arm unveiled its upcoming flagship CPUs for 2024, including the Arm Cortex X4, Cortex A720, and Cortex A520. These chips, built on the Armv9.2 architecture, promise higher performance and improved power efficiency. Arm also introduced a new 'QARMA3 algorithm' for memory security and showcased a potential 14-core mega-chip design for high-performance laptops. Ars Technica reports: Arm claims the big Cortex X3 chip will have 15 percent higher performance than this year's X3 chip, and "40 percent better power efficiency." The company also promises a 20 percent efficiency boost for the A700 series and a 22 percent efficiency boost for the A500. The new chips are all built on the new 'Armv9.2' architecture, which adds a "new QARMA3 algorithm" for Arm's Pointer Authentication memory security feature. Pointer authentication assigns a cryptographic signature to memory pointers and is meant to shut down memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows by making it harder for unauthenticated programs to create valid memory pointers. This feature has been around for a while, but Arm's new algorithm reduces the CPU overhead of all this extra memory work to just 1 percent of the chip's power, which hopefully will get more manufacturers to enable it.

Arm's SoC recommendations are usually a "1+3+4" design. That's one big X chip, three medium A700 chips, and four A500 chips. This year the company is floating a new layout, though, swapping out two small chips for two medium chips, which would put you at a "1+5+2" configuration. Arm's benchmarks -- which were run on Android 13 -- claim this will get you 27 percent more performance. That's assuming anything can cool and power that for a reasonable amount of time. Arm's blog post also mentions a 1+4+4 chip -- nine cores -- for a flagship smartphone. [...]

Every year with these Arm flagship chip announcements, the company also includes a wild design for a giant mega-chip that usually never gets built. Last year the company's blueprint monster was a design with eight Cortex X3 chips and four A715 cores, which the company claimed would rival an Intel Core i7. The biggest X3-based chip on the market is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which landed in a few Windows laptops. That was only a four X3/four A715 chip, though. This year's mega chip is a 14-core monster with 10 Cortex X4 chips and four A720 chips, which Arm says is meant for "high-performance laptops." Arm calls the design the company's "most powerful cluster ever built," but will it ever actually be built? Will it ever be more than words on a page?