Microsoft has announced a new edition of Windows 11 designed specifically for the K-8 education sector, dubbed "Windows 11 SE." This new edition of Windows 11 is designed to address fundamental challenges that schools are facing day to day with improved performance, optimized resources, and simple to deploy and manage. From a report: Microsoft says Windows 11 SE has been optimized for education focused low-cost PCs, most of which start at the affordable price of $249 and are powered by low-end Intel and AMD chips. Windows 11 SE was designed with feedback from teachers and school IT admins in mind. Unlike normal Windows 11, Windows 11 SE comes pre-loaded with Microsoft Office out of the box, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, and OneDrive, which can also be used offline as part of a Microsoft 365 license.

Microsoft has also limited some of the multitasking features, including reducing the amount of apps that can be snapped on screen at once to just two; side by side. The Microsoft Store app is also disabled. Windows 11 SE also automatically runs apps in full-screen, which makes sense considering most Windows 11 SE PCs will feature small 11-inch displays. It also removes access to the "This PC" area in File Explorer by default, as it's an area most students don't need to access when working on school work. Windows 11 SE is "cloud backed" meaning it will mirror all your saved documents stored locally to the cloud.

In yet another shift away from its traditional hardware business, Huawei has sold its x86 server unit to a state-owned Chinese firm. Light Reading reports: China company registration data confirms that the sale to Henan Information Industry Investment Co. Ltd., owned by the Henan provincial government, concluded on November 5. The size of the transaction has not been disclosed. Huawei's server business, like its once high-flying handset division, has been hit badly by US sanctions, which prevent it from obtaining the Intel chips that power 90% of the world's servers. The vendor flagged the possibility of a sale at a company event six weeks ago. Eric Xu, one of Huawei's three co-chairmen, acknowledged the server unit had "encountered difficulties" and said Huawei was in discussions with some potential investors.

Advanced Micro Devices said Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is becoming a user of its server processors, further eroding Intel's hold on that lucrative market. From a report: Meta will use AMD Epyc processors in its data center computers, the two companies said Monday at an event. AMD also unveiled a new version of that chip with extra memory, which Microsoft Corp. will use in an offering from its Azure cloud computing service. The chipmaker also showed off a new graphics chip for artificial intelligence workloads and gave hints about its next generation of processors coming in 2022. The addition of Meta, the world's largest social media company, to AMD's customer list means it now supplies all the top operators of the giant computing networks that run the internet. Winning those major spenders was part of Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su's plan to resurrect AMD and have it reach market share levels it had only briefly flirted with amid years of struggling to keep up with Intel.

"Intel is gearing up to go to a war with Nvidia," writes Slashdot reader labloke11. "They have their OneAPI and their GPU. It will be interesting... For me, I like competition." Phoronix reports: While Intel Alder Lake is dominating today's news cycle, Intel and Microsoft also announced today that they have brought oneAPI Level Zero and Intel OpenCL support to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) while employing Intel graphics hardware acceleration. Similar to NVIDIA bringing CUDA and their accelerated GPU support to WSL2 as well as similar efforts by AMD on the Radeon side, Intel and Microsoft are now having Intel graphics compute working within the Linux confines on Windows 11 or Windows 10 21'H2. Hardware-accelerated oneAPI Level Zero, OpenVINO, and OpenCL on Intel graphics hardware can now be enjoyed within the WSL2 environment when using the latest updates and drivers. Like with the rest of the WSL2 stack and capabilities from other GPU vendors, this is at a near-native level of performance. More information can be found via the Microsoft Command Line blog and Intel blog.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Intel has posted a release that the hybrid CPU core architecture on Alder Lake can be incompatible with certain games, specifically some protected by the anti-piracy DRM software from Denuvo. This was confirmed in our review of the Core i9-12900K when we tried to run the hit AAA Ubisoft title Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, part of our processor benchmark suite. The game would crash halfway through the test run, or simply not boot in at all. The errors occur because Denuvo's DRM software will mistakenly think the so-called "Performance-cores" and "Efficiency-cores" (P-cores and E-cores) on the chip belong to two separate PCs, when in reality the two types of processing cores are running on the same Alder Lake processor. (This P-core/E-core design is a new trait of Intel's chips with Alder Lake.)

Intel was originally mum on which specific games were affected, making it unclear the scale of the problem; the company cited "32" in pre-release briefings to the tech press. Whether these would be marginal titles or blockbusters we did not know, as hundreds of games use the Denuvo DRM scheme. But on Thursday, the company published a list of every PC title known to it that has incompatibility issues with Alder Lake. It spans 51 games, including For Honor, Mortal Kombat 11, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as well as the Assassin's Creed: Valhalla game we observed the issue on. Intel says it is working with game developers to roll out a software fix, although the company notes that some of the affected DRM-protected titles can run fine, so long as your PC is on Windows 11. In the meantime, the company says it has come up with a workaround that can run any of the affected games on Alder Lake. But it'll do so by placing the efficiency cores on standby. "According to Intel, 22 of the games won't work on Alder Lake under both Windows 10 and Windows 11," adds PCMag. "[T]he remaining 29 titles [...] will suffer incompatibility problems, but only when run on Windows 10. So owners can also solve the issue by updating their PCs to Windows 11 or using the Scroll Lock workaround if available."

The Information today shared alleged details about future Apple silicon chips that will succeed the first-generation M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max chips, which are manufactured based on Apple chipmaking partner TSMC's 5nm process. MacRumors adds: The report claims that Apple and TSMC plan to manufacture second-generation Apple silicon chips using an enhanced version of TSMC's 5nm process, and the chips will apparently contain two dies, which can allow for more cores. These chips will likely be used in the next MacBook Pro models and other Mac desktops, the report says. Apple is planning a "much bigger leap" with its third-generation chips, some of which will be manufactured with TSMC's 3nm process and have up to four dies, which the report says could translate into the chips having up to 40 compute cores. For comparison, the M1 chip has an 8-core CPU and the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips have 10-core CPUs, while Apple's high-end Mac Pro tower can be configured with up to a 28-core Intel Xeon W processor.

MojoKid writes: After months of speculation and early look teases, Intel's 12th Gen Core processors are finally ready for prime time. Today marks the embargo lift for independent reviews of Alder Lake and it's clear Chipzilla is back and bringing the fight again versus chief rival AMD. Intel 12th Gen Core processors incorporate two new CPU core designs, dubbed Efficiency (E-core) and Performance (P-core). In addition to this new hybrid core architecture, 12th Gen Core processors and the Z690 motherboard chipset platform also feature support for the latest memory and IO technologies, including PCI Express Gen 5, DDR5, Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6E. The new Core i9-12900K features a monolithic, 16-core (24-thread) die with 8 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores, while the Core i5-12600K has 10 cores/16-threads, comprised of 6 P-cores and 4 E-cores. Alder Lake E-cores don't support HyperThreading but P-cores can process two threads simultaneously while E-cores can manage only one, hence the asymmetric core counts.

In the benchmarks, the 16-core Core i9-12900K doesn't sweep AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X across the board in multi-threaded tests, but it certainly competes very well and notches plenty of victories. In the lightly-threaded tests though, it's a much clearer win for Intel and gaming is an obvious strong point as well. Alder Lake's performance cores are as fast as they come. The $589 (MSRP) 16-core Core i9-12900K competes well with the $750 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X, and the $289 10-core Core i5-12600K has a lower MSRP than a $299 6-core Ryzen 5 5600X. The new Core i5's power and performance look great too, especially when you consider this $289 chip outruns Intel's previous-gen flagship Core i9-11900K more often than not, and it smokes a Ryzen 5 5600X.

NotebookCheck: It seems that Intel was not telling the full story when it compared the Core i9-12900K against the Ryzen 9 5950X, currently AMD's most comparable processor. As it turns out, Intel allowed the Core i9-12900K to consume 2.4x the power of its AMD competitor and benchmarked the Ryzen 9 5950X using an older version of Windows 11 with AMD performance issues.

Phoronix ran some fun performance tests this week. "Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions." First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system... The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including:

- Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
- Ubuntu 21.10
- Arch Linux (latest rolling)
- Fedora Workstation 35
- Clear Linux 35150

[...] Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro...

The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.
Out of 44 tests, here's a breakdown of how many first-place wins were scored by each OS:

• Clear Linux: 33 (75%)
• Fedora Workstation 35: 4 (9.1%)
• Windows 11 Pro: 3 (6.8%)
• Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS: 2 (4.5%)
• Arch Linux: 1 (2.3%)
• Ubuntu 21.10: 1 (2.3%)

Phoronix: Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions. First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system. Microsoft Windows 11 Pro with all stable updates as of 18 October was used for this round of benchmarking on Intel Rocket Lake. The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, Arch Linux (latest rolling), Fedora Workstation 35, Clear Linux 35150. All the testing was done on the same Intel Core i9 11900K test system at stock speeds (any frequency differences reported in the system table come down to how the information is exposed by the OS, i.e. base or turbo reporting) with 2 x 16GB DDR4-3200 memory, 2TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe solid-state drive, and an AMD Radeon VII graphics card.

Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro. But for the TLDR version... Out of 44 tests run across all six operating systems, Windows 11 had just three wins on this Core i9 11900K system. Meanwhile Intel's own Clear Linux platform easily dominated with coming in first place 75% of the time followed by Fedora Workstation 35 in second place with first place finishes 9% of the time. The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.

AnandTech reviews the recently unveiled M1 Pro and M1 Max chips : The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely -- these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn't expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve. On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance -- the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It's not just 4 additional performance cores, it's a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren't even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren't only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you'd have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max -- it's just generally absurd.

On the GPU side of things, Apple's gains are also straightforward. The M1 Pro is essentially 2x the M1, and the M1 Max is 4x the M1 in terms of performance. Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it's a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What's clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration. To further improve content creation, the new media engine is a key feature of the chip. Particularly video editors working with ProRes or ProRes RAW, will see a many-fold improvement in their workflow as the new chips can handle the formats like a breeze -- this along is likely going to have many users of that professional background quickly adopt the new MacBook Pro's. For others, it seems that Apple knows the typical MacBook Pro power users, and has designed the silicon around the use-cases in which Macs do shine. The combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, as well as sheer power efficiency, is something that you just cannot find in any other platform right now, likely making the new MacBook Pro's not just the best laptops, but outright the very best devices for the task. It's a comprehensive review, and Intel should be panicking.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The reign of Apple's M1 SoC at the top of the Geekbench speed benchmarks may soon be over with the impending arrival of Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake mobile processors. Hardware site Wccftech appears to have been leaked Intel's upcoming Core i9-12900HK mobile CPU, and has now revealed the first benchmarks. The results show Intel's mobile CPU narrowly outperforming Apple's flagship 10-core M1 Max, which also integrates a 32-core GPU and 64GB of unified memory.

In these latest tests, the Core i9-12900HK outperforms the M1 Max on both single-core and multi-core benchmarks. The margin is slim, but is important for Intel since Apple ditched its CPUs for its own designs in new MacBooks. Intel's Alder Lake CPU didn't beat the M1 Max by much, with respective single-core scores of 1851 and 1785. It beat the Core i9-11980HK and AMD's top mobile CPU, the Ryzen 5980HX, by a bigger margin: the latter two CPUs saw scores of 1616 and 1506, respectively. In the multi-core benchmark, the Core i9-12900HK scored 13256 versus the M1 Max's score of 12753. Again, it trounced AMD's 5980HX, which scored 8217. Wccftech's Alder Lake benchmarks were run using Windows 11, so it's possible Thread Director's hardware scheduling influenced the results.

"Microsoft has been mainly telling consumers that Windows 11 is meant for newer PCs," reports PC Magazine.

"However, an internet user has uploaded a video that shows the OS can actually run on a 15-year-old Pentium 4 chip from Intel." Last week, Twitter user "Carlos S.M." posted screenshots of his Pentium 4-powered PC running Windows 11. He then followed that up with a video and benchmarks to verify that his machine was running the one-core Pentium chip with only 4GB of DDR2 RAM.

To install the OS onto the system, Carlos S.M. said he used a Windows 10 PE Installer, which can be used to deploy or repair Windows via a USB drive. "Windows 11 is installed in MBR (Master Boot Record)/Legacy Boot mode, no EFI emulation involved," he added.

Of course, the OS runs a bit slow on the Pentium 4 chip. Nevertheless, it shows Windows 11 can easily run on decade-old hardware... Officially, Microsoft has said a PC must possess a newer security feature called TPM 2.0 in order to run Windows 11. To underscore the point, the company released a list of eligible CPUs, and the processors only go as far back as late 2017. However, the company has also quietly acknowledged that older PCs without TPM 2.0 can run Windows 11 — so long as the user decides to manually install the OS onto their machine...

If you do install Windows 11 on an unsupported PC, Microsoft warns your machine may not be eligible to receive automatic updates. But apparently Carlos S.M. has had no problems receiving updates for his own Pentium-powered PC. "Windows update still works on this machine and even installed the Patch Tuesday," Carlos S.M. said in a follow-up tweet.
Thanks to tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) for the tip!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: Over the last year and a half, as the pandemic has everyone turned to their screens, demand has surged for devices (phones and laptops) and cloud services (Netflix and Zoom), all powered by a range of advanced semiconductors. Manufacturers have raced to squeeze more chips out of their fabs, but many were running near their limits before the pandemic. Still, Intel and its competitors didn't rush to build new fabs -- fabs are startlingly expensive, and without continued demand, semiconductor firms are loath to build more. But now, as the global pandemic continues to disrupt supply chains, chipmakers have decided that the current spike in demand isn't going away. Intel's $20 billion investment [to build two new chip factories in Chandler, Arizona] is only one example. Samsung announced in May that it would spend $151 billion over the next decade to boost its semiconductor capacity. TSMC made a similar announcement in April, pledging to invest $100 billion in the next three years alone.

The investments required to stay at the leading edge -- where the most advanced chips are made -- has whittled down the number of semiconductor competitors from more than 20 in 2001 to just two today. "There's really only so much room at the leading edge, just because of the huge capital costs involved," said Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. That cost is driven by the price of the equipment that's required to etch ever-smaller features onto chips. A few years ago, the industry began to use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) to shrink transistor sizes. EUV machines are marvels of physics and engineering, and one tool costs upwards of $120 million. To stay relevant, companies will need to buy a dozen or more annually for the next several years. For those sorts of investments to make sense, semiconductor manufacturers must produce and sell an enormous volume of chips. "When you have volume orders, then you can do yield experiments, you can improve your yield, and yield is everything because that's how you cover your costs," said Willy Shih, a professor of management at Harvard Business School. Which is why Intel, under [Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger], is doing something now that it historically has shunned. "We are now a foundry," Gelsinger said at the Arizona groundbreaking. In the coming years, he said, Intel will "open the doors of our fab wide for the community at large to serve the foundry needs of our customers -- many of them US companies that are dependent on solely having foreign supply sources today."

But becoming a leading-edge foundry isn't just about building fabs and telling customers you've got space to make their chips. Gelsinger will have to change Intel's culture and, to some extent, its technology, both of which are deep-seated. "He has to turn a huge ship around," said Robert Maire, president of Semiconductor Advisors. In the coming years, Intel has several challenges to master at once. As the company rolls out a new business model, it also needs to redouble its R&D efforts while still being careful with cash flow. (Intel has fallen so far behind that it now plans to outsource production of its most advanced chips -- and a portion of the profits that accompany them -- to TSMC.) The transition will demand intense focus. "The foundry business could be a distraction," Shih said. At the same time, he added, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other companies are moving away from Intel's standardized chips toward their own customized designs. If Intel doesn't change with the times, it risks being left behind. "There will be many challenges, and there will be tests that will face them," Shih said. "It's going to be hard."

Intel has open-sourced ControlFlag , a tool that uses machine learning to detect problems in computer code -- ideally to reduce the time required to debug apps and software. From a report: In tests, the company's machine programming research team says that ControlFlag has found hundreds of defects in proprietary, "production-quality" software, demonstrating its usefulness. "Last year, ControlFlag identified a code anomaly in Client URL (cURL), a computer software project transferring data using various network protocols over one billion times a day," Intel principal AI scientist Justin Gottschlich wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn.

"Most recently, ControlFlag achieved state-of-the-art results by identifying hundreds of latent defects related to memory and potential system crash bugs in proprietary production-level software. In addition, ControlFlag found dozens of novel anomalies on several high-quality open-source software repositories." The demand for quality code draws an ever-growing number of aspiring programmers to the profession. After years of study, they learn to translate abstracts into concrete, executable programs -- but most spend the majority of their working hours not programming. A recent study found that the IT industry spent an estimated $2 trillion in 2020 in software development costs associated with debugging code, with an estimated 50% of IT budgets spent on debugging.

When it comes to Intel's recent manufacturing problems, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger places the blame squarely on his predecessors -- many of whom he notes were not engineers deeply steeped in chip technology, as he is. Axios: Gelsinger has announced a broad plan to reinvigorate Intel by doubling down on manufacturing. However, the strategy depends on the venerable semiconductor giant recovering from recent stumbles. Gelsinger told me that the company had grown so successful that leaders wanted to move the strategy away from what had made Intel a chip juggernaut. Especially lacking, he said was the "maniacal" focus on manufacturing that had been a hallmark since Intel's founding. Gelsinger returned to Intel as CEO earlier this year, spent three decades at the company after joining it at age 18.

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: It has been well over a decade since PowerPC Macs roamed the earth -- so long that the Intel Macs that replaced them are themselves being replaced by something else. But to this day, there's a small community of people still developing software for PowerPC Macs and Mac OS 9. One of those projects was TenFourFox, a fork of the Firefox browser for G3, G4, and G5-based PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. Maintained primarily by Cameron Kaiser, the TenFourFox project sprang up in late 2010 after Mozilla pulled PowerPC support from Firefox 4 during its development. And amazingly, the browser has continued to trundle on ever since.

But continuing to backport Firefox features to aging, stuck-in-time PowerPC processors only got more difficult as time went on. And in March of this year, Kaiser announced that TenFourFox updates would be ending after over a decade of development. The final planned release of TenFourFox was earlier this month. Kaiser's full post is long, but it's worth a read for vintage-computer enthusiasts or anyone who works on software -- Kaiser expresses frustration with the realities of developing and supporting a niche app, but he also highlights TenFourFox's impressive technical achievements and ruminates on the nature of the modern Internet and open source software development [...].

Kaiser doesn't intend to fully halt work on the browser, but he is downshifting it into what he calls "hobby mode." He will continue to backport security patches from newer ESR releases of Firefox and post them to the TenFourFox Github page, but anyone who wants to use these will need to build the app themselves. Kaiser also won't commit to providing support for these additions or providing them on any kind of schedule. Other developers are also welcome to continue to release TenFourFox builds on their own.

The original Xbox was released 20 years ago next month, and to mark the upcoming anniversary, the console's designer has apologized to AMD's engineers and its CEO for Microsoft's last-minute decision to drop AMD for rival Intel. GameSpot reports: Seamus Blackley apologized on Twitter to the AMD engineers who worked with Microsoft to create the prototype Xbox consoles that the company used in the lead-up to the OG Xbox's release in November 2001. To AMD CEO Lisa Su, Blackley said, "I beg mercy." "I was standing there on the stage for the announcement, with [Bill Gates], and there they were right there, front row, looking so sad," he said of AMD engineers in the room. "I'll never forget it. They had helped so much with the prototypes. Prototypes that were literally running the launch announcement demos ON AMD HARDWARE." "I felt like such an ass," Blackley said. Microsoft dropped AMD in favor of Intel due to "pure politics," Blackley said in another tweet.

Apple's next hardware event will take place on October 18th, according to invites it sent out today. From a report: The company is widely expected to use its second fall event to launch a pair of new MacBooks, a redesigned higher-end Mac Mini, and possibly a pair of third-generation AirPods. The invite video teases one word: Unleashed.

[...] There have been reports for months that Apple is on the cusp of releasing new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. The new MacBooks would be the latest step in Apple's transition away from Intel chips, replacing them with an Arm-based processor called the M1X that Apple designs itself. The new chip could boost performance compared to the M1 chip that debuted last year. Other anticipated features include the return of fan-favorite MacBook features like magnetic MagSafe charging, an HDMI port, and an SD card slot. The maligned OLED touch bar, mercifully, could be on the way out. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman recently noted that stock of the company's existing MacBook Pro appears to be running low.

The boss of Intel says the US chipmaker is no longer considering building a factory in the UK because of Brexit. The BBC reports: Pat Gelsinger told the BBC that before the UK left the EU, the country "would have been a site that we would have considered." But he added: "Post-Brexit... we're looking at EU countries and getting support from the EU." Intel is investing up to $95 billion on opening and upgrading semiconductor plants in Europe over the next 10 years, as well as boosting its US output. But while Mr Gelsinger said the firm "absolutely would have been seeking sites for consideration" in the UK, he said Brexit had changed this. "I have no idea whether we would have had a superior site from the UK," he said. "But we now have about 70 proposals for sites across Europe from maybe 10 different countries. "We're hopeful that we'll get to agreement on a site, as well as support from the EU... before the end of this year."

Microchips are vital components in millions of products from cars to washing machines, but they have been in short supply this year due to surging demand and supply chain issues. It has led to shortages of popular goods like cars and computers and driven up prices - issues Mr Gelsinger said were set to continue into Christmas. "There is some possibility that there may be a few IOUs under the Christmas trees around the world this year," he said. "Just everything is short right now. And even as I and my peers in the industry are working like crazy to catch up, it's going to be a while." He said things would "incrementally" improve next year but were unlikely to stabilize until 2023.