MojoKid writes: Intel just officially launched its first server products built on its advanced 10nm manufacturing process node, the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the 10nm Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. Core counts have been significantly increased with this generation, and now offer up to 40 cores / 80 threads per socket versus 28 cores / 56 threads in Intel's previous-gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of total memory, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 connectivity per socket, for more bandwidth, higher capacity, and copious IO.

New AI, security and cryptographic capabilities arrive with the platform as well. Across Cloud, HPC, 5G, IoT, and AI workloads, new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are claimed to offer significant uplifts across the board versus their previous-gen counterparts. And versus rival AMD's EPYC platform, Intel is also claiming many victories, specifically when AVX-512, new crypto instructions, or DL Boost are added to the equation. Core counts in the line-up range from 8 — 40 cores per processor and TDPs vary depending on the maximum base and boost frequencies and core count / configuration (up to a 270W TDP). Intel is currently shipping 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable CPUs to key customers now, with over 200K chips in Q1 this year and a steady ramp-up to follow.

To understand why the $450 billion semiconductor industry has lurched into crisis, a helpful place to start is a one-dollar part called a display driver. From a report: Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry, with the flashiest ones from Qualcomm and Intel going for $100 apiece to more than $1,000. Those run powerful computers or the shiny smartphone in your pocket. A display driver chip is mundane by contrast: Its sole purpose is to convey basic instructions for illuminating the screen on your phone, monitor or navigation system. The trouble for the chip industry -- and increasingly companies beyond tech, like automakers -- is that there aren't enough display drivers to go around. Firms that make them can't keep up with surging demand so prices are spiking. That's contributing to short supplies and increasing costs for liquid crystal display panels, essential components for making televisions and laptops, as well as cars, airplanes and high-end refrigerators.

"It's not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don't have a display driver, then you can't build your product," says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein. Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts -- power management chips are also in short supply, for example -- is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor, Nissan Motor and Volkswagen have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year. The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

An inventive MacRumors forums member has successfully retrofitted a water-cooling system to their 15-inch Intel-based MacBook Pro, thereby eliminating fan noise and boosting performance. From the report: MacRumors forums member "theodric" explained that the noise of their MacBook Pro's fans had become disruptive during conference calls, so amid ordering an M1 MacBook Air, they decided to fit a water cooling system to their machine. theodric used inexpensive parts such as Bitcoin ASIC miner blocks from AliExpress, an Aquastream XT Ultra water pump, and a Zalman radiator and reservoir from 2005 to create the system.

High-transmissivity thermal pads were added between the case shell and various motherboard components to conduct heat away from the MacBook Pro and into the water cooling system. The thermal shielding from the bottom of the case was also removed, as well as the feet, to ensure full contact with the new cooling plates. The pump, which requires Windows software to operate, was run via a virtual machine, and a Raspberry Pi was used for monitoring. theodric says that they have "hardly heard the fan since I started using it" and have seen benchmark scores significantly improve under the system. See theodric's full post for more information about the ambitious project.

VentureBeat reports on a "next-generation security" technique that allows data to remain encrypted while it's being processed.

"A security process known as fully homomorphic encryption is now on the verge of making its way out of the labs and into the hands of early adopters after a long gestation period." Companies such as Microsoft and Intel have been big proponents of homomorphic encryption. Last December, IBM made a splash when it released its first homomorphic encryption services. That package included educational material, support, and prototyping environments for companies that want to experiment. In a recent media presentation on the future of cryptography, IBM director of strategy and emerging technology Eric Maass explained why the company is so bullish on "fully homomorphic encryption" (FHE)...

"IBM has been working on FHE for more than a decade, and we're finally reaching an apex where we believe this is ready for clients to begin adopting in a more widespread manner," Maass said. "And that becomes the next challenge: widespread adoption. There are currently very few organizations here that have the skills and expertise to use FHE." To accelerate that development, IBM Research has released open source toolkits, while IBM Security launched its first commercial FHE service in December...

Maass said in the near term, IBM envisions FHE being attractive to highly regulated industries, such as financial services and health care. "They have both the need to unlock the value of that data, but also face extreme pressures to secure and preserve the privacy of the data that they're computing upon," he said.
The Wikipedia entry for homomorphic encryption calls it "an extension of either symmetric-key or public-key cryptography."

"AMD and Intel have both proposed better ways of doing interrupt and exception handling the last few months," reports LinuxReviews.org.

Then they share this analysis Linus Torvalds posted on the Real World Technologies forum: "The AMD version is essentially "Fix known bugs in the exception handling definition".

The Intel version is basically "Yeah, the protected mode 80286 exception handling was bad, then 386 made it odder with the 32-bit extensions, and then syscall/sysenter made everything worse, and then the x86-64 extensions introduced even more problems. So let's add a mode bit where all the crap goes away".

In contrast, the AMD one is basically a minimal effort to fix actual fundamental problems with all that legacy-induced crap that are nasty to work around and that have caused issues...

Both are valid on their own, and they are actually fairly independent. Honestly, the AMD paper looks like a quick "we haven't even finished thinking all the details through, but we know these parts were broken, so we might as well release this".

I don't know how long it has been brewing, but judging by the "TBD" things in that paper, I think it's a "early rough draft"."
In the article (shared by long-time Slashdot reader xiando), LinuxReviews.org summarizes the state of the conversation today: Torvalds went on to say that while AMD's proposed "quick fix" would be easier to implement for him and others operating system vendors, it's not ideal in the long run. Intel's proposal throws the entire existing interrupt descriptor table (IDT) delivery system under the bus so it can be replaced with what they call a new "FRED event delivery" system. Torvalds believes this is a better long-term solution...

While the pros and cons of Intel and AMD's respective proposals for interrupt and event handling in future processors are worthy of discussion, it's in reality mostly up to Intel. They are the bigger and more powerful corporation. It is more likely than not that future processors from Intel will use their proposed Flexible Return and Event Delivery system. Their next generation processors won't, it will take years not months before consumer CPUs have the FRED technology. Remember, the above-mentioned technical document was published earlier this month [in March]. Things do not magically go from the drawing-board to store-shelves overnight.

Intel isn't going to just hand the FRED technology over to AMD and help them implement it. We will likely see both move forward with their own proposals. Intel will have FRED and AMD will have Supervisor Entry Extensions until AMD, inevitably, adopts FRED or some form of it years down the line.
They also note that Torvalds took issue with a poster arguing that microkernels are more secure than monolithic kernels like Linux. "Bah, you're just parroting the usual party line that had absolutely no basis in reality and when you look into the details, doesn't actually hold up.

It's all theory and handwaving and just repeating the same old FUD that was never actually really relevant."

Arm unveiled the biggest overhaul of its technology in almost a decade, with new designs targeting markets currently dominated by Intel, the world's largest chipmaker. From a report: The Cambridge, U.K.-based company is adding capabilities to help chips handle machine learning, a powerful type of artificial intelligence software. Extra security features will lock down data and computer code more. The new blueprints should also deliver 30% performance increases over the next two generations of processors for mobile devices and data center servers, said Arm, which is being acquired by Nvidia. The upgrades are needed to support the spread of computing beyond phones, PCs and servers, Arm said. Thousands of devices and appliances are being connected to the internet and gaining new capabilities through the addition of more chips and AI-powered software and services. The company wants its technology to be just as ubiquitous here as it is in the smartphone industry.

ArsTechnica: Today marks the start of retail availability for Intel's 2021 gaming CPU lineup, codenamed Rocket Lake-S. Rocket Lake-S is still stuck on Intel's venerable 14 nm process -- we've long since lost count of how many pluses to tack onto the end -- with features backported from newer 10 nm designs. Clock speed on Rocket Lake-S remains high, but thread counts have decreased on the high end. Overall, most benchmarks show Rocket Lake-S underperforming last year's Comet Lake -- let alone its real competition, coming from AMD Ryzen CPUs. Our hands-on test results did not seem to match up with Intel's marketing claims of up to 19 percent gen-on-gen IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle) improvement over its 10th-generation parts. It shouldn't come as an enormous surprise that Core i9-11900K underperforms last year's Core i9-10900K in many multithreaded tests -- this year's model only offers eight cores to last year's 10. On the plus side, Intel's claims of 19% gen-on-gen IPC are largely borne out here, mostly balancing the loss out in Passmark and Geekbench. This year's Core i5 makes a much better showing than its Core i9 big sibling. In Cinebench R20, Core i5-11600K almost catches up with Ryzen 5 5600X, and it easily dominates last year's Comet Lake i5 equivalent. It doesn't catch up to its Ryzen competitor in Passmark or Geekbench multithreaded tests, but it outpaces last year's model all the way around.

Samsung has unveiled a new RAM module that shows the potential of DDR5 memory in terms of speed and capacity. Engadget reports: The 512GB DDR5 module is the first to use High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) tech, delivering 7,200 Mbps speeds -- over double that of DDR4, Samsung said. Right now, it's aimed at data-hungry supercomputing, AI and machine learning functions, but DDR5 will eventually find its way to regular PCs, boosting gaming and other applications. Developed by Intel, it uses hafnium instead of silicon, with metals replacing the normal polysilicon gate electrodes. All of that allows for higher chip densities, while reducing current leakage.

Each chip uses eight layers of 16Gb DRAM chips for a capacity of 128Gb, or 16GB. As such, Samsung would need 32 of those to make a 512GB RAM module. On top of the higher speeds and capacity, Samsung said that the chip uses 13 percent less power than non-HKMG modules -- ideal for data centers, but not so bad for regular PCs, either. With 7,200 Mbps speeds, Samsung's latest module would deliver around 57.6 GB/s transfer speeds on a single channel.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel made several big announcements about its 7nm tech at this week's Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future event and divulged that it expects that the majority of its products in 2023 to still be produced in-house using its own manufacturing technology. But there's a caveat: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company will also release "leadership CPU products" in 2023 with CPU cores that are fabricated with an unspecified process node from third-party foundry TSMC, and those CPUs will come to both the client and data center markets. This development comes on the heels of Intel's announcement last year that its 7nm process was delayed, possibly forcing it to do the unthinkable -- turn to external foundries to produce its core logic, like CPUs and GPUs, for the first time in the company's history.

The newest announcements mean that, in addition to the 7nm Meteor Lake desktop chips and Granite Rapids data center processors that Intel will produce with its own process technology in 2023, the company will also release other lines of CPUs in 2023 that will use CPU cores with an as-yet-unspecified process node from TSMC. Intel noted that the chips that utilize TSMC's third-party process tech will power Intel's "CPU leadership" products for both the client and data center markets, suggesting a split product stack. Intel says that the majority of its products in 2023 will come manufactured with its own process technology. Still, it's important to note that Intel hasn't specified that the majority of the newly-released 2023 products will come with its own 7nm process. Naturally, Intel will still have plenty of chip production volume centered on its 14nm and 10nm process tech in that timeframe, and even older nodes that still ship in large volumes. Further reading: Intel To Spend $20 Billion To Build Two New Chip Fabs In Arizona.

phalse phace writes: During today's "Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future" webcast, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger gave an update on the company's future plans and developments, one of which includes a $20 billion investment to build two new chip fabs in Arizona.

The new factories are expected to "become a major provider of foundry capacity in the U.S. and Europe" to serve the global demand for semiconductor manufacturing. "To deliver this vision, Intel is establishing a new standalone business unit, Intel Foundry Services (IFS), led by semiconductor industry veteran Dr. Randhir Thakur. IFS will be differentiated from other foundry offerings with a combination of leading-edge process technology and packaging, committed capacity in the U.S. and Europe, and a world-class IP portfolio for customers, including x86 cores as well as ARM and RISC-V ecosystem IPs." "Gelsinger said the foundry business will compete in a market potentially worth $100 billion by 2025," reports CNBC. "A slide displayed by Intel suggested that companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm could be customers for the business."

The company is also partnering with IBM to improve chip logic and packaging technologies, which will "enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry and support key U.S. government initiatives."

Computer maker Acer has been hit by a ransomware attack "where the threat actors are demanding the largest known ransom to date, $50,000,000," writes Bleeping Computer: Yesterday, the ransomware gang announced on their data leak site that they had breached Acer and shared some images of allegedly stolen files as proof...

In response to BleepingComputer's inquiries, Acer did not provide a clear answer regarding whether they suffered a REvil ransomware attack, saying instead that they "reported recent abnormal situations" to relevant law enforcement and data protection authorities... In requests for further details, Acer said "there is an ongoing investigation and for the sake of security, we are unable to comment on details."
PC Magazine reports that data from Advanced Intel's Andariel cyberintelligence platform "was able to link the possible breach to the Microsoft Exchange issue."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Qualcomm has wrapped up its $1.4 billion acquisition of silicon design firm Nuvia, a move that will lead to in-house Qualcomm CPU designs. The acquisition should allow Qualcomm to compete with Apple's silicon division and focus on pushing bigger, better ARM chips into the laptop market. The deal was announced in January 2021. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Nuvia; the company was only founded in 2019 and has never made a product. Nuvia was focused on building server chips, but Qualcomm seems mainly interested in the engineering pedigree here, since the company was founded by three high-ranking engineers from Apple's silicon division. Nuvia's CEO, Gerard Williams, formerly Apple's chief CPU architect for nearly a decade, is now Qualcomm's SVP of engineering.

Apple is famously in the process of dumping x86 Intel CPUs in order to roll out in-house ARM architecture designs across the company's entire laptop and desktop lines. Qualcomm wants to be here to sell chips to all the PC vendors that want to follow suit. Qualcomm's press release immediately aimed its new design resource at the market Apple is upending, saying, "The first Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms to feature Qualcomm Technologies' new internally designed CPUs are expected to sample in the second half of 2022 and will be designed for high-performance ultraportable laptops." The call-out that this acquisition will lead to "internally designed CPUs" is a big deal, since currently, Qualcomm only ships lightly customized, off-the-shelf ARM CPUs.

Intel has hired Apple's former "I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long to create new ads praising PCs. From a report: Long starts each commercial with "Hello I'm a... Justin," with the typical white background you'd find on Apple's Mac vs. PC ads from the 2000s. Naturally, the ads focus on Mac vs. PC again, with Long mocking Apple's Touch Bar, lack of M1 multiple monitor support, and the "gray and grayer" color choices for a MacBook. One even goes all-in on Apple's lack of touchscreens in Macs or 2-in-1 support by mocking the fact you have to buy a tablet, keyboard, stylus, and even a dongle to match what's available on rival Intel-based laptops. Another ad also points out that "no one really games on a Mac." Intel has put out more ads where they point out that Mac doesn't have the gaming ecosystem that Windows laptops enjoy.

The new generation of Intel Core CPUs is here. Intel is using a new architecture on its ancient 14nm process to power the 11th-generation Rocket Lake-S processors. From a report: That results in some significant power improvements, but it also means that Intel can only fit 8 cores on its flagship Core i9-11900K. That sacrifice to the number of cores looks bad compared to the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X or even the last-gen 10-core i9-10900K. But Intel is also promising massive improvements to efficiency that should keep the Rocket Lake-S parts competitive -- especially in gaming. Rocket Lake-S CPUs launch March 30. The $539 Core i9-11900K has 8 cores and 16 threads with a single-core Thermal Velocity boost of 5.3GHz and 4.8GHz all-core boost. The slightly more affordable $399 i7-11700K boosts up to 5GHz, and the i5-11600K is $262 with 6 cores at a 4.9GHz boost.

While the lack of cores is going to hurt Rocket Lake-S CPUs in multi-threaded applications, Intel claims that its 19% improvement to instructions per clock (IPC) will make up much of the difference. The UHD graphics processor in the CPUs also deliver 50% better performance than last generation. Of course, Intel is focusing on games because that is where its processors remain the most competitive versus AMD. And that should continue with its Rocket Lake-S chips. These high-clocked parts with improved performance should keep up and even exceed AMD's Zen 3 chips in certain games, like Microsoft's Flight Simulator (according to Intel).

MojoKid writes: AMD announced new additions to its EPYC server processor lineup today, codenamed Milan. The company's EPYC 7003 series brings with it significantly improved IPC and per-core performance, better multi-core scaling, and more flexible memory configuration options, in a package that's socket compatible with its previous-gen CPUs. Like the current AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors, new EPYC 7003 CPUs leverage AMD's new Zen 3 microarchitecture. Unlike its desktop parts, however, EPYC 7003 server processors use much larger packaging and feature up to CPU nine chiplets (up to eight 7nm CPU dies and a 12nm IO die), with up to 64 physical cores and 128 threads per socket. As things stand today, Intel doesn't currently have any Xeon processors that can match AMD in terms of single-socket core density. As such, AMD's EPYC 7003 series should consistently offer better performance in many workloads. Pricing for these new big iron processors ranges from $913 or the 16-core 7313P, and up to $7,890 for the powerful EPYC 7763, which AMD is calling "the world's highest-performing server processor." Though nearly $8K is not cheap, AMD appears to be continuing its aggressive price strategy with the EPYC 7003 series, relative to Intel's Xeon Scalable processors. The company also announced a who's who of data center and cloud service OEMs supporting the new platform, including AWS, Azure, Dell Technologies, HPE, Cisco, Google Cloud, Oracle and others.

Adobe today officially unveiled Photoshop for Apple's M1 chip, claiming it provides a 50% performance boost compared to analogous Intel Macs. The Next Web reports: While Adobe has had a beta version of Photoshop for M1 available since November, this is the first time it's been available widely. Previously Apple users could run the Intel version through Apple's Rosetta technology, which didn't fully take advantage of the new chip's power.

[According to Adobe:] "Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems. Our tests covered a broad scope of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, which all feel noticeably faster. Our early benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip." Be warned that there are a couple of recent features missing on the M1 version of the app, most notably inviting others to edit cloud documents and preset syncing.

MojoKid writes: Some may think it strange to design and build an entire PC and custom enclosure, dedicated to running a 20-year-old screensaver, but retro computing fans and well-seasoned enthusiasts may remember the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium. This classic screensaver from the late 90s was created by the legendary artist of Defender of the Crown and more, Jim Sachs. SereneScreen's combination of beautiful fish and technology is still mesmerizing, so why not build a miniature, 3D-printed aquarium and power it with a single board computer like the Rock Pi X and a 1920X480 resolution IPS LCD display? That's just what product developer Colton Westrate did.

Searching for an x86 PC in a Raspberry Pi-sized form factor, Westrate chose the Rock Pi X that purportedly packs the perfunctory punch to push the Windows OS and aquarium screen saver's pulsating pixels. The Rock Pi X is based on a circa 2016 Intel x5-Z8350 processor, which is a 2-watt, quad-core Cherry Trail Atom chip. From there, with a little Fusion 360 parametric modeling, a clear acrylic napkin holder, and some serious skills, Westrate created this adorable pint-sized digital fish tank. There's a full parts list and how-to guide on HotHardware, along with links to the CAD files up on Thingiverse, so you can build yourself one too, if you're feeling inspired.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has signed an agreement with Intel to add it to its Data Protection in Virtual Environments project, which aims to create a practically useful form of fully homomorphic encryption. From a report: Fully homomorphic encryption has been described as the "holy grail" of encryption because it allows encrypted data to be used without ever having to decrypt it. Fully homomorphic encryption isn't fantasy -- it already exists and is usable, but it is incredibly impractical. "FHE adoption in the industry has been slow because processing data using fully homomorphic encryption methods on cryptograms is data intensive and incurs a huge 'performance tax' even for simple operations," Intel said in a press release.

The potential benefits of fully homomorphic encryption make creating a practical way to use it a cybersecurity imperative. Intel succinctly describes the biggest problem in data security as being caused by "encryption techniques [that] require that data be decrypted for processing. It is during this decrypted state that data can become more vulnerable for misuse." The goal of the Data Protection in Virtual Environments program is to develop an accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption that will make it more practical and scalable, which is where Intel comes in. The chip manufacturer's role in the project will be academic research and the development of an application-specific integrated circuit that will accelerate fully homomorphic encryption processing. Intel said that, when fully realized, its accelerator chip could reduce processing times by five orders of magnitude over existing CPU-driven fully homomorphic encryption systems.

Thunderbolt, Intel's super-speedy connection technology, isn't widely used. But that may change in the coming year, as more computer makers incorporate the USB competitor into their new models. From a report: Intel has hoped Thunderbolt, which debuted in 2011 on Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro, would become commonplace for computer users. A year later, the chipmaker forecast that "most PCs" would have Thunderbolt by 2015 to 2017. Despite the hype, only premium PCs carry the fast connection. To get a boost in adoption, Intel has built Thunderbolt into its newest Core processors, code-named Tiger Lake, which means laptop makers get Thunderbolt without having to pay extra for separate controller chips. Because Intel chips are so widely used, the company says Thunderbolt will now have its moment to shine.

"I would expect by 2022 Thunderbolt will be in more than 50% of the PCs sold," said Jason Ziller, who runs Intel's connectivity products, adding that more than half of laptops that ship in the next year will "definitely" carry the technology. Ziller has led Thunderbolt work since before it debuted in Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro laptops almost exactly 10 years ago. PC ports don't capture the imagination the way fast processors or smartphone cameras do. But they're a crucial part of most people's computing experience. Thunderbolt ports provide fast and versatile connections to external storage devices, monitors, network adapters and other peripherals. They can replace ports for HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet and power. The new Thunderbolt 4 lets multiport docks and hubs offer three Thunderbolt ports instead of just one.

tsu doh nimh shares a report: Over the past few weeks, three of the longest running and most venerated Russian-language online forums serving thousands of experienced cybercriminals have been hacked. In two of the intrusions, the attackers made off with the forums' user databases, including email and Internet addresses and hashed passwords. Members of all three forums are worried the incidents could serve as a virtual Rosetta Stone for connecting the real-life identities of the same users across multiple crime forums. On Tuesday, someone dumped thousands of usernames, email addresses and obfuscated passwords on the dark web apparently pilfered from Mazafaka (a.k.a. "Maza," "MFclub"), an exclusive crime forum that has for more than a decade played host to some of the most experienced and infamous Russian cyberthieves.

At the top of a 35-page PDF leaked online is a private encryption key allegedly used by Maza administrators. The database also includes ICQ numbers for many users. ICQ, also known as "I seek you," was an instant message platform trusted by countless early denizens of these older crime forums before its use fell out of fashion in favor of more private networks, such as Jabber and Telegram. This is notable because ICQ numbers tied to specific accounts often are a reliable data point that security researchers can use to connect multiple accounts to the same user across many forums and different nicknames over time. Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 assesses that the leaked Maza database is legitimate.