"I still can't quite believe that I'm using an Arm-powered Windows laptop every day," writes a senior editor at the Verge: After more than a decade of trying to make Windows on Arm a reality, Microsoft and Qualcomm finally nailed it this year with Copilot Plus PCs. These new laptops have excellent battery life and great performance — and the app compatibility issues that have plagued Windows on Arm are mostly a thing of the past (as long as you're not a gamer). Microsoft wanted 2024 to be "the year of the AI PC," but I think it was very much the year of Windows on Arm...

The key to Windows on Arm's revival this year was Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors, which were announced in April. They've provided the type of performance and power efficiency only previously available with Apple's MacBooks and challenged Intel and AMD to do better in the x86 space. After much debate over Microsoft's MacBook Air-beating benchmarks, the reviews rolled in and showed that Windows on Arm was indeed capable of matching and beating Apple's MacBook Air. Qualcomm even hired the "I'm a Mac" guy to promote Windows on Arm PCs, showing how confident it was in challenging Apple's laptop dominance.

Microsoft and Qualcomm also worked closely with developers to make key apps compatible, and it's now very rare to run into an app compatibility issue that can't be solved by a native Arm64 version or Microsoft's improved emulator. Even Google, which previously shunned Windows Phone, has created Arm64 versions of Chrome and Google Drive to support Microsoft's efforts. With developers continually providing native versions of their apps, it makes it a lot easier to switch to a Windows on Arm laptop. The only big exception is gaming, where x86 still reigns supreme for compatibility and performance...

It's hard not to see 2025 as the year that Windows on Arm continues to eat into the laptop space. A Dell leak revealed Qualcomm is preparing new chips for 2025, and the chip maker has also been rolling out cheaper Arm-based chips to bring laptop prices down.
The article acknowledges that both AMD and Intel "have the key advantage of game compatibility that Windows on Arm is definitely not ready for..." But "Given the Windows on Arm gaming situation, a new generation of Nvidia's GPUs could help generate fresh excitement around x86 laptops throughout 2025." And "Nvidia might also be planning to help the Windows on Arm effort. The chip maker has long been rumored to be planning to launch Arm PC chips as soon as 2025... Whatever happens to laptops in 2025, you can guarantee that there's going to be fierce competition between Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm."

But the author still complains about the dedicated Copilot key on his new WIndows-on-Arm laptop. "While the Copilot experience on Windows has gone through several confusing revisions, it's still a key I accidentally press and then get frustrated when a Copilot window appears."

jjslash shares a report from TechSpot: A Valve employee recently provided PC Gamer with a rough calculation of the company's per-employee income, revealing that Valve generates more money per person than several of the world's largest companies. While the data is a few years old and doesn't account for some significant recent trends in the tech sector, Valve's ranking in this metric likely hasn't shifted much over that time. Exact figures for Valve's per-hour and per-employee net income remain redacted. However, a chart from 2018 confirms that Valve's per-employee income exceeded that of companies like Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Amazon. Facebook ranks second with a high revenue per employee of $780,400 annually, or $89 per hour, surpassing competitors like Apple and Microsoft due to its relatively smaller workforce of under 70,000. Amazon, by contrast, with over 1.5 million employees, earns significantly less per employee at $15,892 annually, or $1.81 per hour.

Further reading: Valve Runs Its Massive PC Gaming Ecosystem With Only About 350 Employees

El Salvador secured a $1.4 billion loan deal with the IMF after agreeing to scale back its bitcoin policies, making cryptocurrency acceptance voluntary for businesses and limiting public sector involvement. The deal aims to stabilize the country's economy, with bitcoin's recent rally boosting the value of El Salvador's holdings. The BBC reports: In 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender. This week, the cryptocurrency briefly hit a fresh record high of more than $108,000.

"The potential risks of the Bitcoin project will be diminished significantly in line with Fund policies," the IMF announcement said. "Legal reforms will make acceptance of Bitcoin by the private sector voluntary. For the public sector, engagement in Bitcoin-related economic activities and transactions in and purchases of Bitcoin will be confined." Last Friday, El Salvdaor purchased more than 11 BTC worth $1.07 million and executed another 11 BTC purchase on Sunday, according to crypto data platform Arkham. El Salvador's President, Nayib Bukele, is ramping up buys "with an interim goal of acquiring 20,000 more Bitcoin," reports the Daily Hodl.

They provide training data to top AI companies including OpenAI and Meta, according to its web site. Founded in 2016, San Francisco-based Scale AI now has over 900 employees, eventually growing beyond "unicorn" status with over $1.35 billion in ivnestments. In May the company's valuation was over $14 billion, with investors including Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Cisco, Intel, and AMD (as well as earlier investments from Y Combinator and $100 million from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund). SFGate calls them "a buzzy San Francisco startup with high-dollar ties across the tech industry".

But SFGate also report Scale AI "was sued Tuesday by a former worker with allegations that the company is committing wage theft and misclassifying workers." Steve McKinney filed the suit against Scale and several top executives, including 27-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang, in San Francisco Superior Court. With the filing, the former contractor aims to be a lead plaintiff for a class-action lawsuit against Scale; a judge will need to certify his proposed class of current and former contractors within California...

McKinney, whose complaint says he was paid on an hourly basis and worked on a project eventually sold to Meta, is accusing Scale of amassing its clout and cash by exploiting workers. "Scale AI is the sordid underbelly propping up the generative AI industry," the complaint says, before rattling off a list of allegations about its treatment of contractors. The document accuses Scale of bait-and-switch hiring promises; demanding off-the-clock, unpaid work; denying overtime pay; and unfairly booting contractors from projects...

The Tuesday complaint calls Scale's control over its contractors "Orwellian." The company makes contractors download a tool to track much of their computer use, including by taking periodic screenshots, the suit alleges. The lawsuit also alleges that Scale reassigns the workers to varyingly paid projects and docks pay if a task takes more than it was supposed to, plus posits that Scale is in violation of California's "ABC" test, which monitors use of the designation "independent contractor." It argues that contracted "Taskers" like McKinney should be classified as employees instead...

The complaint, along with arguing for class-action certification, seeks restitution, punitive damages and changes to Scale's worker classification model.
The article adds that "Per Fortune, Scale's armies of contractors marked up images for Cruise and Waymo to help autonomous cars understand their surroundings..."

MojoKid writes: Today's release and review launch of the new Intel Arc B580 marks a second-gen effort from the company, with a fully refreshed Intel Xe2 graphics architecture, aka Battlemage, that promises big gains in performance and efficiency. Comparing Arc B580 to its Arc Alchemist ancestors, you can see that it's somewhat of a smaller GPU. It has fewer of nearly everything, and yet its performance specifications don't look too far off. A lot of this comes down to massive architectural improvements with an eye toward efficiency and making better use of the resources that were already there.

With 12GB of GDDR6 memory at 19Gbps, Arc B580 delivers performance that typically beats a GeForce RTX 4060 and even an RTX 4060 Ti in spots, especially when its extra 4GB of frame buffer memory comes into play. All in, Intel's latest Arc graphics offering is a strong contender in the $250 graphics card segment, and it should sell well in the months ahead, based on its value proposition, improved performance in ray tracing and advanced upscaling technologies.

HDMI Forum will announce new specifications with increased bandwidth capabilities at CES 2025, ahead of anticipated graphics card launches from AMD and NVIDIA. The announcement, scheduled for January 6, is expected to introduce HDMI 2.2 standard alongside a new cable supporting higher resolutions and refresh rates.

Current HDMI 2.1 specification maxes out at 48 Gbps bandwidth, allowing 10K resolution at 120 Hz with compression. The upgrade aims to compete with DisplayPort 2.1, which offers up to 80 Gbps bandwidth and is already supported by recent AMD and Intel GPUs.

Intel's interim co-CEOs acknowledged that the company may be forced to sell its manufacturing operations if a new chipmaking technology slated for next year does not succeed. Reuters reports: Speaking at a Barclays investment banking conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Michelle Johnston Holthaus and David Zinsner - who were tapped as co-CEOs after the ouster of former CEO Pat Gelsinger last week - were asked if the company's continued combination of manufacturing and design was tied to the success of a new chipmaking technology called 18A due next year. Intel plans to use that technology to bring manufacturing of a flagship PC chip back in-house after being forced to outsource its biggest product to rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. "Pragmatically, do I think it makes sense that they're completely separated and there's no tie?" Holthaus said of the company's product and manufacturing divisions. "I don't think so. But someone will decide that."

Zinsner, also chief financial officer, outlined how Intel is already separating the finances and operations of this manufacturing division into a standalone subsidiary. Zinsner said Intel Foundry, as the division is known, is already run separately from Intel's other businesses and is setting up a separate operational board and business process software system. "That's going to happen," Zinsner said. "Does it ever fully separate? That's an open question for another day."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Former Intel chief Pat Gelsinger, who stepped down from his leadership post a week ago, is inviting people to join him in prayer and fasting for the struggling chipmaker's employees.

"Every Thursday I do a 24 hour prayer and fasting day," Gelsinger wrote on X on Sunday morning. "This week I'd invite you to join me in praying and fasting for the 100K Intel employees as they navigate this difficult period. Intel and its team is of seminal importance to the future of the industry and US."

Startup Embodied is closing down, and its product, an $800 robot for kids ages 5 to 10, will soon be bricked. From a report: Embodied blamed its closure on a failed "critical funding round." On its website, it explained: "We had secured a lead investor who was prepared to close the round. However, at the last minute, they withdrew, leaving us with no viable options to continue operations. Despite our best efforts to secure alternative funding, we were unable to find a replacement in time to sustain operations."

The company didn't provide further details about the pulled funding. Embodied's previous backers have included Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Vulcan Capital, but we don't know who the lead investor mentioned above is. When it first announced Moxie in April 2020, Embodied described the robot as a "safe and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development."

This year Marvell's stock rose 95%, giving it a $100 billion market capitalization, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"The latest gains have even put Marvell's market cap ahead of much-beleaguered Intel, which still generates 10 times as much annual revenue." Marvell's recent trajectory suggests that the revenue gap will continue to narrow. The explosive growth of its data center business has finally reached a point where it can more fully offset weakness in the company's more legacy segments, which sell chips used in goods such as telecommunications gear, cable TV boxes and autos. Data center sales nearly doubled year over year to $1.1 billion in the just-ended quarter, and Marvell's projection for the current period indicates the company will end its fiscal year in January with the data center unit encompassing about 72% of its total revenue, up from 40% in the previous year.

The next year is looking bright as well. Marvell's latest deal with Amazon is a five-year "multigenerational" agreement that has Marvell helping Amazon design its own artificial intelligence chips. Amazon, which runs the world's largest cloud computing service, has been expanding its internal chip efforts significantly, in part to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for crucial AI components. Amazon announced the next generation of its largest AI chip, called Trainium, at its annual developers conference this week. Analysts believe Trainium will play a role in Marvell's AI custom revenue more than doubling in the next fiscal year ending January of 2026.

That is expected to help propel Marvell's annual revenue to more than $8 billion in fiscal 2026, up 40% from what is expected for this year, according to consensus estimates from Visible Alpha. In addition, 20% growth is expected for the following year, when Marvell expects to be in production of custom AI chips for another unnamed big tech customer that analysts believe to be Microsoft. Analyst Mark Lipacis of Evercore ISI projects that the industry for custom AI chips will reach $30 billion to $50 billion in sales by 2030. In a note to clients last week, he said Marvell "has the potential to capture one-third of that market."
Marvell's CEO "has been among the few names floated as potential replacements for the recently ousted Pat Gelsinger at Intel's corner office," the article points out — which meant he had to reassure investors on an earnings call that he was staying at Marvell.

"The company is outstanding. The technology is best-in-class. I can't think of a better place to work than Marvell."

Arm " is worth almost $150 billion," writes the Verge, "which is now considerably more than Intel."

"With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger 'retired' and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what [Arm CEO Rene] Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that [Haas] approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted...." Haas: As someone who has been in the industry my whole career, it is a little sad to see what's happening... Intel is an innovation powerhouse. At the same time, you have to innovate in our industry. There are lots of tombstones of great tech companies that don't reinvent themselves.

I think Intel's biggest dilemma is how to disassociate being either a vertical company [where a company owns its supply chain] or a fabless company, to oversimplify it. That is the fork in the road that they've faced for the last decade. Pat [Gelsinger] had a strategy that was very clear that vertical was the way to win. In my opinion, when he took that strategy on in 2021, that was not a three-year strategy. That was a five-to-10-year strategy. He's gone and there's a new CEO to be brought in and the decision has to be made.

My personal bias says that vertical integration is a pretty powerful thing. If they could get that right, I think they would be in an amazing position. But the cost associated with it is so high that it may be too big of a hill to climb. I'm not going to comment on the rumors that we wanted to buy them. But I think, again, if you're a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition.

When Pat was the CEO, I did tell him more than once, "You ought to license Arm because if you've got your own fabs, fabs are all about volume and we can provide volume." I wasn't successful in convincing him to do that...
Haas also obliquely commented on rumors that Arm will build its own AI chips, saying that companies making hardware are closer to the "interlock" of between hardware and software and "have a much better perspective in terms of the design tradeoffs to make. So, if we were to do something, that would be one of the reasons."

The full interview will be coming to the Verge's Decoder podcast soon...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: New Linux patches from Huawei engineers are preparing new driver support for controlling High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with the ARM-based Kunpeng high performance SoC...

[I]t would appear there is a new Kunpeng SoC coming that will feature integrated High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).Unless I missed something, this Kunpeng SoC with HBM memory hasn't been formally announced yet and I haven't been able to find any other references short of pointing to prior kernel patches working on this HBM integration... It will be interesting to see what comes of Huawei Kunpeng SoCs with HBM memory and ultimately how well they perform against other AArch64 server processors as well as the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC competition.

Intel's board of directors ousted CEO Pat Gelsinger after losing confidence in his ambitious turnaround strategy. The move comes as Intel posted significant losses, including $16.6 billion in Q3 2024, its worst quarterly result ever. Under Gelsinger's leadership, Intel struggled to compete in the AI chip market dominated by Nvidia, while facing manufacturing challenges and declining data center revenue.

Analysts suggest the board may be considering splitting off Intel's foundry business, though such a move could face scrutiny from the U.S. Commerce Department due to $8 billion in CHIPS Act funding. The Verge adds: But Moorhead and Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin both believe Gelsinger's departure was so sudden, it can't simply have been the straw that broke the camel's back. "There must have been a decision the board made that he was not going to stick around for," Moorhead tells me.

His hunch: Intel's board may want to split off its foundry business entirely, above and beyond the spinoff that Gelsinger already announced, turning Intel into a company that simply designs chips like its direct rivals.

MojoKid writes: Intel officially revealed its next generation discrete graphics cards, code named Battlemage, this morning. There are two midrange cards in the series so far, branded Arc B580 and Arc B570, though future higher-end B700 series cards are unknown currently. The graphics architecture for Battlemage is Xe2, and it debuted in the iGPU on Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V mobile processors earlier this year.

Arc B580 is paired to 12GB of GDDR6 memory operating at an effective data rate of 19Gbps over a 192-bit interface, and its average GPU clock should hover around 2,670MHz. The Arc B570 is based on the same slice of silicon, but scales things down with 10GB of GDDR6 memory operating at the same speed as the B580, but connected over a narrower 160-bit interface. The B570's average GPU clock will also be lower, in the 2,500MHz range. Performance-wise, Intel is projecting that Arc B580 will be about 10% faster than an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 on average but will be priced at $249 USD, undercutting GeForce RTX 4060 substantially while offering 4GB more onboard graphics memory. Arc B580 cards are due to arrive in market this month, with Arc B570 arriving in January 2025 at $219 USD.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has stepped down amid the company's continued struggles against rivals, with shares losing over half their value this year. The chipmaker announced Monday that Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner and Executive Vice President Michelle Johnston Holthaus will serve as interim co-CEOs while the board searches for a permanent replacement.

Gelsinger, 63, was hired in 2021 to lead an ambitious turnaround aimed at reclaiming Intel's technological edge from competitors like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. His strategy included expanding Intel's factory network with new facilities in Ohio and transforming the company into a contract manufacturer for other firms. The plan faced significant headwinds as Nvidia dominated the AI chip market, with cloud computing companies increasingly favoring Nvidia's processors for AI development over Intel's Gaudi line.

Intel's challenges culminated in an August earnings report showing a surprise loss, leading to dividend suspension and plans to cut over 15% of its 110,000-person workforce. Board Chairman Frank Yeary, now serving as interim executive chair, emphasized the need to prioritize Intel's product group to meet customer demands. The leadership change also impacts the Biden administration's semiconductor industry initiatives, as Intel was set to receive the largest grant under the $39 billion Chips Act program.

Multiple news outlets including Bloomberg and Reuters report that Gelsinger was forced out by the board because "directors felt Gelsinger's costly and ambitious plan to turn Intel around was not working and the progress of change was not fast enough."

Intel must maintain majority control of its foundries as a condition of receiving $7.86 billion in U.S. CHIPS Act funding, according to terms disclosed in a regulatory filing [PDF]. The semiconductor giant will need to keep at least 50.1% ownership if the foundry unit is spun off privately, while no single shareholder can hold more than 35% of shares if it goes public unless Intel remains the largest stakeholder. The restrictions, which also require Intel to remain a customer, come as the company struggles financially and recently restructured its foundry business as an independent unit.

Qualcomm's interest in acquiring Intel is cooling due to the complexity of the deal, Intel's debt, and regulatory hurdles. However, according to Bloomberg, Qualcomm may still explore acquiring certain divisions of Intel to expand into markets like PCs and networking. Tom's Hardware reports: [T]he proposed acquisition faced significant obstacles, including Intel's $50 billion debt, dropping CPU market share, and its struggling semiconductor manufacturing unit, an area where Qualcomm lacks expertise. A deal of this magnitude would also likely trigger extensive regulatory scrutiny, particularly in China, a key market for both companies.

Intel is undergoing significant restructuring under CEO Pat Gelsinger to reclaim its competitiveness in the semiconductor market in terms of products and process technologies. Still, for now, both Intel and Qualcomm are quite successful standalone companies. While the combination would make a formidable firm (probably facing unprecedented antitrust scrutiny), it does not make much sense for Qualcomm to make such a massive takeover. These factors have collectively made a complete takeover less appealing to Qualcomm. Meanwhile, selling off a part of the company to Qualcomm may not make sense for Intel.

Qualcomm aims to generate $22 billion in annual revenue by 2029 by expanding into markets like personal computers, networking, and automotive chips. Although Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm's chief executive, has stated that his company did not need a major takeover to achieve this goal, the company initiated preliminary discussions with Intel regarding a potential acquisition in September. Yet, it does not look like the deal is going to happen.

The Biden administration is reducing Intel's CHIPS Act award by over $600 million, citing a $3 billion military contract the chipmaker was also awarded. Engadget reports: Initially set to receive $8.5 billion from the domestic silicon production bill, the company will get up to $7.85 billion instead. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Intel has extended some plant openings beyond 2030 government deadlines. Intel posted its biggest-ever quarterly loss last month after announcing 15,000 layoffs in August. The chip-maker's struggles have reportedly led some government officials to worry about its ability to deliver as a central component of the Biden White House's CHIPS Act.

Intel will receive at least $1 billion in CHIPS Act funding before the end of the year. The company plans to invest $90 billion in the US by the decade's end, a reduction from its initial goal of $100 billion in the next five years. The Commerce Department said the chip maker is still on schedule to invest the full $100 billion on projects in four states: Arizona ($3.94 billion), Oregon ($1.86 billion), Ohio ($1.5 billion) and New Mexico ($500 million).

"Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit." That's how Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet ended a post on the Linux kernel mailing list.

This was followed by "insufficient action to restore the community's faith in having otherwise productive technical discussions without the fear of personal attacks," according to an official ruling by committee enforcing the kernel community's code of conduct. After formalizing an updated enforcement process for unacceptable behaviors, it then recommended that during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle, Overstreet's participation should be restricted (with his pull requests declined). Phoronix covered their ruling, and ItsFOSS and The Register offer some of the backstory.

Overstreet had already acknowledged that "Things really went off the rails (and I lost my cool, and earned the ire of the CoC committee)" in a 6,200-word blog post on his Patreon page. But he also emphasized that "I'm going to keep writing code no matter what. Things may turn into more of a hassle to actually get the code, but people who want to keep running bcachefs will always be able to (that's the beauty of open source, we can always fork), and I will keep supporting my users..."

More excerpts from Overstreet's blog post: I got an emails from multiple people, including from Linus, to the effect of "trust me, you don't want to be known as an asshole — you should probably send him an apology"... Linus is a genuinely good guy: I know a lot of people reading this will have also seen our pull request arguments, so I specifically wanted to say that here: I think he and I do get under each other's skin, but those arguments are the kind of arguments you get between people who care deeply about their work and simply have different perspectives on the situation...

[M]y response was to say "no" to a public apology, for a variety of reasons: because this was the result of an ongoing situation that had now impacted two different teams and projects, and I think that issue needs attention — and I think there's broader issues at stake here, regarding the CoC board. But mostly, because that kind of thing feels like it ought to be kept personal... I'd like a better process that isn't so heavy handed for dealing with situations where tensions rise and communications break down. As for that process: just talk to people... [W]e're a community. We're not interchangeable cogs to be kicked out and replaced when someone is "causing a problem", we should be watching out for each other...

Another note that I was raising with the CoC is that a culture of dismissiveness, of finding ways to avoid the technical discussions we're supposed to be having, really is toxic, and moreso than mere flamewars... we really do need to be engaging properly with each other in order to do our work well.
After the official response from the committee, Overstreet responded on the kernel mailing list. "I do want to apologize for things getting this heated the other day, but I need to also tell you why I reacted the way I did... I do take correctness issues very seriously, and I will get frosty or genuinely angry if they're being ignored or brushed aside."

The latest Steam client drops support for operating systems older than Windows 10 or macOS 10.15 Catalina. "That means Mac users can't run 32-bit games anymore, as all macOS versions from Catalina onward only run 64-bit binaries," reports The Register. From the report: [I]f you have a well-specified older Mac, here is another reason to check out Open Core Legacy Patcher. For now, macOS 10.15 Catalina will do but we suspect it won't for long. This version of Steam uses the equivalent to Chrome 126: "Updated embedded Chromium build in Steam to 126.0.6478.183." However, versions since Chrome 128 require macOS 11 or newer. For now, Catalina will work -- but the next significant Steam update will update Chromium as well, and there's a high probability that that will drop support for 10.15.

So, if you're using OCLP to install a newer macOS, you should probably go directly to Big Sur. In The Reg FOSS desk's testing, we found that Big Sur ran reasonably well on a machine with Intel HD 520 graphics, although the same hardware ran very poorly with macOS 12 Monterey. Unfortunately, the inevitable end is in sight for older Macs. That said, the November 2024 Steam client update brings several "wins," including a built-in Game Recording feature, an upgraded Chromium browser engine, and the new "Scout" Linux runtime environment for improved compatibility and performance, especially on the Steam Deck and Linux distros. Additionally, it delivers bug fixes and enhancements for modern OS users.