During the Vision 2024 event, Intel announced that its upcoming Xeon processors will be branded under the new "Xeon 6" moniker. This rebranding effort aims to simplify the company's product stack and align with the recent changes made to its consumer CPU naming scheme. In contrast to the previous "x Generation Xeon Scalable", the new branding aims to simplify the product family. The highly anticipated Sierra Forest and Granite Ridge chips will be the first processors to bear the Xeon 6 branding, and they are set to launch in the coming months. Intel has confirmed that Sierra Forest, designed entirely with efficiency cores (E-cores), remains on track for release this quarter. Supermicro has already announced early availability and remote testing programs for these chips. Intel's Sierra Forest is set to deliver a substantial leap in performance. According to the company, it will offer a 2.4X improvement in performance per watt and a staggering 2.7X better performance per rack compared to the previous generation. This means that 72 Sierra Forest server racks will provide the same performance as 200 racks equipped with older second-gen Xeon CPUs, leading to significant power savings and a boost in overall efficiency for data centers upgrading their system.

Intel has also teased an exciting feature in its forthcoming Granite Ridge processors-support for the MXFP4 data format. This new precision format, backed by the Open Compute Project (OCP) and major industry players like NVIDIA, AMD, and Arm, promises to revolutionize performance. It could reduce next-token latency by up to 6.5X compared to fourth-gen Xeons using FP16. Additionally, Intel stated that Granite Ridge will be capable of running 70 billion parameter Llama-2 models, a capability that could open up new possibilities in data processing. Intel claims that 70 billion 4-bit models run entirely on Xeon in just 86 milliseconds. While Sierra Forest is slated for this quarter, Intel has not provided a specific launch timeline for Granite Ridge, stating only that it will arrive "soon after" its E-core counterpart. The Xeon 6 branding aims to simplify the product stack and clarify customer performance tiers as the company gears up for these major releases.

Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

Valve has posted advance notice that Steam will not officially support macOS versions 10.11 ("El Capitan") and 10.12 ("Sierra") from September 1 2023. After this date "the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of macOS." Valve recommends that users should upgrade to a newer version of macOS, if they intend to continue running Steam and related games and products. The cited reason for ending support is: "core features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of macOS. In addition, future versions of Steam will require macOS feature and security updates only present in macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and above."

Last week, Valve announced that support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems would cease at the very beginning of 2024. It has been a while since older versions of macOS have been declared as unsupported by the Steam Client - Valve announced, way back in late 2018, that it would stop supporting macOS versions 10.7 ("Lion"), 10.8 ("Mountain Lion"), 10.9 ("Mavericks") and 10.10 ("Yosemite") by January 1 2019. Again, an embedding of an iteration of Google Chrome was given as the main reason behind this discontinuation.

Intel Corporation today announced that its board of directors has reset its dividend policy, reducing the quarterly dividend to $0.125 per share (or $0.50 annually) on the company's common stock. The dividend will be payable on June 1, 2023, to stockholders of record on May 7, 2023. Intel also reaffirmed its first-quarter 2023 business outlook provided at its most recent earnings call, including revenue of between $10.5 billion and $11.5 billion; gross margin of 34.1% on a GAAP basis and 39% on a non-GAAP basis; tax rate of (84%) on a GAAP basis and 13% on a non-GAAP basis; and earnings per share of $(0.80) on a GAAP basis and $(0.15) on a non-GAAP basis.

The decision to decrease the quarterly dividend reflects the board's deliberate approach to capital allocation and is designed to best position the company to create long-term value. The improved financial flexibility will support the critical investments needed to execute Intel's transformation during this period of macroeconomic uncertainty. Since first initiated in 1992, Intel's dividend has delivered more than $80 billion in cash returns to the company's stockholders, and the board is committed to maintaining a competitive dividend.

The 58th annual edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2 was the only machine to shake up the top spots, claiming No. 10. Based on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and 2.45GHz working together with an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 80 GB of memory, Voyager-EUS2 also utilizes a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for data transfer.

While there were no other changes to the positions of the systems in the Top10, Perlmutter at NERSC improved its performance to 70.9 Pflop/s. Housed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Perlmutter's increased performance couldn't move it from its previously held No. 5 spot.

System software code used for detecting and installing AMD's upcoming Radeon "Navi" family of graphics processors surfaced in the latest Apple MacOS "Mojave" beta. Version 14.2 beta of the operating system packs preparation for AMD's next-generation GPUs through a device identifier "0x73101002." A similar piece of code surfaced on early versions of MacOS "Sierra" some 6 months prior to Radeon "Vega" family launch, which perfectly aligns with this release of Mojave preceding the speculated mid-2019 launch of "Navi."

The code makes four references, Navi 16, Navi 12, Navi 10, and Navi 9. We're not quite sure if these are brand names or ASIC codes pointing to the number of next-generation compute units enabled on the silicon. If they are the latter, and assuming AMD hasn't changed the number of stream processors per NGCU, we're looking at the possibility of these chips being mid-range performance successors to the "Polaris" family, and it's likely they'll find place in Apple's upcoming generation of iMac, and possibly even MacBooks.Many Thanks to theoneandonlymrk for the tip.

Apple today introduced the thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro ever, along with a breakthrough interface that replaces the traditional row of function keys with a brilliant, Retina-quality Multi-Touch display called the Touch Bar. The new MacBook Pro features Apple's brightest and most colorful Retina display yet, the security and convenience of Touch ID, a more responsive keyboard, a larger Force Touch trackpad and an audio system with double the dynamic range. It's also the most powerful MacBook Pro ever, featuring sixth-generation quad-core and dual-core processors, up to 2.3 times the graphics performance over the previous generation, super-fast SSDs and up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports.

The Touch Bar places controls right at the user's fingertips and adapts when using the system or apps like Mail, Finder, Calendar, Numbers, GarageBand, Final Cut Pro X and many more, including third-party apps. For example, the Touch Bar can show Tabs and Favorites in Safari, enable easy access to emoji in Messages, provide a simple way to edit images or scrub through videos in Photos and so much more.

Apple is preparing its first major design overhaul for the MacBook Pro in four years. The next-generation premium notebook from Apple, reportedly features a thinner form, a touchscreen strip in place of function keys, acting as a second display; and an upscaling of the USB type-C based universal connector concept introduced with the new MacBook.

Apple's Touch ID feature could be ported to the Mac ecosystem with the new MacBook Pro, which could feature a fingerprint reader. Under the hood, the new MacBook Pro could be the launchpad for the company's next MacOS "Sierra" software, which brings Siri to the Mac platform, and deeper iCloud integration. Its processor supplier is unclear at this point, but its graphics processing could be care of an AMD "Polaris" GPU.

Sierra Entertainment announced today that TimeShift, the first-person shooter developed by Saber Interactive, has reached Gold status and will hit the store shelves on October 30th, for PC and Xbox 360, while the PS3 version is scheduled for December 4th. TimeShift allows players to master time to become the ultimate weapon. Armed with the experimental time-manipulating beta suit and a huge arsenal of weaponry, players have the ability to slow, stop and reverse the flow of time, allowing them to control several aspects of each battle sequence and puzzle situation. The PC single player demo can be downloaded from our servers here.

The third iteration of Sierra's popular multi-million unit selling Empire Earth series will be shipping this November to PC. The pre-order campaign kicks-off at select retailers nationwide this week. For more information, please visit the game's official Web site here.

Sierra Entertainment today announced that more F.E.A.R. is on the way to PC and Xbox 360 systems. PC gamers will get F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate, a new expansion pack for Monolith's 2005 action thriller. The campaign features a parallel story allowing players to take the role of a different F.E.A.R. soldier, battling new enemies that the other team never saw. Meanwhile, F.E.A.R. Files for the Xbox 360 will include F.E.A.R. Extraction Point, released for the PC last year, as well as the new Perseus Mandate expansion pack. Both games will be released this fall.

Sierra's new 'Chronicles of Riddick' game, titled 'Dark Athena', will be released later this year for both the PS3 and the XBOX360. The game is both a remake of the original award winning 'Escape from Butcher Bay' that was released in 2004, and an expansion which introduces the Merc-ship Dark Athena. The ability to play online has also been added.