Global shipments of traditional PCs, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, declined 5.1% in the first quarter of 2022 (1Q22) but exceeded earlier forecasts, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The PC market is coming off two years of double-digit growth, so while the first quarter decline is a change in this momentum, it doesn't mean the industry is in a downward spiral. Despite ongoing supply chain and logistical challenges, vendors still shipped 80.5 million PCs during the quarter. The 1Q22 volume marks the seventh consecutive quarter where global shipments surpassed 80 million, a feat not seen since 2012.

"The focus shouldn't be on the year-over-year decline in PC volumes because that was to be expected. The focus should be on the PC industry managing to ship more than 80 million PCs at a time when logistics and supply chain are still a mess, accompanied by numerous geopolitical and pandemic-related challenges," said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "We have witnessed some slowdown in both the education and consumer markets, but all indicators show demand for commercial PCs remains very strong. We also believe that the consumer market will pick up again in the near future. The result of 1Q22 was PC shipment volumes that were near record levels for a first quarter."

According to TrendForce research, corporate demand for digital transformation including artificial intelligence and high-performance computing has accelerated in recent years, which has led to increasing adoption of cloud computing. In order to improve service flexibility, the world's major cloud service providers have gradually introduced ARM-based servers. The penetration rate of ARM architecture in data center servers is expected to reach 22% by 2025.

In the past few years, ARM architecture processors have matured in the fields of mobile terminals and Internet of Things but progress in the server field has been relatively slow. However, companies have diversified cloud workloads in recent years and the market has begun to pay attention to the benefits ARM architecture processing can provide to data centers. TrendForce believes that ARM-based processors have three major advantages. First, they can support diverse and rapidly changing workloads and are more scalability and cost-effective. Second, ARM-based processors provide higher customization for different niche markets with a more flexible ecosystem. Third, physical footprint is relatively small which meets the needs of today's micro data centers.

Today, during Mobile World Congress 2022, Qualcomm Incorporated President and Chief Executive Officer, Cristiano Amon highlighted how Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is continuing to bring best-in-case experiences to enterprise PCs and drive the convergence of the PC and mobile to increase productivity, connectivity, and security from anywhere. During last month's Consumer Electronics Show, the Company announced that over 200 enterprise customers were testing or deploying Windows 11 on Snapdragon laptops and 2-in-1 devices. Today, Amon outlined how strategic relationships with Microsoft, Lenovo, and many other ecosystem leaders are helping deliver the next generation of enterprise-ready PCs, powered by Snapdragon. Utilizing its global relationships, Qualcomm Technologies continues to lead the PC industry's inevitable transition to innovative and modern solutions from the portfolio of Snapdragon compute platforms.Quotes from key collaborators that Qualcomm Technologies is working with to drive innovation for always on, always connected enterprise PCs through Snapdragon Compute Platforms can be found here.

At Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger and Intel's business leaders outlined key elements of the company's strategy and path for long-term growth. Intel's long-term plans will capitalize on transformative growth during an era of unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Among the presentations, Intel announced product roadmaps across its major business units and key execution milestones, including: Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, Intel Foundry Services, Software and Advanced Technology, Network and Edge, Technology Development, More: For more from Intel's Investor Meeting 2022, including the presentations and news, please visit the Intel Newsroom and Intel.com's Investor Meeting site.

As part of its IDM 2.0 (Integrated Device Manufacturer) plan, Intel has announced it has setup a $1 Billion fund to support early-stage startups and established companies building disruptive technologies for the foundry ecosystem. A collaboration between Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services (IFS), the move aims to capitalize on what Intel sees as the future of the industry: with a focus on an Open Chiplet platform and Open Interconnect Standard, Intel is looking to enable partners to deploy packaging technologies that bring together multiple ISAs (Instruction Set Architectures) within the same chip. The idea is simple: customers will be looking to mix and match several IPs on their semiconductor designs, taking advantage of different strengths (particularly in the power/performance/area equation) from each.

Foundry customers are rapidly embracing a modular design approach to differentiate their products and accelerate time to market. Intel Foundry Services is well-positioned to lead this major industry inflection. With our new investment fund and open chiplet platform, we can help drive the ecosystem to develop disruptive technologies across the full spectrum of chip architectures.

Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is thrilled to announce the achievement of a new overclocking world record for fastest memory frequency at DDR5-8888 CL88-88-88-88, in cooperation with ASUS. This amazing frequency speed was achieved by the extreme overclocker "lupin_no_musume" with G.SKILL Trident Z5 DDR5 memory, ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 APEX motherboard, and Intel Core i9-12900K processor. To see the moment this amazing overclocking world record was set, please click the following video link: https://youtu.be/OgQFbUOs6i8

DDR5-8888 CL88-88-88-88 - Pushing the Speed to the Limit
At the dawn of the DDR5 era, G.SKILL and ASUS have been constantly exploring the memory speed limitations of the latest Intel Z690 platform. Surpassing the previous DDR5-8704 world record in November 2021, a new memory frequency world record is achieved at DDR5-8888 under liquid nitrogen extreme cooling. The memory speed has been validated by CPU-Z. Please refer to the screenshot and validation link below: https://valid.x86.fr/qgvylc

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has expanded its AMD EPYC processor-based offerings with the general availability of general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances. The M6a instances are powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors delivering, according to AWS, up to 35% better price-performance compared to the previous M5a instances and a 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances.

"Our 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors provide Amazon EC2 users excellent scalability and impressive price-performance compared to previous generation Amazon EC2 M5a instances. This announcement shows our strong collaboration as well as highlights our overall momentum in cloud infrastructure," said Lynn Comp, corporate vice president, Cloud Business, AMD. "Our work with AWS exemplifies our commitment to giving end users innovation and performance for their cloud environments and workloads."

The India traditional PC market (inclusive of desktops, notebooks, and workstations) continued its growth momentum despite ongoing supply and logistical challenges. The traditional PC shipments witnessed a 30% year-over-year (YoY) growth in 3Q21 (Jul-Sep), marking the fifth consecutive quarter of growth in India, according to new data from the International Data Corporation 's (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. A total of 4.5 million PCs were shipped during the quarter, making it India's biggest-ever single quarter. To put this in perspective, it is bigger than the total yearly consumer shipments in 2019, a year before the pandemic hit us. As a result, many brands also reported their biggest quarter of PC shipments.

Notebook PCs continue to dominate the overall category with more than 80% share. Enterprise and consumer demand helped the Notebook category to reach over 3 million units for the first time, and the desktop category also continued its upward momentum as it grew by 30.5% YoY in 3Q21.

Qualcomm has been in the game of creating SoCs for the PC market with the company's Snapdragon lineup. These processors mainly were beefed-up versions of their mobile designs and were based on the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA). Microsoft has backed this effort by creation Windows-on-Arm (WoA) project that enables the Windows OS to operate on Arm processors. However, up until now, Qualcomm's designs were not very powerful as they represented a relatively moderate approach to the problem and almost made no sense of purchase compared to the standard laptops equipped with x86 processors from AMD and Intel. This is about to change.

According to the news from Investor Day yesterday, Qualcomm is preparing high-performance Arm SoCs for the PC market. The company has recently acquired Nuvia Inc., a startup focused on creating novel IPs based on Arm ISA. And this is what Qualcomm will use in building its next-generation PC processors. As the company plans, in August of 2022, it should start sampling OEM partners with these new chips, and we will be seeing them in consumers' hands in early 2023. If everything goes as planned, this should represent direct competition to AMD, Intel, and now Apple in the high-end SoC market. After PCs, the company plans to tackle datacenter, mobile, and automotive market.

AMD will debut TSMC's ambitious System-on-Integrated-Chips (SoIC) technology with its upcoming HPC chips, according to a DigiTimes report. A step toward rivaling Intel's Foveros 3-D chip stacking technology, SoIC will enable AMD to stack logic, memory, and I/O as separate chips within a single package. The article references a next-generation "HPC" chip, although it didn't delve into what this could be. Logically, AMD would want to integrate its EPYC and MI accelerator lines into a single package that can be used in HPCs. Such a product would combine its Zen-series x86-64 serial processing, with CDNA-series scalar processing, expertise in memory, leveraging large on-die victim-caches, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM); along with next-gen I/O.

With the x86 architecture, large hyperscale cloud providers have been experiencing all sorts of troubles, from high power consumption to the high pricing structure of these processors. Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) build their processors based on 3rd party instruction set architecture designs. Today, Alibaba, the Chinese giant, has announced the launch of two processors made in-house to serve everything from edge to central server processing. First in line is the RISC-V-based Xuantie series of processors, which can run anything from AliOS, FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, Linux, Android, etc., to other operating systems as well. These processors are open-source, capable of modest processing capabilities, and designed as IPs that anyone can use. You can check them out on T-Head GitHub repositories here.

The other thing that Alibaba announced is the development of a 128-core custom processor based on the Arm architecture. Called Yitian 710 server SoC, TSMC manufactures it on the company on 5 nm semiconductor node. So far, Alibaba didn't reveal any details about the SoC and what Arm cores are used. However, this signifies that the company seeks technology independence from outside sources and wants to take it all in-house. With custom RISC-V processors for lower-power tasks and custom Arm server CPUs, the whole infrastructure is covered. It is just a matter of time before Alibaba starts to replace x86 makers in full. However, given the significant number of chips that the company needs, it may not happen at any sooner date.

The x86 instruction set architecture has experienced many issues, and today's announcement is no exception. Yesterday morning, the Linux kernel received an urgent set of patches that are supposed to fix "yet another hardware trainwreck," as Thomas Gleixner, the kernel developer, describes. This time, the problem occurs with the high precision event timer (HPET) that stops once x86 processors reach PC10 idle state. In that event, the timer stops even when the OS/kernel uses it and could potentially cause a vulnerability inside a processor that an attacker can exploit. The problem has been known for quite a while since, in 2019, the Linux kernel started removing HPET functionality from some Intel processors.

The priority of this patch for Linux Kernel version 5.15-rc5 is high and marked as an urgent update. A reliable hardware timer and an interrupt are a must for the proper function of a processor. The hardware fix for this will not happen soon, so the Linux kernel has to adapt to it and create a solution at the software level. According to Mr. Gleixner, "The probability that this problem is going to be solved in the forseeable future is close to zero, so the kernel has to be cluttered with heuristics to keep up with the ever growing amount of hardware and firmware trainwrecks. Hopefully some day hardware people will understand that the approach of "This can be fixed in software" is not sustainable. Hope dies last..."

While the server industry transitions to the latest generation of processors based on the x86 platform, the Intel Ice Lake and AMD Milan CPUs entered mass production earlier this year and were shipped to certain customers, such as North American CSPs and telecommunication companies, at a low volume in 1Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. These processors are expected to begin seeing widespread adoption in the server market in 3Q21. TrendForce believes that Ice Lake represents a step-up in computing performance from the previous generation due to its higher scalability and support for more memory channels. On the other hand, the new normal that emerged in the post-pandemic era is expected to drive clients in the server sector to partially migrate to the Ice Lake platform, whose share in the server market is expected to surpass 30% in 4Q21.

NVIDIA at GDC dropped a major hint at where it wants to take PC gaming post the Arm acquisition. The company is demonstrating its RTX real-time raytracing technology, and the DLSS performance enhancement, on an Arm processor by MediaTek. To the PC, this means NVIDIA is laying the foundations of gaming in the post-x86 world where it holds Arm IP; foundations that were dug up by Apple and its mighty M1 chip, based on Arm CPU technology.

Making this unequivocal, was MediaTek. "RTX is the most groundbreaking technology to come to PC gaming in the last two decades," said PC Tseng, general manager of MediaTek's Intelligent Multimedia Business Unit."MediaTek and NVIDIA are laying the foundation for a new category of Arm-based high-performance PCs." The Taiwan-based Arm SoC major has developed a new Arm-based PC processor called Kompanio 1200, which it hopes will power PC platforms much like the Apple M1 or the Qualcomm Compute Platforms.

Armed with up to 8 "Golden Cove" high-performance CPU cores and up to 8 "Gracemont" low-power cores in a hybrid x86 processor setup, the "Alder Lake" silicon enables Intel to carve out some interesting SKUs in the mobile space, by creating numerous combinations of the big and small CPU core counts, and more importantly, by adjusting the ratio of big cores to small ones. The two core types operate at significantly different performance/Watt bands, which allows Intel to target the various TDP-defined mobile processor SKU categories with just the right big:small core ratios, as revealed by a leaked "Alder Lake" mobile SKU roadmap, leaked to the web by HXL.

Intel is looking to spread the silicon across six mobile segments defined by TDP—the 5 W tablet/handheld; the 9 W ultra-thin, the 15 W mainstream tablet/laptop, the 28 W performance tablet/laptop, the 35-45 W thin enthusiast laptop, and the 45-55 W "muscle" laptop. With Intel recently announcing the discontinuation of its 1+4 (big+small) core "Lakefield" hybrid processor, its mantle in the 5 W segment will be picked up by "Alder Lake-M5," with 1 "Golden Cove" and 4 "Gracemont" cores. There will be two product tiers segmented by iGPU execution units (EUs), one with 48 EU, and the other with 64.

At the 2021 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) Intel is showcasing how the company is extending its lead in high performance computing (HPC) with a range of technology disclosures, partnerships and customer adoptions. Intel processors are the most widely deployed compute architecture in the world's supercomputers, enabling global medical discoveries and scientific breakthroughs. Intel is announcing advances in its Xeon processor for HPC and AI as well as innovations in memory, software, exascale-class storage, and networking technologies for a range of HPC use cases.

"To maximize HPC performance we must leverage all the computer resources and technology advancements available to us," said Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. "Intel is the driving force behind the industry's move toward exascale computing, and the advancements we're delivering with our CPUs, XPUs, oneAPI Toolkits, exascale-class DAOS storage, and high-speed networking are pushing us closer toward that realization."

AMD and Google Cloud today announced T2D, the first instance in the new family of Tau Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors. According to Google Cloud, the T2D instance offers 56% higher absolute performance and more than 40% higher price performance for scale-out workloads. The Tau VM family provides customers with a leading combination of performance, price, and easy integration. The T2D instances, using the leadership performance of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, excels at workloads including web servers, containerized micro-services, data logging-processing, large scale Java applications and more.

"At Google Cloud, our customers' compute needs are evolving," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "By collaborating with AMD, Google Cloud customers can now leverage amazing performance for scale-out applications, with great price-performance, all without compromising x86 compatibility." "We designed 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to meet the growing demand from cloud and enterprise customers for high-performance, cost-effective solutions with optimal TCO," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We work closely with Google Cloud and are proud they selected AMD to exclusively power the new Tau VM T2D instance which provides customers with powerful new options to run their most demanding scale-out workloads."

AMD is innovating its own x86 hybrid processor technology formulated along the Arm big.LITTLE hybrid CPU core topology that inspired Hybrid processors by Intel. Under this, the processor has two kinds of CPU cores with very different performance/Watt bands—one kind focuses on performance and remains dormant under mild processing loads; while the other hand handles most lightweight processing loads that don't require powerful cores. This is easier said than done, as the two kinds of cores feature significantly different CPU core microarchitectures, and instruction sets.

AMD has filed a patent describing a method for processing workloads to be switched between the two CPU core types, on the fly. Unlike homogenous CPU core designs where workload from one core is seamlessly picked up by another over a victim cache like the L3, there is some logic involved in handover between the two core types. According to the patent application, in an AMD hybrid processor, the two CPU core types are interfaced over the processor's main switching fabric, and not a victim cache, much in the same way as the CPU cores and integrated GPU are separated in current-gen AMD APUs.

Tachyum Inc. today announced that it has taken delivery of an IO motherboard for its Prodigy Universal Processor hardware emulator from manufacturing. This provides the company with a complete system prototype integrating CPU, memory, PCI Express, networking and BMC management subsystems when connected to the previously announced field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation system board.

The Tachyum Prodigy FPGA DDR-IO Board connects to the Prodigy FPGA CPU Board to provide memory and IO connectivity for the FPGA-based CPU tiles. The fully functional Prodigy emulation system is now ready for further build out, including Linux boot and incorporation of additional test chips. It is available to customers to perform early testing and software development prior to a full four-socket reference design motherboard, which is expected to be available Q4 2021.

British competition regulator Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Monday, launched an enquiry into the ramifications of AMD's buy-out of FPGA maker Xilinx. The agency is soliciting opinions from the public on whether the $35 billion all-stock purchase will make goods and services less competitive for the UK. Unlike NVIDIA's Arm buyout the Xilinx acquisition is seeing no opposition from tech-giants. The Register notes that AMD could combine Xilinx's FPGAs with its x86 CPU and RDNA SIMD to create highly customizable HPC accelerators. AMD president Dr Lisa Su said "By combining our world-class engineering team and deep domain expertise, we will create an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to define the future of high performance computing."

Intel's upcoming Alder Lake generation of processors is going to be the first iteration of heterogeneous x86 architecture. That means that Intel will for the first time combine smaller, low-power cores, with some big high-performance cores to provide the boost to all the workloads. If a task doesn't need much power, as some background task, for example, the smaller cores are used. And if you need to render something or you want to fire up a game, big cores are used to provide the power needed for the tasks. Intel has decided to provide such an architecture on the advanced 10 nm SuperFin, which represents a major upgrade over the existing 14 nm process.

Today, we got some information from Igor's Lab, showing the leaked specification of the Intel Core-1800 processor engineering sample. While this may not represent the final name, we see that the leaked information shows that the processor is B0 stepping. That means that the CPU will see more changes when the final sample arrives. The CPU has 16 cores with 24 threads. Eight of those cores are big ones with hyperthreading, while the remaining 8 are smaller Atom cores. They are running at the base clock of 1800 MHz, while the boost speeds are 4.6 GHz with two cores, 4.4 GHz with four cores, and 4.2 GHz with 6 cores. When all cores are used, the boost speed is locked at 4.0 GHz. The CPU has a PL1 TDP of 125 Watts, while the PL2 configuration boosts the TDP to 228 Watts. The CPU was reportedly running at 1.3147 Volts during the test. You can check out the complete datasheet below.

Researches from the University of Virginia and University of California San Diego have published their latest case study. The two universities have worked hard to discover a new Spectre vulnerability variant that can pass all of the existing Spectre mitigations and exploit all of the existing processors coming from Intel and AMD. The vulnerability exploits all of the existing x86 processors, and as it is new, there are not implementations of hardware mitigation. The whitepaper called "I see dead μops" takes the implementation of exploiting micro-op caches that could lead to a potential data leak in the processor, which is leading to a Spectre-type exploit.

Modern x86 processors break down complex instructions into smaller RISC-like units called micro-ops, in the frontend, where it makes the design of the backend part much simpler. The micro-ops are stored in the micro-ops cache. The paper is describing micro-op cache-based timing channel exploits in three primary settings: "a) across code regions within the same thread, but operating at different privilege levels, (b) across different co-located threads running simultaneously on different SMT contexts (logical cores) within the same physical core, and (c) two transient execution attack variants that leverage the micro-op cache to leak transiently accessed secrets, bypassing several existing hardware and software-based mitigations, including Intel's recommended LFENCE."

NVIDIA has recently announced the company's first standalone Grace CPU that will come out as a product in 2023. NVIDIA has designed Grace on Arm ISA, likely ARM v9, to represent a new way that data centers are built and deliver a whole new level of HPC and AI performance. However, the CPU competition in a data center space is considered one of the hardest markets to enter. Usually, the market is a duopoly between Intel and AMD, which supply x86 processors to server vendors. In the past few years, there have been few Arm CPUs that managed to enter the data canter space, however, NVIDIA is aiming to deliver much more performance and grab a bigger piece of the market.

As a self-proclaimed leader in AI, Intel is facing hard competition from NVIDIA in the coming years. In an interview with Fortune, Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger has talked about NVIDIA and how the company sees the competition between the two. Mr. Gelsinger is claiming that Intel is a leader in CPUs that feature AI acceleration built in the chip and that they are not playing defense, but rather offense against NVIDIA. You can check out the whole quote from the interview below.

In response to the growing need for data protection, ATP Electronics, the global leader in specialized storage and memory solutions, has launched the SecurStor microSD cards - the latest in its line of secure NAND flash storage products for the Internet of Things (IoT), education, automotive, defense, aerospace and other applications requiring confidentiality and reliability.

"Removable storage media such as microSD cards provide great convenience and versatility for storing and transporting data. However, such convenience also exposes them to risks of unauthorized access," said Chris Lien, ATP Embedded Memory Business Unit Head. "In many instances, the boot image may be compromised, corrupting the operating system or rendering the system unusable. Malware may be introduced, or private information may be disclosed and used for damaging intents. Amidst such dangerous scenarios, we have made security a key priority for all ATP products."

NVIDIA today announced its first data center CPU, an Arm-based processor that will deliver 10x the performance of today's fastest servers on the most complex AI and high performance computing workloads.

The result of more than 10,000 engineering years of work, the NVIDIA Grace CPU is designed to address the computing requirements for the world's most advanced applications—including natural language processing, recommender systems and AI supercomputing—that analyze enormous datasets requiring both ultra-fast compute performance and massive memory. It combines energy-efficient Arm CPU cores with an innovative low-power memory subsystem to deliver high performance with great efficiency.