Intel

It looks like big.little CPU design—an architecture that includes both fast, power-hungry cores and slower, more power-efficient cores—is here to stay in the x86_64 world, according to unverified insider information leaked by wccftech and AdoredTV.

At Intel's 2021 Architecture day, the company confirmed that its upcoming Alder Lake (12th generation) processors will use a mixture of performance and efficiency cores. This brings the company's discontinued 2020 Lakefield design concept firmly into the mainstream.

Earlier this year, Intel got a new CEO and kicked off a new business plan that would open its foundries to other chip-design firms, the same way TSMC and Samsung Semiconductor operate. At its "Intel Accelerated" event today, the company laid out a roadmap for its future as a for-hire foundry. Besides the future of ever-smaller process nodes, the company also announced it has scored one of the world's biggest chip designers, Qualcomm, as a future foundry customer.

Intel has a new consumer-targeted storage product, called Optane H20—as in H twenty, not water. The new device is an M.2 2280 format drive, using QLC (Quad Level Cell) NAND storage running behind an Optane cache layer.

This isn't Intel's first try at an Optane-backed hybrid SSD—the first, 2019's Optane H10, made its way into a few consumer laptops but didn't make much of a splash. H20 is a second try, with a significantly improved QLC SSD and NAND controller.

Since 2018, an almost endless series of attacks broadly known as Spectre has kept Intel and AMD scrambling to develop defenses to mitigate vulnerabilities that allow malware to pluck passwords and other sensitive information directly out of silicon. Now, researchers say they’ve devised a new attack that breaks most—if not all—of those on-chip defenses.

A Texas jury has ordered Intel to pay $2.18 billion in damages for infringing two patents. The lawsuit was filed by VLSI Technology LLC, a 4-year-old firm that Intel says has no products and no sources of revenue besides patent litigation.

The patents at issue in the case previously belonged to NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch company that spun off from Philips in 2006. NXP acquired the patents when it bought Freescale Semiconductor (itself a spinoff of Motorola) in 2015. Intel's lawyer told jurors that NXP would get a portion of the proceeds from the lawsuit.

Intel's Resource and Design Center is a website dedicated to providing the company's partners with NDA documentation for product integration purposes. Reports are also cropping up that some of the files are marked with NDA license agreements to "Centerm Information Co. Ltd., a Chinese company established and existing under the laws of the People's Republic of China," meaning this company could have been also hacked.

The past few years have been tough times for Intel, and after last week's news that intel's 7nm parts had been delayed (again), this week the company is announcing a shakeup to the executive team. The biggest news is that Intel's chief engineering officer, Murthy Renduchintala, is leaving the company.

Intel has outlined what to expect from the new Thunderbolt 4 standard, which is expected to start appearing in consumer devices later this year.

While it won't offer an increase over the 40GB/s that Thunderbolt 3 does, Thunderbolt 4 has steeper minimum requirements than Thunderbolt 3 for devices to claim certification—and that makes some new features and perks standard.

These are the specifications for Thunderbolt 4, according to Intel:

As has been rumored and rumored and rumored and then rumored some more, Apple will no longer rely on Intel chips for its MacBook laptops. Instead, the company’s homegrown ARM-based processors—already a staple of the iPhone and iPad—will provide the brains for the future of Apple computing. The shift to so-called Apple Silicon is monumental not just for the performance gains of Apple’s laptop and desktop lines, but for the surprising convergence of all of its devices.

The history of hacking has largely been a back-and-forth game, with attackers devising a technique to breach a system, defenders constructing a countermeasure that prevents the technique, and hackers devising a new way to bypass system security. On Monday, Intel is announcing its plans to bake a new parry directly into its CPUs that’s designed to thwart software exploits that execute malicious code on vulnerable computers.