Intel

Intel has given an unusual insight into the road ahead for its mainstream desktop and laptop processors, confirming the existence of a new processor family called Ice Lake.

Intel has revealed a significant scaling back in its hardware offerings.

The company has announced it will stop making its Arduino 101 board as well as the Curie module, both of which offered low-cost computing solutions.

Anyone looking to get their hands on the Arduino 101 has until September 17 to order one, with Intel confirming it will fulfill orders through to December 17 this year. As for Curie, it will be available until January 17, next year, with fulfillments continuing until July 17, 2018.

Intel was once moving full-steam ahead into wearables, but that effort has apparently come to an end. Reports at the end of last year claimed the company was looking to step back from wearables, but Intel denied those rumors. Now a report from CNBC cites a source that claims Intel completely shut down its wearables division about two weeks ago.

Intel's latest 10-core, high-end desktop (HEDT) chip—the Core i9-7900X—costs £900/$1000. That's £500/$500 less than its predecessor, the i7-6950X. In previous years, such cost-cutting would have been regarded as generous. You might, at a stretch, even call it good value. But that was at a time when Intel's monopoly on the CPU market was as its strongest, before a resurgent AMD lay waste to the idea that a chip with more than four cores be reserved for those with the fattest wallets.

Under certain conditions, systems with Skylake or Kaby Lake processors can crash due to a bug that occurs when hyperthreading is enabled. Intel has fixed the bug in a microcode update, but until and unless you install the update, the recommendation is that hyperthreading be disabled in the system firmware.

All Skylake and Kaby Lake processors appear to be affected, with one exception. While the brand-new Skylake-X chips still contain the flaw, their Kaby Lake X counterparts are listed by Intel as being fixed and unaffected.

Since Intel makes the processors that run, well, most computers, any Intel chip vulnerability—especially one that’s been around for nearly a decade—rings alarms. In the wake of Intel disclosing a longstanding flaw in the remote system management features of some popular Intel chipsets, manufacturers are scrambling to release patches.

It’s not an unmitigated disaster, and it affects enterprises more than consumers. But make no mistake, it’s going to take a major effort to fix.

Over the past six weeks, AMD’s Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs have been making Intel’s life a bit difficult. Chipzilla’s standard desktop lineup has been rattled by AMD’s new chips, which offer higher core counts and better performance in many workloads for significantly less money. Intel, of course, was never going to take this lying down — and new rumors suggest the company will accelerate the launch of its Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs, pulling them forward to a June Computex unveiling as opposed to the original August timeline.

Intel took half a day this week to talk about processor manufacturing technology. The company still believes in Moore's Law and says the principle will continue to guide and shape the microchip industry. But the way the law works is changing. The company also wants to change how people talk about manufacturing processes, because current terminology—wherein the node size is used to characterize a particular process—no longer serves as a good guide to how many transistors can be packed into a chip.

Intel has launched its first bug bounty program, offering rewards of up to $30,000.

The chip maker has partnered with specialist bug bounty outfit HackerOne to create a scheme that aims to encourage hackers to hunt for flaws in Intel's hardware, firmware and software. Intel will pay up to $30,000 for critical hardware vulnerabilities (less for firmware or software holes). The more severe the impact of the vulnerability and the harder it is to mitigate, the bigger the payout.

The Intel Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying. The i7-7700K is the first desktop Intel chip in brave new post-"tick-tock" world—which means that instead of major improvements to architecture, process, and instructions per clock (IPC), we get slightly higher clock speeds and a way to decode DRM-laden 4K streaming video. Huzzah.

For the average consumer building or buying a new performance-focused PC, a desktop chip based on 14nm Kaby Lake remains the chip of choice—a total lack of competition at this level makes sure of that.