With rivals Nvidia and AMD both offering graphics processors, Intel is now deploying screaming co-processors of its own in the form of FPGAs.
FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are extremely fast chips that can be reprogrammed to do specific tasks. Intel last year acquired Altera for $16.7 billion as it started thinking beyond CPUs and stressing co-processors for demanding computing tasks.
Since the release of Intel's Skylake-based processors, we have been working tirelessly to learn everything there is to know about the architecture and its associated platform. The information we have accumulated over a number of months, but it seems to be constantly changing, creating confusion among tech enthusiasts. And so we're aiming to clear up conflicting information and condense everything we know about the Skylake platform down into a single resource.
Our creative director Aurich Lawson is building a PC to power a custom arcade cabinet, and he was having trouble picking a processor. Not because he didn’t know what he needed, but because he was having trouble matching what he needed (the cheapest quad-core CPU that meets the recommended requirements for Street Fighter V) with what Intel was offering (five different obfuscated brands spread out over multiple sockets and architectures).
Intel, according to rumors, is to release three generations of processors that will be fabbed on 5nm after Cannonlake and Icelake. Yesterday we already talked a bit about 5nm at TSMC. This new rumor pops up exactly at the same moment.
Intel has announced a chip technology that the company said was designed to foil hackers who use fake emails to trick employees into revealing their usernames and passwords.
It could also give future corporate IT managers the option of eliminating long, ever-changing passwords and replacing them with short personal identification numbers, or fingerprints and other identifiers.
Intel Authenticate will be added to the company's line of sixth-generation processors and tested by some businesses before entering production, said Tom Garrison, an Intel vice president.
Intel has confirmed that its Skylake processors suffer from a bug that can cause a system to freeze when performing complex workloads. Discovered by mathematicians at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), the bug occurs when using the GIMPS Prime95 application to find Mersenne primes.
Update: We've been informed that the bug was reportedly discovered and tested by the the community at hardwareluxx.de before being passed onto GIMPS, which conducted further testing. Both groups passed their findings onto Intel.
Intel's original Compute Stick was a neat idea that ultimately wasn't executed very well. Any system based on one of Intel's Atom processors is going to be a little slow, but flaky wireless, inconsistent performance, and a clunky setup process all made it less appealing than it could have been. It had all of the hallmarks and rough edges of a first-generation product.
For Intel, the temporary inability to keep pace with Moore's Law -- the foundation of its business -- was a bit of an embarrassment, but the company is trying hard to catch up.
Moore's Law is an observation that has led to faster, cheaper and smaller computers, and a concept that Intel has followed for decades. It states that the density of transistors doubles every two years, while cost per transistor declines.
Nearly a year after its debut, Intel's Internet of Things (IoT) platform is being prepped for an upgrade as the chip maker weaves in more of its hardware and software products to accelerate development.
"IoT is just a phrase," said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich during a media presentation on Tuesday morning, explaining what he thinks it really means is that these devices that are going to become part of our lives and make them better.
If you think mini-ITX is too big but don't like the soldered down processor of the Intel NUC, the chip giant has come up with a new form factor that splits the difference: 5×5.
