“Had Intel disclosed the defect, including through advertising, press releases, the Product packaging, or the initial setup process, Plaintiff and class members would not have purchased a Product, or would have paid substantially less for it,” Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint said.
According to Tom’s Hardware, “Intel’s 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors have a return rate four times higher than that of the previous generation,” and “14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh chips also have return rates thrice as high as the 12th Generation Alder Lake processors.” But instead of alerting the public to the defects, Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint alleged, Intel continued touting the processors as providing the ultimate desktop experience for serious gamers and people with “the most demanding of multitasking workloads” seeking speed, efficiency, and reliability.
Vanvalkenburgh alleged that Intel misled customers because Intel wanted to protect its brand and seek unjust enrichment. According to his complaint, Intel knows “consumers are willing to pay more for a reliable processor that runs stably, without failing or crashing frequently.” By failing to alert customers to known defects, Intel’s alleged deceptions increased demand for its CPUs, spiking sales into the millions, while its customers paid hundreds for processors and allegedly “sustained an economic injury.”
“Reasonable consumers do not expect that the Products will crash and fail at high rates, or that running the Products will damage the Products themselves,” Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint said, noting that a patch Intel later provided failed to fix the issue.
Vanvalkenburgh is hoping a jury will agree that Intel deceived customers and order an injunction preventing any future misconduct like misleading advertising or failure to disclose defective products.
If the class action is certified, Intel could owe extensive damages, potentially paying hundreds of millions in a loss. Because Vanvalkenburgh alleged that “Intel’s fraudulent concealment was malicious, oppressive, deliberate, intended to defraud” him, he’s seeking “an assessment of punitive damages in an amount sufficient to deter such conduct.” That’s on top of requests for maximum statutory damages for allegedly unfair and deceptive practices and disgorgement for alleged unjust enrichment.
An Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 7 258V inside.
Andrew Cunningham
These high-end Zenbooks usually offer pretty good keyboards and trackpads, and the ones here are comfortable and reliable.
Andrew Cunningham
An HDMI port, a pair of Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.
Andrew Cunningham
A single USB-A port on the other side of the laptop. Dongles are fine, but we still appreciate when thin-and-light laptops can fit one of these in.
Andrew Cunningham
Two things can be true for Intel’s new Core Ultra 200-series processors, codenamed Lunar Lake: They can be both impressive and embarrassing.
Impressive because they perform reasonably well, despite some regressions and inconsistencies, and because they give Intel’s battery life a much-needed boost as the company competes with new Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm and Ryzen AI chips from AMD. It will also be Intel’s first chip to meet Microsoft’s performance requirements for the Copilot+ features in Windows 11.
Embarrassing because, to get here, Intel had to use another company’s manufacturing facilities to produce a competitive chip.
Intel claims that this is a temporary arrangement, just a bump in the road as the company prepares to scale up its upcoming 18A manufacturing process so it can bring its own chip production back in-house. And maybe that’s true! But years of manufacturing misfires (and early reports of troubles with 18A) have made me reflexively skeptical of any timelines the company gives for its manufacturing operations. And Intel has outsourced some of its manufacturing at the same time it is desperately trying to get other chip designers to manufacture their products in Intel’s factories.
This is a review of Intel’s newest mobile silicon by way of an Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Core Ultra 7 258V provided by Intel, not a chronicle of Intel’s manufacturing decline and ongoing financial woes. I will mostly focus on telling you whether the chip performs well and whether you should buy it. But it’s a rare situation, where whether it’s a solid chip is not a slam-dunk win for Intel, which might factor into our overall analysis.
About Lunar Lake
Enlarge/ A high-level breakdown of Intel’s next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake’s changes while reverting others.
Intel
Let’s talk about the composition of Lunar Lake, in brief.
Like last year’s Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 100 chips, Lunar Lake is a collection of chiplets stitched together via Intel’s Foveros technology. In Meteor Lake, Intel used this to combine several silicon dies manufactured by different companies—Intel made the compute tile where the main CPU cores were housed, while TSMC made the tiles for graphics, I/O, and other functions.
In Lunar Lake, Intel is still using Foveros—basically, using a silicon “base tile” as an interposer that enables communication between the different chiplets—to put the chips together. But the CPU, GPU, and NPU have been reunited in a single compute tile, and I/O and other functions are all handled by the platform controller tile (sometimes called the Platform Controller Hub or PCH in previous Intel CPUs). There’s also a “filler tile” that exists only so that the end product is rectangular. Both the compute tile and the platform controller tile are made by TSMC this time around.
Intel is still splitting its CPU cores between power-efficient E-cores and high-performance P-cores, but core counts overall are down relative to both previous-generation Core Ultra chips and older 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips.
Enlarge/ Some high-level details of Intel’s new E- and P-core architectures.
Intel
Lunar Lake has four E-cores and four P-cores, a composition common for Apple’s M-series chips but not, so far, for Intel’s. The Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H, for example, included six P-cores and a total of 10 E-cores. A Core i7-1255U included two P-cores and eight E-cores. Intel has also removed Hyperthreading from the CPU architecture it’s using for its P-cores, claiming that the silicon space was better spent on improving single-core performance. You’d expect this to boost Lunar Lake’s single-core performance and hurt its multi-core performance relative to past generations, and to spoil our performance section a bit, that’s basically what happens, though not by as much as you might expect.
Intel is also shipping a new GPU architecture with Lunar Lake, codenamed Battlemage—it will also power the next wave of dedicated desktop Arc GPUs, when and if we get them (Intel hasn’t said anything on that front, but it’s canceling or passing off a lot of its side projects lately). It has said that the Arc 140V integrated GPU is an average of 31 percent faster than the old Meteor Lake Arc GPU in games, and 16 percent faster than AMD’s newest Radeon 890M, though performance will vary widely based on the game. The Arc 130V GPU has one less of Intel’s Xe cores (7, instead of 8) and lower clock speeds.
The last piece of the compute puzzle is the neural processing unit (NPU), which can process some AI and machine-learning workloads locally rather than sending them to the cloud. Windows and most apps still aren’t doing much with these, but Intel does rate the Lunar Lake NPUs at between 40 and 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS) depending on the chip you’re buying, meeting or exceeding Microsoft’s 40 TOPS requirement and generally around four times faster than the NPU in Meteor Lake (11.5 TOPS).
Enlarge/ Intel is shifting to on-package RAM for Meteor Lake, something Apple also uses for its M-series chips.
Intel
And there’s one last big change: For these particular Core Ultra chips, Intel is integrating the RAM into the CPU package, rather than letting PC makers solder it to the motherboard separately or offer DIMM slots—again, something we see in Apple Silicon chips in the Mac. Lunar Lake chips ship with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and most of the variants can be had with either amount (in the chips Intel has announced so far, model numbers ending in 8 like our Core Ultra 7 258V have 32GB, and model numbers ending in 6 have 16GB). Packaging memory this way both saves motherboard space and, according to Intel, reduces power usage, because it shortens the physical distance that data needs to travel.
I am reasonably confident that we’ll see other Core Ultra 200-series variants with more CPU cores and external memory—I don’t see Intel giving up on high-performance, high-margin laptop processors, and those chips will need to compete with AMD’s high-end performance and offer additional RAM. But if those chips are coming, Intel hasn’t announced them yet.
Enlarge/ A photo of Dmitry Grinberg’s custom Linux/4004 circuit board.
Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it’s slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.
Initially designed for a Japanese calculator called the Busicom 141-PF, the 4-bit 4004 found limited use in commercial products of the 1970s before being superseded by more powerful Intel chips, such as the 8008 and 8080 that powered early personal computers—and then the 8086 and 8088 that launched the IBM PC era.
If you’re skeptical that this feat is possible with a raw 4004, you’re right: The 4004 itself is far too limited to run Linux directly. Instead, Grinberg created a solution that is equally impressive: an emulator that runs on the 4004 and emulates a MIPS R3000 processor—the architecture used in the DECstation 2100 workstation that Linux was originally ported to. This emulator, along with minimal hardware emulation, allows a stripped-down Debian Linux to boot to a command prompt.
Linux/4004.
Grinberg is no stranger to feats of running Linux in unlikely places. As he explains on his website, “In 2012, I ran real Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller (AVR), setting a new world record for lowest-end-machine to ever run Linux.” After others improved on that record in recent years, he decided to surpass himself and others by targeting the very first microprocessor.
The long, slow boot
To make Linux on the 4004 work, Grinberg had to overcome numerous challenges. The 4004 has extremely limited ROM and RAM, no interrupts, and lacks even basic logical operations like AND and OR. Grinberg’s emulator makes clever use of lookup tables and other tricks to squeeze maximum performance out of the primitive CPU.
The final hardware uses the 4004 (overclocked to 790 kHz) along with several other period-correct support chips from Intel’s MCS-4 chipset. It includes a VFD display to show Linux output and can accept input over a serial connection. The whole setup draws about 6 W of power.
To pull it all together, Grinberg designed a custom circuit board with no vias (paths from one side of the circuit board to the other) and only right-angle traces for a retro aesthetic. It’s meant to be wall-mountable as an art piece, slowly executing Linux commands over the course of days or weeks.
While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits. Grinberg is considering the possibility of offering kits or fully assembled boards for others who want to experience Linux at its slowest, though this is not yet definite.
The full details of the project, including schematics and source code, are available on Grinberg’s website. For those interested in vintage computing or extreme Linux implementations, it’s a fascinating look at what’s possible with 1970s technology and a lot of clever engineering.
But that doesn’t make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you’re looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices.
We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.
You won’t find a high-end “god box” this time around, though; for a money-is-no-object high-end build, it’s probably worth waiting for Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake desktop processors, AMD’s expected Ryzen 9000X3D series, and whatever Nvidia’s next-generation GPU launch is. All three of those things are expected either later this year or early next.
We have a couple of different iterations of the more expensive builds, and we also suggest multiple alternate components that can make more sense for certain types of builds based on your needs. The fun of PC building is how flexible and customizable it is—whether you want to buy what we recommend and put it together or want to treat these configurations as starting points, hopefully, they give you some idea of what your money can get you right now.
Notes on component selection
Part of the fun of building a PC is making it look the way you want. We’ve selected cases that will physically fit the motherboards and other parts we’re recommending and which we think will be good stylistic fits for each system. But there are many cases out there, and our picks aren’t the only options available.
As for power supplies, we’re looking for 80 Plus certified power supplies from established brands with positive user reviews on retail sites (or positive professional reviews, though these can be somewhat hard to come by for any given PSU these days). If you have a preferred brand, by all means, go with what works for you. The same goes for RAM—we’ll recommend capacities and speeds, and we’ll link to kits from brands that have worked well for us in the past, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than the many other RAM kits with equivalent specs.
For SSDs, we mostly stick to drives from known brands like Samsung, Crucial, or Western Digital, though going with a lesser-known brand can save you a bit of money. All of our builds also include built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to worry about running Ethernet wires and can easily connect to Bluetooth gamepads, keyboards, mice, headsets, and other accessories.
We also haven’t priced in peripherals, like webcams, monitors, keyboards, or mice, as we’re assuming most people will re-use what they already have or buy those components separately. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even make your own DIY keyboard! If you need more guidance, Kimber Streams’ Wirecutter keyboard guides are exhaustive and educational.
Finally, we won’t be including the cost of a Windows license in our cost estimates. You can pay a lot of different prices for Windows—$139 for an official retail license from Microsoft, $120 for an “OEM” license for system builders, or anywhere between $15 and $40 for a product key from shady gray market product key resale sites. Windows 10 keys will also work to activate Windows 11, though Microsoft stopped letting old Windows 7 and Windows 8 keys activate new Windows 10 and 11 installs relatively recently. You could even install Linux, given recent advancements to game compatibility layers!
Intel has formally announced its first batch of next-generation Core Ultra processors, codenamed “Lunar Lake.” The CPUs will be available in PCs beginning on September 24.
Formally dubbed “Intel Core Ultra (Series 2),” these CPUs follow up the Meteor Lake Core Ultra CPUs that Intel has been shipping all year. They promise modest CPU performance increases alongside big power efficiency and battery life improvements, much faster graphics performance, and a new neural processing engine (NPU) that will meet Microsoft’s requirements for Copilot+ PCs that use local rather than cloud processing for generative AI and machine-learning features.
Intel Core Ultra 200V
Enlarge/ The high-level enhancements coming to the Lunar Lake Core Ultra chips.
Intel
The most significant numbers in today’s update are actually about battery life: Intel compared a Lunar Lake system and a Snapdragon X Elite system from the “same OEM” using the “same chassis” and the same-sized 55 WHr battery. In the Procyon Office Productivity test, the Intel system lasted longer, though the Qualcomm system lasted longer on a Microsoft Teams call.
If Intel’s Lunar Lake laptops can match or even get close to Qualcomm’s battery life, it will be a big deal for Intel; as the company repeatedly stresses in its slide deck, x86 PCs don’t have the lingering app, game, and driver compatibility problems that Arm-powered Windows systems still do. If Intel can improve its battery life more quickly than Microsoft, and if Arm chipmakers and app developers can improve software compatibility, some of the current best arguments in favor of buying an Arm PC will go away.
Intel is trying to fight back against Qualcomm’s battery life advantage in Windows PCs.
Intel
Many of Lunar Lake’s changes were done in service of reducing power use.
Intel
Here, Intel claims a larger advantage in battery life against both Qualcomm and AMD, though there are lots of variables that determine battery life, and we’ll need to see more real-world testing to back these numbers up.
Intel
Intel detailed many other Lunar Lake changes earlier this summer when it announced high-level performance numbers for the CPU, GPU, and NPU.
Like Meteor Lake, the Lunar Lake processors are a collection of silicon chiplets (also called “tiles”) fused into one large chip using Intel’s Foveros packaging technology. The big difference is that there are fewer functional tiles—two, instead of four, not counting the blank “filler tile” or the base tile that ties them all together—and that both of those tiles are now being manufactured at Intel competitor TSMC, rather than using a mix of TSMC and Intel manufacturing processes as Meteor Lake did.
Intel also said it would be shipping Core Ultra CPUs with the system RAM integrated into the CPU package, which Apple also does for its M-series Mac processors; Intel says this will save quite a bit of power relative to external RAM soldered to the laptop’s motherboard.
Keep that change in mind when looking at the list of initial Core Ultra 200V-series processors Intel is announcing today. There are technically nine separate CPU models here, but because memory is integrated into the CPU package, Intel is counting the 16GB and 32GB versions of the same processor as two separate model numbers. The exception is the Core Ultra 9 288V, which is only available with 32GB of memory.
Intel has shared more about the voltage-related issues that affected some 13th- and 14th-generation Core processors, as the company tries to put the episode behind it. As reported by Tom’s Hardware, Intel says that the problem originated with “elevated operating voltage” stemming from “incorrect voltage requests,” specifically an increase to the minimum operating voltage of the chips. These “elevated voltage events can accumulate over time,” eventually damaging the processor and causing system hangs or crashes.
Intel has developed a microcode update to fix those elevated voltage requests, but the bad news for some users is that they will require a BIOS update, and they can’t be deployed via software updates as some microcode fixes can be.
Intel says that in most cases, CPU performance should be essentially unaffected by the patch, though the company did notice a handful of benchmark subscores and individual games that exhibited “moderate” slowdown (though we don’t know how much that is, in concrete terms). Here’s the relevant statement about performance:
Intel’s internal testing—utilizing Intel Default Settings—indicates performance impact is within run-to-run variation (eg. 3DMark: Timespy, WebXPRT 4, Cinebench R24, Blender 4.2.0) with a few sub-tests showing moderate impacts (WebXPRT Online Homework; PugetBench GPU Effects Score). For gaming workloads tested, performance has also been within run-to-run variation (eg. Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: Warhammer III – Mirrors of Madness) with one exception showing slightly more impact (Hitman 3: Dartmoor). However, system performance is dependent on configuration and several other factors.
For some PCs, particularly pre-built models, BIOS updates can be delivered via Windows Update or the OEM’s proprietary update software (Lenovo Vantage, Dell SupportAssist, the HP Support Assistant, and the MyASUS app all being prominent examples). For others, particularly boutique or home-built PCs, you may need to go to your motherboard maker’s website, look up your model, and download and install the BIOS update manually.
Some motherboard makers have already released updates for some of their boards; MSI and ASRock are out with updates for most boards with 700-series chipsets, and Asus also has beta updates available for some 700-series boards. Updates for slightly older 600-series motherboards that also support the 13th- and 14th-generation CPUs should follow later. If the release notes mention microcode 0x129, that means you’re getting the update.
Applying the fix as soon as possible is important, because the voltage-related damage to your CPU can’t be reversed. Once you’re noticing hangs and crashes, your CPU is already irreparably damaged, and you’ll need to have it replaced or exchanged for a new one.
If you need to do that, the good news is that Intel is offering two additional years of warranty service to buyers of the affected CPUs, for a total of five years of coverage. People who bought retail boxed CPUs to install in their self-built computers can contact Intel directly; people who bought one of the chips as part of a pre-built system should generally be able to get the same level of coverage from the company that made the PC.
Affected processors include all K, KF, and KS-series Core i5, i7, and i9 processors in the 13th- and 14th-generation Core processor families, plus non-K-series Core i7 and Core i9 processors (despite the name change, the chips are all based on the same Raptor Lake architecture). Lower-end Core i5 and Core i3 processors are unaffected, as are all 12th-generation Core processors.
Earlier this year, Intel also tried to alleviate the problem by asking motherboard makers to adhere to Intel’s default power settings in their BIOS settings. Though these didn’t end up being the root cause of the crashes, the elevated voltage settings or power limits used by some of these motherboards could exacerbate or accelerate the problem.
And Intel’s efforts continue. The company said earlier this month that it was working on a way for users to easily test whether their CPU had been damaged or not. And the company’s statement today reiterated that Intel was still looking into other possible fixes.
“Intel is continuing to investigate mitigations for scenarios that can result in Vmin shift on potentially impacted Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors,” the statement reads. “Intel will provide updates by end of August.”
Enlarge/ Even mainstream CPUs like the Core i5-13400 could theoretically be affected by Intel’s crashing issues.
Andrew Cunningham
Intel will be releasing a microcode update to prevent further damage to crashing 13th- and 14th-generation desktop processors sometime this month if it can stick to its previously announced schedule. This fix should be available via BIOS updates from PC and motherboard makers and from Microsoft as a Windows update. But it will take time for those updates to roll out to users, and Intel has said that processors that are already exhibiting crashes have been permanently damaged and won’t be fixed by the microcode update.
In an effort to provide peace of mind to buyers and cover anyone whose CPU is subtly damaged but not showing explicit signs of instability, Intel is extending the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation CPUs by an additional two years, Tom’s Hardware reports. This raises the warranty on a new boxed Intel CPU from three years to five. For processors that came installed in pre-built PCs, Intel says users should reach out to their PC’s manufacturer for support instead.
Though owners of high-end chips like the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K were the most frequently affected by the crashing issue, Intel says that any 13th- or 14th-generation desktop CPU with a base power of 65 W or higher could ultimately be affected. This means that even slower, more budget-oriented chips like the Core i5-13400 could end up having problems.
According to Intel, the root cause of the issue was “a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor,” a bug that caused motherboards to supply too much power to a CPU. This resulted in damage to the silicon over time, leading to crashing and instability. The problem was also exacerbated by enthusiast motherboards that didn’t stick to Intel’s recommended default power and performance settings.
Intel says it is “investigating options to easily identify affected processors” to help give users peace of mind, and it will have more to share on both these testing options and the details of the extended warranty “in the coming days.” Anyone experiencing problems should reach out to Intel or their PC’s manufacturer, depending on whether they bought a separate CPU or a complete system.
Enlarge/ The Pocket 386 is fun for a while, but the shortcomings and the broken stuff start to wear on you after a while.
Andrew Cunningham
The Book 8088 was a neat experiment, but as a clone of the original IBM PC, it was pretty limited in what it could do. Early MS-DOS apps and games worked fine, and the very first Windows versions ran… technically. Just not the later ones that could actually run Windows software.
The Pocket 386 laptop is a lot like the Book 8088, but fast-forwarded to the next huge evolution in the PC’s development. Intel’s 80386 processors not only jumped from 16-bit operation to 32-bit, but they implemented different memory modes that could take advantage of many megabytes of memory while maintaining compatibility with apps that only recognized the first 640KB.
Expanded software compatibility makes this one more appealing to retro-computing enthusiasts since (like a vintage 386) it will do just about everything an 8088 can do, with the added benefit of a whole lot more speed and much better compatibility with seminal versions of Windows. It’s much more convenient to have all this hardware squeezed into a little laptop than in a big, clunky vintage desktop with slowly dying capacitors in it.
But as with the Book 8088, there are implementation problems. Some of them are dealbreakers. The Pocket 386 is still an interesting curio, but some of what’s broken makes it too unreliable and frustrating to really be usable as a vintage system once the novelty wears off.
The 80386
Enlarge/ A close-up of the Pocket 386’s tiny keyboard.
Andrew Cunningham
When we talked about the Book 8088, most of our discussion revolved around a single PC: the 1981 IBM PC 5150, the original machine from which a wave of “IBM compatibles” and the modern PC industry sprung. Restricted to 1MB of RAM and 16-bit applications—most of which could only access the first 640KB of memory—the limits of an 8088-based PC mean there are only so many operating systems and applications you can realistically run.
The 80386 is seven years newer than the original 8086, and it’s capable of a whole lot more. The CPU came with many upgrades over the 8086 and 80286, but there are three that are particularly relevant for us: for one, it’s a 32-bit processor capable of addressing up to 4GB of RAM (strictly in theory, for vintage software). It introduced a much-improved “protected mode” that allowed for improved multitasking and the use of virtual memory. And it also included a so-called virtual 8086 mode, which could run multiple “real mode” MS-DOS applications simultaneously from within an operating system running in protected mode.
The result is a chip that is backward-compatible with the vast majority of software that could run on an 8088- or 8086-based PC—notwithstanding certain games or apps written specifically for the old IBM PC’s 4.77 MHz clock speed or other quirks particular to its hardware—but with the power necessary to credibly run some operating systems with graphical user interfaces.
Moving on to the Pocket 386’s specific implementation of the CPU, this is an 80386SX, the weaker of the two 386 variants. You might recall that the Intel 8088 CPU was still a 16-bit processor internally, but it used an 8-bit external bus to cut down on costs, retaining software compatibility with the 8086 but reducing the speed of communication between the CPU and other components in the system. The 386SX is the same way—like the more powerful 80386DX, it remained a 32-bit processor internally, capable of running 32-bit software. But it was connected to the rest of the system by a 16-bit external bus, which limited its performance. The amount of RAM it could address was also limited to 16MB.
(This DX/SX split is the source of some confusion; in the 486 generation, the DX suffix was used to denote a chip with a built-in floating-point unit, while 486SX processors didn’t include one. Both 386 variants still required a separate FPU for people who wanted one, the Intel 80387.)
While the Book 8088 uses vintage PC processors (usually a NEC V20, a pin-compatible 8088 upgrade), the Pocket 386 is using a slightly different version of the 80386SX core that wouldn’t have appeared in actual consumer PCs. Manufactured by a company called Ali, the M6117C is a late-’90s version of the 386SX core combined with a chipset intended for embedded systems rather than consumer PCs.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported.
In a letter to the DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, groups demanding more Big Tech oversight raised alarms that Nvidia’s top rivals apparently “are struggling to gain traction” because “Nvidia’s near-absolute dominance of the market is difficult to counter” and “funders are wary of backing its rivals.”
Nvidia is currently “the world’s most valuable public company,” their letter said, worth more than $3 trillion after taking near-total control of the high-performance AI chip market. Particularly “astonishing,” the letter said, was Nvidia’s dominance in the market for GPU accelerator chips, which are at the heart of today’s leading AI. Groups urged Kanter to probe Nvidia’s business practices to ensure that rivals aren’t permanently blocked from competing.
According to the advocacy groups that strongly oppose Big Tech monopolies, Nvidia “now holds an 80 percent overall global market share in GPU chips and a 98 percent share in the data center market.” This “puts it in a position to crowd out competitors and set global pricing and the terms of trade,” the letter warned.
Earlier this year, inside sources reported that the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission reached a deal where the DOJ would probe Nvidia’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in the booming AI industry, and the FTC would probe OpenAI and Microsoft. But there has been no official Nvidia probe announced, prompting progressive groups to push harder for the DOJ to recognize what they view as a “dire danger to the open market” that “well deserves DOJ scrutiny.”
Ultimately, the advocacy groups told Kanter that they fear Nvidia wielding “control over the world’s computing destiny,” noting that Nvidia’s cloud computing data centers don’t just power “Big Tech’s consumer products” but also “underpin every aspect of contemporary society, including the financial system, logistics, healthcare, and defense.”
They claimed that Nvidia is “leveraging” its “scarce chips” to force customers to buy its “chips, networking, and programming software as a package.” Such bundling and “price-fixing,” their letter warned, appear to be “the same kinds of anti-competitive tactics that the courts, in response to actions brought by the Department of Justice against other companies, have found to be illegal” and could perhaps “stifle innovation.”
Although data from TechInsights suggested that Nvidia’s chip shortage and cost actually helped companies like AMD and Intel sell chips in 2023, both Nvidia rivals reported losses in market share earlier this year, Yahoo Finance reported.
Since then, the European Union and the United Kingdom, as well as the US, have heightened scrutiny, but their seeming lag to follow through with an official investigation may only embolden Nvidia, as the company allegedly “believes its market behavior is above the law,” the progressive groups wrote. Suspicious behavior includes allegations that “Nvidia has continued to sell chips to Chinese customers and provide them computing access” despite a “Department of Commerce ban on trading with Chinese companies due to national security and human rights concerns.”
“Its chips have been confirmed to be reaching blacklisted Chinese entities,” their letter warned, citing a Wall Street Journal report.
Nvidia’s dominance apparently impacts everyone involved with AI. According to the letter, Nvidia seemingly “determining who receives inventory from a limited supply, setting premium pricing, and contractually blocking customers from doing business with competitors” is “alarming” the entire AI industry. That includes “both small companies (who find their supply choked off) and the Big Tech AI giants.”
Kanter will likely be receptive to the letter. In June, Fast Company reported that Kanter told an audience at an AI conference that there are “structures and trends in AI that should give us pause.” He further suggested that any technology that “relies on massive amounts of data and computing power” can “give already dominant firms a substantial advantage,” according to Fast Company’s summary of his remarks.
Enlarge/ Intel’s Lunar Lake Core Ultra CPUs will be announced in September.
Intel
Intel announced today that it plans to launch its next-generation Core Ultra laptop chips on September 3, just ahead of this year’s IFA conference in Berlin.
This announcement-of-an-announcement offers few specifics on what the next-gen chips will be like beyond promising “breakthrough x86 power efficiency, exceptional core performance, massive leaps in graphics performance and… unmatched AI computing power.” But we do already know a few things about the next-generation CPUs, codenamed Lunar Lake.
We know that, like current-generation Meteor Lake chips, Lunar Lake will combine multiple silicon “tiles” into one large die thanks to Intel’s Foveros packaging technology. We know that Intel will use a mix of up to four E-cores and four P-cores in the CPU, a step down in core count from what was available in Meteor Lake. We know Lunar Lake includes a next-generation Arc GPU based on the “Battlemage” architecture that promises up to 1.5 times better performance than the current Arc-integrated GPU. We know that at least some models are shifting to RAM that’s soldered to the CPU package, similar to how Apple packages RAM in its M-series processors. And we know that Lunar Lake includes a boosted neural processing unit (NPU) for local generative AI processing, Intel’s first chip fast enough to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ label.
Intel usually announces next-generation chips toward the end of the year in December, and actual laptops using those chips are announced at CES a few weeks later. We don’t know exactly when Lunar Lake systems will show up—announcing products in September doesn’t mean they’ll be readily available in September—but Intel does seem to be operating on an accelerated timeline this year.
That’s almost certainly because of competitive pressure. Qualcomm finally launched its Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips earlier this month, the first Arm processors for Windows PCs that could compete with and beat x86 laptop chips on both performance and battery life. And AMD has already started shipping Ryzen AI processors, which combine a Copilot+ capable NPU with the company’s new Zen 5 architecture and an updated integrated GPU (the version of Windows 11 that will actually enable Copilot+ features for x86 PCs should arrive later this year).
And the first-generation Meteor Lake Core Ultra chips haven’t been as compelling as they could be. They got a nice integrated GPU performance boost for the first time in years, but their single-core CPU performance was actually a minor regression from the 13th-generation Core processors they replaced. And despite being marketed as the first in a wave of “AI PCs,” Microsoft kind of pulled the rug out from under Intel and AMD, setting the Copilot+ NPU requirements to a performance level considerably higher than what either company had been shipping up to that point. It’s anyone’s guess whether Lunar Lake will be an across-the-board upgrade or whether it will be able to keep pace with the new Snapdragon PCs’ lower heat and fan noise and better battery life.
For several months, Intel has been investigating reports that high-end 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs (mainly, but not exclusively, the Core i9-13900K and 14900K) were crashing during gameplay. Intel partially addressed the issue by insisting that third-party motherboard makers adhere to Intel’s recommended default power settings in their motherboards, but the company said it was still working to identify the root cause of the problem.
The company announced yesterday that it has wrapped up its investigation and that a microcode update to fix the problem should be shipping out to motherboard makers in mid-August “following full validation.” Microcode updates like this generally require a BIOS update, so exactly when the patch hits your specific motherboard will be up to the company that made it.
Intel says that an analysis of defective processors “confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.” In other words, the CPU is receiving too much power, which is degrading stability over time.
If you’re using a 13th- or 14th-generation CPU and you’re not noticing any problems, the microcode update should prevent your processor from degrading. But if you’re already noticing stability problems, Tom’s Hardware reports that “the bug causes irreversible degradation of the impacted processors” and that the fix will not be able to reverse the damage that has already happened.
There has been no mention of 12th-generation processors, including the Core i9-12900K, suffering from the same issues. The 12th-gen processors use Intel’s Alder Lake architecture, whereas the high-end 13th- and 14th-gen chips use a modified architecture called Raptor Lake that comes with higher clock speeds, a bit more cache memory, and additional E-cores.
Tom’s Hardware also says that Intel will continue to replace CPUs that are exhibiting problems and that the microcode update shouldn’t noticeably affect CPU performance.
Intel also separately confirmed speculation that there was an oxidation-related manufacturing issue with some early 13th-generation Core processors but that the problems were fixed in 2023 and weren’t related to the crashes and instability that the microcode update is fixing.
AMD has released more information about its next-generation Ryzen 9000 processors and their underlying Zen 5 CPU architecture this week ahead of their launch at the end of July. The company reiterated some of the high-level performance claims it made last month—low- to mid-double-digit performance increases over Zen 4 in both single- and multi-threaded tasks. But AMD also bragged about the chips’ power efficiency compared to Ryzen 7000, pointing out that they would reduce power usage despite increasing performance.
Prioritizing power efficiency
AMD said that it has lowered the default power limits for three of the four Ryzen 9000 processors—the Ryzen 5 9600X, the Ryzen 7 9700X, and the Ryzen 9 7900X—compared to the Ryzen 7000 versions of those same chips. Despite the lower default power limit, all three of those chips still boast double-digit performance improvements over their predecessors. AMD also says that Ryzen 9000 CPU temperatures have been reduced by up to 7º Celsius compared to Ryzen 7000 chips at the same settings.
Ryzen 9000’s low-double-digit performance gains are coming despite the fact that the company has lowered most of its chips’ default TDPs. These TDP settings determine how much power one of AMD’s CPUs can use (though not necessarily how much they will use).
AMD
Because the TDPs have been lowered, AMD claims that Ryzen 9000 chips will have a bit more overclocking headroom than Ryzen 7000.
AMD
It’s worth noting that we generally tested the original Ryzen 7000 CPUs at multiple power levels, and for most chips—most notably the 7600X and 7700X—we found that the increased TDP levels didn’t help performance all that much in the first place. The TDP lowering in the Ryzen 9000 may be enabled partly by architectural improvements or a newer manufacturing process, but AMD already had some headroom to lower those power usage numbers without affecting performance too much. TDP is also best considered as a power limit rather than the actual amount of power that a CPU will use for any given workload, even when fully maxed out.
Still, we appreciate AMD’s focus on power efficiency for the Ryzen 9000 series, especially because Intel’s high-end 13900K and 14900K have been plagued by crashes that seem to be related to high power use and improper motherboard configurations. Intel has yet to release a definitive statement about what the issue is, but it’s plausible (maybe even likely!) that it’s a side effect of these chips being pushed to their thermal and electrical limits.
Ryzen 9000 CPUs can still be pushed further by users who want to raise those power limits and try overclocking—AMD points out that the chips all have more headroom for Precision Boost Overdrive automated overclocking, precisely because the default power limits leave a little more performance on the table. But as long as the chips still perform well at their default settings, people who just want to build a computer without doing a ton of tinkering will be better served by chips that run cooler and use less power.
More time on the clock for socket AM5
AMD has committed to supporting the AM5 socket until “2027+,” two more years than the “2025+” it promised back in late 2022.
AMD
Ryzen 9000 will launch alongside several marginally updated chipsets, though existing AM5 boards will be able to use these chips after a BIOS update.
AMD
Another small but noteworthy change buried in AMD’s slide decks, and good news for anyone who has already invested in a Socket AM5 motherboard or has plans to do so in the near future: AMD has officially extended the socket’s guaranteed support timeline to at least 2027 and is leaving the door open to support past that point. That’s a two-year extension from the “2025+” timeline that the company laid out in late 2022.
Of course, “support” could mean a lot of different things. AMD is still officially supporting the AM4 socket with new CPU releases and continues to lean on AM4 as a budget platform as socket AM5 costs have remained stubbornly high. But these “new” releases have all been repackagings of various iterations of the late-2020-era Ryzen 5000 CPUs, rather than truly new products. Still, AMD’s formal commitment to socket AM5’s longevity makes it a bit easier to recommend for people who upgrade their CPUs regularly.
Ryzen 9000 chips will be able to pop into any current AM5 motherboard after a BIOS update. The company is also announcing a range of 800-series chipsets for new motherboards, though these generally only come with minor improvements compared to the 600-series chipsets they replace. The X870E and X870 are guaranteed to have USB 4 ports, and the X870 supports PCIe 5.0 speeds for the GPU slot where the X670 only supported PCIe 4.0 speeds for the GPU slot. The lower-end B850 chipset still supports PCIe 5.0 speeds for SSDs and PCIe 4.0 speeds for GPUs, while an even lower-end B840 chipset is restricted to PCIe 3.0 speeds for everything. The B840 also won’t support CPU overclocking, though it can still overclock RAM.
