Intel’s long-awaited server chips are shipping today after two years of delays. Three months ago, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told us how shipping Sapphire Rapids was necessary to rebuild Intel’s confidence — and customers’ confidence in Intel. The company told The New York Times a bit more about the delays, though it wouldn’t describe the final fatal flaw that pushed it from 2022 to 2023.
When Intel’s new Arc A750 and A770 GPUs launched in October the performance of older DirectX 9 games wasn’t great. Intel is now promising a “massive” performance boost for games like CS:GO (up to 79 percent), StarCraft 2 (up to 48 percent), and League of Legends (up to 36 percent) all thanks to a new Arc driver.
Intel takes the PC performance crown back from AMD thanks to big multithread performance gains and boosts to gaming and creator apps
The chipmaker has confirmed what Tom’s Hardware reported over the weekend — its Alder Lake BIOS source code has leaked. But Intel says there shouldn’t be any security impact, since it doesn’t “rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure.” In the meantime, it’s pointing security researchers towards its bug bounty program if they discover any vulnerabilities in the code.
As Intel is building up the capability to mass-produce chips for itself and others, the list of potential customers is wide open, as CEO Pat Gelsinger explained during his interview on Decoder.
Intel’s GPU effort is impressive but early
Acer is getting ready to launch its Intel Arc A770 Predator BiFrost GPU. It’s a 2.5-slot design that has a custom PCB and some interesting RGB lighting throughout the fans. We don’t have an exact release date or pricing yet, but Intel’s own A770 starts at $329 and is expected to trade blows with Nvidia’s RTX 3060.
