Updated Intel has said its first discrete Arc desktop GPUs will, as planned, go on sale this month. But only in China.

The x86 giant's foray into discrete graphics processors has been difficult. Intel has baked 2D and 3D acceleration into its chipsets for years but watched as AMD and Nvidia swept the market with more powerful discrete GPU cards.

Intel announced it would offer discrete GPUs of its own in 2018 and promised shipments would start in 2020. But it was not until 2021 that Intel launched the Arc brand for its GPU efforts and promised discrete graphics silicon for desktops and laptops would appear in Q1 2022.

A certain viral pandemic and its impact on Chinese manufacturing capabilities and distribution meant that promise could not be fulfilled, leading to a belated admission that the devices were running late and would first appear in China some time during Q2 2022.

Presumably that's because the Arc cards are being assembled in China. And what with all the logistics chaos in the Middle Kingdom right now, it was decided to kick off shipping in that nation before Intel blew through another deadline.

Which brings us to today, which Intel has chosen to announced that one discrete Xe-architecture Arc model – the A380 – will indeed be available inside PCs sold in China by the end of Q2. Acer, ASUS, Gigabyte, Gunnir, HP, and MSI will all sell machines packing the GPU. Specs have not been revealed by Intel but the company has priced the GPU at ¥1,030 ($153), a figure well below the cost of high-end GPUs. Laptop versions of the product remain elusive.

Essentially, the cards are shipping in PCs and will be available as components in China, followed by system builds and components shipping in the rest of the world.

The A380 is pitched at gamers and content creators, and is part of the low-end Arc 3 series that will be topped by Arc 5 and Arc 7 models, all due later this year.

Intel says the A380 has 6GB of DDR6 RAM, and can run games in 1080p at 60 frames per second, drive four 4K displays at 120Hz refresh rates, and crunch 8K media without undue strain.

The Register suggests not trying to get into China to acquire an Arc-powered PC, because visas are very hard to come by at present and visitors must quarantine for at least 14 days on arrival. Even if you get in ASAP, Intel has said Arc hardware will "shortly" start to become available outside China. The first Arc 5 and 7 kit is promised in the next couple of months. Some Arc 7 units for laptops are already on sale but have proven hard to find. ®

Congrats to Intel's marketing team for choosing the name A380 as the GPU shares that moniker with Airbus's biggest jet – a product that was expected to revolutionize commercial aviation but instead proved to have fewer viable markets than one might expect and was discontinued after 16 years of production.

Now that the word is out about the A380 shipping, Best Buy in the US, at least, is emailing folks offering laptops with Arc A370M GPUs. ASUS, Lenovo, Samsung and HP are all offering devices with the graphics chip family, apparently shipping this month.

Lenovo has unveiled a small desktop workstation in a new physical format that's smaller than previous compact designs, but which it claims still has the type of performance professional users require.

Available from the end of this month, the ThinkStation P360 Ultra comes in a chassis that is less than 4 liters in total volume, but packs in 12th Gen Intel Core processors – that's the latest Alder Lake generation with up to 16 cores, but not the Xeon chips that we would expect to see in a workstation – and an Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU.

Other specifications include up to 128GB of DDR5 memory, two PCIe 4.0 slots, up to 8TB of storage using plug-in M.2 cards, plus dual Ethernet and Thunderbolt 4 ports, and support for up to eight displays, the latter of which will please many professional users. Pricing is expected to start at $1,299 in the US.

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.

During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.

Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE has announced what it claims is the first "cloud laptop" – an Android-powered device that the consumes just five watts and links to its cloud desktop-as-a-service.

Announced this week at the partially state-owned company's 2022 Cloud Network Ecosystem Summit, the machine – model W600D – measures 325mm × 215mm × 14 mm, weighs 1.1kg and includes a 14-inch HD display, full-size keyboard, HD camera, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. An unspecified eight-core processors drives it, and a 40.42 watt-hour battery is claimed to last for eight hours.

It seems the primary purpose of this thing is to access a cloud-hosted remote desktop in which you do all or most of your work. ZTE claimed its home-grown RAP protocol ensures these remote desktops will be usable even on connections of a mere 128Kbit/sec, or with latency of 300ms and packet loss of six percent. That's quite a brag.

Intel's PC chip division is the latest team caught in the current tide of economic uncertainty, as the company freezes hiring in the group. 

In an internal memo obtained by Reuters, Intel told employees all hiring and job requisitions in the client computing group were on hold for at least two weeks. During that time, the chipmaker will reportedly be reevaluating its priorities with "increased focus and prioritization in our spending [to] help us weather macroeconomic uncertainty," Intel said. 

The client computing group, which designs end-user hardware, is Intel's largest by sales, having generated $9.3 billion of the $18.4 billion Intel made last quarter. Despite its place at the top, the CCG's Q1 takings were still down 13 percent compared to the same time in 2021. It was also the only Intel division to lose money compared to Q1 2021, another potential reason for the hiring freeze in the sector. 

Nvidia has chosen Intel's next-generation Xeon Scalable processor, known as Sapphire Rapids, to go inside its upcoming DGX H100 AI system to showcase its flagship H100 GPU.

Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, confirmed the CPU choice during a fireside chat Tuesday at the BofA Securities 2022 Global Technology Conference. Nvidia positions the DGX family as the premier vehicle for its datacenter GPUs, pre-loading the machines with its software and optimizing them to provide the fastest AI performance as individual systems or in large supercomputer clusters.

Huang's confirmation answers a question we and other observers have had about which next-generation x86 server CPU the new DGX system would use since it was announced in March.

By now, you likely know the story: Intel made major manufacturing missteps over the past several years, giving rivals like AMD a major advantage, and now the x86 giant is in the midst of an ambitious five-year plan to regain its chip-making mojo.

This week, Intel is expected to detail just how it's going to make chips in the near future that are faster, less costly and more reliable from a manufacturing standpoint at the 2022 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits, which begins on Monday. The Register and other media outlets were given a sneak peek in a briefing last week.

The details surround Intel 4, the manufacturing node previously known as the chipmaker's 7nm process. Intel plans to use the node for products entering the market next year, which includes the compute tiles for the Meteor Lake CPUs for PCs and the Granite Rapids server chips.

With Intel poised to enter the datacenter GPU market, the chipmaker this week showed off a software platform mean to simplify management of these devices at scale at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The open-source software, dubbed Intel XPU Manager, is an in-band remote management service for upgrading firmware, monitoring system utilization, and administering GPUs at the individual node level. The code is an important step as Intel prepares to compete against Nvidia, which has a mature software stack for GPUs with AMD working hard to get its software straight for GPU and CPU.

XPU Manager is a low-level management interface that runs in Kubernetes and is designed to be integrated into existing cluster management and schedulers using RESTful APIs. It also supports local management via the CLI and is validated for use on Ubuntu 20.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4.

After a few years of teasing Ponte Vecchio – the powerful GPU that will go into what will become one of the fastest supercomputers in the world – Intel is sharing more details of the high-performance computing chips that will follow, and one of them will combine CPUs and GPUs in one package.

The semiconductor giant shared the details Tuesday in a roadmap update for its HPC-focused products at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Intel has only recently carved out a separate group of products for HPC applications because it is now developing versions of Xeon Scalable CPUs, starting with a high-bandwidth-memory (HBM) variant of the forthcoming Sapphire Rapids chips, for high-performance kit. This chip will sport up to 64GB of HBM2e memory, which will give it quick access to very large datasets.

Intel has found a new way to voice its displeasure over Congress' inability to pass $52 billion in subsidies to expand US semiconductor manufacturing: withholding a planned groundbreaking ceremony for its $20 billion fab mega-site in Ohio that stands to benefit from the federal funding.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was tentatively scheduled to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Ohio manufacturing site with state and federal bigwigs on July 22. But, in an email seen by the newspaper, the x86 giant told officials Wednesday it was indefinitely delaying the festivities "due in part to uncertainty around" the stalled Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.

That proposed law authorizes the aforementioned subsidies for Intel and others, and so its delay is holding back funding for the chipmakers.

Having successfully appealed Europe's €1.06bn ($1.2bn) antitrust fine, Intel now wants €593m ($623.5m) in interest charges.

In January, after years of contesting the fine, the x86 chip giant finally overturned the penalty, and was told it didn't have to pay up after all. The US tech titan isn't stopping there, however, and now says it is effectively seeking damages for being screwed around by Brussels.

According to official documents [PDF] published on Monday, Intel has gone to the EU General Court for “payment of compensation and consequential interest for the damage sustained because of the European Commissions refusal to pay Intel default interest."

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