Friday the Wall Street Journal reported Qualcomm recently "made a takeover approach" to Intel, which has a market value of roughly $90 billion ("according to people familiar with the matter...") A deal is far from certain, the people cautioned. Even if Intel is receptive, a deal of that size is all but certain to attract antitrust scrutiny, though it is also possible it could be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the U.S.'s competitive edge in chips... Both Intel and Qualcomm have become U.S. national champions of sorts as chip-making gets increasingly politicized. Intel is in line to get up to $8.5 billion of potential grants for factories in the U.S. as Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger tries to build up a business making chips on contract for outsiders...
Both Intel and Qualcomm have been "overshadowed" by Nvidia's success in powering the AI boom, the article points out.

But "To get the deal done, Qualcomm could intend to sell assets or parts of Intel to other buyers... A deal would significantly broaden Qualcomm's horizons, complementing its mobile-phone chip business with chips from Intel that are ubiquitous in personal computers and servers..." Qualcomm's approach follows a more than three-year turnaround effort at Intel under Gelsinger that has yet to bear significant fruit. For years, Intel was the biggest semiconductor company in the world by market value, but it now lags behind rivals including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments and AMD. In August, following a dismal quarterly report, Intel said it planned to lay off thousands of employees and pause dividend payments as part of a broad cost-saving drive. Gelsinger last month laid out a roadmap to slash costs by more than $10 billion in 2025, as the company reported a loss of $1.6 billion for the second quarter, compared with a $1.5 billion profit a year earlier...

Intel earlier this year began to report separate financial results of its manufacturing operations, which many on Wall Street saw as a prelude to a possible split of the company. Some analysts have argued Intel should be split into two, mirroring a shift in the industry toward specializing in either chip design or chip manufacturing. Splitting up immediately might not be possible, however, Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon said in a recent note. Intel's manufacturing arm is money-losing and hasn't gained strong traction with customers other than Intel itself since Gelsinger opened the factories to outside chip designers three years ago. Gelsinger has been doubling down on the company's factory ambitions, outlining spending of hundreds of billions of dollars building new plants in the U.S., Europe and Israel in recent years.

Given Intel's market value, a successful takeover of the entire company would rank as the all-time largest technology M&A deal, topping Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Intel's stock "had its biggest one-day drop in over 50 years in August after the company reported disappointing earnings," reports CNBC. Partly because of that one-day, 26% drop, Intel's shares "are down 53% this year as investors express doubts about the company's costly plans to manufacture and design chips."

But the Register remains skeptical about Qualcomm taking over Intel: Chipzilla may not be worth much to Qualcomm unless it can renegotiate the x86/x86-64 cross-licensing patent agreement between Intel and AMD, which dates back to 2009. That agreement is terminated if a change in control happens at either Intel or AMD.

While a number of the patents expired in 2021, it's our understanding that agreement is still in force and Qualcomm would be subject to change of control rules. In other words, Qualcomm wouldn't be able to produce Intel-designed x86-64 chips unless AMD gave the green light. It's also likely one of the reasons why no one bought AMD when it was dire straits; whoever took over it would have to deal with Intel.

Intel shares surged 8% after announcing plans to make its foundry business an independent unit with its own board and potential for outside capital, part of CEO Pat Gelsinger's strategy to restructure the company amid financial challenges. The company is also exploring the possibility of spinning off the foundry business, pausing some European manufacturing projects, and expanding its AI chip production partnership with Amazon Web Services to regain market share in the growing AI server chip industry. CNBC reports: As part of CEO Pat Gelsinger's effort to turn around the struggling chipmaker, Intel said in a memo to employees that it will also sell off part of its stake in Altera. Gelsinger said the restructuring would allow the foundry business to "evaluate independent sources of funding,â and comes days after Intel's board met to assess the direction and future of the company. The foundry business, which Intel plans to use to manufacture chips for other customers, has been a big drag on its bottom line, with the company spending roughly $25 billion on it in each of the last two years. Beyond just considering outside funding, Intel is weighing whether to spin off the foundry business, possibly into a separate publicly traded company, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who declined to be named in order to discuss confidential information. With a standalone "operating board" and a cleaner corporate structure, the mechanics of a separation become far easier than trying to turn a fully integrated unit into a separate company. [...] Intel will also pause its fabrication efforts in Poland and Germany "by approximately two years based on anticipated market demand," Gelsinger said, and pull back on its plans for its Malaysian factory. U.S. manufacturing projects will remain unaffected, the company said.

In addition to the foundry announcement, Intel said it entered into a deal with Amazon Web Services to produce custom chips for AI, extending a long-running partnership between the two companies. Amazon is a big customer of Intel chips to power its AWS servers, and will buy a custom Xeon processor from Intel as well, Intel said. The move will potentially give Intel a new foothold in the growing industry for AI server chips. While Intel has several products that can be used for AI, including Gaudi 3, Nvidia has largely taken control of the market. Amazon has been developing its own AI chips, including one called Trainium, for over five years. Microsoft and Google have also invested heavily in custom chips to run AI, aiming to offer less expensive processors than Nvidia's general-purpose graphics processing units. Intel said that it would carry out its most advanced manufacturing, including the AI chip for AWS, at its plant in Ohio that's currently under construction. "All eyes will remain on us," Gelsinger said. "We need to fight for every inch and execute better than ever before. Because that's the only way to quiet our critics and deliver the results we know we're capable of achieving."

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released version 6.11 of the open-source operating system kernel. The new release, while not considered major by Torvalds, introduces several notable improvements for AMD hardware users and Arch Linux developers. ZDNet: This latest version introduces several enhancements, particularly for AMD hardware users, while offering broader system improvements and new capabilities. These include:
RDNA4 Graphics Support: The kernel now includes baseline support for AMD's upcoming RDNA4 graphics architecture. This early integration bodes well for future AMD GPU releases, ensuring Linux users have day-one support.
Core Performance Boost: The AMD P-State driver now includes handling for AMD Core Performance Boost. This driver gives AMD Core users more granular control over turbo and boost frequency ranges.
Fast Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) Support: Overclockers who want the most power possible from their computers will be happy with this improvement to the AMD P-State driver. This feature enhances power efficiency on recent Ryzen (Zen 4) mobile processors. This can improve performance by 2-6% without increasing power consumption.
AES-GCM Crypto Performance: AMD and Intel CPUs benefit from significantly faster AES-GCM encryption and decryption processing, up to 160% faster than previous versions.

Intel lost a bid to design and manufacture Sony's PlayStation 6 chip in 2022, dealing a blow to its contract manufacturing business. The contract, worth potentially billions in revenue, went to rival AMD after Intel failed to agree on pricing with Sony, Reuters reported Monday.

Discussions between the companies spanned months and involved top executives. Intel's loss has hampered CEO Pat Gelsinger's turnaround strategy, which hinges on expanding the company's foundry operations. The PlayStation deal would have provided steady business for Intel's struggling manufacturing arm, which reported $7 billion in operating losses last quarter. Sony's need for backwards compatibility with older PlayStation models complicated Intel's bid, as AMD designed chips for previous console generations, the report adds.

Further reading:
Intel Foundry Achieves Major Milestones;
Intel Weighs Options Including Foundry Split To Stem Losses:
Intel's Money Woes Throw Biden Team's Chip Strategy Into Turmoil.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Haiku (the MIT-licensed operating system, inspired by BeOS) has released its fifth beta for Haiku R1.

Some new features include improved UI color management, improved dark mode coloring, Tracker improvements, TUN/TAP support for VPN connections, TCP throughput improvements, performance optimizations, UFS2 (BSD's filesystem) read-only support, new FAT filesystem driver, improved hardware support, improved POSIX compliance, improved performance, and more.
Slashdot has been covering the fate of the BeOS since 2000 (as well as the short-lived derivative project ZETA — and Haiku).

And now "With a history of over two decades and previously known as OpenBeOS, today's Haiku is pushing forward..." writes the site NotebookCheck: Haiku is a spiritual successor to BeOS, with a focus on a clean and user-friendly design paired with low system requirements. The minimum system requirements are still an Intel Pentium II/AMD Athlon CPU or better, at least 384 MB RAM, an 800x600 screen, and at least 3GB storage. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 PCs, and the 32-bit version can run many unmodified BeOS applications. It might be the best desktop open-source operating system not based on Linux or Unix... It works well in a virtual machine like VirtualBox or UTM.

Qualcomm has explored the possibility of acquiring portions of Intel's design business to boost the company's product portfolio, Reuters reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The mobile chipmaker has examined acquiring different pieces of Intel, which is struggling to generate cash and looking to shed business units and sell off other assets, the people said. Intel's client PC design business is of significant interest to Qualcomm executives, one of the sources said, but they are looking at all of the company's design units. Other pieces of Intel such as the server segment would make less sense for Qualcomm to acquire, another source with knowledge of Qualcomm's operations said.

The latest Windows personal computers with AI features have "the best specs" on "all the benchmarks," Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella recently said. There is one problem: The chips inside current models are incompatible with many leading videogames. From a report: Microsoft and its partners this spring rolled out Copilot+ PCs that include functions such as creating AI-generated pictures and video. Under the hood of the new laptops is a hardware change. Instead of the Intel chips that have powered Microsoft Windows PCs for nearly four decades, the initial Copilot+ PCs to hit the market use Qualcomm chips, which in turn rely on designs from U.K.-based Arm.

Most PC games, including popular multiplayer games such as "League of Legends" and "Fortnite," are made to work with Intel's x86, a chip architecture that has been the standard for many personal computers for decades. To make some of these programs function on the Qualcomm-Arm system, they must be run through a layer of software that translates Intel-speak into Arm-speak. Chip experts say the approach isn't perfect and can result in bugs, glitches or games simply not working. The problem is widespread. About 1,300 PC games have been independently tested to see if they work on Microsoft's new Arm-powered PCs and only about half ran smoothly, said James McWhirter, an analyst with research firm Omdia.

The Biden-Harris administration's big bet on Intel to lead a US chipmaking renaissance is in grave trouble as a result of the company's mounting financial struggles, creating a potentially damaging setback for the country's most ambitious industrial policy in decades. From a report: Five months after the president traveled to Arizona to unveil a potential $20 billion package of incentives alongside Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger, there are growing questions around when -- or if -- Intel will get its hands on that money. Intel's woes also may jeopardize the government's ability to reach its policy goals, which include establishing a secure supply of cutting-edge chips for the Pentagon and making a fifth of the world's advanced processors by 2030.

Intel is mired in a sales slump worse than anticipated and hemorrhaging cash, forcing its board to consider increasingly drastic actions -- including possibly splitting off its manufacturing division or paring back global factory plans, Bloomberg reported last week. That threatens to further complicate its quest for government funding, at a time when Intel desperately needs the help. The Silicon Valley company is supposed to receive $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in loans from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, but only if the chipmaker meets key milestones -- and after significant due diligence. That process, which applies to all Chips Act winners, has been clear from the outset, and aims to ensure that companies only get taxpayer dollars once they've actually delivered on their promises. Intel, like other potential recipients, hasn't received any money yet.

Intel's slumping share price could cost it a spot in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Reuters reports: Analysts and investors said Intel was likely to be removed from the Dow, pointing to a near 60% decline in the company's shares this year that has made it the worst performer on the index and left it with the lowest stock price on the price-weighted Dow. The chipmaker's shares slid about 7% on Tuesday amid a broader market selloff, with the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index (.SOX) down nearly 6%, following reports of lower chip sales globally in July.

A removal from the index will hurt Intel's already bruised reputation. The company has missed out on the artificial intelligence boom after passing on an OpenAI investment and losses are mounting at the contract manufacturing unit that the chipmaker has been building out in hopes of challenging TSMC. To fund a turnaround, Intel suspended dividend and announced layoffs affecting 15% of its workforce during its earnings report last month. But some analysts and a former board member believe the moves might be too little, too late for the chipmaker.

Intel launched its new Core Ultra 200V-series processors on Tuesday, promising significant improvements in power efficiency, performance, and battery life over competitors and previous generations. The company claims the chips offer "historic x86 power efficiency" and the "world's fastest mobile CPU cores." The processors, available for pre-order in OEM systems and shipping September 24, feature four Lion Cove P-cores and four Skymont E-cores with boost speeds up to 5.1 GHz.

Intel says the chips deliver up to 20.1 hours of battery life, Tom's Hardware reports, outperforming Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite by nearly two hours and AMD's chips by almost four hours. Intel asserts a 30% faster gaming performance than competing processors and highlighted compatibility issues with Qualcomm's chips, noting that nearly two dozen games used for benchmarking failed to run on X Elite chips. The company claims up to 64% advantage in single-threaded performance over Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and up to 33% over AMD Strix Point HX370.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and key executives are expected to present a plan later this month to the company's board of directors to slice off unnecessary businesses and revamp capital spending, according to a source familiar with the matter, as they try to revive the once-dominant chipmaker's fortunes. The plan will include ideas on how to shave overall costs by selling businesses, including its programmable chip unit Altera, that Intel can no longer afford to fund from the company's once-sizeable profit.

Gelsinger and other high-ranking executives at Intel are expected to present the plan at a mid-September board meeting, the same source said. The proposal does not yet include plans to split Intel and sell off its contract manufacturing operation, or foundry, to a buyer such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to the source and another person familiar with the matter. The presentation, including the plans around its manufacturing operations, are not yet finalized and could change ahead of the meeting.

CSO Online reports that North Korea "is actively infiltrating Western companies using skilled IT workers who use fake identities to pose as remote workers with foreign companies, typically but not exclusively in the U.S."

Slashdot reader snydeq shares their report, which urges information security officers "to carry out tighter vetting of new hires to ward off potential 'moles' — who are increasingly finding their way onto company payrolls and into their IT systems." The schemes are part of illicit revenue generation efforts by the North Korean regime, which faces financial sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, as well as a component of the country's cyberespionage activities.

The U.S. Treasury department first warned about the tactic in 2022. Thosands of highly skilled IT workers are taking advantage of the demand for software developers to obtain freelance contracts from clients around the world, including in North America, Europe, and East Asia. "Although DPRK [North Korean] IT workers normally engage in IT work distinct from malicious cyber activity, they have used the privileged access gained as contractors to enable the DPRK's malicious cyber intrusions," the Treasury department warned... North Korean IT workers present themselves as South Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Eastern European, and as U.S.-based teleworkers. In some cases, DPRK IT workers further obfuscate their identities by creating arrangements with third-party subcontractors.

Christina Chapman, a resident of Arizona, faces fraud charges over an elaborate scheme that allegedly allowed North Korean IT workers to pose as U.S. citizens and residents using stolen identities to obtain jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies. U.S. payment platforms and online job site accounts were abused to secure jobs at more than 300 companies, including a major TV network, a car manufacturer, a Silicon Valley technology firm, and an aerospace company... According to a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, unsealed in May 2024, Chapman ran a "laptop farm," hosting the overseas IT workers' computers inside her home so it appeared that the computers were located in the U.S. The 49-year-old received and forged payroll checks, and she laundered direct debit payments for salaries through bank accounts under her control. Many of the overseas workers in her cell were from North Korea, according to prosecutors. An estimated $6.8 million were paid for the work, much of which was falsely reported to tax authorities under the name of 60 real U.S. citizens whose identities were either stolen or borrowed...

Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv, was separately charged over a years-long scheme to create fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms and with U.S.-based money service transmitters. "Didenko sold the accounts to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean, and the overseas IT workers used the false identities to apply for jobs with unsuspecting companies," according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Didenko, who was arrested in Poland in May, faces U.S. extradition proceedings...

How this type of malfeasance plays out from the perspective of a targeted firm was revealed by security awareness vendor KnowBe4's candid admission in July that it unknowingly hired a North Korean IT spy... A growing and substantial body of evidence suggests KnowBe4 is but one of many organizations targeted by illicit North Korean IT workers. Last November security vendor Palo Alto reported that North Korean threat actors are actively seeking employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world...

Mandiant, the Google-owned threat intel firm, reported last year that "thousands of highly skilled IT workers from North Korea" are hunting work. More recently, CrowdStrike reported that a North Korean group it dubbed "Famous Chollima" infiltrated more than 100 companies with imposter IT pros.
The article notes the infiltrators use chatbots to tailor the perfect resume "and further leverage AI-created deepfakes to pose as real people." And the article includes this quote from a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force turned cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig. "In some cases, they may try to get jobs at tech companies in order to steal their intellectual property before using it to create their own knock-off technologies."

The article closes with its suggested "countermeasures," including live video-chats with prospective remote-work applicants — and confirming an applicant's home address.

Intel is working with investment bankers to help navigate the most difficult period in its 56-year history, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company is discussing various scenarios, including a split of its product-design and manufacturing businesses, as well as which factory projects might potentially be scrapped, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Intel's longtime bankers, have been providing advice on the possibilities, which could also include potential M&A, the people said. The discussions have only grown more urgent since the Santa Clara, California-based company delivered a grim earnings report this month, which sent the shares plunging to their lowest level since 2013.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been a burning question for months -- are Intel's laptop chips susceptible to the same permanent damage that can potentially lay 24 different flagship desktop chips low? Today, Intel has finally confirmed: its 13th and 14th Gen laptop chips do not seem to have an instability issue. And the company claims they are definitely not affected by the too-high voltage issue, which it's now calling "Vmin Shift Instability." While Intel maintains that Vmin Shift Instability is not necessarily the root cause or only cause of the crashes -- it's still investigating -- Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford now tells The Verge that laptop chips basically aren't affected at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from overkill.wtf: The team behind popular emulation tool EmuDeck is today announcing something rather special: they've spent the first half of 2024 working on their very first hardware product, called the EmuDeck Machine, and it's due to arrive before the year is out. This EmuDeck Machine is an upcoming, crowdfunded, retro emulation mini PC running Bazzite, a Linux-based system similar to SteamOS. [...] This new EmuDeck Machine comes in two variants, the EM1 running an Intel N97 APU, and the EM2 -- based on an AMD Ryzen 8600G. While both machines are meant as emulation-first devices, the AMD-based variant can easily function as a console-like PC. This is also thanks to some custom work done by the team: "We've optimized the system for maximum power. The default configuration of an 8600G gets you 32 FPS in Cyberpunk; we've managed to reach 47 FPS with a completely stable system, or 60FPS if you use FSR."

Both machines will ship with a Gamesir Nova Lite controller and EmuDeck preinstalled naturally. The team has also preinstalled all available Decky plugins. But that's not all: if the campaign is successful, the EmuDeck team will also work on a docking station for the EM2 that will upgrade the graphics to an AMD Radeon 7600 desktop GPU. With this, in games like Cyberpunk 2077, you'll be able to reach 160 FPS in 1080p as per EmuDeck's measurements. You can preorder the EmuDeck Machines via Indigogo, starting at $322 and shipping in December.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The sudden resignation of a high-profile Intel board member came after differences with CEO Pat Gelsinger and other directors over what the director considered the U.S. company's bloated workforce, risk-averse culture and lagging artificial intelligence strategy, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Lip-Bu Tan, a semiconductor industry veteran, had said he was leaving the board because of a personal decision to "reprioritize various commitments" and that he remained "supportive of the company and its important work," in a regulatory filing on Thursday.

The former CEO of chip-software company Cadence Design joined Intel's board two years ago as part of a plan to restore Intel's place as the leading global chipmaker. The board expanded Tan's responsibilities in October 2023, authorizing him to oversee manufacturing operations. Over time, Tan grew frustrated by the company's large workforce, its approach to contract manufacturing and Intel's risk-averse and bureaucratic culture, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The circumstances around Tan's exit have not previously been reported. The departure of the industry veteran, who is well-regarded by investors, over Intel's strategy illustrates the uncertainty of its turnaround efforts. Tan leaves as the company endures one of the bleakest periods in its five-decade history that has left it vulnerable to a potential activist shareholder attack, former executives said. Intel has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to prepare a defense, according to sources familiar with the matter, confirming an earlier report.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel benchmarked AMD's latest Ryzen 9 9950X in several different Linux distros and found that the Zen 5 chip performs up to 16% faster with the Intel-optimized Clear Linux distro. Here's an excerpt from the report: The Linux distributions for this round of testing on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X included Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 40, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and a recent daily snapshot of Ubuntu 24.10 in its current development form. Intel's Clear Linux is the one most interesting for looking at on the new AMD Zen 5 hardware. While there hasn't been so much Clear Linux news in recent times, it remains the most well optimized x86_64 Linux distribution out of the box. Clear Linux makes use of compiler function multi versioning, performance-minded defaults, aggressive compiler CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS defaults, optional AVX-512 usage for more libraries, and many other patches and optimizations in the name of delivering the greatest x86_64 Linux performance. And while not Intel's focus, it works typically on AMD hardware too. [...]

Using the same Ryzen 9 9950X system, all of these Linux distributions were tested in their default / out-of-the-box state. [...] When taking the geometric mean of 59 benchmarks run across all of the Linux distributions on this AMD Ryzen 9 9950X system, Intel's Clear Linux easily took the crown. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS -- which was used for all of the Ryzen 9000 series Linux testing so far on Phoronix -- was the slowest. Tapping Intel's Clear Linux netted a 16% improvement on top of the performance offered by Ubuntu 24.04 LTS! Ubuntu 24.04 with the Ryzen 9000 series was already looking great generationally, but as shown today the performance can be even better with further software optimizations.

The Arch Linux powered CachyOS that is tuned out-of-the-box with a similar aim to Clear Linux also performed great. CachyOS was 7% faster than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based on the geo mean and 3% faster than upstream Arch Linux itself. For different workloads though the CachyOS advantage over Arch Linux varied from a minimal difference to quite significant advantages. From the performance of PHP and Python scripts atop Clear Linux to compiling various server and HPC minded software, Intel's Clear Linux -- and a commendable second place for CachyOS -- were showing that even greater performance can be achieved on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. Even for devoted Ubuntu Linux users, these results did show some nice advantages of the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release over Ubuntu 24.04 LTS thanks to the GCC 14 compiler. Ubuntu 24.10 performance is also still subject to change since the current daily ISOs haven't yet moved past the Linux 6.8 kernel while Ubuntu 24.10 in October will be shipping with Linux 6.11.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: As part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative they had been developing SVT-HEVC as a BSD-licensed high performance H.265/HEVC video encoder optimized for Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors. But recently they've changed course and the project has been officially discontinued. [...] The SVT-AV1 project a while ago was already punted to the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) project and one of its lead maintainers having joined Meta from Intel two years ago. SVT-AV1 continues excelling great outside the borders of Intel but SVT-HEVC (and SVT-VP9) have remained Intel open-source projects but at least officially SVT-HEVC has ended.

SVT-HEVC hadn't seen a new release since 2021 and there are already several great open-source H.265 encoders out there like x265 and Kvazaar. But as of a few weeks ago, SVT-HEVC upstream is now discontinued. The GitHub repository was put into a read-only state [with a discontinuation notice]. Meanwhile SVT-VP9 doesn't have any discontinuation notice at this time. The SVT-VP9 GitHub repository remains under Intel's Open Visual Cloud account although it hasn't seen any new commits in four months and the last tagged release was back in 2020.

Slashdot reader yeokm1 is the Singapore-based embedded security researcher whose side projects include installing Linux on a 1993 PC and building a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS.

Today he writes: When one thinks of modern technologies like Thunderbolt, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and modern CPUs, one would associate them with modern operating systems. How about DOS?

It might seem impossible, however I did an experiment on a relatively modern 2020 Thinkpad and found that it can still run MS-DOS 6.22. MS-DOS 6.22 is the last standalone version of DOS released by Microsoft in June 1994. This makes it 30 years old today.

I'll share the steps and challenges in locating a modern laptop capable of doing so — and the challenge of making the 30-year-old OS work on it with audio and networking functions. This is likely among the final generation of laptops able to run DOS natively.

Bloomberg's Mark Gruman remembers how Apple's hardware group "allowed Apple to dump Intel chips from its entire Mac lineup."

And they're now building an in-house cellular modem: For more than a decade, Apple has used modem chips designed by Qualcomm... But in 2018 — while facing a legal battle over royalties and patents — Apple started work on its own modem design.... It's devoting billions of dollars, thousands of engineers and millions of working hours to a project that won't really improve its devices — at least at the outset...

Over the past few years, Apple's modem project has suffered numerous setbacks. There have been problems with performance and overheating, and Apple has been forced to push back the modem's debut until next year at the earliest. The rollout will take place on a gradual basis — starting with niche models — and take a few years to complete. In a sign of this slow transition, Apple extended its supplier agreement with Qualcomm through March 2027... But Qualcomm has said that Apple will still have to pay it some royalties regardless (the chipmaker believes that Apple won't be able to avoid infringing its patents).

So it's hard to tell how big the benefits will be in the near term. Down the road, there are plans for Apple to fold its modem design into a new wireless chip that handles Wi-Fi and Bluetooth access. That would create a single connectivity component, potentially improving reliability and battery life. There's also the possibility that Apple could one day combine all of this into the device's main system on a chip, or SoC. That could further cut costs and save space inside the iPhone, allowing for more design choices. Furthermore, if Apple does ultimately save money by switching away from Qualcomm, it could redirect that spending toward new features and components.