The Top500 organization released its semi-annual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with the AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer retaining its spot at the top of the list with 1.194 Exaflop/s (EFlop/s) of performance, fending off a half-scale 585.34 Petaflop/s (PFlop/s) submission from the Argonne National Laboratory's Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer. From a report: Argonne's submission, which only employs half of the Aurora system, lands at the second spot on the Top500, unseating Japan's Fugaku as the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. Intel also made inroads with 20 new supercomputers based on its Sapphire Rapids CPUs entering the list, but AMD's EPYC continues to take over the Top500 as it now powers 140 systems on the list -- a 39% year-over-year increase.

Intel and Argonne are currently still working to bring Arora fully online for users in 2024. As such, the Aurora submission represented 10,624 Intel CPUs and 31,874 Intel GPUs working in concert to deliver 585.34 PFlop/s at a total of 24.69 megawatts (MW) of energy. In contrast, AMD's Frontier holds the performance title at 1.194 EFlop/s, which is more than twice the performance of Aurora, while consuming a comparably miserly 22.70 MW of energy (yes, that's less power for the full Frontier supercomputer than half of the Aurora system). Aurora did not land on the Green500, a list of the most power-efficient supercomputers, with this submission, but Frontier continues to hold eighth place on that list. However, Aurora is expected to eventually reach up to 2 EFlop/s of performance when it comes fully online. When complete, Auroroa will have 21,248 Xeon Max CPUs and 63,744 Max Series 'Ponte Vecchio' GPUs spread across 166 racks and 10,624 compute blades, making it the largest known single deployment of GPUs in the world. The system leverages HPE Cray EX â" Intel Exascale Compute Blades and uses HPE's Slingshot-11 networking interconnect.

Nvidia, the world's most valuable chipmaker, is updating its H100 artificial intelligence processor, adding more capabilities to a product that has fueled its dominance in the AI computing market. From a report: The new model, called the H200, will get the ability to use high-bandwidth memory, or HBM3e, allowing it to better cope with the large data sets needed for developing and implementing AI, Nvidia said Monday. Amazon's AWS, Alphabet's Google Cloud and Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure have all committed to using the new chip starting next year.

The current version of the Nvidia processor -- known as an AI accelerator -- is already in famously high demand. It's a prized commodity among technology heavyweights like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, who boast about their ability to get their hands on the chip. But the product is facing more competition: AMD is bringing its rival MI300 chip to market in the fourth quarter, and Intel claims that its Gaudi 2 model is faster than the H100. With the new product, Nvidia is trying to keep up with the size of data sets used to create AI models and services, it said. Adding the enhanced memory capability will make the H200 much faster at bombarding software with data -- a process that trains AI to perform tasks such as recognizing images and speech.

Started in 2013, "Hour of Code" is an annual tradition started by the education non-profit Code.org (which provides free coding lessons to schools). Its FAQ describes the December event for K-12 students as "a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities," and over 100 million schoolkids have participated over the years.

This year's theme will be "Creativity With AI," and the "computer vision" lesson includes a short video (less than 7 minutes) featuring a Tesla Autopilot product manager from its computer vision team. "I build self-driving cars," they say in the video. "Any place where there can be resources used more efficiently I think is a place where technology can play a role. But of course one of the best, impactful ways of AI, I hope, is through self-driving cars." (The video then goes on to explain how lots of training data ultimately generates a statistical model, "which is just a fancy way of saying, a guessing machine.")

The 7-minute video is part of a larger lesson plan (with a total estimated time of 45 minutes) in which students tackle a fun story problem. If a sports arena's scoreboard is showing digital numbers, what series of patterns would a machine-vision system have to recognize to identify each digit. (Students are asked to collaborate in groups.) And it's just one of seven 45-minute lessons, each one accompanied by a short video. (The longest video is 7 minutes and 28 seconds, and all seven videos, if watched back-to-back, would run for about 31 minutes.)

Not all the lessons involve actual coding, but the goal seems to be familiarizing students (starting at the 6th grade level) with artificial intelligence of today, and the issues it raises. The second-to-last lesson is titled "Algorithmic Bias" — with a video including interviews with an ethicist at Open AI and professor focused on AI from both MIT and Stanford. And the last lesson — "Our AI Code of Ethics" — challenges students to assemble documents and videos on AI-related "ethical pitfalls," and then pool their discoveries into an educational resource "for AI creators and legislators everywhere."

This year's installment is being billed as "the largest learning event in history." And it's scheduled for the week of December 4 so it coincides with "Computer Science Education Week" (a CS-education event launched in 2009 by the Association for Computing Machinery, with help from partners including Intel, Microsoft, Google, and the National Science Foundation).

A a report from TechSpot says AMD has recently increased its market share in the CPU sector for desktops, laptops, and servers: According to Mercury Research (via Tom's Hardware), AMD gained 5.8% unit share in desktops, 3.8% in laptops, and 5.8% in servers. In terms of revenue share, Team Red gained 4.1% in desktops, 5.1% in laptops, and 1.7% in servers. The report does not mention competitors by name, but the global PC industry only has one other major CPU supplier, Intel, which has a major stake in all the market segments.

While Intel and AMD make x86 processors for PCs, Qualcomm offers Arm-based SoCs for Windows notebooks, but its market share is minuscule by comparison. So, while the report doesn't say anything about the market share of Intel or Qualcomm, it is fair to assume that most of AMD's gains came at Intel's expense.
Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

Velcroman1 writes: Overclocking master Allen 'Splave' Golibersuch surfaced on Tom's Hardware to detail his work with liquid nitrogen to set a slew of new world records with Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh" CPUs. They include 15 world records with the Core i7-14700K and eight records with the Core i5-14600K, along with four records with the Core i9-14900K, spanning benchmarks from Cinebench to wPrime and H265.

"My top speeds were 7,730.11 MHz on all cores on the 14900K, 7,859.05 MHz on the 14600K and 7,600 MHz on the 14700K," writes Splave. "All of these achieved in Cinebench R23 while using Liquid Nitrogen cooling." "At the end of a week of playing around, I broke the 8-core Cinebench record at a crazy 7.73 GHz on all cores," concludes Splave. "Overall, these CPUs potentially OC better than their predecessors and cost the same. It was a rather refreshing refresh, I would say."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel may receive billions in U.S. government funding to build secret facilities that produce microchips for the military. SiliconANGLE reports: The facilities, which have not yet been disclosed, would be designated as a "secure enclave" to reduce the military's dependence on chips imported from East Asia, particularly Taiwan, which is at risk of a future invasion from China. The funding for the new facilities would come from the $52.7 billion allocated under the Chips Act, signed into law by President Biden in August 2022. The Chips Act, which had bipartisan support, promotes chipmaking and scientific research through funding and tax credits. The law is aimed at encouraging domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and helping U.S. companies compete with China in developing cutting-edge technologies.

The new Intel facilities, presuming they go ahead, could reside partly at Intel's Arizona factory complex, according to sources referenced in the Journal report. The exact amount of funding that will be made available is not yet known, but "people familiar with the situation" tell the Journal that they could cost about $3 billion to $4 billion, which would come from the $39 billion set aside in the Chips Act for manufacturing grants. Officials from the Commerce Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department are said to be negotiating the project with Intel but have not yet made a final decision.

The first manufacturing grants under the Chip Act are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The program was reported to have had more than 500 entities express interest and more than 130 have submitted applications or pre-applications for funding.

U.S. chip group Intel is on track to deliver five upgrades to its advanced manufacturing process in four years, CEO Pat Gelsinger said on Tuesday as the company faces pressure to reassure PC and server-making clients that its technology will remain competitive. From a report: Speaking at Intel Innovation Day in Taipei, Gelsinger said the company's most advanced chip design, the 18A, will move into the test production phase by the first quarter of 2024. "For 18A, we have many test wafers coming out at this moment," the CEO said. "The invention phase of the 18A is now complete, and now we're racing to production."

This production node represents Intel's big bet to reclaim semiconductor manufacturing leadership by 2025. The company also announced it will use this production technology to make chips for outside customers such as Ericsson, instead of using it only for its own products. Its two biggest rivals, Samsung of South Korea and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., are racing to put their own most advanced chips into production in 2025. These 2-nanometer chips are seen as being at a similar level as Intel's 18A. Gelsinger said his company has been aggressively pursuing its "five nodes in four years" plan since he returned to the company in 2021. It usually takes at least two years for a chipmaker to move forward to a new production node.

Apple will not be making an Apple Silicon version of the 27-inch iMac to replace the Intel-equipped model that it discontinued in 2022. From a report: The company is instead focusing the iMac line around the 24-inch model that was first released in early 2021 and just updated with the new M3 processor this fall. Apple PR representative Starlayne Meza confirmed the company's plans to The Verge. The company encourages those who have been holding out hope for a larger iMac to consider the Studio Display and Mac Studio or Mac Mini, which pair a 27-inch 5K screen with a separate computer, compared to the all-in-one design of the iMac. For many years, the 27-inch iMac was Apple's flagship consumer desktop computer, and its reach spread far beyond the typical living room or home office into the studios and edit bays of many media companies.

It happened a quarter of a century ago. The New York Times wrote that "An internal memorandum reflecting the views of some of Microsoft's top executives and software development managers reveals deep concern about the threat of free software and proposes a number of strategies for competing against free programs that have recently been gaining in popularity." The memo warns that the quality of free software can meet or exceed that of commercial programs and describes it as a potentially serious threat to Microsoft. The document was sent anonymously last week to Eric Raymond, a key figure in a loosely knit group of software developers who collaboratively create and distribute free programs ranging from operating systems to Web browsers. Microsoft executives acknowledged that the document was authentic...

In addition to acknowledging that free programs can compete with commercial software in terms of quality, the memorandum calls the free software movement a "long-term credible" threat and warns that employing a traditional Microsoft marketing strategy known as "FUD," an acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," will not succeed against the developers of free software. The memorandum also voices concern that Linux is rapidly becoming the dominant version of Unix for computers powered by Intel microprocessors.

The competitive issues, the note warns, go beyond the fact that the software is free. It is also part of the open-source software, or O.S.S., movement, which encourages widespread, rapid development efforts by making the source code — that is, the original lines of code written by programmers — readily available to anyone. This enables programmers the world over to continually write or suggest improvements or to warn of bugs that need to be fixed. The memorandum notes that open software presents a threat because of its ability to mobilize thousands of programmers. "The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing," the memo states. "More importantly, O.S.S. evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale."
Back in 1998, Slashdot's CmdrTaco covered the whole brouhaha — including this CNN article: A second internal Microsoft memo on the threat Linux poses to Windows NT calls the operating system "a best-of-breed Unix" and wonders aloud if the open-source operating system's momentum could be slowed in the courts.

As with the first "Halloween Document," the memo — written by product manager Vinod Valloppillil and another Microsoft employee, Josh Cohen — was obtained by Linux developer Eric Raymond and posted on the Internet. In it, Cohen and Valloppillil, who also authored the first "Halloween Document," appear to suggest that Microsoft could slow the open-source development of Linux with legal battles. "The effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated," the duo wrote.
Microsoft's slogain in 1998 was "Where do you want to go today?" So Eric Raymond published the documents on his web site under the headline "Where will Microsoft try to drag you today? Do you really want to go there?"

25 years later, and it's all still up there and preserved for posterity on Raymond's web page — a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and related materials known collectively as "the Halloween documents." And Raymond made a point of thanking the writers of the documents, "for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mtaht for remembering the documents' 25th anniversary...

Officially, Intel's Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture died back in 2021, when the company shipped its last processors. But failed technology often dies a million little deaths. From a report: To name just a few: Itanium also died in 2013, when Intel effectively decided to stop improving it; in 2017, when the last new Itanium CPUs shipped; in 2020, when the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped getting updates; and in 2003, when AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn't break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications.

Itanium is dying another death in the next version of the Linux kernel. According to Phoronix, all code related to Itanium support is being removed from the kernel in the upcoming 6.7 release after several months of deliberation. Linus Torvalds removed some 65,219 lines of Itanium-supporting code in a commit earlier this week, giving the architecture a "well-earned retirement as planned."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The head of the Russian department responsible for identifying threats to the "stability, security and integrity" of the internet, has revealed the extent of the Kremlin's VPN crackdown. Former FSO officer Sergei Khutortsev, a central figure in Russia's 'sovereign internet' project, confirmed that 167 VPN services are now blocked along with over 200 email services. Russia is also reported as stepping up measures against protocols such as OpenVPN, IKEv2 and WireGuard. [...]

An in-depth report published by TheIns.ru has details of the monitoring/blocking system reportedly deployed in Russia, how much it costs (4.3 billion rubles/$43 million in 2020, 24.7 billion rubles/$247 million for 2022-2024), and the names of the companies supplying the components. The publication also obtained original documents that apparently show some of the protocols Russia initially intended to block. They include older VPN protocols IPSec, L2TP, and PPTP, plus the BitTorrent protocol still widely used today. The full report on the system, which reveals the use of Intel chips/chipsets in 965 servers manufactured by Huawei and already purchased by Russia, plus another 2400+ servers for 2023/24, is available here.

AV1 -- a next-generation, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium including tech giants like Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, and Apple -- is finally making inroads. From a report: We are finally seeing more hardware support for this codec. The new M3 chips from Apple support AV1 decode. The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max also feature an AV1 hardware decoder. The official Android 14 Compatibility Definition makes support for AV1 mandatory. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, widely used by Android phones released in 2023, supports AV1. With the exception of Microsoft Edge, all browsers support AV1.

VentureBeat reports: Thursday San Francisco-based Oxide, a startup founded by computing experts from Joyent and Dell, launched what it calls the world's first "commercial cloud computer," a rack-scale system that enterprises can own to reap the benefits and flexibility of cloud computing on-premises, right within their data center. The company believes the new offering can finally put an end to the "cloud vs on-prem" dilemma enterprises face while setting up their infrastructure...

It also announced $44 million in a series A round of funding, led by Eclipse VC with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and Rally Ventures. Oxide plans to use this money to accelerate the adoption of its cloud computer, giving teams a new, better option to serve their customers... The round brings Oxide's total financing raised to date to $78 million.
Since 2019 Oxide has thrown a team of 60 technologists at the problem — and Thursday, Oxide also revealed an impressive list of current customers: There's the U.S. Department of Energy — specifically its Idaho National Laboratory (which has historically been involved in nuclear research) — as well as "a well-known financial services firm". Oxide also announced that within just a few months, there'll be additional installments at multiple Fortune 1000 companies. And beyond that, Oxide is also boasting that they now have "a long wait list of customers ready to install once production catches up with demand...."

Will Coffield, a partner at Riot Ventures, quipped that Oxide had "essentially wrapped all the hopes and dreams of a software engineer, IT manager, and a CFO into a single box...." Steve Tuck, CEO and co-founder of Oxide, pointed out that cloud computing "remains restricted to a centralized, rental-only model." There are many reasons why an enteprise might want to own their infrastructure — security, reliability, cost, and response time/latency issues — and as Tuck sees it, "the rental-only model has denied them modern cloud capabilities for these use cases.

"We are changing that."
Earlier this year on the Software Engineering Daily podcast, CTO/co-founder Bryan Cantrill remembered that when doing their compliance testing, "The folks at the compliance lab — they see a lot of servers — and they're like, 'Are you sure it's on?' Because it's so quiet!" (This June article notes that later on the podcast Cantrill argued that the acoustics of today's data centers are "almost like an odor. It is this visceral reminder that this domain has suffered for lack of real systemic holistic thinking...")

Oxide's press packet lays out other advantages for their servers. "Power usage is 2x efficient, takes up half the space, and can be up and running in just four hours instead of three months."

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has downplayed the threat of rival chipmakers creating processors based on the Arm architecture for PCs. From a report: "Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business," he told analysts during the x86 giant's Q3 earnings call Thursday. "We take all our competition seriously, but I think history is our guide here. We don't see these as potentially being all that significant overall," he added, a sentiment somewhat at odds with Microsoft which last week cited analyst research predicting Arm's PC market share will grow from its curernt 14 percent to 25 percent by 2027.

Which seems far from "pretty insignificant." Gelsinger's words also contrast markedly with past Intel CEO Andy Grove, who penned a book titled "Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company." While Gelsinger doesn't see Arm as a threat, he said Intel Foundry Services is more than happy to work with chipmakers to build chips based on the architecture. "When you're thinking about other alternative architectures like Arm, we also say, 'Wow, what a great opportunity for our foundry'," he said. To that end, the in April 2023 the chipmaker announced a strategic partnership with Arm to make it easier to produce chips on the architecture in Intel foundries.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Two Ukrainian hacktivist groups are claiming to have broken into Russia's largest private bank, Alfa-Bank. In a blog post last week, the hackers from groups called KibOrg and NLB shared screenshots of what appears to be an internal database belonging to Alfa-Bank, as well as personal details of several Russian individuals as "confirmation" of the breach. Within the database, the hackers say there are over 30 million records including names, birthdates, account numbers and phone numbers of Russian customers.

Adding some legitimacy to those claims, a Ukrainian intelligence official who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation confirmed to NPR that Ukraine's top counterintelligence agency, the SBU, helped the hacktivists breach Alfa-Bank. The official did not share additional details about how the SBU participated or any further plans for sharing the stolen data. Ukrainian journalists including from cybersecurity website The Record previously reported on the connection to the SBU. While the hacktivists did not immediately respond to a request to discuss the breach, they wrote in the blog post -- posted on their own site -- that they would be sharing the data obtained from Alfa-Bank with investigative journalists. Alfa-Bank has not publicly responded to the news of the hack.

Researchers have devised an attack that forces Apple's Safari browser to divulge passwords, Gmail message content, and other secrets by exploiting a side channel vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices. From a report: iLeakage, as the academic researchers have named the attack, is practical and requires minimal resources to carry out. It does, however, require extensive reverse-engineering of Apple hardware and significant expertise in exploiting a class of vulnerability known as a side channel, which leaks secrets based on clues left in electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or other manifestations of a targeted system. The side channel in this case is speculative execution, a performance enhancement feature found in modern CPUs that has formed the basis of a wide corpus of attacks in recent years. The nearly endless stream of exploit variants has left chip makers -- primarily Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD -- scrambling to devise mitigations.

The researchers implement iLeakage as a website. When visited by a vulnerable macOS or iOS device, the website uses JavaScript to surreptitiously open a separate website of the attacker's choice and recover site content rendered in a pop-up window. The researchers have successfully leveraged iLeakage to recover YouTube viewing history, the content of a Gmail inbox -- when a target is logged in -- and a password as it's being autofilled by a credential manager. Once visited, the iLeakage site requires about five minutes to profile the target machine and, on average, roughly another 30 seconds to extract a 512-bit secret, such as a 64-character string.

Intel's latest 14th Gen chips aren't a huge improvement over the 13th Gen in gaming performance, but a new Intel Application Optimization (APO) feature might just change that. From a report: Intel's new APO app simply runs in the background, improving performance in games. It offers impressive boosts to frame rates in games that support it, like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Metro Exodus. Intel Application Optimization essentially directs application resources in real time through a scheduling policy that fine-tunes performance for games and potentially even other applications in the future.

It operates alongside Intel's Thread Director, a technology that's designed to improve how apps and games are assigned to performance or efficiency cores depending on the performance needs. The result is some solid gains to performance in certain games, with one Reddit poster seeing a 200fps boost in Rainbow Six Siege at 1080p. "Not all games benefit from APO," explained Intel VP Roger Chandler in a press briefing ahead of the 14th Gen launch. "As we test and verify games we will add those that benefit the most, so gamers can get the best performance from their systems."

Qualcomm unveiled a new laptop processor designed to outperform rival products from Intel and Apple on Tuesday, stepping up its long-running effort to break into the personal computer market. From a report: Qualcomm formally launched the Snapdragon X Elite, the flagship platform of its Snapdragon X family that leverages its Oryon CPU core, and promises to double -- yes, double -- the performance of some of the most popular 13th-gen Core chips from AMD and Intel. Sound familiar? It should. Qualcomm promised the same with its earlier Snapdragon 8-series chips, and really didn't deliver. But after buying chip designer Nuvia in 2021, Qualcomm is trying again, hoping that its superpowered Arm chips can once again make Windows on Arm PCs a competitor to conventional X86 PCs when they launch in mid-2024. And they'e talking some big numbers to prove it.

Qualcomm sees Oryon first going into PCs (as the engine of the Snapdragon X Elite platform) but then moving into smartphones, cars, "extended reality" devices, and more, Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon is expected to say today. [...] To begin with, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is manufactured on a 4nm process node, versus the Intel 4 process node of Intel's Meteor Lake. (The two process technologies aren't directly comparable, though they're close enough for most purposes.) Oryon is a tri-cluster design. Historically, that has meant prime, performance, and efficiency cores, with each type of core taking on their own role depending upon the task. However, it appears that Qualcomm and its X86 rivals may have swapped strategies; as Intel adopts performance and efficiency cores, Qualcomm has chosen AMD's path. There are twelve cores within the Snapdragon X Elite, all running at 3.8GHz. Well, most of the time. If needed one or two of the cores can boost to 4.3GHz, the turbo boost strategy that's become common on the PC. The 64-bit Oryon CPU will be paired with 42Mbytes of total cache, and a memory controller that can access eight channels of LPDDR5x memory (64GB in total) with 130GBps memory bandwidth, executives said. It will be a single die, not a chiplet design.

According to Reuters, Nvidia is designing ARM-based processors that would run Microsoft's Windows operating system. While they're not expected to be ready until 2025, it poses a major new challenge to Intel which has long dominated the PC industry. From the report: The AI chip giant's new pursuit is part of Microsoft's effort to help chip companies build Arm-based processors for Windows PCs. Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers, according to preliminary third-quarter data from research firm IDC. Advanced Micro Devices also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology, according to two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm's efforts could shake up a PC industry that Intel long dominated but which is under increasing pressure from Apple. Apple's custom chips have given Mac computers better battery life and speedy performance that rivals chips that use more energy. Executives at Microsoft have observed how efficient Apple's Arm-based chips are, including with AI processing, and desire to attain similar performance, one of the sources said. Microsoft has been encouraging the involved chipmakers to build advanced AI features into the CPUs they are designing. The company envisions AI-enhanced software such as its Copilot to become an increasingly important part of using Windows. To make that a reality, forthcoming chips from Nvidia, AMD and others will need to devote the on-chip resources to do so. "Microsoft learned from the 90s that they don't want to be dependent on Intel again, they don't want to be dependent on a single vendor," said Jay Goldberg, chief executive of D2D Advisory, a finance and strategy consulting firm. "If Arm really took off in PC (chips), they were never going to let Qualcomm be the sole supplier."

Chinese multinational Zotac has announced a mini-PC built around two solid-state active cooling chips called the AirJet Pro and AirJet Mini. They're designed by a company called Frore Systems. New Atlas reports: The AirJet tech is described as a self-contained active heat sink featuring membranes inside that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency, generating "a powerful flow of air" that's pushed through vents at the top of the unit. These "high-velocity pulsating jets" remove heat from the processor and push it out through an integrated spout. Back at Computex 2023 in May, Zotac's new Zbox mini-PC was announced as the first recipient of Frore's cooling technology, in the shape of two near-silent AirJet Minis. Now The Zbox PI430AJ has launched to "select regions." Zotac reckons that the active cooling modules can only be heard if the user places an ear against the Zbox's housing.

The processor of choice for this "world's first" device is an Intel Core i3-N300 octacore chip that can clock up to 3.8 GHz. This features integrated UHD graphics, and is supported by 8 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. The Windows flavor comes with 512 GB of SSD storage, while users who opt for the barebones version will need to install their own. The 114.8 x 76 x 23.8-mm (4.52 x 2.99 x 0.95-in) mini-PC sports two USB 3.2 Type-A ports plus one USB-C, HDMI and DisplayPort, Ethernet LAN and a combo headphone/microphone jack. Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6 are cooked in for wireless needs.