Intel Vision Intel has said it has put "desktop-caliber" silicon in a mobile package to provide its fastest 12th-generation Core laptop processors yet.
The chipmaker unveiled the seven 12th-generation Core HX laptop chips at the Intel Vision event Tuesday, where the company also revealed AI chips meant to challenge Nvidia and a roadmap for its fledgling product line of infrastructure processing units for datacenters.
These latest Core chips are expected to power more than 10 laptops coming out later this year from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other PC makers, and they are based on the same Alder Lake hybrid architecture that debuted with Intel's 12th-gen Core S-Series processors for desktop PCs last fall.
What makes the 12th-gen HX chips different from other Alder Lake laptop processors that came out earlier this year is that they are said to be more powerful and come with features that are geared toward heavy-duty users, such as PCIe 5.0 connectivity, error-correcting code memory and RAID support. Like other processors in the broader 12th-gen lineup, select models include Intel's vPro enterprise-level management and security features.
As for other functionality, the processors come with support for overclocking, which includes the ability to overclock the memory as well as the processors' efficient cores. The processors also support up to 128GB of DDR4-3200 and DDR5-4800 memory as well as Thunderbolt 4 interfaces for up to two controllers.
The HX chips consist of a total of seven Core i5, i7, and i9 models, and they feature up to 16 CPU cores — split between eight performance cores and eight efficient cores — a 5GHz max turbo frequency, a 2.3GHz base frequency, and a 30 MB L3 cache. For integrated graphics, the chips feature up to a 1.55GHz max graphics unit frequency, and all but one of the models pack 32 execution units.
But in exchange for the high performance and advanced features, the processors require a great deal of power. The base power for all the latest chips is 55 watts, and it can go up to 157 watts to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the silicon. This is higher than the power envelope for the regular 12th-gen H-Series processors, which have a base power of 45 watts and a turbo power of 115 watts.
Intel said architecture improvements allows its latest flagship mobile chip, the Core i9-12900HX, to provide 17 percent higher single-threaded performance and 64 percent higher multi-threaded performance compared to last year's Core i9-11980HK, based on internal tests using the SPECint_rate_base2017 benchmarks.
A slide showing how Intel's Core i9-12900HX allegedly compares to other processors across single-threaded and multi-threaded performance benchmarks. Click to enlarge.
The semiconductor goliath also said it found performance gains across specific applications, with 81 percent higher performance for 3D rendering in Blender, 28 percent higher performance for model creation in Autodesk Revit, 21 percent higher performance for simulation in Autodesk Inventor, and 12 percent higher performance for design in Autodesk AutoCAD.
Intel alleged the Core i9-12900HX is faster than the best laptop silicon from AMD and Apple. Specific benchmark figures were not provided for the tests it performed, though Intel shared various performance comparisons [PDF] that put its flagship chip above Apple's M1 Max and AMD's Ryzen 9 6000 H-Series chips across multiple tests.
However, we note that, for instance, the Intel Core i9-12900HX was given an Nvidia RTX 3080ti graphics card in its tests, the previous i9-11980HK an RTX 3080, and the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX was fobbed off with an RTX 3060. This doesn't seem a straight comparison to us, so take all of this bench-marking with a suitable grain of salt.
A slide showing how Intel's Core i9-12900HX allegedly compares to other processors, including those from AMD and Apple, across Blender and CrossMark benchmarks. Click to enlarge.
"With the new core architecture and higher power limits of 12th-gen Intel Core HX processors, we're enabling content creators to tackle the most demanding workflows like never before – for example, executing 3D renders in the background while continuing to iterate on other 3D assets in the scene," said Chris Walker, head of mobility client platforms at Intel. ®
A Tor-hidden website dubbed the Eternity Project is offering a toolkit of malware, including ransomware, worms, and – coming soon – distributed denial-of-service programs, at low prices.
According to researchers at cyber-intelligence outfit Cyble, the Eternity site's operators also have a channel on Telegram, where they provide videos detailing features and functions of the Windows malware. Once bought, it's up to the buyer how victims' computers are infected; we'll leave that to your imagination.
The Telegram channel has about 500 subscribers, Team Cyble documented this week. Once someone decides to purchase of one or more of Eternity's malware components, they have the option to customize the final binary executable for whatever crimes they want to commit.
A Ukrainian man has been sentenced to four years in a US federal prison for selling on a dark-web marketplace stolen login credentials for more than 6,700 compromised servers.
Glib Oleksandr Ivanov-Tolpintsev, 28, was arrested by Polish authorities in Korczowa, Poland, on October 3, 2020, and extradited to America. He pleaded guilty on February 22, and was sentenced on Thursday in a Florida federal district court. The court also ordered Ivanov-Tolpintsev, of Chernivtsi, Ukraine, to forfeit his ill-gotten gains of $82,648 from the credential theft scheme.
The prosecution's documents [PDF] detail an unnamed, dark-web marketplace on which usernames and passwords along with personal data, including more than 330,000 dates of birth and social security numbers belonging to US residents, were bought and sold illegally.
David Harville, eBay's former director of global resiliency, pleaded guilty this week to five felony counts of participating in a plan to harass and intimidate journalists who were critical of the online auction business.
Harville is the last of seven former eBay employees/contractors charged by the US Justice Department to have admitted participating in a 2019 cyberstalking campaign to silence Ina and David Steiner, who publish the web newsletter and website EcommerceBytes.
Former eBay employees/contractors Philip Cooke, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Popp, Veronica Zea, and Stephanie Stockwell previously pleaded guilty. Cooke last July was sentenced to 18 months behind bars. Gilbert, Popp, Zea and Stockwell are currently awaiting sentencing.
Just as costs for some components have started to come down, TSMC and Samsung, the two largest contract chip manufacturers in the world, are reportedly planning to increase prices of production, which may affect Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and others that rely on the foundries.
Reports emerged earlier this week stating that Taiwan-based TSMC is planning price hikes in the single-digit percentages for legacy and advanced chip manufacturing technologies next year. Citing industry sources, Nikkei reported that the price hike will be around five to eight percent.
On Friday Bloomberg reported that South Korea's Samsung is planning to raise prices for chip designers by 15-20 percent this year, citing industry sources. Legacy nodes will be hit hardest, and the new pricing will come into effect in the second half of the year.
Finnish open-source-as-a-service provider Aiven received $210 million in funding this week, adding $1 billion to its nominal valuation in just nine months.
The Series D cash injection – led by Eurazeo, and joined by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock as well as existing investors IVP, Atomico, Earlybird, World Innovation Lab, and Salesforce Ventures – follows $60 million Series C funding which valued the firm at $2 billion.
The latest investment round values the company at $3 billion. It's remarkable considering it only supports open-source software and was worth $800 million when it got its first $100 million tranche of Series C funding in March last year.
Black Hat Asia Software made unsafe by dependencies should be fixed without users needing to interact with the source of the problem, according to US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, who serves in the Executive Office of the President.
Speaking to The Register at the Black Hat Asia conference in Singapore on Friday, Inglis said that when a faulty component in a car needs to be replaced, the manufacturer who chose that component takes responsibility for securing safe parts and arranging their installation. He contrasted that arrangement with the fix for the Log4j bug, which required users to seek assistance from both vendors that used the open-source logging code and source software from the Log4j project itself.
Inglis wants vendors to take responsibility for their choices so that addressing security issues is easier and users' systems – and the US – can achieve better resilience with less effort.
Memory and storage maker Micron Technology has revealed a new business model intended to address the volatility in the memory market that has resulted in sharp swings in pricing over the past several years.
Revealed at Micron's Investor Day 2022 event, the new forward pricing agreements enable a Micron customer to sign a multi-year deal that guarantees them a supply of memory at a predictable price that follows the cost reduction that the chipmaker sees during the lifecycle of a particular product.
Micron's chief business officer Sumit Sadana told Investor Day attendees that the chipmaker has already signed up an unnamed volume customer to one of the new agreements, which the company is currently trying out to see whether it delivers on the expected benefits.
Almost nine in 10 organizations that have suffered a ransomware attack would choose to pay the ransom if hit again, according to a new report, compared with two-thirds of those that have not experienced an attack.
The findings come from a report titled "How business executives perceive ransomware threat" by security company Kaspersky, which states that ransomware has become an ever-present threat, with 64 percent of companies surveyed already having suffered an attack, but more worryingly, that executives seem to believe that paying the ransom is a reliable way of addressing the issue.
The report, available here, is based on research involving 900 respondents across North America, South America, Africa, Russia, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The respondents were in senior non-IT management roles at companies between 50 and 1,000 employees.
Black Hat Asia Cyber war has become an emerged aspect of broader armed conflicts, commencing before the first shot is fired, cybersecurity expert Kenneth Geers told the audience at the Black Hat Asia conference on Friday.
"Peacetime in cyberspace is a chaotic environment," said Geers, who has served as a visiting professor at Kiev National Taras Shevchenko University, represented the US government at NATO, and held senior roles at the National Security Agency. "A lot of hacking has to be done in peacetime."
Geers said the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates how electronic and kinetic conflicts interact. Ahead of the Ukraine invasion, Russia severed network cables, commandeered satellites, whitewashed Wikipedia, and targeted military ops via mobile phone geolocations.
Canonical has begun slinging daily builds of Ubuntu at Windows Subsystem for Linux. We took a look at the not-for-production code.
Ubuntu has long been friends with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. If you pop wsl --install onto a virgin Windows 11 PC, the odds are it will be Canonical's Linux distribution that is installed by default.
There are plenty of other options available – OpenSUSE and Debian spring effortlessly to mind, and we recently noted the arrival of AlmaLinux for RHEL refuseniks, but all require specifying manually.
The Iran-linked Cobalt Mirage crew is running attacks against America for both financial gain and for cyber-espionage purposes, according to Secureworks' threat intelligence team.
The cybercriminal gang has been around since June 2020, and its most recent activities have been put into two categories. One, using ransomware to extort money, as illustrated by a strike in January against a US philanthropic organization, according to Secureworks' Counter Threat Unit (CTU); and two, gathering intelligence, with a local government network in the United States targeted in March, CTU researchers detailed Thursday.
"The January and March incidents typify the different styles of attacks conducted by Cobalt Mirage," they wrote. "While the threat actors appear to have had a reasonable level of success gaining initial access to a wide range of targets, their ability to capitalize on that access for financial gain or intelligence collection appears limited. At a minimum, Cobalt Mirage's ability to use publicly available encryption tools for ransomware operations and mass scan-and-exploit activity to compromise organizations creates an ongoing threat."
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