Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: US government is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act cash to help fund its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri. The Commerce Department said GlobalWafers' Texas plant is a significant milestone for the US as it's the country's first facility for manufacturing 300mm wafers, the kind that are used for modern processes. The Missouri site will produce a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) variant of 300mm wafers, which are more geared towards defense and aerospace applications where chips need to be less prone to failure. Plans to build the Texas wafer plant were first revealed just over two years ago by the Taiwanese chip biz. It was an alternative use of a few billion dollars that were originally earmarked for acquiring German wafer maker Siltronic, an acquisition which didn't go as hoped due to resistance from German regulators.

The Missouri plant meanwhile was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip fab spun off from AMD that now focuses on older nodes rather than the cutting edge. This fab seems to be the smaller of the two, considering that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and that seems to also cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer plant. In total, GlobalWafers' Texas and Missouri factories will cost around four billion dollars, which means the maximum award funded by the CHIPS Act would cover up to ten percent of the budget. The Commerce Department claims that facilities will create 1,700 jobs in construction and 880 in manufacturing.

"The latest version of the Linux kernel adds an array of improvements," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, " including a new memory sealing system call, a speed boost for AES-XTS encryption on Intel and AMD CPUs, and expanding Rust language support within the kernel to RISC-V." Plus, like in all kernel releases, there's a glut of groundwork to offer "initial support" for upcoming CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, Wi-Fi, and other hardware (that most of us don't use yet, but require Linux support to be in place for when devices that use them filter out)...

Linux 6.10 adds (after much gnashing) the mseal() system call to prevent changes being made to portions of the virtual address space. For now, this will mainly benefit Google Chrome, which plans to use it to harden its sandboxing. Work is underway by kernel contributors to allow other apps to benefit, though. A similarly initially-controversial change merged is a new memory-allocation profiling subsystem. This helps developers fine-tune memory usage and more readily identify memory leaks. An explainer from LWN summarizes it well.

Elsewhere, Linux 6.10 offers encrypted interactions with trusted platform modules (TPM) in order to "make the kernel's use of the TPM reasonably robust in the face of external snooping and packet alteration attacks". The documentation for this feature explains: "for every in-kernel operation we use null primary salted HMAC to protect the integrity [and] we use parameter encryption to protect key sealing and parameter decryption to protect key unsealing and random number generation." Sticking with security, the Linux kernel's Landlock security module can now apply policies to ioctl() calls (Input/Output Control), restricting potential misuse and improving overall system security.

On the networking side there's significant performance improvements to zero-copy send operations using io_uring, and the newly-added ability to "bundle" multiple buffers for send and receive operations also offers an uptick in performance...

A couple of months ago Canonical announced Ubuntu support for the RISC-V Milk-V Mars single-board computer. Linux 6.10 mainlines support for the Milk-V Mars, which will make that effort a lot more viable (especially with the Ubuntu 24.10 kernel likely to be v6.10 or newer). Others RISC-V improvements abound in Linux 6.10, including support for the Rust language, boot image compression in BZ2, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, and Zstandard (instead of only Gzip); and newer AMD GPUs thanks to kernel-mode FPU support in RISC-V.
Phoronix has their own rundown of Linux 6.10, plus a list of some of the highlights, which includes:

• The initial DRM Panic infrastructure
• The new Panthor DRM driver for newer Arm Mali graphics
• Better AMD ROCm/AMDKFD support for "small" Ryzen APUs and new additions for AMD Zen 5.
• AMD GPU display support on RISC-V hardware thanks to RISC-V kernel mode FPU
• More Intel Xe2 graphics preparations
• Better IO_uring zero-copy performance
• Faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern Intel and AMD CPUs
• Continued online repair work for XFS
• Steam Deck IMU support
• TPM bus encryption and integrity protection

"Intel's problems with unstable 13th-gen and 14th-gen high-end CPUs appear to run deeper than we thought," writes TechRadar, "and a new YouTube video diving into these gremlins will do little to calm any fears that buyers of Raptor Lake Core i9 processors (and its subsequent refresh) have." Level1Techs is the YouTuber in question, who has explored several avenues in an effort to make more sense of the crashing issues with these Intel processors that are affecting some PC gamers and making their lives a misery — more so in some cases than others. Data taken from game developer crash logs — from two different games — clearly indicates a high prevalence of crashes with the mentioned more recent Intel Core i9 chips (13900K and 14900K).

In fact, for one particular type of error (decompression, a commonly performed operation in games), there was a total of 1,584 that occurred in the databases Level1Techs sifted through, and an alarming 1,431 of those happened with a 13900K or 14900K. Yes — that's 90% of those decompression errors hitting just two specific CPUs. As for other processors, the third most prevalent was an old Intel Core i7 9750H (Coffee Lake laptop CPU) — which had a grand total of 11 instances. All AMD processors in total had just 4 occurrences of decompression errors in these game databases.
"In case you were thinking that AMD chips might be really underrepresented here, hence that very low figure, well, they're not — 30% of the CPUs in the database were from Team Red..."

"The YouTuber also brings up another point here: namely that data centers are noticing these issues with Core i9s."

More details at Digital Trends... And long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool wrote a summary of the video's claims here.

Arm is launching its Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) upscaler that "can make games look better, while lowering power consumption on your phone," according to The Verge. "It's also making the upscaling technology available to developers under an MIT open-source license." From the reprot: Arm based its technology on AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), which uses temporal upscaling to make PC games look better and boost frame rates. Unlike spatial upscaling, which upscales an image based on a single frame, temporal upscaling involves using multiple frames to generate a higher-quality image.

You can see just how Arm ASR stacks up to AMD's FSR 2 and Qualcomm's GSR tech in [this chart] created by Arm. Arm claims ASR produced 53 percent higher frame rates than rendering at native resolution on a device with an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU and 2800 x 1260 display, beating AMD FSR 2. It also tested ASR on a device using MediaTek's Dimensity 9300 chip and found that rendering at 540p and upscaling with ASR used much less power than running a game at native 1080p resolution.

AMD shares are up following the announcement that it plans to acquire Finnish artificial intelligence company Silo AI for about $665 million. Reuters reports: Acquiring Silo AI will help AMD improve the development and deployment of AMD-powered AI models and help potential customers build complex AI models with the company's chips, AMD said. Silo AI will also strengthen AMD's software development capabilities. While the deal will not impact AMD's financial performance, it "unlocks a significant amount of business moving forward," AMD Senior Vice President of AI, Vamsi Boppana said in an interview. AMD declined to discuss how much business the acquisition would generate over time.

Helsinki, Finland-based Silo AI specializes in end-to-end AI-driven solutions that help customers integrate the tech into their products and services. With operations in Europe and North America, the startup counts companies, including Philips, Rolls-Royce, and Unilever, among its customers. Silo AI's CEO and co-founder Peter Sarlin will continue to lead the unit as part of the AMD Artificial Intelligence Group, AMD said. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2024.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the OMG Ubuntu blog: Those of you who own a Framework Laptop 13 — consider me jealous, btw — or are considering buying one in the near future, you may be interested to know that a RISC-V motherboard option is in the works. DeepComputing, the company behind the recently-announced Ubuntu RISC-V laptop, is working with Framework Computer Inc, the company behind the popular, modular, and Linux-friendly Framework laptops, on a RISC-V mainboard.

This is a new announcement; the component itself is in early development, and there's no tentative price tag or pre-order date pencilled in... [T]he Framework RISC-V mainboard will use soldered memory and non-upgradeable eMMC storage (though it can boot from microSD cards). It will 'drop into' any Framework Laptop 13 chassis (or Cooler Master Mainboard Case), per Framework's modular ethos... Framework mentions DeepComputing is "working closely with the teams at Canonical and Red Hat to ensure Linux support is solid through Ubuntu and Fedora", which is great news, and cements Canonical's seriousness to supporting Ubuntu on RISC-V.
"We want to be clear that in this generation, it is focused primarily on enabling developers, tinkerers, and hobbyists to start testing and creating on RISC-V," says Framework's announcement. "The peripheral set and performance aren't yet competitive with our Intel and AMD-powered Framework Laptop Mainboards." They're calling the Mainboard "a huge milestone both for expanding the breadth of the Framework ecosystem and for making RISC-V more accessible than ever... DeepComputing is demoing an early prototype of this Mainboard in a Framework Laptop 13 at the RISC-V Summit Europe next week, and we'll be sharing more as this program progresses."

And their announcement included two additional updates:

• "Just like we did for Framework Laptop 16 last week, today we're sharing open source CAD for the Framework Laptop 13 shell, enabling development of skins, cases, and accessories."

• "We now have Framework Laptop 13 Factory Seconds systems available with British English and German keyboards, making entering the ecosystem more affordable than ever."

"We're eager to continue growing a new Consumer Electronics industry that is grounded in open access, repairability, and customization at every level."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At SUSECon in Berlin, SUSE, a global Linux and cloud-native software leader, announced significant enhancements across its entire Linux distribution family. These new capabilities focus on providing faster time-to-value and reduced operational costs, emphasizing the importance of choice in today's complex IT landscape. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 Service Pack (SP) 6 is at the heart of these upgrades. This update future-proofs IT workloads with a new Long Term Service (LTS) Pack Support Core. How long is long-term? Would you believe 19 years? This gives SLES the longest-term support period in the enterprise Linux market. Even Ubuntu, for which Canonical recently extended its LTS to 12 years, doesn't come close.

You may ask yourself, "Why 19 years?" SUSE General Manager of Business Critical Linux (BCL) Rick Spencer, explained in an interview that the reason is that on 03:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, aka Coordinated Universal Time) Tuesday, January 19, 2038, we reach the end of computing time. Well, not really, but Linux, and all the other Unix-based operating systems, including some versions of MacOS, reach what's called the Epoch. That's when the time-keeping code in 32-bit Unix-based operating systems reaches the end of the seconds it's been counting since the beginning of time -- 00:00:00 GMT on January 1, 1970, as far as Linux and Unix systems are concerned -- and resets to zero. Just like the Y2K bug, that means that all unpatched 32-bit operating systems and software will have fits. The Linux kernel itself had the problem fixed in 2020's Linux 5.6 kernel, but many other programs haven't dealt with it. Until then, though, if you're still running SLES 15 SP6, you'll be covered. I strongly suggest upgrading before then, but if you want to stick with that distro to the bitter end, you can. The new SLES also boasts enhanced security features like confidential computing support with encryption in memory, utilizing Intel TDX and AMD SEV processors, along with remote attestation via SUSE Manager. Additionally, SLES for SAP Applications 15 SP6 offers a secure and reliable platform for running mission-critical SAP workloads, incorporating innovations from Trento to help system administrators avoid infrastructure issues.

AMD said on Tuesday it was looking into claims that company data was stolen in a hack by a cybercriminal organization called "Intelbroker". "The alleged intrusion, which took place in June 2024, reportedly resulted in the theft of a significant amount of sensitive information, spanning across various categories," reports Hackread. From the report: In a recent post on Breach Forums, IntelBroker detailed the extent of the compromised data. The hacker claims to have accessed information related to the following records: ROMs, Firmware, Source code, Property files, Employee databases, Customer databases, Financial information, Future AMD product plans, and Technical specification sheets. The hacker is selling the data exclusively for XMR (Monero) cryptocurrency, accepting a middleman for transactions. He advises interested buyers to message him with their offers.

The reputation of IntelBroker in the cybersecurity community is one of significant concern, given the scale and sensitivity of the targeted entities in previous hacks. The hacker's past exploits include breaches of: Europol, Tech in Asia, Space-Eyes, Home Depot, Facebook Marketplace, U.S. contractor Acuity Inc., Staffing giant Robert Half, Los Angeles International Airport, and Alleged breaches of HSBC and Barclays Bank. Although the hacker's origins and affiliates are unknown, according to the United States government, IntelBroker is alleged to be the perpetrator behind one of the T-Mobile data breaches.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip, any CPU can instantly double its performance, increasing to as much as 100x with software tweaks. If it works, it could help the industry keep up with the insatiable compute demand of AI makers. Flow is a spinout of VTT, a Finland state-backed research organization that's a bit like a national lab. The chip technology it's commercializing, which it has branded the Parallel Processing Unit, is the result of research performed at that lab (though VTT is an investor, the IP is owned by Flow). The claim, Flow is first to admit, is laughable on its face. You can't just magically squeeze extra performance out of CPUs across architectures and code bases. If so, Intel or AMD or whoever would have done it years ago. But Flow has been working on something that has been theoretically possible -- it's just that no one has been able to pull it off.

Central Processing Units have come a long way since the early days of vacuum tubes and punch cards, but in some fundamental ways they're still the same. Their primary limitation is that as serial rather than parallel processors, they can only do one thing at a time. Of course, they switch that thing a billion times a second across multiple cores and pathways -- but these are all ways of accommodating the single-lane nature of the CPU. (A GPU, in contrast, does many related calculations at once but is specialized in certain operations.) "The CPU is the weakest link in computing," said Flow co-founder and CEO Timo Valtonen. "It's not up to its task, and this will need to change."

CPUs have gotten very fast, but even with nanosecond-level responsiveness, there's a tremendous amount of waste in how instructions are carried out simply because of the basic limitation that one task needs to finish before the next one starts. (I'm simplifying here, not being a chip engineer myself.) What Flow claims to have done is remove this limitation, turning the CPU from a one-lane street into a multi-lane highway. The CPU is still limited to doing one task at a time, but Flow's Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), as they call it, essentially performs nanosecond-scale traffic management on-die to move tasks into and out of the processor faster than has previously been possible. [...] Flow is just now emerging from stealth, with [about $4.3 million] in pre-seed funding led by Butterfly Ventures, with participation from FOV Ventures, Sarsia, Stephen Industries, Superhero Capital and Business Finland. The primary challenge Flow faces is that for its technology to be integrated, it requires collaboration at the chip-design level. This means chipmakers need to redesign their products to include the PPU, which is a substantial investment.

Given the industry's cautious nature and the existing roadmaps of major chip manufacturers, the uptake of this new technology might be slow. Companies are often reluctant to adopt unproven technologies that could disrupt their long-term plans.

The white paper can be read here. A Flow Computing FAQ is also available here.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Covered last week on Phoronix was a new patch from Intel that with tuning to the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver was showing big wins for Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" performance and power efficiency. I was curious with the Intel claims posted for a couple benchmarks and thus over the weekend set out to run many Intel Meteor Lake benchmarks on this one-line kernel patch... The results are great for boosting the Linux performance of Intel Core ultra laptops with as much as 72% better performance. [...]

When looking at the CPU power consumption overall, for the wide variety of workloads tested it was just a slight uptick in power use and thus overall leading to slightly better power efficiency too. See all the data here. So this is quite a nice one-line Linux kernel patch for Meteor Lake and will hopefully be mainlined to the Linux kernel for Linux 6.11 if not squeezing it in as a "fix" for the current Linux 6.10 cycle. It's just too bad though that it took six months after launch for this tuned EPP value to be determined. Fresh benchmarks between Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen on the latest Linux software will be coming up soon on Phoronix.

As reported by Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia now holds 88% of the GPU market after its market share jumped 8% in its most recent quarter. "This jump shaves 7% off of AMD's share, putting it down to 19% total," reports XDA Developers. "And if you're wondering where that extra 1% went, it came from all of Intel's market share, squashing it down to 0%." From the report: Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, mentions how the GPU market hasn't really looked "normal" since the 2007 recession. Ever since then, everything from the crypto boom to COVID has messed with the usual patterns. Usually, the first quarter of a year shows a bit of a dip in GPU sales, but because of AI's influence, it may seem like that previous norm may be forever gone: "Therefore, one would expect Q2'24, a traditional quarter, to also be down. But, all the vendors are predicting a growth quarter, mostly driven by AI training systems in hyperscalers. Whereas AI trainers use a GPU, the demand for them can steal parts from the gaming segment. So, for Q2, we expect to see a flat to low gaming AIB result and another increase in AI trainer GPU shipments. The new normality is no normality."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel's fastest processors have included hyperthreading, a technique that lets more than one thread run on a single CPU core, for over 20 years -- and it's used by AMD (which calls it "simultaneous multi-threading") as well. But you won't see a little "HT" on the Intel sticker for any Lunar Lake laptops, because none of them use it. Hyperthreading will be disabled on all Lunar Lake CPU cores, including both performance and efficiency cores. Why? The reason is complicated, but basically it's no longer needed. The performance cores or P-Cores on the new Lunar Lake series are 14 percent faster than the same cores on the previous-gen Meteor Lake CPUs, even with the multi-thread-processing of hyperthreading disabled.

Turning on the feature would come at too high a power cost, and Lunar Lake is all about boosting performance while keeping laptops in this generation thin, light, and long-lasting. That means maximizing single-thread performance -- the most relevant to users who are typically focusing on one task at a time, as is often the case for laptops -- in terms of surface area, to improve overall performance per watt. Getting rid of the physical components necessary for hyperthreading just makes sense in that context.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A Chinese research team says it has uncovered a significant security flaw in processor design that could have a wide impact on China's booming domestic chip industry. China was relying on the structure of the world's largest open-source CPU architecture to build their own CPUs and bypass the US chip ban, and was paying attention to any weaknesses, they said. The issue was found in RISC-V, an open-source standard used in advanced chips and semiconductors. Compared with mainstream CPU structures -- such as X86 used by Intel and AMD --RISC-V offers free access and can be modified without restriction.

The flaw allows attackers to bypass the security protections of modern processors and operating systems without administrative rights, leading to the potential theft of protected sensitive information and breaches of personal privacy. The vulnerability was confirmed by the team of Professor Hu Wei at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), a major defence research institute in Shaanxi province. The researchers are experienced in hardware design security, vulnerability detection and cryptographic application safety. It was first reported by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Centre of China (CNCERT) on April 24, and NPU gave further details in an official announcement on May 24.

Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger took the stage at the Computex show in Taiwan to talk about new products he expects will help turn back the tide of share losses to peers, including AI leader Nvidia. From a report: Intel showed its new Xeon 6 data center processors with more efficient cores that will allow operators to cut down the space required for a given task to a third of prior-generation hardware. Like rivals, from Advanced Micro Devices to Qualcomm, Intel touted benchmarks that showed its new silicon is significantly better than its existing options. AMD and Qualcomm's CEOs, in earlier Computex keynotes, used Intel's laptop and desktop processors to show how far ahead they are in certain aspects of technology.

Gelsinger took a direct shot at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's claim that traditional processors like Intel's are running out of steam in the age of artificial intelligence. "Unlike what Jensen would have you believe, Moore's Law is alive and well," he said, stressing that Intel will have a major role to play in the proliferation of AI as the leading provider of PC chips. "I think of it like the internet 25 years ago, it's that big," Gelsinger said. "We see this as the fuel that's driving the semiconductor industry to reach $1 trillion by the end of the decade."

AMD is reverting to a simpler, more traditional numbering scheme for its laptop processors, abandoning its recent complex "decoder ring" system. The new system for Ryzen AI laptop processors will use a three-digit model number to denote generation and SKU, aligning more closely with industry norms. Ars Technica reports: For its new Ryzen AI laptop processors, codenamed "Strix Point," AMD is still using the same broad Ryzen 3/5/7/9 number to communicate general performance level plus a one- or two-letter suffix to denote general performance and power level (U for ultraportables, HX for higher-performance chips, and so on). A new three-digit processor number will inform buyers of the chip's generation in the first digit and denote the specific SKU using the last two digits. In other words, the company is essentially hitting the undo button.

Like Intel, AMD is shifting from four-digit numbers to three digits. The Strix Point processor numbers will start with the 300 series, which AMD says is because this is the third generation of Ryzen laptop processors with a neural processing unit (NPU) included. Current 7040-series and 8040-series processors with NPUs are not being renamed retroactively, and AMD plans to stop using the 7000- and 8000-series numbering for processor introductions going forward. AMD wouldn't describe exactly how it would approach CPU model numbers for new products that used older architectures but did say that new processors that didn't meet the 40+ TOPS requirement for Microsoft's Copilot+ program would simply use the "Ryzen" name instead of the new "Ryzen AI" branding. That would include older architectures with slower NPUs, like the current 7040 and 8040-series chips.

Desktop CPUs are, once again, totally unaffected by this change. Desktop processors' four-digit model numbers and alphabetic suffixes generally tell you all you need to know about their underlying architecture; the new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs and the Zen 5 architecture were also announced today. It seems like a lot of work to do to end up basically where we started, especially when the people at AMD who make and market the desktop chips have been getting by just fine with older model numbers for newly released products when appropriate. But to be fair to AMD, there just isn't a great way to do processor model numbers in a simple and consistent way, at least not given current market realities [...].

The highlight of AMD's presentation Sunday at Computex 2024 was "the introduction of AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series processors for laptops and the Ryzen 9000 Series for desktops," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (sharing his report at Beta News): AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series processors, designed for next-generation AI laptops, come with AMD's latest XDNA 2 architecture. This includes a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that delivers 50 TOPS of AI processing power, significantly enhancing the AI capabilities of laptops. Among the processors announced were the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which features 12 cores and 24 threads with a boost frequency of 5.1 GHz, and the Ryzen AI 9 365 with 10 cores and 20 threads, boosting up to 5.0 GHz...

In the desktop segment, the Ryzen 9000 Series processors, based on the "Zen 5" architecture, demonstrated an average 16% improvement in IPC performance over their predecessors built on the "Zen 4" architecture. The Ryzen 9 9950X stands out with 16 cores and 32 threads, reaching up to 5.7 GHz boost frequency and equipped with 80MB of cache... AMD also reaffirmed its commitment to the AM4 platform by introducing the Ryzen 9 5900XT and Ryzen 7 5800XT processors. These models are compatible with existing AM4 motherboards, providing an economical upgrade path for users.
The article adds that AMD also unveiled its Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot workstation graphics card — priced at $3,499 — "further broadening its impact on high-performance computing...

"AMD also emphasized its strategic partnerships with leading OEMs such as Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, and MSI, who are set to launch systems powered by these new AMD processors." And there's also a software collaboration with Microsoft, reportedly "to enhance the capabilities of AI PCs, thus underscoring AMD's holistic approach to integrating AI into everyday computing."

Last than two weeks after it was announced, "Windows enthusiasts have managed to crack Microsoft's flagship AI-powered Recall feature to run on unsupported hardware," reports The Verge. From the report: Recall leverages local AI models on new Copilot Plus PCs to run in the background and take snapshots of anything you've done or seen on your PC. You then get a timeline you can scrub through and the ability to search for photos, documents, conversations, or anything else on your PC. Microsoft positioned Recall as needing the very latest neural processing units (NPU) on new PCs, but you can actually get it running on older Arm-powered hardware.

Windows watcher Albacore has created a tool called Amperage, which enables Recall on devices that have an older Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, Microsoft's SQ processors, or an Ampere chipset. You need to have the latest Windows 11 24H2 update installed on one of these Windows on Arm devices, and then the tool will unlock and enable Recall. [...] You can technically unlock Recall on x86 devices, but the app won't do much until Microsoft publishes the x64 AI components required to get it up and running. Rumors suggest both AMD and Intel are close to announcing Copilot Plus PCs, so Microsoft's AI components for those machines may well appear soon. I managed to get Recall running on an x64 Windows 11 virtual machine earlier today just to test out the initial first-run experience.

Framework, a company known for its modular laptops, has announced a fourth round of iterative updates and upgrade options for its Framework Laptop 13. The upgrades include motherboards and pre-built laptops featuring new Intel Meteor Lake Core Ultra processors with Intel Arc dedicated GPUs, lower prices for AMD Ryzen 7000 and 13th-gen Intel editions, and a new display with a higher resolution and refresh rate.

The Core Ultra boards come with three CPU options, with prices starting at $899 for a pre-built or DIY model. Upgrading from an older Intel Framework board requires an upgrade to DDR5 RAM, and Framework charges $40 for every 8GB of DDR5-5600, which is above market rates. The new 13.5-inch display has a resolution of 2880x1920, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and costs $130 more than the standard display.

This week the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the launch of the High Performance Software Foundation, which "aims to build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for high performance computing" (or HPC) by "increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts."

It promises initiatives focused on "continuously built, turnkey software stacks," as well as other initiatives including architecture support and performance regression testing. Its first open source technical projects are:

- Spack: the HPC package manager.

- Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.

- Viskores (formerly VTK-m): a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.

- HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from desktop systems to GPU-accelerated supercomputers.

- Apptainer: Formerly known as Singularity, Apptainer is a Linux Foundation project providing a high performance, full featured HPC and computing optimized container subsystem.

- E4S: a curated, hardened distribution of scientific software packages.

As use of HPC becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation will provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance computing ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate on the scientific software.

The High Performance Software Foundation benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including Premier Members Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories; General Members AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Intel, Kitware, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Associate Members University of Maryland, University of Oregon, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
In a statement, an AMD vice president said that by joining "we are using our collective hardware and software expertise to help develop a portable, open-source software stack for high-performance computing across industry, academia, and government." And an AWS executive said the high-performance computing community "has a long history of innovation being driven by open source projects. AWS is thrilled to join the High Performance Software Foundation to build on this work. In particular, AWS has been deeply involved in contributing upstream to Spack, and we're looking forward to working with the HPSF to sustain and accelerate the growth of key HPC projects so everyone can benefit."

The new foundation will "set up a technical advisory committee to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics," according to the announcement, following a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Josh Norem reports via ExtremeTech: At the recent International supercomputing conference called ISC 2024, Intel's newest Aurora supercomputer installed at Argonne National Laboratory raised a few eyebrows by finally surpassing the exascale barrier. Before this, only AMD's Frontier system had been able to achieve this level of performance. Intel also achieved what it says is the world's best performance for AI at 10.61 "AI exaflops." Intel reported the news on its blog, stating Aurora was now officially the fastest supercomputer for AI in the world. It shares the distinction in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which both built and houses the system in its current state, which Intel says was at 87% functionality for the recent tests. In the all-important Linpack (HPL) test, the Aurora computer hit 1.012 exaflops, meaning it has almost doubled the performance on tap since its initial "partial run" in late 2023, where it hit just 585.34 petaflops. The company then said it expected to cross the exascale barrier with Aurora eventually, and now it has.

Intel says for the ISC 2024 tests, Aurora was operating with 9,234 nodes. The company notes it ranked second overall in LINPACK, meaning it's still unable to dethrone AMD's Frontier system, which is also an HPE supercomputer. AMD's Frontier was the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier in June 2022. Frontier sits at around 1.2 exaflops in Linpack, so Intel is knocking on its door but still has a way to go before it can topple it. However, Intel says Aurora came in first in the Linpack-mixed benchmark, reportedly highlighting its unparalleled AI performance. Intel's Aurora supercomputer uses the company's latest CPU and GPU hardware, with 21,248 Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs and 63,744 Ponte Vecchio GPUs. When it's fully operational later this year, Intel believes the system will eventually be capable of crossing the 2-exaflop barrier.