An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Intel has introduced a telemetry collection service by default in the latest beta driver for its Arc GPUs. You can opt out of it, but we all know most people just click "yes" to everything during a software installation. Intel's release notes for the drivers don't mention this change to how its drivers work, which is a curious omission. News of Intel adding telemetry collection to its drivers is a significant change to how its GPU drivers work. Intel has even given this new collation routine a cute name -- the Intel Computing Improvement Program. Gee, that sounds pretty wonderful. We want to improve our computing, so let's dive into the details briefly. According to TechPowerUp, which discovered the change, Intel has created a landing page for the program that explains what is collected and what isn't. At a high level, it states, "This program uses information about your computer's performance to make product improvements that may benefit you in the future." Though that sounds innocuous, Intel provides a long list of the types of data it collects, many unrelated to your computer's performance. Those include the types of websites you visit, which Intel says are dumped into 30 categories and logged without URLs or information that identifies you, including how long and how often you visit certain types of sites. It also collects information on "how you use your computer" but offers no details. It will also identify "Other devices in your computing environment." Numerous performance-related data points are also captured, such as your CPU model, display resolution, how much memory you have, and, oddly, your laptop's average battery life. The good news is that Intel allows you to opt out of this program, which is not the case with Nvidia. According to TechPowerUp, they don't even ask for permission! As for AMD, they not only give you a choice to opt out but they also explain what data they're collecting.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: This Patch Tuesday brings a new and potentially painful processor speculative execution vulnerability... Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Skylake is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance. Downfall is characterized as a vulnerability due to a memory optimization feature that unintentionally reveals internal hardware registers to software. With Downfall, untrusted software can access data stored by other programs that typically should be off-limits: the AVX GATHER instruction can leak the contents of the internal vector register file during speculative execution. Downfall was discovered by security researcher Daniel Moghimi of Google. Moghimi has written demo code for Downfall to show 128-bit and 256-bit AES keys being stolen from other users on the local system as well as the ability to steal arbitrary data from the Linux kernel. Skylake processors are confirmed to be affected through Tiger Lake on the client side or Xeon Scalable Ice Lake on the server side. At least the latest Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake and Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids are not vulnerable to Downfall. But for all the affected generations, CPU microcode is being released today to address this issue. Intel acknowledges that their microcode mitigation for Downfall will have the potential for impacting performance where gather instructions are in an applications' hot-path. In particular given the AVX2/AVX-512 impact with vectorization-heavy workloads, HPC workloads in particular are likely to be most impacted but we've also seen a lot of AVX use by video encoding/transcoding, AI, and other areas. Intel has not relayed any estimated performance impact claims from this mitigation. Well, to the press. To other partners Intel has reportedly communicated a performance impact up to 50%. That is for workloads with heavy gather instruction use as part of AVX2/AVX-512. Intel is being quite pro-active in letting customers know they can disable the microcode change if they feel they are not to be impacted by Downfall. Intel also believes pulling off a Downfall attack in the real-world would be a very difficult undertaking. However, those matters are subject to debate. Intel's official security disclosure is available here. The Downfall website is downfall.page.

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Intel reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday, including a return to profitability after two straight quarters of losses, and a stronger-than-expected forecast. CNBC reports: For the third quarter, Intel expects earnings of $0.20 per share, adjusted, on revenue of $13.4 billion at the midpoint, versus analyst expectations of 16 cents per share on $13.23 billion in sales. Intel posted net income of $1.5 billion, or earnings of $0.35 per share, versus a net loss of $454 million, or a loss of 11 cents per share, in the same quarter last year. Intel CFO David Zinsner said in a statement that part of the reason that Intel's report was stronger than expected was because of the progress it has made towards slashing $3 billion in costs this year. Earlier this year, Intel slashed its dividend and announced plans to save $10 billion per year by 2025, including through layoffs. Revenue fell to $12.9 billion from $15.3 billion a year ago, marking the sixth consecutive quarter of declining sales for the company. Here's how Intel's business units performed: - Intel's Client Computing group, which includes the company's laptop and desktop processor shipments, fell 12% annually to $6.8 billion.The overall PC market has been slumping for over a year. - Intel's server chip division, which is reported as Data Center and AI, declined 15% to $4.0 billion in sales. - Intel's Network and Edge division, which sells networking products for telecommunications, declined 28% to $1.4 billion. - Mobileye, a publicly-traded Intel subsidiary focusing on self-driving cars, saw sales down 1% on an annual basis to $454 million. - It reported $232 million in revenue for its foundry business, Intel Foundry Services, that makes chips for other companies.

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Intel has announced ASUS as the company's first partner for its Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini PC business. From a report: The two companies have entered a non-binding agreement that will see ASUS manufacture, sell and support the 10th- to 13th-generation products in Intel's NUC line. ASUS will also develop future NUC designs. Based on the business' current lineup, ASUS could be developing future NUC mini PCs, DIY kits for mini PCs, DIY kits for laptops, customizable boards, chassis and other assembly elements. If you'll recall, Intel recently told Engadget that it's ending its "direct investment" in its NUC business and will no longer produce first-party NUC products. It didn't elaborate on its reasoning, but working with partners for a non-essential business will free up resources it could use to concentrate on making chips. Intel previously said its first quarter earnings exceeded expectations, but its revenue was still down 36 percent year-over-year when compared to its results in the same period for 2022. The company also said that it remains cautious in this economy.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A year ago, we compiled a model list of Macs spanning over two decades, complete with their launch dates, discontinuation dates, and all the available information about the macOS updates each model received. We were trying to answer two questions: How long can Mac owners reasonably expect to receive software updates when they buy a new computer? And were Intel Macs being dropped more aggressively now that the Apple Silicon transition was in full swing? The answer to the second question was a tentative "yes," and now that we know the official support list for macOS Sonoma, the trendline is clear. Macs introduced between 2009 and 2015 could expect to receive seven or eight years of macOS updates -- that is, new major versions with new features, like Ventura or Sonoma -- plus another two years of security-only updates that fix vulnerabilities and keep Safari up to date. Macs released in 2016 and 2017 are only receiving about six years' worth of macOS updates, plus another two years of security updates. That's about a two-year drop, compared to most Macs released between 2009 and 2013. The last of the Intel Macs are still on track to be supported for longer than the last PowerPC Macs were in the mid-to-late 2000s, but they're getting fewer years of software update support than any other Macs released in the last 15 years.

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Intel has decided to stop making its Next Unit of Computing (NUC), but the company will encourage partners to keep making the small form-factor (SFF) PCs, the company said Tuesday. From a report: Intel's NUC championed compact PCs, while leaving larger chassis options to partners like Dell and HP. But Intel's decision seems like a natural one, given that Intel has refocused on its core businesses during a period in which it also invested heavily in its own manufacturing operations and foundry business. An Intel spokesman confirmed an initial report by Serve The Home, saying that Intel will continue to support the existing NUCs it has already shipped into the market. "We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth," the Intel spokesman said in an email.

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Intel says its manufacturing business will work like a separate unit and will begin to generate a margin, but gave no clear timeline on when it will start scaling up, sending the chipmaker's shares down about 5%. From a report: The company also did not name a new external customer for the business as part of its foundry services, a key element of Intel's turnaround plans wherein it will offer its manufacturing services to other companies including its competitors. Intel's internal business units will now have a customer-supplier relationship with the manufacturing business, Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said on an investor call. Based on that model, Intel will be the second largest foundry next year with manufacturing revenue of more than $20 billion, he said.

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Elissaveta M. Brandon writes via Fast Company: There's a new font in town -- and it's already causing rifts on Reddit. The font is called Intel One Mono, and as its name implies, it was designed by tech giant Intel, together with New York-based type design practice Frere-Jones Type and marketing agency VMLY&R. It joins a group of monospaced fonts designed primarily for developers -- think JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, and Consolas. By definition, monospaced fonts consist of characters that have the same width and occupy the same horizontal space, making it easy for coders and programmers to tell the difference between long strings of characters. But here's where Intel One Mono stands out: it was designed with and for low-vision developers. (It's free to download on GitHub and will soon be available on Google Fonts, too.) To ensure the font was legible and readable to its target audience, the team ran more than a dozen "live testing sessions" with visually impaired developers who were asked to write code using Intel One Mono. [...] Some of the feedback the designers received was particularly surprising. For example, some people were struggling to tell apart a capital "M" from a capital "N," most likely because both letters have two vertical stems and some diagonals in between, which can be confusing. To make the letters more legible, the designers sloped the vertical stems on the "M" so it looks close to an inverted W. "The point at which the two diagonals meet in the middle gets shifted up to make it clearly a V shape in the middle, and then the two verticals get flared out a little bit to give it slightly more differentiable shape from the capital N," says Fred Shallcrass, a type designer at Frere-Jones Type. Similar challenges kept coming back with the "x" and the "y" which people struggled to distinguish, and the "e" and the "c." In every instance, the designers meticulously tweaked the letters to make them highly distinctive, resulting in a fairly idiosyncratic font where every glyph is as different as possible from the other -- all the way down to the curly brackets, which can best be described as extra curly. This brings us to that Reddit rift. "This font would be great were it not for those curly braces," one person wrote. "For someone that hates fonts sometimes because of curly brackets not being clear and evident, I'm officially switching to this font set because of the curly brackets," wrote another. The developers were equally torn, but the designers stand by them. "Part of our thinking in negotiating those responses is that reinforcing the identity of any shape is not just amplifying what is unique about that letter, but also making it clearly not some other letter, so foreclosing any confusion," says Tobias Frere-Jones, the founder and lead designer at his eponymous studio. "If there's a thing the curly braces do, which is that extra back and forth movement, the parentheses don't do that, the brackets don't do that, therefore these ought to do a lot of that."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. chipmaker Intel will spend $25 billion on a new factory in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, calling it the largest-ever international investment in the country. The factory in Kiryat Gat is due to open in 2027, to operate through 2035 at least and to employ thousands of people, Israel's Finance Ministry said. Under the deal Intel will pay a 7.5% tax rate, up from the current 5%, the ministry added. During its almost five decades of operations in Israel, Intel has grown to become the country's largest privately held employer and exporter and a leader of the local electronics and information industry, according to the company's website. In 2017, Intel bought Israel-based Mobileye, which develops and deploys advanced driver-assistance systems, for $15 billion. Intel took Mobileye public last year.

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Intel will invest more than 30 billion euros ($33 billion) in Germany as part of its expansion push in Europe, the U.S. company said on Monday, marking the biggest investment by a foreign company in Europe's top economy. From a report: The deal to build two leading-edge semiconductor facilities in the eastern city of Magdeburg involves 10 billion euros in German subsidies, a person familiar with the matter said. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said he was grateful to the German government and the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where Magdeburg is located, for "fulfilling the vision of a vibrant, sustainable, leading-edge semiconductor industry in Germany and the EU." Under Gelsinger, Intel has been investing billions in building factories across three continents to restore its dominance in chipmaking and better compete with rivals AMD, Nvidia and Samsung.

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As first hinted at by Intel back in late April, Intel is embarking on a journey to redefine its client processor branding, the biggest such shift in the previous 15 years of the company. From a report: Having already made waves by altering its retail packaging on premium desktop chips such as the Core i9-11900K and Core i9-12900K, the tech giant aims to introduce a new naming scheme across its client processors, signaling a transformative phase in its client roadmap. This shift is due to begin in the second half of the year, when Intel will launch their highly anticipated Meteor Lake CPUs. Meteor Lake represents a significant leap forward for the company in regards to manufacturing, architecture, and design -- and, it would seem, is prompting the need for a fresh product naming convention. The most important changes include dropping the 'i' from the naming scheme and opting for a more straightforward Core 3, 5, and 7 branding structure for Intel's mainstream processors. The other notable inclusion, which is now officially confirmed, is that Intel will bifurcate the Core brand a bit and place its premium client products in their own category, using the new Ultra moniker. Ultra chips will signify a higher performance tier and target market for the parts, and will be the only place Intel uses their top-end Core 9 (previously i9) branding.

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Next year Intel introduces a new transistor — RibbonFET — and a new way of powering it called "PowerVia." This so-called "backside power" approach "aims to separate power and I/O wiring, shifting power lines to the back of the wafer," reports Tom's Hardware, which "eliminates any possible interference between the data and power wires and increases logic transistor density." IEEE Spectrum explains this approach "leaves more room for the data interconnects above the silicon," while "the power interconnects can be made larger and therefore less resistive." And Intel has already done some successful powering tests using it on Intel's current transistors: The resulting cores saw more than a 6 percent frequency boost as well as more compact designs and 30 percent less power loss. Just as important, the tests proved that including backside power doesn't make the chips more costly, less reliable, or more difficult to test for defects. Intel is presenting the details of these tests in Tokyo next week at the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits... [C]ores can be made more compact, decreasing the length of interconnects between logic cells, which speeds things up. When the standard logic cells that make up the processor core are laid out on the chip, interconnect congestion keeps them from packing together perfectly, leaving loads of blank space between the cells. With less congestion among the data interconnects, the cells fit together more tightly, with some portions up to 95 percent filled... What's more, the lack of congestion allowed some of the smallest interconnects to spread out a bit, reducing parasitic capacitance that hinders performance... With the process for PowerVia worked out, the only change Intel will have to make in order to complete its move from Intel 4 to the next node, called 20A, is to the transistor... Success would put Intel ahead of TSMC and Samsung, in offering both nanosheet transistors and backside power.

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Intel has announced Intel One Mono, a new font catering to "the needs of developers" with an "expressive" monospace for clarity and legibility" It's easier to read, and available for free, with an open-source font license. Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, Frere-Jones Type designed the Intel One Mono typeface in partnership with the Intel Brand Team and VMLY&R, for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors. A panel of low-vision and legally blind developers provided feedback at each stage of design. The Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu calls the new font "pretty decent," adding that "Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great. "Still, there's always room for more, right...?" Better yet, it's not only free to download and use but free to edit, and free to redistribute... Overall, I think Intel One Mono looks great, especially in a text editor (GUI or CLI). There's a noticeable upper and lower margin to the font that in dense text situations allows text to breathe, but in some terminal tools, like Neofetch, the gaps can seem a bit too happy. The Intel One Mono repository on GitHub includes instructions for activating the font in VSCode and Sublime Text, and lists some extra features accessible in some applications and via CSS: There is an option for a raised colon, either applied contextually between numbers or activated generally. Superior/superscript and inferior/subscript figures are included via their Unicode codepoints, or you can produce them from the default figures via the sups (Superscript), subs (Subscript), and si (Scientific Inferior) features. Fraction numerals are similarly available via the numr (Numerator) and dnom (Denominator) features. A set of premade fractions is also available in the fonts.

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Rivals such as Nvidia have left Intel far behind. CEO Pat Gelsinger aims to reverse firm's fortunes by vastly expanding its factories. From a report: Pat Gelsinger is keenly aware he must act fast to stop Intel from becoming yet another storied American technology company left in the dust by nimbler competitors. Over the past decade, rivals overtook Intel in making the most advanced chips, graphics-chip maker Nvidia leapfrogged Intel to become America's most valuable semiconductor company, and perennial also-ran AMD has been stealing market share. Intel, by contrast, has faced repeated delays introducing new chips and frustration from would-be customers. "We didn't get into this mud hole because everything was going great," said Gelsinger, who took over as CEO in 2021. "We had some serious issues in terms of leadership, people, methodology, et cetera that we needed to attack." As he sees it, Intel's problems stem largely from how it botched a transition in how chips are made. Intel came to prominence by both designing circuits and making them in its own factories. Now, chip companies tend to specialize either in circuit design or manufacturing, and Intel hasn't been able to pick up much business making chips designed by other people. So far, the turnaround has been rough. Gelsinger, 62 years old and a devout Christian, said he takes inspiration from the biblical story of Nehemiah, who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem under attack from his enemies. Last year, he told a Christian group in Singapore: "You'll have your bad days, and you need to have a deep passion to rebuild." Gelsinger's plan is to invest as much as hundreds of billions of dollars into new factories that would make semiconductors for other companies alongside Intel's own chips. Two years in, that contract-manufacturing operation, called a "foundry" business, is bogged down with problems.

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Intel will use the "VPU" tech it acquired along with Movidius in 2016 to all models of its forthcoming Meteor Lake client CPUs. From a report: Chipzilla already offers VPUs in some 13th-gen Core silicon. Ahead of the Computex conference in Taiwan, the company briefed The Register on their inclusion in Meteor Lake. Curiously, Intel didn't elucidate the acronym, but has previously said it stands for Vision Processing Unit. Chipzilla is, however, clear about what it does and why it's needed -- and it's more than vision. Intel Veep and general manager of Client AI John Rayfield said dedicated AI silicon is needed because AI is now present in many PC workloads. Video conferences, he said, feature lots of AI enhancing video and making participants sounds great -- and users now just expect that PCs do brilliantly when Zooming or WebExing or Teamising. Games use lots of AI. And GPT-like models, and tools like Stable Diffusion, are already popular on the PC and available as local executables. CPUs and GPUs do the heavy lifting today, but Rayfield said they'll be overwhelmed by the demands of AI workloads. Shifting that work to the cloud is pricey, and also impractical because buyers want PCs to perform. Meteor Lake therefore gets VPUs and emerges as an SoC that uses Intel's Foveros packaging tech to combine the CPU, GPU, and VPU. The VPU gets to handle "sustained AI and AI offload." CPUs will still be asked to do simple inference jobs with low latency, usually when the cost of doing so is less than the overhead of working with a driver to shunt the workload elsewhere. GPUs will get to do jobs involving performance parallelism and throughput. Other AI-related work will be offloaded to VPUs.

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Intel has proposed a potential simplification of the x86 architecture by creating a new x86S architecture that removes certain old features, such as 16-bit and some elements of 32-bit support. A technical note on Intel's developer blog proposes the change, with a 46-page white paper (PDF) providing more details. The Register reports: The result would be a family of processors which boot straight into x86-64 mode. That would mean bypassing the traditional series of transitions -- 16-bit real mode to 32-bit protected mode to 64-bit long mode; or 16-bit mode straight into 64-bit mode -- that chips are obliged to go through as the system starts up. [...] Some of the changes are quite dramatic, although the impact upon how most people use computers today would probably be invisible -- which is undoubtedly the idea.

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Intel on Monday provided a handful of new details on a chip for artificial intelligence (AI) computing it plans to introduce in 2025 as it shifts strategy to compete against Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. From a report: At a supercomputing conference in Germany on Monday, Intel said its forthcoming "Falcon Shores" chip will have 288 gigabytes of memory and support 8-bit floating point computation. Those technical specifications are important as artificial intelligence models similar to services like ChatGPT have exploded in size, and businesses are looking for more powerful chips to run them. The details are also among the first to trickle out as Intel carries out a strategy shift to catch up to Nvidia, which leads the market in chips for AI, and AMD, which is expected to challenge Nvidia's position with a chip called the MI300. Intel, by contrast, has essentially no market share after its would-be Nvidia competitor, a chip called Ponte Vecchio, suffered years of delays. Intel on Monday said it has nearly completed shipments for Argonne National Lab's Aurora supercomputer based on Ponte Vecchio, which Intel claims has better performance than Nvidia's latest AI chip, the H100. But Intel's Falcon Shores follow-on chip won't be to market until 2025, when Nvidia will likely have another chip of its own out.

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Intel plans a fresh wave of layoffs in the wake of a steep decline in revenue over the last six months. The chipmaker, Oregon's largest corporate employer, blames a weak global economy. From a report: "We are focused on identifying cost reductions and efficiency gains through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company," Intel said in a written statement. "These are difficult decisions, and we are committed to treating impacted employees with dignity and respect," Intel said. Dylan Patel with the technology research firm SemiAnalysis first reported the pending cuts over the weekend. Intel didn't say what else it's cutting, in what areas, or how these layoffs compare to a prior round of job cuts that ended last winter. Intel laid off more than 500 employees in California in job cuts announced last fall, according to filings there with state workforce agencies. It laid off employees in Oregon, too, but didn't make a similar filing here, suggesting that the layoffs represented a smaller percentage of the company's local workforce. Intel employs more than 22,000 at its Washington County campuses.

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Analyst Jean-Louis Gassee, writing at Monday Note about Intel's habit of requesting investors that they wait for the company to catch up to the competition: Concurrently, the company's revenue for its new IFS foundry business decreased by 24% to an insignificant $118M, with a $140M operating loss gingerly explained as "increased spending to support strategic growth." Other Intel businesses such as Networking (NEX) products and Mobileye -- yet another Autonomous Driving Technology -- add nothing promising to the company's picture. This doesn't prevent [Intel CEO Pat] Gelsinger from once again intoning the Just You Wait refrain. This time, the promise is to "regain transistor performance and power performance leadership by 2025." Is it credible? We all agree that the US tech industry would be better served by Intel providing a better alternative to TSMC's and Samsung's advanced foundries. Indeed, We The Taxpayers are funding efforts to stimulate our country's semiconductor sector at the tune of $52B. I won't comment other than to reminisce about a difficult late 80s conversation with an industry CEO when, as an Apple exec, I naively opposed an attempt to combat the loss of semiconductor memory business to foreign competitors by subsidizing something tentatively called US Memories. But, in this really complicated 2023 world, what choices do we actually have? For years I've watched Intel's repeated mistakes, the misplaced self-regard, the ineffective leadership changes for this Silicon Valley icon, for the inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, only to be disappointed time and again as the company failed to shake the Wintel yoke -- while Microsoft successfully diversified. I fervently hope Pat Gelsinger succeeds. His achievement would resonate deeply, it would bring to mind another historic turnaround: Steve Jobs' 1997 return to the Apple he had "left" in 1985.

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When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, the company may drop its iconic "i" CPU branding and add a new moniker. Chipzilla today told The Register "We are making brand changes as we're at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks." From the report: The Register asked Intel about branding after semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel on Monday tweeted "Imagine you're losing market share when you've been monopoly for decades, and your bright idea is to burn all brand recognition to the ground!" "That's Intel's plan by removing the 'i' in i7 i5 i3. All the decades brand recognition being lit on fire for no reason!" Patel labelled the rebranding a "horrible very short sighted move" that won't fix Intel's woes and "will cause more harm than good, as many buyers know + recognize the i7 i5 branding, they won't once it's changed." "The new branding sounds bad with ultra strewn about + confusing scheme." Patel's mention of "Ultra" branding appears to be a reference to this benchmark result for game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation which lists a processor called "Intel Core Ultra 5 1003H".

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