We've gotten our first retail appearance of the Arrow Lake refresh family, listed at an Indian retailer but with barely any information. The specs mentioned seem regurgitated from existing media coverage and leaks, and there's no price, but at least the vendor is promising a 3-year warranty.
Intel's Panther Lake family is still awaiting release, but the possible flagship chip of the bunch has been spotted on Geekbench. The Core Ultra X9 388H scores 3,057 points in the single-core test and 17,687 points in the multi-core test, racing past its Arrow Lake-H predecessor and AMD's Strix Halo.
The Arrow Lake refresh is expected to fill in the gap till Nova Lake finally launches. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus has just appeared on Geekbench and it achieved great scores that show a decent improvement over the outgoing 265K Plus it'll replace, despite running on relatively slow memory.
AMD is refreshing its X3D lineup, with new chips part of the Ryzen 9000 family, one of which is the updated Ryzen 7 9850X3D. As the name suggests, it's pretty much the same as the existing 9800X3D, but with 400 MHz higher boost clocks, which have now been confirmed won't require more power.
Leakers are selling engineering samples for Panther Lake weeks before its official launch, with at least two different SKUs floating online. The first is an alleged 10-core Core Ultra 3 SKU from a well-known tipster, while the second sample appears to be an accurate pre-production model, as it lacks LP-E cores, which all Panther Lake silicon is expected to have.
There's good news and band news for Intel's Panther Lake and 18A. Bad news is that its yields are likely still very low. Good news is that their improvement are on the industry-standard yield ramp pace, which means that Intel is on track to hit industry-standard yields in early 2027.
The upcoming, next-gen Diamond Rapids server CPUs from Intel have received a big shakeup. Previously, both 8-channel and 16-channel SKUs were planned for Xeon 7, expected to succeed existing Xeon 6 models, respectively. Now, Intel has confirmed that 8CH Diamond Rapids has been officially cancelled; Xeon 7 will be only 16-channel.
An independent software project has published new firmware for select motherboards supporting AMD's Bulldozer and Piledriver CPUs nearly 15 years after release.
An updated CPU roadmap from AMD has put Zen 6 and Zen 7 in clear sight, with the former set to debut next year on TSMC's 2nm node, and the latter slated for a release sometime in 2027-2028, touted as the company's next major leap. Details were scarce at the announcement, and it's mostly just reiterating what we already knew before.
Veteran Windows dev Dave W Plummer has run a simple performance test across his 25 computers, released between 1976 and 2023, and he observed a huge 200,000X CPU performance delta.