After a little over three months, Intel has a new CEO to replace ousted former CEO Pat Gelsinger. Intel’s board announced that Lip-Bu Tan will begin as Intel CEO on March 18, taking over from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus.
Gelsinger was booted from the CEO position by Intel’s board on December 2 after several quarters of losses, rounds of layoffs, and canceled or spun-off side projects. Gelsinger sought to turn Intel into a foundry company that also manufactured chips for fabless third-party chip design companies, putting it into competition with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company(TSMC), Samsung, and others, a plan that Intel said it was still committed to when it let Gelsinger go.
Intel said that Zinsner would stay on as executive vice president and CFO, and Johnston Holthaus would remain CEO of the Intel Products Group, which is mainly responsible for Intel’s consumer products. These were the positions both executives held before serving as interim co-CEOs.
Tan was previously a member of Intel’s board from 2022 to 2024 and has been a board member for several other technology and chip manufacturing companies, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), and Cadence Design Systems.
Tech innovation in US likely to stall if Trump ends the CHIPS Act.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump finally made it clear to Congress that he wants to kill the CHIPS and Science Act—a $280 billion bipartisan law Joe Biden signed in 2022 to bring more semiconductor manufacturing into the US and put the country at the forefront of research and innovation.
Trump has long expressed frustration with the high cost of the CHIPS Act, telling Congress on Tuesday that it’s a “horrible, horrible thing” to “give hundreds of billions of dollars” in subsidies to companies that he claimed “take our money” and “don’t spend it,” Reuters reported.
“You should get rid of the CHIPS Act, and whatever is left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt,” Trump said.
Instead, Trump potentially plans to shift the US from incentivizing chips manufacturing to punishing firms dependent on imports, threatening a 25 percent tariff on all semiconductor imports that could kick in as soon as April 2, CNBC reported.
The CHIPS Act was supposed to be Biden’s legacy, and because he made it a priority, much of the $52.7 billion in subsidies that Trump is criticizing has already been finalized. In 2022, Biden approved $39 billion in subsidies for semiconductor firms, and in his last weeks in office, he finalized more than $33 billion in awards, Reuters noted.
Among the awardees are leading semiconductor firms, including the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Micron, Intel, Nvidia, and Samsung Electronics. Although Trump claims the CHIPS Act is one-sided and only serves to benefit firms, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the law sparked $450 billion in private investments increasing semiconductor production across 28 states by mid-2024.
With the CHIPS Act officially in Trump’s crosshairs, innovation appears likely to stall the longer that lawmakers remain unsettled on whether the law stays or goes. Some officials worried that Trump might interfere with Biden’s binding agreements with leading firms already holding up their end of the bargain, Reuters reported. For example, Micron plans to invest $100 billion in New York, and TSMC just committed to spending the same over the next four years to expand construction of US chips fabs, which is already well underway.
So far, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has only indicated that he will review the finalized awards, noting that the US wouldn’t be giving TSMC any new awards, Reuters reported.
But the CHIPS Act does much more than provide subsidies to lure leading semiconductor companies into the US. For the first time in decades, the law created a new arm of the National Science Foundation (NSF)—the Directorate of Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP)—which functions unlike any other part of NSF and now appears existentially threatened.
Designed to take the country’s boldest ideas from basic research to real-world applications as fast as possible to make the US as competitive as possible, TIP helps advance all NSF research and was supposed to ensure US leadership in breakthrough technologies, including AI, 6G communications, biotech, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.
Biden allocated $20 billion to launch TIP through the CHIPS Act to accelerate technology development not just at top firms but also in small research settings across the US. But as soon as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) started making cuts at NSF this year, TIP got hit the hardest. Seemingly TIP was targeted not because DOGE deemed it the least consequential but simply because it was the youngest directorate at NSF with the most workers in transition when Trump took office and DOGE abruptly announced it was terminating all “probationary” federal workers.
It took years to get TIP ready to flip the switch to accelerate tech innovation in the US. Without it, Trump risks setting the US back at a time when competitors like China are racing ahead and wooing US scientists who suddenly may not know if or when their funding is coming, NSF workers and industry groups told Ars.
Without TIP, NSF slows down
Last month, DOGE absolutely scrambled the NSF by forcing arbitrary cuts of so-called probationary employees—mostly young scientists, some of whom were in transition due to promotions. All those cuts were deemed illegal and finally reversed Monday by court order after weeks of internal chaos reportedly stalling or threatening to delay some of the highest-priority research in the US.
“The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency,” US District Judge William Alsup said, calling probationary employees the “life blood” of government agencies.
Ars granted NSF workers anonymity to discuss how cuts were impacting research. At TIP, a federal worker told Ars that one of the probationary cuts in particular threatened to do the most damage.
Because TIP is so new, only one worker was trained to code automated tracking forms that helped decision-makers balance budgets and approve funding for projects across NSF in real time. Ars’ source likened it to holding the only key to the vault of NSF funding. And because TIP is so different from other NSF branches—hiring experts never pulled into NSF before and requiring customized resources to coordinate projects across all NSF fields of research—the insider suggested another government worker couldn’t easily be substituted. It could take possibly two years to hire and train a replacement on TIP’s unique tracking system, the source said, while TIP’s (and possibly all of NSF’s) efficiency is likely strained.
TIP has never been fully functional, the TIP insider confirmed, and could be choked off right as it starts helping to move the needle on US innovation. “Imagine where we are in two years and where China is in two years in quantum computing, semiconductors, or AI,” the TIP insider warned, pointing to China’s surprisingly advanced AI model, DeepSeek, as an indicator of how quickly tech leadership in global markets can change.
On Monday, NSF emailed all workers to confirm that all probationary workers would be reinstated “right away.” But the damage may already be done as it’s unclear how many workers plan to return. When TIP lost the coder—who was seemingly fired for a technicality while transitioning to a different payscale—NSF workers rushed to recommend the coder on LinkedIn, hoping to help the coder quickly secure another opportunity in industry or academia.
Ars could not reach the coder to confirm whether a return to TIP is in the cards. But Ars’ source at TIP and another NSF worker granted anonymity said that probationary workers may be hesitant to return because they are likely to be hit in any official reductions in force (RIFs) in the future.
“RIFs done the legal way are likely coming down the pipe, so these staff are not coming back to a place of security,” the NSF worker said. “The trust is broken. Even for those that choose to return, they’d be wise to be seeking other opportunities.”
And even losing the TIP coder for a couple of weeks likely slows NSF down at a time when the US seemingly can’t afford to lose a single day.
“We’re going to get murdered” if China sets the standard on 6G or AI, the TIP worker fears.
Rivals and allies wooing top US scientists
On Monday, six research and scientific associations, which described themselves as “leading organizations representing more than 305,000 people in computing, information technology, and technical innovation across US industry, academia, and government,” wrote to Congress demanding protections for the US research enterprise.
The groups warned that funding freezes and worker cuts at NSF—and other agencies, including the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards & Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health—”have caused disruption and uncertainty” and threaten “long-lasting negative consequences for our competitiveness, national security, and economic prosperity.”
Deeming America’s technology leadership at risk, the groups pointed out that “in computing alone, a federal investment in research of just over $10 billion annually across 24 agencies and offices underpins a technology sector that contributes more than $2 trillion to the US GDP each year.” Cutting US investment “would be a costly mistake, far outweighing any short-term savings,” the groups warned.
In a separate statement, the Computing Research Association (CRA) called NSF cuts, in particular, a “deeply troubling, self-inflicted setback to US leadership in computing research” that appeared “penny-wise and pound-foolish.”
“NSF is one of the most efficient federal agencies, operating with less than 9 percent overhead costs,” CRA said. “These arbitrary terminations are not justified by performance metrics or efficiency concerns; rather, they represent a drastic and unnecessary weakening of the US research enterprise.”
Many NSF workers are afraid to speak up, the TIP worker told Ars, and industry seems similarly tight-lipped as confusion remains. Only one of the organizations urging Congress to intervene agreed to talk to Ars about the NSF cuts and the significance of TIP. Kathryn Kelley, the executive director of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, confirmed that while members are more aligned with NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, her group agrees that all NSF cuts are “deeply” concerning.
“We agree that the uncertainty and erosion of trust within the NSF workforce could have long-lasting effects on the agency’s ability to attract and retain top talent, particularly in such specialized areas,” Kelley told Ars. “This situation underscores the need for continued investment in a stable, well-supported workforce to maintain the US’s leadership in science and innovation.”
Other industry sources unwilling to go on the record told Ars that arbitrary cuts largely affecting the youngest scientists at NSF threatened to disrupt a generation of researchers who envisioned long careers advancing US tech. There’s now a danger that those researchers may be lured to other countries heavily investing in science and currently advertising to attract displaced US researchers, including not just rivals like China but also allies like Denmark.
Those sources questioned the wisdom of using the Elon Musk-like approach of breaking the NSF to rebuild it when it’s already one of the leanest organizations in government.
Ars confirmed that some PhD programs have been cancelled, as many academic researchers are already widely concerned about delayed or cancelled grants and generally freaked out about where to get dependable funding outside the NSF. And in industry, some CHIPS Act projects have already been delayed, as companies like Intel try to manage timelines without knowing what’s happening with CHIPS funding, AP News reported.
“Obviously chip manufacturing companies will slow spending on programs they previously thought they were getting CHIPS Act funding for if not cancel those projects outright,” the Semiconductor Advisors, an industry group, forecasted in a statement last month.
The TIP insider told Ars that the CHIPS Act subsidies for large companies that Trump despises mostly fuel manufacturing in the US, while funding for smaller research facilities is what actually advances technology. Reducing efficiency at TIP would likely disrupt those researchers the most, the TIP worker suggested, proclaiming that’s why TIP must be saved at all costs.
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
Cambridge-headquartered Arm has more than doubled in value to $160 billion since it listed on Nasdaq in 2023, carried higher by explosive investor interest in AI. Arm’s partnerships with Nvidia and Amazon have driven its rapid growth in the data centers that power AI assistants from OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic.
Meta is the latest big tech company to turn to Arm for server chips, displacing those traditionally provided by Intel and AMD.
During last month’s earnings call, Meta’s finance chief Susan Li said it would be “extending our custom silicon efforts to [AI] training workloads” to drive greater efficiency and performance by tuning its chips to its particular computing needs.
Meanwhile, an Arm-produced chip is also likely to eventually play a role in Sir Jony Ive’s secretive plans to build a new kind of AI-powered personal device, which is a collaboration between the iPhone designer’s firm LoveFrom, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SoftBank.
Arm’s designs have been used in more than 300 billion chips, including almost all of the world’s smartphones. Its power-efficient designs have made its CPUs, the general-purpose workhorse that sits at the heart of any computer, an increasingly attractive alternative to Intel’s chips in PCs and servers at a time when AI is making data centers much more energy-intensive.
Arm, which started out in a converted turkey barn in Cambridgeshire 35 years ago, became ubiquitous in the mobile market by licensing its designs to Apple for its iPhone chips, as well as Android suppliers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek. Maintaining its unique position in the center of the fiercely competitive mobile market has required a careful balancing act for Arm.
But Son has long pushed for Arm to make more money from its intellectual property. Under Haas, who became chief executive in 2022, Arm’s business model began to evolve, with a focus on driving higher royalties from customers as the company designs more of the building blocks needed to make a chip.
Going a step further by building and selling its own complete chip is a bold move by Haas that risks putting it on a collision course with customers such as Qualcomm, which is already locked in a legal battle with Arm over licensing terms, and Nvidia, the world’s most valuable chipmaker.
Without tuned power profiles, a separate but related feature called the Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO) couldn’t kick in, reducing performance by between 2 and 14 percent.
Current BIOS updates for motherboards contain optimized performance and power settings that “were not consistently toggled” in early BIOS versions for those boards. This could also affect performance by between 2 and 14 percent.
The fifth and final fix for the issues Intel has identified is coming in a later BIOS update that the company plans to release “in the first half of January 2025.” The microcode updates in that BIOS update should provide “another modest performance improvement in the single-digit range,” based on Intel’s performance testing across 35 games. When that microcode update (version 0x114) has been released, Intel says it plans to release another support document with more detailed performance comparisons.
If a long Intel support document detailing a multi-stage series of fixes for elusive performance issues is giving you deja vu, you’re probably thinking about this other, more serious problem with 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs from earlier this year. In that case, the issue was that the CPU could request more voltage than it could handle, eventually leading to degraded performance and crashes.
These voltage requests could permanently damage the silicon, so Intel extended the warranties of most 13th- and 14th-gen Core CPUs from three years to five. The company also worked with motherboard makers to release a string of BIOS updates to keep the problems from happening again. A similar string of BIOS updates will be necessary to fix the problems with the Core Ultra 200S chips.
Intel has solved the biggest problems with its Arc GPUs, but not the timing.
Intel’s Arc B580 design doesn’t include LEDs or other frills, but it’s a clean-looking design. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Intel’s Arc B580 design doesn’t include LEDs or other frills, but it’s a clean-looking design. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Intel doesn’t have a ton to show for its dedicated GPU efforts yet.
After much anticipation, many delays, and an anticipatory apology tour for its software quality, Intel launched its first Arc GPUs at the end of 2022. There were things to like about the A770 and A750, but buggy drivers, poor performance in older games, and relatively high power use made them difficult to recommend. They were more notable as curiosities than as consumer graphics cards.
The result, after more than two years on the market, is that Arc GPUs remain a statistical nonentity in the GPU market, according to analysts and the Steam Hardware Survey. But it was always going to take time—and probably a couple of hardware generations—for Intel to make meaningful headway against entrenched competitors.
Intel’s reference design is pretty by the book, with two fans, a single 8-pin power connector, and a long heatsink and fan shroud that extends several inches beyond the end of the PCB. Andrew Cunningham
The new Arc B580 card, the first dedicated GPU based on the new “Battlemage” architecture, launches into the exact same “sub-$300 value-for-money” graphics card segment that the A770 and A750 are already stuck in. But it’s a major improvement over those cards in just about every way, and Intel has gone a long way toward fixing drivers and other issues that plagued the first Arc cards at launch. If nothing else, the B580 suggests that Intel has some staying power and that the B700-series GPUs could be genuinely exciting if Intel can get one out relatively soon.
Specs and testbed notes
Specs for the Arc B580 and B570. Credit: Intel
The Arc B580 and Arc B570 lead the charge for the Battlemage generation. Both are based on the same GPU silicon, but the B580 has a few more execution resources, slightly higher clock speeds, a 192-bit memory bus instead of 160-bit, and 12GB of memory instead of 10GB.
Intel positions both cards as entry-level 1440p options because they have a bit more RAM than the 8GB baseline of the GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600. These 8GB cards are still generally fine at 1080p, but more memory does make the Arc cards feel a little more future-proof, especially since they’re fast enough to actually hit 60 fps in a lot of games at 1440p.
Our testbed remains largely the same as it has been for a while, though we’ve swapped the ASRock X670E board for an Asus model. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains the heart of the system, with more than enough performance to avoid bottlenecking midrange and high-end GPUs.
We haven’t done extensive re-testing of most older GPUs—the GeForce and Radeon numbers here are the same ones we used in the RX 7600 XT review earlier this year. We wouldn’t expect new drivers to change the scores in our games much since they’re mostly a bit older—we still use a mix of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games, including a few with and without ray-tracing effects enabled. We have re-tested the older Arc cards with recent drivers since Intel does still occasionally make changes that can have a noticeable impact on older games.
As with the Arc A-series cards, Intel emphatically recommends that resizable BAR be enabled for your motherboard to get optimal performance. This is sometimes called Smart Access Memory or SAM, depending on your board; most AMD AM4 and 8th-gen Intel Core systems should support it after a BIOS update, and newer PCs should mostly have it on by default. Our test system had it enabled for the B580 and for all the other GPUs we tested.
Performance and power
As a competitor to the RTX 4060, the Arc B580 is actually pretty appealing, whether you’re talking about 1080p or 1440p, in games with ray-tracing on or off. Even older DirectX 11 titles in our suite, like Grand Theft Auto V and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, don’t seem to take the same performance hit as they did on older Arc cards.
Intel is essentially making a slightly stronger version of the argument that AMD has been trying to make with the RX 7600. AMD’s cards always come with the caveat of significantly worse performance in games with heavy ray-tracing effects, but the performance hit for Intel cards in ray-traced games looks a lot more like Nvidia’s than AMD’s. Playable ray-traced 1080p is well within reach for the Intel card, and in both Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal, its performance came closer to the 8GB 4060 Ti’s.
The 12GB of RAM is also enough to put more space between the B580 and the 8GB versions of the 4060 and 7600. Forza Horizon 5 performs significantly better at 1440p on cards with more memory, like the B580 and the 16GB RX 7600 XT, and it’s a safe bet that the 8GB limit will become more of a factor for high-end games at higher resolutions as the years go on.
We experienced just one performance anomaly in our testing. Forza Horizon 5 actually runs a bit worse with XeSS enabled, with a smooth average frame rate but frequent stutters that make it less playable overall (though it’s worth noting that Forza Horizon 5 never benefits much from upscaling algorithms on any GPUs we’ve tested, for whatever reason). Intel also alerted us to a possible issue with Cyberpunk 2077 when enabling ray-tracing but recommended a workaround that involved pressing F1 to reset the game’s settings; the benchmark ran fine on our testbed.
GPU power consumption numbers under load. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Power consumption is another place where the Battlemage GPU plays a lot of catch-up with Nvidia. With the caveat that software-measured power usage numbers like ours are less accurate than numbers captured with hardware tools, it looks like the B580’s power consumption, when fully loaded, consumes somewhere between 120 and 130 W in Hitman and Borderlands. This is a tad higher than the 4060, but it’s lower than either Radeon RX 7600.
It’s not the top of the class, but looking at the A750’s power consumption shows how far Intel has come—the B580 beats the A750’s performance every single time while consuming about 60 W less power.
A strong contender, a late arrival
The Intel Arc B580. Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Intel is explicitly targeting Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 with the Arc B580, a role it fills well for a low starting price. But the B580 is perhaps more damaging to AMD, which positions both of its 7600-series cards (and the remaining 6600-series stuff that’s hanging around) in the same cheaper-than-Nvidia-with-caveats niche.
In fact, I’d probably recommend the B580 to a budget GPU buyer over any of the Radeon RX 7600 cards at this point. For the same street price as the RX 7600, Intel is providing better performance in most games and much better performance in ray-traced games. The 16GB 7600 XT has more RAM, but it’s $90 to $100 more expensive, and a 12GB card is still reasonably future-proof and decent at 1440p.
All of that said, Intel is putting out a great competitor to the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 a year and a half after those cards both launched—and within just a few months of a possible RTX 5060. Intel is selling mid-2023’s midrange GPU performance in late 2024. There are actually good arguments for building a budget gaming PC right this minute, before potential Trump-administration tariffs can affect prices or supply chains, but assuming the tech industry can maintain its normal patterns, it would be smartest to wait and see what Nvidia does next.
Nvidia also has some important structural benefits. DLSS upscaling support is nearly ubiquitous in high-end games, Nvidia’s drivers are more battle-tested, and it’s extremely unlikely that Nvidia will decide to pull out of the GPU market and stop driver development any time soon (Intel has published a roadmap encompassing multiple GPU generations, which is reassuring, but the company’s recent financial distress has seen it shed several money-losing hobby projects).
If there’s a saving grace for Intel and the B580, it’s that Nvidia has signaled, both through its statements and its behavior, that it’s mostly uninterested in aggressively lowering GPU prices, either over time (Nvidia GPUs tend not to stray far from MSRP, barring supply issues) or between generations. An RTX 5060 is highly unlikely to be cheaper than a 4060 and could easily be more expensive. Depending on how good a hypothetical RTX 5060 is, Intel still has a lot of room to offer good performance for the price in a $200-to-$250-ish GPU market that doesn’t get a ton of attention.
The other issue for Intel is that for a second straight GPU generation, the company is launching late with a part that is forced by its performance to play in a budget-oriented, low-margin area of the GPU market. I don’t think I’m expecting a 4090 or 5090-killer out of Intel any time soon, but based on the B580, I’m at least a little optimistic that Intel can offer a B700-series card that can credibly compete with the likes of Nvidia’s 4070-series or AMD’s 7800 XT and 7900 GRE. Performance-wise, that’s the current sweet spot of the GPU market, but you’ll spend more than you would on a PS5 to buy most of those cards. If Intel can shake up that part of the business, it could help put Arc on the map.
The good
Solid midrange 1080p and 1440p performance at a good starting price
More RAM than the competition
Much-improved power efficiency compared to Arc A-series GPUs
Unlike the A-series, we noticed no outliers where performance was disproportionately bad
Simple, clean-looking reference design from Intel
The bad
Competing with cards that launched a year and a half ago
New Nvidia and AMD competitors are likely within a few months
Intel still can’t compete at the high end of the GPU market, or even the medium-high end
The ugly
So far, Arc cards have not been successful enough to guarantee their long-term existence
Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.
Turnover at the top of the company isn’t stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.
Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10GB of RAM. The B580 launches on December 13, while the B570 won’t be available until January 16.
The two cards are Intel’s first dedicated GPUs based on its next-generation “Battlemage” architecture, a successor to the “Alchemist” architecture used in the A-series cards. Intel’s Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were its first products to ship with Battlemage, though they used an integrated version with fewer of Intel’s Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6 nm process used for the A-series; as of this writing, no integrated or dedicated Arc GPUs have been manufactured by one of Intel’s factories.
Both cards use a single 8-pin power connector, at least in Intel’s reference design; Intel is offering a first-party limited-edition version of the B580, while it looks like partners like Asus, ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, Onix, and Sparkle will be responsible for the B570.
Compared to the original Arc GPUs, both Battlemage cards should benefit from the work Intel has put into its graphics drivers over the last two years—a combination of performance improvements plus translation layers for older versions of DirectX have all improved Arc’s performance quite a bit in older games since late 2022. Hopefully buyers won’t need to wait months or years to get good performance out of the Battlemage cards.
The new cards also come with XeSS 2, the next-generation version of Intel’s upscaling technology (analogous to DLSS for Nvidia cards and FSR for AMD’s). Like DLSS 3 and FSR 3, one of XeSS 2’s main additions is a frame-generation feature that can interpolate additional frames to insert between the frames that are actually being rendered by the graphics card. These kinds of technologies tend to work best when the cards are already running at a reasonably high frame rate, but when they’re working well, they can lead to smoother-looking gameplay. A related technology, Xe Low Latency, aims to reduce the increase in latency that comes with frame-generation technologies, similar to Nvidia’s Reflex and AMD’s Anti-Lag.
Intel awarded nearly $8B to “supercharge” US semiconductor innovation.
An aerial view from February 2024 shows construction progress at Intel’s Ohio One campus of nearly 1,000 acres in Licking County, Ohio. Credit: Intel Corporation
On Tuesday, the Biden-Harris administration finalized a CHIPS award of up to $7.865 billion to help fund the expansion of Intel’s commercial fabs in the US. By the end of the decade, these fabs are intended to decrease reliance on foreign adversaries and fill substantial gaps in America’s domestic semiconductor supply chain.
Initially, Intel was awarded $8.5 billion, but it was decreased after Intel won a $3 billion subsidy from the Pentagon to expand Department of Defense semiconductor manufacturing. In a press release, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo boasted that the substantial award would set up “Intel to drive one of the most significant semiconductor manufacturing expansions in US history” and “supercharge American innovation” while making the US “more secure.”
For Intel, the CHIPS funding supports an expected investment of nearly $90 billion by 2030 to expand projects in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon. Approximately 10,000 manufacturing jobs and 20,000 construction jobs will be created “across all four states,” the Commerce Department’s press release said. Additionally, Intel estimated that the funding will create “more than 50,000 indirect jobs with suppliers and supporting industries.”
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which oversees CHIPS funding for manufacturing and research and development initiatives, the “funding will spur investment in leading-edge logic chip manufacturing, packaging, and R&D facilities.”
The sprawling effort includes the construction of two new fabs in Chandler, Arizona, the modernization of two fabs in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, building a new leading-edge logic fab in New Albany, Ohio, and creating a “premier hub of leading-edge research and development” in Hillsboro, Oregon. By the end, Intel expects to operate America’s largest advanced packaging facility in New Mexico and “one of only three locations in the world where leading-edge process technology is developed” in Oregon, NIST said.
Who’s enforcing worker safety commitments?
To succeed, Intel will need to build a talented workforce, so $65 million has been set aside to fund those efforts. The majority, $56 million, will “help train students and faculty at all education levels,” Intel said. Another $5 million will “help increase childcare availability near Intel’s facilities,” and the final $4 million will support efforts to recruit women and “economically disadvantaged individuals” as construction workers, Intel said.
Recruitment could be challenging if worker safety concerns are continually raised, though. Chips Communities United (CCU), a coalition of “labor, environmental, social justice, civil rights, and community organizations representing millions of workers and community members nationwide,” has been monitoring worker concerns at facilities receiving CHIPS funding. While the coalition fully supports Intel’s US expansion, they recently requested a full environmental impact statement at one of Intel’s Arizona fabs, detailing potential environmental and worker hazards, as well as mitigation plans.
As of August, CCU said that Ocotillo workers and communities had been given “insufficient detail on the use, storage, and release of hazardous substances, as well as other environmental impacts, to conclude that there are no significant environmental impacts.”
Workers have a bunch of questions. But perhaps most urgently, they need more information on how environmental safety commitments will be enforced, CCU suggested, because no one wants to work in constant fear of chemical exposure. Especially when Intel’s facilities in Oregon were revealed last year to have “accidentally turned off its air pollution control equipment for two months and underreported its CO2 emissions.”
NIST noted that Intel is required to protect workers to receive CHIPS funding and has promised to meet regularly with workers and managers at each project facility to discuss worker safety concerns.
Intel could not immediately be reached for comment on whether it’s currently in discussions with workers impacted by CCU’s recent claims.
Weighing in on the Intel Community Impact Report that NIST released today, CCU applauded Intel’s commitments to bring workers to the table, adopt the “most protective health and safety standards for chemical exposure,” “segregate PFAS-containing waste for treatment and disposal,” and “make environmental compliance public when it comes to energy and water use,” CCU coalition director Judith Barish told Ars. But the enforceability of the promised workplace safety conditions remains a concern at Intel’s facilities.
“Protective workplace health and safety regulation” has “historically been missing in semiconductor production,” Barish told Ars. And it’s a big problem Intel’s current plan is to regulate the management of toxic chemicals following guidelines developed by industry—not government.
“Unlike government regulations, this standard is not easily available for public inspection since it is proprietary, copyrighted, and can only be inspected by purchasing it,” Barish told Ars. “Allowing a regulated entity to write the regulations that will be applied to it violates basic principles of good government.”
While segregating PFAS-containing waste sounds good, Barish said that workers need more transparency to understand how it “will be separated, stored, and treated and what the environmental impacts will be for nearby communities.”
It’s also unclear to workers what might happen if Intel fails to follow through on its commitments. The Commerce Department has emphasized that Intel’s funding will be disbursed “based on Intel’s completion of project milestones,” but workers “aren’t clear on the penalties or clawbacks the Commerce Dept. would impose if Intel failed to meet workforce, health and safety, or environmental milestones and metrics,” Barish said.
Intel only approved unionized workers at one site
For top talent to be attracted to Intel’s facilities, establishing the most protective safety protocols will be critical. But just as critical for workers—especially “economically disadvantaged” workers Intel is targeting for construction jobs—will be worker benefits.
Barish noted that Intel has only committed to employing unionized construction workers at one of four sites. The company may struggle to recruit workers, Barish suggested, without being clear about their rights to “join a union free from intimidation, captive audience meetings, exposure to anti-union consultants, threats of retaliation, and other obstacles to achieve bargaining.”
CCU plans to continue monitoring concerns at Intel’s fabs and others receiving CHIPS funding as the presidential administration potentially introduces CHIPS Act changes next year.
On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump attacked the CHIPS Act, saying he was “not thrilled” with the price tag, CNBC reported. However, analysts told CNBC that any changes under Trump would likely be smaller rather than something drastic like repealing the law.
The Commerce Department continues to tout the CHIPS Act as a firmly bipartisan initiative. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, whose company’s large investment depends on bipartisan support for the CHIPS Act continuing for years to come, echoed that sentiment after the award was finalized.
“With Intel 3 already in high-volume production and Intel 18A set to follow next year, leading-edge semiconductors are once again being made on American soil,” Gelsinger said. “Strong bipartisan support for restoring American technology and manufacturing leadership is driving historic investments that are critical to the country’s long-term economic growth and national security. Intel is deeply committed to advancing these shared priorities as we further expand our US operations over the next several years.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
“Had Intel disclosed the defect, including through advertising, press releases, the Product packaging, or the initial setup process, Plaintiff and class members would not have purchased a Product, or would have paid substantially less for it,” Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint said.
According to Tom’s Hardware, “Intel’s 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors have a return rate four times higher than that of the previous generation,” and “14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh chips also have return rates thrice as high as the 12th Generation Alder Lake processors.” But instead of alerting the public to the defects, Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint alleged, Intel continued touting the processors as providing the ultimate desktop experience for serious gamers and people with “the most demanding of multitasking workloads” seeking speed, efficiency, and reliability.
Vanvalkenburgh alleged that Intel misled customers because Intel wanted to protect its brand and seek unjust enrichment. According to his complaint, Intel knows “consumers are willing to pay more for a reliable processor that runs stably, without failing or crashing frequently.” By failing to alert customers to known defects, Intel’s alleged deceptions increased demand for its CPUs, spiking sales into the millions, while its customers paid hundreds for processors and allegedly “sustained an economic injury.”
“Reasonable consumers do not expect that the Products will crash and fail at high rates, or that running the Products will damage the Products themselves,” Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint said, noting that a patch Intel later provided failed to fix the issue.
Vanvalkenburgh is hoping a jury will agree that Intel deceived customers and order an injunction preventing any future misconduct like misleading advertising or failure to disclose defective products.
If the class action is certified, Intel could owe extensive damages, potentially paying hundreds of millions in a loss. Because Vanvalkenburgh alleged that “Intel’s fraudulent concealment was malicious, oppressive, deliberate, intended to defraud” him, he’s seeking “an assessment of punitive damages in an amount sufficient to deter such conduct.” That’s on top of requests for maximum statutory damages for allegedly unfair and deceptive practices and disgorgement for alleged unjust enrichment.
An Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 7 258V inside.
Andrew Cunningham
These high-end Zenbooks usually offer pretty good keyboards and trackpads, and the ones here are comfortable and reliable.
Andrew Cunningham
An HDMI port, a pair of Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.
Andrew Cunningham
A single USB-A port on the other side of the laptop. Dongles are fine, but we still appreciate when thin-and-light laptops can fit one of these in.
Andrew Cunningham
Two things can be true for Intel’s new Core Ultra 200-series processors, codenamed Lunar Lake: They can be both impressive and embarrassing.
Impressive because they perform reasonably well, despite some regressions and inconsistencies, and because they give Intel’s battery life a much-needed boost as the company competes with new Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm and Ryzen AI chips from AMD. It will also be Intel’s first chip to meet Microsoft’s performance requirements for the Copilot+ features in Windows 11.
Embarrassing because, to get here, Intel had to use another company’s manufacturing facilities to produce a competitive chip.
Intel claims that this is a temporary arrangement, just a bump in the road as the company prepares to scale up its upcoming 18A manufacturing process so it can bring its own chip production back in-house. And maybe that’s true! But years of manufacturing misfires (and early reports of troubles with 18A) have made me reflexively skeptical of any timelines the company gives for its manufacturing operations. And Intel has outsourced some of its manufacturing at the same time it is desperately trying to get other chip designers to manufacture their products in Intel’s factories.
This is a review of Intel’s newest mobile silicon by way of an Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Core Ultra 7 258V provided by Intel, not a chronicle of Intel’s manufacturing decline and ongoing financial woes. I will mostly focus on telling you whether the chip performs well and whether you should buy it. But it’s a rare situation, where whether it’s a solid chip is not a slam-dunk win for Intel, which might factor into our overall analysis.
About Lunar Lake
Enlarge/ A high-level breakdown of Intel’s next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake’s changes while reverting others.
Intel
Let’s talk about the composition of Lunar Lake, in brief.
Like last year’s Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 100 chips, Lunar Lake is a collection of chiplets stitched together via Intel’s Foveros technology. In Meteor Lake, Intel used this to combine several silicon dies manufactured by different companies—Intel made the compute tile where the main CPU cores were housed, while TSMC made the tiles for graphics, I/O, and other functions.
In Lunar Lake, Intel is still using Foveros—basically, using a silicon “base tile” as an interposer that enables communication between the different chiplets—to put the chips together. But the CPU, GPU, and NPU have been reunited in a single compute tile, and I/O and other functions are all handled by the platform controller tile (sometimes called the Platform Controller Hub or PCH in previous Intel CPUs). There’s also a “filler tile” that exists only so that the end product is rectangular. Both the compute tile and the platform controller tile are made by TSMC this time around.
Intel is still splitting its CPU cores between power-efficient E-cores and high-performance P-cores, but core counts overall are down relative to both previous-generation Core Ultra chips and older 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips.
Enlarge/ Some high-level details of Intel’s new E- and P-core architectures.
Intel
Lunar Lake has four E-cores and four P-cores, a composition common for Apple’s M-series chips but not, so far, for Intel’s. The Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H, for example, included six P-cores and a total of 10 E-cores. A Core i7-1255U included two P-cores and eight E-cores. Intel has also removed Hyperthreading from the CPU architecture it’s using for its P-cores, claiming that the silicon space was better spent on improving single-core performance. You’d expect this to boost Lunar Lake’s single-core performance and hurt its multi-core performance relative to past generations, and to spoil our performance section a bit, that’s basically what happens, though not by as much as you might expect.
Intel is also shipping a new GPU architecture with Lunar Lake, codenamed Battlemage—it will also power the next wave of dedicated desktop Arc GPUs, when and if we get them (Intel hasn’t said anything on that front, but it’s canceling or passing off a lot of its side projects lately). It has said that the Arc 140V integrated GPU is an average of 31 percent faster than the old Meteor Lake Arc GPU in games, and 16 percent faster than AMD’s newest Radeon 890M, though performance will vary widely based on the game. The Arc 130V GPU has one less of Intel’s Xe cores (7, instead of 8) and lower clock speeds.
The last piece of the compute puzzle is the neural processing unit (NPU), which can process some AI and machine-learning workloads locally rather than sending them to the cloud. Windows and most apps still aren’t doing much with these, but Intel does rate the Lunar Lake NPUs at between 40 and 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS) depending on the chip you’re buying, meeting or exceeding Microsoft’s 40 TOPS requirement and generally around four times faster than the NPU in Meteor Lake (11.5 TOPS).
Enlarge/ Intel is shifting to on-package RAM for Meteor Lake, something Apple also uses for its M-series chips.
Intel
And there’s one last big change: For these particular Core Ultra chips, Intel is integrating the RAM into the CPU package, rather than letting PC makers solder it to the motherboard separately or offer DIMM slots—again, something we see in Apple Silicon chips in the Mac. Lunar Lake chips ship with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and most of the variants can be had with either amount (in the chips Intel has announced so far, model numbers ending in 8 like our Core Ultra 7 258V have 32GB, and model numbers ending in 6 have 16GB). Packaging memory this way both saves motherboard space and, according to Intel, reduces power usage, because it shortens the physical distance that data needs to travel.
I am reasonably confident that we’ll see other Core Ultra 200-series variants with more CPU cores and external memory—I don’t see Intel giving up on high-performance, high-margin laptop processors, and those chips will need to compete with AMD’s high-end performance and offer additional RAM. But if those chips are coming, Intel hasn’t announced them yet.
Enlarge/ A photo of Dmitry Grinberg’s custom Linux/4004 circuit board.
Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world’s first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it’s slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.
Initially designed for a Japanese calculator called the Busicom 141-PF, the 4-bit 4004 found limited use in commercial products of the 1970s before being superseded by more powerful Intel chips, such as the 8008 and 8080 that powered early personal computers—and then the 8086 and 8088 that launched the IBM PC era.
If you’re skeptical that this feat is possible with a raw 4004, you’re right: The 4004 itself is far too limited to run Linux directly. Instead, Grinberg created a solution that is equally impressive: an emulator that runs on the 4004 and emulates a MIPS R3000 processor—the architecture used in the DECstation 2100 workstation that Linux was originally ported to. This emulator, along with minimal hardware emulation, allows a stripped-down Debian Linux to boot to a command prompt.
Linux/4004.
Grinberg is no stranger to feats of running Linux in unlikely places. As he explains on his website, “In 2012, I ran real Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller (AVR), setting a new world record for lowest-end-machine to ever run Linux.” After others improved on that record in recent years, he decided to surpass himself and others by targeting the very first microprocessor.
The long, slow boot
To make Linux on the 4004 work, Grinberg had to overcome numerous challenges. The 4004 has extremely limited ROM and RAM, no interrupts, and lacks even basic logical operations like AND and OR. Grinberg’s emulator makes clever use of lookup tables and other tricks to squeeze maximum performance out of the primitive CPU.
The final hardware uses the 4004 (overclocked to 790 kHz) along with several other period-correct support chips from Intel’s MCS-4 chipset. It includes a VFD display to show Linux output and can accept input over a serial connection. The whole setup draws about 6 W of power.
To pull it all together, Grinberg designed a custom circuit board with no vias (paths from one side of the circuit board to the other) and only right-angle traces for a retro aesthetic. It’s meant to be wall-mountable as an art piece, slowly executing Linux commands over the course of days or weeks.
While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits. Grinberg is considering the possibility of offering kits or fully assembled boards for others who want to experience Linux at its slowest, though this is not yet definite.
The full details of the project, including schematics and source code, are available on Grinberg’s website. For those interested in vintage computing or extreme Linux implementations, it’s a fascinating look at what’s possible with 1970s technology and a lot of clever engineering.
But that doesn’t make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you’re looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices.
We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.
You won’t find a high-end “god box” this time around, though; for a money-is-no-object high-end build, it’s probably worth waiting for Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake desktop processors, AMD’s expected Ryzen 9000X3D series, and whatever Nvidia’s next-generation GPU launch is. All three of those things are expected either later this year or early next.
We have a couple of different iterations of the more expensive builds, and we also suggest multiple alternate components that can make more sense for certain types of builds based on your needs. The fun of PC building is how flexible and customizable it is—whether you want to buy what we recommend and put it together or want to treat these configurations as starting points, hopefully, they give you some idea of what your money can get you right now.
Notes on component selection
Part of the fun of building a PC is making it look the way you want. We’ve selected cases that will physically fit the motherboards and other parts we’re recommending and which we think will be good stylistic fits for each system. But there are many cases out there, and our picks aren’t the only options available.
As for power supplies, we’re looking for 80 Plus certified power supplies from established brands with positive user reviews on retail sites (or positive professional reviews, though these can be somewhat hard to come by for any given PSU these days). If you have a preferred brand, by all means, go with what works for you. The same goes for RAM—we’ll recommend capacities and speeds, and we’ll link to kits from brands that have worked well for us in the past, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than the many other RAM kits with equivalent specs.
For SSDs, we mostly stick to drives from known brands like Samsung, Crucial, or Western Digital, though going with a lesser-known brand can save you a bit of money. All of our builds also include built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to worry about running Ethernet wires and can easily connect to Bluetooth gamepads, keyboards, mice, headsets, and other accessories.
We also haven’t priced in peripherals, like webcams, monitors, keyboards, or mice, as we’re assuming most people will re-use what they already have or buy those components separately. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even make your own DIY keyboard! If you need more guidance, Kimber Streams’ Wirecutter keyboard guides are exhaustive and educational.
Finally, we won’t be including the cost of a Windows license in our cost estimates. You can pay a lot of different prices for Windows—$139 for an official retail license from Microsoft, $120 for an “OEM” license for system builders, or anywhere between $15 and $40 for a product key from shady gray market product key resale sites. Windows 10 keys will also work to activate Windows 11, though Microsoft stopped letting old Windows 7 and Windows 8 keys activate new Windows 10 and 11 installs relatively recently. You could even install Linux, given recent advancements to game compatibility layers!
Intel has formally announced its first batch of next-generation Core Ultra processors, codenamed “Lunar Lake.” The CPUs will be available in PCs beginning on September 24.
Formally dubbed “Intel Core Ultra (Series 2),” these CPUs follow up the Meteor Lake Core Ultra CPUs that Intel has been shipping all year. They promise modest CPU performance increases alongside big power efficiency and battery life improvements, much faster graphics performance, and a new neural processing engine (NPU) that will meet Microsoft’s requirements for Copilot+ PCs that use local rather than cloud processing for generative AI and machine-learning features.
Intel Core Ultra 200V
Enlarge/ The high-level enhancements coming to the Lunar Lake Core Ultra chips.
Intel
The most significant numbers in today’s update are actually about battery life: Intel compared a Lunar Lake system and a Snapdragon X Elite system from the “same OEM” using the “same chassis” and the same-sized 55 WHr battery. In the Procyon Office Productivity test, the Intel system lasted longer, though the Qualcomm system lasted longer on a Microsoft Teams call.
If Intel’s Lunar Lake laptops can match or even get close to Qualcomm’s battery life, it will be a big deal for Intel; as the company repeatedly stresses in its slide deck, x86 PCs don’t have the lingering app, game, and driver compatibility problems that Arm-powered Windows systems still do. If Intel can improve its battery life more quickly than Microsoft, and if Arm chipmakers and app developers can improve software compatibility, some of the current best arguments in favor of buying an Arm PC will go away.
Intel is trying to fight back against Qualcomm’s battery life advantage in Windows PCs.
Intel
Many of Lunar Lake’s changes were done in service of reducing power use.
Intel
Here, Intel claims a larger advantage in battery life against both Qualcomm and AMD, though there are lots of variables that determine battery life, and we’ll need to see more real-world testing to back these numbers up.
Intel
Intel detailed many other Lunar Lake changes earlier this summer when it announced high-level performance numbers for the CPU, GPU, and NPU.
Like Meteor Lake, the Lunar Lake processors are a collection of silicon chiplets (also called “tiles”) fused into one large chip using Intel’s Foveros packaging technology. The big difference is that there are fewer functional tiles—two, instead of four, not counting the blank “filler tile” or the base tile that ties them all together—and that both of those tiles are now being manufactured at Intel competitor TSMC, rather than using a mix of TSMC and Intel manufacturing processes as Meteor Lake did.
Intel also said it would be shipping Core Ultra CPUs with the system RAM integrated into the CPU package, which Apple also does for its M-series Mac processors; Intel says this will save quite a bit of power relative to external RAM soldered to the laptop’s motherboard.
Keep that change in mind when looking at the list of initial Core Ultra 200V-series processors Intel is announcing today. There are technically nine separate CPU models here, but because memory is integrated into the CPU package, Intel is counting the 16GB and 32GB versions of the same processor as two separate model numbers. The exception is the Core Ultra 9 288V, which is only available with 32GB of memory.
