Forget Lunar Lake; If there's one chip family that serves as the lynchpin for Intel’s entire turnaround plan, it's this – the company’s coming Clearwater Forest Xeon that it revealed for the first time at a recent event. The chip family is exceedingly important because this is the first high-volume chip to be fabbed on the Intel 18A process node, a node so critical that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has said he has bet the entire company on it.

Although JEDEC still needs to finalize the HBM4 specification, the industry seems to need the new memory technology as soon as possible, as demand for high-performance GPUs for AI is insatiable. To enable chip designers to build next-generation GPUs, Rambus has unveiled the industry's HBM4 memory controller IP, which surpasses the capabilities of HBM4 announced to date.

NBD shipping manifests for AMD's Zen 5 Threadripper CPUs, codenamed "Shimada Peak" and most likely corresponding to a Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series, have been spotted as of the earliest hours of this morning/latest hours of last night.

On Tuesday, Intel provided an update on the progress of its 18A (1.8nm-class) fabrication process, a crucial technology for its foundry initiative. By now, the company has a process design kit (PDK) version 1.0 ready, so its third-party customers can start (or even finalize) the development of chips in this manufacturing process. Furthermore, two essential Intel products using this production node have powered on, which is a good sign.