Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

As the Intel Mac era has wound down over the last couple of years, we've been painstakingly tracking the amount of software support that each outgoing model is getting. We did this to establish, with over 20 years' worth of hard data, whether Intel Mac owners were getting short shrift as Apple shifted its focus to Apple Silicon hardware and to software that leveraged Apple Silicon-exclusive capabilities.

So far, we've found that owners of Intel Macs made in the mid-to-late 2010s are definitely getting fewer major macOS updates and fewer years' worth of security updates than owners of Intel Macs made in the late 2000s and early 2010s but that these systems are still getting more generous support than old PowerPC Macs did after Apple switched to Intel's processors.

The good news with the macOS 15 Sequoia release is that Apple is dropping very few Intel Mac models this year, a much-needed pause that slows the steady acceleration of support-dropping we've seen over the last few macOS releases.

Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hot on the heels of AMD, here’s Intel’s next-generation processor, this time for the laptop market.

Overall, Lunar Lake represents their second generation of disaggregated SoC architecture for the mobile market, replacing the Meteor Lake architecture in the lower-end space. At this time, Intel has disclosed that it uses a 4P+4E (8 core) design, with hyper-threading/SMT disabled, so the total thread count supported by the processor is simply the number of CPU cores, e.g., 4P+4E/8T.

↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech

The most significant change in Lunar Lake, however, has nothing to do with IPC improvements, core counts, or power usage. No, the massive sea change here is that Lunar Lake will do away with separate memory sticks, instead opting for on-die memory at a maximum of 32GB LPDDR5X. This is very similar to how Apple packages its memory on the M dies, and yes, this also means that as far as thin Intel laptops go, you’ll no longer be able to upgrade your memory after purchase. You choose your desired amount of memory at purchase, and that’s what you’ll be stuck with.

Buyer beware, I suppose. We can only hope Intel isn’t going to default to 8GB.

Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy used for around ~$50 USD), today the Intel Xeon Phi support was indeed removed.

↫ Michael Larabel

Xeon Phi PCIe cards are incredibly cheap on eBay, and every now and then my mouse hovers over the buy button – but I always realise just in time that the cards have become quite difficult to use, since support for them, already sparse to begin with, is only getting worse by the day. Support for them was already removed in Linux 5.10, and now GCC is pulling he plug too, so the only option is to keep using old kernels, or pass the card on to a VM running an older Linux kernel version, which is a lot of headache for what is essentially a weird toy for nerds at this point.

GCC 15 will also, sadly, remove support for Itanium, which, as I’ve said before, is a huge disgrace and a grave mistake. Itanium is the future, and will stomp all over crappy architectures like x86 and ARM. With this deprecation, GCC relegates itself to the dustbin of history.