Remember about two years ago, when absolutely everyone wanted to either upgrade their existing PC or buy a new one? Yeah, that doesn't appear to be the case anymore, according to the latest market report from Mercury Research. The report states that x86 chip shipments have dropped by the largest percentage year-over-year since the report began way back in 1994. Analyst Dean McCarron says it's probably the largest decline since the precipitous downturn of 1984.

Intel has frozen hiring in the division responsible for PC desktop and laptop chips, according to a memo reviewed by Reuters, as part of a series of cost-cutting measures.

Intel's first desktop GPUs in 20 years need a special BIOS

Intel focused much of its time at this year's virtual CES on its new desktop and mobile processors, as well as spotlighting the laptops that will feature its new hardware debuting in the next few months.

Slowly but surely, AMD has been closing the desktop CPU market share gap on Intel for years.

The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007, and manufacturers still are months away from fulfilling outstanding orders, hardware industry executives and analysts said.

In a blog post on Medium today, Intel's John Bonini has confirmed that the company will be launching its next-generation desktop platform in Q1 2021. This is confirmed as Rocket Lake, presumably under Intel's 11th Gen Core branding, and will feature PCIe 4.0 support. After several months (and Z490 motherboards) mentioning Rocket Lake and PCIe 4.0 support, this note from Intel is the primary source that confirms it all.

Even as rival AMD continues to push forward with its 7nm silicon, Intel has so far hung on to a larger 14nm node for its desktop chips, only migrating to 10nm within this past year on mobile.

Microsoft is building a new desktop-as-a-service offering built on top of Windows Virtual Desktop that could launch as soon as 2021.

Adios LGA2066

AMD announced the newest additions to the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processor family, the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and AMD Ryzen 3 3300X processors and AMD B550 Chipset for Socket AM4 designed for 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processors with over 60 designs in development.

Facebook on Thursday rolled out the desktop version of its Messenger app for Apple's Mac and Microsoft's Windows to make video chats available on computer screens for Facebook users.

Is coronavirus delaying the release date of Intel's 10th Gen desktop CPUs?

We could soon see a successor to the popular Core i9-i9900K gaming-centric CPU.

And it'll reach up to 5GHz with an i9 processor.

Is Team Red dominating the world?

Preliminary results for the third quarter of 2018 (3Q18) show that shipments of traditional PCs (desktop, notebook, and workstation) totaled nearly 67.4 million units, marking a decline of 0.9% in year-on-year terms, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. Unlike 2Q18, which grew, the 3Q18 results nonetheless outperformed the forecast which called for a decline of 3.0% due to several factors.

AMD is expected to release its next-generation of high-end desktop (HEDT) Threadripper processors sometime between now and September, though nothing official has been announced. We must be getting close to a launch, however, as AMD's existing Threadripper CPUs are selling well below their launch MSRPs.

There is a rumor going around that Intel is getting ready to kill its "Extreme Edition" branding that it uses for certain high-end desktop (HEDT) processors. It was put out there by Francois Piednoel, a former Intel chip architect who worked at the company for two decades, who called the decision a "big mistake." Maybe it would be, but Intel is not axing the Extreme Edition brand.

For years, PC gamers have needed to pick a poison: Buy a desktop with the most powerful components available, or sacrifice some performance for a laptop they could take on the road. Intel's new six-core mobile Core i9 chip, its fastest notebook CPU ever, paves the way for 5GHz gaming laptops, making that decision even tougher.

Looks like Intel is finally addressing AMD's Ryzen mainstream desktop processor threat with eight-core processors of its own later this year. The upcoming "Coffee Lake-S" chips will be based on 14nm process technology, and part of Intel's eighth-generation design refresh slated for the second half of 2018. The chips are now starting to appear in benchmarks although the speeds are merely preliminary, given they won't be finalized until the summer at the earliest.

Details on AMD's second-generation Ryzen desktop processors have leaked out over the last several months, and now the company's entire processor road maps leading up to 2020 is now on display thanks to leaked marketing slides. They reveal what we already know to some extent - that the second-generation Ryzen chips will be based on a refreshed "Zen+" architecture, while the third-generation CPUs will rely on the company's second-generation Zen2 design.

Google today unveiled its experimental effort to integrate augmented reality features into the mobile and desktop web using its Chrome browser. That way, web designers, media organizations, and other creative professionals could create virtual 3D objects, embed them into websites for viewing on desktop, and make them downloadable on mobile so users could place those objects into their real world surroundings.

The SiSoftware database is revealing an entry of an AMD processor for which the GPU has 28 compute units and 2 GB of memory. The processor could be the desktop equivalent of Raven Ridge.

In a product change notice, Intel stated that it will begin assembling Coffee Lake desktop CPUs at its plant located in Chengdu, China.

Worldwide shipments of traditional PCs (desktop, notebook, workstation) totaled 67.2 million units in the third quarter of 2017 (3Q17), which translates into a slight year-over-year decline of 0.5%, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.

Underpinning all these delays and difficulties with new processes is the continued difficulty of developing production-ready extreme UV (EUV) lithography techniques.

With Intel's Core X-Series and AMD's Ryzen, the competition in high-end desktop CPUs is starting to solidify. When it comes to GPUs, Nvidia's GeForce GTX offerings are currently at the top of the heap, and gamers are awaiting AMD's next generation Vega GPUs to arrive to complete the competition in graphics as well.

A recent report by the folks at The Motley Fool suggests that Intel finally seems to have things under control for its high-end 14-nanometer Skylake desktop parts with improving yields and more stock on retail shelves.