A group of 20 consumer organizations on Wednesday evening said it's sending a letter to antitrust regulators around the world, highlighting concerns over Google's proposed acquisition of the fitness tracker pioneer Fitbit. 

Google last year announced the $2.1 billion deal with Fitbit as an attempt to bolster its business in wearable technology, like smartwatches and other devices.

The letter is being sent to authorities in seven different jurisdictions: the US, UK, European Union, Canada, Australia, Mexico and Brazil. In the US, it's going to the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. In the EU, the letter is being sent to the office of competition commission Margrethe Vestager. EU regulators have until July 20 to decide whether to clear the acquisition. 

The group behind the letter consists of NGOs and other organizations in several regions. They include the Open Markets Institute, Omidyar Network and Center for Digital Democracy in the US; the Open Society European Policy Institute and Access Now in the EU; and Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales in Mexico.

The letter calls Google's buyout of Fitbit a "test case" for big tech acquisitions, as Silicon Valley companies expand in part by obtaining data from competitors.  

"Google could exploit Fitbit's exceptionally valuable health and location datasets, and data collection capabilities, to strengthen its already dominant position in digital markets such as online advertising," the letter reads. "Google could also use Fitbit's data to establish a commanding position in digital and related health markets, depriving competitors of the ability to compete effectively. This would reduce consumer welfare (including degrading data privacy options), limit innovation and raise prices."

A Google spokeswoman on Wednesday denied that the acquisition is about collecting the data of a competitor, insisting the goal of the buyout is to build up the company's hardware efforts. 

"This deal is about devices, not data," the spokeswoman said. "The wearables space is highly crowded, and we believe the combination of Google and Fitbit's hardware efforts will increase competition in the sector, benefiting consumers and making the next generation of devices better and more affordable."

The letter comes as Google already faces intense scrutiny over its competition practices. The search giant is under investigation by the Justice Department, as well as a coalition of state attorneys general probing the company's dominance in online advertising. The Justice Department is reportedly expected to file a case this summer. 

We all have different ways of celebrating Halloween. Many of us dress up or hand out candy to kids. If you're Tesla, however, you drop a pumpkin onto your product from a great height. 

Tesla founder Elon Musk tweeted a video on Thursday showing a seasonally themed torture test of Solarglass, a key component of the company's Solar Roof system. The whimsical whammy likely took place at Tesla's Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo, New York where the roofing is made.

The video features a carved pumpkin taking a slow-motion, two-story dive from the factory roof onto a panel of Solarglass tiles. The gourd splatters, spitting seeds everywhere. We are then treated to a closeup version of the pumpkin shredding apart and the Solarglass bouncing back, seemingly unharmed by this pumpocalypse. 

Telsa marked the commercial launch of its Solar Roof last week. The system uses solar tiles that resemble traditional roofing tiles. These tie into the company's Powerwall batteries to power a home.

Musk has been talking up the durability of Solar Roof on Twitter lately. "Yes, you can walk on the Tesla Solarglass roof. In stilettos, if you want," he tweeted on Oct. 26. So there you have it. You don't have to worry about hail or tree limbs or fat raccoons. Your Tesla solar roof can survive a stiletto-wearing pumpkin.

Just when you thought Google was out of the tablet game, the company is back in. At its latest I/O developer conference, Google teased a new Pixel Tablet arriving in 2023, featuring Google's own Tensor chip.

Google's history with tablets has been very touch-and-go. Google's last tablet, the Pixel Slate in 2018, tried to be a Chrome tablet and Chromebook in one. Google moved away from tablets after that, until now. According to Google hardware products head Rick Osterloh, the Pixel Tablet looks to instead bring a lot of the features of Google's Pixel phones to a larger tablet form, which suggests an Android environment. The return to tablets is part of a response to consumer interest, according Osterloh.

The Pixel Tablet is part of a renewed push by Google towards Android tablets: the company also announced that some Android OS updates for tablets will start optimizing experiences for larger screens. The focus on tablets could also be about finding ways to maximize Android on larger folding-screen phones and devices, which are blurring the lines between tablet and phone already. 

Very little is known about the upcoming Pixel Tablet, and we don't expect it'll be foldable. But here's what we do know.

It has a Google Tensor chip: Google sees its own chip as the big draw of its next tablet, offering some of the same AI features as the Pixel 6. Google's second-generation Tensor chip will be in its Pixel 7 phones this fall, suggesting that will be what the next Pixel Tablet uses in 2023.

It'll be a phone companion: Osterloh referred to the tablet as a companion for the phone, suggesting a lot of handing-off features and dovetailing of apps. Google's focus on cross-device ambient computing aims to have headphones, voice assistants and other apps naturally flow from one device to another, and the Pixel Tablet may emphasize that. Maybe that also suggests that this tablet won't have its own cellular connection?

It will be large and not cheap: Osterloh confirmed during a Q&A with reporters ahead of Google I/O that the Pixel Tablet will be on the "larger side," and "more premium." Samsung's recent Galaxy Tab S8 tablets have also been on the expensive side, and work with connected keyboards. Perhaps Google will take a similar approach with the Pixel Tablet.

It has a camera on the landscape edge of the tablet: Only one brief teaser image was shown of the Pixel Tablet, and one thing stood out to me: a camera on the longer edge of the front-facing display. Apple's iPads have cameras on the shorter edges, making for oddly off-center video chats. Google's placement, like Samsung's, looks to be optimized for video chat in landscape mode and when connected with a keyboard like a laptop.

Is that a smart connector? Yes, we see those dots on the back. That looks like a smart connector for keyboards and things.

We don't know about the tablet's price, or anything else, yet. But we'll undoubtedly know more before the tablet's release in 2023.

For more, check out everything else that was shown at Google I/O 2022, including the Pixel Watch, Pixel 6A, Android 13 (here's how to download the beta now) and the Pixel Buds Pro. 

This story is part of Making the Metaverse, CNET's exploration of the next stage in the internet's evolution.

Facebook's iconic thumbs-up sign at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters now bears a blue infinity-shaped symbol along with a new name: Meta.

The corporate rebranding, unveiled Thursday at Facebook's Connect conference, is part of Facebook's headlong sprint into the metaverse, a virtual environment where people could work, play, learn and socialize with one another. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the metaverse, which at this point is largely hypothetical, "the successor to the mobile internet."

In barreling headlong into the metaverse, however, Facebook may be repeating the practices that got it into trouble in the first place. The company's former mantra -- "Move fast and break things" -- encouraged a culture that rewarded new ideas without careful consideration of the risks. The metaverse will create an entirely new environment for Facebook's legacy problems to take root. 

Facebook's hard-charging attitude has contributed to it racking up a seemingly endless list of scandals around data privacy, hate speech and misinformation. It's been blamed for destroying democracy and for body shaming. The company's latest controversy, which involves leaked documents gathered by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, has proved especially damaging. Haugen alleges the company has misled the public and investors about its role in perpetuating hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content. 

Facebook denies the accusations, noting that it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security. About 3.58 billion people use Facebook and its services every month.

Analysts say a clever rebranding won't help Facebook distance itself from its many problems. 

"A name change doesn't suddenly erase the systemic issues plaguing the company," Forrester vice president and research director Mike Proulx said in a statement. "If Meta doesn't address its issues beyond a defensive and superficial attitude, those same issues will occupy the metaverse."

Forrester, which surveyed 745 people across the US, Canada and the UK, said 75% of those polled disagreed that a new company name will increase their trust in Facebook.

The company says the rebranding is a refocusing of its corporate priorities. Founded in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has spread beyond its roots as a social network. The tech giant now has virtual reality headsets, smart glasses and video chat devices. It's also dabbling in finance with its Novi cryptocurrency wallet. 

During the Connect keynote, Zuckerberg said he's well aware of the risks that come with entering a new field. Facebook doesn't have a great track record when it comes to protecting the privacy and safety of its users, and those issues won't vanish in the metaverse.

"Every chapter brings new voices and new ideas but also new challenges, risks and disruption of established interests," he said. "We'll need to work together, from the beginning, to bring the best possible version of this future to life."

Zuckerberg's presentation painted a hopeful vision of the metaverse, filled with digital spaces for people to gather. Friends could fence using virtual swords, attend concerts from their homes or simply work together in virtual offices. 

But Facebook will also have to deal with the same issues it grapples with on social media, including data privacy, security, child-exploitation dangers, and content moderation. Misinformation has been a widespread problem on Facebook's namesake social network. Lies that spread on the platform have been blamed for the Jan. 6 insurrection and for hesitancy to get COVID vaccinations. 

That wasn't lost on lawmakers, who've been studying ways to regulate the company and its Big Tech peers. 

"Meta as in 'we are a cancer to democracy metastasizing into a global surveillance and propaganda machine for boosting authoritarian regimes and destroying civil society... for profit!'" tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, also warned Zuckerberg a name change wouldn't deter lawmakers from pursuing Facebook. The two senators lead a subcommittee that recently met with Haugen to discuss her concerns about the social network. 

Virtual worlds existed long before Facebook ramped up investment in VR and augmented reality after its purchase of headset maker Oculus in 2014. And the world of virtual reality already has a harassment problem. In 2007, Belgian police were looking into whether an avatar allegedly raped another character in Second Life, a virtual world developed by Linden Lab, according to The Washington Post. 

Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, who'll become the company's new chief technology officer in 2022, said in a video chat before the conference that muting another user could help give people more control over their surroundings in VR if they're being harassed. Facebook is also exploring ideas such as allowing users to share with authorities the last 10 to 15 seconds of a VR interaction they've had with another person. The company, though, will have to weigh the trade-offs between privacy and user safety, a dilemma it's confronted before with end-to-end encrypted chats on messaging apps.

Another issue that may pop up is the use of avatars to impersonate others. One solution could be tying the avatar to an authenticated account or verifying identity in some other way.

A new name, however, won't help Facebook dodge its old problems. Lawmakers, celebrities and critics took swings at the company after its big reveal. 

"Changing their name doesn't change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world's leading peddler of disinformation and hate," said the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of well-known critics. "Their meaningless name change should not distract from the investigation, regulation and real, independent oversight needed to hold Facebook accountable."

Samsung is the latest tech giant trying to replace your physical wallet with a digital one that lives on your phone. The company on Thursday launched Samsung Wallet, a new mobile wallet for storing digital keys, boarding passes, ID cards and credit cards. Apple and Google announced major updates for their own virtual wallet platforms in recent weeks.

Samsung previously announced its mobile wallet in February alongside the Galaxy S22, but only just launched the platform on Thursday. Samsung is merging two existing services to create Samsung Wallet. The app combines Samsung Pay, its mobile payment service for storing payment cards and vaccine records, and Samsung Pass, which manages passwords and login information for apps and websites. 

The unified app signals an expansion of Samsung's efforts to make its service better compete with those offered by Apple and Google. Samsung Wallet is launching via an app update, and Galaxy device owners can migrate their information directly from the Samsung Wallet and Samsung Pass apps. 

Samsung Wallet will support official forms of identification such as driver's licenses and student IDs later this year. Google also announcement in May that it's working with governments to incorporate IDs into Google Wallet. Apple Wallet already supports virtual IDs in several states. 

Read more: What iOS 16 and Android 13 Reveal About the Future of Smartphones

Samsung also wants its wallet app to serve as a hub for digital keys to your car and home, functionality that's already availableon the iPhone. The company says it's working with nine home security companies on virtual home keys, and Samsung Wallet will also integrate with the company's SmartThings platform. As for car keys, Samsung Wallet will support digital car keys for certain BMW, Hyundai and Genesis models. Korean Air will also be Samsung's first partner for storing digital boarding passes.

In addition to storing traditional payment methods like credit, debit and loyalty cards, Samsung will also allow users to manage their cryptocurrencies from its new Wallet app. The entire platform is protected by Samsung's Knox security software. 

American are increasingly embracing the idea of replacing their physical credit cards with digital ones. Usage of in-store mobile payment services is expected to surpass 50% of all smartphone users in the US by 2025, says a 2021 report from eMarketer. 

Now, tech companies are developing more comprehensive alternatives to the traditional wallet, a mission that Google and Apple both made clear during their recent press events. "With Apple Wallet, we're working hard on our goal to replace your physical wallet," Corey Fugman, Apple's senior director for Wallet and Apple Pay, said during the company's Worldwide Developers Conference last week. 

Adoption is estimated to take off in the coming years. One in two people are expected to use a mobile wallet by 2025, according to a July 2021 report from financial tech company Boku and market research company Juniper Research. The launch of Samsung Wallet is also another sign that tech companies are increasingly relying on apps and services to lock in existing users.

Almost all of the devices we use on a daily basis are powered with electricity, whether we plug them into outlets or use batteries to keep them powered. It may be easy to keep your devices full of charge in the comfort of your own home or the nearest coffee shop, but what happens if the power cuts or you're stuck in a situation where you can't access electricity? A portable power bank is a great resource in those sticky situations, and right now Woot is offering deals on some heavy-duty power stations.

There are several GoLabs products on sale during this deal, including portable solar panels that you can grab for $86 (save $134) and a portable 518 watt-hour outdoor solar generator for $260 (save $180). 

These items can come in handy even during camping trips when you just want to keep your phone, laptop, or tablet charged for the duration of your trip. For those who like to trek deep into the wilderness, you can make sure you have at least one line of communication open in case of an emergency. These power banks come equipped with at least one AC charger, some USB chargers and at least one DC output.

There's something about time-lapse videos that grabs your attention a little more than your average YouTube video. Especially popular on Vimeo, these videos often capture scenes like a starry night, a cityscape, or snow piling up over the course of a particularly rough storm.

Sometimes, the camera stays in one spot, monitoring a scene from just one angle. But the most beautiful time lapses involve movement -- the camera pans across the scene over the course of an hour (or longer) to capture change over time on a 360-degree angle.

It sounds complicated. Like, too much work. But, the reality is that it takes no more than 10 minutes to put together a rotating tripod made just for time lapse shooting.

With this setup, what we produced wasn't as alluring as a time-lapsed starry sky, but a pretty cool video of time passing and skies changing at a busy San Francisco corner:

Shooting a time-lapse video is as easy as setting up your camera (or phone) to shoot in intervals, and sticking it on a tripod. But to capture a 360-degree angle, you'll need a rotating tripod accessory.

You can purchase one of these attachments for around $40, but fuggetabout that -- you can do it yourself for much less. Here's how.

You'll need:

• Flat-topped windup kitchen timer, like Ikea's Ordning timer
• 1/4-inch nut
• Strong adhesive, like rubber cement
• Blu-Tack or any generic, moldable museum putty
• Basic tripod (even a Gorillapod would work here)

1. With the rubber cement (or other adhesive), adhere the 1/4-inch nut to the bottom of the timer, making sure to center it. Follow the adhesive's instructions, and let it dry completely before moving onto the next step.

2. Once it's dry, attach the timer to the tripod or tripod mount. All tripods attach to cameras with a standard 1/4-inch bolt, so the timer should work with any model.

3. This is the part that will vary depending on the camera -- it might take some tinkering. Prepare the museum putty or Blu-Tack according the the package instructions. Then, attach the camera to the top surface of the timer.

4. If your camera has a flat bottom, like a GoPro, dSLR, or any other point-and-shoot, this part's easy. But, if you're securing a phone to the timer, it's a little trickier. It's doable, but take the time to ensure the phone won't budge before moving forward.

At this point, your time lapse tripod is set, and you're ready to record! Watch the video above to find out how easily we recorded and edited a time-lapse video with our DIY rotating tripod.

Apple will reportedly allow alternative payment systems on its App Store in South Korea as part of a move to comply with new regulations in the country. On Tuesday, the Korea Communications Commission said Apple had submitted plans for the change, according to reports from The Korea Herald and Reuters. 

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment but told Reuters it looks "forward to working with the KCC and our developer community on a solution that benefits our Korean users."

Last year, South Korea passed a law that prohibits tech giants like Google and Apple from requiring developers to use their in-app purchase systems. It also prevents app store operators from unreasonably delaying approval of apps or deleting already approved ones.

Google in November said it would allow Android app developers to add an alternative in-app billing system for people in the country for both mobile and tablet apps.

Representatives for the KCC couldn't immediately be reached for comment. 

I was invited to connect with the creators of Spatial, a social metaverse meeting space app I've used many times. But this time, we weren't using VR headsets. We were just connecting on my laptop, looking at NFT virtual homes. Is this where metaverse strategies are heading next year?

Spatial was one of the early explorers of workplace meeting areas in AR and VR. The company's latest shift, however, is towards the web. It's found a new financial path as a gallery space and host for NFT creators and their works, and according to Spatial's team, that makes more sense in web browsers on computers, tablets and phones. But Spatial is also moving into more immersive NFTs, selling and renting entire NFT environments that could be places for people to meet. It says these files could eventually work across metaverse apps.

Whether or not Spatial's environmental NFT files will work across apps depends on whether other apps support the GLB file format they're created in. GLB is a popular 3D file format for VR and AR, but it remains unclear how metaverses such as Meta's Horizon Worlds, for example, will work with files like these.

I took a look at Bozo Island, a space with avatars meant to be set in the year 3333, made by creator Renaud. "We're minting 64 editions. Anyone can come in, and if they want to buy this unique space, they can mint it, and they will be one of 64 people who uniquely have access to this space. They could use it for exhibitions, or events, whatever they want to," Spatial's Head of Business, Jacob Loewenstein, said as we met inside Bozo Island in Spatial. The Spatial app scans an account's wallet for a crypto token of the transaction, which then allows access to the space. "We're pretty excited to getting into the business of selling people their own unique home and unique space in the metaverse," says Loewenstein.

I visited one of Spatial's first virtual gallery spaces for more "traditional" NFTs earlier this year, where I looked at 2D and 3D artworks with a VR headset on, while chatting with creators who appeared as avatars. On a web browser, the experience is pretty much the same, minus the more expansive sense of headset immersion. I can see my avatar moving around on my laptop screen, and everyone else's. I move around with keyboard buttons and the trackpad. One big difference, using a laptop or a phone: I can show my face in a video screen bubble over my avatar. It's the type of face-to-face interaction that VR headsets still lack.

Spatial's already worked on art gallery NFT spaces in partnership with The Hermitage and the NBA, and a number of other creators (I visited a house-size work earlier this year, a NFT space called Mars House created by Krista Kim.)

This doesn't mean Spatial is saying goodbye to VR and AR headsets: the app's still around, and I find it useful to hop into as a more close-up way of exploring 3D content or art. But using a regular computer, and having its keyboard and interface and multitasking capabilities, has clear advantages, especially for things like commerce. Spatial's co-founder and CEO, Anand Agarawalla, also points to the far larger number of people that browsers can command over headsets. "We were a little skeptical, for sure," Agarawalla says of the NFT-related growth of Spatial, but he feels the changes reflect what NFT-interested Spatial users want. "Recently the growth has been amazing. I think it tripled in the last month alone, and it's going straight up."

As metaverse hype continues into 2022, it's worth noting that one of VR and AR's most prominent companies is shifting away from headsets. The metaverse has never just been about AR and VR goggles, and the move to widen access seems like a trend that will continue next year no matter what new hardware emerges. 

Hackers thought to have stolen source code from the Symantec's extended network have threatened to release the source code for Norton Antivirus on Tuesday, but the company says such a release poses no threat.

The hackers, who call themselves "Yama Tough" and employ the "Anonymous" mask in its Twitter avatar, said in a tweet Saturday that they would release the 1.7GB source code on Tuesday. "The rest will follow...," they added.

Several reports surfaced earlier this month that hackers had managed to access the source code for certain Symantec products. Symantec identified the products as Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2, but said the attack did not affect any current Norton consumer products.

The hackers said they found the code after breaking into servers run by Indian military intelligence. The code was apparently left on the servers by mistake after Indian authorities inspected the source code to ensure it was secure. And that's where the hackers found the code.

The group said in a Pastebin post that it had the "source codes of dozens of companies" and contained documentation describing the API procedures for Symantec's virus definition generation service. The group's post on the Pastebin site has since been removed, though a Google cached version still exists.

Symantec said in a statement to CNET sister site ZDNet that code posted to Pastebin was related to a 2006 version and is "no longer sold or supported."

"The current version of Norton Utilities has been completely rebuilt and shares no common code with Norton Utilities 2006. The code that has been posted for the 2006 version poses no security threat to users of the current version of Norton Utilities," the company said in a statement.

Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, wrote in a blog post that the incident was "embarrassing on Symantec's part" but not likely to "keep the Symantec folks awake too late at night, and certainly not their customers."

If the source code had been recent and the hackers were able to poke enough holes in it, then exploiting the software could be possible, noted Rachwald. But there's not much they can learn from old code.

It's been a busy social season on Netflix's Bridgerton. The regency drama about social machinations and a mysterious gossip writer named Lady Whistledown, dropped its second season on Friday. 

This round focuses on the oldest Bridgerton son, Anthony, as he searches for a wife, mostly ignoring the promptings of his various family members that love might be a key component of a marriage -- not just duty. 

You can refresh your memory on season 1. Or if you've already raced through season 2 as quickly as Lady Whistledown wears down quills, here's the ending of Bridgerton season 2, explained.

Of course, everything single word that follows is a spoiler. So beware.

Do Kate and Anthony get together?

The season comes to a turning point when Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma -- after weeks of suggestively eyeing each other -- finally cough have an evening to themselves. In the morning, Kate rides her horse in the rain. It rears up. She gets thrown off and hits her head. Anthony rescues her, and she spends the next several days unconscious. He remains stony-faced yet internally twisty. Mercifully, he has a conversation with his mother about true love being worth the trouble and the pain it sometimes brings. 

When Kate wakes up, Anthony visits and proposes marriage. While you might think the preceding events would clear the decks for them, Kate turns him down, insisting that she's going to return to India.

That night, the Featherington family throws a ball. At the ball, Kate and Anthony dance together with apparently such intense vibes that everyone there (including the Queen) more or less understands the pair is in love and why Anthony and Kate's sister Edwina did not get married. After one more conversation in the garden, where Anthony tells Kate he loves her and she tells him they're probably going to continue to vex each other, they make out amid fireworks. While the viewer doesn't see their wedding, the end of the episode shows them married and spending time with the whole Bridgerton family at the country estate, Aubrey Hall.

Does Edwina find a husband?

Edwina has a rough few weeks. She learns that her sister and finance are in love, as well as a few other family secrets, and somehow makes peace with all the deception after her sister's accident. At the ball, she has a short exchange with the Queen, who mentions that her nephew (Prince Friedrich, who courted Daphne Bridgerton in season 1) happens to still be available.

What happens with Eloise?

This season the headstrong Eloise Bridgerton finds herself in a sticky situation. Her hunt for Lady Whistledown puts her in the path of a boy who works in Lady Whistledown's print shop. The pair have a nerd love thing going on. It's cute. The Queen, however, finds out that Eloise has been frequenting a print shop and thinks that Eloise is Lady Whistledown. Penelope, partly in effort to get the spotlight off her friend, writes a pamphlet exposing Eloise's un-chaperoned visits with print shop boy Theo. Eloise ends up breaking things off with Theo and gives up her search for the gossip writer. 

Does Lady Whistledown's identity remain secret?

Of course the moment Eloise has given up, she has a revelatory moment at the Featherington ball that -- oh snap -- her best friend is Lady Whistledown. It seems Penelope has gossiped a little too close to the sun. Eloise confronts Penelope. It's not pretty. Eloise tells Penelope that she's been making money tarnishing everyone in town. Penelope says that she's ceased writing the gossip sheet and that at least she's actually done something with her time. Eloise responds that she never wants to see or speak to Penelope again. At the end of the episode, Lady Whistledown in voiceover returns, and says she won't be silent. 

Does the Featheringtons' scam work?

After the death of the Featherington patriarch last season, the family's been dealing with the appearance of cousin Jack to head up the estate. He spends much of the season with Lady Portia Featherington, plotting a scam to gain investments in a ruby mine in America from the locals and then take off with the money, knowing that the mine is a failure. 

Colin Bridgerton exposes the scheme, unaware that Portia knew all along. He threatens Jack, and Portia rolls with the narrative that Jack is a liar. She later tells Jack she's going to keep some of the money and tells him to get out.

For decades, you could test a computer chip's mettle by how small and tightly packed its electronic circuitry is. Now Intel believes another dimension is as big a deal: how artfully a group of such chips can be packaged into a single, more powerful processor.

At the Hot Chips conference Monday, Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger shined a spotlight on the company's packaging prowess. It's a crucial element to two new processors: Meteor Lake, a next-generation Core processor family member that'll power PCs in 2023, and Ponte Vecchio, the brains of what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer, Aurora.

Advanced packaging, which lets chip designers link several "chiplets" into one larger processor, is key to making future PCs faster and more capable. The technology is how AMD builds its top-end PC processor, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and how Apple glues two M1 Max chips into the M1 Ultra, its most powerful Mac processor.

But that Ryzen chip retails for $440, and the M1 Ultra adds $2,000 to the price of an M1 Max Mac Studio. Meteor Lake brings packaging to the mainstream PC market, where consumers buy hundreds of millions of machines annually, even in bad years. The advancement will lead to faster, more powerful computers without an eye-popping price tag. 

"Meteor Lake will be a huge technical innovation," thanks to how it packages chiplets together, said Real World Tech analyst David Kanter.

For decades, staying on the cutting edge of chip progress meant miniaturizing chip circuitry. Chipmakers make that circuitry with a process called photolithography, using patterns of light to etch tiny on-off switches called transistors onto silicon wafers. The smaller the transistors, the more designers can add for new features like accelerators for graphics or artificial intelligence chores.

Now Intel believes building these chiplets into a package will bring the same processing power boost as the traditional photolithography technique. 

"We're at that point where packaging is as important as the process technology itself," said Boyd Phelps, leader of Intel's Design Engineering Group, in an interview.

Packaging technology matters to Intel. It's struggling to reclaim chipmaking leadership lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which makes Apple chips, and to Samsung. Even as it spends tens of billions of dollars on new chipmaking capacity, though, its most recent quarterly financial results were "disastrous,"  TechInsights analyst Linley Gwennap said. A $52.7 billion chipmaking subsidy from the US government won't help until 2023.

Packaging could help Intel get back some of its onetime lead.

Intel co-founder's 1965 prophecy comes true

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted a "day of reckoning" in which it no longer makes sense to make chips out of a single large slice of silicon. In his seminal paper laying out Moore's Law, he wrote, "It may prove to be more economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected."

Intel has two main packaging approaches.

First is EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge), which links two "chiplets" side by side with a small connecting patch beneath. That's used in Ponte Vecchio and higher end models of its upcoming Sapphire Rapids server processor.

Second is Intel's Foveros, which joins multiple chiplets vertically, like plopping one pancake atop another. The Meteor Lake chip is built with Foveros, with four chiplets perched on another silicon substrate below that provides communication links.

Foveros also is key to Meteor Lake's successor, Arrow Lake, which will benefit from upgraded circuitry for its central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) cores. After that comes Lunar Lake, designed for laptops with very low power consumption, and featuring an updated recipe of chiplet ingredients. Both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake should be "ready in 2024," Phelps said.

EMIB and Foveros both help extend Moore's Law's trend of increasing transistor counts. The Ponte Vecchio supercomputer chip, for example, has more than 100 billion transistors.

Advanced packaging advantages

One big advantage of packaging chiplets is that a chip designer can mix and match processor components. The most performance sensitive chiplets can be built with the latest generation manufacturing process, a premium option, but less critical parts can be built with older, cheaper processes, with chiplets that already have proved themselves.

Designers "can focus on more innovative engineering and less turning the crank on basic stuff," Kanter said.

Chiplets also smooth over Intel's manufacturing problems. Three of Meteor Lake's four data-processing chiplets are built by its top rival, TSMC. Intel designed all the components but will only build the chiplet with the CPU cores.

And chiplets can let chip designers embrace new manufacturing faster. Instead of having to wait while engineers update every type of transistor for a more advanced photolithography process, chipmakers can adopt the new process just for the most performance sensitive chip tasks.

Advanced packaging adds cost, complexity and new manufacturing steps, so it's not always the best choice. It also doesn't fix woes like the problems that delayed Intel's Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio. Increasingly, though, it'll be key to chips in just about every PC for sale.