Intel has divested its entire stake in Arm Holdings during the second quarter, raising approximately $147 million. Alongside this, Intel sold its stake in cybersecurity firm ZeroFox and reduced its holdings in Astera Labs, all as part of a broader effort to manage costs and recover cash amid significant financial challenges.

The sale of Intel's 1.18 million shares in Arm Holdings, as reported in a recent SEC filing, comes at a time when the company is struggling with substantial financial losses. Despite the $147 million generated from the sale, Intel reported a $120 million net loss on its equity investments for the quarter, which is a part of a larger $1.6 billion loss that Intel faced during this period.

In addition to selling its stake in Arm, Intel also exited its investment in ZeroFox and reduced its involvement with Astera Labs, a company known for developing connectivity platforms for enterprise hardware. These moves are in line with Intel's strategy to reduce costs and stabilize its financial position as it faces ongoing market challenges.

Despite the divestment, Intel's past investment in Arm was likely driven by strategic considerations. Arm Holdings is a significant force in the semiconductor industry, with its designs powering most mobile devices, and, for obvious reasons, Intel would like to address these. Intel and Arm are also collaborating on datacenter platforms tailored for Intel's 18A process technology. Additionally, Arm might view Intel as a potential licensee for its technologies and a valuable partner for other companies that license Arm's designs.

Intel's investment in Astera Labs was also a strategic one as the company probably wanted to secure steady supply of smart retimers, smart cable modems, and CXL memory controller, which are used in volumes in datacenters and Intel is certainly interested in selling as many datacenter CPUs as possible.

Intel's financial struggles were highlighted earlier this month when the company released a disappointing earnings report, which led to a 33% drop in its stock value, erasing billions of dollars of capitalization. To counter these difficulties, Intel announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and implement other expense reductions. The company has also suspended its dividend, signaling the depth of its efforts to conserve cash and focus on recovery. When it comes to divestment of Arm stock, the need for immediate financial stabilization has presumably taken precedence, leading to the decision.

Earlier this month, AMD launched the first two desktop CPUs using their latest Zen 5 microarchitecture: the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Ryzen 5 9600X. As part of the new Ryzen 9000 family, it gave us their latest Zen 5 cores to the desktop market, as AMD actually launched Zen 5 through their mobile platform last month, the Ryzen AI 300 series (which we reviewed).

Today, AMD is launching the remaining two Ryzen 9000 SKUs first announced at Computex 2024, completing the current Ryzen 9000 product stack. Both chips hail from the premium Ryzen 9 series, which includes the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X, which has 16 Zen 5 cores and can boost as high as 5.7 GHz, while the Ryzen 9 9900X has 12 Zen 5 cores and offers boost clock speeds of up to 5.6 GHz.

Although they took slightly longer than expected to launch, as there was a delay from the initial launch date of July 31st, the full quartet of Ryzen 9000 X series processors armed with the latest Zen 5 cores are available. All of the Ryzen 9000 series processors use the same AM5 socket as the previous Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) series, which means users can use current X670E and X670 motherboards with the new chips. Unfortunately, as we highlighted in our Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X review, the X870E/X870 motherboards, which were meant to launch alongside the Ryzen 9000 series, won't be available until sometime in September.

We've seen how the entry-level Ryzen 5 9600X and the mid-range Ryzen 7 9700X perform against the competition, but it's time to see how far and fast the flagship Ryzen 9 pairing competes. The Ryzen 9 9950X (16C/32T) and the Ryzen 9 9900X (12C/24T) both have a higher TDP (170 W/120 W respectively) than the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 (65 W), but there are more cores, and Ryzen 9 is clocked faster at both base and turbo frequencies. With this in mind, it's time to see how AMD's Zen 5 flagship Ryzen 9 series for desktops performs with more firepower, with our review of the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900 processors.