We certainly live in interesting times. Most stores are closing, toilet paper is worth its weight in gold, handshakes are out of fashion (and fist bumps should probably be avoided), and if there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 situation, it is that technology companies like Intel and Razer are getting in on the relief effort. Intel has now announced that it will donate up to $6 million to support coronavirus relief efforts in places where the company has a significant presence

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Intel plans to disburse a minimum of $4 million through the Intel Foundation to selected areas in the U.S. and around the world. However, donations made by Intel employees (including full-time employees, full-time employees, and retirees in the U.S.) will be matched up to an additional $2 million.

"The $4 million donation will be distributed to community foundations and organizations focused on food security, shelter, medical equipment, and small business support," Intel said. Intel has identified strategic organizations specific to each of Intel's key locations for matching donations." Recipients include food banks, school districts, and children's hospitals, all focused on helping communities cope with the impact of the coronavirus outbreak.

Intel had previously announced plans to donate 1 million gloves, masks, and other supplies to healthcare workers facing a shortage of supplies, as well as $1 million to the International Red Cross. This announcement is in addition to that.

Intel can certainly afford to be generous, although it is under no obligation to do so. The chipmaker had revenues of $20.2 billion in Q4 2019 and a quarterly profit of $6.9 billion; for the full year 2019, revenues reached $72 billion and profit was $21 million.

On a related note, peripheral manufacturer Razer recently announced plans to convert some of its manufacturing lines to produce masks and donate up to 1 million units. [Over the past few days, our designers and engineers have been working in 24-hour shifts to convert some of our existing production lines into the manufacture of surgical masks so that we can donate them to countries around the world," said Min-Liang Tan, CEO of Razer.

Additionally, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he and his wife Priscilla Chan will donate $25 million to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to "accelerate the development of a cure for Covid-19."

If you want to help, one way is to join PC Gamer's Folding@home team. This distributed computing project distributes Covid-19 workloads, and users can donate idle CPU and GPU cycles to related research.

The project has recently attracted a large amount of interest and is now the equivalent of an exa-scale supercomputer. Its overall performance is more than five times the theoretical peak performance of ORNL's Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer. Put another way, its current output is equivalent to more than 150,000 GeForce RTX 2060 graphics cards.