Rapid advancements in flash technology and continued improvements in high-speed interfaces have driven the growth of small, bus-powered portable SSDs. Kingston introduced the DataTraveler Max in August 2021 as a USB-C flash drive capable (UFD) of hitting 1GBps speeds. Its uniqueness lies in the form-factor. In fact, it is the first device in a thumb drive form-factor to hit such performance numbers. These numbers are achieved while keeping the UFD light enough to sport an integrated USB-C male connector. Read on for our analysis of the drive's performance and a detailed look at the technology enabling this unique product.

As a laptop vendor, Huawei is entering its fourth year. Relying on x86 silicon and a GPU here and there, one thing Huawei does well is the quality of the design. The company has transferred the knowhow developed over a decade of smartphones into something bigger, with a keyboard, running Windows. The latest MateBook X Pro 2021 edition we’re testing today equips an Intel 11 Gen Core i7 with one of the physically largest displays you can fit into a 14-inch device, and a brushed aluminium chassis that’s very smooth to the touch and an Emerald Green finish that really stands out.

Western Digital's Red series of drives for network-attached storage systems has a significant share in various NAS market segments. The series started off with a focus on hard drives, and more recently WD Red SSDs were introduced in Q4 2019, a few years after the SanDisk acquisition. These SATA SSDs (in both 2.5" and M.2 form-factors) were based on Marvell 88SS1074 controllers and targeted caching applications.The increasing popularity of tiered storage, coupled with the deployment of NVMe (in the form of add-in cards, and now, natively in NAS boards) has prompted Western Digital to create a new member in the WD Red family. The new WD Red SN700 comes in 5 capacities ranging from 250GB to 4TB.WD Red SN700 NVMe SSDs for NASCapacity250 GB500 GB1 TB2 TB4 TBModel NumberWDS250G1R0CWDS500G1R0CWDS100T1R0CWDS200T1R0CWDS400T1R0CControllerSanDisk In-House?NAND Flash3D TLC NANDForm-Factor

Back in July, we reported that EVGA was teasing its first AMD-based motherboard since the AM2+ days. Fast forward to now, and that dream of an EVGA model for AMD's Ryzen processors led by in-house engineer and extreme overclocker Vince 'KINGPIN' Lucido is now a reality. The EVGA X570 Dark benefits from a large premium 17-phase power delivery (14+2+1) designed for pushing Ryzen 5000 to its limits and support for up to DDR4-4800 out of the box across two memory slots to minimize latency.The EVGA X570 Dark, as expected, is primarily suited to extreme overclockers, with a variety of performance-enhancing features across the large E-ATX sized PCB. One of the most notable design characteristics includes a transposed AM4 CPU socket for better support when mounting an LN2 (liquid nitrogen) pot, and an empty CPU socket area to minimize risks when insulating for sub-ambient cooling. All the major power connectors are also at right angles, to be less of an issue when extreme overclocking for records.EVGA uses a 16-phase power delivery organized into a 14+2 configuration, with fourteen premium 90 A power stages for the CPU section. It's a slightly different design to accommodate the transposed socket as it stretches around the bottom of the AM4 socket. It is using active VRM cooling with two cooling fans and uses a 10-layer PCB design. The 17th power stage is for the memory. Providing power to the CPU is a pair of 8-pin 12 V ATX CPU power inputs. Some of the most notable features of the EVGA X570 Dark include voltage monitoring points at the top of the board, as well as a variety of switches to enable/disable features that might be critical to sub-zero overclocking stability.For end-users wanting to have a daily system, there are dual PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, eight SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays, as well as 2.5 GbE wired and Wi-Fi 6 wireless networking. Looking at PCIe support, EVGA includes two full-length PCIe 4.0 slots operating at x16 and x8/x8, with a half-length PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. Other features include a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec backed by EVGA's NU audio solution, eight 4-pin cooling headers, a passively cooled chipset heatsink, and two USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C port on the rear panel.The EVGA X570 Dark is currently available to purchase directly from the EVGA website for $690. This isn't a cheap motherboard, but overclocking-focused motherboards such as this come at a hefty premium. Although it has plenty of features for a daily Ryzen 5000 based system, the hope is that it provides the substance for extreme overclockers looking to push Ryzen 5000 silicon to its limits.Our review of the EVGA X570 Dark will be coming very soon - it arrived a couple of days ago and is currently on our testbed!Gallery: EVGA Releases X570 Dark Motherboard, Overclocking Flagship For AMD Ryzen 5000Related Reading

This week, Samsung LSI announced a new camera sensor that seemingly is pushing the limits of resolution within a mobile phone. The new S5KHP1, or simply HP1 sensor, pushes the resolution above 200 megapixels, almost doubling that of what’s currently being deployed in contemporary hardware in today’s phones.

Plugable is introducing its Thunderbolt 4 product lineup today, with the TBT4-HUB3C Thunderbolt 4 Hub leading the pack. Joining it are two Thunderbolt 4 cables - the 2m. long TBT4-40G2M, and the 1m. long TBT4-40G1M.Intel had provided detailed updates on Thunderbolt 4 in mid-2020 before releasing it in Tiger Lake-based products. As peak bandwidth (40Gbps) didn't get an upgrade over Thunderbolt 3, many consumers just considered it a branding update. In fact, under the hood, the specifications were being fine-tuned to bring in some features from the USB world. It is these new features that Plugable is focusing on:

Prior to the Huawei/Honor split, I had my hands on almost every model or flagship that Honor made. The co-design with Huawei, along with a good high-middle market for those flagships, made them competitive products. However, Honor was sold to essentially run standalone, which meant it was no longer under the US entity list bans, and could leverage Google services again. The Honor 50 is one of these devices, offering a full Google experience, and opting to pair a 700-series Snapdragon SoC with a 108 MP camera and a 6.57-inch OLED display. We had some hands-on with the Honor 50 ahead of the launch next month in October.

In anticipation of the upcoming Windows 11 launch, Microsoft is introducing an almost complete top to bottom refresh of their Surface device lineup. Ranging from the brand-new Surface Laptop studio to refreshed devices like the Surface Pro X, Microsoft's 2021 Surface lineup covers the entire spectrum, with some devices getting some minor tweaks while other devices are completely new. As tends to be the case, all of them feature quirks which are distinctively Surface.

The internal storage device market segment has seen rapid evolution over the last decade after the introduction of flash-based disk drives. Beginning with 2.5-inch SSDs in early 2010s, the market moved to mSATA units while the SATA-to-NVMe transition started to gather steam. With the PCIe 4.0 transition set in motion, many users are finding themselves with spare M.2 SSDs.A common re-purposing method has been to place the SSD in a USB enclosure. Akasa is one of the few manufacturers to possess a SSD enclosure lineup catering to almost all possible scenarios in this market segment. Read on for our review of their M.2 SSD enclosures lineup - the Akasa AK-ENU3M2-02 (SATA), AK-ENU3M2-03 (NVMe), and the AK-ENU3M2-04 (SATA / NVMe).

After a new firmware update, we've updated our original review of the Xiaomi 11T, showcasing better battery life results, and a more positive conclusion to the device.

Seagate's IronWolf series of drives for network-attached storage systems has gained significant traction in its market segments. One of the primary reasons has been the breadth of offerings - high-capacity HDDs targeting different applications, as well as SATA and NVMe SSDs. In fact, Seagate was one of the first vendors to introduce SSDs targeting the prosumer / SMB / SME NAS markets with the IronWolf SSD 110 series at the 2019 CES. This 2.5" SATA SSD family was complemented by the announcement of the IronWolf 510 NVMe SSD family in Q1 2020. The SSD family, based on the Phison E12DC Enterprise SSD Controller, sported a 1DWPD rating that was not available in other SSDs targeting the prosumer / SMB NAS market.Seagate is continuing their leadership march today with the launch of the IronWolf 525 NVMe SSDs. Based on the Phison E16 (PS5016-E16-32) PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD controller, the product appears to dial back to consumer roots with a 0.7 DWPD rating. Currently, there are no commercial off-the-shelf NAS offerings from the major vendors (Synology, QNAP, Asustor, etc.) with native PCIe 4.0 capability. The IronWolf 525 is backwards compatible with PCIe 3.0 and can slot into the same places where the IronWolf 510 is currently being used. Key confirmed specifications are captured in the table below.The Seagate IronWolf 525 SSDs for NASCapacity500 GB1 TB2TBModel NumberZP500NM30002ZP1000NM30002ZP2000NM30002ControllerPhison E16NAND FlashKioxia BiCS 4 96L 3D TLC NANDForm-Factor, InterfaceM.2-2280, PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.3Double-Sided

The emergence of edge computing as a paradigm has expanded the market for industrial PCs over the last few years. Traditionally an 'industrial PC' was built with a focus on reliable operation in a rugged environment - the emphasis on computing performance being secondary to the utility. This has changed recently with the need to process more data at the edge.OnLogic (formerly, Logic Supply) has been servicing the embedded / industrial PC market with pre-configured small form-factor (SFF) systems since 2003. Their Helix line of fanless industrial PCs is based on Intel's Elkhart Lake (300-series) and Comet Lake (500 and 600-series) processors, catering to the increased demand for processing power in edge computing. Read on for a detailed look at the performance and value proposition of a high-end Helix HX500 configuration based on the 35W Intel Core i7-10700T.

To date, most of the new AI hardware entering the market has been a ‘purchase necessary’ involvement. For any business looking to go down the route of using specialized AI hardware, they need to get hold of a test system, see how easy it is to migrate their workflow, then compute the cost/work/future of going down that route, if feasible. Most AI startups are flush with VC funding that they’re willing to put the leg work in for it, hoping to snag a big customer at some point to make that business profitable. One simple answer would be to offer the hardware in the cloud, but it takes a lot for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to bite and offer that hardware as an option to their customers. Today’s announcement between Cerebras and Cirrascale is that as a CSP, Cirrascale will begin to offer wafer-scale instances based on Cerebras’ WSE2.

The external storage market has experienced rapid growth over the last few years, particularly in the retail consumer segment. It has been fueled in part by advancements in bus-powered flash-based storage devices.Thunderbolt SSDs are at the top in terms of both performance and price, but the last few years have seen various high-end portable SSDs with a USB interface. The USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gbps) ecosystem has been slowly gaining traction, with Kingston's XS2000 portable SSD being the latest to join the device lineup. Based on Silicon Motion's new SM232x family of UFD (USB flash drive) controllers, the product family offers full Gen 2x2 performance while consuming a fraction of the power needed by similar solutions currently in the market.Silicon Motion sent across the bare reference board used inside the Kingston XS2000 to put through our rigorous direct-attached storage testing routine. Read on for our evaluation report of the SM2320XT reference design.

Today Xiaomi is announcing three new devices – the 11T, the 11T Pro and the 11 Lite 5G NE. We’ve had the first two in for review for a bit now and are able to give some first-hand experiences with the phones today.

Today Apple held its fall 2021 iPhone launch event, and we’ve gotten 4 new iPhones from the new iPhone 13 series: the iPhone 13 mini, the iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max.

It's that time of the year again - Apple's fall iPhone event, where we expect the Cupertino company to unveil its newest generation family of iPhones - likely the iPhone 13 series.Last year's iPhone 12 series introduced a new industrial design, and we generally expect Apple to iterate and refine upon the form of last generation's phones. The industry rumblings are that we might be seeing some new generation OLED panels for the Pro models and high refresh rates for the first time. Cameras remain a mystery on whether Apple will upgrade things this generation.Naturally, we also expect Apple to introduce a new generation processor in the form of the A15. Apple's latest iterations of SoC silicon have been ground-breaking and industry leading, and we very much expect the new chip to further push the envelope in performance and efficiency.The live blog will start along with the event at 10am PT / 17:00 UTC / 19:00 CEST.

Whether overclocking the CPU is your cup of morning tea/coffee/something stronger or not, there are specific motherboards built by professional overclockers and engineers designed to squeeze out as much performance as possible. For example, while the regular everyday PC user might groan at the thought of spending $500 on a Z590 motherboard with two memory slots, boards such as the ASRock Z590 OC Formula pay homage to the art of overclocking. As such, legendary overclocker and ASRock employee Nick Shih has overseen the design and creation of one of the best series of motherboards for overclocking. The OC Formula has been ASRock's brand for their pinnicle performance motherboards for generations - it seemed dead as we hand't seen it in a while, but it as come back with some blazing style. The latest iteration has had a facelift and comes with a wave of features - but can ASRock strike the right balance between enthusiast and conventional? Let's find out in our review of the Z590 OC Formula.

Flash-based removable media has a host of use cases in products ranging from content capture devices to portable game consoles. Behind the standards of these is the SD Association, and we saw the introduction of an NVMe-based SD Express standard (SD 7.0) in 2018, with a SD 8.0 follow-up in 2020. SD cards, as well as card readers based on these new standards, have been making the rounds at various trade shows since 2019. However, none went on to appear in the retail market. That is about to change in the coming months, with both ADATA and Lexar announcing plans to launch their SD Express 7.1 cards within the next few quarters. The cards from both vendors are based on the Silicon Motion SM2708 controller. Read on for a detailed look at what the controller brings to the table for flash-based removable storage.

When it was announced that AMD was set to give a presentation at Hot Chips on its newest Zen 3 microarchitecture, I was expecting the usual fare when a company goes through an already announced platform – a series of slides that we had seen before. In the Zen 3 presentation this was largely the case, except for one snippet of information that had not been disclosed before. This bit of info is quite important for considering AMD’s growth strategy.

The Axon 30 uses a new second-generation under-display camera with an OLED from Visionox, and features the Snapdragon 870- does it convince enough for the $499 price tag?

At Hot Chips last week, IBM announced its new mainframe Z processor. It’s a big interesting piece of kit that I want to do a wider piece on at some point, but there was one feature of that core design that I want to pluck out and focus on specifically. IBM Z is known for having big L3 caches, backed with a separate global L4 cache chip that operates as a cache between multiple sockets of processors – with the new Telum chip, IBM has done away with that – there’s no L4, but interestingly enough, there’s no L3 either. What they’ve done instead might be an indication of the future of on-chip cache design.

The last few years have seen plenty of new innovations come up in the hard-disk drive market. For quite some time, the HDD technology roadmap was shared industry-wide - vendors introduced new technologies at different points in time, but they were all similar in nature. As a recent example, HGST (now, Western Digital) was the first to market with helium-filled HDDs, but both Seagate and Toshiba followed up with similar drives within a few years.Prior to 2017, there was consensus that heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) would help drive the increase in storage density for HDDs after traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) ran out of steam. Western Digital sprang a surprise in Q4 2017 by announcing the decision to go with microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) for future HDDs. Seagate, in the meanwhile, has been all-in on HAMR and also launched 20TB HDDs based on the technology for enterprise customers (those HAMR drives are yet to hit retail, though). In the meanwhile, Western Digital was promising MAMR drives for 16TB+ HDDs, but eventually back-tracked in favor of energy-enhanced PMR (ePMR). Toshiba, on the other hand, introduced flux control-MAMR (FC-MAMR) in its MG09-series of enterprise 16TB and 18TB HDDs.At the HDD Reimagine event today, Western Digital is introducing OptiNAND - a novel architecture involving the integration of an embedded iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD) on the drive's mainboard.In conjunction, the company is also announcing that it has been sampling its first 20TB non-SMR drives based on OptiNAND-enabled ePMR to select customers, and that it would be adopting the OptiNAND platform moving forward for all 20TB+ HDDs. The company also sees a path to 50TB OptiNAND-enabled ePMR drives in the second half of the decade.While the company did not quantify the amount of NAND in its OptiNAND drives, they are stressing the fact that it is not a hybrid drive (SSHD). Unlike SSHDs, the OptiNAND drives do not store any user data at all during normal operation. Instead, the NAND is being used to store metadata from HDD operation in order to improve capacity, performance, and reliability.CapacityWestern Digital's OptiNAND announcement also conveys the fact that their 20TB 9-platter HDDs will continue to use energy-enhanced PMR (ePMR). In addition to the use of a triple-stage actuator to enable more accurate positioning of the heads over the tracks, the OptiNAND aspect is being touted as the key to enabling 2.2TB capacity for each platter.The increase in areal density is being achieved by cramming the tracks on the platter closer together (increased TPI), while also moving out some of the metadata (both factory-generated and mid-user operation) out from the platter to the NAND. In particular, Western Digital made a mention of the repeatable run out (RRO) recording of the head jitter / error position as the spindle revolves. This data (running into multiple gigabytes) is generated in the factory during manufacturing. It is typically stored in the disk, taking up space that could have potentially been used for user data. The OptiNAND architecture moves this to the NAND in the EFD.One of the key challenges to packing tracks closer together is the concept of 'adjacent track interference' (ATI). This results in the need to periodically refresh data in the platter's tracks as it could get corrupted by writes to adjacent tracks. Currently available HDDs triggered these refreshes on a track-by-track basis based on the recording of write operations at the track-level. One of the downsides to increasing areal density by increasing the TPI is the need to do more frequent refreshes. From refreshing once in 10000 write operations in early HDDs, the narrow tracks now need to be refreshed as frequently as once every 6 writes. Beyond a certain point, it doesn't make sense to increase TPI any further because the increase in the frequency of ATI refreshes has an extreme impact on performance. In present-generation HDDs, these refreshes have been triggered at the track level by recording write operations at that hierarchy. The OptiNAND architecture allows the write operations to be recorded at the sector level. This means that the refresh operations are more spread out both temporally and spatially, allowing the tracks to be packed closer together without sacrificing performance. In turn, this increases the areal density.PerformanceConsumers can operate HDDs with the write cache in the device enabled or disabled. Irrespective of the cache enablement, the HDD has to buffer up the incoming data. In the disabled case, the amount of data that could be buffered up is dependent on the amount of data that can be safely flushed out to non-volatile storage in the case of an emergency power-off (EPO) situation. The presence of significant NAND capacity in the HDD means that the drive can use the rotational energy present in the platters to flush out more data in the DRAM into the NAND (Present-day HDDs dump out the DRAM data into serial flash - around a couple of MBs worth - in an EPO situation). The ability to buffer out more data in this case means that the performance of write-cache enabled case and write-cache disabled case approach each other in OptiNAND-enabled HDDs.Western Digital also claims that the 'write cache enabled' case can benefit on the performance front. This is an indirect result of the reduced refresh rates (referencing the observations in the previous sub-section on how OptiNAND handles adjacent-track interference) that allows the HDD to spend more time in servicing user data requests. Again, there was no quantification of the improvement in IOPS for different access patterns over non-OptiNAND HDDs in Western Digital's event.ReliabilityThe aspects of OptiNAND used to enhance the performance of the drives in the write caching disabled state also contribute to enhancing their reliability under EPO conditions. By including faster non-volatile storage compared to serial flash, Western Digital claims that up to 50x more data can be flushed out compared to previous-generation HDDs.Concluding RemarksWestern Digital claims that the vertical integration possible with the HDD technology from the WD / HGST side along with the flash technology from the SanDisk side is essential for the creation of a platform like OptiNAND.There is bound to be a cost-premium associated with the drives due to the NAND integration. New recording technologies (like HAMR and MAMR) require significant investment into the design of the recording heads as well as platters, and need to be revamped every few generations. On the other hand, technologies like OptiNAND are independent of the underlying technology.Without exact quantification of the increase in areal density enabled by OptiNAND, it is not possible to provide comparative comments on the Capacity aspect of Western Digital's OptiNAND trifecta - except that the company is now able to introduce 20TB hard drives to the market with the same ePMR technology used in its 18TB drives (around 2.2TB/platter).The Performance aspect should be easier to evaluate when OptiNAND drives hit retail. While the benefits for the 'write caching disabled' case (where the NAND can act as a safe cache in an EPO situation) are easy to verify (essentially acting the same as the 'write caching enabled' case), the pure 'write caching enabled' case should be much more interesting to analyze against competing drives of the same capacity.Western Digital indicated that all of their 20TB+ HDDs moving forward will be OptiNAND-enabled. This will be across all market verticals - cloud deployment, enterprise drives (Gold), storage for surveillance recording (Purple line), and NAS (Red line). It must be noted that the company has a 20TB SMR drive already in the market that is not OptiNAND-enabled. The new HDD architecture with its flexible SoC and high-performance NAND integration can also be used to enable customer-specific enhancements in the future. The ability to use the NAND to dynamically remap sectors can increase areal density and improve performance much more in SMR drives. Based on this, we can expect OptiNAND-enabled SMR drives to gain significant capacity advantage over CMR drives in comparison to what is being seen in the market currently.The HDD industry is not yet in dire need of CPR, but Western Digital's usage of OptiNAND to address the Capacity, Performance, and Reliability trifecta is yet another unique aspect in the innovation-rich hard-disk drive market. Western Digital has both HDD and complete flash technology (from NAND fabrication to controller) in-house, while the other HDD vendors do not have that advantage. As such, it might take the other vendors some time to catch up on the advantages of using NAND for HDD metadata.

One of the critical deficits Intel has to its competition in its server platform is core count – other companies are enabling more cores by one of two routes: smaller cores, or individual chiplets connected together. At its Architecture Day 2021, Intel has disclosed features about its next-gen Xeon Scalable platform, one of which is the move to a tiled architecture. Intel is set to combine four tiles/chiplets through its fast embedded bridges, leading to better CPU scalability at higher core counts. As part of the disclosure, Intel also expanded on its new Advanced Matrix Extension (AMX) technology, CXL 1.1 support, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and an Accelerator Interfacing Architecture that may lead to custom Xeon CPUs in the future.

The gaming market has experienced significant growth over the last decade. In addition to boosting PC sales, the peripherals market associated with the segment has also expanded. Installed sizes for games now regularly run into hundreds of gigabytes, thanks in large part to support for increased resolutions and more detailed graphics. The data also needs to be loaded into memory as fast as possible in order to improve the gaming experience.Unsurprisingly then, gamers want the fastest possible portable SSDs to store their games. The 20 Gbps transfer rates promised by USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 has an instant appeal in this market segment. Keeping this in mind, many vendors have introduced USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 bus-powered portable SSDs targeting the gaming crowd. Last year, we looked at Western Digital's WD_BLACK P50. Seagate's FireCuda Gaming SSD was available in the market around the same time, but it didn't make it to our testbed in time for that review.We recently got the Seagate offering into our latest testbed, and took the opportunity to refresh the numbers for the WD_BLACK P50 with our latest test suite as well. Read on for our hands-on review of the Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD.

Intel introduced the Willow Cove micro-architecture with their Tiger Lake processors in the latter part of 2020. These were designed to span a wide range of performance levels and applications, with TDPs ranging from as low as 7W up to 65W.While mobile systems are the prime market for the 7W - 15W SKUs, higher TDP processors have found themselves in a number of different form-factors ranging from notebooks and UCFF mini-PCs to full-blown gaming desktops. Many ultra-compact mini-PCs based on Tiger Lake have been introduced by different vendors in the last few quarters. Competitively speaking, the Tiger Lake UCFF PCs come in at a time when systems based on AMD's compelling 7nm Zen 2-based Ryzen 4000U series of processors are already well-established in the market.Can Tiger Lake shift the value proposition metric back towards Intel? Read on for our review of ASRock Industrial's flagship 'NUC' based on Tiger Lake - the NUC BOX-1165G7.

In today's review, we are taking a look at Noctua's NH-U12S Redux, a price-optimized version of their highly popular NH-U12S tower CPU cooler. The NH-U12S Redux has been redesigned to bring the same kind of Noctua performance, but at a retail price of just $50, making it more affordable to the masses.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.

Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs. Today we start at 8:45am PT, so set your watches and notifications to return back here! The first set of talks is all about CPUs: Intel Alder Lake, AMD Zen 3, IBM Z, and Intel Sapphire Rapids.

Over the last couple of years, a great deal of concern has developed around the future of semiconductor manufacturing, both with respect to total capacity and where the next generation of fabs will be hosted. The current chip crunch has underscored that current fab capacity is too small for a world where there’s a silicon chip in practically everything, and meanwhile geopolitical matters have made nations increasingly worried about where today’s cutting-edge fabs are located – mostly in Taiwan and South Korea. Consequently, we’ve seen governments kick-start initiatives to woo fab companies or otherwise incentivize the domestic construction of next-generation fabs, including the United States Department of Defense, whom today is awarding Intel an agreement to provide commercial foundry services for the DoD.As announced by Intel this morning, Intel’s Foundry Services group has secured an agreement with the United States Department of Defense to provide fab services under the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C) program. RAMP-C is one of several US government programs to encourage domestic chip production, with this program focused on chip production for defense needs. In short, the DoD wants to ensure it will be able to have its chips (and other necessary commercial hardware) fabbed within the United States on a leading-edge commercial manufacturing node, and it is tapping a consortium of companies lead by Intel to develop the necessary foundry ecosystem.Along with Intel, the consortium also includes IBM, Cadence, Synopsys and other companies, all of whom will be providing their relevant expertise and technologies to the project. These companies will be working together on what’s a fairly forward-looking service agreement, as the DoD is looking at fab needs several years down the line. Ultimately, the group is being tasked with establishing a semiconductor IP ecosystem around Intel’s forthcoming 18A process – the most advanced process on their development roadmap – which isn’t due to start ramping until 2025.At this point Intel and the DoD are not announcing the value of the services agreement. There is no doubt some hedging going on, and there are multiple milestones Intel & co will need to hit between now and 2025 as part of their participating in the RAMP-C program.But in the meantime, even being able to claim the DoD as a major customer for Intel Foundry Services is a big win for the group, which is still in the early stages of lining up customers and proving that it has learned from past mistakes, both with regards to offering contract foundry services, and in operating a leading-edge fab ecosystem. As a reminder, Intel has previously announced that it will be spending around $20 billion to build a pair of new fabs in Arizona, so success for IFS hinges on finding big customers like the DoD to fill those fabs with orders.

This week as part of the annual Hot Chips semiconductor conference, Samsung’s memory division has presented a poster/slides on a project it is currently working on with impressive end-point results. The company details a 512 GB module of DDR5 memory, running at DDR5-7200, designed for server and enterprise use. This is a step up from the 256 GB modules at the top end of the market today, but to get there, Samsung has been introducing some new features and functionality.

In our coverage of the semiconductor space, we typically think of two main vectors of hardware – the CPU and the GPU. Beyond that, we look at FPGAs, microcontrollers, and this decade is bringing the advent of the dedicated AI processor. What ties all of these products together is actually the FPGA - a field programmable gate array that allows a skilled technician to essentially build a custom circuit out of configurable gates. This means an FPGA can be used to design and simulate a full CPU or GPU, but also an FPGA offers a reconfigurable way to offer optimized compute power that adapts to the needs of its users without the cost of millions or tens of millions to design dedicated silicon. One of the first FPGA companies on the market was Lattice Semiconductor, which now focuses on small power efficient FPGA designs that end up in everything from consumer devices to servers.Over the last three years at Lattice, Jim has initiated a cultural shift that is playing out in the company roadmaps – new products, a more agile approach, and a need to focus on enabling machine learning at every part of its product stack. The recent financial disclosures at Lattice show an increasing demand for its hardware, as well as the company making strides to double its addressable market over the next five years. I thought this would be a good time to reconnect with Jim to find out exactly what he’s doing at Lattice to earmark the next generation of growth at this foundational FPGA company.

Alongside a sneak peek at their forthcoming Xe-HPG architecture, the other big reveal today from Intel’s consumer graphics group comes from the software side of the business. Along with preparing Intel’s software stack for the 2022 launch of the first Arc products, the group has also been hard at work at their own take on modern, neural net-driven image upscaling techniques. The product of that research is Xe Super Sampling, or XeSS, which Intel is pitching as the best solution yet for high image quality and low processing cost image upscaling.

This week Intel held its annual Architecture Day event for select press and partners. As with previous iterations, the company disclosed details about its next generation architectures set to come to the market over the next twelve months. Intel has promised the release of its next-generation consumer and mobile processor family, Alder Lake, to come by the end of the year and today the company is sharing a good number of details about the holistic design of the chips as well as some good detail about the microarchitectures that form this hybrid design: Golden Cove and Gracemont. Here is our analysis of Intel’s disclosure.

For Intel’s 2021 Architecture Day presentations, the yin to the CPU company’s traditional yang is GPUs. Intel has spent the last few years preparing to enter the market for discrete GPUs, with aims of competing in everything from consumer video cards up to HPC-class accelerators. And now, as the company already begins preparing for 2022, those efforts are finally coming to a head. Intel’s big breakout effort in the discrete GPU space starts in earnest next year with Xe-HPG and Xe-HPC, so for their 2021 architecture day, Intel is opening up a bit more about the GPU architectures that will be driving their first wave of high-performance products next year.

On the back of a myriad of new motherboard launches based on AMD's X570 chipset, we have the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max. The new Max motherboard supersedes the previous X570 Ace, and fittingly has lots of new and improved features. Some of the biggest features of the new Ace Max include a large 18-phase power delivery with premium 90 A power stages and the inclusion of an Intel Wi-Fi 6E wireless interface. Other features include four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, support for DDR4-5300 memory, and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet.Perhaps on par with MSI's flagship X570 model, the Godlike, the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max looks to take things to the next level with a stylish all-black design with contrasting gold stripes and multiple areas of integrated RGB lighting. Looking at PCIe support on the X570S Ace Max, it includes three full-length PCIe 4.0 slots that operate at x16 or x8/x8/+x4, with a single PCIe 4.0 x1 slot. The latter of which unfortunately shares bandwidth with the Wi-Fi 6E module, so when that is in use, the slot is disabled.Looking at storage options, the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max has four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, including three with support for SATA drives, as well as eight SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays. MSI also includes an M.2 Xpander-Z Gen4 S M.2 PCIe 4.0 addon card for users looking to add more M.2 storage. Memory support is also impressive, with support for up to DDR4-5300 and a maximum supported capacity of up to 128 GB across four memory slots. Keeping the system cool is a combined total of eight 4-pin headers, including one designated to a CPU fan, one for a water pump, and six for chassis fans. MSI also has a premium power delivery, with an 18-phase design using 90 A power stages versus the 60 A power stages used on the original MEG X570 Ace.The rear panel has a solid array of input and output befitting a premium model, including one USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C, three USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and four USB 2.0 ports. It uses a Realtek RTL8125B 2.5 GbE controller for Ethernet, and Intel's latest AX210 Wi-Fi 6E wireless interface for Wi-Fi, offering access to the 6 GHz band and support for BT 5.2 devices. There's also a premium onboard audio pairing of a Realtek ALC4082 HD audio codec and an ESS Sabre 9018Q2C DAC.At the time of writing, we don't have pricing information or when the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max will be available at retail, but we expect this to be within the coming months.Source: MSIGallery: MSI Launches MEG X570S Ace Max Motherboard, Max Out Ryzen 5000Related Reading

The portable SSD market has been steadily expanding thanks to the increasing digital footprint of consumers. Technological advancements such as 3D NAND with high layer counts and the emergence of QLC have enabled SSD capacities to increase substantially over the last few years. And with those economies of scale kicking in, multiple vendors are finally able to offer consumer-focused flash-based storage devices in capacities up to 4TB.At the 2021 CES, Western Digital introduced 4TB variants of almost all their portable SSD families, including their flagship SanDisk Extreme PRO v2 and the WD_BLACK P50 lines. In March, Crucial updated its affordable X6 lineup to include a 4TB version. WD's flagships and Crucial's mainstream X6 offerings represent two ends of the pricing spectrum. At the same capacity point, they present an interesting view of the tradeoffs involved in bringing a portable SSD to the market. Read on for an analysis of the performance and value propositions of the SanDisk Extreme PRO v2 and the Crucial X6 4TB portable SSDs.

Coming off of the popular reception of their first family of retail NVMe SSDs, SK hynix this morning is adding another model to the Gold P31 family: the long-awaited 2TB version. The higher capacity drive, still using SK hynix’s in-house controller and 128L NAND, is being launched with immediate availability today, with retail pricing set at $280.