The AMD team surprised us here. What seemed like a very par-for-the-course Computex keynote turned into an incredible demonstration of what AMD is testing in the lab with TSMC’s new 3D Fabric technologies. We’ve covered 3D Fabric before, but AMD is putting it to good use by stacking up its processors with additional cache, enabling super-fast bandwidth, and better gaming performance. That’s the claim at any rate, and AMD showcased its new demo processor on stage at Computex. Here’s a deeper run-down into what it actually is.

Alongside announcing their new Radeon RX 6000M notebook GPUs, AMD this evening is also using Computex to formally unveil their FidelityFX Super Resolution technology. The game upscaling technology has garnered a lot of interest since AMD first announced last year that they were working on the technology, today AMD is finally lifting the lid on the technology, at least for a brief moment. Overall today is more of a teaser of what’s to come on June 22, when AMD is planning to reveal more information on the technology, but for the moment this is the biggest information release on the technology since AMD’s initial announcement.As a quick recap, AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution last year as part of the Radeon RX 6000 series launch. The in-development technology was being designed as AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s increasingly popular Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, an advanced image upscaling technique NVIDIA introduced to allow their GPUs to render games at a lower resolution (and thus higher performance) without the severe hit to image quality. Research into DLSS and similar smart upscaling techniques has become increasingly intense, as upscaling offer a tantalizing way to improve game performance via what’s computationally a relatively cheap post-processing effect.While NVIDIA seems to have finally hit their stride with DLSS 2.0, the downside for everyone who is not NVIDIA is that it’s an NVIDIA-only technology. Which for AMD, means it’s yet another NVIDIA value-add software feature that NVIDIA can use to outmaneuver AMD. And while it’s not strictly necessary for AMD to match NVIDIA on a one-for-one software feature basis, clearly DLSS is the start of a bigger shift in the game rendering landscape, so it’s an area where AMD is going to try to catch up, both to nullify an NVIDIA advantage and to give PC game developers another tool in their arsenal for better performance.And thus FidelityFX Super Resolution was born. While today is more a teaser than a detailed technical breakdown, AMD is confirming a few major facts about their take on smart game upscaling.First and foremost, FSR, as AMD likes to call it, will be another one of AMD’s GPUOpen technologies, meaning that it will be published open source and free for developers to use. And not only will developers be able to use it on AMD GPUs, but they will be able to use it on NVIDIA GPUs as well.AMD is not going into the specific technical underpinnings of the execution model here – I’m assuming this is being implemented as a shader – but they are confirming that it doesn’t require any kind of tensor or other deep learning hardware. As a result, the technology can be used not only on recent AMD Radeon RX 6000 series cards, but also the RX 5000 series, RX 500 series, and Vega series. Meanwhile, though it won’t be officially supported to the same extent on NVIDIA cards, according to AMD FSR will work (on day one) on NVIDIA cards going back as far as the Pascal-based GTX 10 series (which pre-dates DLSS support). In fact about the only modern graphics hardware not supported at this point are the current-generation game consoles; AMD may get there one day, but for now they’re focusing on the PC side of things.At this point AMD is not disclosing which games will support the technology, but the messaging right now is that developers will need to take some kind of an active role in implementing the tech. Which is to say that it’s not sounding like it can simply be applied in a fully post-processing fashion on existing games ala AMD’s contrast adaptive sharpening tech.Following its June 22 launch, AMD will be posting FSR to GPUOpen. Overall the company is stating that over 10 “game studios and engines” in 2021 will implement FSR, with more details to come on the 22. Expect to see Godfall among these game, as AMD is using it as their example game for today’s announcement.Moving on, AMD is also revealing that FSR will have four quality modes. Similar to DLSS, I expect that these modes are all based on the upscaling factor used, and that the smaller upscaling factor used (the closer to native resolution you are) the higher the quality mode. Formally, these modes are Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced, and Performance mode.For today’s Computex presentation, AMD is publishing performance numbers from Godfall, running on a 6800XT. That card gets 49 fps when running at 4K with the “epic” image quality preset and ray tracing. This rises to 78 fps with FST in ultra quality mode, 99 fps in quality mode, 124 fps in balanced mode, and 150 fps in performance mode. The exact benefit will depend on the card and the game used, of course, but overall AMD is touting the tech’s performance mode as improving game performance by over 2x versus native 4K rendering.

The 1989 film Field of Dreams offers one of the most memorable quotes in movie history. “If you build it, he will come” was, of course, a reference to a baseball diamond in Iowa, but for AMD, this same quote (gender removed) also succeeds in defining AMD’s success over the last couple of generations. Once the realm of budget-conscious devices, AMD-based products are now the premium in the market and are sought after by consumers looking for the ultimate in performance. With the launch of the Zen 3 based Cezanne laptop processors, AMD now offers the most powerful laptop CPUs available. But that is only a single portion of a successful product. AMD is today announcing the launch of their latest graphics architecture, RDNA2, into the laptop market. AMD has built it. Now they must see who will come.

Headlining a busy Computex for AMD – and a bit of return to form in that regard – this evening the company is making several graphics and CPU-related product announcements. The most visible of which is on the GPU side of matters, where the company is launching their long-awaited Radeon RX 6000M series of laptop graphics adapters. Based on the same RDNA2 architecture that underpins AMD’s well-received desktop RX 6000 parts, the new mobile parts scale that down to power levels suitable for gaming laptops. All told, AMD is announcing three parts today – the Radeon RX 6800M, 6700M, and 6600M – with two of those parts shipping now.Going back to CES 2021 at the start of the year, AMD has been touting laptop Radeon parts for the first half of 2021, and those parts are now landing right on schedule. All told today is a mix of new and old, with AMD releasing a new GPU as a mobile-first product (Navi 23), while also mobilizing the existing Navi 22 for use in laptops. Consequently, this means that there aren’t any major feature additions or hidden hardware capabilities to talk about for this launch. But that’s okay. AMD has plenty to offer just by bringing their RDNA2 GPUs to the laptop market.When it launched on the desktop last year, the RDNA2 architecture was something of a turning point for AMD’s graphics division – a culmination of multiple generations’ worth of efforts to modernize their graphics architecture at both the execution and feature set levels. This has already paid off in spades for AMD on the desktop, but, as we’ll see over the coming weeks and months, it’s something that’s going to be an even bigger deal for AMD’s mobile graphics efforts.To put things charitably for AMD, the company’s GPUs have been virtually absent from the laptop market for the last generation. Outside of their Apple commitment (with the interesting HBM-equipped Navi 12) and their experimental Dell collaboration (G5 15 SE) almost the entire laptop discrete graphics market was held by NVIDIA. And this was largely the case a generation before that, as well. AMD simply hasn’t had the hardware, software, and OEM relationships needed to drive a top-tier laptop graphics program, and that is finally changing, thanks in big part to RDNA2.Power efficiency is incredibly important graphics performance, but that aspect is even more important for laptops. With desktop cards you can at least increase TDPs (to an extent) to buy more performance, but laptops are rigidly bound by the cooling capabilities of the form factor. So the only way to increase performance on a generational basis is to improve power efficiency, and that is an area where AMD has heavily invested into with RDNA2.The net result is that AMD is in a much better position in this generation to fight for the laptop space. As we’ve already seen on the desktop, RDNA2 is performance and efficiency competitive, and that means AMD (finally) has the kind of architecture they need to make inroads into the laptop market. To be sure, even in the best-case scenario AMD isn’t going to immediately capture the majority of the laptop graphics market, but like their resurgence in laptop CPUs, laptop GPUs will be a multi-generational effort that has to start somewhere.And the payoff for AMD isn’t just reputation, either. Laptop gaming continues to be a high growth area for the PC marketplace, and it can be very high margin as well, especially at the mid-to-high end. So for AMD’s graphics division, missing out on laptops hasn’t only cost them visibility and capital with game developers, but it’s left money on the table. This makes grabbing a sizable piece of the laptop all the more important for the company as part of their long-term product strategy.But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. The first step for AMD is to launch a successful generation of laptop graphics adapters, which the company is aiming to do today with the Radeon RX 6000M series. Based on the Navi 22 and Navi 23 GPUs, AMD is taking their most power efficient graphics architecture yet and dropping it into laptops, looking to go toe-to-toe with arch-rival NVIDIA for the mid-range and high-end gaming laptop segments.AMD Radeon RX Mobile Series Specification ComparisonAMD Radeon RX 6800MAMD Radeon RX 6700MAMD Radeon RX 6600MAMD Radeon RX 5600MStream Processors2560

Back in April of this year, AMD announced its new series of Ryzen 5000G processors with integrated graphics. These processors were an upgrade over the previous generation of 4000G hardware by using AMD’s newest Zen 3 cores coupled with Vega 8 integrated graphics. At the time those processors were released for the pre-built system market only, with promises that retail versions would be made available later in the year. Today AMD is announcing two Ryzen 5000G models for retail, coming to market worldwide on August 5.

When the big trade shows roll around, this is the time for the big companies in our sphere to announce their next biggest hardware, or update us on what is to some. AMD had some really big launches at the top of the year, with Ryzen 5000 for desktop and mobile, Radeon for desktop, and then a bit later we saw EPYC on Zen 3 come to market. This year at Computex, CEO Dr. Lisa Su heads up AMD's keynote presentation, and we're here ready to live blog the announcements as they come in. Join us at 10pm ET (10am Taiwan local time)!

Due to the global pandemic, this year’s annual Computex event in Taiwan is being held virtually, but all the big-name companies have keynotes to present their latest news and wares. Intel is no different, and this year the hot ticket items stem from an expansion or ‘refresh’ of their Tiger Lake-U series processors (as we exclusively confirmed at AnandTech in April) but also the first fruits of an Intel 5G solution developed through the partnership with MediaTek.

This year is a busy one for Intel. A new CEO at the start of the year, a commitment to 7nm, and then the launch of new desktop Rocket Lake processors followed by Tiger Lake-H processors. There are promises of next-generation Alder Lake later in the year, and we're all interested to see what happens with Intel's desktop graphics strategy. Heading up today's Computex keynote is not the usual CEO spot, but Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel's EVP and Chief Revenue Officer.We'll be starting the live blog promptly at 10pm ET, or 10am Taipei time.

The USB-IF released a couple of new specifications recently - R2.1 for Type-C and R3.1 for USB-PD. The main update is the 'Extended Power Range' aspect that allows for delivery of up to 240W over Type-C setups supporting the relevant USB-PD profile.The first USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) specification was released in 2012, and it has seen regular updates over the years. Initially, the focus was on enabling faster charging rates for smartphones and other such devices (which had been using proprietary charging schemes or the USB-BC battery charging specifications). After the release of the Type-C specifications in 2014, USB-PD became a hot topic again. In addition to charging, the attractiveness of a single port for both data and power I/O - particularly from the viewpoint of compact and slim notebooks - brought in the need to shore up the amount of power transferred between a source and a sink. Prior to the release of USB-PD R3.1, certifications from the USB-IF were in place for equipment capable of sourcing / sinking up to 100W (slightly lesser in practical circumstances). The newly released specifications refer to the modes in R3.0 as 'Standard Power Range' (SPR).USB-PD R3.1 supports three charging models:

Intel's 11th generation of Core processors have finally hit the market. If you're looking to upgrade your gaming rig, now is the perfect time to do so. And MSI has the perfect combo with which to do so.

Many billions have been poured into the industry when it comes to AI processor development. If you were to list the number of AI processors currently in development or production at the wide variety of start-ups, then that number quickly surpasses 50 and is seemingly forever rising. Each one of these companies is aiming to build a compelling product to meet the needs of their intended customers, all the way from small-scale inference workloads up to multi-datacenter scale training. One of these companies is Tenstorrent, led by CEO Ljubisa Bajic, who recently hired famed chip designer Jim Keller as the CTO. Jim was also the initial angel investor when the company started. Today we are interviewing these two about the company, the Tenstorrent product, and the direction of the demands for machine learning accelerators.

Today Marvell is announcing the first NVMe SSD controllers to support PCIe 5.0, and a new branding strategy for Marvell's storage controllers. The new SSD controllers are the first under the umbrella of Marvell's Bravera brand, which will also encompass HDD controllers and other storage accelerator products. The Bravera SC5 family of PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers will consist of two controller models: the 8-channel MV-SS1331 and the 16-channel MV-SS1333.Marvell Bravera SC5 SSD ControllersMV-SS1331MV-SS1333Host InterfacePCIe 5.0 x4 (dual-port x2+x2 capable)NAND Interface8ch, 1600 MT/s16ch, 1600 MT/sDRAMDDR4-3200, LPDDR4x-4266 with ECCSequential Read14 GB/sSequential Write9 GB/sRandom Read2 M IOPSRandom Write1 M IOPSMax Controller Power8.7 W9.8 WVirtualization16 Physical Functions, 32 Virtual FunctionsThese new SSD controllers roughly double the performance available from PCIe 4.0 SSDs, meaning sequential read throughput hits 14 GB/s and random read performance of around 2M IOPS. To reach this level of performance while staying within the power and thermal limits of common enterprise SSD form factors, Marvell has had to improve power efficiency by 40% over their previous generation SSD controllers. That goes beyond the improvement that can be gained simply from smaller fab process nodes, so Marvell has had to significantly alter the architecture of their controllers. The Bravera SC5 controllers still include a mix of Arm cores (Cortex-R8, Cortex-M7 and a Cortex-M3), but now includes much more fixed-function hardware to handle the basic tasks of the controller with high throughput and consistently low latency.Such an architectural shift often means sacrificing flexibility, but Marvell doesn't expect that to be a problem thanks in large part to the Open Compute Project's Cloud SSD specifications. Those standards go beyond the NVMe spec and define which optional features should be implemented, plus target performance and power levels for different form factors. The Cloud SSD specs were initially a collaboration between Microsoft and Facebook but have caught on in the broader market and even have the support of traditional enterprise server vendors like Dell and HP. This allows controller vendors like Marvell and SSD manufacturers to more narrowly focus their product development efforts, and to target a wider range of customers with a single hardware and firmware platform. In spite of the shift toward more fixed hardware functionality, the Bravera SC5 controllers still support a wide range of features including NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS), Open Channel SSDs and Kioxia's Software-Enabled Flash model.In addition to being the first available PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers, the Bravera SC5 family includes the first 16-channel controller designed to fit on the EDSFF E1.S form factor, using a controller package size of 20x20 mm with peak controller power of 9.8 W. The new controllers are currently sampling to select customers, with the option of using Marvell's firmware or developing custom firmware.

Prior to the release of Intel's 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors, motherboard vendors unveiled their ranges of Z590 motherboards ready for the realm of PCIe 4.0. We saw a lot of refreshed models, with the MSI MEG Z590 Ace being one of them. Typically positioned as a bridge between the mid-range and the flagship models, the Ace has offered exceptional features in the past, with slightly fewer bells and whistles of models such as MSI's Godlike, but still plenty to get excited about. The MSI MEG Z590 Ace includes an impressive four M.2 slots, six SATA ports, 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and Intel's latest Thunderbolt 4 Maple Ridge controller. Looking to dominate the premium motherboard market segment, we deep dive into the Ace in this review.

Western Digital's G-Technology brand is well-known in multimedia production circles with products ranging from portable SSDs to multi-HDD RAID enclosures. As part of its Flash Perspective event today, the company is introducing the SanDisk Professional tag for products sold earlier under the G-Technology brand. In addition to new products targeting the prosumers and production houses, existing products are also getting speed bumps with updates in the USB interface.With increased resolutions and frame rates, content capture on location (as well as post-processing) now deals with huge amounts of data. On the capture side, we have seen multimedia-recording equipment support new card formats such as SD Express, CFast, and CFexpress. These allow capture at speeds exceeding even SATA SSDs, with CFexpress being the current card of choice for professional capture equipment. SanDisk has traditionally played in the consumer market with various memory cards. On the CFexpress side, they have been offering the Extreme PRO lineup - however, the other products in the Extreme PRO category are often meant for the consumer base too. With SanDisk Professional, the company has introduced the PRO-CINEMA CFexpress VPG400 (with a guaranteed 400MBps write speed) for multimedia production houses with the 256GB version carrying a MSRP of $450.Card readers that integrate into optional card docks are quite popular in the industry, allowing for simultaneous ingestion of content from multiple capture devices. One of the first products in this segment was the Thunderbolt 2-equipped Lexar Professional Workflow HR2, which we reviewed back in 2017. Though Lexar dropped the ball in terms of keeping up with the latest technology, vendors such as ATech Flash Technologies carry products such as the Blackjet TX-4DS. Equipped with a Thunderbolt 3 upstream interface, the TX-4DS supports up to 4 different swappable modules to support a range of physical media (CFast / CFexpress / XQD / Sony SxS / RED MINI-MAG / SDXC / 2.5" SATA / M.2 PCIe etc.). Western Digital has also decided to play in this market - the SanDisk Professional PRO-READER series comes with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C interface (up to 10 Gbps) and supports different types of cards including CFast ($90), CFexpress ($100), RED MINI-MAG ($200), and CF / SD / microSD ($80).These readers can also integrate into a 4-bay PRO-DOCK with a MSRP of $500. The Thunderbolt dock (with support for traditional USB-C hosts also) includes additional USB Type-C and Type-A ports.In terms of product upgrades, the G-DRIVE ArmorLock SSD introduced last year with a 2TB SKU now comes with the SanDisk Professional branding and a 4TB SKU. The G-RAID and G-RAID SHUTTLE products with the enterprise HDDs are also getting updated interfaces to work with both Thunderbolt and USB hosts. The entire product portfolio is expected to hit shelves in June 2021.The G-Technology brand has got significant traction in the professional market. However, SanDisk is better known to consumers moving into the prosumer category and SOHO / SMBs just starting out with video workflows. By retaining the G-Technology product names under the 'SanDisk Professional' tag, Western Digital has managed to create a unified branding for its entire portfolio of products targeting the full spectrum of content capture and post-processing markets.

Among several announcements today, Western Digital is introducing a new more affordable PCIe Gen4 SSD under their gaming-oriented WD Black brand (styled WD_BLACK). The new WD Black SN750 SE is not just a refresh of their existing SN750 but instead appears to be an entirely new and different drive. The SN750 SE brings PCIe Gen4 support but in other respects seems to be a downgrade compared to the SN750, and appears to have more in common with the WD Blue SN550. Based on the pictures and the few performance specifications that have been disclosed so far, the SN750 SE looks like a 4-channel DRAMless NVMe SSD, with respectable sequential read throughput but reduced sequential write throughput compared to the original SN750. Random IO performance was not included on the data sheet—not a good sign.UPDATE: Our friends over at PCGamer have learned that WD is using the Phison E19T DRAMless controller for this drive, and the product listings are now live with a few more detailed performance specs.WD Black SN750 SE SSD SpecificationsCapacity250 GB500 GB1 TBForm Factorsingle-sided M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4ControllerPhison E19TDRAMNoneNAND Flash?Sequential Read3200 MB/s3600 MB/s3600 MB/sSequential Write1000 MB/s2000 MB/s2830 MB/sRandom Read IOPS190k360k525kRandom Write IOPS240k480k640kWarranty5 yearsWrite Endurance200 TB

Western Digital is adding a new external SSD to their WD_BLACK product line: the WD Black D30 Game Drive SSD. The D30 is a bus-powered USB SSD offering up to 900MB/s read speeds, with capacities from 500GB to 2TB. There is also a special version for Xbox console gaming, which changes some of the drive's trim to white instead of black and comes with a one month trial membership of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, but is otherwise functionally identical.The new WD_BLACK D30 products fit into the WD_BLACK product line between the D10 external hard drive and the D50 Game Dock (Thunderbolt 3) with optional NVMe storage. The D30 also complements the portable drives under the WD_BLACK brand, including the P10 portable hard drive, and the P50 portable SSD that uses USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 to hit speeds of up to 2 GB/s.The WD_BLACK D30 Game Drive SSD is available starting today with an MSRP of $89.99 for the 500GB version. The WD_BLACK D30 Game Drive SSD for Xbox is up for pre-order and will be available next month, with prices starting at $99.99 for the 500GB version.

Today alongside the CPU announcements, Arm is also unveiling a whole family of third generation Valhall GPUs with the Mali-G710, G510, G310, with particularly large improvements in the mid- and low-end.

Today Arm is announcing a whole cluster of Armv9 client CPUs: The Cortex-X2: A flagship core with more performance and deeper OOO, the Cortex-A710: a power-efficient performance core, and the Cortex-A510: the new much-awaited little core with a twist. All housed in a new redesigned DSU-110 L3.

As part of their Scaling the Mobile Compute Ecosystem presentation, Qualcomm this morning is announcing a refreshed version of their Snapdragon 7c for laptops. Aptly named Snapdragon 7c Gen 2, the updated chip for entry-level Windows PCs and Chromebooks sports a slight clockspeed boost, bumping the frequency of the two Kryo 486 (Cortex-A76) cores up to 2.55GHz. Spec bumps aside, Qualcomm’s target market for the 7c family hasn’t changed, with the updated SoC designed to serve as an anchor for sub-$400 “always-on” devices.

Alongside today’s Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 SoC announcement, Qualcomm is also unveiling a new Windows 10-focused development kit. Collaborating with Microsoft, the two companies have put together the Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows 10, which true to its name, is designed to serve as a dev kit for application authors to more easily test Windows 10 on Arm programs. The pint-sized PC is expected to be available this summer.Overall, while devices based on Qualcomm’s Windows-capable Snapdragon SoCs have been around for a couple of years now, neither Qualcomm nor Microsoft have put together an official development kit for the platform. And though the idea of a development kit is somewhat foreign in the PC landscape where there is no one PC platform (x86 or otherwise), Qualcomm’s Windows on Arm (WoA) efforts hail from the mobile world, where dev kits and reference devices are common. So in an effort to better meet the needs of WoA application developers, whom until now have been stuck doing testing on laptops and tablets like the Surface Pro X, Qualcomm and Microsoft are putting together a proper mini-PC for developer testing.At this point, Qualcomm isn’t saying too much about the PC itself, in part to give Microsoft something to announce as part of their Build conference later this week. However, given the timing of the announcement – as well as Qualcomm’s own comments on ensuring the dev kit remains affordable – it wouldn’t be too surprising to see the kit based around the new Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 SoC. Though the slowest of Qualcomm’s offerings, the 7c Gen 2 is also the cheapest option, and more than sufficient for basic compatibility testing.Meanwhile a side-shot of the PC at least gives us a basic idea of what to expect for I/O. The right side of the box ha a single USB port, along with a SD card slot and a third, unknown card slot (SIM?).The Snapdragon Developer Kit will go on sale this summer, with Microsoft selling the dev kit directly through their online store.

Over the last year, we've seen several B550 models, with the vast majority of these catering to desktop users and gamers looking for a cost-efficient option to use with AMD's Ryzen processors. Back in January, we reported that ASRock Rack had readied up a new B550 model with a more professional flavor, the B550D4-4L. The B550D4-4L features support with a broad range of AMD Ryzen processors, including 5000, 4000G, and 4000 Pro, with support for most 3000 series processors. Some of the board's core features include Gigabit Ethernet, support for 128 GB of DDR4 memory, and an ASPEED BMC controller for management over a network. We get to grips with the ASRock Rack B550D4-4L and see how it compares to other AM4 models in our latest motherboard review. It came with a few surprises as well.

Today we’re seeing an Ampere roadmap update: Beyond 128-core Altra Max perf reiterations, and announcing a Microsoft cloud win, the company discloses they’re switching from Neoverse to a new in-house full custom CPU microarchitecture starting in 2022.

Continuing their ongoing efforts to limit the Ethereum mining performance of their GeForce video cards – and thus make them less enticing for miners – NVIDIA today has announced that they are bringing their cryptocurrency hash limiter to additional GeForce cards. Already a fixture on the vanilla GeForce RTX 3060 since its launch, NVIDIA has begun incorporating their hash limiting technology and its associated security stack into newly manufacture red GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti cards. The new cards will appear on shelves later this month, and will carry the “LHR” branding to differentiate themselves from the first-generation, unthrottled cards.

Two competing products break out of the mold of typical consumer SSDs and combine two kinds of storage on one drive, with extra software to use that storage intelligently. Intel's latest Optane Memory caching drive and the first tiered storage SSD from Enmotus boost low-end QLC NAND toward high-end performance.

Once a year the promise of super hot potatoes graces the semiconductor world. Hot Chips in 2021 is set to be held virtually for the second successive year, and the presentation schedule has just been announced. Coming this August, there will be deeper disclosures on next-generation processor architectures, infrastructure compute platforms, new enabling technologies such as processing-in-memory, a number of upcoming AI solutions, as well as a deeper look into custom accelerators.

Conclusion: Powerful, but Power HungryAfter last week’s reveal of Tiger Lake-H, today’s results put things into context for Intel’s new high-end enthusiast mobile platform. The new design follows roughly 8 months after our initial coverage of the lower power “regular” Tiger Lake design and SKUs. The question is whether the new Tiger Lake-H can differentiate itself beyond just the notion that it’s a doubled-up core count variant of the lower power models.I’ll have to reiterate that our review today isn’t nearly as in-depth as usual – due to circumstances we’ve essentially only had 2 days’ worth of testing of Intel’s reference Tiger Lake-H laptop, however in this time I think we can come to some crucial conclusions as to how the design performs and where it positions itself against the competition.From a feature perspective, the new Tiger Lake-H platform seemingly delivers, offering up the necessary I/O and platform features to enable it to compete in the super high-end enthusiast and desktop-replacement laptop market.Obvious requirements for this segment are also unquestioned performance metrics, and it’s here where things become rather complicated for the new 8-core Willow Cove design.The area where the new TGL-H and particularly today’s tested Core i9-11980HK performs extremely well and is undoubtedly the leader among mobile x86 CPUs, is in its single-threaded performance. The new Willow Cove CPU cores alongside with the extremely high 5GHz boost frequencies achieved by the chip means that it manages to differentiate itself to even AMD’s more recent Cezanne Zen3 based Ryzen Mobile chips. While the performance lead isn’t large, it’s extremely solid at a 7-10% advantage throughout a very large number of workloads throughout our test suite.Where things are quite as straightforward, is the multi-threaded performance, as this is where we have to mention TDPs, power limits, and just the result of the Intel reference platform laptop we’ve tested today.The system, as delivered by Intel, came with a default maximum 65W cTDP/PL1 setting, which is the i9 11980HK’s maximum advertised power setting. Unfortunately for the SKU, the reference laptop’s thermal design was not able to keep up with the power output of the chip under this setting, and we had to revert the system to Intel’s advertised default 45W PL1 setting for the chip. The 65W mode was just not sustainable, with noticeable thermal tripping down to 35W as well as peak temperatures of up to 96°C. In our multi-threaded SPEC tests, we saw the 65W mode only perform 9% better than the 45W mode even though in theory it’s supposed to have a 44% larger thermal envelope.At 45W, the multi-threaded performance of the chip is well sustainable and reasonable for this kind of device form-factor and cooling solution, but here it needs to be put into context, particularly against the nearest competition, which is AMD’s Ryzen 9 5980HS. In our benchmarks, both the Core i9-11980HK and the Ryzen 9 5980HS battle it out, sometimes with the Intel chip coming ahead, sometimes with the AMD chip leading the results. The issue with this comparison though is that we’re comparing a 45W chip vs a 35W chip, and more often in compute heavy workloads such as rendering or encoding, the AMD chip comes ahead even though it has a lower TDP.Intel’s new 10nm SuperFin process had promised to finally outperform the mature 14nm node – while we couldn’t get to a definitive conclusion based on the initial 4-core Tiger Lake designs due to the smaller core numbers, here in 8-core vs 8-core scenario at their latest microarchitecture implementations, we can still see that Intel is lagging behind in terms of efficiency versus AMD’s 7nm CPUs.This leads us to the conclusion and question for whom the new Tiger Lake-H designs are meant for. The market in recent years has generally attempted to switch away from bulkier desktop-replacement laptops, but it’s precisely this product segment which seems to be what Intel is targeting with TGL-H. A thicker device with more robust cooling capabilities would certainly unleash the new 8-core design’s performance, but unfortunately, exactly where this performance would end up is something we unfortunately weren’t able to answer in today’s piece.The rest of the market generally is pivoting towards high-performance compact designs within that crucial <20mm thickness. While Tiger Lake-H here certainly delivers large generational performance improvements to previous SKUs in the H-series, such as Comet Lake-H, it doesn’t seem to be sufficient to quite catch up to the AMD alternatives which while maybe not as performant in every workload, do win it out on an efficiency basis.As Intel noted in its launch event, Tiger Lake-H is said to already have 80+ enthusiast designs in the works, likely to come out in the next few months to rest of the year. The final verdict on TGL-H will be in final commercial products, which we expect to see in the next month or two.

In a brief Securities and Exchange Commission Form 8-K filing, AMD this afternoon has revealed that it has once again amended its wafer supply agreement with US fab (and AMD fab spin-off) GlobalFoundries. Under the terms of the amended seventh amendment, AMD will see out its existing commitment to use GlobalFoundries through 2024, with the latest amendment setting purchase targets for 2022, 2023, and 2024. Beyond those new targets, however, the agreement releases AMD from all further exclusivity commitments to GlobalFoundries. AMD is now free to use any fab on any process node that it wants.As a quick refresher, the seventh WSA amendment, which was signed in January of 2019, set terms for the AMD/GlobalFoundries relationship through the end of 2024. Among other things, it set wafer purchase targets for the first three years of the agreement (2019-2021), leaving the last three years to be negotiated at a later time. Meanwhile, that agreement also began the process of decoupling AMD from GlobalFoundries by allowing AMD to utilize other competing fabs for 7nm and smaller, while GlobalFoundries remained AMD’s exclusive provider for chips made on 12nm and larger nodes.The latest amendment, in turn, essentially finishes what the seventh amendment started. In what AMD/GloFo are calling the “A&R Seventh Amendment”, the updated amendment sets wafer purchase targets for 2022, 2023, and 2024. The full details on these targets are not yet available, however according to the 8-K filing, AMD expects to buy approximately $1.6 billion in wafers from GlobalFoundries in the 2022 to 2024 period.As with the previous agreement, these targets are binding in both directions. GlobalFoundries is required to allocate a minimum amount of its capacity to orders from AMD, and AMD in turn is required to pay for these wafers, whether they use this capacity or not. For finished wafers, the agreement sets new, undisclosed prices. Meanwhile for any capacity AMD does not use, they will once again be required to pay GlobalFoundries a portion of the difference. GlobalFoundries will be also getting pre-paid for some of these orders in 2022 and 2023, though the 8-K form does not disclose by how much.Arguably the bigger news here is that, outside of AMD’s minimum wafer purchase requirements over the next three years, the latest amendment otherwise further separates AMD and GlobalFoundries going forward, as it removes all other exclusivity commitments. This leaves AMD free to place orders at any fab on any process node that the company wishes, as opposed to having to use GlobalFoundries for 12nm and beyond.Now with that said, the net impact of this change is likely to be limited as AMD was already free to pursue other fabs for 7nm and smaller nodes – which will be the vast majority of AMD’s needs over the next three years. But it does underscore how AMD and GlobalFoundries are slowly moving farther apart, as GlobalFoundries has left the race for cutting-edge manufacturing nodes.It should also be noted that the latest WSA does technically extend the agreement one last(?) time. The previous seventh amendment was set to expire March 31, 2024. Whereas the new amendment expires on December 31, 2024. However other than adjusting it to cover the full calendar year, there are no current signs that AMD plans to significantly extend their current agreement with GlobalFoundries. By dropping all exclusivity agreements – and especially in the midst of this chip crunch – it looks like AMD is slowly winding down its dealings with GlobalFoundries for high-performance logic chips.In the meantime, however, AMD still has three years and $1.6 billion in wafer orders to place at GlobalFoundries. According to a separate statement from AMD, these 12/14nm wafer orders will be used to fulfill orders for trailing-edge logic products, as well as for I/O dies for AMD’s current-generation Ryzen and EPYC CPUs. As with their trailing-edge prodcts, the company will still need to keep producing their current-gen products for a time, even after they’re supplanted with newer technologies. And, given the ongoing chip crunch, having a contractually-guaranteed supply of chips is no doubt a great relief to some executives within AMD.Still, it’s somewhat difficult to imagine AMD needing over a billion dollars in last-gen logic and I/O dies going into the next three years. In 2019 we remarked that “AMD's needs for such a large node (or GlobalFoundries' other specialized nodes) in the 2022-2024 timeframe are not nearly as obvious” and that remains true to this day. So it will be interesting to see if AMD places enough orders to use all of that capacity, or whether they'll end up leaving some of it on the table.Finally, GlobalFoundries also sent out a brief statement sharing their thoughts on the newest WSA amendment.

Phison's E18 is their second-generation PCIe 4.0 SSD controller, and it keeps them in the running for the fastest consumer SSDs. Micro Center's Inland Performance Plus is the cheapest way to get this much performance, if you live close to one of their retail stores.

Today ZTE is announcing the global launch pricing of the Axon 30 Ultra – starting at $749, the Snapdragon 888, 144Hz OLED, 3x 64MP camera phone with a striking design and reasonable form-factor seems like an attractive alternative in the market.

A few weeks ago silicon guru Jim Keller reached out to me with a very simple question: shall we do an interview about his new position at Tenstorrent, alongside the CEO? After about 0.2 seconds of thinking, I said of course. However, interviews are typically initiated by companies who want to talk about their product, and so I proposed a two stage interview.The first interview would be on the topic of Tenstorrent, the company Jim now works for, with CEO Ljubisa Bajic. Jim was actually the first angel investor of this AI startup back in 2016, which makes the whole thing very interesting, and now the company is supplying customers and showcasing silicon. As CTO, Jim is actively working towards the next generation product families, and his mere presence is certainly increasing the interest of customers looking at Tenstorrent’s solutions. We recorded that interview yesterday, a full 90 minutes, and are currently in the process of transcribing for AnandTech.The second interview was at my request – a 1-on-1 with Jim Keller, discussing his role in the industry, as well as his thoughts and perceptions about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Jim has two very well produced interviews with Lex Fridman freely available, as well as a number of industry talks. As part of this our interview, which is taking place tomorrow (Thursday), I would like to canvas the thoughts of the AnandTech audience about what they would really like to ask Jim.Jim’s talents are broad, from atom to device, but also the conceptual nature of how devices, corporations, and humans all intersect, as well as the research and thoughts behind what makes us tick. Jim has worked under a number of key revolutionaries, such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, making him better poised than most to talk about the parallels between abstractions in hardware compared to abstractions in the future of computation. This is a key opportunity to put questions to Jim beyond the simple engineering questions, which is why asking our readers what you would like to be talked about becomes such a broad topic.What should we ask Jim about? Please put your thoughts down below, and I'll merge them with thoughts from social media as well. We've scheduled 90 minutes or so for some open-ended light hearted discussion. Jim isn't able to speak to anything he's still under NDA about, which likely means any questions about his full at Intel won't be answered.The interview is taking place tomorrow, May 13. Deadline is noon May 13th UK.

Today ASUS is launching the new Zenfone 8 – a new device in the series, trying to carve itself a niche amongst smaller flagship phones. With a Snapdragon 888, narrow 68.5mm width and light 169g weight, starting at 599€, can ASUS cater to this audience?

Coinciding with today’s launch of Intel’s Tiger Lake-H CPUs for high performance laptops, NVIDIA is also using the occasion to launch their latest lineup of laptop video cards, the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti For Laptops. Based on NVIDIA’s newest and smallest Ampere GPU, GA107, the RTX 3050 series finally rounds out the rest of NVIDIA’s laptop offering, introducing a mobile video card that’s better suited for mid-power systems, and cheaper than RTX 3060 to boot. Laptops featuring the new RTX 3050 video adapters will be available today, with all of the major vendors set to ship laptops using NVIDIA’s latest laptop adapter in short order.NVIDIA’s xx50 tier of laptop video cards has traditionally been the company’s high-volume/low-price products for laptops, and the RTX 3050 family is no different. Laptops with the new adapters will start at $799, and will frequently crop up as a baseline option in Tiger Lake-H laptops. With Intel only shipping 32 EUs in Tiger Lake’s integrated GPU – just a third of how many are in Tiger Lake-U – Intel isn’t setting the bar for graphics performance particularly high in this generation of H-series CPUs. As a result, there’s a wide-open market for NVIDIA’s latest low-end graphics adapter to give these machines a boost in graphics performance.And, like the RTX 3060 For Laptops launch back at the start of the year, it’s actually the laptop market that is getting the newest silicon first. For the RTX 3050 series, NVIDIA is rolling out their new GA107 GPU. Cut from the same cloth as the rest of the Ampere family, NVIDIA’s 5 Ampere chip is the smallest and cheapest yet, fulfilling the company’s traditional waterfall launch strategy of rolling out successively cheaper and lower-power/lower-performing chips for additional markets. As an added kicker, these are the first xx50 tier products to have ray tracing – and thus qualify for the RTX moniker – so expect to see NVIDIA promoting that aspect rather hard.NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop SpecificationsRTX 3070

Ever since the launch of the first series of Intel Core 11 Generation Tiger Lake processors aimed at the ‘U-series’ 15 W market, Intel has teased us that there was another design being produced in the wings. While the Tiger Lake-U was built for portability, battery life, and integrated graphics, the Tiger Lake-H series would double the cores, and be the partner for premium mobile gaming as well as on-the-go muscle. Today is the launch of this new platform, and Intel is promoting over 1 million Tiger Lake-H processors shipped to partners and 80 devices coming to market.

In the computing industry, we’ve lived with PCIe as a standard for a long time. It is used to add any additional features to a system: graphics, storage, USB ports, more storage, networking, add-in cards, storage, sound cards, Wi-Fi, oh did I mention storage? Well the one thing that we haven’t been able to put into a PCIe slot is DRAM – I don’t mean DRAM as a storage device, but memory that actually is added to the system as useable DRAM. Back in 2019 a new CXL standard was introduced, which uses a PCIe 5.0 link as the physical interface. Part of that standard is CXL.mem – the ability to add DRAM into a system through a CXL/PCIe slot. Today Samsung is unveiling the first DRAM module specifically designed in this way.

Usually, when vendors release dual-socket motherboards, this is typically done on larger form factors such as extended ATX (E-ATX) and even larger ones such as SSB-EEB for server form factors. Supermicro looks to buck the trend and has recently listed a pair of Intel motherboards with dual LGA4189 sockets, designed for Intel's latest Ice Lake 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors.Both the Supermicro X12DPL-NT6 and X12DPL-i6 conform to the ATX form factor and have a very similar design. The key metrics include support for two Intel 3rd generation Ice Lake Xeon processors but also eight memory slots between the two, indicating that each processor runs in only quad-channel mode. This is important as some enterprise situations do not require the full memory bandwidth of eight memory channels, and thus having fewer physical channels on board helps with form factor as well as cost. That being said, this motherboard can support up to 2TB of DDR4-3200 ECC memory (1 TB per socket). Also, due to the size of the board, Supermicro recommends that only 185 W TDP processors maximum are used.

One of the most unique models on the Z590 chipset is the GIGABYTE Z590 Aorus Tachyon. While it functions as a 'relatively' normal day-to-day motherboard, the main focus is on extreme overlcoking. Building on the design of its previous XOC models, which are part of its long lineage of performance-inspired designs, the Tachyon has just two memory slots that have been designed to shorten the distance between the memory and the CPU for improved latency and overall performance. The PCIe slots are also designed to allow for massive GPU coolers as well as ancilliary power connections for graphics benchmarking. Other features include an extensive toolkit for overclockers, plenty of premium controllers such as 2.5 Gb Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, and a premium onboard audio solution. Aiming to offer a solution that extreme overclockers can push Rocket Lake to its breaking point, as well as plenty for less aggressive enthusiasts, the GIGABYTE Z590 Aorus Tachyon looks to take Z590 to the next level.

One of the elements of building a complete end-to-end solution means having all the components under one brand. The complexity of modern gadgets means that having everything made under one company is near-on impossible - especially with the wealth of IP and patents in every small segment of the modern electronic device. To facilitate the appearance of uniform branding, companies will often rebrand the components under their own name. Introducing the AMD RZ608, a Wi-Fi 6E 2x2 wireless module!

In the last few months we have tested the latest x86 integrated graphics options on the desktop from AMD, with some surprising results about how performant a platform with integrated graphics can be. In this review, we’re doing a similar test but with Intel’s latest Rocket Lake Core 11 Gen processors. These processors feature Intel’s X-LP graphics, which were touted as ‘next-generation’ when they launched with Intel’s mobile-focused Tiger Lake platform. However, the version implemented on Rocket Lake has fewer graphics units, slower memory, but a nice healthy power budget to maximize. Lo, Intel set forth for battle.

Over the years, Microsoft’s Surface team has become quite a driver of innovation in the PC space. While the original Surface Pro was mostly just a curio, Microsoft continued to iterate through designs, and eventually found their breakthrough product with the very popular Surface Pro 3 convertible tablet. Since then, Microsoft has been able to further build off of the Surface brand's success with additional and interesting designs, including the Surface Book with its detachable display, the Surface Studio all-in-one, and the Surface Pro X which pushes the Surface Pro design into a new, more modern take on the convertible tablet.But with a burgeoning brand, Microsoft has also developed some more conservative devices under the Surface family, and this is most evident with Microsoft's Surface Laptop lineup. The Surface Laptop, now in its fourth generation, has never felt like it was as innovative as the other designs, but the most conventional member of the Surface family does something that no other Surface device can: cater to a wider market looking for a more traditional laptop design. As a result, the Surface Laptop has become a quiet workhorse of sorts for the Surface family, filling the need for a traditional clamshell laptop while still finding just enough space to put the Surface flourish on the complete package.Today, we are looking at the latest generation Surface Laptop 4 to see how the changes under the hood impact the experience of Microsoft’s thin and light clamshell laptop design.

Every decade is the decade that tests the limits of Moore’s Law, and this decade is no different. With the arrival of Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) technology, the intricacies of multipatterning techniques developed on previous technology nodes can now be applied with the finer resolution that EUV provides. That, along with other more technical improvements, can lead to a decrease in transistor size, enabling the future of semiconductors. To that end, Today IBM is announcing it has created the world’s first 2 nanometer node chip.

One of the targets of the modern foundry business is to have a wide array of manufacturing process technologies. This enables it to cater to as many customers as possible. That includes logic, embedded memory, radio frequency, analog, high voltage, long life cycle, and now silicon photonics. As part of a partnership between GlobalFoundries and PsiQuantum announced today, new proprietary manufacturing tools have been installed into GlobalFoundries' most advanced facility in Malta, New York. This will enable GF to build silicon photonics to enable what could be a 1 million+ qubit quantum computer from PsiQuantum.

As part of Intel’s Partner Connect conference last month, AnandTech has learned that information has been provided to European, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) customers and partners regarding the current level of semiconductor supply through the rest of the year. Intel works closely with its key distributors and customers in each region to ensure that they have sufficient support to effectively sell to their customers, however the recent high demand for semiconductors has put additional strain on Intel’s ecosystem, perhaps more so than the high demand period for server processors a couple of years ago. In a discussion session led by Intel’s GM for EMEA, Maurits Tichelman, it was highlighted that May was set to be a testing time for distribution, with the rest of the year still subject to market forces. It was also mentioned that despite Intel’s decades of experience with demand surges, it is not invulnerable to substrate shortages.

One of the key commentaries about the current semiconductor shortages is around where exactly the bottlenecks are. The traditional interpretation of a semiconductor shortage implies that not enough silicon can be made, but over the last few months a number of companies have pointed to post-silicon production, such as testing and packaging, causing some of the issues. To the best of our knowledge, none of the companies affected by the shortages are specifically pointing at partner companies or specific supply chain areas where there is a bottleneck, however there have been a number of comments focused in the direction of packaging, substrates, and the specialist films involved for high performance compute.AnandTech has learned that at its Partner Connect 2021 event recently, Intel Chief Revenue Officer Michelle Johnston Holthaus expanded the dimensions to which the supply chain is causing the semiconductor shortage. During the event Keynote, as part of a planned Q&A session with the host John Kalvin (Intel GM of Scale and Partner Organization), Holthaus expanded on the commentary surrounding Intel’s silicon flow and where the supply chain bottlenecks are for Intel and associated partners.

At a news conference today, Intel has announced that its Rio Rancho campus in New Mexico will be getting an investment of $3.5 billion USD for an expansion of its current state-of-the-art facilities for the company to roll out its new Foveros packaging technology in volume for its own products as well as its customers. This comes on top of the $20 billion USD that Intel has committed to two new fabrication plants in its Ocotillo campus in Arizona for wafer production. In partnership with New Mexico state and local government, the new investment is expected to provide 1000 construction jobs over three years, 700 permanent technical positions at the company, and 3500 ancillary positions in the area when the facility is fully functional.

Today we're taking a look at ADATA's XPG Gammix S50 Lite, a mid-range consumer NVMe SSD based on Silicon Motion's new SM2267 controller. Among other notable features, the Gammix S50 Lite is the first mainstream-focused SSD that supports PCIe 4.0 – though as we'll see in our benchmarks that support is largely incidental, as the drive's performance is mostly the same as high-end Gen3 SSDs.

NVIDIA this morning has released a new driver set for their GeForce cards, version 466.27. And though it’s primarily for next week’s release of Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition and a couple of other games, this latest driver drop from NVIDIA also includes an update to their anti-Ethereum throttle, which they first implemented in their GeForce RTX 3060 cards. In short, NVIDIA has tweaked future RTX 3060 cards to require this driver (or newer), which will prevent them from using older drivers that can bypass NVIDIA’s hash limiter. As a result, RTX 3060 cards shipping starting in mid-May will once again be fully locked down against running Ethereum at full (native) speed.As a quick refresher, back in February with the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 family of desktop video cards, NVIDIA implemented a novel throttling mechanism to artificially limit the Ethereum mining performance of the cards. This was done in an attempt to make the cards less palatable for miners – who have infamously been buying up cards in what is already a supply-constrained market – and thereby ensure more cards made it to gamers. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, this strategy worked for less than a month before the company accidentally released a driver without the full anti-Ethereum code in place, making it possible to mine Ethereum at full speed in some cases.Now, having learned from their previous snafu, NVIDIA is taking another shot at locking down the Ethereum mining performance in future RTX 3060 cards by updating their hash limiter and preventing those new cards from using the older, broken development driver.

The latest flagship desktop processor from Intel, the Core i9-11900K, has been out for over a month, and we've been busy putting numerous Z590 motherboards on tests to see how some of the motherboard options stack up against each other. Up for analysis today is GIGABYTE's Z590 Aorus Master, which is one of its premium models and has plenty of high-quality features and controllers onboard. Based on the Aorus gaming series, the Z590 Aorus Master includes 10 gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, three M.2 slots, and large power delivery. From the specifications, it's a behemoth but with an attractive price tag when compared to the flagship Z590 offerings.

Among the items touched upon by AMD in today’s earnings release, CEO Dr. Lisa Su’s prepared remarks included a brief update on AMD’s GPU product roadmap.For those of you wondering where AMD’s mobile Radeon RX 6000 (Navi 2x) parts are, you shouldn’t be waiting too much longer. At the start of this year AMD announced that RDNA2 mobile products would be launching in the first half of the year, and on today’s call, Dr. Su has confirmed that this is still the case. At this point the company is expecting the first notebooks using its mobile-suitable GPUs to launch later in the quarter – which means that the hardware itself should be shipping to OEMs and ODMs soon.Overall, AMD is continuing to ramp production of GPUs in what continues to be a tight environment for 7nm production capacity at TSMC, as well as the packaging AMD’s advanced chips require. Today’s financial release didn’t include any further information on when additional (mid-range) desktop video cards would launch, but those are expected on a similar time scale as AMD’s mobile parts.

As Q1 earnings season continues to roll along, on deck today is AMD, who is getting the privilege of reporting some very positive earnings for the first three months of 2021. Firing on all cylinders – CPU, GPU, and semi-custom – AMD’s numerous product launches over the last several months are now paying major dividends for the company, as everything AMD is in high demand. And indeed, AMD is the poster child for the current chip crunch, as the company is making everything it can and even after selling over 3.4 billion dollars’ worth of chips in Q1, it’s still not enough.For the first quarter of 2021, AMD reported $3.45B in revenue, making for another staggering jump over a year-ago quarter for AMD, when the company made just $1.79B in what was their best first quarter in a decade. For 2021 it’s now all about setting (and beating) records for the company, as evidenced by the 93% leap in year-over-year revenue.