Hard drives are often considered obsolete or plain bad technology, but they still serve an important role when vast storage space is needed without breaking the bank. Fortunately, this technology is still continuing to evolve. We’ve seen HAMR from Seagate recently and now it’s Western Digital’s turn with a performance-enhancing innovation for a change. Performance is chief weakness of HDDs, but there are ways to improve it. Read more “WD introduces Dual Actuator HDDs reaching SATA SSDs speeds”
In recent weeks, information about the upcoming AMD A620 chipset and cheaper AM5 boards for Ryzen 7000 CPUs based on it began to appear. One of the hardware “leakers” shared the alleged specifications that the A620 chipset is supposed to have, and also what will be the other features of the boards built on the chipset. According to earlier reports, these could start selling or at least be revealed as early as this month. Read more “A620 chipset specs leak: With PCIe 4.0 but no overclocking”
Last week, news stories have emerged that AMD is artificially inflating prices of its processors or GPUs by deliberately underselling the demand. This news has spread a lot. And yet, the report is almost certainly nonsense born out of misinterpretation (or misunderstanding of economics). There’s already been an official denial issued, but the story keeps spreading, so we feel it’s appropriate to address it a bit. Read more “Fact check: AMD is not limiting shipments to inflate prices”
When PCI Express 4.0 first appeared in desktops in 2019, SSDs started to use it virtually right away. On the other hand, PCI Express 5.0, available from autumn 2021 on the LGA 1700 platform and from autumn 2022 on AM5 boards, has suffered a disappointing lack of any SSDs till now. But they are finally here now. Corsair has shown its first PCIe 5.0 module, which however raises some concerns by including a cooling a fan. Read more “PCIe 5.0 SSDs have started selling. The first models use a fan”
It was all the way back in December that the overall specs of cheaper Ada generation GPUs, GeForce RTX 4070 and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, became known. But it looks like they may be launched in a slightly different form than the company intended at the time. According to proven leaker Kopite7kimi, these graphics cards will have a significantly lower TDP than previous leaks have claimed, and could be quite low-power and efficient GPUs. Read more “RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 will be power-efficient, TDPs slashed”
A brand new CPU core architecture coming out is a big thing in the world of processors. We’ve been anticipating that from Intel for a long time, particularly in the Skylake era of waiting for 10 nm. Intel has since fielded new architectures in Ice Lake and Alder Lake, but there could be a major architectural revolution in a few years. The chips following Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake are said to be brewing something completely new. Read more “Intel Lunar Lake: new “Conroe moment” processor revolution?”
Last week, AMD has unveiled the awaited expansion of the AMD Ryzen 7000 processor family with “X3D” models with 3D V-Cache. It boosts performance in games, so these could be very good (maybe even the best?) gaming PC processors. AMD has disclosed the specs, but hasn’t given the availability date for these models. We already have this information though, perhaps inadvertently, divulged by the company itself on its website. Read more “AMD Ryzen 7000X3D release date revealed? (Update: Sadly not)”
In addition to the AM5 Ryzen 7000 processors with 3D V-Cache and mainstream 65W TDP models, AMD also announced a wholly new offering at CES 2023: the first processors with Zen 4 architecture for laptops. They are based on the all-new Phoenix APU, which is the first 4nm Ryzen chip and the first processor with an integrated RDNA 3 GPU, which will also clock up to 3 GHz. So it’s going to be a very interesting laptop platform. Read more “AMD launches Ryzen 7040: 4nm APU with Zen 4 and RDNA 3 iGPU”
One of December’s interesting news was the leak about Intel’s new Sapphire Rapids CPU platform for both high-end desktop (HEDT) and workstations. It’s three CPU platforms – but besides the 2S systems, we’re mainly interested in the two lineups for single-processor workstations: the pricier octo-channel Xeon W-3400 and the cheaper quad-channel Xeon W-2400 with fewer cores. But it looks like these two will be partially compatible. Read more “W790 board for Sapphire Rapids: 64L and 112L CPUs both supported”
Intel’s Raptor Lake processors brought one surprise: breaking the absolute extreme OC record. There were doubts it would ever happen, as today’s CPU architectures are not optimized for the high clock speeds at all costs like the past record holders Pentium 4 and AMD FX. But Raptor Lake and Intel 7 Ultra manufacturing process have shown they are capable of even more and have conquered a milestone never-beaten before, now. Read more “Breakthrough overclocking record: Raptor Lake achieves 9 GHz”
Yesterday, we discussed Intel’s leaked roadmap for 2023, specifically the plans for desktop segment. But in addition to the mainstream LGA 1700 socket, this roadmap also shows new workstation platforms. Alongside the most expensive server-derived platforms, it reveals the W790 platform that should be a more affordable option representing a successor to older HEDT products like the X299 platform, and is therefore of much interest to us. Read more “Return of Intel’s HEDT: W790, Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 processors”
November 3 saw the expected unveiling of a new generation of Radeon graphics cards from AMD with RDNA 3 architecture, a competitor to the GeForce RTX 4000, the already selling new GPU generation from Nvidia. In this article, we’ll discuss the chiplet design of the new 5nm AMD GPUs, the changes in architecture, and the new functionality and features that they bring. RDNA 3 has a lot of new stuff compared to the previous generation. Read more “AMD RDNA 3 details: architecture changes, AI acceleration, DP 2.1”
When the specs of the Ryzen 7000s first leaked, one thing was disappointing. These processors use 5nm process that is much more efficient, yet AMD has not exploited this potential. Likely due to pressure from Intel’s big.LITTLE processors, the company has increased power draw to raise multi-threaded performance and instead of 65W and 105W TDPs, the TDPs went up to 105W and 170W. But lower-power versions are fortunately in the pipeline. Read more “65W CPU with Zen 4 architecture is coming: AMD Ryzen 7 7700”
Ryzen 7000 with Zen 4 architecture is the first AMD processor to support 512-bit AVX-512 vector instructions. We’ve already discussed their benefits (bigger or smaller) here. But the Zen 4 cores support another instruction set extension that used to be Intel’s pride and joy, and now the roles have reversed a bit: VNNI. It seems to bring huge performance improvements in a number of apps, despite the limited 256-bit width of Zen 4 SIMD units. Read more “Why is Zen 4 so fast in Topaz Labs AI apps? In fact it’s Intel’s doing”
This week, AMD Ryzen 7000 processors and AM5 platform went on sale (we’ve already tested the 7900X). Intel will counter with their own new generation next month: the 13th generation Core “Raptor Lake”, which was unveiled on the same day, albeit with no physical availability yet. We now have definitive specs, as well as pricing. You’ll be pleased to know that most SKUs have not gotten more expensive, even though that was rumored. Read more “Raptor Lake is here: high speed with 7 Ultra node, no price hike”
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