Server processors tend to be one of the most profitable businesses for AMD and Intel. Thus, investment groups and analysts closely monitor happenings in the server and data center world. A report from Mizuho Securities (investment bank) Managing Director Jordan Klein states that many upcoming changes on the server processor front are coming this year. Mr. Klein cites sources over at Insupur Systems, one of the most prominent server vendors. More precisely, Dolly Wu is the VP and GM of Datacenter/Cloud at Inspur. According to the report, AMD and Intel will change their strategy in the server market going forward in 2022.

As far as AMD is concerned, the company plans to increase the pricing of its EPYC processors by 10-30%. This increase should be a bit easier on the strategic cloud customers. The report also indicates that as the demand far exceeds the supply of EPYC processors, AMD increases prices and makes a "take it or leave it" offer, resulting in most customers accepting the increased costs. Another interesting tidbit from the report was the talk about Intel. The blue team laid out its strategy to launch highly-anticipated Sapphire Rapids Xeons in Q2 of 2022. However, it will maybe get delayed to Q3 of 2022. Intel doesn't plan to increase prices to remain competitive with AMD, so the server space will see Intel fighting to regain the lost market share.

Valve's highly-anticipated handheld gaming console, Steam Deck, is facing a two-month delay. According to the latest news from the company, the console will not be in time for holidays and will get delayed by two months to February. Suppose you are wondering what the reason behind it is. In that case, Valve says that "we did our best to work around the global supply chain issues, but due to material shortages, components aren't reaching our manufacturing facilities in time for us to meet our initial launch dates." These consequences are understandable, given the issues many companies face with the global supply chain and the overall scarcity of components still ruling the market.

If you have pre-ordered a Steam Deck device, rest assured that your reservation will get shipped accordingly, just with a two-month delay. Valve states that "Based on our updated build estimates, Steam Deck will start shipping to customers February 2022. This will be the new start date of the reservation queue—all reservation holders keep their place in line but dates will shift back accordingly. Reservation date estimates will be updated shortly after this announcement." For more information, please head over to the Steam Deck website.

Everyone and their mother expected NVIDIA to announce - if not a SUPER refresh to their existing graphics cards with increased memory sizes - at least the RTX 3080 Ti. That card surfaced as a planned NVIDIA counter to AMD's preemptive pricing of $999 on its RX 6900 XT graphics card (which to be fair, is in itself as abundant a card as unicorns this side of the galaxy). GamersNexus reported NVIDIA partners' comments on the indefinite postponement of the RTX 3080 Ti and possible SUPER derivatives of the RTX 30-series lineup. It's being said that NVIDIA decided (smartly, I would say) to ensure consistent supply of their existing lineup to sate demand, instead of dispersing its limited chip production across even more product lines.

This would result, I have no doubt, on NVIDIA only having even more SKUs out of stock than they currently do. Considering the market's current state of mind in regards to NVIDIA's lineup, this seems like the most sensible decision possible. TechPowerUp has in the meantime confirmed this information with NVIDIA partners themselves.

DisplayPort 2.0 was supposed to see its implementation beginning by the end of 2020, but that time has come and gone without a single DisplayPort 2.0-touting product on sight. According to VESA, the rollout has been delayed mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented the standards body to perform its PlugTest events, where engineers and hardware developers convene to discuss, tinker, and decide on the standard's implementation. VESA held multiple of these events per year, but none in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic; thus, the delay we are now witnessing surged.

VESA plans to have their first 2021 PlugTest event in Spring of this year, however, and aims to see products on the shelves later, and likely not before 2H 2020. The standards body said that there are, indeed, DisplayPort 2.0 monitors currently in-development, but that these too have been affected by the lack of PlugTests. DisplayPort 2.0 is an update to the current 1.4 implementation, and currently, there are no launched products (monitors, graphics cards, etc) that can make use of the new version. The new standard will technically support up to 80 Gbps max, nearly three times the currently available bandwidth in the DisplayPort 1.4 spec. DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0 also brings most of these capabilities to USB Type-C connectors via the USB 4.0 revision.

NVIDIA has launched its GeForce RTX 3000 series of graphics cards based on the Ampere architecture three months ago. However, we are already getting information about the next-generation that the company plans to introduce. In the past, the rumors made us believe that the architecture coming after Ampere is allegedly being called Hopper. Hopper architecture is supposed to bring multi-chip packaging technology and be introduced after Ampere. However, thanks to @kopite7kimi on Twitter, a reliable source of information, we have data that NVIDIA is reportedly working on a monolithic GPU architecture that the company internally refers to as "ADxxx" for its codenames.

The new monolithically-designed Lovelace architecture is going make a debut on the 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, a whole year earlier than Hopper. It is unknown which foundry will manufacture the GPUs, however, both of NVIDIA's partners, TSMC and Samsung, are capable of manufacturing it. The Hopper is expected to arrive sometime in 2023-2024 and utilize the MCM technology, while the Lovelace architecture will appear in 2021-2022. We are not sure if the Hopper architecture will be exclusive to data centers or extend to the gaming segment as well. The Ada Lovelace architecture is supposedly going to be a gaming GPU family. Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician, has appeared on NVIDIA's 2018 GTC t-shirt known as "Company of Heroes", so NVIDIA may have already been using the ADxxx codenames internally for a long time now.

Developer CD Projekt Red has announced that Cyberpunk 2077 is now facing another delay - this one of just 21 days. The game is now slated for release on December 10th, which gives the developer more time to work on the launch-day patch so that everything runs as smoothly as possible when the game is out in the wild and in the hands of millions of expectant gamers.

The developer clarified that the reason for the game's delay is the need to launch it concurrently on all platforms they've committed to - current-gen, next-gen, PC, and Stadia. In total, the developer is working on polishing and testing nine different versions of the game (PS4, PS4 Pro, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PC, and Stadia). This is just mind-bogglingly complex, as you might expect. We also have to take into account that CD Projekt Red has its own shoes to fill when it comes to final quality, and we must remember that first impressions make or break a videogame's reception in the current climate (remember Mass Effect: Andromeda or any other number of games). It seems that the cautious, methodical approach may be the best one for such a high-stakes release. I, for one, would much rather enjoy a game with less chances of game-breaking bugs than a rushed release - especially considering the amount of platforms the game is shipping for.

Intel 10 nm products have seen massive delays over the years, and Intel has built many IPs on the new node, however, not many of them have seen the light of the day due to problems the company has experienced with the manufacturing of the new node. That has caused delays in product shipments in the past, meaning that the time for 10 nm is just ahead. According to the latest DigiTimes Taiwan report, we have information that Intel is going to delay its Ice Lake-SP server processors manufactured on a 10 nm node. And it is going to be a whole quarter late according to the report. Instead of launching in Q4 this year, we can expect to see new processors in Q1 of 2021. It is yet unknown whatever the launch will happen at the beginning of Q1 or its end, however, we will report on it as we hear more information.

Update: DigiTimes has also released another report regarding server shipments. It is reported that server vendors are decelerating the shipments as they are making fewer orders in Q4 to wait for the new Intel CPUs. Judging by this move, the demand for these new processors is going to be rather high and the supply chain is preparing slowly for it.

CD Projekt Red has announced another delay for what most certainly is the most anticipated game of this year. Cyberpunk 2077, which had a release date set for September, had already been delayed from its original release date in April. Now, the developers have announced they need some more time with the game before they let it loose on soon-to-be-empty shelves and digital storefronts.

Fret not: the game is apparently in great development shape. The announcement that was made today makes it clear that the game is already technically finished: all the quests, cutscenes, skills, items, and functionality are already in place. However, the game itself has become so complex that CD Projekt Red wants these extra months to get balance and bugs just right for the games' release. This makes sense, as it seems that CD Projekt Red's systems will be intertwined in a much more organic way than they ever did in The Witcher 3, which could result in some emergent gameplay and consequences for the games' systems. CD Projekt has already started distributing the game to specific outlets and gaming media who will be releasing their previews after the Night City Wire event, set for June 25th (itself delayed from June 11th as a show of respect for the Black Lives Matter movement). To their credit, the team at CD Projekt keeps their promises once again: the game will ship. When it's ready.

Kojima Productions announced that in light of temporary closure of its offices, the PC platform release of "Death Stranding" has been delayed. The game will now release on 14 July, 2020. The delay was necessitated by the development teams falling behind schedule amidst work-from-home orders in Japan. "Following the temporary closure of KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS, we have had to delay the PC launch of DEATH STRANDING to July 14, 2020, to allow more development time amidst the current work-from-home orders in place. Thank you all for your patience and continued support," reads the brief statement by Kojima on its English Twitter handle.

Samsung's 3 nm manufacturing has already given fruits to the company, with the South Korean giant already achieving risk production at the start of this year. The company previously projected volume production of their 3 nm process to start in early 2021. However, in a report via DigiTimes, this goal may have slipped to 2022 in wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the news outlet, industry sources point this delay not to Samsung's fault in the manufacturing process, but to the entire logistics movement that has to be conducted in ramping up production of a new node. Impacts on logistics and transportation services are causing delays to deliveries of EUV and other critical production equipment, without which Samsung will be hard pressed to achieve its volume production goal. How this will ultimately affect Samsung's bottom line and revenue projections remains to be seen, but this won't do any favors to the company's high-density fabrication tech - especially if rival TSMC somehow manages to skirt these issues.

CD Projekt Red has come out on Twitter with an important announcement regarding the release of their highly-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 game: a five month delay which pushes release to September, instead of the previously-set launch on April 16th. CD Projekt Red said that "We are currently at a stage where the game is complete and playable, but there's still work to be done. Night City is massive - full of stories, content, and places to visit, but due to the sheer scale and complexity of it all, we need more time to finish playtesting, finishing and polishing. We want Cyberpunk 2077 to be our crowning achievement for the generation and postponing launch will give us the precious months we need to make the game perfect." Launching so late into the year does pose questions regarding launch on the next-gen Xbox Series X and PS5 systems; but the developer has already told us the game won't be available on those on launch day.

Game delays are usually taken with disappointment. This editor, however, would like to point out that CD Projekt Red has a proven track record in delivering genre-defining experiences. The Witcher 3 was such for RPGs and fantasy settings; the developer is certainly aiming for no less than the same effect with Cyberpunk 2077 and its FPS gameplay. I, for one, don't mind having a delay on such a game. I'd much rather have it in my hands perfectly polished rather than risk a new Mass Effect: Andromeda situation that could risk killing a new franchise and game world - especially one so interesting as that of Cyberpunk 2077. Patience is a virtue. I believe CD Projekt Red will do everything in their power to make it a game worth our while.

While many users were likely expecting AMD to launch their lower-tier alternatives B550 and A520 chipset solutions for their Ryzen 2 CPUs shortly after their release to the market last year, users who want to pair a more inexpensive motherboard have had to wait in the rain until now. At the time, industry sources pointed towards fabrication of ASMedia's B550 and A520 chipsets for the AM4 platform to begin shipping to motherboard manufacturers in Q4 2019.

Now, new reports say that production of these chipsets (simpler in features, and thus, in price, whilst also not requiring active cooling) will only begin in Q1 2020, which means likely retail availability (at least in significant volumes) in Q2 at the earliest. It seems that users will, for the time being, have to make do with the usually top-of-the-line chipset option for the AMD platform - which is, coincidentally, the one with bigger margins for AMD.

Intel CFO George Davis in an interview with Barron's commented on the company's financial health, and some of the reasons behind its rather conservative gross margin guidance looking forward to at least 2023. Intel's current product stack is moving on to the company's 10 nm silicon fabrication process in a phased manner. The company is allocating 10 nm to mobile processors and enterprise processors, while brazening it out with 14 nm on the client-desktop and HEDT platforms until they can build 10 nm desktop parts. AMD has deployed its high-IPC "Zen 2" microarchitecture on TSMC's 7 nm DUV process, with plans to go EUV in the coming months.

"We're still keenly focused on gross margin. Everything from capital efficiency to the way we're designing our products. What we've said though, the delay in 10 nanometer means that we're going to be a little bit disadvantaged on unit cost for a period of time. We actually gave guidance for gross margin out in 2021 to help people understand. 2023 is the period that we were ultimately guiding [when] we're going to see very strong revenue growth and margin expansion. We've got to get through this period where we have the 10 nanometer being a little bit late [as] we're not optimized on a node that we're on. But [by] then we're moving to a two to two and a half year cadence on the next nodes. So we're pulling in the spending on 7 nanometer, which will start up in the second half of 2021 because we think it's the right thing to do competitively," he said.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been delayed, according to developer Hardsuit Labs (Paradox Interactive makes a cameo here as publisher). The game, which builds upon the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines released way back in 2004, aims to provide a "deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness" that can additionally be played in either first or third person perspective. According to the developer, pushing for a Q1 2020 release would mean compromise in those areas, as well as in polish for the final version of the game.

Of course, one other reason for the delay might be the fact that Q1 2020 is already jam-packed with heavy-hitting franchises and games such as the hugely awaited Cyberpunk 2077, the remastered Final Fantasy 7, The Last of us 2, and Doom Eternal, just to name a few. Perhaps the developer (and publisher Paradox Interactive) saw history in danger of repeating itself with the release of the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which went toe to toe with Half Life 2, Halo 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - not the best time to launch a game. That decision eventually led to the shuttering of then-developer Troika Games. Expect the game to still drop around 2020, though no firm release date was set alongside the delay announcement.

In heartbreaking news to slayers prepping for the hotly anticipated addition to the franchise, DOOM Eternal, id Software announced that the game's release has been delayed to the 20th of March, 2020, from its earlier 22nd November 2019 release. In its announcement, id Software put quality-assurance as the main reason behind the delay. The developer assured gamers that the game will be worth the additional 5 months of wait. id also announced a few updates, namely Invasion Mode, a gameplay mode that allows you to "invade" another player's game as a playable demon, a Nintendo Switch version that follows the other platforms, and the availability of DOOM 64 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.

During Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, Intel's CEO Bob Swan took stage and talked about the company, about where Intel is now and where they are headed in the future and how the company plans to evolve. Particular focus was put on how Intel became "data centric" from "PC centric," and the struggles it encountered.

However, when asked about the demise of Moore's Law, Swan detailed the aggressiveness that they approached the challenge with. Instead of the regular two times improvement in transistor density every two years, Swan said that Intel has always targeted better and greater densities so that it would stay the leader in the business.

For Electronic Arts when it rains, it pours, as Battlefield V continues to experience a multitude of issues. The various controversies and problems that plagued the game leading up to its release were terrible enough. Now with numerous bugs such as audio issues to squash along with balancing of guns and gadgets, DICE remains unable to catch a break. They have now discovered yet another problem, this time resulting in the delay of their first Tides of War content update "Chapter 1: Overture." This particular update was to deliver the new Panzerstorm map, vehicle visual customization options, The Last Tiger War Story, and the practice range among other things. All this new content will still be released but when that is is currently unknown.

DICE expects the delay to be a short one, but no official date for the launch has been set.

Update (5th Dec, 10:00 UTC): The update is now live and distributing via Origin.

Update (5th Dec, 14:30 UTC): We have just posted a detailed performance review of this patch across all three RTX graphics cards, at three resolutions each. To summarize, the performance gains are big enough that the RTX 2080 Ti can comfortably handle 4K again, and RTX 2080 be capable of 4K with some riders.

In another delay to NVIDIA's RTX 20-series launch, the company has announced, via email to buyers, that delivery and availability of the graphics card has been pushed for one week. The card, which had an already delayed release schedule set to September 27th, now has a delivery date that's set between the 5th and 9th of October.

It seems that US customers will receive their cards closer to October 5th, via an express delivery mechanism, while customers in other parts of the world (example, as per the source, in Germany) will receive them within the 5th-9th timeframe, which could be mirrored in other markets. Online retailers seem to have no indication as to when exactly will the RTX 2080 Ti be made available, with no set delivery/stock dates having been confirmed until now. What exactly is causing the delay is unknown at this point.

Via a blog post on EA's website, Oskar Gabrielson, General Manager of DICE, made it known that Battlefield V would be facing a one month delay, moving its previously-announced October 19th release to November 20th. Gabrielson goes on to say that there are some core gameplay features - "gameplay tempo", "soldier visibility" and "player friction" that have been met with copious amounts of feedback, and that DICE wants to dive into these as it improves the game to "get it right".

Gabrielson ends his take with a promise to "(...) take the time to continue to make some final adjustments to core gameplay, and to ensure we really deliver on the potential of Tides of War", a live service which will replace the previous system of Premium Passes and expansion packs with an "evolving journey" - perhaps something in the like of Destiny's non-expansion content - read, events - updates. Battlefield V is one of the games that will launch with support for NVIDIA's RTX technology, by the way (in Alpha mode at GAMESCOM) - and the game was supposed to drop just a single day before NVIDIA's official September 20th launch for the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti graphics cards.

Semiconductor manufacturers have been historically bullish when it comes to the introduction of new manufacturing technologies. Intel, AMD (and then Globalfoundries), TSMC, all are companies who thrive in investors' confidence: they want to paint the prettiest picture they can in terms of advancements and research leadership, because that's what attracts investment, and increased share value, and thus, increased funds to actually reach those optimistic goals.

However, we've seen in recent years how mighty Intel itself has fallen prey to unforeseen complications when it comes to advancements of its manufacturing processes, which saw us go from a "tick-tock" cadence of new architecture - new manufacturing process, to the introduction of 14 nm ++ processes. And as Intel, Globalfoundries and TSMC race towards sub 7-nm manufacturing processes with 250 mm wafers and EUV usage, things aren't getting as rosy as the ultraviolet moniker would make us believe.

Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2 has just seen an announced delay on its launch window. Previously slated for a Spring 2018 release, the sequel to Rockstar's famed, highly successful western Red Dead Redemption thus sees a push back from its previously planned calendar release. Gamers who expected to pick up a game that might tide them over through the summer now see their options reduced - tangibly so.

In a blog post this morning, Rockstar attributed the decision towards a "more polish is needed" scenario, which really isn't all that unexpected, considering the scale the game is expected to have. Release dates were something sacred, back in the days; not so much nowadays, as the general consensus seems to be that it's better late and working, than now and broken. To somewhat mend users' broken hearts, Rockstar also released some screenshots alongside the announcement, as if taunting players with that which they now know will take them longer to experience.

Anthem, BioWare's upcoming always-on RPG that's being made as a Destiny contender, has been delayed until 2019, according to industry insiders (and as reported by Kotaku). The pressure on BioWare's team to deliver a killer co-op online shooter experience with integrated microtransactions' release is apparently being pushed to allow the team more time to avoid Destiny 2's and Star Wars battlefront 2's shortcomings. The tentative release data that had been previously advanced of Fall 2018 was apparently never a realistic goal, anyway. It remains to be seen whether BioWare can carve itself the halo co-op, single-player driven online game, as it strives to avoid missteps such as those that have already been hit, full stride, by other developers.

Intel is reportedly delaying the roll-out of its first processors built on its 10 nanometer silicon fabrication process, codenamed "Cannon Lake" for the third time since its inception. The first products based on the silicon will now come out only by late-2018. In the meantime, Intel could continue to ride on its new 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" processors, including the augmentation of an 8-core mainstream desktop (MSDT) part in the second-half of 2018.

Notebook manufacturers are less than enthusiastic about "Cannon Lake," and plan to skip it altogether for its successor, codenamed "Ice Lake," which could come out in 2019. It won't be the first time OEMs have done this, as Intel's 5th generation Core "Broadwell" architecture was mostly skipped over in the notebook and MSDT segments.

In an interview, AMD's Chris Hook justified Vega's delayed release due to a wish to increase available stock for gamers who want to purchase the new high-performance architecture by AMD. In an interview with HardOCP, Chris Hook had this to say:

"Part of the reason it's taken us a little longer to launch Vega - and I'll be honest about that - is that we wanted to make sure we were launching with good volume. (...) Obviously we've got to compensate for things like coin-miners, they're going to want to get their hands on these. We believe we're launching with a volume that will ensure that gamers can get their hands on them, and that's what's important to us."

It appears that AMD tried their best to increase production and stock volumes so as to mitigate price fluctuations upon Vega's entry to the market due to above normal demand from cryptocurrency miners. The jury is still out on whether Vega will be an option for mining due to its exquisite architecture, however. Still, this sounds as good a reason as any to delay Vega for as long as it has been already. Just a few more days until we see what AMD managed with this one, folks. Check the video after the break.

NVIDIA's flagship dual-GPU graphics card, the GeForce GTX TITAN-Z, was expected to go on sale later today. That launch is now delayed, according to a SweClockers report. The three thousand Dollar question is why. According to some sources, NVIDIA is effecting a last minute design change that sees a meatier cooler on the card, than the one Jen-Hsun Huang rafikied to the press at GTC 2014.

There may have been a last-minute realization at Santa Clara, that the card - as presented at GTC - may not cut it in the ring against AMD's Radeon R9 295X2, or at least it won't be able to warrant its vulgar $3000 price tag, against the R9 295X2's $1500; despite AMD's rather messy three-piece approach to its liquid-cooled product (the card itself, a radiator, and coolant tubing), and so NVIDIA could be redesigning the GTX TITAN-Z with an even bigger cooler, to facilitate higher clock speeds.