ASUS has registered an unprecedented number of AMD Radeon RX 7000-series mid-range graphics card SKUs with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC)—we were somewhat impressed with PowerColor's new SKU count, as reported on TPU two days ago, but Team ASUS shrugs that off with ease. 64 new models based on Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT GPUs have been lodged with the EEC—it should be noted that some of these are unlikely to reach final market form. VideoCardz points out that ASUS has a track record of favoring NVIDIA silicon in terms of offering multiple models across budget, mid level and premium tiers: "ASUS has never released such a large number of cards for a single SKU. Their plans for Radeon models are notably more modest compared to their GeForce RTX 40 counterparts, and some of the listed SKUs are rarely used for AMD GPUs."

ASUS decided to keep things simple with its launch day selection of Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT cards—arriving in TUF Gaming form, with black or white color options. Their latest EEC registration provides an early insight into potential plans for an extensive expansion of Navi 32 GPU-based card models—with additional TUF Gaming options, as well as ROG Strix, Dual, and ProArt SKUs. ASUS has historically adhered to a tradition of picking black shroud designs for its ProArt card series, but the EEC info dump reveals white variants.

Pre-release Meteor Lake silicon has popped up again thanks to an Intel Corporation Client Platform getting submitted for evaluation through Geekbench 6.1.0. The latest database entry—discovered by Benchleaks—presents yet another Core Ultra 100H mobile CPU series engineering sample. This new candidate could end up being named "Core Ultra 165H" once it hits retail in finalized form. Team Blue seems to be playing around with its naming/identifying schemes ahead of an official unveiling—we hope to see something sensible presented at this month's Innovation event.

The tested Meteor Lake Client Platform featured a Core Ultra 7 1002H CPU mounted on an MTL-P LP5x T4 RVP board, with access to 12 GB of memory. Clock speeds of 3.4 GHz (base) and 4.988 GHz are mentioned on the Geekbench Browser page. A 6 P-Core and 10 E-Core configuration aligns this evaluated sample with the previously leaked Core Ultra 7 165H SKU. It achieved a single-core score of 2439 points in Geekbench 6.1, placing it above previously submitted Meteor Lake samples. The multi-core tally comes in at 12668, which trails slightly behind other compiled scores.

PowerColor has registered a significant number of AMD Radeon RX 7000-series SKUs with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC)—these enrollments are seemingly always a good source of pre-launch information. Naturally, the ever reliable harukaze5719 has reported on this latest filing. The most interesting new SKUs within this leak appear to be Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics cards lined up in Hellhound and Fighter flavors—perhaps an early hint of Team Red prepping different versions of existing RDNA 3 GPUs. Scott Herkelman, AMD's senior vice president, stated last month that no new RX 7000-series ASICs were in the pipeline. The already released Radeon RX 7600 8 GB GPU is the sole entry within its lower end gaming segment for the current generation.

Technical information is not included with EEC filings, so we can only speculate about the choice of Navi 3x GPU with these leaked XT variants. VideoCardz has questioned the slightly peculiar allocations of 10 GB and 12 GB VRAM specs: "(raising) questions about AMD's choice of GPU architecture. One possibility is that they are using the Navi 33 with unusual 96-bit and 80-bit memory configurations, although this seems counterintuitive as it would result in lower memory bandwidth compared to the RX 7600. The Navi 33 GPU is typically limited to a 128-bit memory interface." Alternatively, they also propose that a "heavily cut-down Navi 32 GPU" could exist that "grants 192/160-bit memory." SKUs based on AMD's unreleased Radeon RX 6750 Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) GPU are also visible within PowerColor's registration, also sporting 10 GB and 12 GB video memory configurations. Additionally, the Taiwanese graphics card specialist appears to be preparing a couple of white and SAKURA edition Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT cards.

An unreleased NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 SUPER Founders Edition graphics card was last spotted just over a year ago. A fortunate member of the Chinese NGA discussion board provided a close-up shot of a shroud bearing "super." A new leak gives us a full view of the RTX 3090 SUPER FE with prominent branding—KittyYYuko declared: "WTF, I have indeed heard of this leak before" upon posting this discovery to social media.

According to ITHome, the example from last year appeared to be a publicly released variant of "an unpackaged GeForce RTX 3090 Ti," and the latest finding seems to be identical. A seller, tbNick_dn86z, has created an entry for his GeForce RTX 3090 SUPER Founders Edition card with a value of 9999 RMB (~$1370) on Xianyu (Taobao's second hand market)—it is advertised as being "original and not modified, with a pure black casing." When confronted about identifying any apparent differences between the SUPER and officially launched Ti version, tbNick_dn86z confirmed that they are largely the same (minus external branding)—a matching device ID is shared across both variants.

Hardware leaker, YuuKi_AnS, has briefly turned their attention away from all things Team Blue—their latest leak points to upcoming server-grade processors chez AMD. A Zen 6 core-based 9006 EPYC CPU series, codenamed "Venice," is expected to arrive within two to three years along with an all-new SP7 socket—this information seems to have been sourced from an unnamed server manufacturer's product roadmap. A partial view of said slide also reveals forthcoming equipment powered by Intel "Falcon Shore" and NVIDIA "Blackwell" GPU technologies.

As reported a couple of months ago, older insider info has AMD using "Weisshorn" as an in-house moniker for Zen 6 "Morpheus" architecture, destined for Venice CPUs—alleged to form part of a 2025/2026 EPYC lineup. YuuKi_AnS proposes that these will utilize either 12-channel or 16-channel DDR5 memory configurations—thus providing plenty of bandwidth across hundreds of Zen cores. Altogether very handy for cloud, enterprise, and HPC workloads—industry experts reckon that 384-core counts are feasible on single packages. Naturally, a Team Red timeline dictates that Zen 5 "Nirvana" is due before Zen 6 "Morpheus," so EPYC 9005 "Turin(-X)" and 8005 "Turin-Dense" lineups are (allegedly) up for a 2024-ish launch window on SP5 (LGA-6096) and SP6 (LGA 4094) socket types.

Intel's advanced packaging prowess demonstration took place this week—attendees were able to get an early-ish look at Team Blue's sixth Generation Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors. This multi-tile datacenter-oriented CPU family is projected to hit the market within the first half of 2024, but reports suggest that key enterprise clients have recently received evaluation samples. Coincidentally, renowned hardware leaker—Yuuki_AnS—has managed to source more information from industry insiders. This follows their complete blowout of more mainstream Raptor Lake Refresh desktop SKUs.

The leaked slide presents a bunch of evaluation sample "Granite Rapids-SP" XCC and "Sierra Forest" HCC SKUs. Intel has not officially published core counts for these upcoming "Avenue City" platform product lines. According to their official marketing blurb: "Intel Xeon processors with P-cores (Granite Rapids) are optimized to deliver the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for high-core performance-sensitive workloads and general-purpose compute workloads. Today, Xeon enables better AI performance than any other CPU, and Granite Rapids will further enhance AI performance. Built-in accelerators give an additional boost to targeted workloads for even greater performance and efficiency."

In the weeks leading up to Gamescom 2023 all sorts of Nintendo-related rumors started to spew forth—the boldest being a public unveiling of their much anticipated Switch successor during the conference segment. This did not transpire—of course—with Nintendo choosing to showcase existing games and hardware on the trade fair floor in Germany. Post-event murmurs proposed another highly unlikely circumstance—claims posted to social media and on forums pointed to a top secret demo session of "Switch 2" hardware occurring "behind closed doors" at Gamescom, with an elite set of development teams in attendance. These rumblings were largely dismissed due to unsubstantiated information coming from less than reliable sources.

Eurogamer and Video Games Chronicles (VGC) reached out to their cadre of industry insiders to find out more—newly published articles seem to align with recent leaks. The former understands that: "Developer presentations for Switch 2 took place behind closed doors, with partners shown tech demos of how well the system is designed to run. One Switch 2 demo is a souped up version of Switch launch title Zelda: Breath of the Wild, designed to hit the Switch 2's beefier target specs. (To be clear, though - this is just a tech demo. There's no suggestion the game will be re-released." An insider familiar with the games industry in Spain alleged, a few months ago, that Switch 2 development kits had been delivered to a notable local development partner.

Six Intel 14th Gen Core Raptor Lake-S Refresh SKUs were prematurely listed by an e-tailer late last month, with the already leaked Core i9-14900K CPU model popping up again (a week later) via CPU-Z and Geekbench tests. This higher end K and KF product lineup is expected to launch at some point next month—according to the rumor mill. Team Blue could be preparing cheaper non-K models for an unveiling at CES 2024, but a leaker has decided to spoil the fun way in advance. YuuKi_AnS uploaded an allegedly extremely comprehensive list of 14th Gen SKUs, complete with full specifications to their X/Twitter handle. This grants an early glimpse of lowly Intel 300 and 300T models—both featuring a 2P+0E core configuration—these appear to be modern successors to (now retired) Pentium Gold and Celeron branded budget-friendly processor families.

It should be noted that the leaked slide (dated September 5) states that everything sitting within the table is a qualification sample (QS), therefore these chips are subject to change due to their pre-production nature. Parts of the table look a bit iffy—support for DDR5 memory varies across the range, while EEC memory support is also very inconsistent. Intel seems to be sticking with the usual set of three different die designs for desktop Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs—Tom's Hardware points out that: "the B0 die (8P-16E) powers SKUs from the Core i5-14600 and up, while the C0 (8P+8E) die targets models from Core i5-14400 to Core i5-14500T. On the contrary, the H0 (6P+0E) die, which is the lowest of the trio, will be inside the Intel 300 to Core i3-14100T chips."

Argentina's HD Tecnología site has obtained and published AMD's official data outlining the performance prowess of the soon-to-be released Radeon RX 7800 XT & RX 7700 XT GPUs, when stacked up against their closest rivals—NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB and RTX 4070 12 GB. Team Red could have "cherry-picked" some of this information, and presented resultant performance charts during the grand unveiling of their mid-range RDNA 3 cards at last month's Gamescom press event. HD Tecnología claims that the fuzzy batch of screengrabs were obtained from an official review guide, they chose to not share pages containing precise details of system specifications. An embargo imposed on media outlets is set to be lifted tomorrow, which coincides with the launch of AMD's Navi 32-based contenders.

The test system was running games within a DirectX 12 environment, possibly at maximum settings—general hardware specs included an non-specific AMD Ryzen 7000-series CPU coupled with DDR5 memory on unidentified AM5 motherboard. VideoCardz's abbreviated analysis of the numbers stated: "In summary, without ray tracing, the Radeon RX 7800 XT outperforms the GeForce RTX 4070 by almost 7% on average, while with ray tracing enabled, it maintains a slight 0.5% lead. Conversely, the RX 7700 XT exhibits 16% higher performance over the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. However, the presence of ray tracing can tip the scales slightly in NVIDIA's favor, resulting in an 8.5% lead over the AMD GPU."

An alleged Intel Core i9-14900K engineering sample CPU was tested out recently in CPU-Z, with results leaked onto the internet earlier this week—courtesy of wnxod—978 points in single-core and 18117.5 points in multi-core. This particular sample of the flagship Raptor Lake Refresh processor managed to surpass its predecessors quite handily—with 9.7% SC/8.4% MC gains over the i9-13900K (Raptor Lake), and an uplift of 19.4% SC/59% MC over the i9-12900K (Alder Lake). Thanks to the i9-14900K's Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) capability, it is able to hit a maximum 6.0 GHz clock speed (with P-cores) on 1.385 volts according to the leaked CPU-Z info.

Another example was put through the ringer via Geekbench 6.1.0 on Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit. The database entry popped up this morning, and several PC hardware news outlets were quick to pounce on the figures. In terms of single core performance, the benched Core i9-14900K achieved a score of 3121—blowing past a previous record holder—3089 set by a Core i9-13900KS CPU. Intel's 14th generation contender looks to be the fastest single-threaded chip out there, despite a less than optimal test system configuration—16 GB of DDR5-4800 memory on a Biostar Z790A-Silver mainboard, with Windows running a balanced power plan. The Core i9-14900K's multi-core score lagged behind its main rival—19032 versus 21678 (respectively). It would be nice to witness some nicer test builds materialize as we get closer to Intel's Innovation September event, and the rumored launch of K-series Raptor Lake Refresh processors around late October.

AMD's Zen 4 high-end desktop (HEDT) family could be closing in on a launch window—AsRock's European office has registered a number of motherboards with the EEC, and KOMACHI_ENSAKA spotted a model sporting a TRX50 chipset sitting in the middle of mainstream gaming Lightning and Riptide offerings. The "TRX50 WS" seems to be the first sighting of an AMD Threadripper 7000 "Storm Peak" series workstation board. TRX50 is presumably the logical successor to Team Red's existing TRX40 platform—the latter supports third generation (Zen 3) Ryzen Threadripper 5000 "Chagall" processors. AMD has not publicly published any details regarding next-gen Threadripper and Threadripper Pro product lineups, but several leaks have pointed to the new HEDT platform arriving within the second half of 2023.

A mid-August Geekbench database entry outed the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX—this 96 core/192 thread CPU scored 2095 points in single-core tests, and 81408 multi-core points—these results have it positioned as one of the fastest processors submitted to Geekbench. The test system was running Geekbench v5.5 for Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS). It is speculated that four (or more) models could be released with differing core counts: 16, 32, 64 and 96—please refer to the VideoCardz authored chart (below). Past rumors have SP5 and SP6 socket types linked to the "Storm Peak" family, with the introduction of DDR5 memory standard to Threadripper.

PerformanceDatabases has uncovered details relating to an alleged engineering sample of AMD's Ryzen 8000 "Strix Point" APU—likely insider sourced CPU-Z screengrabs from early last month revealed that the upcoming Zen 5-based laptop chip (in their words): "is built on a 4 nm Process and features the Big.Little CPU architecture with 4 Performance Cores and 8 Efficiency Cores. Both the P and E-Cores support hyper-threading. On the P-Core and E-Core, the L1 Data cache is 48 KB, while the L1 instruction cache is 32 KB. Each P Core boasts 1 MB of cache, and with E-Cores, it looks like there are 4 in a group, sharing 1 MB of L2 Cache. This setup is quite similar to Intel's design. Keep in mind, it's still in the engineering sample (ES) stage, so there's more to come. We'll keep you posted on any further updates!"

Another "AMD Strix - Internal GPU" example emerged late last week, this time in the form of a leaked HWInfo64 screen grab with some information completely covered up—the visible parts seems to point to this "Strix Point" APU featuring a core configuration as seen in the earlier leak, along with 1024 unified shaders. We can presume that the sampled Zen 5-based mobile APU possessing 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units (16 × 64 = 1024). Other details include a 45 W TDP rating, and the socket type being FP8 (as utilized by current Ryzen 7040U and 7040H(S) mobile SoCs). The 512 MB GDDR6 memory configuration is very likely an error—according to HWInfo64, the tested system was fitted with 32 GB of LPDDR5 memory. "Strix Point" looks to be the logical successor (in 2024) to AMD's current "Phoenix" lineup of mobile processors, as featured in gaming handhelds and laptops. PC hardware enthusiasts are expressing excitement about the upcoming APU series wielding impressive iGPU performance, with the potential to rival modern discrete mobile solutions.

ITHome has picked up on interesting retail activity in China, where AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT graphics cards are deeply discounted. This seems to correspond to a possible discontinuation of Team Red's Navi 23 XT GPU—a Board Channel source stated: "AMD factory has stopped production of a certain GPU. At the present time, shipments from all AIB brands have stopped with inventory being cleared. AMD has stopped production for the Radeon RX 6650 XT, and nearly all brands will have their inventory cleared by the end of September." Board partners in China appear to running sales promotions, with cards reduced from an original MSRP of 3099 RMB ($425) down to as low as 1739 RMB (~$240), although these adjusted prices are mostly hovering around the 2000 RMB (~$275) mark.

AMD recently declared that its Radeon RX 7000 desktop lineup is now complete, following the unveiling of mid-range RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT cards at last week's Gamescom trade fair in Cologne, Germany. Their low-to-mid tier Radeon RX 7600 card, based on the Navi 33 XL GPU, is the sole successor to multiple RDNA 2 predecessors (RX 6600, 6600 XT & 6650 XT). AMD and its board partners are likely prioritizing larger scale RDNA 3 production, so the latest batch of GPU industry insider information is not all that surprising. Tom's Hardware points out that: "there is hardly any point for AMD to continue production of Navi 23. The company's RDNA 3-based Navi 33 GPU integrates 13.3 billion transistors, has 2048 SPs, and performs better than its direct predecessor. Meanwhile, it has a smaller die size (204 mm² vs 237 mm²) and is made on TSMC's N6 process technology (as opposed to N7 in the case of Navi 23), so it may well be cheaper to produce."

Lenovo's Legion Go handheld gaming system was uncovered by Windows Report over a week ago following a series of minor leaks emerging throughout the summer. Key points of discovery included an AMD Ryzen Z1 APU, detachable Joy-Con-esque controllers and Windows 11 being the operating system of choice. The news site has today divulged even more details, thanks to a trusted anonymous source sending in an official product press release. It seems that Lenovo is planning to unveil the Go and matching accessories (AR glasses & headphones) at next month's IFA 2023 trade fair in Berlin. The handheld gaming device could launch in early October, with the base model starting at $799 (MSRP).

According to the leaked document, Lenovo's Legion Go is specced with an 8.8 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel 144 Hz refresh rate IPS LCD touchscreen display—its maximum brightness is allegedly rated at 500 nits. AMD's Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU—that debuted with the ASUS ROG Ally—appears to run the show. The leak also indicates that 16 GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory is soldered to the Go's mainboard, alongside a user-replaceable PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 2242 SSD. The document infers that Lenovo is prepping variants with 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB SSD storage configurations.

AMD is aiming to launch its Ryzen 8000 desktop CPUs, codenamed "Granite Ridge," at some point next year. The next generation Zen 5 core microarchitecture is expected to arrive alongside (Navi) RDNA 3.5 iGPU cores according to the last batch of Team Red product roadmaps. Today, hardware tipsters Olrak29_ and Kepler_L2 have made claims on social media that part of the Ryzen 7000 CPU legacy will continue with the succeeding desktop processor lineup—we already know that Granite Ridge will exist as a Socket AM5 package, but today's leak proposes that these next-gen chips are lined up to utilize the same IO die as sported by AMD's current Zen 4 desktop family.

These new rumors suggest that the "reused" Ryzen 7000 IOD (I/O Die) chiplet will grant the familiar allocation of 28 PCIe Gen 5 lanes, memory controllers, USB functions, plus RDNA 2 iGPU cores. Wccftech points out that: "...interestingly, AMD lists the Ryzen 7000 "desktop" CPUs with Navi 3.0 support whereas the Radeon 710M iGPU in fact is based on the RDNA 2 graphics core. The next-gen lineup was mentioned to support the newest RDNA 3.5 GPU core which will be coming to the Strix APU family next year but that isn't the case either." The article proposes that "RDNA 3.5 GPU cores on the AM5 platform" could arrive with the advent of upcoming Ryzen APUs—namely 6 nm Rembrandt (6000G) and 4 nm Phoenix (7000G) desktop solutions.

Intel 14th Gen Core CPU series leaks continue to emerge this week—MSI let slip an NDA slide during a livestream a few days ago, and now a retail outlet in the Ukraine has listed six Raptor Lake-S Refresh SKUs on its online store, as spotted by the ever watchful momomo_us. The placeholder product pages that have popped up on Telemart seemingly provide us with yet another look at SKU names, basic specifications, cache sizes, as well as maximum clock speeds. These appear to reaffirm information gleaned from previous leaks regarding 14th generation K and KF models.

Intel's Innovation 2023 event is set to take place on September 19 to 20—where Team Blue is expected to make a big presentation on Raptor Lake Refresh processor ranges (as well as Meteor Lake), so it is somewhat surprising to see retail listings appear well in advance of next month's official announcements, and the anticipated 14th Gen Core K-series product launch in October.

An interesting system popped up on Geekbench Browser early this morning—on initial inspection the evaluated high-end PC was sporting hardware of 2021-vintage, but its graphics card was observed as an outlier. The Intel Core i9-12900K (Alder Lake-S) CPU was sitting on an MSI MPG Z690 Carbon WiFi mainboard, with 64 GB of DDR5 SDRAM (3990 MT/s). The benchmarked computer was running Microsoft Windows 11 Pro (64-bit) on a power saver (economizador) plan. According to the entry's OpenCL information section we are looking at an attached GPU device called "GFX1102 ID," the board name is revealed to be "AMD Radeon PRO W7600" with 8 GB of VRAM. This lower-end alternative to existing (RDNA 3) Radeon Pro models—W7900 (48 GB) and W7800 (32 GB)—could be nearing a public launch.

This information aligns the workstation-oriented card with AMD's Navi 33 GPU—the same GFX1102 designation appears within TPU's database entry (look at the Shader ISA (GFX11.0) graphics feature). VideoCardz reckons that the leaked Radeon PRO W7600 is closely related to AMD's mobile Radeon RX 7700/7600 series—based on Navi 33, due to their matching IDs. Their report proposed: "Based on this data, the GPU is expected to have a clock speed of 1940 MHz. Comparatively, this is 310 MHz lower than the Radeon RX 7600 gaming model, which refers to its Game Clock of 2250 MHz. The Compute Unit field refers to "Workgroup Processor/WGP" cluster, so the card features 32 Compute Units or 2048 Stream Processors, the same configuration as the RX 7600. The card is listed with 8 GB of memory, but it remains uncertain whether this model will support ECC (error correction), a feature found in the W7900/W7800 models. It's important to note that the W6600 did not utilize this type of memory."

PlayStation 5-related rumors have been flowing over the past week—Zuby_Tech was reportedly the main source responsible for leaking out Project Q footage, but the tipster has turned to his attention to an alleged new version of the host system. Yesterday's tweet makes reference to a refreshed PlayStation 5 model—the "CFI-1300 series"—with a revised 5 nm APU. The late-2020 launch model (CFI-1200) sported a 7 nm chipset, while 2022's die shrink granted the CFI-1202 series with a 6 nm SoC.

The tipster thinks that Sony will be dropping the PS5's liquid metal cooling system for its next iteration, thanks to a central 5 nm part offering greater efficiency and reduced thermal output. Previous reports have predicted that this refreshed "modular model" is marked for a late 2023 release window. Sony has been running a summer price reduction campaign—could this marketing incentive be clearing the way—i.e selling off older stock—in anticipation of the refreshed model's arrival? "CFI-1300" should not be confused with the heavily rumored PlayStation 5 Pro variant—Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson has reiterated multiple times that this major hardware upgrade is still a long way off from launching.

AMD's Chinese office has announced that company representatives will be present at this year's ChinaJoy event—their Weibo social media account confirmed that: "from July 28th to July 31st, 2023, in Hall E6 of Shanghai New International Expo Center, super hardcore and mega cool AMD hardware will be on the scene, bringing you a fast and fun gaming experience. We are looking forward to meeting you!" ITHome thinks that the timing of this announcement points to a possible official unveiling of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) on the showroom floor.

The publication has cited a tip provided by the one and only momomo_us—the Chinese market exclusive Golden Rabbit Edition will be released tomorrow, which lines up with ChinaJoy 2023's kick off time. Recent leaks have revealed that the 84 Compute Units + 16 GB configured graphics card is a new SKU, sitting below the RX 7900 XT in Team Red's Radeon RDNA 3 hierarchy. It seems to be "built on the mysterious Navi 31 + Navi 32 hybrid GPU." Additionally, ITHome reports that AMD has partnered up with ASUS, and will be exhibiting ROG Moba 7 Plus series laptops (sporting Ryzen Dragon Range APUs) at the Shanghai event.

Apple introduced its 15‑inch MacBook Air at June's WWDC23 event—the giant multinational technology had taken feedback from its customer base, and followed through by rolling out a larger version of the existing M2-based 13-inch model. That appeasement could be a wasted effort, given the latest rumors emerging from Asia. DigiTimes has gathered information from sources within Apple's supply chain—they claim that "the 15-inch MacBook Air...reportedly didn't meet customer demand expectations. There are even calls for the supply chain to put shipments on hold."

The 15-inch MacBook Air's shipment volume for July is reportedly 50% short of the company's original projection, with a broad downturn in the global notebook market factoring in as a reason for sluggish sales. The model's $1299 starting price appears to be quite reasonable at first glance, but the entry point only gives you a spec consisting of non-upgradable 8 GB (unified) RAM and 256 GB solid state storage. A discerning buyer is semi-forced to shell out closer to $2000 for a more competitive configuration, comparable to the closest Window 11 slimline laptops. The high asking prices, on top of a mixed reception around launch time have done the 15-inch MacBook Air few favors. Apple enthusiasts are probably saving up and waiting for the arrival of upcoming M3 chipset-equipped models. DigiTimes reckons that an "upcoming announcement" regarding a next-gen MacBook Pro is due very soon.

According to a short article released by ITHome, Machenike, a popular Chinese PC hardware company displayed several interesting Intel CPU-based systems at the Bilibili World exhibition (in Shanghai). The manufacturer confirmed (to the reporter) that their next generation hardware will be hitting the market within the next three months, which coincides with the rumored launch of Intel 14th Gen Core Raptor Lake-Refresh desktop K-series SKUs.

Exhibited material implied that Machenike's upcoming PCs—arriving in the form of a "LIGHT-05" desktop tower, mini models and laptops—could be among the first batch of systems to support PCIe Gen 5 storage (as standard). Potential buyers could be attracted to next-gen machines offering access to faster NVMe SSD, on top of rumored higher core counts provided by the Raptor Lake Refresh. ITHome believes that a number of the mini-PCs at Machenike's booth were already running on Raptor Lake Refresh or (Core rebrand) Meteor Lake processors.

Activision is reportedly putting Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 through its paces as an alpha test, and is struggling with the containment of leaks. DCMA takedowns have done little to stop the flow, and the publisher has started teasing the much anticipated 2023 CoD release. Licensing partners seem to be taking a lax attitude with regards to NDAs—new Monster Energy promotional material has been photographed in the wild. Revised energy drink brand packaging features a prominent series character—Captain Price—with the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III logo emblazoned atop the famous protagonist.

Monster Energy has a documented history of offering XP and accessory codes as part of video game tie-in offers, so that legacy is all but confirmed for continuation with this year's alleged mainline CoD entry. Sledgehammer Games is reportedly the main development house working on CoD:MWIII, and various news outlets have claimed that a November launch window is being targeted by the game's publisher. Activision has taken a good humored approach when dealing with the latest leak—their @CallofDuty social media account's response stated: "Whew. Mondays. Anyone have an energy drink they can spare?"

Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson has picked up some interesting insider knowledge about the long rumored PlayStation 5 Pro gaming console—his (side hustle) Key to Gaming article theorizes that a project codenamed "Trinity" has been in-progress since early 2022. Sony is apparently sticking to its tradition of using Matrix themed codenames for internal hardware projects—PlayStation 4 Pro was referred to as "Neo," and PlayStation VR's alias was "Morpheus." His inside sources claim that Sony has been showing off Trinity prototype units to game development studios, with refreshed dev kits lined up for the "majority" of interested parties by November 2023.

Henderson's sources provided scant info about Trinity's specs and performance goals: "Although the Pro's specs were difficult to pin down, (admittedly) due to my lack of technological prowess, sources have stated that Trinity with have 30 WGP and 18000mts memory. As for the consoles performance targets and as to be expected, the PlayStation 5 Pro will be targeting improved and consistent FPS at 4K resolution, a new "performance mode" for 8K resolution, and accelerated ray tracing. Whether or not a PlayStation 5 Pro console is desired enough in the current market remains to be seen, but as of writing, the PlayStation 5 Pro is in development and is targeting a November 2024 release date." The leaked information has been interpreted several ways by different outlets—mostly focusing on the improved AMD RDNA-powered GPU. I have included Zuba_Tech's updated spec sheet (see below), which seems to be a bit on the fanciful side of things (proposing 72 CUs). Others have theorized that the revised GPU could offer twice the performance of the base PS5 model's Oberon RDNA 2-based GPU (36 CUs).

Phoronix has recently uncovered an intriguing Linux update, with kernel improvements being prepared to handle greater microcode payloads—they believe that "future AMD CPUs will be getting larger microcode patches." The timing could suggest that upcoming Zen 5 processors will be likely candidates to meet new requirements: "Right now the Linux kernel has a maximum microcode patch size for AMD CPUs that is three times the kernel's page size (typically 4K). But with a patch (published on July 20) that will "increase substantially" to eight times the page size. The increase is intentionally quite a magnitude larger in order to avoid future patches further having to bump the patch size limit in later generations." Earlier this month, some GitHub entries demonstrated that AMD engineers had patched Linux 6.5 with updates for "Family 26" (1Ah) CPU enablement," which Phoronix believes to be for next-gen platforms (Zen 5): "It's also not elaborated on why the CPU microcode size will be increasing. In any event the simple patch to bump the AMD CPU microcode limit is now out for review. It's also marked for back-porting to existing stable kernel versions."

The Intel Arc A580 GPU was revealed alongside its Alchemist siblings—A380 A750 and A770—last year, but remains the only one out of that lineup to not have reached the retail market. Things have been quiet on the Intel Arc 5-series "Advanced Gaming" front for a while now—TechPowerUp's GPU-Z utility was updated with support for the A580 last September, and an evaluation sample was benched in Ashes of the Singularity a month prior to that. A supposed sample Intel Arc A580 was recently tested via a Vulkan-based renderer in GFXBench 5.0, perhaps not the best platform to gauge PC performance on.

Has an owner of a rare curiosity unit chosen to bench the unreleased GPU, or is a manufacturer evaluating a sample with a very delayed product launch in mind? The test results are not all that impressive, with the A580 performing poorly compared to the range-topping Arc A770 (placed in Intel's "high performance gaming" tier), although it does much better than the A380 (not a big boast). The likely prototype nature of the evaluated card or immature state of drivers could be to blame for shortcomings in GFXBench 5.0.