Atari has today announced that it has formed a collaboration with Playmaji, the company responsible for the Polymega retro game console. The new partnership will "include strategic initiatives that will provide support for Atari games on Polymega hardware and software and integration between Polymega and the Atari VCS." The Polymega console features a modular design that allows the owner to configure their unit to suit differing retro games (physical media) libraries. As part of the deal, Playmaji will introduce a new cartridge model that grants backward compatibility with Atari 2600 and 7800 systems. Wade Rosen, chairman and CEO of Atari stated: "Polymega's approach fills an important need in the market, providing a hardware solution that allows players to legally access classic retro content while respecting game companies' intellectual properties."

Bryan Bernal, chief executive officer of Playmaji chipped in: "This partnership is a vote of confidence in Polymega. This is an important step in the growth of our platform, and we look forward to working with Atari in the important space of retro innovation." Atari has been on an expansion kick lately, with its acquisition of retro/abandonware specialist, Nightdive Studios, announced a few months ago, as well as a Fig crowdfunding campaign. News outlets have reached out for a comment about the company's apparent minority investment in Playmaji. Availability of the modular Polymega console has been inconsistent going back many years—customers expressed their concerns about delays in 2019. Playmaji released an assuring message earlier today, likely in reaction to extra attention due to their new partnership: "Every single person with a system pre-order will have it in hand before end of year."

AMD and Bethesda have today revealed that Starfield will be best experienced on a Ryzen processor and Radeon graphics card-equipped PC. Team Red has been announced as the giant open world game's official graphics and GPU partner, but its Xbox Series hardware also gets a couple of friendly shout-outs. Todd Howard, director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, stated in the video presentation: "We have AMD engineers in our code base working on FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) 2.0 image processing and upscaling and it looks incredible. You're going to get the benefits of that obviously on your PC but also on Xbox. We're super excited and can't wait to show everybody more."

Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of its Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, added: "Making this game even more special, is the close collaboration between Bethesda and AMD to unlock the full potential of Starfield. We have worked hand-in-hand with Bethesda Game Studios to optimize Starfield for both Xbox and PC with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics. The optimizations both accelerate performance and enhance the quality of your gameplay using highly multi-threaded code that both Xbox and PC players will get to take advantage of."

Industry insiders in South Korea have informed news publications that NVIDIA has requested that SK hynix submit samples of next-generation high bandwidth memory (HBM) for evaluation purposes—according to Business Korea's article, workers were preparing an initial batch of HBM3E prototypes for shipment this week. SK hynix has an existing relationship with NVIDIA—it fended off tough competition last year and has since produced (current gen) HBM3 DRAM for the H100 "Hopper" Tensor Core GPU.

The memory manufacturer is hoping to maintain its position as the HBM market leader with fifth generation products in the pipeline—vice president Park Myung-soo revealed back in April that: "we are preparing 8 Gbps HBM3E product samples for the second half of this year and are preparing for mass production in the first half of next year." A new partnership with NVIDIA could help SK hynix widen the gulf between it and and its nearest competitor - Samsung - in the field of HBM production.

DFI, the global leader in embedded motherboards and industrial computers, has stepped into the electric vehicle (EV) market in recent years. Alongside VicOne, the automotive cybersecurity expert and the subsidiary of Trend Micro, they will demonstrate technologies related to vehicle software security application that enable more comprehensive network security protection for smart cities.

This year, to demonstrate the AI computing and vehicle-to-everything technology used in Connected Vehicles and Smart Poles, DFI has built an actual smart traffic intersection at the venue with road side units (RSU), digital signage, intelligent edge computers, onboard units (OBU), in-vehicle AI computers, and driver HMIs.

MSI, the world's leading PC gaming hardware brand, is excited to announce a new partnership with one of the world-famous video game companies, SEGA Europe Limited, to press ahead with their upcoming real-time strategy game—Company of Heroes 3.

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Today, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world.

This agreement follows our previous investments in 2019 and 2021. It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.

Today, Logitech G and Tencent Games announced a partnership to bring a cloud gaming handheld to market later this year that will combine Logitech G's expertise in hardware with Tencent Games' expertise in software services. The new device will support multiple cloud gaming services, and both companies are working with the Xbox Cloud Gaming and NVIDIA GeForce NOW teams, so gamers can play AAA games when they are away from their console or PC.

Logitech G and Tencent Games share a mutual vision of the future of gaming and are committed to ensuring the quality of experience comes together seamlessly to deliver on the exciting promise of gaming from the cloud. Cloud gaming utilizes data center servers to stream video games to consumers. There's no need to download or install PC or console games. Instead, games are rendered and played on remote servers, and users interact with them locally on their devices.

Intel and MediaTek today announced a strategic partnership to manufacture chips using Intel Foundry Services' (IFS) advanced process technologies. The agreement is designed to help MediaTek build a more balanced, resilient supply chain through the addition of a new foundry partner with significant capacity in the United States and Europe. MediaTek plans to use Intel process technologies to manufacture multiple chips for a range of smart edge devices. IFS offers a broad manufacturing platform with technologies optimized for high performance, low power and always-on connectivity built on a roadmap that spans production-proven three-dimensional FinFET transistors to next-generation breakthroughs.

"As one of the world's leading fabless chip designers powering more than 2 billion devices a year, MediaTek is a terrific partner for IFS as we enter our next phase of growth," said IFS President Randhir Thakur. "We have the right combination of advanced process technology and geographically diverse capacity to help MediaTek deliver the next billion connected devices across a range of applications."

As global market changes spur demand for augmented reality (AR) technology, there is an increasing need for innovations that combine the best technologies in CPU, GPU and machine learning into a single SOC (system on chip) to allow for the creation of the most demanding AR experiences while maintaining power efficiency.

Magic Leap today announced it is partnering with AMD on an AR technology solution that includes a semi-custom SOC to enable enterprise users to re-imagine and transform how virtual content and information is visualized and merged with real-world environments.

AMD at its Computex event shed some light on its IP partnership with Samsung. We already knew this was going to be a closer collaboration than most IP licensing deals, as AMD themselves announced this would be a semi-custom solution designed between both companies. AMD CEO Lisa Su described the technology to be embedded in the upcoming Samsung Exynos SoC as being based on RDNA2 - but this likely is just a marketing and clarity perspective on AMD's technology being implemented, since between the design of RDNA2 and the announcement of the Samsung partnership a lot of water has necessarily run under AMD's graphics IP bridge.

Lisa Su did however confirm that two key RDNA2 technologies will find their way into Samsung's Exynos: Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and Raytracing. This isn't he first time VRS has made an appearance on a mobile SoC - it's already been implemented by Qualcomm in the Adreno 660 GPU (part of the Snapdragon 888 SoC design). However, Raytracing does seem to be a first for the SoC market, and Samsung might just edge out competition in its time to market with this technology. more details will certainly be shared as we get closer to the fabled AMD-partnered Exynos release.

Samsung today at its Exynos 2100 launch event announced that its labor with AMD to integrate the company's RDNA graphics architecture onto Exynos chips has born fruit. It's unclear today on which set of technology this integration is bound to - whether RDNA, RDNA 2, or a combination of both - and actual products will only hit shelves by the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022.

Samsung has announced that the design-in for AMD's RDNA platform into the company's flagship Exynos products for the 2021-2022 timeframe have been successful, and that the first iteration of the design will see the light of day on the upcoming Exynos 2100. The collaboration has reportedly resulted in very good performance values obtained from their IP merger in May 2020. It seems we have a few months to look towards to before we see a Galaxy phone with an RDNA-powered engraving, though.