An investigative, generation-upon-generation review from golem.de paints an extremely impressive picture for AMD's efforts in iterating upon their original Zen architecture. While the first generation Zen achieved a sorely needed inflection point in the red team's efforts against arch-rival Intel and its stranglehold in the high-performance CPU market, AMD couldn't lose its vision on generational performance improvements on pain of being steamrolled (pun intended) by the blue giant's sheer scale and engineering prowess. However, perhaps this is one of those showcases of "small is nimble", and we're now watching Intel slowly changing its posture, crushed under its own weight, so as to offer actual competition to AMD's latest iteration of the Zen microarchitecture.

The golem.de review compares AMD's Zen, Zen+, Zen 2 and Zen 3 architectures, represented by the Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 2700X, Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 7 5800X CPUs. Through it, we see a generational performance increase that mostly exceeds the 20% performance points across every iteration of Zen when it comes to both gaming and general computing workloads. This generational improvement hits its (nowadays) most expressive result in that AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X manages to deliver 89% higher general computing, and 84% higher gaming performance than the company's Zen-based Ryzen 7 1800X. And this, of course, ignoring performance/watt improvements that turn the blue giant green with envy.

As a world-leading motherboards brand, MSI commits to deliver gamers and creators genuine pleasure, and will keep moving. BIOS update is always an exhilarating news for most users, so MSI keeps announcing relative news for our users. From this week, MSI will release AMD AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.1.0.0 Patch D BIOS for all AMD 400-series motherboards and it is expected to be completely uploaded before the end of 2020.

All AMD 400-Series Motherboards Comprehensively Support Ryzen 5000 CPU with AMD AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.1.0.0 Patch D
The purpose to keep releasing BIOS update is not only for increasing motherboards performance but also for better compatibilities. After AMD launches Ryzen 5000 CPU, most are inquisitive about whether Ryzen 5000 CPU is compatible with AMD previous platforms. MSI realizes that users are eager to enhance their motherboards with the latest CPU; therefore, we are determined to offer AGESA 1.1.0.0 Patch D for all AMD 400-series motherboards. With AGESA 1.1.0.0 Patch D, your 400-series motherboards can support Ryzen 5000 CPU and achieve its true performance. Since there are some technical issues on AGESA 1.1.8.0, it will not be released. Thus, AGESA 1.1.0.0. Patch D is the finest choice to update your motherboards.

Intel and Argonne National Laboratory are collaborating on the co-design and validation of exascale-class applications using graphics processing units (GPUs) based on Intel Xe-HP microarchitecture and Intel oneAPI toolkits. Developers at Argonne are tapping into Intel's latest programming environments for heterogeneous computing to ensure scientific applications are ready for the scale and architecture of the Aurora supercomputer at deployment.

"Our close collaboration with Argonne is enabling us to make tremendous progress on Aurora, as we seek to bring exascale leadership to the United States. Providing developers early access to hardware and software environments will help us jumpstart the path toward exascale so that researchers can quickly start taking advantage of the system's massive computational resources." -Trish Damkroger, Intel vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing.

It's only tomorrow that reviewers will take the lids off AMD's latest and greatest Navi-powered graphics cards, but it's hard to keep a secret such as this... well... secret. Case in point: Videocardz has accessed some leaked slides from the presentation AMD has given to its partners, and these shed some light on what raytracing performance users can expect from AMD's RX 6800 XT, the card that's meant to bring the fight to NVIDIA's RTX 3080 graphics card. AMD's RDNA2 features support for hardware-accelerated raytracing from the get go, with every CU receiving on additional hardware piece: a Ray Accelerator. As such, the RX 6800 XT, with its 72 enabled CUs, features 72 Ray Accelerators; the RX 6800, with its 60 CUs, features 60 of these Ray Accelerators.

The RX 6800 XT was tested in five titles: Battlefield V, Call of Duty MW, Crysis Remastered, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. At 1440p resolution with Ultra Settings and DXR options enabled according to the game, AMD claims an RX 6800 XT paired with their Ryzen 9 5900X can deliver an average of 70 FPS on Battlefield V; 95 FPS on Call of Duty MW; 90 FPS in Crysis Remastered; 67 FPS in Metro Exodus; and 82 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. These results are, obviously, not comparable to our own results in previous NVIDIA RTX reviews; there's just too many variables in the system to make that a worthwhile comparison. You'll just have to wait for our own review in our normalized test bench so you can see where exactly does AMD's latest stand against NVIDIA.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

AMD's Executive Vice President Rick Bergman in an interview with The Street shed some light on the company's future plans for Zen 4 and RDNA 3, even as we are still reeling from (or coming in to) Zen 3 and RDNA 2's launches. Speaking on RDNA 3, Rick Bergman mentioned the company's commitment to achieve the same 50% performance-per-watt increase they achieved with RDNA 2, and had some interesting takes on the matter of why this is actually one of the most important metrics:

Rick BergmanIt just matters so much in many ways, because if your power is too high -- as we've seen from our competitors -- suddenly our potential users have to buy bigger power supplies, very advanced cooling solutions. And in a lot of ways, very importantly, it actually drives the [bill of materials] of the board up substantially. This is a desktop perspective. And invariably, that either means the retail price comes up, or your GPU cost has to come down. We focused on that for RDNA 2. It's a big focus on RDNA 3 as well.

AMD has just recently announced its next-generation Radeon RX 6000 series GPU based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. The architecture is set to compete with NVIDIA Ampere architecture and highest offerings of the competing company. Today, thanks to the well-known leaker TUM_APISAK, we have some Geekbench OpenCL scores. It appears that some user has gotten access to the system with the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs, running Cinebench 4.4 OpenCL tests. In the tests, the system ran on the Intel platform with Core i9-10900K CPU with 16 GB DDR4 RAM running at 3600 MHz. The motherboard used was ASUS top-end ROG Maximus XII Extreme Z490 board.

When it comes to results, the system with RX 6800 GPU scored anywhere from 347137 points to 336367 points in three test runs. For comparison, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 scores about 361042 points, showcasing that the Radeon card is not faster in any of the runs. When it comes to the higher-end Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU, it scored 407387 and 413121 points in two test runs. Comparing that to GeForce RTX 3080 GPU that scores 470743 points, the card is slower compared to the competition. There has been a Ryzen 9 5950X test setup that boosted the performance of Radeon RX 6800 XT card by quite a lot, making it reach 456837 points, making a huge leap over the Intel-based system thanks to the Smart Access Memory (SAM) technology that all-AMD system provides.

During its Q3 earnings call, Samsung Electronics has provided everyone with an update on its foundry and node production development. In the past year or so, Samsung's foundry has been a producer of a 7 nm LPP (Low Power Performance) node as its smallest node. That is now changed as Samsung has started the production of the 5 nm LPE (Low Power Early) semiconductor manufacturing node. In the past, we have reported that the company struggled with yields of its 5 nm process, however, that seems to be ironed out and now the node is in full production. To contribute to the statement that the new node is doing well, we also recently reported that Samsung will be the sole manufacturer of Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 5G SoC.

The new 5 nm semiconductor node is a marginal improvement over the past 7 nm node. It features a 10% performance improvement that is taking the same power and chip complexity or a 20% power reduction of the same processor clocks and design. When it comes to density, the company advertises the node with x1.33 times increase in transistor density compared to the previous node. The 5LPE node is manufactured using the Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) methodology and its FinFET transistors feature new characteristics like Smart Difusion Break isolation, flexible contact placement, and single-fin devices for low power applications. The node is design-rule compatible with the previous 7 nm LPP node, so the existing IP can be used and manufactured on this new process. That means that this is not a brand new process but rather an enhancement. First products are set to arrive with the next generation of smartphone SoCs, like the aforementioned Qualcomm Snapdragon 875.

Alienware has always prided itself on creating high-performance PCs that power the most immersive gaming experiences on the planet. Never afraid to push the envelope is what has allowed Alienware to stand out in the gaming industry for decades. This desire to drive innovation and performance continues to be reflected in our newest Alienware devices. We're not only bringing the latest & greatest technologies to market, but we're doing it in a way that pushes the design to the limit, giving our customers the ultimate battle station. With the newly announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs and 360Hz NVIDIA G-SYNC - combined with our engineering ingenuity - Alienware's gaming products take another giant leap forward in performance and provide stunning visuals.

Delivering the same high-level experience at home as it does in the world's most demanding e-sports arenas, the Alienware Aurora R11 is for gamers and creators everywhere. Available with custom-engineered NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs and up to 10th Gen Intel Core i9 10900KF processors, the new Aurora builds on its future-ready promise through a tool-less upgradable chassis.

Editor's Note: This is written by Arm vice president and general manager Paul Williamson.

Over the last year, I have been inspired by the innovators who are dreaming up solutions to improve and enrich our daily lives. Tomorrow's mobile applications will be even more imaginative, immersive, and intelligent. To that point, the industry has come such a long way in making this happen. Take app stores for instance - we had the choice of roughly 500 apps when smartphones first began shipping in volume in 2007 and today there are 8.9 million apps available to choose from.

Mobile has transformed from a simple utility to the most powerful, pervasive device we engage with daily, much like Arm-based chips have progressed to more powerful but still energy-efficient SoCs. Although the chip-level innovation has already evolved significantly, more is still required as use cases become more complex, with more AI and ML workloads being processed locally on our devices.

NVIDIA themselves have shared performance slides for their imminent RTX 3090 graphics card, the new halo product that's been marketed as the new Titan. Previous-gen Titans have achieved extremely meager performance uplifts compared to NVIDIA's top-of-the-line cards (see RTX 2080 Ti vs RTX Titan, an average of 8% performance difference in favor of the Titan. According to the company, users should expect a slightly higher performance uplift this time around, though the 10-15% higher performance in 4K still seems meager - in pure price/performance terms - for the average consumer.

The average consumer who isn't the main focus for this graphics card and its gargantuan 24 GB of GDDR6X memory, anyway - this is more aimed at the semi-professional or professional crowds working with specialized software, whether it be in rendering or AI-based workloads. The RTX 3090 is thus not so much a product for the discerning computer enthusiast, but more of a halo product for gamers, and a crucial product for professionals and academics.

Alleged mining benchmarks of NVIDIA's upcoming RTX 3090 graphics card have leaked, and the scenario looks great for non-mining usages. The RTX 3090 is being quoted as achieving 120 MH/s on the ubiquitous Dagger-Hashimoto ETHash protocol. That number in itself is impressive - but not when one considers the cards' 350 W board power. granted, a 100% PL isn't the best scenario for mining - and one would expect no knowledgeable miners to use their graphics cards on the NVIDIA-shipped power-curve spot their graphics cards come in at (nor AMD cards, mind you).

The RTX 3080 may be a better example, as there have been more numerous benchmarks done on that particular GPU. It strikes the best balance in performance and power at around 65% PL (210 W), where it achieves 79.8 MH/s. However, previus-gen AMD RX 5700 XT graphics cards have been shown around 50 MH/s whilst consuming only 110 W (with underclocking and undervoltage), which, paired with that particular graphics card's pricing, makes it a much, much better bet for mining efficiency and return on investment. The point is this: reports of miners gobbling up RTX 3000 series stock are, at least for now, apparently unfounded. And this may mean us regular users of graphics cards can rest assured that we won't have to deal with miner-induced shortages. At least until AMD's Navi flounders (eh) to shore.

According to a report courtesy of Hardwareluxx, where contributor Andreas Schilling reportedly gained access to OEM documentation, AMD's upcoming EPYC Milan CPUs are bound to offer up to 20% performance improvements over the previous EPYC generation. The report claims a 15% IPC performance, paired with an extra 5% added via operating frequency optimization. The report claims that AMD's 64-core designs will feature a lower-clock all-core operating mode, and a 32-core alternate for less threaded workloads where extra frequency is added to the working cores.

Apparently, AMD's approach for the Zen 3 architecture does away with L3 subdivisions according to CCXs; now, a full 32 MB of L3 cache is available for each 8-core Core Compute Die (CCD). AMD has apparently achieved new levels of frequency optimization under Zen 3, with higher upward frequency limits than before. This will see the most benefits in lower core-count designs, as the amount of heat being generated is necessarily lesser compared to more core-dense designs. Milan keeps the same 7 nm manufacturing tech, DDR4, PCIe 4.0, and 120-225 W TDP as the previous-gen Rome. It remains to be seen how these changes actually translate to the consumer versions of Zen 3, Vermeer, later this year.

Lenovo Group (HKSE: 992) PINK SHEETS: LNVGY) today announced Group revenue in the first quarter of US $13.3 billion, up almost 7% year-on-year (up 10% year-on-year excluding currency impact). Pre-tax income grew 38% compared to the same quarter a year earlier, to US $332 million, while net income also increased by 31% year-on-year to US$213 million. Basic earnings per share for the first quarter were 1.80 US cents or 13.95 HK cents.

"Our outstanding performance last quarter proves that Lenovo has quickly regained momentum from the impact of the pandemic and is capturing the new opportunities emerging from remote working, education and accelerated digitalization," said Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Chairman and CEO. "While the world continues to face challenges, Lenovo is focused on delivering sustainable growth through our core businesses as well as the new services and solutions opportunities presented by our service-led intelligent transformation."

Michael Larabel over at Phoronix posted an extremely comprehensive analysis on the performance differential between AMD's Rome-based EPYC and Intel's Cascade Lake Xeons one-year after release. The battery of tests, comprising more than 116 benchmark results, pits a Xeon Platinum 8280 2P system against an EPYC 7742 2P one. The tests were conducted pitting performance of both systems while running benchmarks under the Ubuntu 19.04 release, which was chosen as the "one year ago" baseline, against the newer Linux software stack (Ubuntu 20.10 daily + GCC 10 + Linux 5.8).

The benchmark conclusions are interesting. For one, Intel gained more ground than AMD over the course of the year, with the Xeon platform gaining 6% performance across releases, while AMD's EPYC gained just 4% over the same period of time. This means that AMD's system is still an average of 14% faster across all tests than the Intel platform, however, which speaks to AMD's silicon superiority. Check some benchmark results below, but follow the source link for the full rundown.

AMD today announced availability of the new AMD Radeon Pro 5600M mobile GPU for the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Designed to deliver desktop-class graphics performance in an efficient mobile form factor, this new GPU powers computationally heavy workloads, enabling pro users to maximize productivity while on-the-go.

The AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU is built upon industry-leading 7 nm process technology and advanced AMD RDNA architecture to power a diverse range of pro applications, including video editing, color grading, application development, game creation and more. With 40 compute units and 8 GB of ultra-fast, low-power High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU delivers superfast performance and excellent power efficiency in a single GPU package.

During this unprecedented global health crisis, we have experienced rapid societal changes in how we interact with and rely on technology to connect, aid, and support us. As a result of this we are increasingly living our lives on our smartphones, which have been essential in helping feed our families through application-based grocery or meal delivery services, as well as virtually seeing our colleagues and loved ones daily. Without question, our Arm-based smartphones are the computing hub of our lives.

However, even before this increased reliance on our smartphones, there was already growing interest among users to explore the limits of what is possible. The combination of these factors with the convergence of 5G and AI, are generating greater demand for more performance and efficiency in the palm of our hands.

As we reported earlier this week, the release of Adobe Premiere Pro 14.2 brought GPU acceleration to select NVIDIA and AMD GPUs taking advantage of NVIDIA's NVENC chips to boost encoding and decoding speeds. Intel has now showcased the improvements to encoding and decoding with Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) on 11th generation iGPUs found in mobile Ice Lake chips with Adobe Premiere Pro 14.2.

Compared to the previous 9th generation graphics found in Skylake and Kabylake CPUs the new 11th generation iGPUs perform anywhere from 49-82% better. While impressive, these performance gains can only be found on limited low power 10 nm mobile chips with a maximum of four cores and are yet to arrive on desktop platforms.

ASUS, the leading IT company in server systems, server motherboards, and workstations today announced that ASUS servers achieved the highest rankings on the SPEC Power suite of benchmarks for energy efficiency performed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). ASUS selected the Intel-based RS720-E9-RS8 and AMD-based RS500A-E10-PS4 rack servers for these benchmarks to show the power and performance characteristics of ASUS servers on both CPU platforms and to demonstrate to customers how they can achieve faster deployments and higher energy efficiency for their IT infrastructures. These servers were tested using both Windows Server and Linux — the most popular operating systems used in data centers — to ensure the benchmarks results are relevant to real-world performance and operating conditions. These results are current as of April 16, 2020.

According to the latest report by Windows Latest, Microsoft's Windows 10 2004 May update will bring a much-needed disk performance update. The underlying reason behind this improvement is the terrible performance of the Windows Search indexer, which in previous versions of Windows 10 had high disk usage and resulted in a slowdown of the system. However, Microsoft decided to improve that and found a way to optimize its performance. This improvement will be of much need to everyone who owns and runs Windows 10 on a Hard Drive.

In Windows 10 update 1909, Microsoft has decided to separate Cortana from the Windows Search and thus brought disk usage a bit lower. However, Microsoft's engineers have been fine-tuning the Search Indexer, and now the performance is significantly better while having a lot less disk usage. Previously, the Search Indexer was very aggressive and spared no resources for its process, so this is a welcome addition. This improvement will leave disk usage capacity to other processes and will result in a noticeably snappier system, which Hard Drive users will appreciate the most.

Audio-Technica is introducing four new high-performance Hi-Res Audio headphones. The over-ear ATH-AWKT and ATH-AWAS audiophile and over-ear ATH-WP900 portable headphones combine beautifully crafted woods with superb sound quality, and the ATH-IEX1 features an exclusive hybrid multi-driver system for an unmatched in-ear listening experience.

Like all the new wooden headphones, the over-ear ATH-AWKT is handcrafted at our factory based in Tokyo. The ATH-AWKT (SRP: US$1,899.00) features housings made from prized Kokutan (striped ebony) hardwood. Long used for woodwind instruments and pianos, Kokutan is distinguished by its attractive black and brown stripes, and the housings have a hand-applied semi-gloss finish that brings out the wood's natural beauty. In addition, the high density of the Kokutan wood suppresses unwanted resonances to contribute to the headphones' clear, natural sound.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen 4000 series processors will be based on the company's Zen 3 design, which will feature a deeply revised architecture aiming to offer increased performance (surprising no-one). AMD themselves have already said that Zen 3 will offer performance increases in line with the release of new architectures - and we all remember the around 15% increase achieved with the release of Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 series, which surprised even AMD on its performance capabilities. Several sources around the web are quoting an around 17% increase in performance, taking into account increased operating frequencies of Zen 3 (100 to 200 MHz at least for the enterprise solutions, which could pave the way for even higher increases in consumer-geared products) and increased IPC of its core design. The utilization of EUV in the 7 nm process shouldn't have much to do with the increased frequencies of the CPUs, and will mostly be used to reduce the number of masks that are required for production of AMD's Zen 3 CPUs (which in turn will lead to increased yields).

Sources are claiming an increase of up to 50% in Zen 3's Floating Point Units (FPU) compared to Zen 2, while integer operations should make do with a 10-12% increase. Cores should remain stable across the board - and with that increase in performance, I'd say an upper limit of 16 physical and 32 logic cores in a consumer-geared CPU is more than enough. Increased IPCs and frequencies will definitely make AMD an even better proposition for all markets - gaming in particular, where Intel still has a (slightly virtual) hold in consumer's minds.

G.SKILL, the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is pleased to announce the release of new high-performance and high-capacity quad-channel memory kits for the latest Intel X299 and AMD TRX40 high-end desktop (HEDT) platforms, including the high-capacity DDR4-3600 CL16-19-19-39 256 GB (32 GB x8), DDR4-4000 CL18-22-22-42 256 GB (32 GB x8), and the high-speed, low-latency DDR4-4000 CL15-16-16-36 64 GB (8 GB x8) specifications. By bringing ultra-high 32 GB memory module capacity into the realm of HEDT computing, powerful workstations are now truly able to achieve a complete combination of high core count processor with high-speed, high-capacity memory for heavy workloads or for running more virtual machines than ever.

AMD today announced the AMD Radeon Pro W5700, the world's first 7 nm professional PC workstation graphics card. It delivers new levels of performance and advanced features that enable 3D designers, architects and engineers to visualize, review and interact with their designs in real time, dramatically accelerating decision-making processes and product development cycles.

The AMD Radeon Pro W5700 workstation graphics card features the high-performance, energy-efficient AMD RDNA architecture and state-of-the-art GDDR6 memory to handle large models and datasets, and is the first PC workstation graphics card to support high-bandwidth PCIe 4.0 technology. It is ideal for professionals who push performance beyond traditional 3D design by generating photorealistic renders of their concepts and reviewing virtual prototypes of their designs in virtual reality (VR) environments.

Antec Inc., leading provider of high-performance computer components and accessories for the gaming, PC upgrade and Do-It-Yourself market, show off the latest model of the renowned Performance Series, the P120 Crystal. The chassis is commercially available from US$99.99.The P120 Crystal is the latest addition to Antec's Performance Elegant Series. This award-winning chassis series is synonymous with performance, silence, and build quality. The new P120 Crystal measures 475 x 232 x 480 mm. This elegant case is expertly combined with 0.8 mm and 1 mm steel and tempered glass front and side panel which enable a sturdy and durable build.

The mid-tower model features large interior space for powerful installations and support E-ATX, ATX, micro-ATX and ITX motherboards. The isolated power supply chamber and drive cages are positioned on top of the chassis. The sleek tower offers space for two 2.5" or 3.5" HDDs and two 2.5" SDDs and seven horizontal and three vertical expansion slots. To keep its cool, the P120 Crystal offers space for three 120 mm or two 140 mm case fans at the bottom, one 120 or 140 mm fan in the rear as well as up to three 120 mm or two 140 mm case fans on the side of the chassis.