During the Snapdragon Summit 2022, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Adobe announced an expanded collaboration to support creative experiences on Snapdragon powered devices across mobile, compute, and XR platforms. Together, the companies will push the boundaries of creativity and document productivity for Snapdragon users.

Building on the rich experiences already found with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom for Windows on Snapdragon devices, Adobe remains committed to bringing the best of Creative Cloud natively to the Snapdragon platform, including Adobe Fresco and Adobe Acrobat. Bringing the strength of Adobe Sensei, Adobe's artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, alongside the dedicated on-device Qualcomm AI Engine on Snapdragon compute platforms, users can experience enhanced device performance for creative workflows and tasks including super-resolution, background removal and color enhancement, editing content on-the-go, and more.

The most expensive custom-design NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 will be priced at $1,550, putting it just $50 short of the $1,600 baseline MSRP of the much faster RTX 4090, according to a pricing leak of custom-design cards on popular PC components retailer MicroCenter. The most interesting takeaway from this leak is that there will actually be RTX 4080 cards at the NVIDIA-set baseline MSRP of $1,200. These include the GIGABYTE Eagle, ZOTAC Trinity, ASUS TUF Gaming, and PNY XLR8 Verto. NVIDIA appears to be telling its partners to sell at least one custom-design RTX 4080 SKU at the baseline price.

Most factory-overclocked custom-design RTX 4080 SKUs are within $125 of the $1,200 baseline, with the GIGABYTE Eagle OC priced at $1,240, GIGABYTE Gaming OC at $1,280, MSI Ventus 3X OC at $1,280, and the premium MSI Gaming X Trio at $1,325. The top-tier custom-design cards start here, with the GIGABYTE AORUS Master priced at $1,350, the MSI SUPRIM X (air-cooled) at $1,400, the ZOTAC AMP Extreme AIRO at $1,400, ASUS TUF Gaming OC at $1,500; and the ASUS ROG Strix OC at $1,550, which is just $50 short of the cheapest RTX 4090 (baseline-spec). Will anyone pick the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4080 O16G over the cheapest RTX 4090 (assuming availability of both)? That's a social experiment to watch out for.

NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 4070 Ti performance-segment graphics card could see a January 5, 2023 launch (the day on which you can buy one), according to a Wccftech report. The card will be unveiled to the masses on January 3, and reviews of the card could go live on January 4, before product-availability the next day. This would mean that reviewers could get the card well in advance, and would probably be testing it over the Christmas break in order to meet the review date, before flying off to the 2023 International CES, which opens to the public on January 5, and to the press a couple of days earlier.

The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is reportedly a rebadged RTX 4080 12 GB, which was supposed to launch alongside the RTX 4080 16 GB on November 16; before NVIDIA pulled the plug on the SKU in the face of backlash on social media and the press over its controversial naming that could confuse buyers, given its significantly different hardware specs to those of the RTX 4080 16 GB. With the first batch of RTX 4080 12 GB cards probably already boxed and ready to ship, if not shipped already, NVIDIA is issuing re-branding guidelines to its board partners, so they could do their best at pasting stickers, a template of which is below. It remains to be seen if NVIDIA sticks to the $900 MSRP for the SKU.

When Alibaba announced the development of an Armv9-based processor, it claimed to be some of the most performant designs that the company has laid its hand on, claiming to win the SPEC 2017 CPU benchmark and place itself in the top spot for the world record. Reportedly, the Yitian 710 CPU was able to score an integer score of 440 points in SPECint2017, which is comparable to a dual-socket Xeon Platinum 8362 system. The SPEC 2017 benchmark represents an industry-standard suite of tests that have a combination of 43 different test scenarios that measure the performance of a specific processor. Alibaba's Yitian 710 was claiming to possess the performance target where it is the fastest CPU on the leaderboard, with one major flaw. The Chinese company hasn't mentioned this processor's lack of general availability, making its scoreboard efforts invalid.

As Alibaba plans to use its design almost exclusively in-house and maybe offer it to a few partners, the processor is not sold commercially. This is apparently a requirement for the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark to be completed, so the SPEC committee has overruled the result to make it invalid, stating the following:

SPEC CommitteeSPEC has determined that this result does not comply with the SPEC OSG Guidelines for General Availability and the SPEC CPU 2017 run and reporting rules. Specifically, the submitter has notified SPEC that General Availability requirements were not met.

Intel announced the general availability of the Arc A770 and A750 performance-segment desktop graphics cards. This includes Intel's reference-design Limited Edition cards, and custom-design ones by the likes of ASRock, Gunnir, and Acer, among other OEMs. The A750 has a baseline price of USD $289, the A770 8 GB at $329, and the A770 16 GB at $349.

Based on the Xe-HPG "Alchemist" graphics architecture, the A750 and A770 are carved out of the same 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon. The A750 is configured with 28 Xe Cores, 448 EU, or 3,584 unified shaders; whereas the A770 maxes it out with 32 Xe Cores, 512 EU, or 4,096 unified shaders. Both cards get 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interfaces, and while the A750 uses 16 Gbps memory (512 GB/s bandwidth); the A770 has 17.5 Gbps (560 GB/s).

Ahead of its September 27 market availability, AMD Ryzen 9 7950X "Zen 4" has already hit the gray-markets in China. Some retailers in Europe even started listing them. Chinese online gray-markets (peer to peer commerce) sites, list the 7950X at RMB ¥5,999 (around USD $850). None of these listings show a box, so it's likely that the sellers bought a tray of these chips in the OEM or SI channels, and is selling them off piecemeal. OEM-only AMD SKUs usually land in the retail channel this way. Over in Europe, French retailer Cdiscount has the 7950X listed at 1,099€ including taxes ($1,102). The store also lists the 7900X at 749€ ($751), the 7700X at 589€ ($591), and the 7600X at 409€ ($410).

AMD CEO Lisa Su, who has supervised the company's rise from the ashes, looked to assuage fears of reduced stock for the launch of AMD's next-gen Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. Hardware enthusiasts being understandably burned from the last generation of GPU and CPU's lack of availability (and ensuing scalping practices), the CEO in today's announcement of the Ryzen 7000 series carried a promise: "It is true that if you look at the past 18 months there have been a number of things, whether its capacity limitations or logistics," she said. "From an AMD standpoint, we have dramatically increased our overall capacity, in terms of wafers, as well as substrates and on the back end. So with our launch of Zen 4 we don't expect any supply constraints."

AMD's Zen 4 family is being launched with the new AM5 socket, which AMD says will live through 2025+ for subsequent CPU releases. The company has managed to increase IPC by 13% while decreasing the overall CCD size by 18% compared to that of Zen 3 (reducing the area/cost impact of adding integrated graphics throughout the lineup). Frequencies have gone up to a maximum 5.7 GHz thanks to smart circuitry redesign and TSMC's 5 nm node. AMD says its Ryzen 7000 can thus be expected to provide up to 29% higher single-core and 45% higher multi-core performance. Of course, with macroeconomics being what they are, and recent reports on lack of low-price chips throughout the market, it's not only the availability of Ryzen 7000 CPUs that matters: AM5 motherboards and DDR5 memory chip stocks have to be taken into account as well. But all in all, AMD seems to be prepared for a successful and quantity-adequate launch.

A post on Chinese forum Bilibili has revealed more exact details with regards to when Intel's Raptor Lake series of processors will launch and if nothing changes between now and then, the K and KF SKU's should be announced as previously thought, at the Intel Innovation '22 event that kicks off on the 27th of September. Retail availability, alongside Z790 motherboards should be about a month later, starting the week of the 17th of October. We've confirmed these dates with our own sources, but as always with early information, these things can change.

The rest of the Raptor Lake family of CPUs, as well as the H770 and B760 chipsets are expected to launch at CES 2023 in January and the poster on Bilibili claims that retail sales should be sometime in the second half of January. We've not been able to confirm the latter information here. As per older rumours, Intel is expected to change the PCIe lane allocation for the Z790 chipset compared to Z690 and based on the information posted, Z790 will have 20 PCIe 4.0 and eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, vs. 12 PCIe 4.0 and 16 PCIe 3.0 for the Z690 chipset. Raptor Lake is also said to get native support for faster DDR5 5600 memory, rather than just 4800 MHz DDR5 for Alder Lake. There are apparently no changes to the CPU PCIe lanes and DDR4 support is still here, but once again, no changes have been made to the DDR4 memory controller.

NVIDIA's next generation of graphics cards, codenamed RTX 40 series, Ada Lovelace, is expected to arrive sometime in October. However, the latest information from the YouTube channel "Moore's Law Is Dead" suggests that NVIDIA could postpone the arrival of the new GPU generation to December. Why, you might be wondering? The report claims that the current GPU market is flooded with used GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs. Thus, NVIDIA could postpone the availability of the latest GPUs to keep the demand high and ensure that the market is searching for additional graphics cards.

Retailers are experiencing smaller demand as the used GPU market is full of devices used for cryptocurrency mining, and the recent crypto crash has helped the situation. What we could see is NVIDIA announcing Ada Lovelace GPUs in October, with availability arriving later in December. Of course, these are just the current industry rumors, and we are yet to see how the market and NVIDIA will respond.

Jon Peddie Research reports that the global PC-based graphics processor units (GPU) market reached 96 million units in Q1'22 and PC GPUs shipments decreased 6.2% due to disturbances in China, Ukraine, and the pullback from the lockdown elsewhere. However, the fundamentals of the GPU and PC market are solid over the long term, JPR predicts GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of 6.3% during 2022-2026 and reach an installed base of 3.3 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPU) in the PC market will grow to reach a level of 46%.

AMD's overall market share percentage from last quarter increased 0.7%, Intel's market share decreased by -2.4%, and Nvidia's market share increased 1.69%, as indicated in the following chart.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series of graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 architecture are supposed to feature next-generation protocols all over the board. Today, according to a patch committed to the Linux kernel, we have information about display output choices AMD will present to consumers in the upcoming products. According to a Twitter user @Kepler_L2, who discovered this patch, we know that AMD will bundle DisplayPort 2.0 technology with UHBR 20 transmission mode. The UHBR 20 standard can provide a maximum of 80 Gbps bi-directional bandwidth, representing the highest bandwidth in a display output connector currently available. With this technology, a sample RDNA 3 GPU could display 16K resolution with Display Stream Compression, 10K without compression, or two 8K HDR screens running at 120 Hz refresh rate. All of this will be handled by Display Controller Next (DCN) engine for media.

The availability of DisplayPort 2.0 capable monitors is a story of its own. VESA noted that they should come at the end of 2021; however, they got delayed due to the lack of devices supporting this output. Having AMD's RDNA 3 cards as the newest product to support these monitors, we would likely see the market adapt to demand and few available products as the transition to the latest standard is in the process.

Cooler Master launches the availability of the all-new GM Series Curved Monitor lineup for work and play. The ultra-fast GM27-CFX with a 240 Hz refresh rate is available starting today May 26 2022 while the ultra-wide GM34-CWQ ARGB hits shelves on May 30 2022.

GM27-CFX
Cooler Master's new FHD GM27-CFX 1500R Curved monitor delivers outstanding performance for "Work & Play" Setups with a 98% DCI-P3 color spectrum coverage. The GM27-FQX runs an ultra-fast 240 Hz framerate with 0.5 ms response time and features quantum dot picture quality enabling a 3001:1 contrast ratio for deep blacks and bright whites.

Sabrent Rocket 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB DDR5-UDIMM's 4800 MHz Memory Modules for PC's. It seems like DDR4 has ruled the roost forever. Finally, new motherboards and architectures have allowed memory to grow wings with the advent of DDR5. Improved clock speeds promise up to twice the bandwidth of DDR4, all with lower voltage for better efficiency. To further help with that last bit, DDR5 has on-board power management to reduce motherboard cost and complexity. Sabrent's new DDR5 kits simply plug and play, install your memory kits of choice, enter the BIOS and hit AUTO, and reboot. For those that want to OC these kits, there is plenty of headroom to advance speeds if you want.

Reliability has also been improved by the introduction of on-die error-correction technology. Memory availability is improved by splitting the internal 64-bit (72-bit with ECC) channel into two independent, 32-bit channels (40-bit with ECC) and the addition of the same bank refresh. Combined with other features, including those that allow for up to four times the module capacity with consumer DRAM, DDR5 ensures your multi-core CPU won't be memory starved.

NVIDIA has recently launched a global campaign to promote the availability of RTX 30 series graphics cards with multiple retailers and manufacturers informing customers of increased shipments. The launch of this campaign also coincides with the 5th consecutive month of price drops for NVIDIA GPU prices with the average price now at 119% of MSRP according to the latest report from 3D Center. The stores participating in the campaign appear to have most cards as now available or restocking with some cards receiving minor price cuts.

NVIDIAGeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards are now available! Get the ultimate play with immersive ray tracing, a huge AI performance boost with NVIDIA DLSS, game-winning responsiveness with NVIDIA Reflex, and AI-powered voice & video with NVIDIA Broadcast.

Yesterday, NVIDIA announced its next-generation Hopper architecture designed for data center applications and workloads. There is always a question of availability, as the previous period showed everyone that the supply chain is overbooked and semiconductors are in very high demand. During the Q&A press session today, NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, tried to answer as many questions as possible. However, an exciting topic arose regarding the potential collaboration with Intel. As a part of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy, the company plans to offer its chip manufacturing capabilities to the third-party companies willing to make efforts and port their designs to Intel's semiconductor nodes. NVIDIA, one of the largest TSMC customers, could be a new Intel customer. Below, we compiled a few quotes that highlight Jensen Huang's opinions, taking the quotes from Tom's Hardware.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen HuangOur strategy is to expand our supply base with diversity and redundancy at every single layer. At the chip layer, at the substrate layer, the system layer, at every single layer. We've diversified the number of nodes, we've diversified the number of foundries, and Intel is an excellent partner of ours[…]. They're interested in us using their foundries, and we're very interested in exploring it. [...] I am encouraged by the work that is done at Intel, I think this is a direction they have to go, and we're interested in looking at their process technology. Our relationship with Intel is quite long; we work with them across a whole lot of different areas, every single PC, every single laptop, every single PC, supercomputer, we collaborate. [...] We have been working closely with Intel, sharing with them our roadmap long before we share it with the public, for years. Intel has known our secrets for years. AMD has known our secrets for years. We are sophisticated and mature enough to realize that we have to collaborate.[...] We share roadmaps, of course, under confidentiality and a very selective channel of communications. The industry has just learned how to work in that way.

China is reacting to new outbreaks of the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus with partial lockdowns. This could further delay the availability of laptops with 12th Gen Intel Core processors and NVIDIA's Ti graphics cards, which debuted at the beginning of the year. The first factories have already been closed in Suzhou in the east of the country. Supply chain and logistics bottlenecks, a shortage of certain chip types and price increases are already on the horizon.

Factors such as the rising popularity of topics related to the metaverse and UGC (user-generated content), as well as the rapid increase in AR/VR device shipment, will likely result in the creation of a growing body of virtual reality content in the market, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. TrendForce expects annual global virtual reality content revenue to grow at a 40% CAGR from US$2.16 billion in 2021 to US$8.31 billion in 2025.

TrendForce further indicates that gaming/entertainment, videos, and social interactions comprise the primary categories of virtual reality content. Incidentally, as the construction of the virtual world and the development of virtual reality content are unlikely to be accomplished by only a handful of companies alone, companies in this space will therefore place an increasing emphasis on UGC instead. Leading companies will likely leverage the build-out of virtual reality platforms/environments and the provisioning of developmental tools/interfaces in order to not only lower the barrier to entry for content creation, but also raise user participation, thereby driving up the content market for virtual reality applications.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments of add-in boards increased in Q3'21 from last year. AMD saw a one-percent increase in market share while Nvidia remained the dominant market share leader with 78.2%. Year over year, total AIB shipments increased by 25.7% this quarter compared to last year at 12.7 million units, and up quarter-to-quarter from 11.47 million units in Q2'21.

Add-in boards (AIBs) use discrete GPUs (dGPU) with dedicated memory. Desktop PCs, workstations, servers, rendering and mining farms, and scientific instruments use AIBs. Consumers and enterprises buy AIBs from resellers or OEMs. They can be part of a new system or installed as an upgrade to an existing system. Systems with AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry. Entry-level systems use integrated GPUs (iGPU) in CPUs that share slower system memory.

Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" desktop processors will be available from November 4, 2021, according to a leaked Intel channel document by Wccftech. It confirms that Intel will only debut unlocked "K" and "KF" SKUs and companion Z690 chipset in November, with the first wave being limited to the Core i9-12900K, i9-12900KF, i7-12700K, i7-12700KF, i5-12600K, and i5-12600KF. Pre-orders of these parts, along with product announcements, are set to go live on October 27. Reviews of these processors will be published on the same day as retail availability, on November 4. There's no word on when the "locked" non-K SKUs and more affordable chipsets, such as the B660, H670, and H610, come out, but older reports suggest an early-2022 launch for those. Given that memory isn't tied with these dates, DDR5 memory modules should be available any day now.

Following the peak period of production in 3Q21, the supply of DRAM will likely begin to outpace demand in 4Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations (the surplus of DRAM supply is henceforth referred to as "sufficiency ratio", expressed as a percentage). In addition, while DRAM suppliers are generally carrying a healthy level of inventory, most of their clients in the end-product markets are carrying a higher level of DRAM inventory than what is considered healthy, meaning these clients will be less willing to procure additional DRAM going forward. TrendForce therefore forecasts a downward trajectory for DRAM ASP in 4Q21. More specifically, DRAM products that are currently in oversupply may experience price drops of more than 5% QoQ, and the overall DRAM ASP will likely decline by about 3-8% QoQ in 4Q21.

Although WFH and distance learning applications previously generated high demand for notebook computers, increasingly widespread vaccinations in Europe and North America have now weakened this demand, particularly for Chromebooks. As a result, global production of notebooks is expected to decline in 4Q21, in turn propelling the sufficiency ratio of PC DRAM to 1.38%, which indicates that PC DRAM will no longer be in short supply in 4Q21. However, PC DRAM accounts for a relatively low share of DRAM manufacturers' DRAM supply bits, since these suppliers have allocated more production capacities to server DRAM, which is in relatively high demand. Hence, there will unlikely be a severe surplus of PC DRAM in 4Q21. It should also be pointed out that, on average, the current spot prices of PC DRAM modules are far lower than their contract prices for 3Q21. TrendForce therefore expects an imminent 5-10% QoQ decline in PC DRAM contract prices for 4Q21, with potential for declines that are even greater than 10% for certain transactions, as PC OEMs anticipate further price drops in PC DRAM prices in the future.

The Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) market for gaming PCs posted another quarter of solid growth in 2021Q2, growing 10.8% YoY and recording 2.5 million units shipped, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). Approaching the end of 2021, growth is expected to continue, albeit at a lower rate than in recent quarters. 2021Q3 is predicted to grow at 6.1% YoY, while 2021Q4 has an anticipated rise of 4.8% YoY. While the momentum is stabilizing, long-term growth is still expected. In 2025, the PC gaming market is forecast to rise to 11.4 million units, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.5%.

In Western Europe, 2021H1 saw demand in the market driven by consumers working from home, despite the loosening of lockdowns. With upcoming game releases in 2021H2 expected to increase graphical requirements, more gamers will be looking to refresh their PCs to game at the highest level. Therefore, acceleration of new/returning gamers is expected to continue in 2021. However, with component supply and logistics problems continuing, gaming PC production will be impacted too.

It is often a dilemma for business users to choose between performance and portability when buying a laptop, but MSI is now offering the best of both worlds. If you're looking for a commercial laptop that is convertible, with pen support, and has excellent graphics, MSI Summit E16 Flip may be the solution for someone like you who demand performance on the go.

After its announcement in CES 2021, MSI Summit E16 Flip, this powerful yet beautifully-designed laptop, is finally on the market. Not only has it exemplified the law of "Golden Ratio" with the 16:10 QHD+ Display, the performance will not disappoint mobile commercial users. Moreover, the Dynamic Cooler Boost design will help users to distribute its CPU and GPU performance to the tasks accordingly. If you are engineer, architect, designer, or even startup ownerwho needs to pitch and show proposals, you will no longer have to struggle with loading and editing the files on the spot with the 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processors and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics.Along with the support of the MSI Pen, the first award-winning stylus on 2021 CES, it will be a booster for your productivity and allows you to work more modernly with its low latency, stable connection, long battery life, and customizable functions.

To state that the Steam Deck made a splash when it was announced is an understatement - interest in the portable handheld console with its tight Steam integration is still going strong even after initial orders and the now ubiquitous scalping shenanigans, with eBay sellers looking for some $5,000 just for the end user to take their Steam Deck from their reservation queue place. Interest in the Steam handheld has been so immense, in fact, that it seems that shipping of all versions - even the entry-level one with 64 GB of eMMC storage - has slipped to Q2 2022.

When the handheld was first announced back on the 16th of July, initial shipments were expected to be sent out by the end of this year. However, Valve has now updated its estimated availability, bringing about a few more months of waiting for anyone just entering the queue - and possible 2023 slippings for further reservations. The "after 2Q 2022" is as vague as it comes as well - these units could be shipped in the first day of the quarter or face a delay until the release of the Steam Deck 4 (since Valve will skip the number 3, of course). We'll have to see whether there are any delays for already-confirmed pre-orders, but for now, it seems that if you've locked in an earlier delivery date, your order hasn't been affected.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled (LC) edition is not officially available for the DIY market, as the card is exclusive to OEMs and system integrators, who can use the card in any of their selected systems, given the availability of course. In other words, the card is almost impossible to purchase on its own, unless it is from someone who removed it from a PC. However, it seems like a few retailers in India have been able to get their hands on a few of these cards and offer consumers to buy them individually without the need to purchase a whole system. Of course, you can expect this to come with a premium. Currently, retailers are offering the card at the price tag of around 223,020 rupees, which translates to 3,007 USD. We are not sure if any EU or American retailers will get their hands on just the card to compare prices.

When Intel launched its Tiger Lake processors for laptops, the company has foreseen a smooth integration by OEMs and plenty of design wins. While that has turned out to be true, there seems to be a big problem lurking in the OEM component supply chain. In the new Tiger Lake systems, the CPU carries support for Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 technologies. However, these protocols can not work on their own, as they require external power delivery controllers (PDC) to function. These PDCs are used to regulate and control all of the power circulating in the USB specification, and they come in a form of a separate chip. This chip is later integrated into PCBs of various systems implementing these technologies.

Today, we have a report coming from Igor's LAB, in which we are told that the availability of these chips could be very bad. Intel's OEMs are using Texas Instruments (TI) 994AD PDC, however, as the supply of these chips becomes scarce, OEMs are turning to TI 993AC/994AC chips. Intel advises OEMs, carrying these chips in their systems, to only communicate benefits of Thunderbolt 4 and exclude USB 4 mentions, or to communicate benefits of Thunderbolt 4 and reference USB 4 "compatibility." This means that every OEM using the alternative chips will get Intel's Thunderbolt 4 certifications, as the company plans to temporarily issue certifications with these chips included, while the supply chain regulates. TI's 993AC/994AC are assumed to not have the power and regulation capability of the USB 4 as the 994AD PDC can.