PowerColor is readying a small form-factor friendly custom-design Radeon RX 5700 graphics card, called simply the PowerColor RX 5700 ITX. With a length of 17.5 cm, standard 11 cm height, and strictly 2-slot thickness, the card uses a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink with four 6 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU at the base, ventilated by a single 80 mm fan. More interestingly, the card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector (225 W max power input for the connector + PCIe slot).

Unsurprisingly, the PowerColor RX 5700 ITX sticks to AMD-reference clock-speeds of 1465 MHz base, 1625 MHz gaming, and 1725 MHz boost, with the memory ticking at 14 Gbps (GDDR6-effective). Despite its compact cooling solution, the card does not skimp on idle-fan-off. Display outputs include two DisplayPort 1.4, and one HDMI 2.0. Based on the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon, the RX 5700 features 2,304 stream processors across 36 RDNA compute units, 144 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, holding 8 GB of memory. PowerColor didn't reveal pricing of the card, as it will formally launch it later this month.

Broadcom has today started shipping its latest Tomahawk 4 chip for network switches, used by all hyperscale cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. The Tomahawk 4 is a processor built using a 7 nm manufacturing node from TSMC. Featuring over 31 billion transistors, the chip is one of the largest ever Broadcom built. It is an improvement to the Tomahawk 3, which achieved 12.8Tbps. This new chip is having two times the bandwidth available, resulting in 25.6 Tbps speeds while still achieving the form of a single die.

To achieve the massive throughput of 25.6 Tbps, Broadcom put 512 PAM4 SerDes blocks running at 50 Gbps on a single monolithic design. Capable of supporting 64 ports of 400GbE or 256 ports of 100GbE, the Tomahawk 4 is said to bring costs of operations down by 75% due to the less required power and hardware to operate 25.6 Tbps switch, where in the past it was required to run multiple switches to achieve such throughput. Additionally, to control all the telemetry processing and run the switch firmware, four Arm CPUs running at 1 GHz are embedded in die to help out.

As the world's most popular GAMING graphics card vendor, MSI is proud to introduce its full line up of graphics cards based on the new AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT series with remarkable performance. Furnished with the new AMD RDNA gaming architecture - Efficiently energetic, RDNA architecture was designed to deliver incredible performance, scalability and power efficiency. Built on the 7 nm FinFET process and delivering higher performance-per-watt compared to the previous architecture, the Radeon RX 5500 XT Series will be available as GAMING and MECH.

TUL Corporation, parent of the leading and innovative AMD Graphics Card Manufacturing brand, PowerColor, announces their latest cards in their lineup, PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8 GB and PowerColor RX 5500 XT 4 GB. Powered by the the newest and most advanced 7 nm RDNA architecture with GDDR6 VRAM, the RX 5500 series features performance delivery optimized for better visuals such as volumetric lighting, motion blurring effects, depth of field, and multi-level cache hierarchy for reduced latency and a highly responsive gaming experience.

PowerColor's newest RX 5500 XT series is a perfect match for 1080p gaming, reaching 60 FPS on AAA gaming titles on high graphics settings, and over 90 FPS on the leading e-sports titles. AMD's newest lineup of features on their Radeon Graphics Drivers enhances the experience further with settings such as Radeon Image Sharpening and FidelityFX for maximum performance and insane immersive gaming experiences as well Radeon Anti-Lag for highly responsive gaming.

TSMC is delivering record results day after day, with a 5 nm manufacturing process starting High Volume Manufacturing (HVM) in Q2 next year, 7 nm process getting plenty of orders and the fact that TSMC just became the biggest company publicly trading in Asia. Continuing with the goal to match or even beat the famous Moore's Law, TSMC is already planning for future 3 nm node manufacturing, promised to start HVM as soon as 2022 arrives, according to JK Wang, TSMC's senior vice president of fab operations. Delivering 3 nm a whole year before originally planned in 2023, TSMC is working hard, with fab construction work doing quite well, judging by all the news that the company is releasing recently.

We can hope to see the first wave of products built using 3 nm manufacturing process sometime around end of year 2022, when the holiday season arrives. Usual customers like Apple and HiSilicon will surely utilize the new node and deliver their smartphones with 3 nm processors inside as soon as the process is ready for HVM.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, announces a broad Qualcomm Snapdragon Compute platform portfolio with long battery life, cellular connectivity, and AI accelerated performance to enable fanless, thin and light designs for modern computing. Built with mobility in mind, the portfolio accommodates the evolving needs of mobile consumers. The Snapdragon 7c and 8c now join the previously announced Snapdragon 8cx, delivering lightning fast cellular connectivity to premium, mainstream, and entry-level notebook PCs. The portfolio is available in various price points allowing partners to design always on, always connected PCs for a wide array of consumers. In addition, the Snapdragon 8cx enterprise compute platform brings connected security software and secured-core PC support for modern enterprises looking to bring mobility to their workers.

Amazon Web Services, a part of Amazon that is in charge of all things cloud, has announced plans to release 32 core CPU based on Arm Neoverse N1 microarchitecture that is designed to handle a diverse workload that today's cloud infrastructure needs. This new CPU should be the second iteration of AWS'es custom CPU based on the Arm architecture. First-generation AWS CPU was a processor called Graviton, which Amazon offered on-demand in the cloud.

The still-unnamed second-gen CPU will utilize a 7 nm manufacturing process if the Neoverce N1 core at its base is to be believed. Additionally, everything from the Neoverse line should translate to this next-gen CPU as well, meaning that there will be features like high frequency and high single-threaded performance, cache coherency, and interconnect fabric designed to connect special-purpose accelerators to the CPU complex. For reference, Arm's design of Neoverce N1 has a TDP of 105 W for the whole SoC and its packs 64 cores running at 3.1 GHz, delivering amazing power efficiency and high core count.

MediaTek today unveiled Dimensity, MediaTek's family of powerful 5G system-on-chips (SoCs) offering an unrivaled combination of connectivity, multimedia, AI and imaging innovations for premium and flagship smartphones.

The MediaTek Dimensity 5G chipset family brings smart and fast together to power the world's most capable 5G devices. Dimensity represents a step toward a new era of mobility - the fifth dimension - to spur industry innovation and let consumers unlock the possibilities of 5G connectivity.

At its recent SC19 talk, AMD touched upon its upcoming "Zen 3" CPU microarchitecture. Designed for the 7 nm EUV silicon fabrication process that significantly increases transistor densities, "Zen 3" could post performance gains "right in line with what you would expect from an entirely new architecture," states AMD, referring to the roughly 15 percent IPC gains that were expected of "Zen 2" prior to its launch. "Zen 2" IPC ended up slightly over 15 percent higher than that of the original "Zen" microarchitecture. AMD's SC19 comments need not be a guidance on the IPC itself, but rather performance gains of end-products versus their predecessors.

The 7 nm EUV process, with its 20 percent transistor-density increase could give AMD designers significant headroom to increase clock speeds to meet the company's generational performance improvement targets. Another direction in which "Zen 3" could go is utilizing the additional transistor density to bolster its core components to support demanding instruction-sets such as AVX-512. The company's microarchitecture is also missing something analogous to Intel's DLBoost, an instruction-set that leverages fixed-function hardware to accelerate AI-DNN building and training. Even VIA announced an x86 microarchitecture with AI hardware and AVX-512 support. In either case, the design of "Zen 3" is complete. We'll have to wait until 2020 to find out how fast "Zen 3" is, and the route taken to get there.

According to the findings of a Chiphell user called "wjm47196", AMD is supposedly going to host an event at CES 2020 to showcase its next generation of Radeon graphics cards. Having seen huge success with its first-generation "RDNA" GPUs, AMD is expected to showcase improved lineup utilizing new and improved RDNA 2 graphics card architecture.

Judging by the previous information, second generation of RDNA graphics cards will get much-needed features like ray tracing, to remain competitive with existing offers from NVIDIA and soon Intel. Supposed to be built using the 7 nm+ manufacturing process, the new GPU architecture will get around 10-15% performance improvement due to the new manufacturing process alone, with possibly higher numbers if there are changes to the GPU core.

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.

At Supercomputing 2019, Intel unveiled its vision for extending its leadership in the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) with new additions to its data-centric silicon portfolio and an ambitious new software initiative that represents a paradigm shift from today's single-architecture, single-vendor programming models.

Addressing the increasing use of heterogeneous architectures in high-performance computing, Intel expanded on its existing technology portfolio to move, store and process data more effectively by announcing a new category of discrete general-purpose GPUs optimized for AI and HPC convergence. Intel also launched the oneAPI industry initiative to deliver a unified and simplified programming model for application development across heterogenous processing architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators. The launch of oneAPI represents millions of Intel engineering hours in software development and marks a game-changing evolution from today's limiting, proprietary programming approaches to an open standards-based model for cross-architecture developer engagement and innovation.

Intel's first Xe GPU built on the company's 7 nm silicon fabrication process will be codenamed "Ponte Vecchio," according to a VideoCardz report. These are not gaming GPUs, but rather compute accelerators designed for exascale computing, which leverage the company's CXL (Compute Express Link) interconnect that has bandwidth comparable to PCIe gen 4.0, but with scalability features slated to come out with future generations of PCIe. Intel is preparing its first enterprise compute platform featuring these accelerators codenamed "Project Aurora," in which the company will exert end-to-end control over not just the hardware stack, but also the software.

"Project Aurora" combines up to six "Ponte Vecchio" Xe accelerators with up to two Xeon multi-core processors based on the 7 nm "Sapphire Rapids" microarchitecture, and OneAPI, a unifying API that lets a single kind of machine code address both the CPU and GPU. With Intel owning the x86 machine architecture, it's likely that Xe GPUs will feature, among other things, the ability to process x86 instructions. The API will be able to push scalar workloads to the CPU, and and the GPU's scalar units, and vector workloads to the GPU's vector-optimized SIMD units. Intel's main pitch to the compute market could be significantly lowered software costs from API and machine-code unification between the CPU and GPU.Image Courtesy: Jan Drewes

Marketing material of AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5500 mid-range graphics cards leaked to the web, providing insights to the product's positioning in AMD's stack. The October 2019 dated document lists out the card's specification, performance relative to a competing NVIDIA product, and a provides a general guidance on what experience to expect form it. To begin with, the RX 5500 desktop graphics card is based on the 7 nm "Navi 14" silicon, and is configured with 22 RDNA compute units, amounting to 1,408 stream processors. The chip features a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus, which is paired with either 4 GB or 8 GB of memory running at 14 Gbps data-rate, yielding 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Its GPU clocks are listed as 1670 MHz "gaming," and 1845 MHz boost. The company didn't mention nominal clocks. The typical board power is rated at 110 W, and a single 8-pin PCIe power input is deployed on the reference-design board.

The second slide is where things get very interesting. AMD tabled its product stack, and the RX 570, RX 580, and RX 590 are missing, even as the RX 560 isn't. This is probably a sign of AMD phasing out the Polaris-based 1080p cards in the very near future, and replacing them with the RX 5500, and possibly a better endowed "RX 5500 XT," if rumors of the "Navi 14" featuring more CUs are to be believed. What is surprising about this whole presentation though is that only the "RX 5500" is listed, with the "XT" nowhere in sight. Let's hope the XT version gets released further down the road. In the product stack, the RX 5500 is interestingly still being compared to the GeForce GTX 1650, with no mention of the GTX 1660. This document was probably made when the GTX 1660 Super hadn't launched. A different slide provides some guidance on what kind of experiences to expect from the various cards, rated N/A, good, better, or excellent. According to it, the RX 5500 should provide "excellent" AAA gaming at 1080p, fairly smooth gaming at high settings (graded "better"), "excellent" e-Sports gaming, and "better" 1440p gaming. The card is also "excellent" at all non-gaming graphics, such as watching 4K video, photo/video creator work, game streaming at any resolution, and general desktop use.

MSI, the most powerful motherboard brand, announces that our brand new AMD high-end motherboards are on a shelf, together with the launch of the new 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors and TRX40 chipset. The new 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors adopt 7 nm architecture which supports the latest PCIe 4.0 technology and provide advanced performance with memory frequency and capacity. It is noticeable that the previous X399 motherboards are not compatible with the 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper processors. Therefore, MSI is well-prepared with three TRX40 motherboards for various use, including Creator TRX40, TRX40 PRO 10G and TRX40 PRO WIFI to satisfy any type of users.

To meet the most demanding requirements for content creation processes, Creator TRX40 motherboard is well-designed in every respect. In terms of design, the concept follows the craft of "crystal." The crystal design reflects the light magically with millions of color effects. Creator TRX40 also features the best hardware design for maximum performance and long-lasting operation.

AMD today announced four new desktop processors across three very diverse markets. To begin with, the company crowned its socket AM4 mainstream desktop platform with the mighty new Ryzen 9 3950X processor. Next up, it released its new baseline entry-level APU, the Athlon 3000G. Lastly, it detailed the 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper HEDT processor family with two initial models, the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and the flagship Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. The company also formally released its AGESA Combo PI 1.0.0.4B microcode, and with it, introduced a killer new feature for all "Zen 2" based Ryzen processors, called ECO Mode.

The Ryzen 9 3950X is a 16-core/32-thread processor in the AM4 package, compatible with all socket AM4 motherboards, provided they have the latest BIOS update with AGESA Combo PI 1.0.0.4B microcode. The processor comes with clock-speeds of 3.50 GHz base, with 4.70 GHz maximum boost frequency, and the same 105 W TDP as the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X. With 512 KB of dedicated L2 cache per core, and 64 MB of shared L3 cache, the chip has a mammoth 72 MB of "total cache."

It's sort of a goalpost-moving world, but according to Videocardz, AMD has apparently scrapped plans to announce their new Ryzen Threadripper lineup for today, November 5th, and has since scheduled the announcement for November 7th. The website cites sources close to AMD's plans as a way to add credence to their report. This writer, for one, thinks an announcement on a day other than a 7th would be a missed opportunity, flavor-wise, considering the 7 nm manufacturing process of the new AMD HEDT lineup, but I digress.

As far as is known, all other plans are kept, including the announcement of three new processors: the Threadripper 3960X and 3970X, which will hit shelves come November 19th, when the review embargo lifts; and the Threadripper 3990X, which will only be available come January 2020. The new TRX40 platform and motherboards based on the design will also be showcased, and there should be a myriad of new product announcements on that front to accompany AMD's new products.

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

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

NVIDIA's add-in card partners are ordering fresh stocks of GeForce RTX 2070 graphics chips even as the performance-segment of the GPU market has changed with AMD's introduction of its Radeon RX 5700 series "Navi," according to a Gamers Nexus report citing sources among NVIDIA partners. NVIDIA partners are expecting a slump in AMD's RX 5700 series graphics card inventories, particularly that of the RX 5700 XT, to create a price-point at which to sell the RTX 2070. NVIDIA partners expect RX 5700 XT inventories to run slim as supply of the 7 nm "Navi 10" chips from foundry-partner TSMC may not satiate the SKU's reportedly high demand.

NVIDIA's current product stack has the original RTX 2060 at $349, the RTX 2060 Super at $399, and the RTX 2070 Super at $499. The RTX 2070, which is outperformed by the $399 Radeon RX 5700 XT, was practically phased out from NVIDIA's product-stack as it was succeeded by the RTX 2070 Super at its $499 price-point. With the RTX 2070 making a comeback, it would be interesting to see what its price-point will be. There is a gap between the $399 RTX 2060 Super, and the $499 RTX 2070 Super, although the performance gap between the RTX 2060 Super and the RTX 2070 is a paltry 4 percent, which is easily closed by moderately overclocking the RTX 2060 Super. As of this writing, both pricing and availability of the RX 5700 XT appear normal.

A collaborative effort by several Redditors discovered that AMD could carve as many as five Radeon RX 5000-series SKUs based on its upcoming 7 nm "Navi 14" GPU. They poured through thousands of lines of code in AMD's open-source GPU driver files. Among these are two mobile GPUs, and three desktop. The "Navi 14" silicon allegedly features up to 24 RDNA compute units making up 1,536 stream processors; and possibly a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface. The highest trim based on this silicon is the "Navi 14 XTX" variant, which goes by the commercial name Radeon RX 5500 XT. While it remains to be seen if it maxes out all 24 CUs present on the silicon, it certainly has the highest engine gaming clocks at 1717 MHz.

Next up is the Radeon RX 5500 ("Navi 14 XT"). This SKU is popularized in AMD's October 2019 product announcements. It is known to feature 22 compute units working out to 1,408 stream processors, and up to 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across the chip's 128-bit wide memory interface. Its gaming clocks are rated at 1670 MHz. The other popularized SKU is the Radeon RX 5500M ("Navi 14 XTM"). With the same core-config as the RX 5500, this SKU has slightly lesser clock-speeds contributing to a more aggressive power-management. Its gaming clocks are rated at 1448 MHz. It turns out that AMD is interested in carving out a whole different segment of GPUs based on "Navi 14," the Radeon RX 5300 series.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the third quarter of 2019 of $1.80 billion, operating income of $186 million, net income of $120 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.11. On a non-GAAP(*) basis, operating income was $240 million, net income was $219 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.18.

"Our first full quarter of 7 nm Ryzen, Radeon and EPYC processor sales drove our highest quarterly revenue since 2005, our highest quarterly gross margin since 2012 and a significant increase in net income year-over-year," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "I am extremely pleased with our progress as we have the strongest product portfolio in our history, significant customer momentum and a leadership product roadmap for 2020 and beyond."

TSMC vice chairman and CEO C.C. Wei announced the company's plans for 5 nm are on track, which means High Volume manufacturing (HVM) on the node is expected to be achieved by 2Q 2020. The company has increased expenditures in ramping up its various nodes from an initially projected $10 billion to something along the lines of $14 billion - 15 billion; the company is really banking on quick uptake and design wins on its most modern process technologies - and the increased demand that follows.

TSMC's 5 nm process (N5) will use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) in many more layers than its N7+ and N6 processes, with up to 14 layers being etched in the N5 silicon compared to five and six, respectively, for its "older" N7+ and N6 processes. As the company increases capital expenditure in acquiring EUVL-capable equipment that sets up its production nodes for the market they foresee will just gobble up the chips in 2020, the company is optimistic they can achieve growth in the 5-10% number.

AMD late Thursday released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.10.1 WHQL. These drivers are identical to the Adrenalin 19.10.1 Beta drivers released earlier this month, with the only difference being WHQL certification. AMD is picking up the pace with WHQL releases of Radeon Software, as more OEMs are implementing Radeon RX 5700-series and upcoming RX 5500-series GPUs, and prefer WHQL-signed drivers. The 19.10.1 drivers introduce support for AMD's new Radeon RX 5500 series graphics cards based on its new 7 nm "Navi 11" silicon, along with fixes for "Borderlands 3" running in DirectX 12 mode, optimization for "GRID," and fixes certain display problems with high refresh-rate settings.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.10.1 WHQLChange-log for 19.10.1 follows.

AMD's latest Product Master guide (since taken down but immortalized in the interweb) has a surprise in store for AMD's Ryzen 7 desktop CPU lineup. Sandwiched in-between the Ryzen 7 3700X and the Ryzen 7 3800X, a new entry has reared its head, in the form of the Ryzen 7 3750X. The new CPU is specified to keep the same 105 W TDP of its elder sibling Ryzen 7 3800X, instead of keeping the Ryzen 7 3700X's 65 W TDP. Technically, this is possible to achieve in both pricing and performance: the Ryzen 7 3750X, if it ever is launched (it could be a specific release for system integrators or other interested parties outside the usual mainstream desktop suspects) could sport increased base clocks compared to the Ryzen 7 3700X's 3.6 GHz base / 4.4 GHz boost clocks... But not easily, considering the Ryzen 7 3800X starts at 3.9 GHz base / 4.5 GHz boost. It's possible to release the 3750X with a 200 MHz boost on base clocks and the same 4.4 GHz boost, but does it make any sense to do so?

It could - even if with some forced optimism - should AMD price it closer to the Ryzen 7 3700X than to the Ryzen 7 3800X. The $329 and $399 prices for those CPUs, respectively, leave a gap that could be filled by the Ryzen 7 3750X at around the $349 mark, for example. It's likely most users would be making the jump from the 65 W CPU than dropping less cash compared to the 3800X, so AMD's margins per sale would definitely improve. At the same time, this could be a way for AMD to cope with TSMC's 7 nm increase in lead-times and lower availability of CPUs by moving stock from the 65 W CPU to the pricier 3750X in parts that can actually run at those frequencies. Driving their lineup's ASP up ensures AMD can keep a steady stream of income should availability decline - less parts sold at a greater price can shore up some of the lost cash influx.

These could very well be the first pictures of a custom-design Radeon RX 5500 graphics card. Pictures of the purported XFX Radeon RX 5500 THICC II made it to the web courtesy VideoCardz. It's very likely that this is the RX 5500 looking at its power-connectivity, which includes just a single 8-pin PCIe input. An RX 5700-series product would at least feature an 8+6-pin input design. The display I/O is also peculiar, with not one but two dual-link DVI-D connectors (no analog pins on either), and one each of DisplayPort and HDMI. The card has the same design language as its THICC series siblings from the RX 5700-series.

The cooling solution uses two shrouds (the front shroud and the back-plate) that meet in the middle in symmetry. Two fans ventilate an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that features two or three 8 mm-thick copper heat pipes. The cooler is longer than the card itself. Based on the 7 nm "Navi 11" silicon, the Radeon RX 5500 features 22 RDNA compute units working out to 1,408 stream processors, boost frequencies of up to 1848 MHz, and up to 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface.