GIGABYTE today rolled out a pair of custom-design AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards. These include the RX 6700 XT Gaming OC, and the RX 6700 XT EAGLE. The company will also sell reference-design "made by AMD" RX 6700 XT cards. The RX 6700 XT Gaming OC features a WindForce 3X cooling solution that looks practically identical to the Radeon RX 6800 Gaming OC card, with possible modifications to its heatsink's base-plate. Three aluminium fin-stacks are skewered by five 6 mm-thick copper heat-pipes that make direct contact with the GPU. Additional base-plates pull heat from the memory and VRM areas. The card draws power from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs include two each of HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 connectors.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT EAGLE is the more slender of the two custom-design RX 6700 XT cards by GIGABYTE. It is strictly 2 slots thick, and uses a slimmer heatsink. Three aluminium fin-stacks are joined by three 8 mm-thick copper heat pipes that make direct contact with the GPU. The power input configuration is the same as the Gaming OC card, as is the display output configuration. GIGABYTE didn't disclose the factory overclock speeds or either cards, but the Gaming OC card is expected to be the faster of the two. Both cards are expected to launch on March 18, 2021.

AMD in its "Where Gaming Begins Episode 3" online event, announced that it is introducing Smart Access Memory (resizable base address register) support to Ryzen 3000 series "Matisse" processors, based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture. These exclude the Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G. The PCI-SIG innovated feature was, until now, restricted to the Ryzen 5000 series on the AMD platform, although is heavily proliferated across the Intel platform. Resizable BAR enables the CPU to see the graphics card's entire dedicated memory as one addressable block, rather than through 256-megabyte apertures. For game engines that are able to take advantage of the feature, this could translate to a performance boost of up to 16 percent. Be on the lookout for BIOS updates from your motherboard manufacturer.

AMD has pulled what could be another sucker punch on NVIDIA with the announcement of its upcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card set at the $479 price point. Considering, of course, that there's availability; in case there's not, our very own btarunr defined AMD's claims quite well on the news post covering AMD's announcement. If there is actual availability, however, AMD has showcased eight different designs coming from its more high-profile partners: AsRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, XFX, and Yeston.

All the showcased graphics cards will feature the Navi 22 GPU and 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, but all of them should differ from AMD's reference design in the power delivery: dual 8-pin configurations are the expected changes to the design, so as to allow for higher performance, higher power limit ceilings, and better potential overclocks. Expect all of them - all of them - to be priced higher than AMD's suggested (and we know how that suggestion goes nowadays) MSRP of $479. All of these cards should be available in some quantity come March 18th.

As a leading brand in True Gaming hardware, MSI is proud to announce a new graphics card line-up based on the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU, uniting the latest in graphics technology, high-performance circuit board design and advanced cooling.

GAMING series
MSI brings the GAMING series with the iconic TWIN FROZR 8 thermal design to the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. Compared to the previous generation, the dual fan design has been improved with TORX FAN 4.0, binding fan blade pairs together with an outer link to focus airflow into the TWIN FROZR 8 cooling system. The heatsink features advanced aerodynamic and thermodynamic technologies for efficient heat dissipation, reducing temperatures while maintaining high performance. A new design emphasizes the dazzling Mystic Light RGB infused into the card. Gamers can easily control and synchronize LED-lit components with the upgraded MSI Dragon Center software.

AMD today announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT, its fourth RX 6000 series graphics card based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. The card debuts the new 7 nm "Navi 22" silicon, which is physically smaller than the "Navi 21" powering the RX 6800/RX 6900 series. The RX 6700 XT maxes out "Navi 22," featuring 40 RDNA2 compute units, amounting to 2,560 stream processors. These are run at a maximum Game Clock frequency of 2424 MHz, a significant clock speed uplift over the previous-gen. The card comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface. The card uses 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips, so the memory bandwidth works out to 384 GB/s. The chip packs 96 MB of Infinity Cache on-die memory, which works to accelerate the memory sub-system. AMD is targeting a typical board power metric of 230 W. The power input configuration for the reference-design RX 6700 XT board is 8-pin + 6-pin.

AMD is marketing the RX 6700 XT as a predominantly 1440p gaming card, positioned a notch below the RX 6800. The company makes some staggering performance claims. Compared to the previous-generation the RX 6700 XT is shown beating the GeForce RTX 2080 Super. NVIDIA marketed the current-gen RTX 3060 Ti as having the same performance outlook. Things get interesting, where AMD shows that in select games, the RX 6700 XT can even beat the RTX 3070, a card NVIDIA marketed as matching its previous-gen flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti. AMD is pricing the Radeon RX 6700 XT at USD $479 (MSRP), which is very likely to be bovine defecation, given the prevailing market situation. The company announced a simultaneous launch of its reference-design and AIB custom-design boards, starting March 18, 2021.AMD's performance claims follow.

AMD Radeon Technologies Group today is writing the third chapter in its return to competitiveness across the board, with the "Where Gaming Begins: Episode 3" online media event, which we are live-blogging here. We expect AMD to announce its much awaited Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card that competes against NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series performance-segment; as well as anticipate updates to the software feature-set of Radeon, and possible sneak-peaks to the future of the Radeon RX 6000 series and RDNA2 graphics architecture on the PC, including its mobile debut. Join us for more!15:44 UTC: 15 minutes to go, all we're seeing is a slick render of what's possibly the RX 6700 XT reference-design board.

15:50 UTC: Scott Herkelman, GM and VP of AMD's Graphics Business, will take centerstage ten minutes from now.

Exxact Corporation, a leading provider of high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and data center solutions, announced their new line of Valence and TENSOREX Workstations featuring the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO Processors. These professional grade workstations geared towards engineers, visual graphic artists, and scientists provide game changing single and multithreaded performance and provide unrivaled memory bandwidth1. Exxact has positioned itself to be one of the first system integrators to provide workstations equipped with these powerful new processors.

"The new AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO Processors are a massive leap forward for engineers, designers, architects, any professional who demands ultimate performance and security from their workstation," said Jason Chen, Vice President at Exxact Corporation. "By being one of the first companies to offer these workstations, our customers can gain the competitive edge in their industry," added Jason.

Remember AMD's Threadripper Pro CPUs which went on sale in prebuilt workstations? Well, they're now available for the general public in boxed CPU offerings - if you have the cash for them. The platform offers support for up to 2 TB of DRAM through its eight-channel configuration, 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity, and up to 64 cores (128 Threads with the company's Simultaneous Multi Threading [SMT] technology). The best motherboards for these productivity beasts are, according to AMD, WRX80-based motherboards, which start at a pretty negligible $999.

The company's lineup tops out at the flagship Threadripper PRO 3995WX, which is a 64-core/128-thread max-out of the "Rome" MCM, with a max boost frequency of 4.20 GHz ($5,489). Next up is the Threadripper PRO 3975WX, which is a 32-core/64-thread part, clocked up to 4.20 GHz boost ($2,749). Following this, is the Threadripper PRO 3955WX, a 16-core/32-thread part clocked up to 4.30 GHz boost ($1,149). The Threadripper PRO 3945WX, a 12-core/24-thread part clocked up to 4.30 GHz boost, is apparently absent from this release. If you need the current best from AMD apart from their EPYC CPUs, it doesn't get much better than this.

The next-generation "Zen 4" CPU microarchitecture powering AMD's 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" enterprise processors, will support 512-bit AVX instruction sets, according to an alleged company slide leaked to the web on the ChipHell forums. The slide references "AVX3-512" support in addition to BFloat16 and "other ISA extensions." This would make "Zen 4" the first AMD microarchitecture to support AVX-512. It remains to be seen which specific instructions the architecture supports, and whether all of them are available to both the enterprise and client implementations of "Zen 4," or whether AMD would take an approach similar to Intel, in only enabling certain "relevant" instructions on the client parts. The slide also mentions core counts being "greater than 64" corresponding withour story from earlier today.

AMD is expected to debut its Radeon RX 6700 series with a solo launch of its top-spec RX 6700 XT, with the non-XT "RX 6700" following on at a later date, according to Cowcotland. As it stands the company could announce the RX 6700 XT at an online event on March 3, with availability expected from March 18. The French publication also reports that no more than 100 reference-design RX 6700 XT MBA (made by AMD) cards are on their way to France, and another 100-or-so custom-design cards. It's important to note here, that the RX 6700 XT and its competitors form the NVIDIA camp, the RTX 3060-series, are supposed to be middle-of-the-market products that are expected to sell the most each generation.

AMD's next-generation EPYC enterprise processor that succeeds the upcoming 3rd Gen EYPIC "Milan," codenamed "Genoa," is expected to be the first major platform update for AMD's enterprise platforms since the 2017 debut of the "Zen" based "Naples." Implementing the latest I/O interfaces, such as DDR5 memory and PCI-Express gen 5.0, the chip will also increase CPU core counts by 50% over "Milan," according to ExecutableFix on Twitter, a reliable source with rumors from the semiconductor industry. To enable the goals of new I/O and increased core counts, AMD will transition to a new CPU socket type, the SP5. This is a 6,096-pin land grid array (LGA), and the "Genoa" MCM package on SP5 is imagined to be visibly larger than SP3-generation packages.

With the added fiberglass substrate real-estate, AMD is expected to add more CPU chiplets to the package, and ExecutableFix expects the chiplet count to be increased to 12. AMD is expected to debut the "Zen 4" microarchitecture in the enterprise space with "Genoa," with the CPU chiplets expected to be built on the 5 nm EUV silicon fabrication node. Assuming the chiplets still only pack 8 cores a piece, "Genoa" could cram up to 96 cores per socket, or up to 192 logical processors, with SMT enabled.

Here are some of the first pictures of custom-design AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards, in the form of the ASUS Radeon RX 6700 XT DUAL, and the TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6700 XT OC. Both cards feature 12 GB of memory, and use ASUS's latest generation of Prime Series DUAL and TUF Gaming board designs. The Radeon RX 6700 series is expected to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060-series "Ampere" graphics card in the high-volume "sweetspot" segment. The ASUS DUAL card is a lot larger than it looks, measuring a little over 29 cm in length, and using a pair of 100 mm Axial-Tech fans to ventilate a large heatsink underneath; while the TUF Gaming OC is about as large as any of the other TUF Gaming cards from this generation. AMD is expected to announce the RX 6700 series at an online event, on March 3, 2021.

Lenovo and AMD seem to be developing an exclusive partnership with client/workstation products. Following exclusivity for Lenovo to sell workstations powered by the Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors, the two appear to be collaborating on graphics cards. Pictures surfaced on Chinese social media of the new Lenovo Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT LEGION Edition graphics cards. At this point it's unclear whether Lenovo designed these cards, or if the designers of AMD's reference MBA (made by AMD) graphics cards lent a hand.

Looking at the red-illuminated "R" cornerstone design element, the possibility of the card being designed and made by the same OEM as reference-design MBA cards, cannot be ruled out. Use of the "R" cornerstone dates back to the Radeon RX Vega series. The typeface of the "R" has since been updated to match with the latest Radeon logo. Elsewhere across the card, we see a large "Radeon RX 6x00 XT" logo along the top of the card, which is RGB illuminated. The butch triple-slot card appears to be slightly larger than the RX 6800 XT / RX 6900 XT reference-design, pulling power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Along the metal back-plate we see a large, illuminated logo of LEGION, Lenovo's gaming PC marquee. Below are screengrabs from the animation, watch the animated GIF in the source link below. At this point we don't know if this card is China-exclusive, and exactly how it's marketed, whether it's sold standalone like any AIB retail card, or whether it's pre-installed on LEGION PCs, such as the 2021 LEGION 7000P desktops.

PowerColor has begun teasing another entry to their graphics card brands: Hellhound is fated to meet the Red Dragon and Red Devil products branding in either physical or virtual store shelves. The tease comes a mere week before AMD is expected to launch their mainstream RX 6700 graphics cards (powered by the Navi 22 GPU with 2560 Stream Processors and 12 GB of GDDR6 memory), and thus, it seems legitimate to assume that the new series will debut with that particular AMD SKU. The color scheme for the new brand logo seems to tease a black, silver and teal design language.

This is what PowerColor had to say in describing their new series: "Hellhound is born, sharp of fang and razor-like claws, covered with fur that is tough like armour. Its eyes burn in the darkness, allowing it to precisely track and stalk its prey. It used to be a battle hound kept by a warrior brave, Yet, its bravery not unnoticed by the Red Devil, saw a chance to make this hound the keeper of his gates of hell… This Hellhound is silent, not a sound it makes as it guards the gates ready to strike in the darkness with a killer grace… Once prey is found, Hellhound will take it down, it strikes with stealth at one stroke!"

Demand in the global foundry market remains strong in 1Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. As various end-products continue to generate high demand for chips, clients of foundries in turn stepped up their procurement activities, which subsequently led to a persistent shortage of production capacities across the foundry industry. TrendForce therefore expects foundries to continue posting strong financial performances in 1Q21, with a 20% YoY growth in the combined revenues of the top 10 foundries, while TSMC, Samsung, and UMC rank as the top three in terms of market share. However, the future reallocation of foundry capacities still remains to be seen, since the industry-wide effort to accelerate the production of automotive chips may indirectly impair the production and lead times of chips for consumer electronics and industrial applications.

TSMC has been maintaining a steady volume of wafer inputs at its 5 nm node, and these wafer inputs are projected to account for 20% of the company's revenue. On the other hand, owing to chip orders from AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and MediaTek, demand for TSMC's 7 nm node is likewise strong and likely to account for 30% of TSMC's revenue, a slight increase from the previous quarter. On the whole, TSMC's revenue is expected to undergo a 25% increase YoY in 1Q21 and set a new high on the back of surging demand for 5G, HPC, and automotive applications.

In 2019, AMD and Samsung have announced that they will be joining forces to develop a new class of mobile SoCs, carrying the Exynos name and having a Radeon GPU inside. These Exynos SoCs could be used for almost everything that needs a low-power processor. While the original plan was to have these processors run inside Samsung's mobile phone offerings, it seems like there is another application for them. If the rumors coming from ZDNet Korea are correct, we are in for a surprise. According to the source, Samsung is preparing to use the Exynos SoC with Radeon graphics in the company's next-generation laptops lineup.

While there is little to no information regarding the specifications of the said system, we can expect it to be a fully Samsung-made laptop. That means that Samsung will provide display, RAM, storage, battery, and other components manufactured by the company or its divisions. This laptop is expected to replace Samsung's Galaxy Book S, which currently uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx SoC. The new PC is going to be Windows 10 based system. For more details, we have to wait for the announcement.

AMD has recently announced their third "When Gaming Begins" event to announce the latest addition to the Radeon RX 6000 Series. AMD unveiled the first of their Ryzen 5000 Series processors during the first When Gaming Begins event and announced the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT graphics cards during the second event. This third event will almost certainly be to officially unveil the Radeon RX 6700 XT and/or RX 6700 graphics cards which we have received various leaks and rumors about.

We expect the RX 6700 XT to come with 40 compute units, 2560 cores, and 12 GB 192-bit GDDR6 memory and to compete with the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti. The card is rumored to retail for under 250 USD however it is unknown if the card will actually be available to purchase at this price. The RX 6700 features the same 12 GB 192-bit GDDR6 memory but only includes 36 compute units and 2304 cores. AMD will likely also talk about their laptop plans and software features during the event. The third When Gaming Begins event will be live-streamed by AMD on March 3rd at 11 am ET.

Intel claims that its upcoming 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processors offer up to 11% higher storage performance than competing AMD Ryzen 5000 processors, when using the CPU-attached M.2 NVMe slot. A performance slide released by Intel's Ryan Shrout shows a Samsung 980 PRO 1 TB PCI-Express 4.0 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD performance on a machine powered by a Core i9-11900K processor, compared to one powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. PCMark 10 Quick System Drive Benchmark is used to evaluate storage performance on both machines. On both machines a separate drive is used as the OS/boot drive, and the Samsung 980 PRO is used as a test drive, free from any OS role.

The backup page for the slide provides details of the system configurations used for both machines. What it doesn't mention, however, is whether on the AMD machine, the 980 PRO was installed on the CPU-attached M.2 NVMe slot, or one that's attached to the AMD X570 chipset. Unlike the Intel Z590, the AMD X570 puts out downstream PCI-Express 4.0, which motherboard designers can use to put out additional NVMe Gen 4 slots. On the Intel Z590 motherboard, the M.2 NVMe Gen 4 slot the drive was tested on is guaranteed to be the CPU-attached one, as the Z590 PCH puts out PCIe Gen 3 downstream lanes. A PCI-Express 4.0 x4 link is used as chipset bus on the AMD X570, offering comparable bandwidth to the DMI 3.0 x8 (PCI-Express 3.0 x8) employed on the Intel Z590. A drive capable of attaining 7 GB/s sequential transfers should be in a sub-optimal situation on a chipset-attached M.2 slot. It would be nice if Intel clears this up in an update to its backup.

Update 02:51 UTC: In response to a specific question on Twitter, on whether the drives were tested on CPU-attached M.2 slots on both platforms, Ryan Shrout stated that a PCI-Express AIC riser card was used on both platforms to ensure that the drives are CPU-attached. 11% is a significant storage performance uplift on offer.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 21.2.3 beta adds optimization for "DIRT 5 Energy Content Pack." Among the handful of issued fixed with these drivers include HDMI audio device (such as home-theater receivers) failing to install on Radeon RX 400 series and RX 500 series "Polaris" graphics cards; hot-plugging TVs and displays in multi-monitor configurations causing a system hang; "Substance Painter" experiencing a crash with Radeon RX 6000 series; HP Reverb G2 VR HMD causing a system crash when plugging into RX 6900 XT, and the Radeon Software application sometimes failing to look up the latest version of the software. Grab it from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.2.3 betaThe change-log follows.

AMD is slowly preparing the next-generation of its compute-oriented flagship graphics card design called Instinct MI200 GPU. It is the card of choice for the exascale Frontier supercomputer, which is expected to make a debut later this year at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. With the supercomputer planned for the end of this year, AMD Instinct MI200 is also going to get launched eight a bit before or alongside it. The Frontier exascale supercomputer is supposed to bring together AMD's next-generation Trento EPYC CPUs with Instinct MI200 GPU compute accelerators. However, it seems like AMD will utilize some new technologies for the making of this supercomputer. While we do not know what Trento EPYC CPUs will look like, it seems like Instinct MI200 GPU is going to feature a multi-chip-module (MCM) design with the new CDNA 2 GPU architecture. With this being the only information about the GPU, we have to wait a bit to find out more details.

AMD appears to be taking baby steps toward expanding its Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" desktop processor lineup. Dell Canada has started listing a model of the processor series not yet available in the DIY retail channel, the Ryzen 7 5800 (non-X). This isn't a typo, as the option is listed next to the 5800X. The Ryzen 7 5800 is described as being an 8-core part, much like the 5800X, but has a slightly lower max boost frequency of 4.60 GHz, as opposed to 4.70 GHz of the 5800X. It could have a lower nominal (base) frequency compared to the 5800X, and possibly even a lower TDP. The last time AMD released an OEM-exclusive non-X SKU was the Ryzen 9 3900 12-core processor.

AMD's current retail-channel (PIB) lineup of Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors starts at $299 for the 6-core Ryzen 5 5600X, with the company still selling Ryzen 3000-series SKUs such as the 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X under this price. We expect the company to flesh out the 5000-series with SKUs such as the "Ryzen 5 5600 (non-X)," later this year, in response to Intel's 11th Gen Core i5 series based on the "Rocket Lake-S" silicon. Given the fate of the Ryzen 9 3900, we don't expect a broad retail launch of the Ryzen 7 5800.

GIGABYTE Technology, (TWSE: 2376), an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced the G262-ZR0 for HPC, AI, and data analytics. Designed to support the highest-level of performance in GPU computing, the G262-ZR0 incorporates fast PCIe 4.0 throughput in addition to NVIDIA HGX technologies and NVIDIA NVLink to provide industry leading bandwidth performance.

AMD is expected to launch its Radeon RX 6700 XT performance-segment graphics card on March 18, 2021, according to French tech publication Cowcotland. This would put the launch over two weeks after NVIDIA's February 25 launch of the GeForce RTX 3060. The new RX 6700 series is expected to compete against the RTX 3060 series, and debuts the new 7 nm "Navi 22" silicon that's based on the RDNA2 architecture, and features 40 compute units (2,560 stream processors). The card comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory bus, much like the RTX 3060. Cowcotland expects availability of the RX 6700 XT to be "very limited" at launch. Who knew?

NVIDIA GeForce GPUs feature hotspot temperature measurement akin to AMD Radeon ones, according to an investigative report by Igor's Lab. A beta version of HWInfo already supports hotspot measurement. As its name suggests, the hotspot is the hottest spot on the GPU, measured from a network of thermal sensors across the GPU die, unlike conventional "GPU Temperature" sensors, which reads off a single physical location of the GPU die. AMD refers to this static sensor as "Edge temperature." In some cases, the reported temperature of this sensor could differ from the hotspot by as much as 20°C, which underscores the importance of hotspot. The sensor with the highest temperature measurement becomes the hotspot.

GPU manufacturers rarely disclose the physical locations of on-die thermal sensors, but during the AMD Radeon VII, we got a rare glimpse at this, in a company slide, with the sensors being located near components that can get the hottest, such as the compute units (pictured below). Igor's Lab put out measurements of the deviation between the hotspot and "GPU temperature" sensors on a GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition card. There's a much narrower deviation between the two (between 11-14°C), and than the one between hotspot and Edge temperature on an MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio (which posts a 12-20°C difference).

When AMD announced its Ryzen 5000 series of processors based on the new Zen 3 architecture, the performance of these processors was the best on the market. Even in our own testing, we have found that AMD's Zen 3 core is the highest performing core on the market, even beating Intel's latest and greatest, the 10th generation of Core processors. However, Intel has been doing some silent work and the company has developed a new core to be used in the 11th generation "Rocket Lake" platform. Codenamed Cypress Cove, the design is representing a backport of the 10 nm Sunny Cove design, supposed to bring around 19% IPC improvement across the board.

If you were wondering if that was enough to catch up with AMD's Zen 3 IPC performance, look no further because we have Geekbench 5 performance results of Intel's 35 Watt Core i9-11900T processor. Having a base frequency of only 1.51 GHz, the CPU is capable of boosting one or two cores to the very high speed of 4.9 GHz, giving us a good example of the single-threaded performance we can expect from this CPU. In GB5 tests, the Core i9-11900T has managed to score 1717 points in the single-threaded test and 8349 points in multi-threaded results. Comparing that to something like AMD Ryzen 5800X, which scores 1674 points in single-threaded results, Rocket Lake's Cypress Cove core has managed to be 2.5% faster than Zen 3. However, in multi-threaded results, the AMD chip is unmatched as the low TDP of the Intel processor is stopping it from reaching full performance.