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.

XFX, via its official Twitter account, has started teasing their own interpretation of AMD's upcoming Navi 21-based graphics cards, in the form of the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800. XFX has fallen into slight obscurity ever since its NVIDIA-exclusive days, but the company still manages to hold on to a somewhat cult following for its products. It appears XFX is staying with its THICC series nomenclature for this upcoming generation of graphics cards, as the cooler shroud mostly follows the same design philosophy as that found on the company's RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 graphics cards - with some minimal aesthetic changes.

We're seemingly looking at a full-custom triple-fan design, with a shortened PCB compared to the entire shroud's size. We'll have to wait an additional one or two weeks after November 18th, the official release for AMD's next generation of graphics cards. Only a week to go.

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.

According to the unknown manufacturer (AIB) based in Taiwan, NVIDIA is preparing to launch the new GeForce RTX 3000 series "Ampere" graphics card. As reported by the HKEPC website, the Santa Clara-based company is preparing to fill the gap between its top-end GeForce RTX 3090 and a bit slower RTX 3080 graphics card. The new product will be called GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. If you are wondering what the specification of the new graphics card will look like, you are in luck because the source has a few pieces of information. The new product will be based on GA102-250-KD-A1 GPU core, with a PG133-SKU15 PCB design scheme. The GPU will contain the same 10496 CUDA core configuration as the RTX 3090.

The only difference to the RTX 3090 will be a reduced GDDR6X amount of 20 GB. Along with the 20 GB of GDDR6X memory, the RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards will feature a 320-bit bus. The TGP of the card is limited to 320 Watts. The sources are reporting that the card will be launched sometime in January of 2021, and it will come at $999. This puts the price category of the RTX 3080 Ti in the same range as AMD's recently launched Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card, so it will be interesting to see how these two products are competing.

AMD today launched a new product in its high-performance Embedded processor family, the AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 Series processor. Built on the innovative 7 nm process technology, "Zen 2" cores and high-performance AMD Radeon graphics, the AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 Series provides a new class of performance with 7 nm technology, incredible power efficiency and continues to deliver enterprise-class security features for embedded customers.

The AMD Embedded Ryzen V2000 family is designed for embedded applications such as Thin Client, MiniPC and Edge systems. Equipped with up to eight CPU cores and seven GPU compute units, a single AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 Series processor provides 2x the multi-threaded performance-per-watt, up to 30 percent better single-thread CPU performance and up to 40 percent better graphics performance over the previous generation. For customers and applications that need high-performance display capabilities, the Ryzen Embedded V2000 series can power up to four independent displays in 4K resolution.

The exclusive lifestyle brand Porsche Design and AOC, the leader in the gaming monitor market, have come together to introduce the first ever Porsche Design AOC AGON gaming monitor. The 27" (68.58 cm) PD27 provides an experience similar to driving a race car: high octane specifications (27" QHD panel, 240 Hz refresh rate, 0.5 ms MPRT), a sleek, eye-catching, racing-influenced design and a wide range of functionalities to be utilized both on a daily basis and during long gaming sessions. Even before the official launch, the impressive design of this new monitor was honored with the Red Dot Award 2020.

Hot on the heels of the Radeon RX 6800 XT Pulse picture leak, VideoCardz brings us pics of its pricier sibling, the RX 6800 XT NITRO+. This will be the most premium air-cooled custom-design RX 6800 XT graphics card by Sapphire. Much like the Pulse, the NITRO+ features a meaty triple-slot cooling solution ventilated by three fans. The heatsink of the NITRO+ is larger than that of the Pulse, and looks taller. The PCB is shorter than the card itself, so the extra length go toward air flow-through. There appears to be a design focus on making the cooler shroud airy, with large cutouts wherever possible. At the same time, as its premium offering, Sapphire gave the NITRO+ plenty of RGB LED bling. The card also appears to feature a header so you can sync your lighting to the card. The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power inputs, outputs include two DisplayPorts, an HDMI port, and a USB-C port with DisplayPort passthrough.

PowerColor, the creator of the iconic "Red Devil" flagship designs of AMD Radeon graphics cards, has today posted a teaser for the upcoming Radeon RX 6800 XT GPUs. With their custom PowerColor Radeon RX 6800 XT Red Devil graphics card, the company is bringing consumers their best engineering and design. Today, we are getting the first glimpse of what is to come. Pictured below is a backside of the GPU, with a dark metallic backplate, illuminated by the Red Devil logo. The teased picture shows a bit more of the card as well, where we can see the printed Red Devil logo. This custom design is expected to be a triple-slot and triple-fan design. With AMD reference designs being priced at an MSRP of $649, this custom card is possibly going to be pricier. Below you can see that the Red Devil has awoken amid the wait for custom cards to arrive:

When AMD initially announced that their next-generation Ryzen processors would only support 500 series motherboards they faced significant backlash and were forced to include 400 series motherboard support. The reason AMD cited at the time was the limitations in some flash chips not containing enough space to store the information for all processors, several motherboard manufacturers encountered this issue with Ryzen 3000 bios updates where they needed to reduce graphical elements in their BIOS.

An overclock.net forum user by the name Brko has recently claimed that Zen 3 processors can run on a GIGABYTE X370 motherboard with a beta BIOS and AGESA update. This claim has been partially validated by chm128256m who got a Ryzen 9 5900X to run on his modded ASRock A320M motherboard. AMD is extremely unlikely to officially support this backwards compatibility with 300 series motherboards given their previous statements. It will be interesting to see if any OEMs provide backward compatibility updates and any issues that may arise.

Scalping bots and overpriced re-sales are the new reality of PC hardware launches. The same swarm that wiped out launch inventories of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, now hit AMD Ryzen 5000 series "Zen 3" processor inventories across the US, reports HotHardware. Bots scalped out Ryzen 5000 series inventories using sophisticated scalping services such as Bounce Alerts, and scalpers quickly put their freshly acquired inventory to re-sale on eBay at exorbitant prices, with the likes of an $800 Ryzen 9 5950X being re-sold at over 50% premiums.

ASUS has warned that a similar fate awaits the first inventories of the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 graphics cards, given that AMD has marketed these next-gen GPUs to offer performance rivaling those of the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 2080 Ti (in effect RTX 3070), respectively. In the weeks leading up to the Ryzen 5000 market release, AMD issued anti-scalping guidelines to its retail partners, to ensure fair sales of hardware to genuine buyers, and to prevent scalping bots. We now know these guidelines were futile.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition. Version 20.11.1 beta comes with optimization for Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, DiRT 5, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Godfall. With Godfall, the drivers offer up 7% higher performance as tested with an RX 5700 XT. The driver changelog does not mention any issues fixed with this release, and only a short list of new issues known to AMD, which it's working on to fix. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.11.1The change-log follows.

Following yesterday's teaser of its top Radeon RX 6800 XT NITRO+ graphics card, Sapphire today teased its affordable custom-design offering, the Radeon RX 6800 XT Pulse. The Pulse brand extension represents cost-effective, low-noise custom-designs that are priced close to reference. It's likely that there could be variants of the card, one which sticks to AMD reference clock speeds, and the other with a mild factory overclock. The teaser picture reveals a card that's more than 2 slots thick, and features three evenly sized fans. Sapphire already announced its AMD reference-design cards for the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800, which would mean their Pulse and Pulse OC SKUs are slotted a notch above, followed by the NITRO+ series.

Sapphire today teased its first custom-design Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card, under its coveted NITRO brand. The RX 6800 XT NITRO+ is shown featuring a large cooling solution with a trio of fans of different sizes, and featuring partially webbed impellers. The fan in the middle is smaller than the fans at its sides. From the looks of it, the cooler is thicker than 2 slots, and could very well be the company's top air-cooled custom RX 6800 XT offering. Apparently AMD's Radeon board partners aren't under any restriction to reveal their custom-design cards, given that ASUS already formally launched its custom-design RX 6800-series products.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is announcing new DDR4 memory specifications under the Trident Z Neo series, optimized for the new AMD Ryzen 5000 processors. Featuring ultra-high speeds of up to DDR4-4000 CL16-19-19-39 32 GB (16GBx2), extreme low latency at DDR4-3800 CL14-16-16-36 32 GB (16GBx2), and high-capacity kit at DDR4-4000 CL18-22-22-42 64 GB (32GBx2), these memory kits are the perfect choice for PC enthusiasts and gamers looking to push memory bandwidth to the extreme limits on the new AMD Ryzen 5000 processors.

With the improvements of memory support on the latest AMD Ryzen 5000 processor series, the R&D team at G.SKILL is always looking to push the performance boundaries even further and have expanded the G.SKILL Trident Z Neo series with higher performance options, whether you're looking for extreme frequencies, high kit capacities, or extreme low latency. At high memory frequency speed, the Trident Z Neo DDR4-4000 CL16-19-19-39 32 GB (16 GBx2) raises the memory speed support for AMD platforms to DDR4-4000 from the previous generation of processors. Built with high performance Samsung B-die components, this memory kit also features a low latency of CL16. Seen below, this memory specification can be seen running in 1:1 ratio on the ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero and MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE motherboard with the latest AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X processors.

For AMD Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processor, ASRock, a leading global motherboard manufacturer, has launched the X570 PG Velocita. It is a new crew of Phantom Gaming series designed to meet the needs of high-end gamers and the best choice for high price-performance build. "We've heard the voice of online gamers! The Killer networking on the X570 PG Velocita offers the uninterrupted online experiences and makes gamers beat all competitors in an instant!" said Chris Lee, general manager of ASRock motherboard business unit.

Users may well spot on the phantom gaming logo's difference! The blazing fire in the core symbols the higher transmit rate. Users can enjoy the PCI express 4.0 with double bandwidth from previous generation. At the same time, the whole new Killer Ethernet & Wifi offer a faster and more reliable networking for gamers towards perfect gaming experiences. The cool color around contrasts quite markedly with the flame inside, making the design code of phantom gaming full of mystery. The frame-break shield integrates all elements above, showing temperament of domineer and unbeatable strength of new Phantom Gaming.

Godfall, the RPG looter-slasher that's being developed by Counterplay Games in close collaboration with AMD, will require 12 GB VRAM for maxed-out settings at 4K resolution. As part of AMD's partner videos the company announced when it revealed the RX 6000 series of graphics cards, Godfall is being built with DirectX 12 Ultimate and DXR in mind, and takes advantage of a number of rendering technologies that are part of the DXR 1.1 feature-set, alongside AMD's Fidelity FX technologies. Counterplay Games will make a 4X x 4X Ultra HD texture pack available for maxed-out settings - well within the 16 GB of VRAM AMD has settled on for its RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800 graphics cards.

Godfall features Variable Rate Shading (VRS) for increased performance with no discernible loss of visual quality, as well as raytraced shadows (platform agnostic) and makes use of AMD's Fidelity FX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening. This technology has shown great results in improving both performance (it has been benchmarked as offering performance levels similar to that of DLSS 2.0 in Death Stranding, for instance, compared to a full 4K render) and image quality.

TUL Corporation, a leading and innovative manufacturer of AMD graphic cards since 1997, is tackling today the high end gaming market with its new RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 based on the AMD's RDNA2 architecture and with 16Gb of GDDR6, PowerColor RX6800 stakes gaming to a new level of visual immersion and graphics performance.

AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture was designed to deliver the optimal combination of performance and power efficiency. AMD RDNA 2 architecture is the next generation enthusiast gaming platforms. Designed for the most demanding gaming enthusiasts looking to game on the highest possible settings PowerColor RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 come with boost clock up to 2250 MHz and 2105 MHz respectively and makes use of 16 GB of ultra-fast GDDR6 for no performance compromises.

AMD is eyeing a mid-November debut for its CDNA compute architecture with the Instinct MI100 compute accelerator card. CDNA is a fork of RDNA for headless GPU compute accelerators with large SIMD resources. An Aroged report pins the launch of the MI100 at November 16, 2020, according to leaked AMD documents it dug up. The Instinct MI100 will eye a slice of the same machine intelligence pie NVIDIA is seeking to dominate with its A100 Tensor Core compute accelerator.

It appears like the first MI100 cards will be built in the add-in-board form-factor with PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interfaces, although older reports do predict AMD creating a socketed variant of its Infinity Fabric interconnect for machines with larger numbers of these compute processors. In the leaked document, AMD claims that the Instinct MI100 is the "world's highest double-precision accelerator for machine learning, HPC, cloud compute, and rendering systems." This is an especially big claim given that the A100 Tensor Core features FP64 CUDA cores based on the "Ampere" architecture. Then again, given that AMD claims that the RDNA2 graphics architecture is clawing back at NVIDIA with performance at the high-end, the competitiveness of the Instinct MI100 against the A100 Tensor Core cannot be discounted.

The processors may be a few days away from availability, but the overclocking records are already trickling out. Darklord posted a CPU-Z validation for a Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core processor overclocked to 5898.63 MHz (or roughly 5.90 GHz), with all 16 cores and 32 threads enabled, and dual-channel memory. It appears to be a straight up multiplier overclock with the multiplier set to 59.0X, and stock base-clock. What's interesting, though, is the core voltage that this feat took—a scorching 1.656 V. Other components include an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Impact X570 motherboard, dual-channel DDR4-3600 memory, and basic GT 710 graphics. There's no word on cooling, but with this kind of voltage, an extreme method such as LN2 won't surprise us. Find the validation here.

Following the launch of its 5000 series AMD Ryzen processors based on the new Zen 3 core, AMD is preparing for market availability of these processors on November 5th. The reviews are going to arrive on that day as well, meaning that the consumers will know what to look for in the new CPU lineup. Thanks to a LinusTechTips forum member, Jumper118, we have some of the first benchmarks arriving just ahead of the official launch. The user has posted Cinebench R20, R15, and R11.5 scores of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6C/12T CPU. All of the benchmarks were recorded for the single-core values, revealing what we can expect from the new Zen 3 core.

Scoring 609 points in Cinebench R20, 272 and 258 points in R15, and 3.0 points in R11.5, the new Ryzen 5 5600X CPU shows that there is a good performance improvement to be gained from upgrading to the latest generation. Below, you can see the newly released Zen 3 core detailed by AMD, and the benchmark results of the new leak.

The launch of AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards on November 18 will end NVIDIA's monopoly on real-time raytracing. For the first time, gamers will have a choice of GPU vendors when buying a raytracing-capable graphics card. Today, we're releasing a new 3DMark feature test that measures pure raytracing performance. You can use the 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test to compare the performance of the dedicated raytracing hardware in the latest graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA.

Real-time raytracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that's optimized for raytracing operations. Despite the advances in GPU performance, the demands are still too high for a game to rely on raytracing alone. That's why games use raytracing to complement traditional rendering techniques. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test is designed to make raytracing performance the limiting factor. Instead of relying on traditional rendering, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass.DOWNLOAD: 3DMark v2.15.7078

AMD sent ripples in its late-October even launching the Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA2 "Big Navi" graphics cards, when it claimed that the top RX 6000 series parts compete with the very fastest GeForce "Ampere" RTX 30-series graphics cards, marking the company's return to the high-end graphics market. In its announcement press-deck, AMD had shown the $579 RX 6800 beating the RTX 2080 Ti (essentially the RTX 3070), the $649 RX 6800 XT trading blows with the $699 RTX 3080, and the top $999 RX 6900 XT performing in the same league as the $1,499 RTX 3090. Over the weekend, the company released even more benchmarks, with the RX 6000 series GPUs and their competition from NVIDIA being tested by AMD on a platform powered by the Ryzen 9 5900X "Zen 3" 12-core processor.

AMD released its benchmark numbers as interactive bar graphs, on its website. You can select from ten real-world games, two resolutions (1440p and 4K UHD), and even game settings presets, and 3D API for certain tests. Among the games are Battlefield V, Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019), Tom Clancy's The Division 2, Borderlands 3, DOOM Eternal, Forza Horizon 4, Gears 5, Resident Evil 3, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Wolfenstein Youngblood. In several of these tests, the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT are shown taking the fight to NVIDIA's high-end RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, while the RX 6800 is being shown significantly faster than the RTX 2080 Ti (roughly RTX 3070 scores). The Ryzen 9 5900X itself is claimed to be a faster gaming processor than Intel's Core i9-10900K, and features PCI-Express 4.0 interface for these next-gen GPUs. Find more results and the interactive graphs in the source link below.

Just a few days ago AMD has announced its Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. While AMD has given out the "Big Navi" chips to its partners to design custom boards and give users designs with better cooling and possibly higher overclocking capabilities, that doesn't seem to extend to the highest-end parts. So far, we have seen custom designs from companies like ASUS, MSI, etc., and all of them have one thing in common - they only do designs for Radeon RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT. So one would wonder where are the highest-end custom Radeon RX 6900 XT designs.

The first wave of the "custom" cards will be on November 18th, when manufacturers will release designs that are MBA (Made-by-AMD), meaning that the PCB is a reference design, just with a custom cooler installed. When it comes to the custom RX 6900 XT cards, AMD is now in talks with its partners whether to keep the biggest "Big Navi" design available for custom designs, or to keep it as AMD exclusive, with the most likely scenario being the AMD exclusivity. AMD partners could carry the models in their stores and offerings, however, the PCB and cooler design would be AMD's. The situation is yet unresolved so we have to wait and see what comes out of it and if we are getting any custom designs of the Radeon RX 6900 XT model.

Unlike NVIDIA, AMD still relies on its add-in board (AIB) partners to sell reference design (made by AMD) graphics cards, and Sapphire just announced its lineup. The company unveiled its reference-design Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 cards. The RX 6800 XT is characterized by its triple-slot cooling solution, while the RX 6800 makes do with a slimmer dual-slot one. Both cards are based on the 7 nm "Navi 21" silicon and feature 16 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory over a 256-bit wide memory interface, cushioned by 128 MB of on-die Infinity Cache.

The RX 6800 XT is configured with 72 out of 80 RDNA2 compute units on the "Navi 21" silicon, working out to 4,608 stream processors, 72 ray accelerators, 288 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The engine clock of the RX 6800 XT boosts up to 2.25 GHz. The RX 6800, on the other hand, features 60 out of 80 RDNA2 compute units, which make up 3,840 stream processors, 60 ray accelerators, 240 TMUs, the same 128 ROPs, and the same memory subsystem as the RX 6800 XT. Given that these are reference cards, Sapphire could price them at AMD's baseline, with the RX 6800 XT going for $649, and the RX 6800 at $579.

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high-performance DRAM modules, NAND Flash products, and mobile accessories, today announces that the XPG Overclocking Lab (XOCL) has overclocked the SPECTRIX D50 Xtreme RGB DDR4 memory module to a frequency of 5300MT/s, giving gamers a new baseline for performance. The breakthrough performance was achieved with an MSI MEG B550 Unify X motherboard featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G processor.

Manufactured with only the highest quality chips and PCBs, the SPECTRIX D50 Xtreme offers excellent stability, reliability, and performance and supports the latest Intel and AMD platforms. The SPECTRIX D50 Xtreme sports an elegant and solidly constructed metal heatsink adorned with bold geometric lines and a triangular RGB light bar that perfectly fits the module's overall design.What's more, in line with its limited-edition status, the SPECTRIX D50 Xtreme comes in a special edition packaging that features a glossy exterior and premium box.