AMD's Ryzen Notebook lineup seems to be very important to company, at least when going by how often it gets mentioned in the AMD financial analyst calls. That's why it's even more surprising that the driver situation for these products has been nothing but terrible. Some Ryzen Raven Ridge based notebooks haven't seen a single driver update since their release over a year ago, which is much worse than on any other notebook platform.

Users complained about this on Reddit, and AMD responded through an official account that the issue is that "drivers are typically tailored for specific OEM platforms", and that "releasing generic APU graphics drivers across all AMD Ryzen mobile processor-based mobile systems could result in less-than-ideal user experiences". AMD also made it clear that they will be working with OEMs to increase the release frequency of Ryzen Mobile graphics drivers, targeting two releases per-year in 2019.To me this explanation sounds like bs.

It has been confirmed by Seasonic that their FOCUS PLUS power supplies are experiencing potential conflict with a select number of graphics cards. In regards to NVIDIA, the compatibility issue is currently limited to the ASUS GeForce GTX 970 STRIX. In limited instances, this particular graphics card can encounter a black screen under heavy load. Testing by Seasonic has determined that the issue is caused by higher than normal ripple when the GPU is heavily stressed. They also determined that solving the problem simply required using modified PCIe cables that feature enhanced shielding.

When it comes to AMD GPUs things are a bit more problematic. Both of AMD's Vega 56 and Vega 64 series of graphics cards with serial numbers before January 2018, can experience system shutdowns when paired with a FOCUS PLUS power supply. The issue is caused by higher than normal peak current being emitted by these graphics cards when under heavy load. This results in the power supply's internal protection safety being triggered. Considering Seasonic's popularity the fact these power supplies are encountering problems is likely going to be a hit to their brand image. At least they are stepping up to the plate having admitted to the problem while also investigating the root causes. They are also encouraging anyone that is encountering issues to contact them for assistance.

Sony's announcement of the Playstation team skipping E3 2019 took everyone by surprise aside from a few on Reddit who had paid attention to a thread created the day before. Reddit user RuthenicCookie seemed to know a lot more about Sony's plans for their popular game console for the next few years, as well as game titles supporting this current console generation and the next. Amidst a lot of the tasty rumor bits that should interest console gamers, something more relevant to us directly is the mention of the Playstation 5 to continue using AMD for processing power.

This is a logical move to just about everyone familiar with the industry, and Sony needed to up the CPU horsepower in particular to compete with the XBOX One X and offer a true 4K/60 FPS solution for gaming without framerate drops galore. As such, said redditor shared information saying that the current plans involve an 8-core Ryzen-based processor and an estimated console price point of $500. Sony may well share a teaser about the console next year, with retail availability expected in the holiday season 2020 (two years from now, thus). As such, developer kits are likely already ready meaning the specs are finalized as well. This may mean we will see either the first or second gen Ryzen APUs, and not Ryzen 2 as many may have hoped. No word yet on what Microsoft is cooking in their side of the kitchen, but incremental console updates means we may see a Ryzen 2-powered console sooner than later as well.

GIGABYTE began shipping its second socket AMD TR4 motherboard since 2nd generation Ryzen Threadripper launch, the X399 Aorus Pro. If you've been paying attention to GIGABYTE's new nomenclature for Aorus, the "Pro" SKU is slotted between what was "Gaming 3" and "Gaming 5," making this GIGABYTE's most affordable TR4 motherboard, positioned below the X399 Gaming 7, and a far cry from the range-topping X399 Aorus Xtreme. The board ships with out-of-the-box support for 2nd generation Ryzen Threadripper processors. GIGABYTE appears to have reused the same exact PCB as the X399 Gaming 7, but with aesthetic updates and cost-cutting. The board's design scheme (I/O shroud and heatsink designs) are somewhat aligned with its newer generation design aesthetic introduced with its Z390 Aorus family.

Cost cutting over the X399 Gaming 7 comes in the form of the I/O shroud no longer running the entire length of the PCB, only one out of three M.2 slots getting a SSD heatsink, only two out of five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots getting full metal reinforcement, and the lack of a WLAN module. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and 4-pin ATX, and uses an 8-phase VRM to power the CPU. Expansion slot layout is unchanged from the Gaming 7, with two x16 slots running at x16, and two taking 8 lanes from them. A fifth x16 slot is gen 2.0 x4. All three M.2 PCIe slots are wired to the CPU. The onboard audio solution is carried over, with Realtek ALC1220 CODEC, WIMA capacitors, and ground-layer isolation. The sole networking interface is a 1 GbE pulled by an Intel i211-AT controller. Available now, the GIGABYTE X399 Aorus Pro is priced at $270, a whole Benjamin cheaper than what the Aorus X399 Gaming 7 launched at.

AMD today made available the latest version of their Radeon software drivers, Adrenalin Edition 18.11.2, for supported graphics solutions. This brings with it support for the hotly anticipated Battlefield V game title, as well as some fixes to issues that users have been awaiting. Driver software notifications no longer list erroneously the current installed driver version and, more importantly, the annoying bug affecting some RX Vega users of elevated memory clocks even during system idle states has been resolved.

The driver also brings with it support for a Vulkan extension, VK_AMD_memory_overallocation_behavior, that "allows controlling whether explicit overallocation beyond the device memory heap sizes is allowed or not" as AMD puts it themselves. Things are not all rosy, however, with known issues including potential crashing of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey at some locations on Windows 7 systems and possible mouse lag with multi-display setups with at least one display enabled but powered off. This is disappointing considering an older driver update from September had seemingly fixed it too. The drivers are up for download at the link below, hosted directly on TechPowerUp for your convenience, and the change log is available past the break for those interested.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.11.2

With multi-GPU on the decline, AMD Ryzen platform buyers are drawn to the mid-range AMD B450 chipset-based motherboards as the chipset still offers CPU overclocking features not available on its Intel counterpart, the B360 Express, helping buyers save money over X470-based products. Motherboard vendors, seeing a potential for enthusiasts seeking out B450, have each launched quasi-premium motherboards based on the chipset, such as the GIGABYTE Aorus B450 Pro, MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon, and ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming. ASUS is taking this concept further with the better-endowed new ROG Strix B450-E Gaming. This product is interesting, because ASUS hasn't yet launched a Strix-E SKU based on the AMD X470. The company included a mention of the product in its launch reveal for its AMD B450 motherboard series, and is beginning to roll the product out.

The ASUS ROG Strix B450-E Gaming features a more premium CPU VRM than even the Strix X470-F, with a "12-phase" (likely blind-doubled 8-phase CPU with either blind-doubled 4-phase vSOC or 2+1+1), compared to the B450-F, with its 8-phase (4 CPU + 4 SOC) design. The component quality is a step up from the Strix B450-F, and so are the VRM heatsinks. ASUS added metal reinforcement for two of the board's three PCI-Express x16 slots, although the second and third slots are x4. You also get two M.2-2280 slots, one of which comes with SSD heatsink. Intel i211-AT wired 1 GbE and Intel 9260 802.11ac + Bluetooth 5 WLAN, take care of networking. The onboard audio solution is unchanged from the Strix B450-F. The ROG Strix B450-E Gaming is priced around 149.99€.

ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced the ROG Strix Radeon RX 590, an all-new gaming graphics card powered by the latest AMD Radeon RX 590 GPU and engineered with advanced cooling, reliability, performance, and customizable lighting.

ROG Strix cards take cooling to the next level, keeping temperatures low and dB levels quiet. It starts with MaxContact technology, which uses precision machining to create a heat spreader surface that makes up to 2X more contact with the GPU chip, helping to improve thermal transfer. As heat passes into the heatsink, three powerful Wing-blade fans spin up when GPU temperatures exceed 55 Celsius. Wingblade fans are a patented design that offers 105% more static pressure than traditional axial designs, ensuring air is dispersed through the entire cooling array.

AMD's "Polaris 30" silicon at the heart of Radeon RX 590 graphics card is the company's first 12 nm GPU. Unlike NVIDIA, which is exclusively sourcing its "Turing" family of GPUs from TSMC, the "Polaris 30" is coming from not one, but two sources. This, according to AMD in response to a question by TechPowerUp. The two foundries manufacturing "Polaris 30" are GlobalFoundries and Samsung. AMD did not provide us with visual cues on how to tell chips made from either foundries apart (such as serial numbering schemes). Packaging of dies sourced from both foundries is done in China, and the national-origin marking for the chip is on the package, rather than printed on the die.

GlobalFoundries' 12 nanometer FinFET node, called GloFo 12LP, shares a lot of similarities with Samsung's 11LPP, because both are "nodelets" that are derived from an original 14 nm FinFET process blueprint Samsung licensed to GloFo, deployed in its facility in upstate New York, where AMD's "Zen" processors are made. GloFo's 12 nanometer process is a refinement of its 14 nm node, in which 12 nm transistors are etched onto silicon using the same lithography meant for 14 nm. It doesn't improve transistor densities, but provides dividends in power, which explains why "Polaris 30" and "Pinnacle Ridge" have the same die sizes as "Polaris 20" and "Summit Ridge," respectively. This WikiChip article provides a good explanation of how GloFo 12LP is a nodelet.

Intel is reportedly working tirelessly to launch its "Cascade Lake" Xeon Scalable 48-core enterprise processor before year-end, according to a launch window timeline slide leaked by datacenter hardware provider QCT. The slide suggests a late-Q4 thru Q1-2019 launch timeline for the XCC (extreme core count) version of "Cascade Lake," which packs 48 CPU cores across two dies on an MCM. This launch is part of QCT's "early shipment program," which means select enterprise customers can obtain the hardware in pre-approved quantities. In other words, this is a limited launch, but one that's probably enough to upstage AMD's 7 nm EPYC "Rome" 64-core processor launch.

It's only by late-Q1 thru Q2-2019 that the Xeon "Cascade Lake" family would be substantially launched, including lower core-count variants that are still 2-die MCMs. This aligns to preempt or match AMD's 7 nm EPYC family rollout through 2019. "Cascade Lake" is probably Intel's final enterprise microarchitecture to be built on the 14 nm++ node, and consists of 2-die multi-chip modules that feature 48 cores, and a 12-channel memory interface (6-channel per die); with 88-lane PCIe from the CPU socket. The processor is capable of multi-socket configurations. It will also be Intel's launch platform for substantially launching its Optane Persistent Memory product series.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version, 2.15.0, of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information and diagnostic utility. This brings along with it support for AMD's Radeon RX 590 GPU, two reviews of which can be seen here and here for those interested. In addition, GPU-Z 2.15.0 adds support for Intel Whiskey Lake, UHD Graphics 617, and NVIDIA Tesla V100-SXM2-32GB along with minor bug fixes including detection of certain Quadro cards as fake, as well as an updated Vega 20 release date.

While this alone is plenty to merit an update, there is a special giveaway added to this version. Indeed, to the left of the "Close" button at the bottom is a temporary button that opens up a giveaway window listing a collaboration with PowerColor enabling users to potentially win the following (one per winner):

• 2x PowerColor Radeon RX 590 Red Devil
• 2x AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• 15x $30 Steam Wallet Coupon

The terms and conditions can be found in GPU-Z again, but know that the contest runs through Dec 6, 2018 and you will have to enter via the form in the utility itself. The full change log can be found in the download link seen below, and do let us know what you feel about integrating our giveaways with our utilities in the comments section below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.15.0

AMD's low-power Ryzen 3700U APU has been leaked. Codenamed ZM370SC4T4MFG_38/22_Y, this latest AMD processor features 4 cores and 8 threads with a base clock of 2.2 GHz and a boost clock of 3.8 GHz, making it very similar to the current generation 2700U. The GPU, which is recognized as Picasso by UserBenchmark, is like just another codename for now, as other applications are listing it as a Radeon RX Vega 10 GPU. Considering the 3000U Series is supposed to be similar to the 2000U offerings it could very well feature the same Vega 10 GPU and still be based on the Zen+ or the Zen 2 architectures. That said, nothing is confirmed, but some slides leaked from Informatica Cero suggest that the Ryzen 7 3700U could indeed feature the Zen 2 architecture. That would be fairly interesting given that the Ryzen family for laptops/convertibles have been a step behind the desktop solutions for a quite some time.

Picasso which we've been hearing about since the codename first appeared in September of 2017, looks to be nothing more than Raven Ridge manufactured on the 12nm node. This is of course based on the information that is available. Some people suggest this new APU could be on the 7 nm node, but this is difficult to believe as AMD is likely to devote 7 nm manufacturing to their EPYC server solutions and Ryzen desktop products first. Therefore Zen 2 APUs for notebooks are likely still far off.

Prices of retail packages of Intel Core desktop processors could continue to rise over Q4-2018, as the company has reportedly cut their supply, in favor of tray/reel shipments to OEMs. This could mean DIY favorites such as the Core i5-8400, the i5-8600K, i5-9600K, or even Core i7 models such as the i7-8700K, i7-9700K, and the flagship i9-9900K could be severely in short supply, or heavily marked up wherever available. Intel recently devised a strategy to increase its Core processor volumes by pumping in an additional $1 billion to its usually-$15 billion capital expenditure, to fire up small-scale manufacturing facilities around the world, to augment its bigger fabs located in Malaysia and Vietnam.

Sites like Mexico, Israel, and Ireland are beneficiaries of this move, and are being expanded. Much of Intel's efforts appear to be focused on making sure notebook and pre-built PC manufacturers aren't starved of processor inventory. The DIY retail channel, which consists of boxed processors, will foot the bill for this move. A good example of understocked retail channel would be the $499 Core i9-9900K processor being sold for upwards of $900 in some online stores. AMD is in an enviable position to fill the void, comments PCGamesN. Prices of its Ryzen desktop processor PIBs are either flat, or marginally cut; and socket AM4 motherboards are generally cheaper than LGA1151 ones.

With AMD's announcement of the new Radeon RX 590 graphics card we've learned something interesting: any user who buys a Radeon RX graphics card or a Radeon RX powered PC will get up to three games for free. "Tom Clancy's The Division 2", "Resident Evil 2" and "Devil May Cry 5", with a retail value of up to $180, will be the titles available for those users.

As mentioned on the press release, "gamers who purchase an AMD Radeon RX Vega or RX 590, or an eligible Radeon RX Vega or RX 590 powered PC, will receive free copies of all three games. Gamers who purchase an AMD Radeon RX 580 or RX 570 graphics card, or an eligible Radeon RX 580 or RX 570 powered PC, can choose two of these games for free".

You can find our launch-day reviews of the Radeon RX 590 here: Sapphire RX 590 Nitro+, XFX RX 590 Fatboy

AMD today unveiled the Radeon RX 590 graphics card, an advanced 12 nm GPU designed to deliver amazing gaming experiences and outstanding performance for the latest AAA, eSports and Virtual Reality (VR) titles.

Powered by AMD "Polaris" architecture, the AMD Radeon RX 590 graphics card provides faster clock speeds for higher gaming performance than the AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics card2, and delivers up to 20 percent or higher performance-per-dollar than the competition. Paired with the advanced AMD Radeon FreeSync gaming display technology and loaded with the latest AMD Radeon Software features, the AMD Radeon RX 590 graphics card delivers an exceptional gaming experience.

AMD today released their last driver update for 2018 in the enterprise segment, the Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition 18.Q4 driver. A new feature is the Day Zero Certification Program, which serves for would-be deployers of AMD's updated drivers (or any business looking to leverage the red team's products in a new installation) to know which programs have already been certified to work flawlessly with the latest driver revision. Exactly which scenarios and configurations (name of the ISV, software, OS and graphics card used during the certification process) are also part of this certification. This list is up to 290 entries as of November 13th.

AMD is quoting performance improvements that can go up to 89% in YoY performance gains compared to their last 2017 driver. There's also a mountain of fixed bugs in the latest release, and AMD is keeping up with its commitment to stable, predictable driver releases that it started with their new vision for the enterprise and business environments.

AMD is very close to launching its new Radeon RX 590 graphics card, targeting a middle-of-market segment that sells in high volumes, particularly with Holiday around the corner. The card is based on the new 12 nm "Polaris 30" silicon, which has the same exact specifications as the "Polaris 20" silicon, and the original "Polaris 10," but comes with significantly higher clock-speed headroom thanks to the new silicon fabrication process, which AMD and its partners will use to dial up engine clock speed by 10-15% over those of the RX 580. While the memory is still 8 Gbps 256-bit GDDR5, some partners will ship overclocked memory.

According to a slide deck seen by VideoCardz, AMD is setting the baseline price of the Radeon RX 590 at USD $279.99, which is about $50 higher than RX 580 8 GB, and $40 higher than the price the RX 480 launched at. AMD will add value to that price by bundling three AAA games, including "Tom Clancy's The Division 2," "Devil May Cry 5," and "Resident Evil 2." The latter two titles are unreleased, and the three games together pose a $120-150 value. AMD will also work with monitor manufacturers to come up with graphics card + AMD FreeSync monitor bundles.

TUL Corporation, a leading and innovative manufacturer of AMD graphic cards since 1997, has introduced the newest PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 8GB GDDR5. The new Red Devil RX 590 brings new blood to the mainstream market, performing more than 10% over the comparable priced cards, this makes a no brainer for this segment.

It is powered by AMD's newest gaming RX590 GPU built on 12 nm, offering the best 1080p performance at the highest settings with uncompromised graphic details. Red Devil RX 590 improves on efficiency, having a boost clock of 1576 MHz core clock speed which is 17% clock speed increase over the 580 at no power consumption increase.

GIGABYTE today introduced the B450M Gaming, a low-cost socket AM4 motherboard based on AMD B450 chipset, designed to be priced under $100. Built in the compact micro-ATX form-factor (205 mm x 244 mm), the board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS, and uses a 4+3 phase VRM to power the AM4 SoC. A large VRM heatsink dominates the main MOSFET block, which also covers up a portion of the rear I/O area. The AM4 socket is wired to two DDR4 DIMM slots, supporting up to 32 GB of dual-channel memory, the board's sole M.2-2280 slot, and the PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot with metal reinforcement. Two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots wired to the B450 chipset make for the rest of the expansion area.

Storage connectivity includes one M.2-2280 slot with PCI-Express 3.0 x4 and SATA 6 Gbps wiring, and four SATA 6 Gbps ports. USB connectivity includes four USB 3.1 gen 1 type-A ports on the rear panel, and two USB 3.1 gen 1 ports via header. Networking, interestingly, is a 1 GbE interface driven by Realtek Dragon 8118AS controller, which was originally launched as Realtek's competitor to the i219-V (comes with various performance enhancements). Audio is a basic 6-channel fare driven by Realtek ALC887, somewhat improved with ground-layer isolation and electrolytic capacitors.

With a little Javascript trickery, Redditor "BadReIigion" succeeded in making the company website of AMD partner HIS to spit out details of its upcoming Radeon RX 590 IceQ X² graphics card (model number: HIS-590R8LCBR). Pictured below is the RX 580 IceQ X², but we expect the RX 590-based product to be mostly similar, with cosmetic changes such as a different cooler shroud or back-plate design. The website confirms some details like the ASIC being "Polaris 30 XT," a rendition of the 2,304-SP "Polaris 20" die on the 12 nm FinFET node, and that the card features 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. Some of the other details, such as the engine clock being mentioned as "2000 MHz" is unlikely.

The consensus emerging on engine clock boost frequencies from RX 590 leaks so far, put RX 590 custom-design, factory-overclocked cards to tick around 1500-1550 MHz, a 100-200 MHz improvement over the RX 580. Some board vendors such as Sapphire are even overclocking the memory by about 5%. "Polaris 30" is likely pin-compatible with "Polaris 20," because most board vendors are reusing their RX 580 PCBs, some of which are even carried over from the RX 480. For the HIS RX 590 IceQ X² this means drawing power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

Here are some of the first pictures of ASRock Radeon RX 590 Phantom Gaming graphics card, based on AMD's upcoming "Polaris 30" silicon, which is an optical shrink of the "Polaris 20" silicon to 12 nm FinFET process, letting AMD and its partners increase GPU clock speeds. The RX 590 Phantom Gaming features a similar board design to the RX 580 Phantom Gaming X, with subtle design changes to its cooler shroud. The card still draws power from only a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. The VideoCardz article with these pictures doesn't mention clock-speeds, although going by trends, the RX 590 could be clocked well above 1500 MHz out of the box, compared to 1445 MHz of the RX 580 Phantom Gaming X in "OC mode."

We don't know when, but it seems AMD will someday have support for DirectX Raytracing , a feature introduced by Microsoft on March 2018. David Wang, Senior Vice President of Engineering at AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, told so in an interview on the Japanese gaming website 4Gamer. Overclock3D confirmed the comments with the assistance of a Japanese speaker who helped to translate the interview without misunderstandings. It's important to clarify that what Wang said was "a personal view", not an official statement from AMD.

Nevertheless, this executive seems to be that "AMD will definitely respond to DXR", although right now the company is focused on improving its current CG production environment based on Radeon ProRenderer. Wang went further on his comments and told also that "the spread of Ray-Tracing's game will not go unless the GPU will be able to use Ray-Tracing in all ranges from low end to high end". Therefore he thinks that ray tracing technology will not become mainstream until there is support for all types of products, from low-end to high-end, but that doesn't mean that AMD won't offer that support gradually when it sees fit. And he seems to think it will be entirely appropriate at some point, and that's what's important.

AMD reportedly put out its IPC (instructions per clock) performance guidance for its upcoming "Zen 2" micro-architecture in a version of its Next Horizon investor meeting, and the numbers are staggering. The next-generation CPU architecture provides a massive 29 percent IPC uplift over the original "Zen" architecture. While not developed for the enterprise segment, the stopgap "Zen+" architecture brought about 3-5 percent IPC uplifts over "Zen" on the backs of faster on-die caches and improved Precision Boost algorithms. "Zen 2" is being developed for the 7 nm silicon fabrication process, and on the "Rome" MCM, is part of the 8-core chiplets that aren't subdivided into CCX (8 cores per CCX).

According to Expreview, AMD conducted DKERN + RSA test for integer and floating point units, to arrive at a performance index of 4.53, compared to 3.5 of first-generation Zen, which is a 29.4 percent IPC uplift (loosely interchangeable with single-core performance). "Zen 2" goes a step beyond "Zen+," with its designers turning their attention to critical components that contribute significantly toward IPC - the core's front-end, and the number-crunching machinery, FPU. The front-end of "Zen" and "Zen+" cores are believed to be refinements of previous-generation architectures such as "Excavator." Zen 2 gets a brand-new front-end that's better optimized to distribute and collect workloads between the various on-die components of the core. The number-crunching machinery gets bolstered by 256-bit FPUs, and generally wider execution pipelines and windows. These come together yielding the IPC uplift. "Zen 2" will get its first commercial outing with AMD's 2nd generation EPYC "Rome" 64-core enterprise processors.Update Nov 14: AMD has issued the following statement regarding these claims.

As we demonstrated at our Next Horizon event last week, our next-generation AMD EPYC server processor based on the new 'Zen 2' core delivers significant performance improvements as a result of both architectural advances and 7nm process technology. Some news media interpreted a 'Zen 2' comment in the press release footnotes to be a specific IPC uplift claim. The data in the footnote represented the performance improvement in a microbenchmark for a specific financial services workload which benefits from both integer and floating point performance improvements and is not intended to quantify the IPC increase a user should expect to see across a wide range of applications. We will provide additional details on 'Zen 2' IPC improvements, and more importantly how the combination of our next-generation architecture and advanced 7nm process technology deliver more performance per socket, when the products launch.

Intel late last week put out additional real-world HPC and AI compute performance numbers of its upcoming "Cascade Lake" 2x 48-core (96 cores in total) machine, compared to AMD's EPYC 7601 2x 32-core (64 cores in total) machine. You'll recall that on November 5th, the company put out Linpack, System Triad, and Deep Learning Inference numbers, which are all synthetic benchmarks. In a new set of slides, the company revealed a few real-world HPC/AI application performance numbers, including MIMD Lattice Computation (MILC), Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF), OpenFOAM, NAMD scalable molecular dynamics, and YaSK.

The Intel 96-core setup with 12-channel memory interface belts out up to 1.5X performance in MILC, up to 1.6X in WRF and OpenFOAM, up to 2.1X in NAMD, and up to 3.1X in YASK, compared to an AMD EPYC 7601 2P machine. The company also put out system configuration and disclaimer slides with the usual forward-looking CYA. "Cascake Lake" will be Intel's main competitor to AMD's EPYC "Rome" 64-core 4P-capable processor that comes out by the end of 2018. Intel's product is a multi-chip module of two 24~28 core dies, with a 2x 6-channel DDR4 memory interface.

The flood of leaked AMD Radeon RX 590 graphics cards continues with the latest one being from XFX. Sporting a new naming scheme, the XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy is very similar to the RX 580 GTS series. It features the same dual fan cooler used on the RX 580 GTS, which takes up roughly 2.5 slots. Even the backplate remains the same with no changes to speak of, meaning side by side you wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless you look at power delivery which is where the designs diverge. The RX 590 Fatboy utilizing an 8+6 pin design compared to the RX 580 GTS series and its single 8-pin design. In regards to display outputs that remains the same between the two with three DisplayPorts, one HDMI port, and one DVI-I port being standard.

When it comes to clock speeds the XFX RX 590 Fatboy OC+ at least according to Videocardz will come with a 1600 MHz boost clock. That is an increase of roughly 200 MHz over XFX's highest clocked RX 580. With such a high boost clock the additional 6-pin power connector is likely included for improved power delivery and depending on luck may allow for more overclocking headroom. Considering no vendor releases just one version of a graphics card it is likely that a few more variants will be available at launch. Sadly no pricing information is available as of yet.

AMD has released today the Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.11.1 beta drivers. These drivers bring a host of fixes and performance improvements to a number of titles including, Hitman 2, Battlefield V and Fallout 76. In the case of Hitman 2 the Radeon RX 580 sees a performance uplift of 3% at 1920x1080 compared to the Adrenalin 18.10.2 drivers. Meanwhile, Battlefield V sees performance improvements of 9% and 8% respectively on the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64. It is likely other GPUs based on the Vega and Polaris architectures will benefit from these drivers as well. Fallout 76 gets official support with this release, however, no other information was made available as to what AMD has done for testing with Bethesda's latest offering other than to confirm that it works.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.11.1 BetaThe change-log follows.