The U.S. Department of Energy today announced a contract with Cray Inc. to build the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is anticipated to debut in 2021 as the world's most powerful computer with a performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops.

Scheduled for delivery in 2021, Frontier will accelerate innovation in science and technology and maintain U.S. leadership in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. The total contract award is valued at more than $600 million for the system and technology development. The system will be based on Cray's new Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect and will feature high-performance AMD EPYC CPU and AMD Radeon Instinct GPU technology.

Rumors of AMD's next-generation performance-segment graphics card are gaining traction following a leak of what is possibly its PCB. Tweaktown put out a boatload of information of the so-called Radeon RX 3080 XT graphics card bound for an 2019 E3 launch, shortly after a Computex unveiling. Based on the 7 nm "Navi 10" GPU, the RX 3080 XT will feature 56 compute units based on the faster "Navi" architecture (3,584 stream processors), and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus.

The source puts out two very sensational claims: one, that the RX 3080 XT performs competitively with NVIDIA's $499 GeForce RTX 2070; and two, that AMD could start a price-war against NVIDIA by aggressively pricing the card around the $330 mark, or about two-thirds the price of the RTX 2070. Even if either if not both hold true, AMD will fire up the performance-segment once again, forcing NVIDIA to revisit the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060.

ASRock has announced BIOS updates for AMD X470/B450/X370/B350 and A320 series motherboards to support the soon to be released new AMD Ryzen processors. The latest BIOS update will be available for download from specific product pages on ASRock website or simply update through ASRock APP Shop. The latest BIOS for each motherboard are listed as below. BIOS are expected to be released in May.

We've all taken a look at AMD's March 2019 product roadmap, which showed us the upcoming 2019 tech the company would be bringing to the table in its "non-stop product momentum". However, it seems that this non-stop product momentum might be coming to an unexpected twist of fate that might delay it from entering the last station - the Zen 2-based Threadripper. In the company's latest May earnings call roadmap, the company silently removed the Zen 2 Threadripper from its product roadmap - where it used to sit right after the launch of Zen 2-based Ryzen products for consumers, is now just a big crop of the space it occupied.

This might mean many things, and a mistake on someone's part while cropping the PowerPoint slide could be the only thing going on here. However, the best and most plausible speculation that can be entertained when one considers this is simple - a supply problem. With the 7 nm node being the newest, most dense fabrication process possible, and with AMD having to share TSMC's 7 nm wafer production with a number of high profile companies - such as Qualcomm, for instance - may mean that supply is simply too tight to support Zen 2-based products across so many product stacks - Ryzen and Epyc - at the same time.

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices, introduces the new A68N-5600E SoC motherboard featuring a power efficient AMD PRO A4-3350B Processor and AMD Radeon R4 graphics. The BIOSTAR A68N-5600E is perfect for home entertainment and everyday home computing from web browsing to basic office applications. Watch videos on Netflix and YouTube with high-definition and immersive visuals, thanks to the AMD Radeon graphics, and high-resolution display with HDMI support. The A68N-5600E sports an ultra-compact Mini-ITX form factor, perfect for small-form-factor PCs and HTPCs.

Remember to bring your osmosis process to the table here, as a good deal of salt is detected present in this story's environment. Some online webstores from Vietnam and Turkey have started listing AMD's 3000 series CPUs based on the Zen 2 architecture. The present company stands at a Ryzen 9 3800X, Ryzen 7 3700X, and Ryzen 5 3600X, and the specs on these are... Incredible, to say the least.

The Ryzen 9 3800X is being listed with 32 threads, meaning a base 16-core processor. Clock speeds are being reported as 3.9 GHz base with up to 4.7 GHz Turbo on both a Turkish and Vietnamese etailer's webpages. The Turkish Store then stands alone in listing AMD's Ryzen 7 3700X CPU, which is reported as having 12 cores, 24 threads, and operating at an extremely impressive 4.2 GHz base and 5.0 GHz Boost clocks. Another listing by the same website, in the form of the Ryzen 5 3600X, details the processor as having 8 physical cores and running at 4.0 GHz base and 4.8 Boost clocks.

As we draw closer to the release of Rage 2, publisher Bethesda has released the official PC system requirements for the game. The original Rage pushed the boundaries of rendering technology with its Mega Texture technology (which featured some slight streaming issues as available textures were rendered visible according to the scene).

The least of the requirements are set at an Intel Core i5-3570 or an AMD Ryzen 3 1300X CPU, paired with 8 GB of RAM and the long-in-the-tooth GTX 780 3 GB or R9 280 3GB. Recommended configurations will have to pack, at least, an Intel Core i7-4770 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X CPU with 8 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 1070 8GB or AMD Vega 56 8GB graphics card. The 8 GB of RAM in the recommended settings is a welcome surprise, in that most games have now been requiring 16 GB of system RAM. Unfortunately, Bethesda didn't mention what gameplay experience can be expected from the recommended system configuration. RAGE 2 releases on May 14th.

PATRIOT , a global leader in performance memory, SSDs, gaming peripherals, and flash storage solutions, today has announced the release of their latest Signature Premium series line of DDR4 UDIMM memory, which are Non-ECC unbuffered memory designed to deliver outstanding quality, rock solid stability and great performance expected by today's mainstream PC builder.

Signature Premium DDR4 memory provides a wide range of capacities allowing the builder to choose from a variety of speeds and capacities starting with 4GB single modules up to 32GB dual channel kits. The minimalist heat spreader design offers great heat dissipation and is made from high-purity aluminum. Signature Premium DDR4 series modules offer reliability to those who upgrade or build systems for work or business and are cost effective too.

The headline of this post makes it seem a touch more innocuous than the story may lead to, at least if you believe the rumor mills abound. There has been an ongoing issue with AMD systems using Ryzen CPUs and the HTC Vive wireless adapter (powered by Intel WiGig) to where the systems have frozen or even had a BSOD. HTC acknowledged this as early as Nov, 2018, noting that they have seen this with a subset of Ryzen-based motherboards when the PCIe wireless adapter is installed and running. It took until last week to get a solution of sorts, and unfortunately reports from users indicate this is not a true fix for everyone.

The hotfix update 1.20190410.0 was made available April 25 to attempt to combat this issue, which was garnering a lot of attention in the VR-community on whether there was more Intel could be doing to help AMD customers. This hotfix update is available automatically once an end user with the Vive wireless adapter checks for an update, and HTC acknowledge that they continue to test this, as well as partner with Intel and AMD to help resolve this once and for all. In the meantime, users report mixed success to date, including some we know personally as well, and it remains a thorn in the side of wireless VR to get to the PC successfully.

AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2019 of $1.27 billion, operating income of $38 million, net income of $16 million and diluted
earnings per share of $0.01. On a non-GAAP(*) basis, operating income was $84 million, net income was $62 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.06.

"We delivered solid first quarter results with significant gross margin expansion as Ryzen and EPYC processor and datacenter GPU revenue more than doubled year-over-year," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We look forward to the upcoming launches of our next-generation 7nm PC, gaming
and datacenter products which we expect to drive further market share gains and financial growth."

AMD has filed a trademark for an updated design on their Vega logo. The original Vega logo was made out of two full triangles, arranged in such a way as to form the letter "V". The updated trademark has since made an appearance on AMD's professional line of graphics cards, in the form of packaging for the Radeon Pro WX 9100 - likely an effort from AMD to further separate its professional and consumer graphics.

The new logo is the old being revisited, with the same prismatic arrangement, but with added detailing for a 3D effect, which makes sense in the 3D rendering world that AMD's professional graphics cards are used in. Perhaps this AMD investment in updating the branding means a refresh could be coming for its professional graphics card market that still uses the Vega architecture, though this is mere speculation at this point.

TechPowerUp today released GPU-Z 2.20.0 as a very quick follow-up to version 2.19.0 from a few hours ago. We have come across a few critical bugs with the older version that needed immediate fixing. To begin with, your overclock getting reset on NVIDIA graphics cards with Boost when using GPU-Z, has been fixed. A crash noticed on machines with NVIDIA "Pascal" GPUs with no driver loaded, has also been fixed. Crashes noticed on Apple machines (i.e. Windows on Apple) with AMD Radeon Vega 12 GPU have been fixed. We touched up the memory bus-width read-out to show "bit" instead of "Bit," while we were at it. Grab the download from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.20.0The change-log follows.

ASUS today has posted a full listing of the motherboards that are receiving BIOS updates to allow for full compatibility with AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series CPUs. These range across the B350, X370, B450, and X470 chipsets, with everything from ROG to TUF to Prime-branded motherboards receiving the support update. Conspicuously absent, though, are ASUS' A-series motherboards, based on the A320 chipset - despite it supporting the same electrical load as its B350 counterpart.

An ASUS remark claiming that "new models to be listed" gives some hope, but there have been unofficial rumors of A-series-based motherboards not supporting AMD's latest CPUs - and that ASUS claim could well be directed to some unlisted motherboards between the already mentioned chipsets.

As we gear up for launch of AMD-s Ryzen 3000 series, details are bound to come up with increasing frequency. One of the latest, regarding AMD's in-house developed X570 chipset, which brings a renewed feature set to the AM4 platform, pertains to its PCIe lanes. AMD has included a grand total of 40 PCIe 4.0 lanes on the chipset, which will be distributed between PCIe uplink, USB 3.1 Gen2, USB 2.0 and SATA, as the spec sheet below (which may not be real) indicates. That's a whole load of bandwidth for the PC platform, not counting those PCIe lanes that are to be provided by the Ryzen CPUs.

It seems AMD will be using PCIe support level as a differentiator factor for its chipsets. The X570 is reported to be the only chipset to feature PCIe 4.0 support, while all other chipsets below it (B550 and so on) will only support PCIe 3.0. These lower-end chipsets should be manufactured by ASMedia.

Canada Computers put out details of Ryzen 7 2700X 50th Anniversary Edition, officially known as the Ryzen 7 2700X Gold Edition, a commemorative SKU of the 2700X which has been pictured in our older story. At the time we reported that the new SKU commands a roughly $50 premium over the regular 2700X with a fancy new box design and a facsimile of AMD CEO Lisa Su's signature on the processor's IHS. Turns out, you get a whole lot more.

The Ryzen 7 2700X 50th Anniversary Edition includes not just the processor and a Wraith Prism RGB cooling solution, but also two AAA games: Tom Clancy's "The Division 2" Gold Edition, and "World War Z," a black cotton T-shirt with AMD 50 artwork on both sides, and a special case-badge with another signature of the CEO, besides the Ryzen 7 case-badge. The 2 Free Games offer is being extended to the entire Ryzen 2000 AM4 desktop processor family, and several Radeon GPU models, including Radeon VII, RX 500 series, and RX Vega series. The offer is subject to retailer participation.

Pictures of an upcoming AMD Radeon "Navi" graphics card bare PCB made it to the web over the weekend. The picture reveals a fairly long (over 25 cm) board with AMD markings, and a layout that doesn't match with any reference-design PCB AMD launched so far. At the heart of the PCB is a large ASIC pad that appears to be within 5 percent of the size of a "Polaris10" chip. The ASIC is surrounded by eight GDDR6 memory pads. We could guess they're GDDR6 looking at the rectangularity of their pin-layout compared to GDDR5.

The PCB has provision for up to two 8-pin PCIe power inputs, and an 8+1 phase VRM that uses premium components such as rectangular tantalum capacitors, DrMOS, and a high-end VRM controller chip. There's also provision for dual-BIOS. The display I/O completely does away with DVI provisioning, and only includes the likes of DisplayPort, HDMI, and even USB-C based outputs such as VirtualLink. The fan header looks complex, probably offering individual fan-speed control for the card's multi-fan cooling solution that could resemble that of the Radeon VII. Looking purely at the feature-set on offer, and the fact that "Navi" will be more advanced than "Vega 2.0," we expect this card to be fairly powerful, going after the likes of NVIDIA's RTX 2070 and RTX 2060. AMD is expected to unveil this card at the 2019 Computex, this June.

Intel put out interesting details about its upcoming 10 nanometer "Ice Lake" CPU microarchitecture rollout in its recent quarterly financial results call. The company has started qualification of its 10 nm "Ice Lake" processors. This involves sending engineering samples to OEMs, system integrators and other relevant industry partners, and getting the chips approved for their future product designs. The first implementation of "Ice Lake" will not be a desktop processor, but rather a low-power mobile SoC designed for ultraportables, codenamed "Ice Lake-U." This SoC packs a 4-core/8-thread CPU based on the "Sunny Cove" core design, and Gen11 GT2 integrated graphics with 64 execution units and nearly 1 TFLOP/s compute power. This SoC will also support WiFi 6 and LPDDR4X memory.

Intel CEO Bob Swan also remarked that the company has doubled its 10 nm yield expectations. "On the [10 nm] process technology front, our teams executed well in Q1 and our velocity is increasing," he said, adding "We remain on track to have volume client systems on shelves for the holiday selling season. And over the past four months, the organization drove a nearly 2X improvement in the rate at which 10nm products move through our factories." Intel is prioritizing enterprise over desktop, as "Ice Lake-U" will be followed by "Ice Lake-SP" Xeon rollout in 2020. There was no mention of desktop implementations such as "Ice Lake-S." Intel is rumored to be preparing a stopgap microarchitecture for the desktop platform to compete with AMD "Matisse" Zen 2 AM4 processors, codenamed "Comet Lake." This is essentially a Skylake 10-core die fabbed on existing 14 nm++ node. AMD in its CES keynote announced an achievement of per-core performance parity with Intel, so it could be interesting to see how Intel hopes 10 "Skylake" cores match up to 12-16 "Zen 2" cores.

Today Team Group releases three new products from the T-FORCE gaming series: T-FORCE T1 gaming memory, T-FORCE VULCAN Z gaming memory and T-FORCE VULCAN high speed gaming solid state drive. T-FORCE T1 gaming memory's unique look is specially designed for entry gamers. T-FORCE VULCAN Z gaming memory's cooling performance has fully evolved to perfectly protect the memory. T-FORCE VULCAN high speed gaming solid state drive has focused on overall details and offering large capacity and high speed read/write performance at the same time. All three products have inherited the unique and classic design of T-FORCE gaming series, which makes building your own pc cooler than ever.

T-FORCE T1 gaming memory's impressive racing style is specially designed for entry gamers. Created using exclusive patented color printing and special ink, the racing design enhances the overall style of the DIY PC. The selected high-quality IC chips are exceptional in durability, stability and compatibility, allowing gamers to have excellent combat status on the battlefield of eSports. T-FORCE T1 gaming memory supports both Intel & AMD platform. Plug & play allows gamers to be ready for battles at any time.

Here are two of the first high-resolution pictures of the Ryzen 7 2700X 50th Anniversary Edition commemorative processor by AMD. It turns out we were right in guessing that it has special markings on the IHS (integrated heatspreader). Turns out, you get a facsimile of AMD CEO Lisa Su's signature, in addition to the AMD-50 logo above the main Ryzen logo. The box itself sees black replace gray as the primary color, and gold replacing auburn/orange in most places except the main Ryzen logo on the front face. A Wraith Prism RGB cooling solution is included, just like normal 2700X PIB packages. Early listings of the processor pinned its price around USD $340, a premium over the $295 price the Ryzen 7 2700X is typically going for.

AMD is going to celebrate their 50th anniversary in a big way, with commemorative editions of both its highest performance GPU and CPU in the form of the Radeon VII and Ryzen 7 2700X, respectively. This isn't so surprising - after all, if partners are readying their own special editions, it would be amiss for the red team not to do the same. It's a time to lavish their lineup with something that marks the fifty years of the company's existence - alongside its bright (and not so bright) spots.

The Radeon VII will apparently bring the red up to 11, with a red-colored shroud and LED lighting - and apart from that, we simply don't know. It's speculated the Ryzen 7 2700X will be packaged in a prettier box, with increased core clocks to boot - perhaps through core binning and a higher maximum boost threshold. It would make sense for AMD to do the same on their own Radeon VII - celebrating a 50th anniversary with increased performance across the board seems an easy conclusion to come to. We'll just have to wait a few more days, though - apparently, the company will be introducing these products next week, come April 29th. If you want a piece of AMD's history, this could be your chance - albeit a limited one when it comes to actual production numbers for these limited edition GPU and CPU.

AMD today released the latest in their driver suite, which brings about improved performance and support for Mortal Kombat 11 - that means gory details in full GPU-acceleration for the best possible gaming experience. Apart from that, not much to see here: there's a fixed issue relating to AMD Link and Radeon Settings sometimes displaying incorrect parameters. The list of known issues is slightly larger, and follows after the break. Follow the link below for your latest AMD driver download.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.4.3

AMD Ryzen 3 3200G is an upcoming processor featuring integrated graphics, forming the tail-end of the company's 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processor family. A Chinese PC enthusiast with access to an early sample pictured and de-lidded the processor. We know from older posts that while the "Matisse" MCM will form the bulk of AMD's 3rd gen Ryzen lineup, with core counts ranging all the way from 6 to 12, and possibly 16 later, the APU lineup is rumored to be based on older "Zen+" architecture.

The Ryzen 3 3200G and possibly the Ryzen 5 3400G, will be based on a derivative of the "Raven Ridge" silicon built on the 12 nm process at GlobalFoundries, and comes with a handful innovations AMD introduced with "Pinnacle Ridge," such as an improved Precision Boost algorithm and faster on-die caches. The 12 nm shrink also allows AMD to dial up CPU and iGPU engine clock speeds, and improve DDR4 memory support to work with higher DRAM clock speeds. AMD has used thermal paste as the sub-IHS interface material instead of solder for its "Raven Ridge" chips, and the story repeats with the 3200G.

GIGABYTE unveiled a special commemorative package of its flagship socket AM4 motherboard, the Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFi. Much like the Ryzen 7 2700X AMD-50 Edition processor, this GIGABYTE motherboard is a minor variation of the original it's based on, with a handful cosmetic changes. The box package features AMD-50 markings, as does the board's model name, with a "-50" suffix. The motherboard itself features some "AMD-50" and "AORUS x AMD 50th Anniversary" markings along the acrylic RGB LED diffuser along the board's top-right corner and elsewhere. Perhaps out of the box, the board's RGB LEDs shine in a more pronounced shade of gold than the Aorus default orange-gold tint. These apart, the board is every bit identical to the Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFi, which currently retails for around USD $220, competing with the likes of the MSI X470 Gaming M7 and the ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero.

BIOSTAR and TechPowerUp brought you a chance to win one of two AMD platform motherboards with unique design and feature-sets. The Giveaway period is up, and the results are in! Among the prizes are the BIOSTAR Racing B450GT3, a formidable socket AM4 motherboard in the micro-ATX form-factor designed to be the foundation of a highly capable gaming PC build, and the BIOSTAR A10N-8800E, which packs an embedded AMD A10-8800E processor to everyday tasks and casual gaming. Without further ado, the Winners:

• Dumitru from Romania, wins the BIOSTAR Racing B450GT3
• Rene from Denmark, wins the BIOSTAR A10N-8800E

A huge Congratulations to the Winners!

Thermaltake today rolled out the Floe Riing RGB 360 TR4 Edition, a variant of this closed-loop liquid CPU cooler for AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors. Although its pump-block has the same dimensions as the original Floe Riing series, the TR4 Edition features an enlarged, rectangular copper base for more coverage of the Ryzen Threadripper integrated heatspreader (IHS).

The cooler features a 360 mm x 120 mm radiator with three included Riing Plus RGB TT Premium Edition fans, which each spin between 1,000 to 2,000 RPM, pushing 26.35 to 54.42 CFM of air-flow, with a noise output ranging between 21.8 to 33 dBA. The three fans and the pump-block feature 16.7 million-color addressable RGB embellishments, which are controlled by the included addressable RGB LED controller. The cooler can handle high enough thermal loads to support 250W TDP Threadripper WX processors with high core-counts. TR4 is also the only socket type supported by this cooler. The company didn't reveal pricing.