Blackmagic Design today announced the Blackmagic eGPU Pro, an external graphics processor featuring the blazingly fast AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics processor. Designed to accelerate pro creative software such as DaVinci Resolve, 3D games and VR, the Blackmagic eGPU Pro delivers nearly twice the performance of the original Blackmagic eGPU model and up to 22x faster performance than the built-in graphics on a 13-inch MacBook Pro.

The Blackmagic eGPU Pro features a built-in AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a new DisplayPort for connecting 5K displays, HDMI 2.0, 85W of charging power and four USB 3.1 connections. Designed in collaboration with Apple, the integrated design brings cutting-edge workstation-class graphics processing and computational acceleration to customers working in professional video, playing 3D games or using the latest virtual reality software.

Thanks to some photographs by Andreas Schilling, of HardwareLuxx, it is now confirmed that AMD's Radeon RX 590 will make use of the 12 nm FinFET process. The change from 14 nm to 12 nm FinFET for the RX 590 brings with it the possibility of both higher clock speeds and better power efficiency. That said, considering it is based on the same Polaris architecture used in the Radeon RX 580 and 570, it remains to be seen how it will impact AMDs pricing in regards to the product stack. Will there be a price drop to compensate, or will the RX 590 be more expensive? Since AMD has already made things confusing enough with its cut down 2048SP version of RX 580 in China, anything goes at this point.

Darren McPhee worked 12 years for ATI and AMD. When he left AMD in 2015, he was one of the company's top marketing managers. For the last three years he has worked for various companies, but the surprise has come with Intel recruiting him to occupy the position of Product Marketing Manager in its 'Discrete Graphics' group, one of the most interesting initiatives in the recent times.

This division is working hard to develop a new family of discrete graphics cards that will theoretically compete with AMD and NVIDIA solutions. Intel has been steadily growing, and in fact Intel already signed Raja Koduri, AMD GPU architect, in November 2017. This firm has been attracting more and more talent from an AMD: Koduri was followed by Jim Keller, Ryzen Architect, and Chris Hook, who led AMD's Radeon Technologies Group Marketing Departmen prior to his move to Intel. These hires certainly make it clear that Intel is taking an increasingly promising project very seriously. We will have to be patient, however, because the firm already indicated in SIGGRAPH 18 that it will have its first models ready in 2020.

[Editor's Note: Our review of the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X is out already, and that of the Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX will follow soon after.]

Today, AMD announced availability of two additional 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor models, 2970WX with 24 cores and 48 threads and the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X with 12 cores and 24 threads. The Ryzen Threadripper WX series commands class-leading core counts, purpose-built for prosumers focused on raw computational power for the heaviest workloads. In turn, Ryzen Threadripper X series provides enthusiasts, gamers, and streamers high performance with a beautiful and smooth gaming experience based on higher base and boost processor clock speeds than the previous generation.

"The dramatic transformation in the HEDT and overall PC market is driven by AMD leadership and innovation, and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper family is central to this global excitement," said Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, Client Compute, AMD. "We are expanding this excitement while also ensuring the HEDT market remains accessible to a broader range of creators and gamers with two new Threadripper processors that start at $649."

AMD "Vega 20" is a new GPU based on existing "Vega" graphics architecture, which will be fabbed on the 7 nanometer silicon fabrication process, and bolstered with up to 32 GB of HBM2 memory across a 4096-bit memory interface that's double the bus-width of "Vega 10". AMD CEO Lisa Su already exhibited a mock-up of this chip at Computex 2018, with an word that alongside its "Zen 2" based EPYC enterprise processors, "Vega 20" will be the first 7 nm GPU. AMD could still make good on that word, only don't expect to find one under your tree this Holiday.

According to GamersNexus, the first "Vega 20" products won't launch before the turn of the year, and even in 2019, one can expect product launches till the end of Q1 (before April). GamersNexus cites reliable sources hinting at the later-than-expected arrival of "Vega 20" as part of refuting alleged "Final Fantasy XV" benchmarks of purported "Vega 20" engineering samples doing rounds on the web. Lisa Su stressed the importance of data-center GPUs in AMD's Q3-2018 earnings call, which could hint at the possibility of AMD allocating its first "Vega 20" yields to high-margin enterprise brands such as Radeon Pro and Radeon Instinct.

In what will likely seem baffling to many, AMD is releasing a new APU for their ancient FM2+ socket. While the release of the newly minted A8-7680 was alluded to previously via an ASRock BIOS update for their A68H motherboards, many considered it a fake at the time. However, with AMD's own literature listing the processor for the mass market, along with it popping up at various etailers with the product number AD7680ACABBOX, its release is now all but certain.

The processor is still being manufactured on the old 28 nm node and is very similar to the older A8-7600, with this speculated to also being a quad-core design based on the AMD Excavator architecture. It would appear the main difference between the two, noting that the A8-7680 specs are not formally released yet, is a 400 MHz increase on the base clock bringing it up from 3.1 GHz on the A8-7600 to 3.5 GHz on the A8-7680. Sadly, the boost clock remains the same at 3.8 GHz as noted at various etailers. Currently, only the A68 chipset works with the new CPU with the following boards having all received BIOS updates adding support for the A8-7680: Asus A68HM-K, A68HM-Plus, Gigabyte F2A68HM-DS2 rev1.1, F2A68HM-H rev1.1, F2A68HM-S1 rev1.1, MSI A68HM-E33-v2, ASRock FM2A68M-HD+, and FM2A68M-DG3+.The rumored specifications follow.

AMD has released today the Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.10.2 beta drivers. These drivers focus on a few key fixes with the first one solving the issue of Vulkan API titles that experience crashing when launching the game. Next is a specific fix for Assassin's Creed Odyssey which keeps the game from randomly exiting when it is restarted after applying Adaptive Anti-Aliasing on multi-GPU systems.

That said, a few issues have been specifically noted. Strange Brigade can still experience application hang when using the DirectX 12 API. Radeon Overlay does not play nice with the latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update. It can cause intermittent instability or game crashes for the time being. Finally, RX Vega series graphics cards may experience elevated memory clocks when the system is idle. Other than that nothing else is mentioned by AMD in regards to possible driver performance improvements etc. Instead, this latest beta focuses on a few key fixes and nothing more. It should also be noted that it is available in 64-bit only, as AMD confirmed earlier today they will not be supporting 32-bit operating systems going forward.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.10.2 BetaThe change-log follows.

It would appear AMD's 7nm Vega 20 has been benchmarked in Final Fantasy XV. While the details are scarce, what we do know is the hardware device ID 66AF:C1 can be linked to Vega 20 via the Linux patches back in April. Now considering AMD has not confirmed any 7nm Vega graphics cards for consumers, It is more likely this version is an engineering sample for the new Radeon Instinct or Pro series cards.

AMD, via a statement provided to the 4Gamer publication, has confirmed they're dropping support for 32-bit executables in their driver releases. This move from AMD comes after mainstream adoption of 64-bit Operating Systems, which has rendered the market for 32-bit executables as apparently not worth the additional coding and certification effort.

For users till on a 32-bit operating system that have modern graphics hardware that's still being supported via AMD's drivers, though, this means that the last 32-bit version of an AMD driver will likely be the 18.9.3 version, which was re-released as WHQL on October 9th. As it stands, AMD won't be distributing new driver releases on the 32-bit format, so support for Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Forza Horizon 4 better be all you care about. The Vega page listing for driver releases already only lists the 64-bit version of the executables as is. Strangely, AMD has also pulled 32-bit driver references and links from its Vega 64 driver page - we'd expect some links to be up for legacy support, at least.

Following the release of theQ3 financial results by AMD, the stock market was quick to respond to less-than-expected operating income and market share numbers with a ~9.2% drop in share price before the markets closed. This was then followed by fervent after-hours trading resulting an even bigger drop to a share price of $17.88 at the time of this post, compared to the starting value of $25.04 earlier today. The small hike and drop after-hours also indicates some enterprising parties made use of the lower share values to their profit.

AMD held a teleconference for their investors to go along with the report, and attempted to better explain what was going on. In particular, they attribute the decreased client GPU sales to a big decrease in the blockchain GPU sales market (read GPU mining) relative to the first half of 2018. The lack of competing products to take on NVIDIA Pascal-, and then Turing-based, GPU solutions also does not help. As it stands, AMD shared news that GPUs now contribute to only ~30% of their revenue with the other 70% coming from the Ryzen-based processor division instead. They hinted strongly at new products coming from both segments, including an on-track path for a 7 nm datacenter GPU later this year and new Ryzen+Vega-powered notebooks, but it appears that more needs to be done to appease their investors at this point.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the third quarter of 2018 of $1.65 billion, operating income of $150 million, net income of $102 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.09. On a non-GAAP1 basis, operating income was $186 million, net income was $150 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.13.

Today at Oracle OpenWorld 2018, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced the availability of the first AMD EPYCTM processor-based instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With this announcement, Oracle becomes the largest public cloud provider to have a Bare Metal version on AMD EPYCTM processors1. The AMD EPYC processor-based "E" series will lead with the bare metal, Standard "E2", available immediately as the first instance type within the Series. At $0.03/Core hour, the AMD EPYC instance is up to 66 percent less on average per core than general purpose instances offered by the competition2 and is the most cost-effective instance available on any public cloud.

"With the launch of the AMD instance, Oracle has once again demonstrated that we are focused on getting the best value and performance to our customers," said Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president, software development, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "At greater than 269 GB/Sec, the AMD EPYC platform3, offers the highest memory bandwidth of any public cloud instance. Combined with increased performance, these cost advantages help customers maximize their IT dollars as they make the move to the cloud."

ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high-performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash products, today announces a new line up of gaming hardware including the XPG SX8200 ProM.2 2280 SSD, GAMMIX S5 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 SSD, and GAMMIX D30 DDR4 memory module.

The SX8200 Pro M.2 2280 SSD is XPG's fastest SSD to date and is designed for avid PC enthusiasts, gamers, and overclockers. It features an ultra-fast PCIe Gen3x4 interface that offers sustained peak read/write speeds of 3500/3000MB/s, outpacing SATA 6Gb/s by a wide margin. Supporting NVMe 1.3, the SX8200 Pro delivers excellent random read/write performance of 390K/380K IOPS. With SLC caching, DRAM cache buffer, E2E Data Protection, and LDPC ECC, it maintains high speeds and data integrity, even during highly intensive applications such as gaming, rendering, and overclocking.

TSMC has become the de facto leader when it comes to manufacturing technology. The company is on the forefront of new process technologies, and provides solutions for some of the biggest players in the industry, like Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and AMD, just to name a few. This process leadership means that TSMC is being courted by numerous fabless silicon designers so as to produce their silicon chips with the latest process technologies - part of the reason why TSMC has seen increasing revenues and profits forecasts.

By the end of 2018, TSMC will have taped out 50 7 nm designs, and plans to double that number in 2019. And these design wins don't stand solely on the shoulders of TSMC's first 7 nm technology (which should account for 20% of the company's revenue by 2019); the company will also tape-out chips built upon their 7 nm + EUV process, which will begin production in 2019.

AMD is giving final touches to its Radeon RX 590 graphics card, which is rumored to be based on an efficient new rendition of the "Polaris" silicon, which could disturb NVIDIA's product lineup between the GTX 1060 series and the GTX 1070, as its new RTX 2060 series is nowhere in sight. In a bid to thwart this threat, NVIDIA is preparing a variant of the GeForce GTX 1060 with faster GDDR5X memory.

The current GTX 1060 6 GB is endowed with 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory, which at its 192-bit bus width works out to a memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s. NVIDIA had attempted to improve its competitive position once, by creating a shortlived sub-variant of this SKU with 9 Gbps GDDR5 memory (211 GB/s). Switching to 10 Gbps GDDR5X memory would give the chip 240 GB/s memory bandwidth, and 11 Gbps (unlikely because expensive), would yield 264 GB/s. With the GP106 silicon maxed out, it's also possible the new GTX 1060 could be based on a heavily cut down GP104, possibly even with 192-bit memory, which explains GDDR5X memory.

AMD gave its first major reaction to the Principled Technologies (PT) controversy, in which it came out strongly against the questionable methods PT employed, in its performance comparison between the Core i9-9900K and AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, in addition to certain other Ryzen Threadripper series products. In its response, AMD made its official position on controversy clear - it is not happy with PT.

AMD prepared a long list of flaws with PT's original testing, and the areas where it did not correct the mistakes in its second testing. The company also put out a list of its own "best practices" for comparative benchmarking, which prescribes "sanitizing the operating system," "sanitizing the platform" for stock vs. overclocked testing, "sanitizing the data," and to not create a vast disconnect between the test environment and the real-world.

AMD "Zen" CPU architecture brought the company back to competitive relevance in the processor market. It got an incremental update in the form of "Zen+" which saw the implementation of an improved 12 nm process, and improved multi-core boosting algorithm, along with improvements to the cache subsystem. AMD is banking on Zen 2 to not only add IPC (instructions per clock) improvements; but also a new round of core-count increases. Bits n Chips has information that Zen 2 is making significant IPC gains.

According to the Italian tech publication, we could expect Zen 2 IPC gains of 13 percent over Zen+, which in turn posted 2-5% IPC gains over the original Zen. Bits n Chips notes that these IPC gains were tested in scientific tasks, and not in gaming. There is no gaming performance data at the moment. AMD is expected to debut Zen 2 with its 2nd generation EPYC enterprise processors by the end of the year, built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process. This roughly 16 percent IPC gain versus the original Zen, coupled with higher clocks, and possibly more cores, could complete the value proposition of 2nd gen EPYC. Zen 2-based client-segment products can be expected only in 2019.

AMD's first response to Intel's 9th generation Core "Coffee Lake Refresh" processors could be that of 5-10% price-cuts of its Ryzen "Pinnacle Ridge" processors across the board, according to a pricing list compiled by Techspot. These cuts could see the company's Ryzen 7 2700X priced just below the $300-mark. These cuts will be introduced not just by AMD, but also retailers.

The $200-300 segment could get crowded, with the 8-core/16-thread 2700X at around $295, the Ryzen 7 2700 (non-X) at $265, and the 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 2600X drop to around $210. Intel's only sub-$300 offering from its 9th generation family is the 6-core/6-thread Core i5-9600K. The sub-$200 segment will see the Ryzen 5 2600 go for $160, a rather compelling price for a 6-core/12-thread chip, given that Intel's cheapest 6-core offering, the i5-8400, is now retailing for $220, and that the company only has the quad-core i3-8350K around this price, at $170.

In a silent event that occurred earlier today, AMD's Chinese product page for the Radeon RX 580 graphics card now shows a new addition- the RX 580 2048SP. Contrary to every other RX 580 on the website, including OEM and system integrator solutions, this new SKU has 256 fewer stream processors (2304 vs 2048, respectively). As it turns out, this appears to be a China-only graphics solution that launched on October 15, 2018 and TechPowerUp can confirm this is a Polaris 20-based Radeon product as well.

Looking purely at the specifications, this appears to be an RX 570 with a higher boost frequency (up to 1284 MHz vs 1244 MHz), so this is a confusing strategy by AMD to call it an RX 580 instead. The tinfoil hat nearby suggests that this may well be taking advantage of consumers who go simply by the name scheme and do not look up what a stream processor is, and indeed this is similar to what AMD did last year with the downgraded Radeon RX 560 that started out to be a Chinese-region product and then found its way elsewhere as well. Retailers have started listing this as a product available for consumer purchase already, and a search for RX 580 brings up both these and the other versions together. Not cool, AMD, not cool.

Benchmark scores for 3D Mark's Time Spy have surface, and are purported to represent the performance level of an unidentified "Generic VGA" - which is being identified as AMD's new 12 nm Polaris revision. The RX 590 product name makes almost as much sense as it doesn't, though; for one, there's no real reason to release another entire RX 600 series, unless AMD is giving the 12 nm treatment to the entire lineup (which likely wouldn't happen, due to the investment in fabrication process redesign and node capacity required for such). As such, the RX 590 moniker makes sense if AMD is only looking to increase its competitiveness in the sub-$300 space as a stop-gap until they finally have a new graphics architecture up their shader sleeves.

With its "Zen" CPU microarchitecture, AMD removed support for the FMA4 instruction-set, on paper. This, while retaining FMA3. Level1Techs discovered that "Zen" CPUs do support FMA4 instructions, even through the instruction-set is not exposed to the operating system. FMA, or fused multiply add, is an efficient way to compute linear algebra. FMA3 and FMA4 are not generations of the instruction-set (unlike SSE3 and SSE4), but rather the digit denotes the number of operands per instruction. Support for both were introduced by AMD in 2012 with its FX-series processors, while Intel added FMA3 support in 2013 with "Haswell."

The exact reasons why AMD deprecated FMA4 with "Zen" are unknown, but some developers speculate it's because AMD's implementation of FMA4 is buggy, even though it's more efficient (33% more throughput). Intel's adoption of FMA3 made it more popular, and hence more stable over the years. Level1Techs used an OpenBLAS FMA4 test-program to confirm that feeding "Zen" processors with FMA4 instructions won't just return a "illegal instruction" error, but also the processor will go ahead and complete the operation. This is interesting because FMA4 isn't exposed as a CPUID bit, and the operating system has no idea the processor even supports the instruction. For linear algebra, FMA4 has proven more efficient than AVX in both single- and double-precision.

Principled Technologies (PT), which Intel paid to obtain some very outrageous test results for its Core i9-9900K eight-core processor launch event test-results, revised its benchmark data by improving its testing methodology partially. Initial tests by the outfit comparing Core i9-9900K to the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen Threadripper 2950X and 2990WX, sprung up false and misleading results because PT tested the AMD chip with half its cores effectively disabled, and crippled its memory controller with an extremely sub-optimal memory configuration (4-module + dual-rank clocked high, leaving the motherboard to significantly loosen up timings).

The original testing provided us with such gems as the i9-9900K "being up to 50 percent faster than 2700X at gaming." As part of its revised testing, while Principled Technologies corrected half its rookie-mistakes, by running the 2700X in the default "Creator Mode" that enables all 8 cores; it didn't correct the sub-optimal memory. Despite this, the data shows gaming performance percentage-differences between the i9-9900K and the 2700X narrow down to single-digit or around 12.39 percent on average, seldom crossing 20 percent. This is a significant departure from the earlier testing, which skewed the average on the basis of >40% differences in some games, due to half the cores being effectively disabled on the 2700X. The bottom-line of PT's new data is this: the Core i9-9900K is roughly 12 percent faster than the Ryzen 7 2700X at gaming, while being a whopping 66% pricier ($319 vs. $530 average online prices).

TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.12.0 released today with useful new features and several stability updates. We worked extensively on the ability of GPU-Z to detect fake NVIDIA graphics cards (i.e cards not really having the GPU advertised on the box). GPU-Z now prepends "[FAKE]" to the Graphics Card name field, and lights up with a caution triangle. This capability is forward compatible for the supported GPUs (listed in the changelog), so for example, it will be able to detect a fake RTX 2060, which in reality uses a GK106 GPU. The second big feature is the ability to extract and upload graphics card BIOS of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 graphics cards. Graphics cards with multiple independent fans (each with its own speed control) are gaining popularity, and we've added the ability to read and log fan-speeds of individual fans on NVIDIA "Turing" graphics cards that support the feature, in addition to fan speed percentage monitoring.

Our feature-rich "Advanced" tab now also shows information on HDMI and DisplayPort connectors of your graphics cards. Power-draw on NVIDIA graphics cards is now reported both as a percentage of TDP and as an absolute value in Watts. Among the bugs fixed are a system hang due to Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) kicking in when GPU-Z is running in the background; memory bandwidth reading on RTX 2080 & RTX 2080 Ti with GDDR6 memory, AMD Radeon RX 400-series GPU utilization monitoring, and improved texts for system memory usage sensors.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.12.0

The change-log follows.

AMD has released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.10.1 beta drivers. These drivers include support for Microsoft's Windows 10 October 2018 Update as well as optimizations for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Along with improved support, AMD has addressed a number of issues with this latest release. First of which is a fix for the HDMI audio drivers not upgrading during the Radeon Software installation in some circumstances. Random reboots when upgrading from Radeon Software versions older than RSAE 18.8.1 on CPUs with more than 16 cores has also been resolved. In regards to gaming fixes, Fortnite sees lighting corruption when effects quality is set to High or Epic resolved, while Sea of Thieves sees texture flickering in multi-GPU configurations fixed. You can grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.10.1 BetaThe change-log follows.

AOC, a worldwide leader in monitor display technology, today announces the first member of the premium AGON monitor line with HDR support, the AG322QC4 gaming monitor. The AG322QC4 is a curved 32-inch, QHD HDR gaming monitor with a refresh rate of 144Hz, 4ms response time and AMD's FreeSync2 technology. FreeSync2 is AMD's HDR-compatible technology. This monitor is made for enthusiast gamers, who want both high-performance visuals without stutter, screen tearing or motion blur, and a gorgeous visual experience with HDR. This is AOC's first monitor with Display HDR400 certification.

The 32-inch monitor features a 2560 x 1440 QHD screen with a 1800R curve. The curved VA panel offers vibrant colors with high dynamic range for a more exciting and immersive visual experience to be enjoyed while gaming. The display also covers 85 percent of the NTSC. The AG322QC4's curve conforms to the way the eye sees and helps reduce eye fatigue.