PC diagnostics tool HW Info has added support for future, as-of-yet unreleased AMD CPUs and GPUs, which seemingly confirm some earlier news on AMD's plans for their next-generation offerings. HWiNFO's v5.72 update adds support for upcoming AMD Navi GPUs, Pinnacle Ridge, 400-series motherboards (which should make their market debut alongside AMD's Zen+ CPUs), and enhanced support for AMD's Starship, Matisse and Radeon RX Vega M. We already touched upon AMD's Matisse codename in the past: it's expected to refer to the company's Zen 2 microarchitecture, which will bring architecture overhauls of the base Zen design - alongside a 7 nm process - in order to bring enhanced performance and better power consumption.

Starship, on the other hand, is a previously leaked evolution of AMD's current Naples offering that powers their EPYC server CPUs. Starship has been rumored to have been canceled, and then put back on the product schedule again; if anything, its inclusion in HWiNFO's latest version does point towards it having made the final cut, after all. Starship will bring to businesses an increased number of cores and threads (48/96) compared to Naples' current top-tier offering (32/64), alongside a 7 nm manufacturing process.

Sapphire quietly introduced a slightly bolstered Radeon RX 550 graphics card that's based on the "Polaris 21" silicon, rather than the Polaris 20 "Lexa" silicon, called simply the Pulse Radeon RX 550 2GD5/4GD5 (model: 11268-16 for 2 GB and 11268-15 for 4 GB). Consumers should pay attention to the model number. "Polaris 21" is the same chip AMD bases the RX 560 on. This particular card has 10 out of 16 compute units physically present on the chip, which translates to 640 stream processors, higher than the 512 stream processors the RX 550 is originally endowed with. Other vital specs include 40 TMUs, and 2 GB or 4 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6.00 GHz, over a 128-bit wide memory interface (96 GB/s memory bandwidth). The GPU is clocked at 1071 MHz. The card relies on the PCI-Express slot for power, its display outputs include one each of DVI, HDMI 2.0, and DisplayPort 1.4. Sapphire could be going after the sweltering PUBG crowd.

MSI today introduced its Radeon RX 580 Armor MK2 graphics card series, available in standard and OC variants. Both feature 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. The two cards feature the same Armor MK2 product design that the company debuted with the RX 570 Armor MK2 series, earlier this month. The standard variant offers out of the box clock speeds of 1353 MHz core, which is slightly higher than AMD-reference clocks of 1340 MHz. The OC variant tops that with 1366 MHz out of the box. Both variants leave the memory untouched at 8.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective).

The Armor MK2 series is positioned a notch above the original Arsenal-series Armor SKU, in featuring a pair of updated TorX 2.0 fans, red-colored accents in place of white on the cooler shroud, and the addition of a metal back-plate with red accents. It hence sits in between the Armor and Gaming series. TorX 2.0 fans feature double ball-bearings, and an improved fan blade design for higher air-flow, allowing MSI to lower the fan speeds, and with it, noise. The fans stay off when the GPU is idling. The PCB design is unchanged between the Armor MK2 and the original RX 580 Armor series. The company didn't reveal pricing.

Following its Q4 and 2017 Annual financial results reveal, AMD CEO Lisa Su, in the company's post-results earnings conference call, made some notable disclosures and guidance. The most interesting - and which shouldn't come as a surprise - is that AMD expects revenues to grow by a staggering 30 percent quarter-over-quarter in Q1-2018, riding on the blockchain (crypto-currency mining) wave. The company's graphics processors offer high efficiency at mining popular crypto-currencies, such as Ethereum, Z-cash, and Bitcoin.

Moving on, Su commented on how her company is coping with the "Meltdown" and "Spectre" CPU vulnerabilities, and reaffirmed that AMD's x86 architectures are slightly safer by design against some of the vulnerabilities; that while the upcoming "Zen+" CPU micro-architecture, which is essentially an optical-shrink of "Zen" to the 12 nanometer process will ship with microcode-level patches against the vulnerabilities, its successor, the "Zen2" micro-architecture, which will be built on the 7 nm process, will feature architecture-level hardening against the vulnerabilities. "Zen 2" tapes out towards the end of 2018, and could see production and marketing in 2019. The other big reveal is the taping out of an optically-shrunk "Vega" architecture implementation on the 7 nm process, taping out within 2018. This isn't "Navi," but possibly a bigger "Vega" chip that leverages 7 nm to have acceptable power/thermals. AMD could tap into the machine-learning market with this silicon first.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the fourth quarter of 2017 of $1.48 billion, operating income of $82 million and net income of $61 million or diluted earnings per share of $0.06. Non-GAAP operating income was $103 million, non-GAAP net income was $88 million and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.08. For fiscal 2017, the Company reported revenue of $5.33 billion, operating income of $204 million and net income of $43 million or diluted earnings per share of $0.04. Non-GAAP operating income was $301 million, non-GAAP net income was $179 million and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.17.

"2017 marked a key inflection point for AMD as we re-shaped our product portfolio, delivered 25 percent annual revenue growth, expanded gross margin and achieved full-year profitability," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We are even more excited about 2018 as we launch our next wave of high-performance products and continue to position AMD as one of the premier long-term growth companies in the technology industry."

QNAP Systems, Inc. today released the new "vQTS" virtualization technology that enables users to run multiple virtual QTS operating systems on a QNAP NAS. Based on Virtualization Station, vQTS provides benefits for resource segregation, multi-tenant environments, flexible application deployment, and savings on energy, cost and physical space. vQTS is initially available for the AMD Ryzen-powered TS-x77 NAS series, which delivers high-performance to maximize vQTS utilization for greater business flexibility in management and applications.

Sk Hynix has added to its product catalog single-die 16 Gb DDR4 memory chips, which should enable a two-fold increase in maximum memory capacity per single DIMM. This allows SK Hynix to sell same-capacity chips with fewer memory semiconductor dies, due to the increase in storage density, and to increase maximum memory capacity at the same memory die populations as before. The benefits are lower power consumption (due to the reduced number of memory dies to power), and the possibility of putting together either dual-ranked 64 GB modules, quad-ranked 128 GB LRDIMMs and octal-ranked 256 GB LRDIMMs. That last part is the most important: theoretically, the maximum amount of memory on top Intel or AMD server platforms could double, which could enable up to 4 TB RAM in EPYC systems, for example. And as memory-hungry as big data applications have become, there's ever need for higher memory capacity.

SK Hynix's 16 Gb DDR4 chips are organized as 1Gx16 and 2Gx8 and supplied in FBGA96 and FBGA78 packages, respectively. Current 16 Gb density speeds stand at DDR4-2133 CL15 or DDR4-2400 CL17 modes at 1.2 V. SK Hynix plans increase the available frequencies in the third quarter of this year, adding DDR4-2666 CL19 to the lineup.

Intel, which benefited from the post-Q4 public-disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in its latest results, is hoping to mitigate its fallout on Q1-2018. The company, along with several other CPU designers, such as AMD and ARM, are firefighting the two devastating security vulnerabilities through OS kernel patches and CPU micro-code updates; which come at a slight expense of performance. In a bid to unnerve investors, company CEO Brian Krzanich announced that Intel is working on "in-silicon" fixes to Meltdown and Spectre.

An "in-silicon" fix would entail a major CPU micro-architecture design that's inherently immune to the two vulnerabilities and yet offers the benefits of modern branch-prediction and speculative execution. Krzanich says processors with in-silicon fixes to the two vulnerabilities will be released to market by the end of 2018.

AMD is pinning a lot of hopes on its upcoming Ryzen 2000G "Raven Ridge" desktop APU family, which combine a quad-core "Zen" CPU with a larger-than-expected integrated GPU based on the latest "Vega" architecture. While Intel's iGPU design focus for its "Coffee Lake-S" processors continues to be hardware-accelerated 4K video playback, and non-gaming tasks; AMD promises a more wholesome solution. The integrated Radeon Vega 11 graphics of the Ryzen 5 2400G features 11 "Vega" NGCUs (next-generation compute units), which translates to 704 stream processors, 44 TMUs (@ 4 TMUs per NGCU), 8 or 16 ROPs, and a bandwidth-rich pathway to the APU's dual-channel DDR4-2933 capable IMC, thanks to AMD's new Infinity Fabric interconnect.

In its pre-launch press-deck for the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G, AMD did the obvious - comparing a similarly priced Intel Core i5-8400 six-core processor (MSRP: $189) with its faster Ryzen 5 2400G (MSRP: $169.99) at gaming, highlighting its products key promise - enabling 1080p gaming with many of the newer AAA titles. In AMD's testing, the Radeon Vega 11 iGPU keeps frame-rates well above 30 fps at 1080p. In key popular titles such as "Battlefield 1," the frame-rates cross 50 fps, titles like "Overwatch" and "Rocket League" are almost that fast. "Skyrim" approaches 96 fps, while "The Witcher 3" stays barely above 30 fps. The i5-8400 with its UHD 620 graphics barely touches the 30 fps mark in any of the games, at 1080p. Even taking into account AMD's marketing hyperbole, the Radeon Vega 11 seems capable of running most eSports titles at resolutions above 1600 x 900, which should particularly interest iCafes and gamers on a shoestring budget.

AMD today announced the appointment of Mike Rayfield as senior vice president and general manager of AMD Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), and David Wang as senior vice president of engineering for RTG. Both will report to President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. Rayfield will be responsible for all aspects of strategy and business management for AMD's graphics business including consumer graphics, professional graphics, and semi-custom products. Wang will be responsible for all aspects of graphics engineering, including the technical strategy, architecture, hardware, and software for AMD graphics products and technologies.

"Mike and David are industry leaders who bring proven track records of delivering profitable business growth and leadership product roadmaps," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We enter 2018 with incredible momentum for our graphics business based on the full set of GPU products we introduced last year for the consumer, professional, and machine learning markets. Under Mike and David's leadership, I am confident we will continue to grow the footprint of Radeon across the gaming, immersive, and GPU compute markets."

MSI is apparently working on a revised version of its dual-fan Armor design for AMD's cards, dropping the white and black color scheme and opting for a more AMD-basic black and red one. The new versions, tentatively dubbed the Armor MK2 graphics cards, are expected to trickle through MSI's AMD graphics card lineup slowly, starting with the RX 570 and RX 560 graphics cards in their OC versions. The new color scheme, even if used to exhaustion already, does a little more than the previous Armor iteration in conveying the image of an AMD graphics card (black and red, anyone?), and the Armor MK2 models should feature an additional color and design upgrade to the existing backplate.

Primitive shaders are lightweight shaders that break the separation of vertex and geometry shaders, promising a performance gain in supporting games. Initially announced during the Radeon RX Vega launch, the feature has been delayed again and again. At one of its 2018 International CES interactions with the press, AMD reportedly announced that it had cancelled the implicit driver path for primitive shaders. Game developers will still be able to implement primitive shaders on AMD hardware, using a (yet to be released) explicit API path. The implicit driver path was the more interesting technology though, since it could have provided meaningful performance gains to existing games and help cut down a lot of developer effort for games in development. AMD didn't state the reasons behind the move.

To explain the delay, some people were speculating that the Primitive Shader feature was broken unfixable in hardware, which doesn't seem to be the case, now that we are hearing about upcoming API support for it, so this can also be interpreted as good news for Vega owners.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information and diagnostic utility. Version 2.7.0 comes with a handful of important bug fixes and updates to its internal modules. To begin with, we've updated the NVFlash module that lets GPU-Z extract video BIOS from graphics cards, the newer NVFlash supports BIOS extraction from some of the newer NVIDIA graphics cards such as the GTX 1070 Ti. We've also fixed incorrect video memory amount reading on AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. TMU and ROP counts, and OpenCL status on AMD "Polaris 21" GPUs is fixed, as is incorrect labeling of a memory clock sensor on NVIDIA GPUs. GPU-Z will no longer prevent system shutdowns and reboots on Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.7.0

The change-log follows.

Here are the first pictures of AMD Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" desktop APU retail PIB (processor in box) packages. The PIB package includes the APU itself, an AMD Wraith Stealth cooling solution, a case-badge, and some documentation. These packages are visually distinguishable from Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 "Summit Ridge" CPU PIB packages, with a chrome silver band heading the front face, which has prominent AMD Radeon Vega Graphics branding. It keeps up with the APUs' full retail names: "AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with Radeon Vega 8 graphics" and "AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega 11 graphics." The Ryzen 3 2200G is expected to be priced (MSRP) at USD $99.99, and the Ryzen 5 2400G at $169.99; both parts launch in the retail channel on the 12th of February. The two have been extensively detailed in our older article.

AMD today revealed specifications of its first desktop socket AM4 APUs based on the "Zen" CPU micro-architecture, the Ryzen 2000G "Raven Ridge" series. The chips combine a quad-core "Zen" CPU with an integrated graphics core based on the "Vega" graphics architecture, with up to 11 NGCUs, amounting to 704 stream processors. The company is initially launching two SKUs, the Ryzen 3 2200G, and the Ryzen 5 2400G. Besides clock speeds, the two are differentiated with the Ryzen 5 featuring CPU SMT, and more iGPU stream processsors. The Ryzen 5 2400G is priced at USD $169, while the Ryzen 3 2200G goes for $99. Both parts will be available on the 12th of February, 2018.

The Ryzen 5 2400 features an 4-core/8-thread CPU clocked at 3.60 GHz, with a boost frequency of 3.90 GHz; 2 MB of L2 cache (512 KB per core), and 4 MB of shared L3 cache; and Radeon Vega 11 graphics (with the 11 denoting NGCU count), featuring 704 stream processors. The iGPU engine clock is set at 1250 MHz. The dual-channel DDR4 integrated memory controller supports up to 64 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2933 MHz memory. The Ryzen 3 2200G is a slightly cut down part. Lacking SMT, its 4-core/4-thread CPU ticks at 3.50 GHz, with 3.70 GHz boost. Its CPU cache hierarchy is unchanged; the iGPU features only 8 out of 11 NGCUs, which translate to 512 stream processors. The iGPU engine clock is set at 1100 MHz. Both parts feature unlocked CPU base-clock multipliers; and have their TDP rated at 65W, and include AMD Wraith Stealth cooling solutions.

AMD late Thursday released Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.1.1 Beta drivers to the public. Bearing the same version numbering as the early-January 18.1.1 Alpha release, these drivers have a more detailed change-log, which includes the game crash fix for DirectX 9 games; freezing experienced in DRM-protected video playback, a stability issue affecting Windows 10 "Movies & TV" app, color corruption on Radeon Overlay when running multiple game and 3D applications, PUBG menu flickering in multi-GPU systems, and more. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.1.1 Beta

The complete change-log follows.

Despite the grunt of the media's attention and overall customer rage having been thrown largely at Intel, AMD hasn't moved past the Spectre/Meltdown well, meltdown, unscathed. News has surfaced that at least two law firms have announced their intention of filing a class action lawsuit against AMD, accusing the company of not having disclosed their products' Spectre vulnerability, despite knowledge of said vulnerabilities.

AMD stated loud and clear that their processors weren't affected by the Meltdown flaw. However, regarding Spectre, AMD's terms weren't as clear cut. The company stated that its CPUs were vulnerable to the Spectre 1 flaw (patchable at a OS level), but said that vulnerability to Spectre 2's variant had "near-zero risk of exploitation". At the same time, the company also said that "GPZ Variant 2 (Branch Target Injection or Spectre) is applicable to AMD processors", adding that "While we believe that AMD's processor architectures make it difficult to exploit Variant 2, we continue to work closely with the industry on this threat.

SiSoft's hardware database is a fountain of information for soon-to-be-released hardware if you have the patience to go through all the entries. On this occasion, we get a glimpse of AMD's future Ryzen 5 2600 processor. Similar to its predecessor, the Ryzen 5 2600 is a 65W six-core processor with twelve threads. However, this new model features a 3.4 GHz base clock which is 200 MHz faster than the Ryzen 5 1600 that we reviewed last year. It will also come with 6 x 512 kB of L2 cache and 2 x 8 MB of L3 cache. Being an engineer sample and all, take these specifications with a pinch of salt. According to the entry, the processor was tested on an ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero motherboard that sports AMD's X470 chipset. Unfortunately, we don't have any more details at this time.

It looks like Intel has achieved the design goals of its new Core i7-8705G multi-chip module, built in collaboration with AMD. Combining a 4-core/8-thread "Kaby Lake" CPU die with an AMD "Vega" GPU die that has its own 4 GB HBM2 memory stack, the ruthless duo put similarly-priced discrete GPU setups to rest, such as the combination of an 8th generation Core processor + NVIDIA GeForce MX 150. More importantly, entry-level discrete GPU combinations with high-end mobile CPUs have a similar power/thermal envelope as the i7-8705G MCM, but at significantly higher PCB footprint.

Dell implemented the Core i7-8705G on one of its latest XPS 15 2-in-1 models. The device was compared to an Acer Swift 3 (SF314-51), which combines a Core i5-8250U processor with GeForce MX 150 discrete graphics; and a Dell XPS 13 9370, which implements an 8th generation Core processor that has Intel's workhorse graphics core, the HD 620. The three devices squared off against each other at "Rise of the Tomb Raider" game benchmark. The i7-8705G averaged 35 frames per second (fps), while the MX 150 barely managed 24 fps. The HD 620 ran a bored intern's PowerPoint slideshow at 9 fps.

AMD today in a blog post announced the fruits of its partnership with Enmotus, a mainly enterprise-focused company that has made its name in creating performance-optimizing software solutions. The new solution, the FuzeDrive, is an ingenius (paid) software stack that will aggregate all of a users' system memory (be it RAM, HDDs, SSDs, NVMe drives, all of that) and expose it as a single drive via software. The goal is to allow the software to optimize data placement on the fly according to its read/write needs, creating caching solutions at will, learning from users' usage patterns, and basically creating a "set it and forget it" experience for users that critically also improves performance (and by AMD's estimates, it really does do so by a significant margin).

All of these features were pretty hard-set from the start; in the AMD blog post by Don Woligroski, he states that "AMD started with a list of goals, like improving storage performance and lowering loading times." AMD's love for open standards still hasn't gone and went away; he said that "because AMD believes in open hardware standards, it prefers to work with off-the-shelf, non-proprietary NVMe, SSD, and hard disk drives." Convenience was also a very important item to check; according to AMD, "any superior storage acceleration solution needs to be easy to set up, and simple to use." And the company believes they've achieved all of that with their new solution.

The public disclosure on January 3rd that multiple research teams had discovered security issues related to how modern microprocessors handle speculative execution has brought to the forefront the constant vigilance needed to protect and secure data. These threats seek to circumvent the microprocessor architecture controls that preserve secure data.

At AMD, security is our top priority and we are continually working to ensure the safety of our users as new risks arise. As a part of that vigilance, I wanted to update the community on our actions to address the situation.

ASUS today announced XG Station Pro, an external graphics card enclosure with a stylish aluminum chassis and advanced cooling that provides PC and Mac laptop users with high-end graphics performance, suitable for demanding professional applications, such as video rendering, 3D design and scientific modeling. With support for the latest NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and featuring fast and convenient Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, XG Station Pro enables a workstation-class experience when connected to a laptop and an external monitor without sacrificing mobility.

Premium, all-aluminum design
Designed in collaboration with In Win - the well-known maker of premium computer chassis - XG Station Pro has a highly functional and stylish design with an elegant, grey aluminum chassis that perfectly complements premium laptops. XG Station Pro fits a full-length, 2.5-slot graphics card, yet has a compact size that takes up minimal space on a desk or workspace. An external, 330W power supply drives even the most demanding graphics cards, reduces heat within the chassis, and enables XG Station Pro to have a smaller overall size.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced the release of the high-performance TVS-x73e series - an SMB NAS lineup featuring an AMD RX-421BD quad-core APU, up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, two M.2 SATA 6Gb/s SSD slots (for SSD cache acceleration with Qtier auto-tiering), the unique USB QuickAccess port, dual 4K HDMI output, and hardware-assisted 4K video transcoding acceleration. Designed for versatile business needs, the secure and scalable TVS-x73e series provides a pair of PCIe slots for flexibly installing 10GbE NICs, QM2 cards or USB 3.1 10 Gbps cards, presenting small and medium businesses with the perfect NAS solution to build a private cloud for applications including high-speed data transfer, backup/recovery, virtualization, media playback and graphics display.

"The TVS-x73e NAS series is powered by an AMD quad-core APU with up to 3.4 GHz clock speed and also provides dual PCIe slots that add more value to maximize NAS potential for a wider range of applications, making the TVS-x73e ideal for organizations and professionals who ask for performance and expandability," said Jason Hsu, Product Manager of QNAP.

We headed to the GIGABYTE Aorus booth at the 2018 International CES to check out the only motherboard based on AMD's upcoming 400-series chipset visible in the entire show, the Aorus X470 Gaming 7. We snapped a lot of pictures. The first thing that caught our attention is the board's updated styling, which resembles the one GIGABYTE introduced with its Intel Z370-series motherboards. The second thing of course, was two 32 Gb/s M.2 slots, confirming that AMD has indeed addressed 300-series chipset's greatest shortcoming - lack of PCIe gen 3.0 general purpose lanes. Since the AM4 SoC puts out 4 gen 3.0 general purpose lanes of its own, which wired to one 32 Gb/s M.2 slot on 300-series motherboards, the new 400-series boards will have at least two of these slots, one wired to the AM4 SoC, and another to the chipset.

The Aorus X470 Gaming 7 could become the company's flagship socket AM4 product based on AMD X470 chipset. It's been designed as such. Built in the ATX form-factor, the board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and 4-pin ATX power connectors. A 12-phase VRM supplies power to the AM4 SoC. It's interesting to note that GIGABYTE chose some very high-current chokes for the chip's main voltage domains. The VRM heatsinks, too, are elaborate aluminium fin-stack types, with the two heatsinks spreading heat over a heat pipe. Is this a telltale sign that certain Ryzen 2 parts could have >95W TDP? The CPU socket is wired to four DDR4 DIMM slots, two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x8/x8 when both are populated), and one of the two M.2 slots (we're guessing the top M.2-22110 slot). Both it, and the bottom M.2-2280 slots have included heatsinks. Other expansion slots include an x16 (electrical x4) slot wired to the chipset, and two x1 slots, which are all gen 3.0.

AMD took to CES 2018 with a smattering of partner products and designs that take advantage of the company's mobile implementation of its Ryzen CPUs (and ZEN architecture). At its CES 2018 booth, AMD showcased products from HP and Lenovo, and our lucky coverage agents even managed to catch AMD CEO, Lisa Su, in her visit/inspection to her company's CES 2018 presence (extra Easter-egg after the break).

The products on display included one HP AIO, one Dell AIO, one HP and one Lenovo laptop, as well as pre-built systems from the likes of Dell (under its own brand and the Alienware brand) and Lenovo. The HP Pavilion AIO 24 makes use of AMD's Ryzen Mobile 2500U with Radeon Vega 8 graphics, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 2 TB HDD. The other AIO in the house, a Dell Inspiron 7775, packs a desktop-class Ryzen 7 1700, discrete Radeon RX 580 graphics, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, a 256 GB SSD, and a 1 TB HDD for all your storage needs.