AMD followed up its Ryzen processor launch with support for the software development ecosystem by releasing special C and C++ compilers that let you make software that can fully take advantage of the "Zen" micro-architecture. The new AOCC 1.0 C/C++ compilers by AMD are based on LLVM Clang, with "Zen" specific patches. AMD claims AOCC offers improved vectorization and better code generation for "Zen" based CPUs. It also includes a "Zen" optimized linker.

Phoronix benchmarked AOCC against other more common compilers such as GCC 6.3, GCC 7.1, GCC 8, LLVM Clang 4.0, and LLVM Clang 5.0 using a Ryzen 7-1700 eight-core processor powered machine, running on Ubuntu 17.04 Linux, and found that AOCC offers higher performance than GCC in most cases, LLVM Clang in some cases, and marginally higher performance than LLVM Clang in some cases. Find more results in the link below.

At its Analyst Day follow-up conference call, AMD confirmed that the company could build a new generation of Ryzen processors on 14 nm (albeit refined 14 nm) process, before transitioning to "Zen2," which will be built on the 7 nm process. As the first "Zen" based products built on the 14 nm process, the Ryzen "Summit Ridge" processors are based on the current-generation 14 nm FinFET process. AMD hopes to tap into a more refined version of this process before moving on to "Zen 2."

This could indicate that AMD's next generation of Ryzen processors, likely the Ryzen # 2xxx series, could be minor incremental updates to the current product stack, likely in the form of higher clock speeds or better energy-efficiency facilitated by the refined 14 nm process, but nothing major in the way of micro-architecture. Assuming the current Ryzen product stack, which will be augmented by Ryzen 3 series, Ryzen Pro series, and Ryzen APUs in the second half of 2017; last till mid-2018, one could expect a follow-up or refreshed Ryzen # 2xxx series run up to another year, before AMD makes a "leapfrog" upgrade to the 7 nm process with "Zen2," in all likelihood, by 2019.

At its follow-up conference call for its Analysts Day presentation, AMD clarified that Threadripper is a brand, and not a codename to its upcoming line of HEDT processors. This effectively implies that the chips will be called either Threadripper (followed by a model number), or Ryzen Threadripper, but not "Ryzen 9." Responding to questions by TechPowerUp, AMD also mentioned that it will put out more details about Threadripper in its May 29th pre-Computex event in Taipei.

AMD also confirmed that Threadripper is very much a client platform product and not enterprise; although its target audience is "a bit of both" power-users looking for a huge amount of CPU power, and high-end gamers. The Epyc line of processors are firmly in the enterprise domain. Finally, AMD confirmed that motherboard manufacturers will show off Threadripper motherboards at Computex 2017. AMD hopes to launch Threadripper within Summer 2017 (that's before September end). Wake me up when September ends.

AMD's senior marketing director Chris Hook has taken to Twitter to tease AMD's recently-revealed, non-gaming oriented Vega Frontier Edition graphics card. According to the man, he's testing the Frontier Edition's lighting system, which, as we've seen in renders, is supposed to bring in that yellow shade to the Frontier Edition's brushed aluminum, "Pro Blue" furnishings.

What we should be paying more attention to, though, is the partial graphics card that stands to the frontier Edition's right side. It's only a partial, granted, but the black and red color scheme is reminiscent of... well... AMD's gaming Radeon graphics cards. Could this actually be meant as a tease for one of the gaming-oriented RX Vega graphics cards?

AMD, in an interview with Forbes, confirmed that it is working to improve DDR4 memory support of its Ryzen series processors, to enable higher memory clocks. AMD Ryzen users find it difficult to get DDR4 memory clocks to run above 3000 MHz reliably. With memory clock being linked with the chip's Infinity Fabric clock (the interconnect between two CCX units on the "Summit Ridge" silicon), the performance incentives for higher memory clocks are just that much more.

AMD confirmed that its AGESA update for May improves DDR4 memory compatibility, although it also stressed on the need for motherboard manufacturers to improve their board designs in the future, with more PCB layers and better copper traces between the DIMM slots and the SoC socket. The company assures that more updates to AGESA are in the pipeline, and would improve performance of Ryzen processors at various levels. The AGESA updates are dispensed through motherboard vendors as BIOS updates.

In a bid to increase attractiveness of its offerings even further, Gigabyte has recently announced via a forum post that it's offering up to 60€ in Steam vouchers to consumers who purchase a select Aorus motherboard. This promotion is available for both Intel and AMD Aorus-branded motherboards, and will be open until June 30th 2017 or while stock lasts. Intel customers seem to be getting the bulk of the promotion though, with AMD users only getting 20€ in Steam Wallet vouchers.

Something that we don't see everyday is that this promotion is particularly focused on the EU. Gigabyte states it's only open to residents of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Portugal (yay!), Serbia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuanian, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland, Croatia and Slovenia. Check the list of featured motherboards and respective voucher value eligibility after the break.

ASUS today introduced the Republic of Gamers (ROG) STRIX X370-F Gaming motherboard, positioned below its flagship ROG Crosshair VI Hero, but above its Prime X370-Pro upper mid-range motherboard. Based on the AMD X370 chipset, and ready for socket AM4 Ryzen processors, the board is characterized by its RGB LED lighting chops. The VRM and chipset heatsinks feature RGB LEDs with diffusers, the board is peppered with status LEDs, and features RGB LED headers. The included ASUS Aura Sync RGB lets you orchestrate your LED setup.

Built in the ATX form-factor, the STRIX X370-F Gaming draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors. A 10-phase VRM conditions power for the AM4 SoC, which is wired to four reinforced DDR4 DIMM slots, supporting up to 64 GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory; and two reinforced PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (electrical x8/x8 with both populated), with NVIDIA SLI support. The third x16 slot is electrical x4 and wired to the chipset. Three other x1 slots make for the rest of the expansion.

AMD Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) head Raja Koduri, responding to questions on a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) session, confirmed that while the company will launch the consumer-graphics variant of "Vega," the Radeon RX Vega graphics card, at its 2017 Computex event, availability of the card won't follow immediately after, making it a soft-launch. "We'll be showing Radeon RX Vega off at Computex, but it won't be on store shelves that week. We know how eager you are to get your hands on Radeon RX Vega, and we're working extremely hard to bring you a graphics card that you'll be incredibly proud to own," Koduri said.

The first consumer graphics card based on the "Vega 10" ASIC will be the Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition. This card will be armed with 8 GB of HBM2 memory spread across two 16 Gbit HBM2 8-Hi stacks, with its combined memory bandwidth around 480 GB/s. From the words of Koduri, we can deduce that AMD is still finding the right clocks to make Vega Frontier Edition a competitive product. Koduri confirmed that there will be faster/bigger implementations of Vega. "Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version," he said. In the meantime, check out some groovy concept renders of RX Vega reference board by VideoCardz. Our money is on the one below.

AMD released the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.5.2 drivers. These drivers improve performance of "Prey" a further 4.5 percent, compared to 17.5.1 drivers, as tested on a Radeon RX 580 8 GB graphics card. The drivers also address some critical bugs, beginning with random hangs or application crash noticed on "NieR: Automata," excessive level load times noticed on "Forza Horizon 3," a bug related to multi-GPU setups where displays plugged into the second graphics cards where the first (primary) graphics card disappears from the device list; and a bug with Radeon RX 550 which causes the system to hang when entering sleep or hibernate states. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.5.2

You must've read recent reports on the web about an AMD-Intel licensing deal. We purposefully didn't cover that information, spread on May 15th, based on an expiring graphics IP licensing deal between NVIDIA and Intel. The initial report said that since that deal was expiring, Intel was now turning to its x86 arch-enemy, AMD. It would seem those reports weren't based on facts, having since been denied by Intel, who told Barron's Tiernan Ray that "the recent rumors that Intel has licensed AMD's graphics technology are untrue."

Investors and speculators are an attentive bunch, and jumped at the original rumor, expecting another million-dollar licensing deal. As a result of the Intel-AMD licensing deal rumor, AMD's stock soared by 12% even before AMD's Financial Analyst day. Naturally, after Intel rectified the story, AMD's stock proceeded to correct the speculative bubble, dropping back to previous levels. AMD could have denied the deal as much as Intel could (it takes two to tango), but chose not to. The company played smartly, keeping its cards close to its chest with a "no comment" posture regarding the rumor. This let AMD AMD play on it, seeing their stock increase (even if it was a short-lived scenario, now rectified in its stock value.)

In a blog post detailing AMD's Vega Frontier Edition graphics card, which we covered in-depth at the time of its announcement in AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2017, AMD's Radeon Technologies Group head Raja Koduri clarified that current machine learning poster child, the Vega Frontier Edition GPU, can also be used for gaming (who's to say some researchers, or pioneers, as AMD is so fond of calling them, won't be visiting Talos 1 themselves between coffee breaks?)

However, it is Raja Koduri's opinion that you should wait for Vega's gaming GPUs, since the Frontier Edition is "optimized for professional use cases (and priced accordingly)", and that if you want to game on AMD hardware, you should wait "just a little while longer for the lower-priced, gaming-optimized Radeon RX Vega graphics card." He then threw in a free "You'll be glad you did," as if Vega hasn't been a long, long time coming already.

Professional workloads are known to tax graphics cards like few do (well, Furmark would beg to differ, wouldn't it), and AMD is looking to cover all of its bases when it comes to the liquid cooling needs of its pioneers, its graphics professionals that will get a taste of Vega before any other consumer.

In the Q&A section of their 2017 Financial Analyst Day, AMD CEO Lisa Su answered an enquiry from a Deutsche-bank questioner regarding the company's aggressive 7 nm plan for their roadmap, on which AMD seems to be balancing its process shrinkage outlook for the foreseeable future. AMD will be developing their next Zen architecture revisions on 7 nm, alongside a push for 7 nm on their next-generation (or is that next-next generation?) Navi architecture. This means al of AMD's products, consumer, enterprise, and graphics, will be eventually built on this node. This is particularly interesting considering AMD's position with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, with which AMD has already had many amendments to their Wafer Supply Agreement, a remain of AMD's silicon production division spin-off, the latest of which runs from 2016 to 2020.

As it is, AMD has to pay GLOBALFOUNDRIES for its wafer orders that go to other silicon producers (in this case, TSMC), in a quarterly basis since the beginning of 2017, based on the volume of certain wafers purchased from another wafer foundry. In addition, AMD has annual wafer purchase targets from 2016 through the end of 2020, fixed wafer prices for 2016, and a framework for yearly wafer pricing in this amendment, so the company is still bleeding money to GLOBALFOUNDRIES. However, AMD is making the correct decision in this instance, I'd wager, considering GLOBALFOUNDRIES' known difficulties in delivering their process nodes absent of quirks.

Where is Vega? When is it launching? On AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2017, Raja Koduri spoke about the speculation in the past few weeks, and brought us an answer: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is the first iteration of Vega, aimed at data scientists, immersion engineers and product designers. It will be released in the second half of June for AMD's "pioneers". The wording, that Vega Frontier Edition will be released in the second half of June, makes it so that AMD still technically releases Vega in the 2H 2017... It's just not the consumer, gaming Vega version of the chip. This could unfortunately signify an after-June release time-frame for consumer GPUs based on the Vega micro-architecture.

This news comes as a disappointment to all gamers who have been hoping for Vega for gaming, because it reminds of what happened with dual Fiji. A promising design which ended up unsuitable for gaming and was thus marketed for content creators as Radeon Pro Duo, with little success. But there is still hope: it just looks like we really will have to wait for Computex 2017 to see some measure of details on Vega's gaming prowess.

AMD has tentatively announced the existence of an additional Ryzen line-up, Ryzen PRO, which AMD pits against Intel's i5-7500 with some interesting performance claims for professional-grade workloads.

AMD's Jim Anderson has just confirmed reports about AMD's high-performance, enthusiast-level performance CPUs with up to 16 cores and 32 threads. These Threadripper CPUs will be available this summer.

Today on their Financial Analyst Day 2017, AMD has taken the lid off their "Naples" Zen implementation. The balanced Zen core in its unrestrained, server-grade level has become EPYC, with AMD CEO Lisa Su holding the silicon in her bare hands. The new EPYC platform with its I/O performance improvements allows more GPUs to be connected to a CPU than any other platform, with up to 128 PCIe lanes being expected on these server-grade chips.

AMD today announced availability of the Radeon RX 560 upper-mainstream graphics card, "completing" the RX 500-series family. The company had launched the RX 500 family with the RX 550, the RX 570, and the RX 580. The RX 560 is based on the 14 nm "Polaris 11" silicon, and features 1,024 stream processors across 16 GCN compute units, 64 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB or 4 GB of memory. The card is clocked at 1175 MHz core, with 1275 MHz boost, and 7.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory, working out to 96 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It starts at $99.

We expect to know a little more about AMD's Ryzen 3 processors soon, which are expected to compete against Intel's Core i3 processors while offering a full-blown, true quad-core design against Intel's dual-core + HyperThreading solutions. However, it would seem that ASUS itself has given up a little of the game away, through a processor compatibility list for its upcoming Crosshair VI Hero WIFI AC motherboard.

The processor specifically detailed is AMD's Ryzen 3 1200 CPU. We already know this to be a quad-core part (and ASUS notes it as a 4C processor, so, four cores), but ASUS' misstep tells us this one will carry a base clock speed of 3.1GHz, with 8 MB of L3 cache and a 65 W TDP.

AMD Ryzen 9 "Threadripper" series 12-core, 14-core, and 16-core client desktop processors, which will form the company's next-generation high-end desktop (HEDT) lineup, which goes against Intel Core i9 "Skylake-X" series, could come in a brand new socket. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the chips have higher electrical requirements, besides double the I/O of socket AM4 Ryzen processors, such as a 44-lane PCIe gen 3.0 root complex, quad-channel DDR4 memory interface, and more. This socket, according to a "HotHardware" report, is an LGA (land-grid array) with 4,094 pins.

The new LGA-4094 socket, so-called SP3r2, will be slightly scaled up from the SP3 socket AMD has been selling enterprise Opteron-brand multi-socket CPUs on (pictured below). The consumer version of this socket could feature a more user-friendly retention mechanism that shouldn't require a screwdriver to fasten. Motherboards based on this distinctively rectangular socket will feature up to eight DDR4 DIMM slots to hold quad-channel DDR4 memory, and over four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, with support for 3-way and 4-way multi-GPU solutions. The motherboards will also feature copious amounts of onboard devices, M.2 slots, and other storage connectivity. Since "Threadripper" is rumored to be a multi-chip module of two 14 nm "Summit Ridge" dies linked together on-package with with an Infinity Fabric interconnect, only one of the two dies links to the motherboard chipset (AMD X399 chipset), while all the PCIe lanes of the second die (including those which would make up the chipset bus) are freed up.

We've recently covered how AMD was going to have a full day today, with the company's top executives present on a meeting that is expected to build on AMD's product portfolio inflection point. This meeting will bring together most of AMD's higher-ups - namely, CEO Lisa Su, head of Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri, and AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster. The purpose of this meeting seems to be to discuss AMD's inflexion point, and lay out a vision for the company's future, supported on its upcoming products: the too-long-awaited Vega, its successor Navi, and the natural evolution of the company's current Zen processors, tentatively identified as Zen+.

Don't expect this to be a full-blown, specification-laden, performance-benchmarks-driven presentation, though. That honor is probably reserved to AMD's Computex 2017 event, scheduled for May 31st from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m.

In this issue of the Ryzen BIOS update digest, we have last week's latest updates. Our BIOS update digest lets you keep track of crucial BIOS updates that improve stability of your AMD Ryzen machine. There have been a lot of updates this week corresponding with manufacturers still catching up with the AGESA 1.0.0.6 update. As per usual, only updated BIOSes from the last digest are listed. Changes are listed after each BIOS, sans beta BIOSes which do not always include change logs. You can find it all below.

Today is an eventful day in the tech world, with two high-impact leaks already offering themselves up to our scrutiny. We had previously covered AMD's upcoming HEDT platform, based on the company's new X399 chipset, as having a quite distinctive lineup of processors, with not only 16 and 12-core offerings hot on foundries presses', but also some 14-core, 28-thread chips as well. Now, a leak has apparently revealed the entire Ryzen HEDT platform, whose processor marketing name, Ryzen 9, sounds really close to Intel's Core i9.

AMD's offerings look to offer an edge at least on core-count, with the Red team's top offerings, the Ryzen 9 1998X and Ryzen 9 1998, bringing in a game-changer 16 cores and 32 threads to the table. Perhaps even more importantly, we have to mention that the 1998X (these names, if true, are quite a mouthful, though) achieves a 3.5 GHz base, 3.9 GHz boost clock, which owes nothing to AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X consumer flagship CPUs. Rumors of AMD's frequency demise on higher core-count Ryzen CPUs have been greatly exaggerated, it would seem. And did I mention that these chips are coming with a TDP of 155 W - 5 W lower than Intel's purported 12-core, i9-7920X offering? Consider that for a moment.

An AMD RX Vega video card has apparently made its way towards CompuBench. Granted, the no-name AMD graphics card could be an Instinct accelerator instead of AMD's consumer-oriented RX Vega graphics cards. However, the card did appear on CompuBench under the 6864:00 device ID, which had already appeared under a Vega Linux patch issued by the company. granted, this doesn't necessarily make it a consumer graphics product, so we'll have to look into this with some reservations.

Reports are doing the rounds regarding alleged AMD insiders having "blown the whistle", so to speak, on the company's upcoming Vega graphics cards. This leak also points towards retail availability of Vega cards on the 5th of June, which lines up nicely with AMD's May 31st Computex press conference. An announcement there, followed by market availability on the beginning of next week does sound like something that would happen in a new product launch.

On to the meat and bones of this story, three different SKUs have been leaked, of which no details are currently known, apart from their naming and pricing. AMD's Vega line-up starts off with the RX Vega Core graphics card, which is reportedly going to retail for $399. This graphics card is going to sell at a higher price than NVIDIA's GTX 1070, which should mean higher performance. Higher pricing with competitive performance really wouldn't stir any pot of excitement, so, higher performance is the most logical guess. The $399 pricing sits nicely in regards to AMD's RX 580, though it does mean there is space for another SKU to be thrown into the mix at a later date, perhaps at $329, though I'm just speculating on AMD's apparent pricing gap at this point.