Taiwanese industrial computer manufacturer iBase has listed what appears to be the first motherboard for AMD's Snowy Owl platform. Based on the BGA2028 socket, the iBase MBN806 is powered by an eight-core, eight-thread EPYC Embedded 3201 SoC with a clock speed up to 2.3 GHz. The motherboard has four DDR4 memory slots and supports up to 128GB of registered memory or 64GB of unregistered memory (ECC/non-ECC) at a maximum frequency of 2667 MHz. A lonely PCIe x8 also slot sits near the memory slots. As for storage options, the MBN806 comes with two SATA III ports and a PCIe x4 M.2 slot that supports both the SATA and PCIe protocols. By default, there are no integrated display outputs, but consumers can purchase a separate IPMI module to add a VGA port to the motherboard. Ethernet connectivity is present via an Intel I210-AT GbE controller.

Dell EMC announced three new servers designed for software-defined environments, edge and high-performance computing (HPC). The PowerEdge R6415, PowerEdge R7415 and PowerEdge R7425 expand the 14th generation of the Dell EMC PowerEdge server portfolio with new capabilities to address the demanding workload requirements of today's modern data center. All three rack servers with the AMD EPYC processor offer highly scalable platforms with outstanding total cost of ownership (TCO).

"As the bedrock of the modern data center, customers expect us to push server innovation further and faster" said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, Server and Infrastructure Systems at Dell EMC. "As customers deploy more IoT solutions, they need highly capable and flexible compute at the edge to turn data into real-time insights; these new servers that are engineered to deliver that while lowering TCO."

MSI is among the first motherboard manufacturers to release BIOS updates for its entire socket AM4 motherboard lineup, to enable support for Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G APUs, based on the "Raven Ridge" silicon. With the two chips installed, you will finally be able to use the DVI, D-Sub, HDMI or DisplayPort connectors on the rear-panel of your socket AM4 motherboards. Motherboards based on AMD's upcoming 400-series chipset, will come with support for "Raven Ridge" APUs out of the box, among other chips, such as the company's upcoming 12 nm "Pinnacle Ridge" processors.

Among MSI's 300-series chipset socket AM4 motherboards to receive "Raven Ridge" support, are the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium, the X370 Gaming M7 ACK, the X370 Gaming Pro Carbon, the X370 Gaming Pro, X370 Gaming Plus, X370 SLI Plus, X370 Krait Gaming; the B350 Tomahawk Plus, the B350 Tomahawk, the B350 Tomahawk Arctic, B350 PC Mate, B350M Gaming Pro, B350M Mortar, B350M Bazooka, B350M Pro-VDH, and A320M Gaming Pro. You'll find the BIOS ROM files in the downloads section of your motherboard's product page on MSI website.

Sapphire over the weekend officially launched its cost-effective custom-design Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card, the Pulse Radeon Vega 56 (model: 11276-02), which began appearing on European e-tailers late-January. The card combines a custom-design short-length PCB that's roughly the length of AMD's reference R9 Fury board; with a beefy custom-design cooling solution that features two large aluminium fin-stacks, ventilated by a pair of 100 mm double ball-bearing fans.

The card offers out of the box clock speeds of 1208 MHz core, 1512 MHz boost, and 800 MHz (1.60 GHz HBM2 effective) memory, against AMD reference clock speeds of 1138 MHz core and 1474 MHz boost. At its given clock, the memory bandwidth on offer is 409.6 GB/s. The "Vega 10" silicon is configured with 3,584 stream processors, 192 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.0. Sapphire intended for this SKU to ideally occupy a close-to-reference price-point, a notch below its Nitro+ series, however in the wake of the crypto-currency wave, market-forces will decide its retail price.

Rouchon Industries Inc., dba Swiftech, today announced the release of their new Apogee SKF flagship waterblock. With overwhelming success from our Limited Edition Apogee SKF "Heirloom Series" which truly allowed customers to "Make it personal", we are now extremely proud to introduce the Apogee SKF - which follows in the footsteps of the award winning high performance Apogee XL2 featuring customization options that allows users to go beyond their limits. This new technology is at least one generation ahead of the competition and will be the foundation of Swiftech's next generation CPU waterblocks.

The Apogee SKF also features an entirely new cooling engine made of 125 micron (less than 5 thousandths of an inch!) thick slotted fins. The center piece is also customizable/replaceable. Out of the box, the Apogee SKF is compatible with all current and upcoming CPU's: From Intel's LGA 115x, 2011, 2011-v3 and 2066, to AMD's legacy AM2/3, AM4 and upcoming SP3/TR4.

AMD today released its latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition. Version 18.2.1 Beta adds optimization for "Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age." It also corrects a bug with AMD FreeSync which caused it to switch between minimum and maximum refresh-rate range, causing a stutter. FreeSync compatibility with Samsung CF791 displays, was also improved. It also corrects a game launch issue with "Sid Meier's Civilization V" on hybrid graphics systems. Radeon Chill compatibility is improved with games that use the Vulkan API (such as "Doom" and "Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus." Texture and artifact glitches were corrected in games such as "NFS: Payback" and "Hyperdimension Neptunia."DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.2.1

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.