It's here. The Radeon Vega that's not for gamers, that is. After what seems like a year of waiting forward to AMD's next generation GPU architecture, so it has finally appeared. As we all knew was going to be the case, Vega's first foray in the market is geared at the more profitable professional sector of the market. The good news for professionals: the pricing is lower than previously reported. Instead of the expected $1,199 and $1,799 for an air cooled or water-cooled version of the card respectively, AMD is commanding a much less demanding price tag of $999 for the air cooled version (available now) and $1,499 for the water-cooled one (to be available in Q3.)

One thing that deserves to be placed before the break is a software feature of the new Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards: AMD has changed their driver scheme into a single-package installer (available in the source), with both the professional-geared drivers, and the gaming ones as well. This means that after all that Raja Koduri told us to wait for AMD's consumer, gaming-oriented RX Vega graphics cards, these will probably work just as well for gaming as for professional workloads.

Be Quiet!, the market leader in PC power supplies in Germany for eleven consecutive years, is introducing the newest addition to the Silent Loop family, Silent Loop 360 mm. With last September's introduction of the Silent Loop product line, be quiet! brought its first All-in-One water cooler to the forefront. Built out of high-quality materials, Silent Loop's whisper-quiet reverse-flow pump design ensured the product line made a big impact in the water cooling market.

A full copper radiator with a length of 360 millimeters sets Silent Loop 360 mm apart from the rest of the Silent Loop series. It fits in be quiet!'s Dark Base 900, Dark Base Pro 900 and Pure Base 600 chassis. Silent Loop 360 mm uses three Pure Wings 2 120 mm PWM fans with airflow-optimized and load-regulated fan blades, producing quiet and efficient operation while offering high static pressure at extremely low noise levels.

Ah mining. The revival of an old craze. Who doesn't want to make their room's temperature increase to insane levels over the summer in order to cash in on the mining wagon? Who doesn't want to pull their hardware by the ankles and wrists, stretching it in utilization so as to maintain the PoW (proof of Work) cryptographic security in cryptocurrencies? Apparently, a not insignificant number of users and would-be miners does want that. That has, in turn, placed a whole lot of pressure on the graphics card market from both AMD and NVIDIA, with prices climbing and skyrocketing for graphics cards in the $200-$400 price ranges, as you know. It remains to be seen whether the flow of new miners decreases somewhat now, considering the recent market correction (read: dip) in the cryptocurrency market value (down around 42% from the all-time high of 357€ [~$400] of June 12th.)

After ASUS, it would seem like it's Sapphire's time to try and sway miners from their consumer-oriented, gaming graphics cards, through the launch of five different graphics cards models especially geared for mining. These are currently available for pre-order on Overclockers UK, and there are five different products in total, one based of RX 560 silicon, and four different takes on the RX 470 silicon (no, that's not a typo; it really is the 400 series.)

GIGABYTE introduced the AB350N-Gaming WiFi, its first socket AM4 motherboard in the mini-ITX form-factor, with support for the entire Ryzen "Summit Ridge" processor family, the 7th generation "Bristol Ridge" A-series APUs, and the upcoming Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APUs. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors, and conditions it for the AM4 SoC with a 6-phase VRM. The motherboard is based on AMD B350 chipset.

The AM4 SoC is wired to two DDR4 DIMM slots, supporting up to 32 GB of dual-channel memory, the lone PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, a 32 Gb/s M.2 slot on the reverse side of the PCB, two out of four of the board's SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and two out of six of the board's USB 3.0 ports. Other USB connectivity includes two USB 3.0 ports from the B350 chipset, and two 10 Gb/s USB 3.1 ports (both type-A). Networking includes a WLAN card with 802.11ac WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.2, and gigabit Ethernet. 8-channel HD audio driven by a 120 dBA SNR CODEC makes for the rest of it. The company didn't reveal pricing.

PC World posted a preview of an AMD Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition graphics card, and reported some interesting observations about the card ahead of its review NDA. The tech publication compared the air-cooled Pro Vega Frontier Edition against NVIDIA's fastest consumer graphics card, the TITAN Xp. It did reveal performance numbers of the two cards in two compute-heavy tests, SPECViewPerf 12.1 and Cinebench R15 (OpenGL test), where the Vega FE significantly outperforms the TITAN Xp. This shouldn't come as a shocker because AMD GPUs tend to have a strong footing with GPU compute performance, particularly with open standards.

It's PC World's comments on the Vega card's gaming performance that might pique your interest. In its report, the publication comments that the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition offers gaming performance that is faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, but slightly slower than its GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. To back its statement, PC World claims to have run the Vega Frontier Edition and TITAN Xp in "Doom" with Vulkan API, "Prey" with DirectX 11, and "Sniper Elite 4" with DirectX 12. You must also take into account that the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition could command a four-figure price, in the league of the TITAN Xp; and that gamers should look forward to the Radeon RX Vega series, bound for a late-July/early-August launch, at price-points more appropriate to their competitive positioning. The RX Vega is also expected to have 8 GB of memory compared to 16 GB on the Frontier Edition. Watch PC World's video presentation in the source link below.

MSI introduced the B350M Pro-VD and A320M Pro-VD socket AM4 motherboards. Built in the slim micro-ATX form-factor, the two boards are nearly identical, and differ only with the chipset (AMD B350 and A320). The boards draw power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors; conditioning it for the AM4 SoC with a 6-phase VRM. The APU socket is wired to two DDR4 DIMM slots, supporting up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory; a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, and both of the boards' PCIe x1 slots. Two of the four SATA 6 Gbps ports on the boards come from the AM4 SoC. Display outputs include DVI and D-Sub. Gigabit Ethernet and 6-channel HD audio make for the rest of them. The only feature the B350M Pro-VD offers over its A320-based twin is support for CPU overclocking. The two could feature sub-$80 price-points.

GPU-accelerated crypto-currency mining poses a threat to the consumer graphics industry, yet the revenues it brings to GPU manufacturers are hard to turn away. The more graphics cards are bought up by crypto-currency miners, the fewer there are left for gamers and the actual target-audience of graphics cards. This is particularly bad for AMD, as fewer gamers have Radeon graphics cards as opposed to miners; which means game developers no longer see AMD GPU market-share as an amorphous trigger to allocate developer resources in optimizing their games to AMD architectures.

To combat this, both AMD and NVIDIA are innovating graphics cards designed specifically for crypto-currency mining. These cards are built to a cost, lack display outputs, and have electrical and cooling mechanisms designed for 24/7 operation, even if not living up to the durability standards of real enterprise-segment graphics cards, such as Radeon Pro series or Quadro. NVIDIA's "Pascal" GPU architecture is inherently weaker than AMD's "Polaris" and older Graphics CoreNext architectures at Ethereum mining, owing in part to Pascal's lack of industry-standard asynchronous compute. This didn't deter NVIDIA from innovating a lineup of crypto-mining SKUs based on its existing "Pascal" GPUs. These include the NVIDIA P104 series based on the "GP104" silicon (on which the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 are based); and P106 series based on the "GP106" silicon (GTX 1060 series is based on this chip). NVIDIA didn't tap into its larger "GP102" or smaller "GP107" chips, yet.

AMD is dragging its feet with the launch of its next performance/enthusiast segment graphics card based on the cutting-edge "Vega 10" silicon, the Radeon RX Vega. The last we heard, the company is announcing the product late-July/early-August, along the sidelines of SIGGRAPH 2017. The company already put out specifications of the first consumer product based on this silicon, the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition; and according to listings by online retailers, its power figures aren't looking good. The air-cooled version has its TDP rated at 300W, and the faster liquid-cooled variant 375W. This is way above the 275W TDP of the TITAN Xp, NVIDIA's fastest client-segment graphics card.

An MSI company representative posting on Dutch tech-forums confirmed our worst fears, that the RX Vega will have a very high power draw. "Specs van Vega RX gezien. Tering wat power heeft die nodig. Wij zijn er aan bezig, dat is een start dus launch komt dichterbij," said the representative who goes by "The Source" on Dutch tech forums Tweakers.net. As a gentleman scholar in Google Translate, and citing VideoCardz which cited a native Dutch speaker; the MSI rep's statement translates as "I've seen the specs of Vega RX. It needs a damn lot of power. We're working on it, which is a start so launch is coming closer."

BIOSTAR is proud to announce its latest motherboard designed for the perfect balance of performance and value for small form factor (SFF) and home theatre PCs with its latest motherboard featuring AMD A10-4655M SoC solution. BIOSTAR has created the A68N-5600 in line with its SoC motherboard offerings that bring together the essence of the ultimate home-entertainment or office PC that offer low-power, small footprint whilst still bringing excellent performance for its intended tasks The BIOSTAR A68N-5600 has an MSRP of USD 64.99.

Featuring a built-in AMD A10-4655M quad-core processor capable of Turbo clocks of 2.8GHz with a base clock of 2GHz, the motherboard delivers modern-day multitasking performance for day-to-day task as well as decoding task for entertainment use, enough to play HD content. The motherboard supports DDR3-1333MHz memory up to 32GB for excellent compatibility and all comes in the compact mini-ITX form factor perfect for SFF.

AMD also announced the Radeon Instinct MI8 and MI6 Machine Learning GPUs based on Fiji and Polaris cores, respectively. These parts comprise the more "budget" part of the still most certainly non-consumer oriented high-end machine learning lineup. Still, with all parts using fairly modern cores, they aim to make an impact in their respective segments.

Starting with the Radeon Instinct MI8, we have a Fiji based core with the familiar 4 GBs of HBM1 memory and 512 GB/s total memory bandwidth. It has 8.2 TFLOPS of either Single Precision of Half Precision floating point performance (so performance there does not double when going half precision like its bigger Vega based brother, the MI25). It features 64 Compute Units.

The Radeon Instinct MI6 is a Polaris based card and slightly slower in performance than the MI8, despite having four times the amount of memory at 16 GBs of GDDR5. The likely reason for this is a slower bandwidth speed, at only 224 GB/s. It also has less compute units at 36 total, with a total of 2304 stream processors. This all equates out to a still respectable 5.7 TFLOPs of overall half or single precision floating point performance (which again, does not double at half precision rate like Vega).

AMD's EPYC Launch presentation focused mainly on its line of datacenter processors, but fans of AMD's new Vega GPU lineup may be interested in another high-end product that was announced during the presentation. The Radeon Instinct MI25 is a Deep Learning accelerator, and as such is hardly intended for consumers, but it is Vega based and potentially very potent in the company's portfolio all the same. Claiming a massive 24.6 TFLOPS of Half Precision Floating Point performance (12.3 Single Precision) from its 64 "next-gen" compute units, this machine is very suited to Deep Learning and Machine AI oriented applications. It comes with no less than 16 GBs of HBM2 memory, and has 484 GB/s of memory bandwidth to play with.

AMD has unveiled the pricing scheme for its latest EPYC line of datacenter processors. In a series of graphs and tables at it's EPYC launch presentation, it outlined a comprehensive platform that it claims beats Intel on a performance per dollar basis across the entire 64 thread spectrum. What is known up to now in regards to pricing can be summarized in this nice table we have made for you below:

Today, AMD, along with its global ecosystem of server customers and partners, launched the EPYC 7000 series of high-performance datacenter processors. With up to 32 high-performance "Zen" cores and an unparalleled feature set, the record-setting AMD EPYC design delivers greater performance across a full range of integer, floating point, memory bandwidth, and I/O benchmarks and workloads.

A report from HWBattle is making the rounds claiming that new information has surfaced on AMD's upcoming high-performance, consumer versions of the Vega architecture. According to these reports, Vega graphics cards will (at least initially) come in two different performance tiers. A top of the line GPU, Vega 10 (being identified as Vega XT), and a cut-down version of it, based on Vega 11 (which is being called Vega Pro). Graphics chips for graphics card integration are supposedly being shipped to partners as of this week.

HWBattle goes on to say that there will be a myriad of approaches to AMD's AIB partner designs around the Vega graphics chips, with multiple cooling solutions being worked on (which isn't surprising, really; graphics cards nowadays can see upwards of 4 different cooling designs for the same GPU, according to the use case the company is designing it for. HWBattle is also saying that Vega will be faster than the GTX 1080, though there's no information on whether this only applies to the top-tier GPU or no. Other details are scant, scarce, or nonexistent; it would seem that the launch delay from AMD has sapped some of the interest surrounding Vega.

AMD today posted an updated compatibility list of DDR4 memory kits for Ryzen processors. While just about any DDR4 memory kit will run on socket AM4 motherboards, a limited few have been tested by AMD to run reliably at speeds such as DDR4-3200, DDR4-2933, DDR4-2667, and DDR4-2400. AMD's new compatibility list contains a wider selection of DDR4 memory modules that have been tested by AMD to work reliably on Ryzen processors.

To make the most of these modules, however, AMD asks you to look out for and install motherboard BIOS updates which contain the AGESA 1.0.0.6 micro-code update. This should be prominently displayed in the change-logs of BIOS updates from motherboard manufacturers, and the latest batches of motherboards should come with AGESA 1.0.0.6 pre-installed.The revised DDR4 compatibility list can be accessed here.

The United States has been being pushed down in the TOP500 standings for some time courtesy China, whom has taken the 1st and 2nd place seats from the US with their Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 Supercomputers (at a Linpack performance of 93 and 33.9 Petaflops, respectively). It seemed though the crown was stolen from America, 3rd place was relatively safe for the former champs. Not so. America has been pushed right off the podium in the latest TOP500 refresh... not by China though, but Switzerland?

Hold on to your ETH hats: you will still be able to cash in on the ETH mining craze for a while. However, you should look towards your 3 GB and 4 GB graphics cards with a slight distrust, for reasons that you should know, anyway, since you have surely studied your mining cryptocurrency of choice. Examples are the GTX 1060 3 GB, or one of those shiny new 4 GB RX 480 / RX 580 which are going at ridiculously premium prices right now. And as a side note, don't you love the mechanisms of pricing and demand?

The problem here stems from ETH's own design for its current PoW (Proof of Work) implementation (which is what allows you to mine the currency at all.) In a bid to make ETH mining unwieldy for the specialized silicon that brought Bitcoin difficulty through the roof, ETH implements a large size data set for your GPU to work with as you mine, which is stored in your GPU's memory (through the DAG, which stands for Directed Acyclic Graph). This is one of the essential differences between Bitcoin mining and Ethereum mining, in that Ethereum mining was designed to be memory-intensive, so as to prevent usage of ASICs and other specialized hardware. As a side-note, this also helps (at least theoretically) in ETH's decentralization, which Bitcoin sees more at risk because of the inherent centralization that results from the higher hardware costs associated with its mining.

AMD is readying a new stepping of its 14 nm "Summit Ridge" eight-core CPU silicon, which powers its socket AM4 Ryzen processors, according to Canard PC. The new B2 stepping reportedly addresses a lot of hardware-level errata which cannot be fixed merely by AGESA updates. According to Canard PC, the changes seem to be focused on the uncore components of "Summit Ridge." Typically, uncore refers to the integrated northbridge, which includes components such as the memory controllers, PCI-Express root complex, etc.

If the B2 stepping is mostly focused on uncore-level errata, it could mean improved PCI-Express device support, and perhaps even memory support improvements beyond even what AGESA 1.0.0.6 brings to the table. Canard PC reports that it hasn't come across any CPU core-specific errata being addressed with the B2 stepping. The glaring FMA3-related bug has been patched through BIOS updates, and most newer batches of socket AM4 motherboards come with the patch pre-installed.

A set of details on AMD's upcoming Naples platform's family of EPYC CPUs has leaked on the site videocardz.com, claiming that the top product, the EPYC 7601, will feature a turbo clock of no less than 3.2 GHz (base clocks are more moderate at around 2.2 GHz for the EPYC 7601), with a core count of 32 Zen units, and 64 threads. These clocks are pretty high for a 32-core CPU, and will probably be only for a handful of cores at a time. The EPYC 7601 is also a hot chip according to this leak, in both thermals and price. It costs over $4000 USD, and has a TDP of 180 Watts (not bad at all for a 32-core part, though!)

The rest of the lineup is detailed as well, but as this is a leak that is blatantly admitting to violating an NDA, it goes without saying this could be nothing more than a fabrication. Take it with your usual dose of healthy skepticism.

For the full details of the leak (including the rest of the expected lineup), you can view the source link below.

Developing supercomputers isn't for the faint of heart. Much less it is for those that are looking for fast development and deployment time-frames. And as such, even as the world's supercomputers are getting increasingly faster and exorbitantly expensive to develop and deploy, players who want to stay ahead have to think ahead as well. To this end, the US Department of Energy has awarded a total of $258M in research contracts to six of the US's foremost tech companies to accelerate the development of Exascale Supercomputer technologies (AMD, Cray, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, and NVIDIA.) These companies will be working over a three year contract period, and will have to support at least 40% of the project cost - to help develop the technologies needed to build an exascale computer for 2021. It isn't strange that the companies accepted the grant and jumped at the opportunity: 60% savings in research and development they'd have to do for themselves is nothing to scoff at.

Supercomputers birthed from the project are expected to be in the exaFLOPS scale of computing performance, which is around 50 times more processing power than the generation of supercomputers being installed now. Since traditional supercomputing knowledge and materials are known to falter at the objective level of exaFLOPS performance, the PathForward program - which looks to ensure achievement of such systems in a timely fashion to ensure US leadership in the field of supercomputing - will need to see spurred research and development, which the $258M grant is looking out to do.

AMD Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition goes on sale later this month (26 June). It is designed to provide a "gateway" to the "Vega" GPU architecture for graphics professionals and game developers alike, with the consumer graphics product, the Radeon RX Vega, is bound for late-July/early-August. Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition, being a somewhat "enterprise-segment" product, was expected to have slightly lower TDP than its consumer-graphics sibling, since enterprise-segment implementations of popular GPUs tend to have slightly restrained clock speeds. Apparently, AMD either didn't clock the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition low, or the chip has extremely high TDP.

According to specifications put out by EXXACT, a retailer which deals with enterprise hardware, the air-cooled variant of the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition has a TDP rated at 300W, while its liquid-cooled variant has its TDP rated as high as 375W. To put this in perspective, the consumer-segment TITAN Xp by NVIDIA has its TDP rated at 275W. EXXACT is claiming big performance advantages in certain enterprise benchmarks such as SPECVIEWPERF and Cinebench. In other news, the air-cooled Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition is reportedly priced at USD $1,199; while the liquid-cooled variant is priced at $1,799. Based on the 14 nm "Vega 10" silicon, the Pro Vega Frontier Edition features 4,096 stream processors and 16 GB of HBM2 memory across a 2048-bit memory interface.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced the availability of its 7nm Leading-Performance (7LP) FinFET semiconductor technology, delivering a 40 percent generational performance boost to meet the needs of applications such as premium mobile processors, cloud servers and networking infrastructure. Design kits are available now, and the first customer products based on 7LP are expected to launch in the first half of 2018, with volume production ramping in the second half of 2018.

In September 2016, GF announced plans to develop its own 7nm FinFET technology leveraging the company's unmatched heritage of manufacturing high-performance chips. Thanks to additional improvements at both the transistor and process levels, the 7LP technology is exceeding initial performance targets and expected to deliver greater than 40 percent more processing power and twice the area scaling than the previous 14nm FinFET technology. The technology is now ready for customer designs at the company's leading-edge Fab 8 facility in Saratoga County, N.Y.

"Our 7nm FinFET technology development is on track and we are seeing strong customer traction, with multiple product tapeouts planned in 2018," said Gregg Bartlett, senior vice president of the CMOS Business Unit at GF. "And, while driving to commercialize 7nm, we are actively developing next-generation technologies at 5nm and beyond to ensure our customers have access to a world-class roadmap at the leading edge."

AMD late Wednesday released the latest version of Radeon Software Crimso ReLive Edition. Version 17.6.2 beta is the second release for this month, and comes with a quick-fix for the performance loss noticed in DiRT 4 after its latest game-patch, when the MSAA is cranked up to 8x. The rest of its feature-set appears unchanged from the previous 17.6.1 drivers. AMD has added to the list of known issues, listed after the break.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.6.2The change-log follows.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced its upgraded 13.3-inch version of the award-winning 12.5-inch Razer Blade Stealth. The new Razer Blade Stealth is one of the most portable laptops for professionals in the world, measuring 0.52 inches thin, weighing 2.93 pounds and with up to nine hours of battery life.

Razer's latest chassis is CNC-milled out of aircraft grade aluminum, and it is now available in a black or gunmetal gray finish. The gunmetal gray variant features a tone-on-tone Razer logo and white backlit keyboard, offering a sleek, solid and professional design. Gunmetal gray will be available in the United States and Canada.

Apparently, AMD's nomenclature of its flagship Ryzen Threadripper won't look like years-of-birth of today's gamers after all. The flagship 16-core part will bear the model name Ryzen Threadripper 1950X (and not the previously-reported 1998X). This chip was put through GeekBench 4.1.0, on an ASRock X399 Professional Gaming, paired with 16 GB of DDR4-2133 MHz memory. Whether it's dual-channel or quad-channel, is not known at this point. What is known, however, is that 2133 MHz isn't the best memory frequency for Ryzen; and paired with quad-channel DDR4-3200, one could expect the best possible performance. The 1950X was clocked at 3.40 GHz for this test, which probably is its final nominal clock speed, after all.

The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X sample scored 4,167 single-thread performance, and 24,539 points in multi-threaded performance. To put these numbers into perspective, an Intel Xeon E5-2697A v4 16-core/32-thread processor based on the "Broadwell" architecture scores 30,450 points in multi-threaded performance, even if single-thread performance is as low as 3,651 points. Perhaps the memory setup or SMT isn't optimally set for the Threadripper chip. Among the other Threadripper SKUs AMD plans to launch on July 27 are the 12-core/24-thread Ryzen Threadripper 1920X and 1920 (non-X).