Colorful Technology Company Limited, a leading brand in gaming PC components, gaming laptops, and HiFi audio products, proudly announces the COLORFIRE MEOW R15 and MEOW R16 gaming laptops. Coming from the success and rising popularity of the COLORFIRE MEOW Series gaming desktop, the MEOW R15 and R16 gaming laptops are adorned with designs inspired by our beloved cat—Bobi. The laptop is littered with cat-inspired aesthetics from cat pawprints to the chic orange tabby cat color. The new MEOW Series gaming laptops are equipped with the latest AMD Ryzen 8000 Series processor designed for gaming, content creation, and entertainment. It also features the AMD Ryzen AI technology unlocking magical AI experiences.

Like a feline, the COLORFIRE MEOW R15 and R16 gaming laptops are fast and agile - swift in attacking enemies. Both laptops comes equipped with that new AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, with a maximum boost clock of 5.1 GHz in a very efficient 45 W TDP power design. Designed for AI engine capabilities, its AMD Ryzen AI processor performance delivers up to 39 TOPS. For graphics, the MEOW R15 and MEOW R16 comes equipped with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 laptop GPU with up to 140 W maximum performance power.

ASUS today introduced its custom design Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics cards for a wider product launch outside China. These include the RX 7900 GRE DUAL OC, and the TUF Gaming RX 7900 GRE OC. Given the nearly identical 260 W total board power (TBP) and ASIC pin-map of the RX 7900 GRE to the RX 7800 XT, ASUS appears to be reusing its RX 7800 XT custom-design board designs for these cards. The RX 7900 GRE DUAL OC features a 27.9 cm length, triple-slot thickness, and 13.39 cm height, and uses an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with two 100 mm Axial Tech fans—hence the name. There is no RGB lighting or other such frills to speak of, but you get dual-BIOS. The default P-BIOS runs the card at factory-overclocked 1927 MHz Game clock (vs. 1880 MHz reference); while the quieter Q-BIOS runs it at reference speeds, with a more tame fan profile.

The TUF Gaming RX 7900 GRE features the same version of the company's DirectCU III TUF Gaming cooling solution that the company uses with its RX 7800 XT TUF Gaming product, it's 31.9 cm in length, 3-slot thick, and 15 cm tall (about a 1 cm added due to the stub toward the tail-end). The cooler features a trio of 100 mm Axial Tech fans, and as is characteristic of TUF Gaming cooler designs, is well ventilated, exposing more of the heatsink underneath; than competing cooling solutions. You get a minimal amount of RGB lighting, in the form of a diffuser near the tail-end. You also get dual-BIOS, and a more pronounced factory OC than the DUAL OC card, with the P-BIOS enabling 1972 MHz Game clocks. The Q-BIOS again sticks to reference clocks for quieter fan settings. ASUS didn't release pricing, but given that both are factory-overclocked cards, we expect the RX 7900 GRE DUAL OC to be priced around the $570-mark; and the TUF Gaming OC at $600, if not more.

AMD today released the latest version of AMD Software Adrenalin. Version 24.2.1 WHQL comes with optimization for "Skull and Bones," and "Nightingale." In case you're wondering where Radeon RX 7900 GRE support is; it's been around since July 2023 when the GPU was launched as a China-exclusive. With this release, AMD is also expanding the Vulkan API feature-set with new extensions as listed below. A large number of issues have been fixed with this release. To begin with; an intermittent driver-timeout issue seen with "Helldivers 2" on RX 7000 series GPUs has been addressed. Excessive stutter when playing several games, such as "Battlefield 2042," "Destiny 2," "Overwatch 2," "Monster Hunter: World," "PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS," and "STAR WARS Battlefront II," has been fixed. Excessive game loading times with "Deathloop" on cards such as RX 6900 XT, has been fixed.

"Deadspace" crashing on some RX 6000 series cards with RTAO enabled, has been fixed. First launching "Enshrouded" or changing AA settings, causes an intermittent application crash, which has been fixed. Visual artifacts with the game have been also fixed. HDR settings failing to take effect with "Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth" has been fixed. An intermittent driver-timeout with "Counterstrike 2" with FSR enabled on RX 7900 XTX, has been fixed. Incorrect reporting of graphics API as DirectX 12 in some Vulkan games has been fixed. Parsec host application experiencing a crash after reboot, has been fixed. Microsoft Teams displaying looped webcam footage on Ryzen 7 7840U has been fixed. Also fixed is a green tint noticed in Oculus Rift S with some RX 7000 series products. AFMF incorrectly displaying in hybrid GPU setups has been fixed—AFMF only works with a supported GPU is the display GPU.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 24.2.1 WHQL

GIGABYTE, a leading manufacturer of premium gaming hardware, today announced the new GIGABYTE AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics cards powered by AMD RDNA 3 architecture - the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7900 GRE GAMING OC 16G graphics cards available for purchase on February 27, 2024. The GAMING OC graphics card, a classic and popular GIGABYTE graphics card, focuses on exceptional performance and stability. With the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, it brings next-gen, immersive and high-refresh 1440p gaming and streaming experiences, with additional video memory to enable gamers to step into 4K.

The GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7900 GRE GAMING OC 16G graphics cards come with the WINDFORCE cooling system. The system includes three unique blade fans with alternate spinning, a copper plate that directly contacts the GPU, composite copper heat pipes, 3D active fans and screen cooling to maximize heat dissipation, ensuring the graphics cards operate at low temperatures while delivering outstanding performance. The alternate spinning technology rotates the central fan in the opposite direction of the other two fans, effectively dissipating heat from both the top and the bottom of the graphics card for more efficient cooling. The large copper plate makes direct contact with the GPU and VRAM. Coupled with the composite copper heat pipes, it provides excellent heat dissipation. Moreover, the handy onboard dual BIOS switch allows users to choose between OC and SILENT modes, offering the optimal settings tuned by GIGABYTE.

GPTshop.ai is building prototypes of their "ultimate high-end desktop supercomputer," running the NVIDIA GH200 "Grace" CPU for AI and HPC workloads. Michael Larabel—founder and principal author of Phoronix—was first allowed to "remote access" a GPTshop.ai GH200 576 GB workstation converted model in early February—for the purpose of benchmarking it against systems based on AMD EPYC Zen 4 and Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids processors. Larabel noted: "it was a very interesting battle" that demonstrated the capabilities of 72 Arm Neoverse-V2 cores (in Grace). With this GPTshop.ai GH200 system actually being in workstation form, I also ran some additional benchmarks looking at the CPU capabilities of the GH200 compared to AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series workstations."

Larabel had on-site access to two different Threadripper systems—a Hewlett-Packard (HP) Z6 G5 A workstation and a System76 Thelio Major semi-custom build. No comparable Intel "Xeon W hardware" was within reach, so the Team Green desktop supercomputer was only pitched against AMD HEDT processors. The HP review sample was configured with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX 96-core / 192-thread Zen 4 processor, 8 x 16 GB DDR5-5200 memory, and NVIDIA RTX A4000 GPU. Larabel said that it was an "all around nice high-end AMD workstation." The System76 Thelio Major was specced with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X processor "as the top-end non-PRO SKU." It is a 64-core / 128-thread part, working alongside 4 x 32 GB DDR5-4800 memory and a Radeon PRO W7900 graphics card.

According to a Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024 schedule page, Microsoft is planning to present next-gen technologies with their upcoming "DirectX State of the Union Ft. Work Graphs and Introducing DirectSR" presentation. Shawn Hargreaves, Direct3D's Development Manager and Austin Kinross (PIX Developer Lead, Microsoft) are scheduled to discuss matters with representatives from NVIDIA and AMD. Wessam Bahnassi, a "20-year veteran in 3D engine design and optimization," is Team Green's Principal Engineer of Developer Technology. Rob Martin, a Fellow Software Engineer, will be representing all things Team Red—where he leads development on implementations for GPU Work Graphs. According to GDC, the intended audience will be: "graphics developers or technical directors from game studios or engine companies."

Earlier this month, an "Automatic super resolution" feature was discovered in Windows 11 Insider Preview build (24H2)—the captioned part stated: "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details," although further interface options granted usage in desktop applications as well. Initial analysis and user impressions indicated that Microsoft engineers had created a proprietary model, separate from familiar technologies: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. It is interesting to note that Team Blue is not participating in the upcoming March 21 "DirectX State of the Union" panel discussion (a sponsored session). GDC's event description states (in full): "The DirectX team will showcase the latest updates, demos, and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and NVIDIA. Work graphs are the newest way to take full advantage of GPU hardware and parallelize workloads. Microsoft will provide a preview into DirectSR, making it easier than ever for game devs to scale super resolution support across Windows devices. Finally, dive into the latest tooling updates for PIX."

SAPPHIRE Technology announces the latest SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card, crafted on the groundbreaking AMD RDNA 3 architecture designed to provide incredible performance to gamers and creators alike. Premium components and complex cooling designs enveloped in a Cold Rolled Steel Frame ensure a smooth, cool, and quiet gaming experience.

Experience strong and steady 4K gaming with the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card, engineered with expert cooling systems, top-notch components and a strong sleek design including SAPPHIRE PANTHEON features found on every NITRO+ product. The SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card features 80 Compute Units and 5120 stream processors, a Boost Clock of up to 2391 MHz and a Game Clock of up to 2052 MHz. Enjoy breakthrough performance on the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE with 16 GB of GDDR6 high-speed memory clocked at up to 18 Gbps with 64 MB of AMD Infinity Cache technology. The graphics card is built with 2x HDMI 2.1 and 2x DisplayPort 2.1 ports to provide support for up to 4 output ports for a wide variety of monitors on the market.

[Editor's note: We've reviewed all three new cards today: Pulse, Pure, Nitro+]

TUL Corporation, a pioneering force in the manufacture of AMD graphics cards since 1997, proudly announces the launch of its groundbreaking AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE series graphics cards. This new lineup, consisting of the Red Devil, Hellhound, and Fighter models, is engineered to redefine gaming excellence, delivering unmatched performance, cooling efficiency, and reliability for gamers and enthusiasts worldwide.

The PowerColor Red Devil AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card, designed for the elite gamer, stands at the pinnacle of performance and aesthetics. Its advanced cooling system and robust design support significant overclocking, ensuring that gamers can push the limits of 1440p and beyond. The Red Devil is more than a graphics card, it's an emblem of power, crafted to help gamers capture every victory with style and performance.

AMD today announced wider availability of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) graphics card. The card is now available in certain western markets including in Europe and North America; although AMD wouldn't call this a global launch. The card was originally designed as a limited edition product meant for the Chinese market, and has been available there since July 2023. The decision to launch the card in other markets may have been driven by NVIDIA's January launch of the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, which have caused cascading price cuts among the older RTX 4070, RTX 4070 Ti; and AMD's RX 7800 XT, creating a rather big gap between this card and the RX 7900 XT, which is probably why AMD decided to launch the RX 7900 GRE at $550.

AMD carved the RX 7900 GRE from the "Navi 31" silicon powering the RX 7900 series, by disabling two MCDs (instead of disabling just one on the RX 7900 XT); which results in a 256-bit memory bus, which drives 16 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, for 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GCD sees 80 out of 96 compute units (CU) being enabled, for 5,120 stream processors, 320 TMUs, 160 AI accelerators, and 80 Ray accelerators. The card is configured with 160 out of 192 ROPs present on the silicon. The total board power (TBP) is set to 260 W, which is about the same as the RX 7800 XT; but there are 33% more shaders to go around. Several AMD board partners are expected to announce their custom RX 7900 GRE cards today, with market availability slated for tomorrow, February 27, 2024. Although AMD is known to have a reference design card, it is expected to be confined to the OEM/SI channel. In addition, AMD also cut the official MSRP of the RX 7700 XT to $419.

Our "launch" day reviews of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE include: Sapphire RX 7900 GRE NITRO+ | ASRock RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend | Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Pure | Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Pulse

AMD's Radeon RX 7900 GRE, or Golden Rabbit Edition, which was previously available only to the Chinese market, will launch globally on February 27. According to the leaked slides, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE will launch at $549, and AMD is comparing it to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 non-SUPER graphics card. In case you missed it, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE is based on the Navi 31 XL GPU with 80 Compute Units (CUs), which leaves it with 5120 Stream Processors, and comes with 16 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory interface, which adds up to a maximum bandwidth of 576 GB/s. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE should fit nicely between the Radeon RX 7900 XT and the Radeon RX 7800 XT.

According to the leaked slides, AMD is comparing the Radeon RX 7900 GRE against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 non-SUPER, which now shares the same price after the recent $50 price cut. According to AMD's own slides, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE should provide around 14 percent more performance per buck on average, and is between 1 and 32 percent faster, at least in games tested by AMD.

Supermicro, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, delivers an expanded portfolio of purpose-built infrastructure solutions to accelerate performance and increase efficiency in 5G and telecom workloads. With one of the industry's most diverse offerings, Supermicro enables customers to expand public and private 5G infrastructures with improved performance per watt and support for new and innovative AI applications. As a long-term advocate of open networking platforms and a member of the O-RAN Alliance, Supermicro's portfolio incorporates systems featuring 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, AMD EPYC 8004 Series processors, and the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip.

"Supermicro is expanding our broad portfolio of sustainable and state-of-the-art servers to address the demanding requirements of 5G and telco markets and Edge AI," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "Our products are not just about technology, they are about delivering tangible customer benefits. We quickly bring data center AI capabilities to the network's edge using our Building Block architecture. Our products enable operators to offer new capabilities to their customers with improved performance and lower energy consumption. Our edge servers contain up to 2 TB of high-speed DDR5 memory, 6 PCIe slots, and a range of networking options. These systems are designed for increased power efficiency and performance-per-watt, enabling operators to create high-performance, customized solutions for their unique requirements. This reassures our customers that they are investing in reliable and efficient solutions."

Apple's M-series chips frighten Intel, AMD, and Microsoft like nothing else can, as they have the potential to power MacBooks to grab a sizable share of the notebook market share. This is based squarely on the phenomenal performance/Watt on offer with Apple's chips. A user installed Windows 11 Arm on a virtual machine running on an M2-powered MacBook, opened up CPU-Z (which of course doesn't detect the chip since it's on a VM). They then ran a CPU-Z Bench session for a surprising result—a single-threaded score of 749.5 points, with a multithreaded score of 3822.3 points.

The single-thread score in particular is comparable to Intel's 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" chips (their "Golden Cove" P-cores); maybe not on the fastest Core i9-12900K, but of the mid-range Core i5 chips, such as the i5-12600. It's able to do this at a fraction of the power and heat output. It is on the backs of this kind of IPC that Apple is building bigger chips such as the M3 Pro and M3 Max, which are able to provide HEDT or workstation-class performance, again, at a fraction of the power.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is a high performance Arm SoC designed to compete with Apple M3, with Windows 11 thin and light notebooks and Chromebooks being its main target devices. Microsoft pins a lot of hope in chips such as the Snapdragon 8cx series as they offer comparable performance and battery life to the current crop of M3 MacBooks. A lot of water has flown under the bridge since Windows RT, and the latest crop of Windows 11 for Arm has a much wider PC application support base thanks to official translation layers by Microsoft. CPUID has an Arm64 version of the popular CPU-Z utility, which correctly detects all the specs of the Snapdragon 8cx, but more importantly, has a Bench tab that can test the single- and multithreaded performance of the CPU.

A Chinese tech enthusiast wasted no time in putting the Snapdragon 8cx through this CPU-Z internal benchmark, and found surprisingly good performance numbers. The single-threaded bench, which loads one of chip's four Arm Cortex-X1C P-cores, registers a score of 543.7 points. This is roughly comparable to that of the AMD "Zen 2" or Intel "Comet Lake" x86-64 core. The multithreaded test, which saturates all four P-cores, and all four Cortex-A78C E-cores, springs up 3479.7 points, which again compares to entry/mainstream x86-64 processors from AMD or Intel. Not impressed? How about the fact that the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is a 7 W chip that idles under 2 W for the most part, and can make do with passive cooling, posting scores comparable to 35 W x86 chips that need active cooling?

By the end of 2023, MSI unveiled its groundbreaking support for memory capacities of up to 256 GB. Now, both MSI Intel and AMD motherboards official support these capacities, with 4 DIMMs enabling 256 GB and 2 DIMMs supporting 128 GB. This advancement enhances multitasking capabilities and ensures seamless computing operations.

Intel Motherboard - 700 & 600 Series Platform, BIOS Rolling Out
The supported platforms for this memory capacity enhancement include Intel 700 and 600 series DDR5 motherboards. Gamers looking to benefit from these enhancements will need to upgrade to the own dedicated BIOS. MSI is currently diligently working on releasing the BIOS, with the first batch already available below. The rest of the models will be released in late February and March.

NVIDIA is anticipating supply issues for its upcoming Blackwell GPUs, which are expected to significantly improve artificial intelligence compute performance. "We expect our next-generation products to be supply constrained as demand far exceeds supply," said Colette Kress, NVIDIA's chief financial officer, during a recent earnings call. This prediction of scarcity comes just days after an analyst noted much shorter lead times for NVIDIA's current flagship Hopper-based H100 GPUs tailored to AI and high-performance computing. The eagerly anticipated Blackwell architecture and B100 GPUs built on it promise major leaps in capability—likely spurring NVIDIA's existing customers to place pre-orders already. With skyrocketing demand in the red-hot AI compute market, NVIDIA appears poised to capitalize on the insatiable appetite for ever-greater processing power.

However, the scarcity of NVIDIA's products may present an excellent opportunity for significant rivals like AMD and Intel. If both companies can offer a product that could beat NVIDIA's current H100 and provide a suitable software stack, customers would be willing to jump to their offerings and not wait many months for the anticipated high lead times. Intel is preparing the next-generation Gaudi 3 and working on the Falcon Shores accelerator for AI and HPC. AMD is shipping its Instinct MI300 accelerator, a highly competitive product, while already working on the MI400 generation. It remains to be seen if AI companies will begin the adoption of non-NVIDIA hardware or if they will remain a loyal customer and agree to the higher lead times of the new Blackwell generation. However, capacity constrain should only be a problem at launch, where the availability should improve from quarter to quarter. As TSMC improves CoWoS packaging capacity and 3 nm production, NVIDIA's allocation of the 3 nm wafers will likely improve over time as the company moves its priority from H100 to B100.

"Sons of the Forest" is an open-world survival horror game, in which you are cast away on a remote island with a dangerous forest and cave network, and have to find the means to survive and thrive. This isn't Far Cry, there are no missions as such, you craft your own journey of survival against hostile weather, wildlife, cannibalistic tribes, hunger, and disease. The overarching story is that you're sent on a remote island to find a missing billionaire. The game just released yesterday, and is a sequel to the 2014 title "The Forest." This is one of the first titles to support AMD FSR 3 at launch, including frame generation.

Consequently, FSR 3 Support has grown to 15 titles. AMD's answer to NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation, FSR 3 nearly doubles performance in games using a proprietary interpolation technology. The list of titles featuring FSR 3 include Forspoken, Immortals of Aveum, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, MotorCubs RC, Call of Duty Modern Warfare III & Warzone, Farming Simulator 22, The Talos Principle 2, Estencel, Mortal Online 2, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Starship Troopers: Extermination, The Thaumaturge, Starfield, and now Sons of the Forest. The list is expected to grow as AMD works to bring back Anti-Lag+, a whole-system latency reduction technology, which was also a vital component of FSR 3.

COMPUTEX 2024, a global leading technology exhibition, featuring AIoT applications, generative AI & and startup ecosystems, will take place from June 4th to 7th at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Halls 1 and 2. Themed "Connecting AI," this year's exhibition focuses on the latest global AI technologies and industry trends. The show will attract 1,500 international and local exhibitors using 4,500 booths. The Opening Keynote will be delivered by Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD, on the morning of June 3rd to set the stage for the event.

COMPUTEX 2024: Global Tech Giants Unite, Paving the Way for the Era of the AI Ecosystem
2024 is acclaimed as the AI PC era, with the development of artificial intelligence propelling products like AI PCs, AI servers, and AI smartphones to thrive in the market. This year's COMPUTEX covers six major themes: AI computing, Advanced Connectivity, Future Mobility, Immersive Reality, Sustainability, and Innovations. Collaborating with international technology powerhouses, including Acer, ASRock, ASUS, Delta, Gigabyte, G.Skill, Intel, MSI, Pro Gamersware, and more, shapes the AI ecosystem. Moreover, the InnoVEX exhibit for startups will connect innovative teams from around the globe, sparking cross-industry collaboration and revitalizing AI technology with fresh energy.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, speaking at the Intel Foundry Services (IFS) Direct Connect event, confirmed to Tom's Hardware that he hopes to turn IFS into the West's premier foundry company, and a direct technological and volume rival to TSMC. He said that there is a clear line of distinction between Intel Products and Intel Foundry, and that later this year, IFS will be more legally distinct from Intel, becoming its own entity. The only way Gelsinger sees IFS being competitive to TSMC, is by making its most advanced semiconductor manufacturing nodes and 3D chip packaging innovations available to foundry customers other than itself (Intel Products), even if it means providing them to companies that directly compete with Intel products, such as AMD and Qualcomm.

Paul Alcorn of Tom's Hardware asked CEO Gelsinger "Intel will now offer its process nodes to some of its competitors, and there may be situations wherein your product teams are competing directly with competitors that are enabled by your crown jewels. How do you plan to navigate those types of situations and maybe soothe ruffled feathers on your product teams?" To this, Gelsinger responded "Well, if you go back to the picture I showed today, Paul, there are Intel products and Intel foundry, There's a clean line between those, and as I said on the last earnings call, we'll have a setup separate legal entity for Intel foundry this year," Gelsinger responded. "We'll start posting separate financials associated with that going forward. And the foundry team's objective is simple: Fill. The. Fabs. Deliver to the broadest set of customers on the planet."

Bethesda on February 20 released the 1.9.67 path update for Starfield, which adds support for AMD FSR 3.0 performance enhancement, including frame generation. To celebrate this update, the game's developers are giving away an ultra-rare Collector's Edition bundle of Starfield-themed flagship AMD hardware. The bundle includes an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX with a special paint-job; and an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which remains the fastest desktop processor for gaming. The RX 7900 XTX Starfield Collector's Edition card features a special cooler shroud and backplate design with design elements from the game; including some anodized aluminium fins in its heatsink in the game's colors. The Giveaway is open to residents of the US, Canada (excluding Quebec), Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. You don't need to purchase the game or any AMD hardware to be eligible. Simply follow the Starfield Twitter account, and reply to the Giveaway announcement tweet. One winner will be randomly chosen. Find all Giveaway rules here.

The AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) is a runaway success in China, where the card is found selling in volumes comparable to GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, and the likes. This is thanks to its aggressive pricing, and decent levels of performance given the maturity of drivers for the older RDNA2 graphics architecture. The RX 6750 GRE comes in two variants—a 10 GB variant with a 160-bit memory bus and 2,304 stream processors; and a 12 GB variant with the full 2,560 stream processors, similar to the globally available RX 6750 XT. For AMD, the success of the RX 6750 GRE couldn't have come at a better time, as it looks to mop up its 7 nm wafer allocation with TSMC with the "Navi 22" silicon, which went underutilized as GPU demand fell with the crypto-mining crash of 2022 and the subsequent move to the 5 nm next-generation; and so it needs these cards to sell at prices at least in line with the MSRP, of ¥2,219 (RMB) for the 10 GB variant, and ¥2,379 for the 12 GB model. Apparently some retailers are selling these cards below the MSRP, and AMD isn't liking this.

The way retail works in general, is that when an item is selling below MSRP, it encourages retailers to negotiate lower prices up the supply chain, which would inevitably cut income for AMD, and set off a feedback loop. To check exactly this, AMD rolled out a slew of measures. It will be monitoring the retail channel for retailers selling the card below MSRP, and impose a set of tiered penalties. For the first offense, a retailer will be penalized ¥500 per card sold below MSRP. For the second instance, this penalty goes up to ¥1,000 per card, and a stoppage of supply to the retailer. The RX 6750 GRE is so popular in China that it isn't just AMD's traditional AIB partners selling the SKU, but also several lesser known Chinese brands, which have purchased volumes of the RX 6750 GRE ASIC, and are belting out cards as the market demands. In related news, AMD is yet to launch the new Radeon RX 7600 XT in the Chinese market, because it doesn't want to disturb the flow of the RX 6750 GRE.

Starfield game patch version 1.9.67 just released, with official support for AMD FSR 3.0 and Intel XeSS. Support for the two performance enhancements was beta (experimental) until now. FSR 3.0 brings frame generation support to Starfield. The game had received DLSS 3 Frame Generation support in November 2023, but by then, FSR 3.0 support wasn't fully integrated with the game, as it had just began rolling out in September. The FSR 3.0 option now replaces the game's FSR 2.0 implementation. FSR 3.0 works on Radeon RX 7000 series and RX 6000 series graphics cards. The patch also fixes certain visual artifacts on machines with DLSS performance preset enabled.

Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based games consultancy Kantan Games was interviewed by CNBC earlier this week—he was invited on-air to provide expert commentary on Sony's freshly revised sales and revenue forecast for PlayStation 5 products. He believes that great forward momentum is best achieved with refreshed hardware, and a well timed launch coinciding with the release of AAA/blockbuster games titles. Last autumn's rollout of slimmer PlayStation 5 consoles was not particularly exciting—with no major bump up in specs or attractive pricing. The development of an inevitable "Pro" variant has circulated around rumor mills for more than a year.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and AMD are believed to co-operating on a very potent hardware redesign—reports from late last year posited that a semi-custom "Viola" SoC is in the pipeline. A more expensive RDNA 3-upgraded refresh could attract an additional segment of hardcore gamers, but another industry analyst reckons that Sony is unlikely to implement a standard model price cut later this year (based on past trends). George Jijiashvili, senior principal analyst at Omdia, stated: "A scenario where Sony launches a PS5 Pro, but still experiences declining year-on-year hardware sales is very much within the realms of possibility." Serkan Toto (of Kantan Games consultancy) expressed a more optimistic view: "There seems to be a broad consensus in the game industry that Sony is indeed preparing a launch of a PS5 Pro in the second half of 2024...And Sony will want to make sure to have a great piece of hardware ready when GTA VI hits in 2025, a launch that will be a shot in the arm for the entire gaming industry."

Acer today announced new models of the Acer Swift Edge 16 and Acer Swift Go 14 laptops, blending AI power and innovative features in stylish thin and light devices. The latest additions to the Swift lineup feature AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processors with up to AMD Radeon 780M Graphics and equipped with Ryzen AI for versatile performance and support for Acer's AI-powered capabilities such as Acer PurifiedVoice, Acer PurfiedView, and the new Acer LiveArt photo-editing feature. Intuitive control and seamless navigation on the AI PCs are made possible thanks to the AcerSense application and Copilot in Windows with instant access through dedicated keys. Users can also appreciate clear images and rich colors when working or streaming through the OLED laptops' displays, as well as Microsoft Pluton technology, enabled by default, to help secure devices, personal data, and encryption keys.

Harnessing the Power of AI with AMD Ryzen 8040 Series Processors
Designed to deliver premium AI experiences and reliable performance for everyday productivity, the Swift Edge 16 and Swift Go 14 laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processors with Ryzen AI technology built in. AMD's latest processors enable the efficient distribution of AI workloads between accelerators on the NPU, GPU, and CPU, to advance user experiences with AI technology on the devices. It leverages AMD's "Zen 4" processor architecture with up to eight cores and delivers up to 16 threads of processing power, so creative professionals and mainstream users can expect fast, power-efficient computing and longer battery life on the ultrathin Swift laptops.

The mysterious Zen 6 "Morpheus" processor architecture was leaked accidentally by an AMD engineer's LinkedIn profile—news outlets picked up on this information last April. Naturally, Team Red's next priority is Zen 5—the latest reports suggest that two different chiplet designs are penciled in for mass production within the second quarter of 2024. Last September, insiders claimed that a proposed EPYC 9006 "Venice" CPU series was based on the sixth-gen microarchitecture. Everest/Olrak_29 has revealed various bits of speculative material regarding futuristic "Ryzen Client" processor designs since the start of 2024.

The latest postings to social media posit that AMD has selected an RDNA 5-based integrated graphics solution (possibly occupying a tile), thus "skipping RDNA 4" on their "Medusa" lineup of Ryzen Client processors. Leaked Microsoft documents revealed that its Xbox hardware design division was considering RDNA 5 for next-gen console specs. Medusa's CPU aspect is allegedly populated by Zen 6 "Morpheus" cores—as claimed in a January tweet. A new package design was also riffed on at the time: "Yes, I have teased this before...Medusa will use 2.5D interconnect with a much higher bandwidth," instead of a "traditional" multi-die design. Industry speculation has AMD's Zen 6 client architecture linked to a loose 2025/2026 launch window.

AMD's first generation XDNA-based Neural Processing Unit (NPU) arrived last year, as an onboard aspect of their "Phoenix" Ryzen 7040 mobile processor series, followed many months later by Intel's similarly NPU-laden Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" generation. It was recently revealed that a Windows 11 DirectML preview grants preliminary support for Core Ultra NPUs—Microsoft's software engineering department seems to be prioritizing Intel AI tech. Team Red has already released XDNA on desktop platforms—with its Ryzen 8000G APU family—and the "Hawk Point" 8040 series is nearing a retail launch, but these processors (plus 7040) remain unsupported by Microsoft's DirectML API. An interesting AMD community blog entry was posted two weeks—news outlets have been slow to pick up on its relevance.

Intel NPU activity can be monitored in Windows Task Manager (see screenshot below), and an upcoming update will add competing AMD parts to the mix. Joel Hruska's Team Red community blog post reveals that NPU monitoring for Ryzen 8040 series processors is due soon: " As AI PCs become more popular, there's a growing need for system monitoring tools that can track the performance of the new NPUs (Neural Processing Units) available on select Ryzen 8040 Series mobile processors. A neural processing unit - also sometimes referred to an integrated or on-die AI engine -- can improve battery life by offloading AI tasks that would otherwise be performed on the CPU or GPU. AMD has been working with Microsoft to enable MCDM (Microsoft Compute Driver Model) infrastructure on the AMD NPU (Neural Processing Unit)-enabled Ryzen 8040 Series of mobile processors. MCDM is a derivative of Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) that is targeting non-GPU, compute devices, such as the NPU. MCDM enables NPUs to make use of the existing GPU device management infrastructure, including scheduling, power management, memory management, and performance debugging with tools such as the Task Manager. MCDM serves as a fundamental layer, ensuring the smooth execution of AI workloads on NPU devices."