LaminiAI appeared to be one of the first customers to receive an initial shipment of AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerators, as disclosed by their CEO posting about functioning hardware on social media late last week. A recent Taiwan Economic Daily article states that the "MI300X is rumored to have begun supply"—we are not sure about why they have adopted a semi-secretive tone in their news piece, but a couple of anonymous sources are cited. A person familiar with supply chains in Taiwan divulged that: "(they have) been receiving AMD MI300X chips one after another...due to the huge shortage of NVIDIA AI chips, the arrival of new AMD products is really a timely rainfall." Favorable industry analysis (from earlier this month) has placed Team Red in a position of strength, due to growing interest in their very performant flagship AI accelerator.

The secrecy seems to lie in Team Red's negotiation strategies in Taiwan—the news piece alleges that big manufacturers in the region have been courted. AMD has been aggressive in a push to: "cooperate and seize AI business opportunities, with GIGABYTE taking the lead and attracting the most attention. Not only was GIGABYTE the first to obtain a partnership with AMD's MI300A chip, which had previously been mass-produced, but GIGABYTE was also one of the few Taiwanese manufacturers included in AMD's first batch of MI300X partners." GIGABYTE is expected to release two new "G593" product lines of server hardware later this year, based on combinations of AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerator and EPYC 9004 series processors.

AMD is looking to debut its Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" desktop processors based on the "Zen 5" microarchitecture some time around May-June 2024, according to High Yield YT, a reliable source with AMD leaks. These processors will be built in the existing Socket AM5 package, and be compatible with all existing AMD 600 series chipset motherboards. It remains to be seen if AMD debuts a new line of motherboard chipsets. Almost all Socket AM5 motherboards come with the USB BIOS flashback feature, which means motherboards from even the earliest production batches that are in the retail channel, should be able to easily support the new processors.

AMD is giving its next-gen desktop processors the Ryzen 9000 series processor model numbering, as it used the Ryzen 8000 series for its recently announced Socket AM5 desktop APUs based on the "Hawk Point" monolithic silicon. "Granite Ridge" will be a chiplet-based processor, much like the Ryzen 7000 series "Raphael." In fact, it will even retain the same 6 nm client I/O die (cIOD) as "Raphael," with some possible revisions made to increase its native DDR5 memory frequency (up from the current DDR5-5200), and improve its memory overclocking capabilities. It's being reported that DDR5-6400 could be the new "sweetspot" memory speed for these processors, up from the current DDR5-6000.

On March 21, you'll be able to explore the Forbidden West, battle awe-inspiring machines and encounter new tribes. Horizon Forbidden West is the beloved follow up to Guerrilla's critically acclaimed Horizon Zero Dawn, and this Complete Edition for PC also includes the Burning Shores expansion, which continues Aloy's journey and takes players to a treacherous volcanic archipelago after completing the main quest.

Today we are excited to announce that the PC version of Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is now available for pre-purchase with bonus content, including:

• Blacktide Outfit and Blacktide Bow (available only with pre-purchase)
• Nora Legacy Outfit and Nora Spear (available only when linking your Steam account to PlayStation Network)
• 2 Special Outfits (Carja Behemoth Elite and Nora Thunder Elite)
• 2 Special Weapons (Carja Behemoth Short Bow and Nora Thunder Sling)
• In-game Resources Pack including ammunition, potions, and travel packs
• In-game Apex Clawstrider Machine Strike Piece
• Exclusive Photo Mode pose and face paint

SAPPHIRE Technology announces the factory overclocked SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB Graphics Card for the ultimate 1080p gamer. With a compact design and beautiful detailed shroud with a strong metallic backplate, the SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB Graphics Card is the perfect addition to any build.

PULSE: The Heart. The Beat. The Game.
The SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB Graphics Card headlines with 2048 stream processors running with a boost clock of up to 2810 MHz and a game clock of up to 2539 MHz. The considerable 16 GB of GDDR6 high-speed memory is clocked at 18 Gbps Effective with 32 MB of AMD Infinity Cache, which dramatically reduces latency and power consumption, ensuring higher overall gaming performance than traditional architectural designs. To support the latest display monitors in the market, it is equipped with 4 output ports, including 2x HDMI and 2x DisplayPort 2.1 with DSC outputs. The SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB Graphics Card series features 32 powerful enhanced Compute Units, 32 Ray Accelerators and 64 AI Accelerators.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT went on sale today, at a starting price of $330. Designed for maxed out AAA gameplay at 1080p, this card can try its hands with 1440p gaming, at mid-thru-high settings; you can use features such as FSR 2, FSR 3 Frame Generation, the AMD Fluid Motion Frames feature that extends frame generation to any DirectX 11/12 game; as well as the HyperRX one-click performance enhancement that's part of the AMD Software control panel app. AMD had already maxed out all available shaders on the 6 nm "Navi 33" monolithic silicon, but has opted not to rope in the larger "Navi 32" chiplet GPU for the RX 7600 XT. Instead, it attempted to squeeze out the most performance possible from the "Navi 33," by dialing up clock speeds, power limits, and doubling the memory size.

You still get 32 compute units on the RX 7600 XT, which are worth 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI accelerators, 32 Ray accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs, but the 128-bit GDDR6 memory bus now drives 16 GB of memory running at the same 18 Gbps speed, yielding 288 GB/s of bandwidth. The GPU game clock has been increased to 2.47 GHz, up from 2.25 GHz on the RX 7600. The power limit has been increased from 165 W to 190 W on the RX 7600 XT; and implementing DisplayPort 2.1 has been made mandatory for board partners (they can't opt for the DisplayPort 1.4a like they could on the RX 7600). AMD claims that the 16 GB of video memory should come in handy for content creators, and those dabbling with generative AI.

We have three reviews of the Radeon RX 7600 XT for you today, so be sure to check them all out.

Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 XT Pulse | XFX Radeon RX 7600 XT Speedster QICK 309 | ASRock Radeon RX 7600 XT Steel Legend

AMD has released the latest version of AMD Software Adrenalin drivers, version 24.1.1 WHQL. This is quite a big update as new drivers add support for the new AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card as well as bring day one support for Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and TEKKEN 8 games. There is also support for AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), which promises to boost FPS by up to 97 percent in any DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 game. In addition to AFMF, the new drivers also add AMD Video Upscaling, some additional video improvements, AMD Smart Technology Tab, AMD Assistant, and additional OS feature support. There are also several fixed issues.

According to AMD, AFMF improves performance by adding frame generation technology to AMD Radeon 700M, RX 6000, and RX 7000 series graphics cards, both desktop and notebook versions. AMD also claims that AFMF preserves image quality by dynamically disabling frame generation during fast visual motion. AMD claims up to 97 percent average increase in performance across select titles at 1080p resolution with enabled AFMF and FSR 2 set at Quality Mode on Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card, as well as up to 103 percent increase with the same settings and the same Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card at 1440p resolution.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 24.1.1 WHQL

AMD announced its Ryzen 8000G series of Zen 4-based desktop APUs earlier this month, with an official product launch date: January 31. The top models within this range are the "Hawk Point" Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G processors—Olrak29_ took to social media after spotting pre-release examples popping up on the Geekbench Browser database. It is highly likely that evaluation samples are in the hands of reviewers, and more benchmarked results are expected to be uploaded over the next week and a half. The Ryzen 7 8700G (w/ Radeon 780M Graphics) was benched on an ASUS ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING WIFI board with 32 GB (6398 MT/s) of DDR5 system memory. Leaked figures appeared online last weekend, originating from an Ryzen 5 8600G (w/ Radeon 760M Graphics) paired with an MSI B650 GAMING PLUS WIFI (MS-7E26) motherboard and 32 GB (6400 MT/s) of DDR5 RAM.

The Geekbench 6 results reveal that the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G APUs are slightly less performant than "Raphael" Ryzen 7000 non-X processors—not a massive revelation, given the underlying technological similarities between these AMD product lines. Evaluations could change with the publication of official review data, but the 8000G series is at a natural disadvantage here—lower core clock frequencies and smaller L3 cache designations are the likely culprits. The incoming APUs are also somewhat hobbled with PCIe support only reaching 4.0 standards. VideoCardz, Tom's Hardware and Wccftech have taken the time to compile the leaked Geekbench 6 results into handy comparison charts—very much worth checking out.

References to GFX1150 & GFX1151 targets have been spotted again—this time in a ROCm Github repository—by renowned hardware sleuth; Kepler_L2. These references were first spotted last summer, in an AMDGPU LLVM backend/compiler (reported by Phoronix)—industry experts immediately linked these target codes to next generation "Strix" APU families. The latest leak provides confirmation that the GFX1150 ID is tied to "Strix Point 1," while GFX1151 is an internal IP for "Strix Point Halo," or simply "Strix Halo." The freshly published ROCm Github's commit is titled: "Strix Halo Support and Strix support in staging," which corroborates previous rumors regarding Team Red's engineers being deep into development of Zen 5 (and RDNA 3.5)-based accelerated processing units.

AMD has published several processor product roadmaps with references to "Strix Point" next-gen APUs, with a targeted 2024 launch window. Their December 2023 "Advancing AI Event" confirmed that the "Strix Point" mobile family will sport "XDNA 2" NPUs—previous generation "Phoenix" and recently released "Hawk Point" processors are on the first iteration of XDNA (a spatial dataflow NPU architecture). It is speculated that a typical "Strix Point" laptop processor will pack 12 Zen 5 CPU cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. Team Red has kept quiet about "Strix Halo" (also known as "Sarlak") when conducting public-facing presentations—a loose 2025 launch window is being touted by the rumor mill. The most advanced examples could feature up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

With the release of AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT set for January 24th, we expect a lot of custom versions from the usual AMD AIB partners, and XFX is coming with two of its own versions, the RX 7600 XT SWFT 210 and the RX 7600 XT QICK 309. In case you missed it, AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT comes with Navi 33 XT GPU and has the same 2048 Stream Processors as the previously available Radeon RX 7600 graphics card. On the other hand, the Radeon RX 7600 XT will come with higher clocks, higher power with 190 W TDP, which now require two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The memory is also increased to 16 GB GDDR6 but it is still on the same 128-bit memory interface.

The XFX RX 7600 XT SWFT 210 is pretty much the same as the Radeon RX 7600 SWFT 210 SKU, except for additional 8-pin PCIe power connector. It is a budget-oriented SKU, so it sticks to dual-fan, dual-slot cooler design, and won't have a factory-overclock, but should launch at AMD's MSRP of $329. The XFX RX 7600 XT QICK 309 on the other hand uses a more hefty triple-fan, 2.5-slot cooler design, and will come a with a factory-overclock. Unfortunately, XFX is still not listing those clocks, but we expect a decent boost on those GPU clocks.

AMD today announced that Ava Hahn has joined the company as senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, replacing Harry Wolin who is retiring from AMD after 24 years.

"I want to thank Harry for the role he has played leading our legal, government relations and public affairs teams during a period of significant growth and transformation," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "I am excited to welcome Ava to AMD. Her extensive experience leading legal functions for multiple technology companies will be an invaluable asset as we enter our next phase of growth."

Hahn joins from Lam Research, where she was chief legal officer with responsibility for global legal and governmental affairs. Prior to Lam, she led the legal functions at CA Technologies and Aruba Networks and served as general counsel for multiple technology and VC firms including Kleiner Perkins. She earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a B.A. in history from the University of California, Berkeley.

AMD has revealed the full specs of its upcoming Ryzen 8000G APUs and it turns out that the Zen 4c cores aren't clocking as high as the Zen 4 cores in the Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 3 8300G. We should point out that the 8300G has a singular Zen 4 core and three Zen 4c Cores here, so there's no confusion. The Zen 4 cores in the 8500G have a base clock of 4.1 GHz, while the 8300G comes in at 4.0 GHz, with both of the APU's Zen 4c cores having a base clock of 3.2 GHz. Oddly enough, AMD lists the overall base clock of the 8500G as 3.5 GHz and the 8300G as 3.4 GHz with a notice that reads "Represents the average effective base frequency of all cores." AMD is in other words averaging the clock speeds of the two different cores to come up with an approximate base clock.

The Zen 4 cores in the 8500G boost up to 5 GHz, with the 8300G boosting to 4.9 GHz, whereas the Zen 4c cores in the 8500G boost up to 3.7 GHz and in the 8300G to 3.6 GHz. Here AMD doesn't provide an estimated frequency equivalent. Despite being budget models in the Ryzen 8000G-series of APUs, both SKUs get two USB4 ports with full 40 Gbps capabilities, plus a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) ports. Furthermore the Radeon 740M GPU will be clocked at 2.8 GHz in both APUs, but both SKUs are limited to a mere four graphics cores, whereas the Ryzen 5 8600G gets eight at the same clock speed and the Ryzen 7 8700G gets 12 at 2.9 GHz. All four APUs also support DisplayPort 2.1.

LaminiAI appears to be one of AMD's first customers to receive a bulk order of Instinct MI300X GPUs—late last week, Sharon Zhou (CEO and co-founder) posted about the "next batch of LaminiAI LLM Pods" up and running with Team Red's cutting-edge CDNA 3 series accelerators inside. Her short post on social media stated: "rocm-smi...like freshly baked bread, 8x MI300X is online—if you're building on open LLMs and you're blocked on compute, lmk. Everyone should have access to this wizard technology called LLMs."

An attached screenshot of a ROCm System Management Interface (ROCm SMI) session showcases an individual Pod configuration sporting eight Instinct MI300X GPUs. According to official blog entries, LaminiAI has utilized bog-standard MI300 accelerators since 2023, so it is not surprising to see their partnership continue to grow with AMD. Industry predictions have the Instinct MI300X and MI300A models placed as great alternatives to NVIDIA's dominant H100 "Hopper" series—AMD stock is climbing due to encouraging financial analyst estimations.

GPD has disclosed to ITHome that a specification refresh of its Win Max 2 handheld/mini-laptop gaming PC is incoming—this model debuted last year with Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" APUs sitting in the driver's seat. A company representative provided a sneak peek of an upgraded device that sports a Team Red Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" mobile processor, and a larger pool of system memory (32 GB versus the 2023 model's 16 GB). The refreshed GPD Win Max 2's Ryzen 7 8840U APU was compared to the predecessor's Ryzen 7 7840U in CPU-Z benchmarks (standard and AX-512)—the results demonstrate a very slight difference in performance between generations.

The 8040 and 7040 APUs share the same "Phoenix" basic CPU design (8-cores + 16-threads) based on the prevalent "Zen 4" microarchitecture, plus an integration of AMD's Radeon 780M GPU. The former's main upgrade lies in its AI-crunching capabilities—a deployment of Team Red's XDNA AI engine. Ryzen 8040's: "NPU performance has been increased to 16 TOPS, compared to 10 TOPS of the NPU on the 'Phoenix' silicon. AMD is taking a whole-of-silicon approach to AI acceleration, which includes not just the NPU, but also the 'Zen 4' CPU cores that support the AVX-512 VNNI instruction set that's relevant to AI; and the iGPU based on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, with each of its compute unit featuring two AI accelerators, components that make the SIMD cores crunch matrix math. The whole-of-silicon performance figures for "Phoenix" is 33 TOPS; while 'Hawk Point' boasts of 39 TOPS. In benchmarks by AMD, 'Hawk Point' is shown delivering a 40% improvement in vision models, and Llama 2, over the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series."

ASRock showcased customized Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB GPU offerings at CES 2024—only a couple days after AMD's official unveiling of its expanded lower mid-range RDNA 3 line. ASRock was among a select few Team Red board partners with finalized units (based on Navi 33 XT) on display—it seems that the Taiwanese manufacturer is preparing for a retail launch of its Radeon RX 7600 XT Steel Legend 16 GB OC and Challenger 16 GB OC graphics card models. ASRock's website has been updated with product pages for the latest Radeon RX 7000-series entries, but press material for an imminent product launch has not been published (at the time of writing).

ASRock's mid-tier triple-fan Steel Legend and entry-level dual-fan Challenger designs are a familiar sight across the company's Radeon RX 7000 and 6000 product lines—last September, customized Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT models were unveiled as sporting these shrouds, along with higher-end Phantom Gaming OC options. A slightly overclocked Radeon RX 7600 XT GPU is not expected to be a heat producing monster, so expensive cooling solutions are not a necessity for a cost-conscious audience—likely targeting a decent level of 1080p gaming performance. The ASRock Radeon RX 7600 XT Challenger 16 GB OC model is expected to launch at an MSRP of $329 (AMD's official guide SEP), while the fancier Steel Legend OC is believed to be only marginally more expensive.

Memory PC GmbH has unveiled an exclusive reskin of Sapphire Technology's standard PULSE RX 7800 XT graphics card—the German e-tailer is advertising this special edition model as a "world first," with a design that is both "unique and eye-catching." We reckon that there is some marketing spiel + exaggeration in effect here, although Memory PC's branding, messaging and extra swathes of red and white do add up to be a more visually appealing package. Sapphire's PULSE card designs tend to focus on function rather than fancy livery—the normal PULSE RX 7800 XT card is almost entirely black, save for some red line accents on its shroud and backplate, plus white text on the twin cooling fans.

This special model sports white PULSE fans with abbreviated Memory PC logo branding, while the shroud has red and white stealth-effect polygonal patterning. This effect adorns almost the entire stretch of backplate, a pixellated heart graphic and a "WE LOVE GAMING" statement sit within an island of black. The Memory PC + Sapphire Technology Navi 32 XT GPU collaboration is only available in pre-built PC systems—starting at €999, with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X build.

AMD unveiled its Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) Radeon RX 7900 GPU last summer—this Navi 31 XL-based card was first launched in China, with only a handful of customized options and a reference model (produced by XFX) available at the starting line. It later emerged that Team Red's special SKU (celebrating the Year of the Rabbit) would be heading West; by Autumn-time, system integrators in Europe started to sell full PC systems outfitted with Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics cards. By late 2023, a small smattering of board partner versions hit the European market in proper retail form—you no longer had to shell out €1500+ for a pre-built system in order to gain access to an exclusive model. Team Red's almost parallel launch of its Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU has overshadowed the slightly more powerful RDNA 3 model's limited release.

VideoCardz has received tips about price cuts affecting certain Radeon RX 7900 GRE models, and a new retail entry for an ASRock custom design. AMD has started to adjust its pricing at the higher mid-tier and flagship GPU level, in reaction to NVIDIA rolling out GeForce RTX 40 SUPER cards this month. This initiative has affected the Radeon RX 7900 GRE as well, despite its very restricted availability in Western markets. The article points to an example of the reference design with its price falling by ~€60 (over a two month period)—Italy's PSK Mega Store's offer currently sits at €542.66. The lowest price in Spanish and German markets appears to be €579—CoolMod Espagna has Sapphire's Pulse Radeon RX 7900 GRE Gaming OC 16 GB card listed at €579.95; it also qualifies for the AVATAR: Frontiers of Pandora promotion. Mindfactory DE lists a mysterious ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Challenger 16 GB OC Edition model (SKU 90-GA52ZZ-00UANF), ready to purchase and ship out immediately at €579. Photos of this twin-fan custom model can be viewed at Skinflint UK.

Farming Simulator 22 now supports AMD FSR 3 on PC, so you can enjoy even smoother farming. Download game update 1.13.1.1, and activate FSR plus Frame Generation to boost your frame rate on supported graphics cards! Wait, what's FSR? AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (in short: AMD FSR) uses upscaling technologies that aim to increase the frame rate. In simplified terms, it first renders Farming Simulator 22 at a lower resolution, but then upscales it using a variety of (very smart & efficient) techniques. Without sacrificing image quality, you can significantly increase the performance of Farming Simulator 22, especially when demanding settings are enabled. Try it!

What's new in FSR 3?
AMD FSR 3 improves upon FSR 2's upscaling and adds Frame Generation. This feature can be activated separately in the graphics settings of Farming Simulator 22. It generates additional frames to increase the frame rate. Imagine one new frame being inserted in between two existing frames. In some, ideal situations, depending on your hardware and individual settings, FSR 3 with activated Frame Generation can straight up double your displayed FPS to guarantee some extra-smooth farming! Please note: AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation is recommended to be used with a minimum of 60 FPS before FG-activation!

At CES, AMD didn't give away too many technical details of its upcoming Ryzen 8000G-series APUs, but details are starting to trickle out and it's not all good news. As has been known for some time, AMD is using two different chips to make the Ryzen 8000G APUs and they're known as the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2, where the Phoenix 2 parts feature Zen 4c cores, which are not present in the Phoenix 1 APUs. This in and of itself shouldn't be a huge issue, although the Zen 4c CPU cores can be slightly slower in some tasks based on testing of AMD's EPYC server parts.

However, PCGamesN noticed that Gigabyte has posted the full specs for the B650E Aorus Elite X AX Ice motherboard and it looks like there's a much bigger difference between the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2 based APUs. Namely, the Phoenix 2 APUs have fewer PCIe lanes and as such are limited to two PCIe 4.0 lanes for the secondary NVMe slot. As if this wasn't bad enough, the Phoenix 2 APUs only have four PCIe 4.0 lanes for add-in GPUs, whereas the Phoenix 1 APUs have eight. This is very likely to lead to reduced performance if a higher-end GPU is used with such an APU. Note that this will vary depending on the motherboard design, but many B650/B650E boards feature a similar design with regards to the PCIe lanes coming from the CPU socket. Luckily, it's easy to avoid this issue, as the Ryzen 5 8600G and the Ryzen 7 8700G are both Phoenix 1 designs, whereas the Ryzen 5 8500G is the only Phoenix 2 design available in retail, as the Ryzen 3 8300G is an OEM only part.

During CES, PCWorld had a chat with Donny Woligroski, Technical Marketing Manager at AMD. The new Ryzen 8000G APUs were a large part of what covered in the almost 17 minute long video and PCWorld got some details that weren't covered in the official press materials that AMD released at the launch. The officially supported memory speed listed by AMD is DDR5-5600, which is a step up from the official speed of DDR5-5200 for the Ryzen 7000-series CPUs.

However, we know that the Ryzen 7000-series is more than happy to use faster memory and as before, AMD has an unofficial memory sweet spot and just as with the Ryzen 7000-series, the Ryzen 8000G-series of APUs has a memory sweet spot of DDR5-6000. That said, it's unknown if the Ryzen 8000G-series will support faster memory or will start flaking out above DDR5-6000, like many Ryzen 7000-series CPUs do unless you switch to a 1:2 ratio. Woligroski is also pointing out that dual-channel is a must to get the best performance out of the new APUs, although this shouldn't really surprise anyone. Full video after the break.

AMD has quietly issued a product discontinuation notice—their PDF document is dated January 1 2024—for a whole bunch of Xilinx Complex Programmable Logic Device (CLPD) and lower-end FPGA models. Team Red's opening statement on the matter reads: "AMD will be discontinuing XC9500XL, CoolRunner XPLA 3, CoolRunner II, Spartan II, and Spartan 3, 3A, 3AN, 3E, 3ADSP Commercial/ Industrial "XC" and Automotive "XA" Product Families due to declining run-rate and supplier sustainability reasons." The American multinational semiconductor inherited a large back catalog of programmable logic products once their acquisition of Xilinx was completed back in 2022.

Industry analysts believed that this takeover was mainly motivated by a desire to expand into FPGA territories, although Team Red indicated that it would carry on producing and supporting Xilinx's older CLPD products—for example, the Spartan 3 family debuted back in 2011, while a couple of the CoolRunner II parts on the list are of 2002 vintage. AMD's discontinuation notice provides details of Last Time Buy (LTB) final orders—the cut-off date for soon-to-be-axed devices appears to be June 29 2024.

Microsoft has reportedly set 16 GB as the minimum system requirement for AI PCs, a TrendForce market research report finds. To say that Microsoft has a pivotal role to play in PC hardware specs is an understatement. This year sees the introduction of the first "AI PCs," or PCs with on-device AI acceleration for several new features native to Windows 11 23H2, mainly Microsoft Copilot. From the looks of it, Copilot is receiving the highest corporate attention from Microsoft, as the company looks to integrate the AI chatbot that automates and generates work, into the mainstream PC. In fact, Microsoft is even pushing for a dedicated Copilot button on PC keyboards along the lines of the key that brings up the Start menu. The company's biggest move with Copilot will be the 2024 introduction of Copilot Pro, an AI assistant integrated with Office and 365, which the company plans to sell on a subscription basis alone.

Besides cloud-based acceleration, Microsoft's various AI features will rely on some basic hardware specs for local acceleration. One of them of course is the NPU, with Intel's AI Boost and AMD's Ryzen AI being introduced with their latest mobile processors. The other requirement will be memory. AI acceleration is a highly memory sensitive operation, and LLMs require a sizable amount of fast frequent-access memory. So Microsoft arrived at 16 GB as the bare minimum amount of memory for not just native acceleration, but also cloud-based Copilot AI features to work. This should see the notebooks of 2024 set 16 GB as their baseline memory specs; and for commercial notebooks to scale up to 32 GB or even 64 GB, depending on organizational requirements. The development bodes particularly well for the DRAM industry.

With NVIDIA's Ampere and Hopper GPUs enjoying a domination in the AI acceleration industry, compute companies are turning to AMD's Instinct CDNA series accelerators to look for alternatives. It seems like they've found one. This has financial market analysts excited, causing the AMD company stock to hit near record highs. AMD recently launched the Instinct MI300X and MI300A processors based on the CDNA 3 architecture, which the company claims beat NVIDIA's H100 "Hopper" processors at competitive prices, which has encouraged analysts from major financial institutions, including Barclays, KeyBanc Capital, and Susquehanna Financial Group, to increase their price targets for the AMD stock. As of market closure at Jan 17, 7:59:56 PM UTC, the AMD stock stood at $160.17, near its November 2021 record high of $164.46.

AMD's data center business looks to ramp up Instinct CDNA accelerators through 2024. These large chiplet-based GPUs are based on the same 5 nm TSMC foundry nodes to NVIDIA's H100 "Hopper," and to maximize the use of its foundry allocation, it's been reported that AMD might even forego large gaming GPUs based on its Radeon RX RDNA4 architecture, to maximize its allocation for high-margin CDNA3 chips. The Instinct MI300X features a colossal 304 compute units worth 19,456 stream processors capable of AI-relevant math formats, and 192 GB of 8192-bit HBM3 memory, with 5.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth on tap.

Official support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3), including support for Frame Generation, has been extended to Call of Duty Modern Warfare III and Warzone, though their latest game patch. This adds FSR 3 as an option, which lets you choose between five performance presets—Ultra Performance, Performance, Balanced, Quality, and Native; with Native being analogous to NVIDIA's DLAA preset—a quality enhancement at native resolution, without upscaling. With the "AMD FSR 3.0" upscaling/sharpening option selection, you also get Frame Generation as a separate toggle, which nearly doubles frame rates using AMD's interpolation technology.

Call of Duty MW:III and Warzone are arguably the biggest game franchise to implement FSR 3 so far. The list of officially supported FSR 3 titles is small, with just five other titles that include Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Forspoken, Immortals of Aveum, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name; and Motorcubs RC; however, with AMD posting the FSR 3 source code to GPUOpen, the game modding community is all over the feature, extending unofficial FSR 3 and Frame Generation mods to games not on this list. It's worth noting that the latest CoD MW:III patch has FSR 3 replace the FSR 2.1 option entirely.

AMD has lowered the official MSRP of the Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card to $749, down from its launch price of $899. Its street price, as TweakTown found out, is lower still, with certain custom-design RX 7900 XT cards selling for as low as $710 on Newegg. At this price, the RX 7900 XT is set up for a major clash with certain overclocked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER graphics cards, leftover inventories of the recently retired GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and probably even looks to soak up some sales before the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER hits the scene on January 24. The cheapest RX 7900 XT is actually one of the better-appointed custom designs out there, the ASRock RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming and XFX RX 7900 XT Merc 319, which had originally launched at prices comparable to the PowerColor Hellhound. These are followed by the PowerColor RX 7900 XT Hellhound and Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse OC at $720.

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is a very capable high-end GPU that AMD categorizes as capable of 4K Ultra HD gaming with settings maxed out. It's carved out from the "Navi 31" chiplet GPU, and configured with 84 RDNA3 compute units, worth 5,376 stream processors, 168 AI accelerators, 84 Ray accelerators, 336 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The best part about this card is its memory sub-system, with 80 MB of Infinity Cache, and 20 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 320-bit wide memory bus with 800 GB/s of bandwidth on tap, which should come in handy at 4K, or when using creator or AI applications.

New York-based security firm Trail of Bits has identified a security vulnerability with various GPU models, which include AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple. This vulnerability, named LeftoverLocals, could potentially allow attackers to steal large amounts of data from a GPU's memory. Mainstream client-GPUs form a sizable chunk of the hardware accelerating AI and LLMs, as they cost a fraction of purpose-built data-center GPUs, and are available in the retail market. Unlike CPUs, which have undergone extensive hardening against data leaks, GPUs were primarily designed for graphics acceleration and lack similar data privacy architecture. To our knowledge, none of the client GPUs use virtualization with their graphics memory. Graphics acceleration in general is a very memory sensitive application, and requires SIMD units to have bare-metal access to memory, with as little latency as possible.

First the good news—for this vulnerability to be exploited, it requires the attacker to have access to the target device with the vulnerable GPU (i.e. cut through OS-level security). The attack could break down data silos on modern computers and servers, allowing unauthorized access to GPU memory. The potential data breach could include queries, responses generated by LLMs, and the weights driving the response. The researchers tested 11 chips from seven GPU makers and found the vulnerability in GPUs from Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm. While NVIDIA, Intel, and Arm first-party GPUs did not show evidence of the vulnerability, Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD confirmed to wired that their GPUs are affected, and that they're working on a security response. Apple has released fixes for its latest M3 and A17 processors, but older devices with previous generations of Apple silicon remain vulnerable. Qualcomm is providing security updates, and AMD plans to offer mitigations through driver updates in March 2024.