Gamers Nexus recently visited AMD's headquarters in Austin, Texas—a previous video documented company employees discussing the history of Zen CPUs, and the showcasing of historical prototypes including (unreleased) Ryzen 9 5950X3D and 5900X3D models. The YouTube channel promised that more AMD HQ tour footage would be shared over the next couple of weeks—their latest upload has (host) Steve Burke talking to representatives from various internal labs.

A notable detail extracted from Team Red's thermal laboratory was an old heat spreader concept for Zen 4 processors—the team evaluated whether a concealed vapor chamber would offer improved cooling performance versus conventional metal solutions. Their tests determined that the extra cost (not disclosed) required to integrate a vapor chamber was not worth the resultant 1°C temperature difference, when lined up against a traditional metal design IHS. AMD confirmed that the concept was not developed further since prototype chips were also found to generate heat exceeding expected normal levels, under continuous long-term workload conditions.

Last week Bethesda announced AMD as its exclusive partner for Starfield on the PC platform, although the short video presentation did not tease upcoming hardware/software bundles. Details of a Ryzen 7000-series CPUs promotional campaign emerged seven days later thanks to a mini-store page appearing on Newegg's retail site. The Starfield promo was not active at the time, but AMD Taiwan has made it official that the event will be going live on July 11 (at least in that territory).

According to the freshly published event site their offer will be running until September 30, and product serial numbers will not be redeemable after October 28. Eligible hardware includes the aforementioned Ryzen 7000 processor family, as well as Radeon GPUs. Thankfully Team Red has made sure to make a significant number of RDNA 2 models eligible for the Starfield incentive, with the entry point being RX 6600. All discrete RDNA 3 cards qualify—starting with RX 7600 and jumping up to the expensive RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX GPUs. AMD Taiwan's info graphics show a two tier system—Standard Edition (NT$1990) applies to buyers of Ryzen 5/7 7000 series CPUs or Radeon 6600 through 7600 cards. Premium Edition (NT$2890) will grant a 5-day early access period—exclusive to buyers of Ryzen 9 7000 CPUs or Radeon cards starting at RX 6700.

According to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, AMD started to enable next-generation processors by submitting patches to the Linux kernel. Codenamed Family 1Ah or Family 26 in decimal notation, the set of patches corresponds to the upcoming AMD Zen 5 core, which is the backbone of the upcoming Ryzen 8000 series processors. The patches have a few interesting notes, namely few of them being: added support for the amd64_edac (Error Detection and Correction) module and temperature monitoring; added PCI IDs for these models covering 00h-1Fh and 20h; added required support in k10temp driver.

The AMD EDAC driver also points out that the Zen 5 server CPUs will max out with 12-channel memory. Codenames 0-31 correspond to next-generation EPYC, while 40 to 79 are desktop and laptop SKUS. Interestingly, these patches are just the start, as adding PCI IDs and temperature drivers are basic enablement. With the 2024 launch date nearing, we expect to see more Linux kernel enablement efforts, especially with more complicated parts of the kernel.

AMD late Thursday released the Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL drivers. While these do not come with optimization for any new games since the previous 23.5.2 drivers, they add several new Vulkan API extensions, and fix a few issues. In particular, they introduce Vulkan-based accelerated video decode for H.264 and H.265 formats, among 8 other extensions spanning the Khronos and Valve trunks. The drivers also claim to improve idle power and multi-monitor power draw of RX 7000 series GPUs.

Among the issues fixed with Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL include sub-optimal VR performance or stuttering noticed with RX 7000 series GPUs, and an application crash for DaVinci Resolve Studio with AV1 video playback. The drivers improve idle- and multi-monitor power-draw for RX 7000 series GPUs on some 4K@144 Hz displays, and multi-monitor configurations. Display corruption noticed with WWE 2K23, and Nioh 2 have been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL

Newegg is currently running a time limited offer on AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU—the base price sits at $662, but a promotional voucher can be applied at checkout that removes $105. Amazon USA price matched the competition earlier today—via their own voucher system—but stock allocation of the powerful desktop processor appears to be sold out. North American customers eager to acquire an attractively priced Ryzen 9 7950X3D soon-ish will have to do business with Newegg.

The latest $557 deal is certainly more generous when compared to a campaign run by the American online retailer back in May, albeit via their Ebay store—several Ryzen 7000X3D-series CPUs were discounted at the time, perhaps in reaction to bad publicity swirling around the product lineup (referring to accounts of hardware burnouts). The Ryzen 9 7950X3D was reduced to a previous all-time low of $629.99. Perhaps public perception of AMD's top flight models has not improved all that much since then (plus other economical factors), and very deep discounts are necessary to attract customers. A Newegg mini-store page recently revealed a forthcoming "Starfield Game Bundle Promotion," that will apply to all Ryzen 7000-series CPUs. The AMD + Bethesda initiative will probably kick in closer to the game's September 6 launch date.

Sapphire has officially boarded the white PCB design train, a trend most popular within China's PC hardware market—the Hong Kong-based graphics card specialist is teasing its oddly named "Power Elves" custom cooling solution. They have decided to pair this new look with non-cutting edge silicon, namely AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT GPU. The budget Navi 24 XT (RDNA 2) card looks to be cooled by a single fan and heatsink array housed within a shroud approximating a Mini-ITX form factor.

Sapphire appears to using its "Angular Velocity Fan Blade," as seen on its Radeon RX 7000-series PULSE and NITRO custom models, so it is somewhat odd that we are not seeing a new-ish RX 7600 GPU in fresh Polar Elves/all-white livery. Since the company is merely teasing this upcoming 4 GB model (at the time of writing) we can assume that it will be served by the normal single 8-pin power connector, and its name assignment suggests a factory overclock will be applied as standard.

Gigabyte has updated the CPU support list for its X570 AORUS XTREME motherboard, and the usual internet hardware sleuths spotted the addition of an intriguing unreleased AMD CPU—compatible with said board when updated to BIOS version F35. Team Red could be readying the quad-core/eight-thread "Cezanne" Ryzen 3 5100 processor for a forthcoming market launch—the AM4 platform and Zen 3 continue to live on—co-existing with the 7000-series lineup—the "Vermeer-X" Ryzen 5 5600X3D arrives later this week as a Micro Center retail exclusive, and another Cezanne-based unit (an eight-core Ryzen 7 5700) has been added to motherboard support lists.

The Ryzen 3 5100 and Ryzen 7 5700 CPUs were included in SKU manifests from last spring, but did not end up launching in 2022. Both appear to be monolithic die APUs with their iGPUs disabled—the Cezanne CPU microarchitecture is based on TSMC's 7 nm process node. Other news sources posit that these processors have occasionally cropped up as OEM parts on e-commerce platforms, but AMD has (so far) kept very quiet about possible retail releases.

The Eurasian Economic Commission or the EEC for short, has become something of a source when it comes to upcoming product leaks, at least as far as the model names goes and now a range of upcoming motherboards from Gigabyte has made an appearance on its site. What we're looking at is a range of refreshed boards, some that were on display at Computex, but most of them haven't been officially announced as yet. On the Intel side, all the new models have an X somewhere towards the end of the model names to reflect them being part of the refresh and at least some SKUs are getting WiFi 7 support, All except one model is based on the Z790 chipset, at least as far as most of us are concerned, as there's one custom SKU that's said to be for a Chinese system integrator that won't be available outside of China. As the China specific SKU is already listed on Gigabyte's Chinese website, we've included a picture of the B70M YT Pioneer WiFi below.

On the AMD side of things, Gigabyte is adding a more affordable X670E SKU with the X670E Aorus Elite AX. Here, AMD has stuck with a simple V2 to reflect the refreshed boards, but it's unclear what has changed on these models. Gigabyte has also added a few new MicroATX B650 boards, with the B650M Aorus Elite AX Arctic which will be a white and/or silver motherboard with matching design elements. This board will have limited availability and although it might be found in retail in some countries, it's largely intended for system integrators. The other two new boards are the B650M A Elite AX Arc—we were told by a source that this is a mistake in the filing—and the B650M Gaming WiFi, which should be a cheaper alternative to the B650M Gaming X models the company is currently offering. These boards should start arriving in the autumn some time, at least based on the boards Gigabyte was showing at Computex.

American online retailer, Newegg, has perhaps jumped the gun a little by readying CPU listings for an "AMD Starfield Game Bundle Promotion." The store page was noticed by some eagle-eyed folks over the weekend, and news sites were soon tipped off to the early announcement. AMD was revealed as Starfield's exclusive partner on PC last week, but upcoming promotions/bundles were not mentioned during presentation proceedings. Newegg's mini-site only functions as a promo product container (at the time of writing) for all available Ryzen 7000-series CPUs—individual SKU pages are void of any Starfield material, and the previous Star Wars Jedi: Survivor campaign ended on June 30.

The Newegg promo page includes everything in the mainstream Zen 4 lineup—from the entry-level Ryzen 5 7600 model going all the way up to the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D, but internet sleuths were unable to track down anything representing an equivalent campaign for AMD's latest Radeon RX graphics cards. Team Red's Zen 4 and RDNA 3 technologies got plenty of shout-outs in last week's partnership presentation: "Making this game even more special, is the close collaboration between Bethesda and AMD to unlock the full potential of Starfield. We have worked hand-in-hand with Bethesda Game Studios to optimize Starfield for both Xbox and PC with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics. The optimizations both accelerate performance and enhance the quality of your gameplay using highly multi-threaded code that both Xbox and PC players will get to take advantage of."

A screenshot from Puget Systems benchmark database reveals a new upcoming desktop processor model by AMD, the Ryzen 5 7500F. The screenshot details the 7500F as a 6-core processor, and the machine features an ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming motherboard, along with an RTX 4080 graphics card. At this point it's hard to tell what the "F" brand extension means in AMD nomenclature. On Intel, it denotes a lack of integrated graphics.

There are two possible theories on what the 7500F could be. One holds that it's a down-rated "Raphael" MCM with a disabled iGPU; while the other holds that it could be based on the 4 nm Phoenix-2 monolithic silicon. Detailed in an older article, the Phoenix-2 is a 137 mm² monolithic silicon that physically features no more than 6 "Zen 4" CPU cores, and an iGPU with just 4 RDNA 3 compute units, besides I/O that's identical to that of the regular 178 mm² 8-core/12-CU Phoenix silicon. Phoenix-2 on AM5 might just end up with a lower bill of materials than a single-CCD "Raphael" MCM.

Update 06:13 UTC: A Korean retailer has posted the first picture of the Ryzen 5 7500F in the flesh. They claim a street price of around $170-180 (KRW equivalent), and availability slated for July 7.

Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison last week announced a substantial spending spree on new equipment as he prepares his business for a cloud computing service expansion that will be aimed at attracting a "new wave" of artificial intelligence (AI) companies. He made this announcement at a recent Ampere event: "This year, Oracle will buy GPUs and CPUs from three companies...We will buy GPUs from NVIDIA, and we're buying billions of dollars of those. We will spend three times that on CPUs from Ampere and AMD. We still spend more money on conventional compute." His cloud division is said to be gearing up to take on larger competition—namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. Oracle is hoping to outmaneuver these major players by focusing on the construction of fast networks, capable of shifting around huge volumes of data—the end goal being the creation of its own ChatGPT-type model.

Ellison's expressed that he was leaving Team Blue behind—Oracle has invested heavily in Ampere Computing—a startup founded by ex-Intel folks: "It's a major commitment to move to a new supplier. We've moved to a new architecture...We think that this is the future. The old Intel x86 architecture, after many decades in the market, is reaching its limit." Oracle's database software has been updated to run on Ampere's Arm-based chips, Ellison posits that these grant greater power efficiency when compared to AMD and NVIDIA enterprise processors. There will be some reliance on "x86-64" going forward, since Oracle's next-gen Exadata X10M platform was recently announced with the integration of Team Red's EPYC 9004 series processors—a company spokesman stated that these server CPUs offer higher core counts and "extreme scale and dramatically improved price performance," when compared to older Intel Xeon systems.

High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is emerging as the preferred solution for overcoming memory transfer speed restrictions due to the bandwidth limitations of DDR SDRAM in high-speed computation. HBM is recognized for its revolutionary transmission efficiency and plays a pivotal role in allowing core computational components to operate at their maximum capacity. Top-tier AI server GPUs have set a new industry standard by primarily using HBM. TrendForce forecasts that global demand for HBM will experience almost 60% growth annually in 2023, reaching 290 million GB, with a further 30% growth in 2024.

TrendForce's forecast for 2025, taking into account five large-scale AIGC products equivalent to ChatGPT, 25 mid-size AIGC products from Midjourney, and 80 small AIGC products, the minimum computing resources required globally could range from 145,600 to 233,700 Nvidia A100 GPUs. Emerging technologies such as supercomputers, 8K video streaming, and AR/VR, among others, are expected to simultaneously increase the workload on cloud computing systems due to escalating demands for high-speed computing.

AMD's "Vega" graphics architecture powering graphics cards such as the Radeon VII, Radeon PRO VII, sees a discontinuation of maintenance with ROCm GPU programming software stack. The release notes of ROCm 5.6 states that the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator, Radeon VII client graphics card, and Radeon PRO VII pro-vis graphics card, collectively referred to as "gfx906," will reach EOM (end of maintenance) starting Q3-2023, which aligns with the release of ROCm 5.7. Developer "EwoutH" on GitHub, who discovered this, remarks gfx906 is barely 5 years old, with the Radeon PRO VII and Instinct MI50 accelerator currently being sold in the market. The most recent AMD product powered by "Vega" has to be the "Cezanne" desktop processor, which uses an iGPU based on the architecture. This chip was released in Q2-2021.

AMD has designed a physically smaller version of its 4 nm "Phoenix" mobile processor silicon. The chip could power lower-end mobile SKUs in the Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 series, and it's likely that it could make it to Socket AM5, where it will power Ryzen 3 and lower-end versions of Ryzen 5 desktop processors. Built on the same 4 nm foundry process as the standard "Phoenix" silicon, the so-called "Phoenix 2" or "PHX2" die physically features a 6-core/12-thread CPU based on the "Zen 4" microarchitecture, and a physically smaller iGPU with just two WGPs (workgroup processors), or 4 CU (compute units), which work out to 256 stream processors. This iGPU is based on the same RDNA3 graphics architecture as the one powering the regular "Phoenix" silicon. At this point we don't know if the Ryzen AI component gets the axe, but given AMD's enthusiasm with consumer AI acceleration, the die might just retain it.

The PHX2 die likely retains the I/O of the regular "Phoenix," including a dual-channel (4 sub-channel) DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory interface, and a 24-lane PCI-Express Gen 4 root complex. These changes result in a die that appears to be around three-quarters the size of the regular "Phoenix," with an area of around 137 mm², compared to 178 mm² of the regular "Phoenix." The smaller die will save AMD big on costs and yields. At this time, there are at least two processor models reported to be based on this die, the Ryzen 5 7540U and Ryzen 3 7440U. Both are 15 W to 28 W class mobile processors aimed at thin-and-light notebooks.

US Computer component retailer Micro Center has announced that the store has struck an exclusive deal with AMD to be the sole retailer for the Ryzen 5 5600X3D processor. The CPU is apparently a limited edition release, although it's not clear how limited it'll be in terms of available quantities. The new CPU will launch on the 7th of July and has a base clock of 3.3 GHz and a boost clock of 4.4 GHz, each 100 MHz slower than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The CPU obviously has six CPU cores, which results in a total cache of 99 MB due to the missing two cores.

The TDP remains at 105 W and it appears that the Ryzen 5 5600X3D might just consist of failed Ryzen 7 5800X3D chips sold with two cores disabled. From what TPU understands, there should be some OEM availability of the Ryzen 5 5600X3D as well, based on what our sources have told us, but we don't have any details on which system integrators might be offering the CPU. Micro Center will be charging US$229.99, which is US$220 less than what the Ryzen 7 5800X3D launched at, although Micro Center is currently selling it at US$279.99. The Ryzen 5 5600X3D will also be offered at a discounted price when bought with eligible motherboard and memory bundles from Micro Center.

New research from Omdia reveals that the semiconductor market declined in revenue for a fifth straight quarter in the first quarter of 2023. This is the longest recorded period of decline since Omdia began tracking the market in 2002. Revenue in 1Q23 settled at $120.5B, down 9% from 4Q22. The semiconductor market is cyclical, and this prolonged decline follows the upsurge as the market grew to record revenues in each quarter between 4Q20 through 4Q21 following increased demand from the global pandemic.

The memory and MPU market are major areas of the semiconductor market that are contributing to the decline. The MPU market in 1Q23 was $13.1B, just 65% of its size in 1Q22 when it was $20B. The memory market fared worse, with 1Q23 coming in at $19.3B, just 44% of the market in 1Q22 when it was $43.6B. The combined MPU and memory markets declined 19% in 1Q23, dragging the market down to the 9% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) decline.

According to Taiwanese media, TSMC will start production of its first 1.4 nm fab in 2026, with chip production in the fab said to start sometime in 2027 or 2028. The new fab will be located in Longtan Science Park outside of Hsinchu in Taiwan, where many of TSMC's current fabs are located. TSMC is currently constructing a 2 nm and below node R&D facility at a nearby plot of land to where the new fab is expected to be built. This facility is expected to be finished in 2025 and TSMC has been allocated a total area of just over 158 hectares of land for future expansion in the area.

In related news, TSMC is expected to be charging US$25,000 per 2 nm GAA wafer, which is an increase of about a fifth compared to its 3 nm wafers which are going for around US$20,000. This is largely due to the nodes being fully booked and TSMC being able to charge a premium for its cutting edge nodes. TSMC is also expanding in CoWoS packaging facilities due to increased demand from both AMD and NVIDIA for AI related products. Currently TSMC is said to be able to output 12,000 CoWoS wafers per month and this is twice as much as last year, yet TSMC is unable to meet demand from its customers.

AMD and Bethesda have today revealed that Starfield will be best experienced on a Ryzen processor and Radeon graphics card-equipped PC. Team Red has been announced as the giant open world game's official graphics and GPU partner, but its Xbox Series hardware also gets a couple of friendly shout-outs. Todd Howard, director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, stated in the video presentation: "We have AMD engineers in our code base working on FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) 2.0 image processing and upscaling and it looks incredible. You're going to get the benefits of that obviously on your PC but also on Xbox. We're super excited and can't wait to show everybody more."

Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of its Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, added: "Making this game even more special, is the close collaboration between Bethesda and AMD to unlock the full potential of Starfield. We have worked hand-in-hand with Bethesda Game Studios to optimize Starfield for both Xbox and PC with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics. The optimizations both accelerate performance and enhance the quality of your gameplay using highly multi-threaded code that both Xbox and PC players will get to take advantage of."

AMD today announced the AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive system-on-chip (SoC), the world's largest adaptive SoC. The VP1902 adaptive SoC is an emulation-class, chiplet-based device designed to streamline the verification of increasingly complex semiconductor designs. Offering 2X the capacity over the prior generation, designers can confidently innovate and validate application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and SoC designs to help bring next generation technologies to market faster.

AI workloads are driving increased complexity in chipmaking, requiring next-generation solutions to develop the chips of tomorrow. FPGA-based emulation and prototyping provides the highest level of performance, allowing faster silicon verification and enabling developers to shift left in the design cycle and begin software development well before silicon tape-out. AMD, through Xilinx, brings over 17 years of leadership and six generations of the industry's highest capacity emulation devices, which have nearly doubled in capacity each generation.

Noctua today introduced its new NM-DD1 direct die kit. Developed in cooperation with professional overclocker and direct die cooling expert Roman "der8auer" Hartung, the NM-DD1 is a mounting spacer kit that makes it possible to use a wide range of Noctua CPU coolers on delidded AMD AM5 processors. Removing the processor's integrated heat spreader (delidding) and putting the heatsink directly onto the dies allows for much more efficient thermal transfer and can thereby lower CPU temperatures significantly, with typical gains in the range of 10-15°C.

"Delidding and direct die cooling will void your CPU's warranty and bear a certain risk of damaging it, so this certainly isn't for everyone," explains Roland Mossig (Noctua CEO). "However, the performance gains to be had are simply spectacular, typically ranging from 10 to 15°C but in some cases, we've even seen improvements of almost 20°C in combination with our offset mounting bars, so we're confident that this is an attractive option for enthusiast users. Thanks to Roman for teaming up with us in order to enable customers to implement this exciting tuning measure with our CPU coolers!"

Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and an industry leader in high-performance servers, workstations, and mini-PCs, today announced a newly designed ultra-compact, mainstream mini-PC for the GIGABYTE BRIXs lineup that adopts AMD Ryzen 7030 series processors. With AMD Zen 3 architecture and TSMC 7 nm process, AMD advanced its high-performance, efficient mobile processors for the mobile market to multitask and stay entertained. Even while adopting a compact size, all new mainstream BRIXs still delivers powerful computing that fits perfectly in any IoT deployment, whether for office use, education use, home use, digital signage, medical care, or KIOSK.

The most recent generation of mainstream BRIXs products in 2023 adopt an all-new chassis design. Computing performance has increased, but the design does not require an increase in the size of the chassis. Its appearance has curved, soft, and twisted lines with a liveliness that makes it very unobtrusive. By the way it was assembled and layered, and designing oblique angles around the base, a sense of simplicity is created to achieve a lightweight design. This allows users to enjoy ultimate computing performance while also having a stylish and elegant product.

The AMD Radeon RX 7600 mainstream graphics card slides a little closer to its ideal price, with an online retailer price-cut sending it down to $249, about $20 less than its MSRP of $269. The cheapest RX 7600 graphics card in the market right now is the MSI RX 7600 MECH 2X Classic, going for $249 on Amazon; followed by the XFX RX 7600 SWFT 210 at $258, and the ASRock RX 7600 Challenger at $259.99.

The sliding prices of the RX 7600 should improve its prospects against the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, which leaked 3DMark benchmarks show to be around 17% faster than the previous-generation RTX 3060 (12 GB) and 30% faster than its 8 GB variant. Our real-world testing puts the RX 7600 about 15% faster than the RTX 3060 (12 GB) at 1080p, which means there could be an interesting square-off between the RTX 4060 and RX 7600. NVIDIA has announced $299 as the baseline price for the RTX 4060, which should put pressure on AMD partners to trim prices of the RX 7600 to below the $250-mark.

Hardware leaker MEGAsizeGPU has uploaded photos of unreleased G.Skill DIMMs—they claim that the leaked hardware "is the world's first 24G*2 DDR5 expo module: F5-6000J4048F24GX2-TZ5NR." The next-gen Trident Z5 memory is said to be rated for a 6000 MT/s data transfer rate, and close-up shots of labels on heatsinks point to the sample units being non-binary 24 GB DDR5 memory modules that can support EXPO profiles for AMD's Ryzen 7000-series CPUs. MEGAsizeGPU claims that "6000 MHz is the sweetspot for Ryzen" (AM5).

Off-screen captures show a PC system booting up in DDR5-6000 mode—within a Windows OS environment, CPU-Z demonstrates that these new Trident Z5 modules are based on SpecTek-made 24Gb DRAM ICs (instead of binary 16Gb)—SpecTek is a division working under Micron Technology. G.SKILL will likely be selling non-binary Z5 memory in pairs, so we expect to see matched 48 GB dual-channel kits popping up on the market soon. MEGAsizeGPU did not mention anything about pricing or availability. Kingston debuted its own non-binary memory offerings at Computex 2023, but presentation material on hand did not mention whether their new models support AMD's Extended Profiles for Overclocking (EXPO).

AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT will be a much-needed performance-segment addition to the company's Radeon RX 7000-series, which has a massive performance gap between the enthusiast-class RX 7900 series, and the mainstream RX 7600. A report by "Moore's Law is Dead" makes a sensational claim that it is based on a whole new ASIC that's neither the "Navi 31" powering the RX 7900 series, nor the "Navi 32" designed for lower performance tiers, but something in between. This GPU will be AMD's answer to the "AD103." Apparently, the GPU features the same exact 350 mm² graphics compute die (GCD) as the "Navi 31," but on a smaller package resembling that of the "Navi 32." This large GCD is surrounded by four MCDs (memory cache dies), which amount to a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, and 64 MB of 2nd Gen Infinity Cache memory.

The GCD physically features 96 RDNA3 compute units, but AMD's product managers now have the ability to give the RX 7800 XT a much higher CU count than that of the "Navi 32," while being lower than that of the RX 7900 XT (which is configured with 84). It's rumored that the smaller "Navi 32" GCD tops out at 60 CU (3,840 stream processors), so the new ASIC will enable the RX 7800 XT to have a CU count anywhere between 60 to 84. The resulting RX 7800 XT could have an ASIC with a lower manufacturing cost than that of a theoretical Navi 31 with two disabled MCDs (>60 mm² of wasted 6 nm dies), and even if it ends up performing within 10% of the RX 7900 XT (and matching the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti in the process), it would do so with better pricing headroom. The same ASIC could even power mobile RX 7900 series, where the smaller package and narrower memory bus will conserve precious PCB footprint.

Oracle today introduced the latest generation of the Oracle Exadata platforms, the X10M, delivering unrivaled performance and availability for all Oracle Database workloads. Starting at the same price as the previous generation, these platforms support higher levels of database consolidation with more capacity and offer dramatically greater value than previous generations. Thousands of organizations, large and small, run their most critical and demanding workloads on Oracle Exadata including the majority of the largest financial, telecom, and retail businesses in the world.

"Our 12th generation Oracle Exadata X10M continues our strategy to provide customers with extreme scale, performance, and value, and we will make it available everywhere—in the cloud and on-premises," said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Mission-Critical Database Technologies, Oracle. "Customers that choose cloud deployments also benefit from running Oracle Autonomous Database, which further lowers costs by delivering true pay-per-use and eliminating database and infrastructure administration."