Intel is apparently taking its GPU business seriously, at the expense of AMD, as according to an article from CRN, Intel has hired Vineet Goel, former Corporate Vice President GPU architecture, graphics, machine learning and mobile platform at AMD. His new title at Intel is almost as longwinding, as he joined Intel as Vice President and General Manager, GPU architecture and IP engineering.

Goel spent his past five years at AMD and prior to that he was the Director of GPU compute solution and Adreno architecture at Qualcomm, although his first job listed on LinkedIn was as a fellow at AMD. His new position at Intel will have him lead the Xe GPU IP roadmap, or in other words, he'll be the person that decides what kind of tech Intel will be putting in its future GPUs.

AMD disrupted a decade of $350 quad-core from Intel with its path-breaking Ryzen processor and the "Zen" microarchitecture, which enters 5th year in the market (5 years since tapeout). AMD went into the Ryzen processor launch as a company that had been written off in the CPU space by PC enthusiasts, and "Zen" was at best expected to give AMD another round of processors to sell around $250. Boy was everyone wrong. The Ryzen 7 1800X eight-core processor brought HEDT-levels of performance to the mainstream desktop form-factor, and its HEDT counterpart, the Threadripper, dominated Intel's Core X series ever since.

Intel's first response to the 1800X was a 50% increase in CPU core counts calculating that AMD would only see marginal IPC increases going forward, and the superior IPC of "Skylake" cores, along with a 6-core/12-thread setup in the Core i7-8700K would see things through. This is roughly when Intel faced severe supply shortages that spiraled prices out of control, giving AMD space to come out with the Ryzen 7 2700X with a 4% IPC increase, and improved multi-threaded performance, but more importantly, predictable pricing at around $330. Months later, Intel refreshed its lineup with the 9th Gen, and finally attained parity with AMD in core counts, with the Core i9-9900K.

AMD on Monday released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 21.10.2 beta comes with optimization for "The Riftbreaker," and "Back 4 Blood." The company seems to be fixing a lot of driver-timeout bugs off late, and the latest fixes surround "Assassins Creed Origins" on certain GPUs based on the "Polaris" architecture. A rare game-freeze with "Dota 2" in OpenGL mode, has also been fixed. A bug that forced OBS to continue running in the background even after the end of a recording session and the user closing the application, has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.10.2 beta

ASUS today rolled out the TUF Gaming VG30VQL1A, a curved ultrawide gaming monitor that's closely related to the VG28UQL1A the company released in August 2021. As its name suggests, this one is a 30-inch. It comes with some impressive specs, including a 1500R curvature, 2560 x 1080 pixels native resolution, 1 ms MPRT response time, 200 Hz refresh-rate, ELMB, AMD FreeSync Premium, and HDR10, covering 127% of the sRGB palette. It uses a VA panel, and its other specs include 300 cd/m² maximum brightness, 3000:1 static contrast-ratio, and flicker-free brightness adjustments. Display inputs include two HDMI 2.0 ports, and a DisplayPort 1.2a. A 2-port USB 3.0 hub makes for the rest of it. The company didn't reveal pricing.

AMD is expected to announce their Radeon RX 6600 graphics card on October 13th according to leaked documents. The graphics card will feature a cut-down Navi 23 GPU with 28 Compute Units and 1,792 stream processors compared to 32 and 2,048 on the RX 6600 XT. The card has also been revealed to feature 8 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps on a 128-bit memory bus. The first images of cards from board partners including XFX, ASRock, and PowerColor have been published by VideoCardz covering 5 different RX 6600 models.

The XFX Speedster SWFT 210 features a unique shorter PCB design with a relocated 8-pin power connector in addition to a redesigned backplate which differs from the RX 6600 XT model. PowerColor appears to be releasing Hellhound and Fighter models with identical designs as their RX 6600 XT counterparts featuring 2-slot cooling and single 8-pin power connectors. ASRock is preparing two Challenger series models both sharing the same PCB with the single-fan Challenger ITX and dual-fan Challenger D. These new cards will reportedly match the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 according to a leaked internal benchmark.

Ahead of its launch, memory clock speeds of the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics card was leaked to the web by someone with access to a sample. GPU-Z detected the memory clocks on this card to be 14 Gbps, which is slower than the 16 Gbps clocks on the RX 6600 XT. This gives the RX 6600 about 12.5% lower memory bandwidth than its sibling (224 GB/s vs. 256 GB/s). Among the other specs detected by GPU-Z are 28 compute units, amounting to 1,792 stream processors (vs. 32 CUs and 2,048 of the RX 6600 XT); the same 8 GB memory amount and 128-bit memory bus width, and almost 2.50 GHz engine boost frequency. VideoCardz claims that in official benchmarks by AMD, the RX 6600 is shown trading blows with the GeForce RTX 3060.

Apparently, AMD processors officially compatible with Windows 11, exhibit a three-times increase in L3 cache latency with the new operating system. The new operating system is also found to break the "preferred cores" system on AMD processors (UEFI CPPC2), in which the two "best" CPU cores, which can sustain the highest boost frequencies, are highlighted to the operating system, so most of the light-threaded traffic could be sent to them.

AMD and Microsoft jointly made this discovery, and listed out potential impact on application performance. The increased L3 cache latency affects performance of applications sensitive to memory performance. They also warn of a 10-15% loss in gaming performance. On the other hand, a dysfunctional "preferred cores" system would mean reduced performance in light-threaded tasks as the OS is unaware which are the processor's two best cores. Thankfully, both issues can be fixed via software updates, and AMD is working with Microsoft to push fixes for both issues through Windows Update, in an update rollout scheduled within October 2021.

Intel's recently appointed CEO wasn't mincing words in a recent interview with CRN, where he claimed that Intel not only "have the best product" but also that "this period of time when people could say, "Hey, [AMD] is leading," that's over." We'd say them are fighting words, regardless of what various leaks have suggested, since Intel still has a lot to prove with its upcoming Alder Lake CPUs.

Gelsinger continues with "We have 80 percent market share. We have the best software assets that are available in the industry. We do the best job supporting our partners and our OEMs with it. We have an incredible brand that our channel partners, customers want and trust. Wow, that's a lot of assets in that. If the channel partner doesn't see value in that, I want to talk to him." It's pretty clear from this that Intel believes that they're doing a bang up job and if their customers don't see it, then they need a talking to.

AMD on Monday released the latest version of the Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 20.10.1 beta comes with optimization for the Windows 11 operating system. Game-specific optimizations include "Far Cry 6," where it posts 10% performance gains over the previous driver; "Battlefield 2042 Open Beta," "Naraka: Bladepoint," and a 12% performance uplift for "Player Unknown's Battlegrounds" with DirectX 12 at 4K with Ultra settings.

Among the issues fixed include rare driver timeouts noticed on "Horizon Zero Dawn" and "The Medium" on RX 6000 series graphics cards such as the RX 6700 XT, and when gaming+streaming on RX 500 series cards. An issue with high idle memory clocks on multi-monitor setups has been fixed. Incorrect power reporting by Radeon Software at full load, has been fixed. Foliage artifacting in "Arma 3" and "Wreckfest" have been fixed.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.10.1 beta

Samsung appears to be in a hurry to beat Apple and Qualcomm at bringing real-time ray tracing to the smartphone space, with its next-generation Exynos 2200 "Pamir" SoC. The chip integrates a graphics processor based on the AMD RDNA2 architecture, codenamed "Voyager." Samsung all but confirmed that the compute units of this will feature Ray Accelerators, the hardware component that performs ray-intersection calculations. The "Voyager" iGPU, as implemented on the Exynos 2200 SoC, physically features six RDNA2 compute units (384 stream processors), and hence six Ray Accelerators.

Built on the 4 nm EUV silicon fabrication process, Exynos 2200 will feature not two, but three kinds of CPU cores—four lightweight efficiency cores, three mid-tier cores, and one ultra high-performance core. Each of these three operate in unique performance/Watt bands, giving software finer-grained control over the kinds of hardware resources they want. Samsung is expected to debut the Exynos 2200 with its next-generation Galaxy S and Galaxy Note devices.

Launch of AMD's upcoming Ryzen Threadripper 5000 series high-end desktop (HEDT) and Threadripper WX workstation processors, is rumored to have been delayed to 2022, according to Greymon55, a reliable source with AMD leaks. Codenamed "Chagall," these processors are compatible with existing sTRX4 and sWRX8 motherboards, based on the AMD TRX40 and AMD WRX80 chipsets, respectively. What's new, is the "Zen 3" microarchitecture.

It remains to be seen if the delay is the result of a last-minute decision by AMD to go with the newer "Zen 3" CCD that comes with 3D Vertical Cache technology, over the conventional "Zen 3" CCD; or some other reason. A 2022 launch would mean that Threadripper 5000 series will be launching around the time when Intel has desktop platforms with DDR5 memory and PCI-Express Gen 5. Threadripper 5000 chips with quad-channel DDR4 memory (four 64-bit wide channels) will be seen offering only comparable memory bandwidth to "Alder Lake" systems with overclocked DDR5 memory (four 40-bit wide channels). AMD is likely to prioritize its next "big" socket for the enterprise segment with EPYC "Genoa," as the company could find itself embattled with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors that come with next-gen I/O.

AMD today announced a goal to deliver a 30x increase in energy efficiency for AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators in Artificial Intelligence (AI) training and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications running on accelerated compute nodes by 2025.1 Accomplishing this ambitious goal will require AMD to increase the energy efficiency of a compute node at a rate that is more than 2.5x faster than the aggregate industry-wide improvement made during the last five years.

Accelerated compute nodes are the most powerful and advanced computing systems in the world used for scientific research and large-scale supercomputer simulations. They provide the computing capability used by scientists to achieve breakthroughs across many fields including material sciences, climate predictions, genomics, drug discovery and alternative energy. Accelerated nodes are also integral for training AI neural networks that are currently used for activities including speech recognition, language translation and expert recommendation systems, with similar promising uses over the coming decade. The 30x goal would save billions of kilowatt hours of electricity in 2025, reducing the power required for these systems to complete a single calculation by 97% over five years.

Remember that Core i9-12900K CPU-Z leak from last week? It had the multi-threaded score blurred out and now we know why. A new CPU-Z screenshot has shown up on Twitter and although the single threaded score is still beating the AMD Ryzen 5950X baseline single core score by a comfortable margin, it's behind when we're switching to the multi-threaded score.

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that eight big and eight small CPU cores doesn't beat AMD's 16 big cores, but this was apparently expected by some. This is not saying that Intel doesn't get close as you can see, but it's also worth keeping in mind that Intel runs on 24 threads vs. AMD's 32 threads. The Core i9-12900K is said to be running on stock clocks, but no other information was provided. Once again, take this for what it is while we wait for the actual launch date and proper benchmarks.

Silicon Lottery is a boutique online store offering prebinned Intel and AMD CPUs that have been tested to reach guaranteed clock speeds when overclocked. The store has been operating for seven years but have recently announced that they will be ceasing operation on October 31st. This news comes as the culmination of multiple factors that have been impacting the store including a shift from Intel to prebin their K-series processors reducing their overclocking potential. This maximization of existing silicon also meant that there was limited opportunity for the store to find enough faster processors to sell. The final influence was the move by Intel to switch from thermal compound under the IHS to solder Tim with their 9th generation CPUs which severely limits the thermal advantages gained from delidding. The general component shortages and delays associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have also impacted the business, the complete statement from Silicon Lottery can be found below.

Finally some potentially good news, as AMD's CEO Lisa Su is bringing hope that the current chip shortage situation might improve over the next 18 to 24 months according to a new piece on CNBC. She's expecting new chip fabs to have come online by then, although no details were mentioned, one would presume it involves TSMC in AMD's case.

Lisa Su is quoted saying "We've always gone through cycles of ups and downs, where demand has exceeded supply, or vice versa, this time, it's different." "The pandemic has just taken demand to a new level". This isn't exactly breaking news by now, but it also seems like the demand for computers has reached its peak and is now plateauing ahead of what will likely be a drop in sales come next year, but that doesn't mean the demand for chips will go down. Lisa Su is also expecting further consolidation in the industry, which has its upsides and downsides, but her take on it is that "if you want to do something very large for the industry, you know, scale is important." AMD should know this better than most companies, since they've scaled their business from the brink of bankruptcy to where they are today.

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su last Friday joined an exclusive list of personalities whose contributions to he semiconductor industry have been deemed relevant enough to receive the prestigious Robert N. Noyce medal. The award, attributed by the IEEE and funded by Intel, was awarded to Lisa Su in recognition of her "leadership in groundbreaking semiconductor products and successful business strategies that contributed to the strength of the microelectronics industry." Her current and past actions at AMD have pulled most of the weight behind this recognition, as Dr. Lisa Su has completely turned around a company that was bleeding talent and dollars, reversing its 2$ per share lows from AMD's 2014 up to today's $110 per share.

Lisa Su divides her carrier in two parts: the first ten to 15 years where she moved and produced as an MIT-trained electrical engineer, where she earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees on the subject. The move towards management of research and technological teams actually happened during her stint in IBM; after 11 years at the company, in 2006 she was appointed vice president of IBM's semiconductor research and development center in New York. She then moved on to AMD as senior vice president in charge of the company's global business units, where she was so impressively skilled it only took her two years to become President and CEO of AMD. Her nomination for the Robert N. Noyce Medal paints her as the first woman to have ever received it. In 1993, MIT female graduates where 32% of the total; in 2016, that number increased to 50%.

Stephanie Brenham, Team Lead Programmer for Ubisoft's upcoming AAA Far Cry 6, recently spoke to WCCFTech on the upcoming Far Cry installment. Stephanie went into some detail regarding the graphics and performance options, and an interesting fact that surfaced was that neither Sony's PS5 nor Microsoft's Xbox Series consoles will feature ray tracing enabled on their respective versions of the game. Apparently, ray tracing will be a PC-exclusive feature, as console versions of the game are targeting higher render resolution and more fluid framerates over expensive graphics options such as ray tracing. And even on PC, it'll be a hybrid form of it, and not a full implementation: ray tracing is supported for both shadows and reflections, but Ubisoft opted for a hybrid approach here, marrying traditional rendering with ray tracing so as to improve performance in mainstream PC hardware.

"Ray tracing is a PC-only feature," Stephanie Brenham said. "On console, our objective has been to take advantage of new hardware capabilities, optimizing performance targeting 4K and achieving 60 FPS." This does somewhat fall in the face of performance expectations set by both Sony and Microsoft; both companies made (and still make) extensive use of ray tracing support on the marketing campaigns for their consoles. However, as we've seen in the past, enabling ray tracing comes with severe performance penalties in even the latest and greatest PC hardware (sometimes not to best effect, even), which still outclasses even the latest consoles' powerful innards (compared to their predecessors, of course).

AMD's Fidelity Super Resolution (FSR) tech is being implemented in RPSCS3, one of the foremost emulators for Sony's Playstation 3. The emulator allows PC users to play otherwise PS3-exclusive games via software emulation. The nature of this emulation, however, leads to a couple important aspects. One pertains to performance: emulating non-existent hardware is one of the most resource-hungry workloads one can think of, and is highly dependent on the emulator's coding quality. Another is that since this is a software solution, it does allow to changes in maximum render resolution, for example, or the addition of visual effects or other modifications to the rendering pipeline. One limitation of this approach is that game support has to be added almost manually, checking and correcting the emulators' behaviors according to the software being played.

AMD's FSR tech been received with a rather enthusiastic response. This is in part due to its open source nature, but also because of its apparent ease of implementation and its higher compatibility with graphics cards new, old, and from the competition - unlike NVIDIA's DLSS, which requires specific hardware (Tensor cores) to be present in the GPU chip, locking it to only the latest NVIDIA products. This nature of FSR has led to its integrationn on the RPCS3 emulator, promising a relatively easy to implement performance and image quality increase compared to the original rendering pipeline, including 4K upscaling. Check after the break for a video of the tech in action (spoiler: the quality difference isn't nearly as close as what the thumbnail implies).

An alleged Intel Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake-S" sample is shown beating the 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX HEDT processor at AMD's favorite benchmark, Cinebench R23, in its multi-threaded (nT) test. At this point it's not known whether the i9-12900K is overclocked, but the CPU-Z instance in the screenshot reads 5.30 GHz, which could very well be the processor's stock Thermal Velocity Boost frequency. The sample scored upward of 30000 points, putting it above the Threadripper 2990WX reference score in Cinebench.

The 2990WX is based on the "Zen+" microarchitecture, and released in 2018, but is a 32-core/64-thread chip that should have ripped through this rendering workload. The i9-12900K, on the other hand, has eight "Golden Cove" performance cores that have HyperThreading, in addition to 8 "Gracemont" efficiency cores that lack HTT. This benchmark was run on Windows 10, which lacks awareness of the Intel Thread Director, a hardware component that optimizes utilization of the two kinds of CPU cores. Windows 11 is known to feature better awareness of hybrid core architectures. The i9-12900K sample is possibly installed on a Gigabyte Z690 AORUS Ultra motherboard, and has 32 GB of DDR5-5200 memory (two modules, logically four 40-bit channels).

The AMD Radeon RX 6600 is expected to launch in October after documents received by VideoCardz reveal that reviews for the card are set to be published on October 13th. The documents reveal that board partners who will be releasing cards for review will need to have informed AMD by September 15th and can begin shipping them to reviewers on September 29th. The AMD Radeon RX 6600 will use the Navi 23 GPU with 4 Compute Units disabled for a total of 28. This will give the card 1792 Stream Processors which will be paired with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. The documents also show that AMD is not planning to release an RX 6600 reference card so no pricing information was included. We expect that the card will be shortly available after the listed review embargo is lifted on October 13th at 9 AM EST.

AMD today released the latest version of their Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers, guaranteeing the best possible experience for AMD GPU users. The latest driver revision introduces support for World War Z: Aftermath, and Amazon's New World MMORPG. Besides that initial game release support, the drivers also deliver an up to 13% performance improvement in Diablo II: Resurrected. This performance increase seems to solve a rendering bottleneck experienced with the RX 6700 XT graphics card at 4K resolution, with Very High settings enabled.

AMD also fixed four outstanding issues with this driver release. The CPU Additional Metrics section within the Performance tab should now show up for all users; compatibility error messages when trying to load a previously saved tuning profile should no longer appear; water should no longer spontaneously evaporate in Hitman III for RX 6000 series users; CPU Auto Overclock in Radeon Software should no longer be absent for users sporting an AMD 5000 series CPU alongside an RX 6000 series graphics card. Check after the break for the list of outstanding issues; as always, you can grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.9.2

The prices for NVIDIA Ampere and AMD RDNA 2 GPUs have increased 6% - 7% in Germany since August according to the latest report from 3DCenter. The report covers the period from January 2021 to September 2021 where prices reached 304% and 214% of MSRP for NVIDIA RTX 30 and AMD RX 6000 cards earlier this year before coming down to 150% and 153% respectively. We had hoped that this trend might continue downwards but these reductions have started to reverse with prices steadily increasing since early August. The latest period from August 29th to September 19th saw NVIDIA RTX 30 series prices increase from 159% of MSRP to 170% while AMD RX 6000 cards rose from 164% to 174%.

These price trends can be fairly closely attributed to the changes in supply as shown with the addition of an availability trend line to the graph in this latest report. The card which has experienced the largest price increase relative to MSRP is the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT which now sells for double the recommended € 649 price at € 1299. The least affected card is the NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti retailing for 26% above it's € 1199 MSRP at € 1511.

XFX formally launched the Radeon RX 6900 XT Speedster ZERO WB, a graphics card it teased last month. The company's new flagship product, the Speedster ZERO WB is a graphics card with a factory-fitted full-coverage water-block, for those with DIY liquid-cooling setups. It appears to be based on an all new PCB with a more tuned-up 14+2 phase VRM setup than that of the air-cooled RX 6900 XT Speedster MERC 319, which pulls power from a trio of 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

Under the hood is a 7 nm "Navi 21" XTXH silicon, which is able to sustain 10% higher engine clocks than the standard "Navi 21," and XFX claims that it has unlocked overdrive slider limit (the de facto maximum overclock), beyond 3 GHz. Out of the box, the card comes with a maximum boost frequency of 2525 MHz, compared to 2250 MHz AMD-reference. The water block came about from a collaboration with EK Water Blocks, and combines a nickel-plated copper primary material with a slightly frosted acrylic top that's studded with addressable RGB LEDs. XFX didn't reveal pricing.

With the 15.6 and 17.3 inch XMG APEX gaming laptops, XMG is positioning a new model series below its own high-end range consisting of the NEO and PRO series. These new laptops combine mobile AMD eight-core processors up to the Ryzen 9 5900HX with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards up to the RTX 3070. The company is simultaneously introducing the XMG FOCUS, a new product series in the entry-level segment. Intel's Core i7-11800H and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti offer decent gaming performance, while good connectivity and memory round off the overall package. All four new models feature an IPS display with 144 Hz.

Until now, the XMG APEX 15 in the older E20 generation represented uncompromising desktop CPU performance, with processors up to the Ryzen 9 3950X in a laptop. Although XMG is already working on a direct successor under a slightly different name, it is unleashing the XMG APEX 15 and APEX 17 of the M21 generation for the time being with the currently fastest eight-core mobile processors from AMD. The laptops are available with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H as well as with the slightly faster Ryzen 9 5900HX from the 54 watt TDP class, as well as with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 or RTX 3060 in the respective maximum TGP configuration (RTX 3070: 125 watts plus 15 watts Dynamic Boost 2.0; RTX 3060: 115 watts plus 15 watts Dynamic Boost 2.0).

Chinese cooler manufacturer Cool Server have recently listed several upcoming coolers for the AMD Zen 4 AM5 & SP5 sockets. The manufacturer has listed 5 AM5 coolers, and 4 SP5 coolers all targeted towards the enterprise sector. The lineup includes several passive coolers which rely on case airflow while the others feature high-performance fans which can get quite noisy. The AM5 socket will be introduced with the next-generation Zen 4 Ryzen processors while the SP5 (LGA6096) socket has been prepared for the Zen 4 EPYC processors. The complete list of coolers can be found below.