AMD's Threadripper Pro WX or workstation processors are set to finally join the 5000-series of AMD CPU's if the latest leaks are to be believed. It would seem that AMD is planning no less than five new SKUs, or one more than the current 3000-series of workstation chips. The new entry is a 24 core, 48 thread chip, which was lacking from the current range. As such, the entire series will consist of 12, 16, 24, 32 and 64 core options, all with twice as many threads. All chips have a common 4.5 GHz peak turbo clock, but the base clocks vary by quite a bit, depending on the core count.

The 12 core 5945WX has a base clock of 4.1 GHz, with the 16 core 5955WX coming in at 4 GHz, the 24 core 5965WX then drops to 3.8 GHz, followed by the 32 core 5975WX at 3.6 GHz. Finally the 64 core 5995WX is said to only muster a base clock of 2.7 GHz. All five CPUs have a TDP rating of 280 Watts. The new Threadripper chips are expected to work in current boards that sport a WRX80 socket. As such, PCIe lanes and memory support is expected to remain the same as for the 3000-series.

Unless you have been living under a rock, chances are you are following the news about the Russia-Ukraine war disputes. Not to get too political, we are here to report about your favorite rivals—AMD and Intel—officially stopping the delivery of processors to Russia and Belarus. Firstly, an AMD representative told PCWorld that "Based on sanctions placed on Russia by the United States and other nations, at this time AMD is suspending its sales and distribution of our products into Russia and Belarus. It is all AMD products and products we power (PCs, etc) in Russia and Belarus." Additionally, Intel posted an official quote, which you can find below.

IntelIntel condemns the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and we have suspended all shipments to customers in both Russia and Belarus. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, including the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends and loved ones in the region.

"We are working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, especially those with close ties to this region. We have launched an employee donation and matching campaign through the Intel Foundation that has already raised over $1.2 million for relief efforts, and we are proud of the work our teams in surrounding areas including Poland, Germany and Romania are doing to aid refugees. We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine and the global community in calling for an immediate end to this war and a swift return to peace.

The Radeon 680M integrated graphics powering the AMD Ryzen 6000-series mobile processors is proving to be an entry-level discrete-GPU killer. TechEpiphany posted a video presentation showing the iGPU's real-world gameplay performance with the AAA title "Cyberpunk 2077" at Full HD (1080p), with a little help from FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). TechEpiphany used an ASUS TUF GAMING F17 notebook powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H "Rembrandt" processor that has the full Radeon 680M iGPU unlocked, with all its 12 RDNA2 compute units (768 stream processors), 12 Ray Accelerators, 16 ROPs, and 48 TMUs, enabled. The notebook also features a GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, but for this testing, it was disabled.

The first part of the video shows the game running at 1080p and Medium-High settings, with FSR set at Ultra Quality. Here, the iGPU is managing 30-40 FPS. Real-time ray tracing is disabled. In the second part, they enabled ray tracing and FidelityFX Super Resolution, but this is where the iGPU runs out of steam. Frame-rates drop to unplayable levels, but there still aren't any noticeable visual artifacts or rendering errors typically associated with iGPUs made to render games above their pay-grade. It's still impressive to see that AMD following through on its promise of bringing 1080p gaming across a broader range of titles. The TechEpiphany video presentation can be watched in the source link below.

Intel, along with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE), AMD, Arm, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., have announced the establishment of an industry consortium to promote an open die-to-die interconnect standard called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). Building on its work on the open Advanced Interface Bus (AIB), Intel developed the UCIe standard and donated it to the group of founding members as an open specification that defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package, enabling an open chiplet ecosystem and ubiquitous interconnect at the package level.

"Integrating multiple chiplets in a package to deliver product innovation across market segments is the future of the semiconductor industry and a pillar of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy," said Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Artificial Intelligence Group at Intel. "Critical to this future is an open chiplet ecosystem with key industry partners working together under the UCIe Consortium toward a common goal of transforming the way the industry delivers new products and continues to deliver on the promise of Moore's Law."

It will be an unexpectedly busy March for AMD, with the company launching three distinct products across its processor lines. The first one, which we reported earlier this morning, speaks of a late-March availability of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D 8-core/16-thread Socket AM4 processor, which AMD claims offers gaming performance on par with the Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake." It turns out, there are two more surprises.

Apparently the company is ready with Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 series workstation processors. Designed for Socket sWRX8 motherboards based on the only chipset option available—the AMD WRX80, these are the first Threadripper products based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, and feature 8-channel DDR4 memory, and up to 128 PCI-Express Gen4 lanes for workstation connectivity. Unfortunately, you can't buy one of these in the retail channel, as AMD is making them OEM-only. The first pre-built workstations will arrive as early as next week (March 8). At this point we still don't know if these chips use the newer "Zen 3" CCD with 3D Vertical Cache, or the conventional "Zen 3" CCD with 32 MB planar L3 cache.

Based on details posted by the Commercial Times in Taiwan, it would appear that Samsung Foundry is working on ways to win over customers from TSMC. The backstory is that fabless chip makers have had to change foundries over time, due to the fact that from a foundry side, it's expensive to be on the cutting edge and many foundries have stepped out of the race. This has left the fabless chip makers with fewer options and with TSMC as the de facto industry leader today. That said, as we've seen, NVIDIA and Qualcomm picked Samsung Foundry for some of their latest chips, but based on industry rumours, the yields aren't great.

Samsung Foundry has been trying to win over customers by offering attractive pricing compared to TSMC, but far from everyone has been interested. Some companies, like Apple, have tried to work with Samsung, but abandoned them in the end in favour of TSMC. Samsung is said to be courting both AMD and NVIDIA, as well as others, although only time will tell if we'll see any future product from either company being manufactured by Samsung Foundry. The fact that there are investigations into the yields at Samsung Foundry should be a concern for any future customer and isn't a good sign of where the company is heading.

With motherboard vendors posting UEFI firmware updates to support it, we were wondering where the actually processor is. It turns out, that the new AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D started shipping from factories. Greymon55, a reliable source with hardware leaks, states that 5800X3D is shipped, and the first retail batch of these processors could reach markets by the end of the month (the end of March, 2022).

The 5800X3D is the first client processor to feature a 3D stacked-die design. AMD is introducing the new 3D Vertical Cache, a 64 MB addition to the processor's 32 MB on-die cache, which works contiguously as a 96 MB L3 cache that each of the processor's eight "Zen 3" cores can access. Apparently "Zen 3" with 3D Vertical Cache has major performance gains, with AMD claiming gaming performance parity with the Core i9-12900K.

Pricing of AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core/32-thread "Zen 3" processor dropped to a surprising all-time-low of $600 on Newegg, down from its original $800, a 25% drop in price. This puts the 5950X more or less on par with the pricing of the Intel Core i9-12900K (±$20 variance). The 12-core/24-thread 5900X is going for $450, which is still significantly higher than the $380 that the Core i7-12700K commands.

The 5950X continues to lead the i9-12900K in various heavily multi-threaded productivity tasks, although it has lost the gaming performance edge to the new Intel chip. AMD is attempting to remedy this with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor that the company claims offers gaming performance parity, but will fall behind in multi-threaded productivity on account of fewer cores. If you're planning to pick a 5950X from Newegg for a build-from-scratch, don't forget to check out combo deals with motherboards, where you get to save a further $30-odd.

The recent NVIDIA data-leak springs up information on various upcoming graphics parts. Besides "Ada Lovelace," "Hopper," we come across a new codename, "Blackwell." It turns out that NVIDIA is splitting the the graphics and compute architecture naming with the next generation, not unlike what AMD did, with its RDNA and CDNA series. The current "Ampere" architecture is being used both for compute and graphics, with the streaming multiprocessor for the two being slightly different—the compute "Ampere" has more FP64 and Tensor components, while the graphics "Ampere" does away with these in favor of RT cores and graphics-relevant components.

The graphics architecture to succeed GeForce "Ampere" will be GeForce "Ada Lovelace." GPUs in this series are identified in the leaked code as "AD102," "AD103," "AD104," "AD106," "AD107," and "AD10B," succeeding a similar numbering for parts with the "A" (GeForce Ampere) series. The compute architecture succeeding "Ampere" will be codenamed "Hopper." with parts in the series being codenamed "GH100" and "GH202." Another compute or datacenter architecture is "Blackwell," with parts being codenamed "GB100" and "GB102." From all accounts, NVIDIA is planning to launch the GeForce 40-series "Ada" graphics card lineup in the second half of 2022. The company is in need of a similar refresh for its compute product lineup, and could debut "Hopper" either toward the end of 2022 or next year. "Blackwell" could follow "Hopper."

RockitCool is a new entrant towards the deliding and IHS replacement game, and the company is offering new delid kits that allow users to replace the Integrated Heatspreader (IHS) on their CPUs in an attempt to achieve better operating temperatures - and potentially improve performance. Considered by some to be one of the most daring quests towards extracting the most performance possible from a given chip, the deliding process is, however, not without its dangers, and will void CPU warranties irrespective of the tool - or care - employed in the operation.

RockItCool's website sprung up earlier this year, and the website doesn't count with many user reviews - but those that are there seem to be glowing. The company specializes in providing complete delid and pure-copper IHS replacement kits, taking advantage of copper's higher thermal conductivity as a way to increase the amount of heat that can be pulled away from the CPU - improving its operating temperatures and power profiles. The copper IHS themselves have guidance markings to ease concerns regarding the application of liquid metal itself, which is a particularly risky substance to misapply around electrical circuitry.

GIGABYTE over the last week posted UEFI firmware updates for its Socket AM4 motherboards that add support for the upcoming AMD Ryzen 5800X3D processor. Released for motherboards across its AMD 400-series and 500-series lineups; the updates pack AGESA ComboPI V2 1.2.0.6 Patch-b microcode. Another key feature of these updates are that they re-introduce the "Max CPU Boost Clock Override" toggle, which appears when a Ryzen 5000 "Vermeer" processor is installed.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is an 8-core/16-thread processor based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, and packs the AMD 3D Vertical Cache (3DV Cache) technology, featuring 100 MB of Total Cache (AMD jargon for the sum of all L2 + L3 cache). The company claims gaming performance on par with the Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake" processor. The re-introduction of the Boost Frequency overrides signal that the company wants enthusiasts to go to town with overclocking, making this a possible response to the i9-12900KS gaming performance, at a lower price-point.

AMD has today released version 22.2.3 of their Adrenalin Radeon drivers adding support for Elden Ring and improving performance for Shadow Warrior 3 and GRID Legends. The drivers are reported to increase performance 5% - 6% in Shadow Warrior 3 when running at 4K High settings compared to Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.2.2 while in GRID legends at 4K Ultra High settings this ranged from 7% - 15%. The known issues remain identical to those from version 22.2.2 with the complete change-log listed below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.2.3

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced that its board of directors approved a new $8 billion share repurchase program. The new authorization is in addition to the $4 billion share repurchase program announced in May 2021, under which the company has repurchased approximately $3 billion of shares of AMD common stock.

"We are pleased to expand our share repurchase program based on the strength of our balance sheet and expectations for future free cash flow generation," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "With our strong financial performance, we are able to increase investments to drive long-term growth while returning additional value to our shareholders."

Intel is designing a "Halo" SKU of a future generation of mobile processors with a goal to match Apple's in-house silicon of the time. Slated for tape-out some time in 2023, with mass-production expected in 2024, the 15th Generation Core "Arrow Lake-P Halo" processor is being designed specifically to compete with Apple's "premium 14-inch laptop" (presumably the MacBook Pro) that the company could have around 2024, based on an in-house Apple silicon. This is to essentially tell its notebook partners that they will have an SoC capable of making their devices in the class truly competitive. Apple relies on a highly scaled out Arm-based SoC based on in-house IP blocks, with a software that's closely optimized for it. Intel's effort appears to chase down its performance and efficiency.

The Core "Arrow Lake" microarchitecture succeeds the 14th Gen "Meteor Lake." It is a multi-chip module (MCM) of three distinct dies built on different fabrication nodes, in line with the company's IDM 2.0 strategy. These nodes are Intel 4 (comparable to TSMC N7 or N6), Intel 20A (comparable to TSMC N5), and an "external" 3 nm-class node that's just the TSMC N3. The compute tile, or the die which houses the CPU cores, combines a hybrid CPU setup of 6 P-cores, and 8 E-cores. The performance cores are likely successors of the "Redwood Cove" P-cores powering the "Meteor Lake" compute tiles. Intel appears to be using one kind of E-cores across two generations (eg: Gracemont across Alder Lake and Raptor Lake). If this is any indication, Arrow Lake could continue to use "Crestmont" E-cores. Things get interesting with the Graphics tile.

Since the launch of AMD's Ryzen processors, the CPU market share has been reshaped in AMD's favor. Intel's offerings were matched by team red, and AMD quickly broke into the consumer market. However, according to the latest round of reports, it seems like that is no longer the case. As per the Japanese DIY market analysis from BCNR, sales of Intel processors started rising in mid-2021, and the company is managing to grab some market share from AMD. After nearly two years of dominance in the Japanese market, AMD is now behind Intel in sales, and team blue is getting back to its older setting.

Another source that is generally a pretty good indicator of the market share of Intel and AMD processor is PassMark. As users submit their benchmark runs, the PassMark software developer has updated the CPU market share statistics chart, mainly showing the desktop segment. It also concludes the same thing as BCRN: Intel is again gaining share in the CPU market. As it always goes hand-in-hand, AMD is losing the CPU marker share naturally. This is due to many reasons, and it seems like Intel's marketing and supply tactics are paying off. Intel now sits at 60% share, while AMD is set at 40%.

This week, the International Solid-State Circuits Conference is taking place online and during one of the sessions, AMD shared some more details of its 3D V-Cache design. The interesting part here is the overall design of AMD's 3D V-Cache, as well as how it interfaces with its CPU dies. The cache chip itself is said to measure 36 mm² and interfaces directly with the L3 cache using a Through Silicon Via or TSV interface. For all the CPU cores to be able to communicate with the 3D V-Cache, AMD has implemented a shared ring bus design at the L3 level. The entire L3 cache is said to be available to each of the cores, which should further help improve performance.

The 3D V-Cache is made up of multiple 8 MB "slices" which has a 1,024 contact interface with a single CPU core, for a total of 8,192 connections in total between the CCX and the 3D V-Cache. This allows for a bandwidth in excess of two terabyte per second, per slice, in full duplex mode. This should allow for full L3 speeds for the 3D V-Cache, despite the fact that it's not an integrated part of the CCX. AMD is also said to have improved the design of its CCX for the upcoming Ryzen 7 5800X3D in several ways to try and reduce the power draw, while improving clock speeds. AMD has yet to reveal a launch date for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but it'll be interesting to see if the 3D V-Cache and the various minor optimizations can make it competitive with Intel's Alder Lake CPUs until Zen 4 arrives.

The recently announced AMD Ryzen 6000 series mobile Zen 3+ processors feature a significant graphics improvement with up to 12 RDNA2 Compute Units available. These new graphics solutions have recently been tested and compared by an engineer working for Lenovo in China. The Radeon 680M and Radeon 660M feature 12 and 6 RDNA2 Compute Units respectively and have been tested against the NVIDIA MX450 and the Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7. The Radeon 680M represents an 85% performance improvement over the Radeon RX Vega 8 and is 24% faster than the discrete NVIDIA MX450 mobile GPU in 3DMark. This lead narrows in real-world tests where the 680M is only 1.1% faster than the MX450 and the 660M is 37% slower.

The mid-range Radeon 660M is still significantly faster than the Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 (96EU) found in the i7-12700H beating it by 9% in 1080P gaming. The review also looks at power efficiency for the Radeon 660M & 680M showing that in their highest power configurations performance increases by 10% for the 660M and 42% for the 680M. The Radeon 680M remains behind the NVIDIA GTX 1650 Max-Q which holds a 25% lead. The Ryzen 6000 mobile series will be available in laptops starting from next month.

AMD on Thursday unveiled its Ryzen 6000 series "Rembrandt" mobile processors. The company claims these chips offer generational increases in CPU performance, along with big leaps in energy-efficiency and integrated graphics performance. At the heart of these processors is the new 6 nm "Rembrandt" silicon that the company is building on the TSMC N6 silicon fabrication node that leverages EUV lithography.

The "Rembrandt" silicon broadly combines an 8-core/16-thread CPU based on the new Zen 3+ microarchitecture, a large new iGPU based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture, complete with real-time ray tracing support; a DDR5 + LPDDR5 memory controller, and a full PCI-Express Gen4 root-complex. The iGPU, memory interface, and PCIe interface are generational updates over the previous-gen "Cezanne," and it may seem like the CPU is largely unchanged, but AMD claims there are several optimizations that have gone into the CPU to earn the "+" tag.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin. Bearing the fancy number 22.2.2, these drivers add optimization for "Total War: Warhammer III." The drivers also add major optimization for AMD Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) when you pair AMD "Cezanne" based processors with compatible Radeon RX 6000 and RX 5000 series GPUs, with game-specific performance improving by as much as 23%. Details of individual use-cases in the change-log below. With this release, the company didn't fix any new bugs, but identified several of them. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.2.2 beta

AMD announced the expansion of Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) AMD EPYC processor-based offerings with the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances. According to AWS, the C6a instances offer up to 15% better compute price performance over previous generation C5a instances for a variety of compute focused workloads.

The C6a instances support compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. This is the second AWS EC2 instance type powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, following the release of the M6a instances. These instances continue the collaboration between AWS and AMD providing AWS EC2 customers access to the performance and price performance capabilities of the latest generation of AMD EPYC processors.

AMD today announced that the AMD board has elected President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su as the chair of the board and John E. Caldwell as lead independent director. Caldwell joined the AMD board in 2006 and has served as chair since May 2016. AMD also announced that former Xilinx board members Jon Olson and Elizabeth Vanderslice have joined the AMD board in conjunction with the close of AMD's acquisition of Xilinx.

"Under Lisa's leadership, AMD has successfully executed a multi-year strategy that has significantly re-shaped the company's product portfolio and customer set and delivered industry-leading growth," said Caldwell. "As CEO and chair, Lisa will now have an ability to drive an even sharper focus for AMD and create greater shareholder value. I am also excited to welcome Jon and Elizabeth to the board as a part of the successful completion of the Xilinx acquisition. Their depth of industry knowledge and expertise are valuable additions to the board that will help AMD continue its strong growth."

Following its acquisition of FPGA and network hardware giant Xilinx, AMD is a larger company in terms of market capitalization. At closing bell on Tuesday (15/02), this figure stands at $199.58 billion, which for the very first time in AMD's history, beats rival Intel, which closed at $197.20 billion. Chiakokhua, aka Retired Engineer, provided the calculation that arrives at the $199.58 billion market cap. Before close, AMD had a share-count of 1.216 billion. 427 million shares were issued to Xilinx shareholders, resulting in a share-count (after close) of 1.643 billion, which at a share price of $121.47 works out to $199.58 billion. At $121.47, AMD is still trading around 26% lower than its all-time high price of $165.46.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the completion of its acquisition of Xilinx in an all-stock transaction. The acquisition, originally announced on October 27, 2020, creates the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader with significantly expanded scale and the strongest portfolio of leadership computing, graphics and adaptive SoC products. AMD expects the acquisition to be accretive to non-GAAP margins, non-GAAP EPS and free cash flow generation in the first year.

"The acquisition of Xilinx brings together a highly complementary set of products, customers and markets combined with differentiated IP and world-class talent to create the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "Xilinx offers industry-leading FPGAs, adaptive SoCs, AI engines and software expertise that enable AMD to offer the strongest portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing solutions in the industry and capture a larger share of the approximately $135 billion market opportunity we see across cloud, edge and intelligent devices."

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced that AMD EPYC processors will power the new C2D virtual machine offering from Google Cloud, bringing customers strong performance and compute power for high-performance (HPC) memory-bound workloads in areas like electronic design automation (EDA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This announcement continues the momentum for AMD EPYC processors, marking the third family of instances powered by 3rd Gen EPYC processors at Google Cloud, joining the T2D and N2D instances.

With the help of AMD EPYC processors and its high core density, the C2D VMs will provide the largest VM sizes within compute optimized family at Google Cloud. As well, because of the EPYC processor's performance for compute focused workloads, Google Cloud showcased the C2D VMs can provide up to 30 percent better performance for targeted workloads compared to previous generation EPYC based VMs at a comparable size.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced that it has received approval from all necessary authorities to proceed with the acquisition of Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX). With the exception of the remaining customary closing conditions, all conditions to the transaction closing have been satisfied and the company expects the transaction to close on or about February 14, 2022.

AMD announced its intention to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction on October 27, 2020. The transaction brings together two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise to enable leadership computing platforms for cloud, edge and intelligent end devices.