Sapphire released the GPRO X070 compute graphics card. This is very much a graphics card, in that it has display outputs, and is based on the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, but there's a twist—it's completely fanless. The card has a large triple-slot heatsink cooling the GPU, which is designed to rely on external airflow in rackmount cases, and probably won't work on its own in a tower case. Sapphire says its applications include render farms, or V-GPUs. The card features an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT that runs at reference clock speeds—1905 MHz max boost, 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory. There's also an "Efficiency Mode" enabled through a secondary BIOS, which runs the GPU at 1750 MHz boost, possibly making the card best suited for crypto-currency mining operations.

ZenTimings by Ivan Rusanov is a tiny (< 500 KB download) app that lets you monitor your machine's memory timings in a really neat user-interface. The app works with all generations of AMD Ryzen processors, as well as Athlon processors based on the "Zen" microarchitectures. Besides timings, you also get basic info about the main clock domains that affect memory, such as memory clock (DDR), MCLK, UCLK, FCLK; relevant voltage readouts. This simple app is completely free, and open-source, if you'd like to inspect the code. The latest version v1.2.2 adds PHYWRD, PHYWRL, PHYRDL and PowerDown reading, DRAM and VTT readings, and the latest AMD "Dali" APUs. If you like the app, consider contributing to Rusanov on his website, in the source link below.

DOWNLOAD: ZenTimings by Ivan Rusanov v1.2.2The change-log follows.

AMD is always in development mode and just when they launch a new product, the company is always gearing up for the next-generation of devices. Just a few months ago, back in November, AMD has launched its Zen 3 core, and today we get to hear about the next steps that the company is taking to stay competitive and grow its product portfolio. In the AnandTech interview with Dr. Lisa Su, and The Street interview with Rick Bergman, the EVP of AMD's Computing and Graphics Business Group, we have gathered information about AMD's plans for Zen 4 core development and RDNA 3 performance target.

Starting with Zen 4, AMD plans to migrate to the AM5 platform, bringing the new DDR5 and USB 4.0 protocols. The current aim of Zen 4 is to be extremely competitive among competing products and to bring many IPC improvements. Just like Zen 3 used many small advances in cache structures, branch prediction, and pipelines, Zen 4 is aiming to achieve a similar thing with its debut. The state of x86 architecture offers little room for improvement, however, when the advancement is done in many places it adds up quite well, as we could see with 19% IPC improvement of Zen 3 over the previous generation Zen 2 core. As the new core will use TSMC's advanced 5 nm process, there is a possibility to have even more cores found inside CCX/CCD complexes. We are expecting to see Zen 4 sometime close to the end of 2021.

If anyone was looking to buy a new GPU in the past few months, the person is likely familiar with the situation we are in. It is now a fact that the latest generation of GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA are extremely hard to find, and when you come across one it is listed at some mind-blowing price. However, the makers of those GPUs, AMD and NVIDIA, are claiming that we are near the end of this situation and the things are going to be better shortly. And companies such as these two must reach out to consumers and try to satisfy their needs, even in the difficult situation that is going on now with the GPUs.

In the interview with The Verge, AMD has confirmed that it will be selling more Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards using its website, throughout Q1 of this year. The company claims that it will try to supply as many customers as possible, without any exact figures. When it comes to NVIDIA, the company has commented that the situation will likely resolve sometime at the end of Q1, meaning that in March things should return to normal. The company has also added that in the meantime consumers shouldn't expect to buy any of the GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards at their original MSRP. NVIDIA also continues emphasizing that the reason for such high prices is the high demand they are seeing, exceeding production capacity by far.

MSI announced that it is bringing the PCI-SIG resizable base-address register (resizable BAR) support to a variety of older PC platforms, and not just the latest Intel 400-series and AMD 500-series. Among these are Intel 300-series, AMD 400-series, and AMD TRX40. This should come as a boon to those with 8th Gen and 9th Gen Core "Coffeee Lake" processors, such as the i9-9900K and i5-8400. Support is also being added to AMD X470 and AMD B450 chipset motherboards, however, this requires a compatible processor, and the latest beta UEFI firmware that supports them. Lastly, resizable-BAR support is making its way to the AMD TRX40 chipset (Socket sTRX4) Threadripper platform.

Resizable BAR is a feature that allows a processor to see the entire video memory of a discrete GPU as a single addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures. This has the potential to tangibly improve performance with certain games. Currently, AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series "Big Navi" GPUs; and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs support it. MSI is releasing UEFI firmware updates that add resizable-BAR support. Keep checking the "support" section of your motherboard's product page on the MSI website.

Alienware, the gaming division of Dell Technologies, has today announced a lineup refresh, meaning that all of the existing products will get upgraded to versions with the latest hardware. And to start off, the company has equipped their thin and powerful Alienware m15 R4 and m17 R4 laptops with the latest hardware we saw announced just yesterday. The laptops are equipped with 12-phase voltage regulation modules to power the newest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series of mobile GPUs. To pair with a strong GPU, Alienware decided to use 10th generation Intel Comet Lake-H designs. These new laptops can be equipped with up to 4 TB of PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD storage and up to 32 GB of 2933 MHz RAM. For display, options range from FHD LCD to a 4K OLED panel and 360 Hz refresh rate for the m17 R4 model.

At her 2021 International CES keynote address, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced the Ryzen 5000 series mobile processor family, which the company thinks has what it takes to beat Intel's 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processor, possibly even its upcoming 8-core version. The Ryzen 5000 mobile processor is based on the new 7 nm "Cezanne" monolithic SoC die. This chip features an 8-core CPU based on the latest "Zen 3" microarchitecture, and its biggest change is the advent of the 8-core CCX, which means all eight cores on "Cezanne" share a common L3 cache.

AMD slides from the CES keynote confirm that the company has not only doubled the L3 cache amount compared to "Renoir," but also quadrupled the maximum addressable L3 cache per core. On "Renoir," the eight cores are split between two CCXs, each with 4 MB of L3 cache. "Cezanne" features a single 8-core CCX with 16 MB of it. The dedicated L2 cache amount remains at 512 KB per core. The "total cache" (L2+L3) adds up to 20 MB. For the 45-Watt Ryzen 5000 HX-series enthusiast mobile processors, the increased caches, coupled with improved IPC and higher clock speeds should be AMD's play against Intel's top H-segment mobile chips. AMD claims that the second-fastest Ryzen 9 5900HX beating Intel's fastest Core i9-10980HK by 13% in raw single-thread performance, 19% in game physics performance, and 35% in overall PassMark performance. The 5980HX should only end up faster.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, extended its industry-proven workstation family with a new generation server-grade high-end workstation that offers maximum configurability and reliability in a robust single-socket platform. The new workstation is just the latest in Supermicro's overall support of AMD processors, including the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC based servers for multiple applications.

The highly versatile, configurable platform harnesses the power of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO Processor with up to 64 cores and 128 PCI-E 4.0 lanes, doubling the data throughput of the previous generation. The new workstation (AS -5014A-TT) dramatically boosts productivity for demanding professional workloads found in media content creation, scientific research, visualization, deep learning (DL) and artificial intelligence (AI), virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR), and 3-D modeling with real-time simulation.

AMD today announced that the Ryzen Threadripper PRO workstation processors will be directly available for purchase from March 2021. Until now, the processors were exclusively available as options for the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 workstation. The processors are being released alongside a small selection of compatible motherboards by ASUS and GIGABYTE. The Threadripper PRO processors are built in the sWRX8 package, and compatible with the AMD WRX80 chipset. From what we can tell, these processors are not compatible with sTRX4 motherboards.

What sets the Ryzen Threadripper PRO apart from the regular Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series is that it's a fully unlocked "Rome" multi-chip module re-configured for the workstation, with up to 64 CPU cores, 8-channel DDR4 memory, and 128 PCI-Express Gen 4 lanes. In comparison, the Ryzen Threadripper 3000 chips only feature 4-channel memory, and fewer 72 PCIe Gen 4 lanes from the SoC. The PIB (processor in box) retail package of the Ryzen Threadripper PRO looks rather plain compared to the PC enthusiast-focused Threadripper 3000, with a simple paperboard box that packs the processor, an Asetek AIO CLC adapter, and a spring-loaded screwdriver that's tuned for the sWRX80 socket.

In her 2021 International CES keynote address, AMD revealed a slide with two upcoming reference board designs. The slide which points to what AMD has in store for 2021 illustrates two unannounced graphics cards, and a notebook. The first of these cards is a dual-fan sibling of the RX 6000 series that's been doing rounds for quite some time now, which is very likely the RX 6700 XT. The one next to it is interesting—a card with just one fan, which is likely the RDNA2 successor to the RX 5500 XT. The gaming notebook next to them brandishes both the Ryzen and Radeon logos, which means the company will not only launch the Ryzen 5000 mobile series based on "Zen 3," but also mobile variants of its Radeon RX 6000 RDNA2 series. The best part, all these launch within the first half of 2021.

Following today's launch of the latest graphics card and processor generation from NVIDIA and AMD, XMG not only updates the gaming laptops from the NEO and PRO product lines to significantly more powerful components, but also fundamentally redesigns both series. While the maximum performance-focused XMG NEO 15 and NEO 17 feature AMD's Ryzen 9 5900H and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Max-P in each of their top configurations, the XMG PRO 15 and PRO 17 aim to perfectly combine performance and mobility. The new PRO series now measure less than 20 mm in height and thus offers significantly improved portability than the previous generation. For this reason, XMG utilises a combination of graphics cards up to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q and Intel's Core i7-10870H.

In the latest E21 version, the XMG NEO 15 and NEO 17 offer more performance than ever and feature a double upgrade. On the graphics card side, the laptops designed for the highest mobile gaming performance possible, make the leap to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3000 series in the form of the RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 - with 16, 8 and 6 GB of GDDR6; each in the full Max-P configuration with TGP of 135 (RTX 3080), 125 (RTX 3070) and 115 watts (RTX 3060), plus a dynamic boost of an additional 15 watts. But XMG does not only introduce the NEO laptops as mobile high-performance 3D powerhouses.

Today, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced the full portfolio of AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile Processors, bringing the highly-efficient and extremely powerful "Zen 3" core architecture to the laptop market. New AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile Processors provide unprecedented levels of performance and incredible battery life for gamers, creators, and professionals. New laptops powered by Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile processors will be available from major PC manufacturers including ASUS, HP and Lenovo, starting in Q1 2021. Expanding its leadership client computing product portfolio featuring the "Zen 3" core, AMD also announced the AMD Ryzen PRO 5000 Series Mobile Processors, delivering enterprise-grade security and seamless manageability to commercial users. Throughout the course of 2021, AMD expects a broad portfolio of more than 150 consumer and commercial notebooks based on the Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile Processors.

"As the PC becomes an even more essential part of how we work, play and connect, users demand more performance, security and connectivity," said Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, Client business unit, AMD. "The new AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop and Mobile Processors bring the best innovation AMD has to offer to consumers and professionals as we continue our commitment to delivering best-in-class experiences with instant responsiveness, incredible battery life and fantastic designs. With our PC partners, we are delivering top-quality performance and no-compromise solutions alongside our record-breaking growth in the notebook and desktop space in the previous year."

Samsung today at its Exynos 2100 launch event announced that its labor with AMD to integrate the company's RDNA graphics architecture onto Exynos chips has born fruit. It's unclear today on which set of technology this integration is bound to - whether RDNA, RDNA 2, or a combination of both - and actual products will only hit shelves by the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022.

Samsung has announced that the design-in for AMD's RDNA platform into the company's flagship Exynos products for the 2021-2022 timeframe have been successful, and that the first iteration of the design will see the light of day on the upcoming Exynos 2100. The collaboration has reportedly resulted in very good performance values obtained from their IP merger in May 2020. It seems we have a few months to look towards to before we see a Galaxy phone with an RDNA-powered engraving, though.

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su is delivering an official keynote address for the 2021 International CES expo, and we are live blogging it.15:58 UTC: Dr Lisa Su, as always takes centerstage on the 2021 International CES keynote for her address.

16:00 UTC: Here we go:

Semiconductor manufacturing is not an easy feat to achieve. Especially if you are constantly chasing the smaller and smaller node. Intel knows this the best. The company has had a smooth transition from other nodes to the smaller ones until the 10 nm node came up. It has brought Intel years of additional delay and tons of cost improving the yields of a node that was seeming broken. Yesterday the company announced the new Tiger Lake-H processors for laptops that are built using the 10 nm process, however, we are questioning whatever Intel can keep up with the semiconductor industry and deliver the newest nodes on time, and with ease. During an interview with Intel's CEO Bob Swan, we can get a glimpse of Intel's plans for the future of semiconductors at the company.

In the interview, Mr. Swan has spoken about the technical side of Intel and how the company plans to utilize its Fabs. The first question everyone was wondering was about the state of 10 nm. The node is doing well as three Fabs are ramping up capacity every day, and more products are expected to arrive on that node. Mr. Swan has also talked about outsourcing chip production, to which he responded by outlining the advantage Intel has with its Fabs. He said that outsourcing is what is giving us shortages like AMD and NVIDIA experience, and Intel had much less problems. Additionally, Mr. Swan was asked about the feasibility of new node development. To that, he responded that there is a possibility that Intel could license its competitor's node and produce it in their Fabs.

Intel has apparently taken the CES opportunity to showcase its upcoming Rocket Lake-S CPU in gaming against one of AMD's best mainstream CPUs, packing 12 cores - although the specific model remains undisclosed. Geeknetics shared screen-grabs from the demo, done inside Metro Exodus, where the undisclosed Intel 8-core Rocket Lake-S is shown achieving higher average frame-rates compared to the AMD solution (an average of 156.54 FPS for Intel, against 147.43 FPS for AMD). The CPUs were paired with an NVIDIA RTX 3080 graphics card - and in case you're wondering whether NVIDIA's Resizable BAR capabilities have been activated for this Rocket Lake-S system, no information on that was available at time of writing (the question is raised since Intel has already announced support for the feature with NVIDIA GPUs on Tiger Lake-H).

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 PRO line of ultra high-end processors with 8-channel DDR4 memory and 128-lane PCI-Express were a bit of a nothingburger for the DIY PC community as AMD made it exclusive to Lenovo for its ThinkStation P620 pre-built workstations. The hope for Threadripper PRO hitting the DIY scene increased in December 2020, with GIGABYTE unveiling a the WRX80 SU8, a motherboard sold in the open market, albeit designed mainly for servers and not workstations that are loaded with I/O. ASUS is about to change this.

Here's the first picture of the ASUS WS WRX80 SAGE, a no-holes-barred workstation motherboard based on the AMD WRX80 chipset, supporting Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3000 series processors. This board wires out each of the processor's eight memory channels to its own DIMM slot (1 DIMM per channel), and spreads the processor's lavish PCIe 4.0 lane budget among seven PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slots, three onboard (and possibly four by AIC) M.2 NVMe slots, a pair of U.2 NVMe slots, and I/O that very likely includes a pair of 10 GbE connections. Getting the board is the easy part. You'll need to hunt down a Ryzen Threadripper PRO sWRX80 processor, and a PSU that can feed the board's three 8-pin EPS, and two 6-pin PCIe, besides the 24-pin ATX.

Certain AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X processors are physically based on a dual-CCD design, according to an investigative report by Igor's Lab and Yuri "1usmus" Bubliy. The 5600X and 5800X are normally meant to be single-CCD processors owing to their core-counts. Based on the "Vermeer" multi-chip module design, the Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors use up to two 8-core CCDs to achieve their core-counts of up to 16 cores, with the 6-core 5600X and 8-core 5800X normally having just one CCD; while the 12-core 5900X and 16-core 5950X use two.

There are, apparently, some 5600X and 5800X built from dual-CCD MCMs, in which an entire CCD, although physically present on the package, is disabled. A 5600X based on a dual-CCD design is essentially a 5900X from which one of the CCDs didn't fully qualify; while the 5800X dual-CCD is a 5950X in which one such die didn't quite make the cut. There's no telling which CCD is disabled, it could be CCD 0 or CCD 1, those with CCD 0 disabled could trigger minor (benign) UI bugs with certain tuning utilities, which is how Wallossek and Bubliy discovered these chips. In any case, you're getting a 5600X or 5800X that works as advertised, and is fully covered by AMD's product warranties. Igor's Lab is investigating further into these dual-CCD 5600X and 5800X chips, and is probing the possibility of unlocking them to Ryzen 9.

AMD is expected to announce its upcoming EPYC lineup of processors for server applications based on the new Zen 3 architecture. Codenamed "Milan", AMD is continuing the use of Italian cities as codenames for its processors. Being based on the new Zen 3 core, Milan is expected to bring big improvements over the existing EPYC "Rome" design. Bringing a refined 7 nm+ process, the new EPYC Milan CPUs are going to feature better frequencies, which are getting paired with high core counts. If you are wondering how Zen 3 would look like in server configuration, look no further because we have the upcoming AMD EPYC 7543 32-core processor benchmarked in Geekbench 4 benchmark.

The new EPYC 7543 CPU is a 32 core, 64 thread design with a base clock of 2.8 GHz, and a boost frequency of 3.7 GHz. The caches on this CPU are big, and there is a total of 2048 KB (32 times 32 KB for instruction cache and 32 times 32 KB for data cache) of L1 cache, 16 MB of L2 cache, and as much as 256 MB of L3. In the GB4 test, a single-core test produced 6065 points, while the multi-core run resulted in 111379 points. If you are wondering how that fairs against something like top-end Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascade Lake 28-core CPU, the new EPYC Milan 7543 CPU is capable of fighting two of them at the same time. In a single-core test, the Intel Xeon configuration scores 5048 points, showing that the new Milan CPU has 20% higher single-core performance, while the multi-core score of the dual Xeon setup is 117171 points, which is 5% faster than AMD CPU. The reason for the higher multi-core score is the sheer number of cores that a dual-CPU configuration offers (32 cores vs 56 cores).

AMD today announced several senior leadership promotions in support of the company's long-term growth goals. "Our high-performance products and long-term roadmaps have placed AMD on a significant growth trajectory," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "Aligning and expanding our senior leadership team around our highest-priority growth opportunities will continue the momentum we have built across our business in 2021 and beyond."AMD announced two executive vice president promotions:

• Darren Grasby to executive vice president and Chief Sales Officer, responsible for driving adoption of AMD products and delivering a world-class customer experience.
• Devinder Kumar to executive vice president and Chief Financial Officer, responsible for continued strengthening of the company's financial profile.

VideoCardz has recently received a render of the upcoming AMD Ryzen 5000 Cezanne APU which is expected to be unveiled next week. The Zen 3 Cezanne APUs support up to 8 cores and 16 threads just like Zen 2 Renoir APUs. The Cezanne APU should support up to 8 graphics cores and 20 PCIe lanes, it is currently unknown whether these lanes will be PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0. The Cezanne die appears to be ~10% larger than Renoir which comes from the larger Zen 3 core design and a larger L3 cache of 16 MB. The new Ryzen 5000H Cezanne series processors are expected to be announced by AMD next week and will power upcoming low and high power laptops.

AMD has recently submitted two new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs to the USB Implementers Forum for compliance. The first listing for a Ryzen 9 5980HX is a new SKU which we haven't seen before which would be positioned above the 5900HX, 5900H, and 5900HS. It is unclear what this processor will offer whether it be higher clocks, more cores, or something else. These new Zen 3 Cezanne Ryzen 5000H mobile processors are expected to be announced by AMD next week.

The second processor submitted by AMD is the Ryzen 7 5700G which appears to be a desktop Zen 3 Cezanne APU. The processor is likely to feature 8 cores and 16 threads, but clock speeds are GPU specifications are unknown. The current generation Ryzen 4000G series is only available to OEMs and was not released to the DIY market. This new desktop APU will be a significant step up from the quad-core Ryzen 5 3400G which is the fastest APU available from AMD in the DIY market.

Sonnet Technologies today announced the launch of the eGPU Breakaway Puck Radeon RX 5500 XT and eGPU Breakaway Puck Radeon RX 5700, the newest members of the company's popular family of portable all-in-one Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processing (eGPU) systems. Replacing the now discontinued eGFX Breakaway Puck Radeon RX 560 and Radeon RX 570 eGPUs, the new models retain the same form factor but in many cases deliver more than 300% performance improvement over the previous-generation models. The new models now include two USB ports for connecting peripheral devices and a second Thunderbolt port for fully supporting a Thunderbolt/USB-C display, including the 6K Apple Pro Display XDR.

eGPU systems boost a computer's graphics performance by connecting a more powerful graphics processor via a Thunderbolt 3 connection and bypassing the computer's onboard GPU to deliver graphics performance not otherwise possible. Sonnet's eGPU Breakaway Puck Radeon RX 5500 XT and Radeon RX 5700 systems are designed for professionals who need to run graphics-intensive applications on their Intel -based MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, or iMac with Thunderbolt 3 ports, with the focus on high performance, portability, and flexible external display connectivity plus quiet, reliable operation. eGPU Breakaway Pucks accelerate a computer's graphics performance on its built-in display (if equipped) and on up to four externally connected displays.

PC benchmarking software company PassMark has recorded the market share of AMD and Intel processors based on their testing data. This data dates back to Q1 2014 and shows Intel dominating the desktop market. AMD has been gradually making ground on Intel since they launched their Ryzen processors in 2017 which have quickly become some of the best processors available. Thanks to the success of Ryzen the market share of AMD desktop processors recently overtook Intel reaching 50.8%, this number has now fallen to 49.8% as the data continues to be updated with new tests but the trend is clear. While AMD has made tremendous gains in the desktop market they still fall far behind in the laptop and server segments with 17% and 1.1% market shares respectively. This puts AMD's total market share across all segments at 38.2% according to PassMark data.

AMD just revealed the top four changes with its new AGESA 1.1.9.0 microcode update, which motherboard manufacturers and OEMs will release via UEFI firmware updates in January and February, 2021. Beta firmware updates with 1.1.9.0 have already been floating around for the past couple of weeks. To begin with, the new AGESA enables support for the S0i3 power state of Windows 10, more commonly known as Modern Standby. Next up, AMD claims that firmware updates with 1.1.9.0 should improve system stability in the FCLK 1800 MHz to 2000 MHz range.

Next up, AMD mentions support for "fanless X570 motherboards." We're not entirely sure whether this means a fan-down mode on existing X570 motherboards, or whether a new wave of motherboards based on the chipset is incoming, which lacks active cooling for the chipset (and makes do with passive heatsinks). One such board is the ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. Perhaps the firmware assists in helping the X570 chipset maintain a lower TDP. Wrapping things up, AMD mentions "general stability improvements," which are always welcome. Keep probing the "support" section of your motherboard's product page on its company website for the latest firmware updates.