NetEase Games and Marvel Games are excited to announce their latest collaboration: Marvel Rivals, a cooperative, Super Hero team-based PVP shooter! Players can assemble an ever-evolving all-star squad of Super Heroes and Super Villains, while battling with unique super powers across a dynamic lineup of destructible maps from across the Marvel Multiverse. Marvel Rivals is in development for PC by a NetEase team composed of global talent, who previously worked on hit franchises such as Call of Duty and Battlefield.

"We are overjoyed to bring Marvel Rivals to players around the world. We have always loved Marvel's universe and its characters, and we are so excited to be developing this game," said the Marvel Rivals Producer Stephen Wu. "This is the game we want to make, and we feel very lucky to be the team who made all of this come true."

Chinese manufacturer Asgard has announced the company's (and the Chinese market's) first PCIe 4.0 SSD. The AN4 pairs 128 Layer 3D TLC NAND manufactured by YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd) Xtacking 2.0 technology, which uses a two-step manufacturing process wherein both NAND cells and interconnects are manufactured in two separate wafers and then optically fused. The NAND memory is then paired with Innogrit's IG5236 Rainier controller. The AN4 is rated for 7,500 MB/s and 5,500 MB/s sequential read and write speeds and features a "high" TBW endurance rating, though Asgard didn't clarify the exact random performance figures, nor the TBW rating for the SSD. Pricing is similarly up in the air - Asgard has only announced market availability for the 1 TB SSD solution come August, with additional 2 TB and 512 GB capacities being readied to market for a later timeframe.

The manufacturing technology of YMTC results in NAND that's as fast as Micron's latest 192-layer NAND tech, and beats well-established Kioxia's 96-layer technology performance-wise. One Bilibili forum user put the drive through its paces, and discovered that to unlock its full potential, one has to have a system capable of 512 bit maximum payload size (MPS), which is currently only supported by AMD motherboards - maximum Intel MPS currently stands at 256 bit, which "only" enables sequential performance of up to 7,150 MB/s. The user put the AN4 through a variety of tests, including PCMark 10's Drive Performance Consistency Test - a 10 to 20 hours workload marathon that puts more than 23 TB of drives on the SSD. It seems that Chinese manufacturers have achieved parity with the top western manufacturers, meaning there is one more option in the global, high-performance NAND market.

Chinese company Jiahe Jinwei owns a sub-brand of gaming-oriented products named after Norse mythology - Asgard. The company has now announced that the trial production for high-speed DDR5 modules using Micron's semiconductors has completed without issue, meaning that their roadmap is going through without a hitch. Of course, as with the introduction of any new DDR memory standard, operating frequencies are still in their nascent stage; Asgard currently is only offering 4,800 MHz DDR5 sticks, which the most premium DDR4 sticks can already surpass.

It's only a matter of time before DDR5 speeds accelerate however, and Asgard is already planning to launch 5600 MHz DDR5 kits as early as 2022. These should be available in 32 GB and 128 GB capacities with a CAS latency of 46 cycles. The next step in performance increase would look towards 6,400 MHz kits, but these should only be expected towards the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, should the development continue to move along smoothly. All of the DDR5 memory speeds should still make do with a relatively puny 1.1 V.

We have seen a number of announcements from key industry players about the introduction of DDR5 memory but today's news from Chinese company Jiahe Jinwei marks the beginning of DDR5 mass production. The company announced that DDR5 RAM from Micron had arrived at its facilities and that memory module production could begin. Jiahe Jinwei is the fourth largest memory manufacturer in China and owns memory brands such as Guangwei and Asgard which have recently announced DDR5 modules with capacities of up to 128 GB and speeds reaching 4,800 MHz. Intel is expected to launch their 12th Generation Alder Lake processors later this year with DDR5 support while AMD will introduce support with Zen 4 processors on a new AM5 socket.

In the name of Odin, Chinese manufacturer Asgard has launched their first DDR5 memory modules to market - beating some competing western companies that are still "gearing up" for it. Owned by the much less interestingly-named Shenzhen Jiahe Jinwei Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., Asgard likewise lost some of its flair in naming these DDR5 sticks - the best they could do was VMA5AUK-MMH224W3. The modules will be available in 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB per-stick densities.

The initial modules don't have any flair - they're built with the same green PCB that's actually the forerunner of today's colored ones. The company hs also announced that the modules win run at a relatively mild 4,800 MHz (the DDR5 specification goes up to 8,400 MHz), and that its timings coincide with JEDEC's "B" classification, which should mean 40-40-40. The voltage likewise remains at the JEDEC-set standard of 1.1 V. The company announced that mass-production rollout will only occur after there are actual CPUs and platforms that can take advantage of the DDR5 memory spec, and said that they expect Intel's Alder-Lake, Sapphire Rapids and Tiger Lake-U from the blue team, as well as Van Gogh and Rembrandt APUs from the AMD camp. No word on consumer pricing was available at time of writing.