Intel's Aurora supercomputer is a $500 million contract with the US Department of Energy to deliver an exascale supercomputer for Argonne National Laboratory. The project aims to build a machine capable of cranking over one ExaFLOP of computing at sustained workloads. The supercomputer aims to reach two ExaFLOPs of computing power once the installation system is completed and powered. The contract bound Intel to create accelerators that are powerful enough to achieve this magical number. However, they left Intel with room to do a little bit extra. With Ponte Vecchio GPU behind the project, it seems like the GPU is performing better than expected.

According to Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, the system will reach over 2 ExaFLOPs at peak and a bit below in sustained workloads. As per preliminary calculations done by The Next Platform, the system's estimations point towards 2.43 ExaFLOPs peak and around 1.7 ExaFLOPs in sustained workloads at Double-precision floating-point format math, aka FP64. The system will utilize Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors with HBM memory and the powerful Ponte Vecchio GPU with 47 tiles and over 100 billion transistors.

Dell has stopped selling its Alienware Aurora R10/R12 systems to customers in six US states as they cannot meet the requirements of California's Energy Consumption Tier 2 implementation. These new energy efficiency regulations which became active on July 1st in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington limit the maximum kilowatt-hour usage of select devices. The maximum power usage allowed by this regulation for new desktop systems is calculated with a base limit and incorporates various additional allowances for discrete GPUs, high-speed memory, and certain storage mediums. Dell has confirmed that select versions of their Alienware Aurora R10/R12 systems cannot meet these requirements and as a result the effected models have been removed from sale for customers in these states.

Intel's Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president and general manager of the Xeon and Memory Group at Intel Corporation, has yesterday published a blog post talking about Intel's next-generation server platform codenamed Sapphire Rapids. The SPR platform is Intel's biggest step-up in the server processor space, and it is the exact CPU that will power the Aurora exascale supercomputer. Besides improvements to the CPU microarchitecture, the platform itself is bringing many benefits with it as well. It will use the latest industry protocols like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. This is making a strong combination designed even for exascale supercomputers to be powered by this processor. However, the availability of this CPU was a bit of a mystery until yesterday. Below, you can see the quote from Ms. Lisa Spelman about the availability of said processors.

Lisa SpelmanDemand for Sapphire Rapids continues to grow as customers learn more about the benefits of the platform. Given the breadth of enhancements in Sapphire Rapids, we are incorporating additional validation time prior to the production release, which will streamline the deployment process for our customers and partners. Based on this, we now expect Sapphire Rapids to be in production in the first quarter of 2022, with ramp beginning in the second quarter of 2022.

Alphacool presents the Rise Aurora 120 mm, a powerful and PWM controllable fan that also features brilliant Digital RGB LED lighting. The Alphacool Rise Aurora fan allows for an impressive airflow of 118.9 m³/h and has high static pressure of 3.17 mm/H₂O. Due to this, the fan is ideally suited for operation on radiators or as a particularly strong case fan. Thanks to the 4-pin PWM connector, the fan can be controlled over the speed range from 0 to 2600 rpm. At 0% PWM control, the fan can be stopped completely. A soft start at start-up increases the life of the fan and reduces the risk of injury. At low speed, the fan is almost silent and provides significant energy savings.

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.

Intel and Argonne National Laboratory are collaborating on the co-design and validation of exascale-class applications using graphics processing units (GPUs) based on Intel Xe-HP microarchitecture and Intel oneAPI toolkits. Developers at Argonne are tapping into Intel's latest programming environments for heterogeneous computing to ensure scientific applications are ready for the scale and architecture of the Aurora supercomputer at deployment.

"Our close collaboration with Argonne is enabling us to make tremendous progress on Aurora, as we seek to bring exascale leadership to the United States. Providing developers early access to hardware and software environments will help us jumpstart the path toward exascale so that researchers can quickly start taking advantage of the system's massive computational resources." -Trish Damkroger, Intel vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing.

Intel's chief architect and senior vice president of discrete graphics division, Mr. Raja Koduri, is said to be scheduled to present at Samsung Electronics Event day. With a presentation titled "1000X More Compute for AI by 2025", the event is called Samsung Foundry SAFE Forum. It is a global virtual conference designed to be available to everyone. So you might be wondering what is Mr. Koduri doing there. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know about Intel's struggles with node manufacturing. Specifically, the 10 nm node delays that show the company's efforts to deliver a node on time. The same is happening with the 7 nm node that also experienced significant delays.

Intel has a contract to develop an exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, called Aurora. That supercomputer is using Intel's CPUs and the company's upcoming Xe GPUs. Since the company has problems with manufacturing and has to deliver the products (it is bound by several contracts) to its contractors and customers, it decided to look at external manufacturers for its products, specifically Xe graphics. Being that Mr. Koduri tweeted an image of him visiting Samsung Giheung Fab in Korea, and now presenting at the Samsung Foundry event, it is possible that Intel will tap Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing process for its Xe GPU efforts and that Samsung will be the contractor in charge.

Today, Alphacool presents its latest RTX 3080/3090 GPU cooling block for the MSI GeForce RTX 3080/3090 Ventus 3X to pre-order. Delivery is expected to start at the end of October. This cooler covers all the necessary components that require cooling. This includes the voltage converters, graphics memory and of course the GPU. All known hotspots of the graphics cards are completely cooled with water. Alphacool includes special 1 mm thick Ultra Soft thermal pads with this GPU cooler. As the name suggests, these are very soft and nestle perfectly to the components to be cooled. When the thermal pads heat up, the consistency and behavior is more like a thermal paste than a thermal pad. This of course has a positive effect on heat dissipation and is thermally far superior to standard thermal pads.

The Alphacool Eisblock Aurora Plexi GPX-N RTX 3090/3080 Ventus comes with a suitable backplate. This does not have to be purchased separately.
Like all Eisblock Aurora coolers, these models offer a comprehensive Digital RGB, sometimes better known as aRGB, illumination.

Alphacool presents the Eisblock Aurora Plexi GPX-N cooler for reference design NVIDIA RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards. The cooler offers outstanding cooling performance thanks to its full cover design. The new backplate, which is delivered together with the cooler, also contributes to this. This stabilizes the graphics card and ensures an even contact along the whole cooler. The water block cold plate is made of nickel-plated copper. The cooler covers all relevant components such as voltage converters and the graphics memory.

The Alphacool Eisblock GPX-N Aurora Plexi has an LED strip across the entire width with addressable 5 V digital RGB LEDs. These illuminate the entire cooler homogeneously and ensures an outstanding ambiance in the PC housing.

Intel has been focusing its resources on data center and high-performance computing lately and the company has made some interesting products. Today, Intel has released its latest creation - mOS operating system. Created as a research project, Intel has made an OS made for some extreme-scale HPC systems, meaning that the OS is created for hyper scalers and ones alike. The goal of mOS is to deliver a high-performance environment for software with low-noise, scalability, and the concept of lightweight kernels (LWK) that manage the system.. Being based on the Linux kernel, the OS is essentially another distribution, however, it has been modified so it fits the HPC ecosystem the best way. The mOS is a product in the pre-alpha phase, however, it can already be used in supercomputers like ASCI Red, IBM Blue Gene, and others. Intel is aiming to develop a stable release by the time the Aurora exascale system is ready so it can deploy mOS there.

TSMC has been the backbone of silicon designers for a long time. Whenever you question where you can use the latest technology and get some good supply capacity, TSMC got everyone covered. That case seems to be similar to Intel and its struggles. When Intel announced that its 7 nm semiconductor node is going to be delayed a full year, the company's customers and contractors surely became worried about the future releases of products and their delivery, like the case is with Aurora exascale supercomputer made for Argonne National Laboratory, which relies on Intel's 7 nm Ponte Vecchio graphics cards for most of the computation power.

To manage to deliver this, Intel is reportedly in talks with TSMC to prepare capacity for the GPUs and deliver them on time. However, according to industry sources of DigiTimes, TSMC is unlikely to build additional capacity for Intel, besides what it can deliver now. According to those sources, TSMC does not see Intel as a long-term customer and it is unknown what treatment will Intel get from TSMC. Surely, Intel will be able to make a deal with TSMC and secure enough of the present capacity for delivering next-generation processors.

Alphacool announced three new products today. These include the Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora (Solo) - Digital RGB, new Quick Release Connector Kits; and Alphatube TPV. Build your own AIO water cooling system with the Eisbaer Aurora (Solo). Alongside the different pre-filled Eisbaer Aurora CPU AIO watercoolers that can be used "Out of the Box", the core of the Eisbaer Aurora is also available as a solo version. With it you can decide how you want to build your water cooling loop and which parts you want to use for it. By using the industry standard G1/4" ports, all fittings from the water cooling sector can be used. This gives you the ability to choose the hose thickness, colour, style, and liquid freely. The Eisbaer Aurora gives you full control.

Alphacool ES quick release connector kit TPV pushin Industry version: The Alphacool HF Quick Disconnect Fittings for TPV tubing are taken from the Alphacool Enterprise Solutions product range and has been developed especially for Alphacool TPV hoses. Special emphasis has been placed on high tensile strength and safety.

Intel's 10 nm Xe DG1 silicon made its first public appearance as the DG1-SDV (software development vehicle), a desktop PCIe graphics cards that Intel shipped out to its ISVs (independent software vendors), allowing them to begin preparing software for the Xe architecture. Argonne National Laboratory, the organization behind the Aurora Supercomputing Project that implements Xe HP "Ponte Vecchio" super-scalar compute processors, in its presentation, took a brief technical detour talking a bit about the DG1-SDV.

In the presentation, it is revealed that Intel will indeed monetize (or "productize") the silicon at the heart of the DG1-SDV, only not as a desktop graphics card. The chip will be sold as a mobile GPU, not even as an MXM, but as a GPU meant to be hardwired along with its dedicated memory onto notebooks' mainboards. We predict Intel is attempting to tap into the market segment where NVIDIA sells its GeForce MX300 line of entry-level discrete GPUs. Earlier this week, we spotted a discrete GPU with the specs of the DG1 having significantly increased 1.50 GHz GPU clocks, resulting in a FP32 throughput rivaling the AMD Radeon RX 560 or the "Vega" based iGPU of "Renoir." The Xe architecture will also be released as an iGPU solution, powering Intel's "Tiger Lake" Core mobile processor. Find the Aurora presentation here (PDF).

Alphacool today unveiled the Eisblock Aurora Plexi GPX-A line of full-coverage water blocks for a range of custom-design AMD Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards. The lineup includes a model for the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+, one for the PowerColor Red Devil and Red Dragon models of RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, and one for the MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X. The common element between the three is a combination of nickel-plated copper primary material, mated with a clear acrylic top. The three weigh roughly 1.2 kg, and feature mount hole spacing aligning with PCBs from the three brands. Available now, the blocks cost 109.94€ a piece.

The Sapphire-specific model is compatible only with the RX 5700 XT Nitro+, and measures 260 mm x 141 mm x 23 mm (LxHxW). The PowerColor-specific model, which supports the common PCB PowerColor uses across its Red Devil and Red Dragon models based on the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, measures 238 mm x 143 mm x 23 mm. The MSI-specific model is the longest among the three, measuring 293 mm x 139.3 mm x 22.5 mm, supporting the RX 5700 XT Gaming X. All three support standard G 1/4" fittings.

Alphacool today introduced two new products to their Aurora lineup. The first is a waterblock that has been especially designed for the RX5700 graphics card. The waterblock features a nickel-plated base and a Radeon RX illuminated logo. It has been designed with a thinner 1 mm heat conduction pads for better performance, and the full copper cooling block has also had a 1 mm shave in materials for better performance.

Concurrently, Alphacool also announced a cooling solution for your system's RAM. The Aurora Plexi can support up to four memory modules., and adds a stop to your watercooling system's flow that removes heat from your operating DRAM. The material is the usual nickel-plated copper, and the Aurora Plexi features compatibility with Alphacool's D-RAM cooling modules. The RX5700 Aurora waterblock will be available for €109.95, while the Aurora Plexi DDR cooling kit will go for €54.95.

The grander the stories, usually, the humbler the beginnings. And so it was for CD Projekt Red with its first adaptation of The Witcher, Wiedźmin, based on Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski's work. The original The Witcher game was built by a CD Projekt Red that had no internal engine, and thus, had to license (then free from EA) developer Bioware's proprietary Aurora engine (used on that company's original neverwinter Nights and expansion packs).

Now, you can have this piece of CD Projekt Red's history for free. Just head on to GOG and you can snag yourself a free, DRM-less copy of the game, including some digital goodies (You'll have to download GWENT, CD Projekt Red's card game, then click on the "Get GWENT card + The Witcher for free" banner. The original game was far, far simpler - and, at the same time, more complex - than its sequels. The version on offer is the definitive one, in the form of the Enhanced Edition: CD Projekt dedicated even more time to polishing the game over the original: it includes over 200 new animations, additional NPC models and recoloring of generic NPC models as well as monsters; vastly expanded and corrected dialogues in translated versions, improved stability, redesigned inventory system and load times reduced by roughly 80%. And if that's not enough, the protagonist has white hair! And if you didn't already know: there's a Netflix series incoming.

This here is an interesting piece of tech news for sure, in that Intel has already scored a pretty massive design win for not one, but two upcoming products. Intel's "Future Xeon Scalable Processors" and the company's "Xe Compute Architecture" have been tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy for incorporation into the new AURORA Supercomputer - one that will deliver exascale performance. AURORA is to be developed in a partnership between Intel and Cray, using the later's Shasta systems and its "Slingshot" networking fabric. But these are not the only Intel elements in the supercomputer design: Intel's DC Optane persistent memory will also be employed (in an as-of-yet-unavailable version of it as well), making this a full win across the prow for Intel.

Alphacool today introduced a few new additions to their catalog of watercooling-related products, and this time, they've focused on adding RGB flairs to users' systems. The new Aurora XPX RGB-LED Frame is a product that attaches to your Alphacool CPU block. It's basically a plastic square that has an RGB strip inside it (which connects via a standard 4-pin male RGB connector), which lights up and illuminates the entirety of your block in an eerie, perfectly diffused hue. There are black and chrome finishes for your particular rig, and the frame goes for €19.79.

The Alphacool XPX RGB frame is intended for users of the Eisblock XPX CPU cooler who are looking for the perfect lighting for their cooler. The RGB frame simply slides over the Eisblock XPX cooler and is then connected to the RGB controller. With an impressive 15 RGB LEDs evenly distributed over the XPX Eisblock CPU cooler, perfect lighting is guaranteed. The RGB controller lets you change not only the colors, but also add color effects like gradients, blinking, slow color changes, and much more. Many controllers also include a dimmer function. The Alphacool XPX RGB frame leaves nothing to be desired.

As a brand, BitFenix is best known for unique PC cases and modding accessories, always striving to provide high-quality PC components and offering diversity for modders and gamers alike. Today, BitFenix is proud to announce its latest addition to the Spectre fan series, the Spectre Pro RGB.

As a direct successor to the Spectre Pro, the Spectre Pro RGB is a high performance silent fan, featuring a high-pressure CFM design for maximum pressure and airflow, delivering a torrent of air to keep systems cool. It is equipped with reinforced fan-blades to assure they resist warping even while spinning at high-speed for long durations, thus providing durability and longevity. The fluid dynamic bearing technology will keep the fan silent, even during heavy load.

BitFenix presented Aurora, Shogun and Alchemy 2.0 RGB Magnetic LED Strips co-developing AURA SYNC technology with Asus bringing in the comprehensive neat RGB LED concept for PC build. Today BitFenix present the BitFenix ENSO and the Alchemy 3.0 Addressable RGB Magnetic LED
Strips, again co-developing with Asus, supporting the latest ASUS AURA SYNC 3-pin technology for addressable RGB illumination.

Sleek Design With Metallic Front & Enhanced AURA SYNC 3 Pin Addressable RGB illumination
With the ENSO, BitFenix is launching the long awaited case shown at Taipei's Computex 2017, available in black and white. The clean design concept is well balanced between a perfectly organized interior structure and a sleek exterior design. It is complemented by a 4mm see-through-tinted tempered glass panel on the side and addressable RGB illumination surrounding the metallic front. It comes with a pre-installed controller, compatible to both, BitFenix Alchemy 2.0, static, and BitFenix 3.0, addressable, RGB products.

NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701) today announced the launch of a new high-end HPC product line, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA. This new platform drastically increases processing performance and scalability on real world applications, aiming for the traditional application areas, such as science and engineering, but also targeting the new fields of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data analytics. With this new technology, NEC opens supercomputing to a wide range of new markets, in addition to the traditional HPC arena.

Utilizing cutting-edge chip integration technology, the new product features a complete multi-core vector processor in the form of a card-type Vector Engine (VE), which is developed based on NEC's high-density interface technology and efficient cooling technology. Kimihiko Fukuda, Executive Vice President, NEC Corporation, said, "The new product addresses the needs of scalar computational capability while still providing the efficiency of a vector architecture. This is accomplished through a tightly integrated complete vector system in the form of a Vector Engine Card."

Creative Technology Ltd today announced that it would be launching the Aurora Reactive SDK. This tool would effectively convert the Aurora Reactive Lighting System found on Sound BlasterX products into an open platform, allowing developers the freedom to customize, animate and synchronize its lighting behavior. The 16.8 million color Aurora Reactive Lighting System is currently found on the Sound BlasterX Katana, Vanguard K08, Siege M04, AE-5, and Kratos S5.

The Aurora Reactive SDK is a system with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow third party developers to program Creative's Sound BlasterX RGB-enabled hardware. The SDK will come complete with sample codes, an API library, and documentation to enable even novice programmers to get started.

In Win has finally announced availability of their Aurora RGB LED fans. We've seen tome a couple of times before - one of them on Computex. Only now are these innovative, daisy-chainable and remote-controlled fans being put up for sale, though.

The Aurora RGB LED fans are first to support multi-unit daisy-chaining, so one fan's power input and control can be shared with multiple fans. This way, you can control each of your multiple fan configurations (say, three fans on the front panel of your case, plus the three fans for your GPU's radiator, plus two fans for your CPU AIO) by simply pointing the remote at them.