AMD today announced a second round of high-performance technology contributions to assist in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. AMD is now contributing high-end computing systems or access to Penguin-On-Demand (POD) cloud-based clusters powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC and AMD Radeon Instinct processors to 21 institutions and research facilities conducting COVID-19 research. With 12 petaflops of total supercomputing capacity now awarded, the combined compute capacity donated through the AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund would rank among the fastest supercomputers in the world according to the most recent Top500 list.

"AMD is proud to be working with leading global research institutions to bring the power of high performance computing technology to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic," said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer, AMD. "These donations of AMD EPYC and Radeon Instinct processors will help researchers not only deepen their understanding of COVID-19, but also help improve our ability to respond to future potential threats to global health."

2020's Game Developers Conference (GDC), originally set to be live from March 16th through March 20th, was one of the first tech shows to be cancelled in wake of the Sars-Cov-2 outbreak. Now, the organization has announced that the event has been rescheduled a full 5 months later for August 2020. The event has been set for a three-day "GDC Summer" still taking place in Moscone Center in San Francisco, USA, starting August 4th and ending August 6th. Passes for the exhibition are already available, with early takers being offered heavy discounts over the on-floor passes.

GDC has been the stage for a number of high-profile gaming and services announcements, with the 2019 edition seeing announcements for Google's Stadia, EPIC Games detailing new features for its Unreal engine, and AMD taking the lid of their (then) upcoming 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs. Intel was first expected to detail their Xe graphics architecture at GDC 2020. It remains to be seen whether the blue giant will still be doing so in wake of this delay, or if the company will find an in-house (albeit likely online) alternative to get word of mouth flowing on their upcoming high performance graphics architecture.