AMD is preparing to launch its next-generation of EPYC processors codenamed Millan. Being based on the company's latest Zen 3 cores, the new EPYC generation is going to deliver a massive IPC boost, spread across many cores. Models are supposed to range anywhere from 16 to 64 cores, to satisfy all of the demanding server workloads. Today, thanks to the leak from ExecutableFix on Twitter, we have the first benchmark of a system containing two of the 64 core, 128 thread Zen 3 based EPYC Milan processors. Running in the 2P configuration the processors achieved a maximum boost clock of 3.7 GHz, which is very high for a server CPU with that many cores.

The system was able to produce a Cinebench R23 score of insane 87878 points. With that many cores, it is no wonder how it is done, however, we need to look at how does it fare against the competition. For comparison, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L processor with its 28 cores and 56 threads that boost to 4.0 GHz can score up to 49,876 points. Of course, the scaling to that many cores may not work very well in this example application, so we have to wait and see how it performs in other workloads before jumping to any conclusions. The launch date is unknown for these processors, so we have to wait and report as more information appears.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide server market grew 2.2% year over year to $22.6 billion during the third quarter of 2020 (3Q20). Worldwide server shipments declined 0.2% year over year to nearly 3.1 million units in 3Q20. Volume server revenue was up 5.8% to $19.0 billion, while midrange server revenue declined 13.9% to $2.6 billion, and high-end servers declined by 12.6% to $937 million.

"Global demand for enterprise servers was a bit muted during the third quarter of 2020 although we did see areas of strong demand," said Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. "From a regional perspective, server revenue within China grew 14.2% year over year. And worldwide revenues for servers running AMD CPUs were up 112.4% year over year while ARM-based servers grew revenues 430.5% year over year, albeit on a very small base of revenue."

As a world-leading motherboards brand, MSI commits to deliver gamers and creators genuine pleasure, and will keep moving. BIOS update is always an exhilarating news for most users, so MSI keeps announcing relative news for our users. From this week, MSI will release AMD AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.1.0.0 Patch D BIOS for all AMD 400-series motherboards and it is expected to be completely uploaded before the end of 2020.

All AMD 400-Series Motherboards Comprehensively Support Ryzen 5000 CPU with AMD AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.1.0.0 Patch D
The purpose to keep releasing BIOS update is not only for increasing motherboards performance but also for better compatibilities. After AMD launches Ryzen 5000 CPU, most are inquisitive about whether Ryzen 5000 CPU is compatible with AMD previous platforms. MSI realizes that users are eager to enhance their motherboards with the latest CPU; therefore, we are determined to offer AGESA 1.1.0.0 Patch D for all AMD 400-series motherboards. With AGESA 1.1.0.0 Patch D, your 400-series motherboards can support Ryzen 5000 CPU and achieve its true performance. Since there are some technical issues on AGESA 1.1.8.0, it will not be released. Thus, AGESA 1.1.0.0. Patch D is the finest choice to update your motherboards.

When AMD announced its 5000 series Ryzen processors, the company has noted that the new CPUs will be able to operate only on the 500 and 400 series chipsets, with a simple BIOS update. That means that millions of motherboards can install the latest CPUs with no problems. Today, we get to see something that is not a usual thing. ASRock has prepared a BIOS for its X370 Taichi motherboard, and it has been leaked at jzelectronic.de. The newly leaked BIOS is said to bring support for AMD's Ryzen 5000 series of processors codenamed Vermeer. Yes, you are reading that right. ASRock has found a way to bring Vermeer to the unsupported X370 platform.

Although impressive, you must note that the BIOS is in the alpha stage of development, which means that it is enriched with possible bugs and glitches, so it is not recommended for use for now. AMD is against this, and said for Tom's Hardware that "AMD has no plans to enable or support AMD Ryzen 5000 series on AMD 300 series chipsets." That means that ASRock has produced one-off software and it is still a question will the company further develop this new "P6.61" BIOS. You can download it at the jzelectronic.de website but proceed with caution.

During CES 2020, way back in January of this year, Razer had shown off a quite interesting concept. Called a modular gaming desktop, the concept has a goal to allow users to just swap-out parts on the fly and have no trouble doing so. Today, the company has officially decided to launch the Tomahawk gaming desktop. Designed for small-form-factor computing, the case of the Tomahawk PC is coming in at just 10L volume, with measurements of 210 mm x 365 mm x 150 mm. The case is an all-black aluminium silhouette with the signature Razer logo and Chroma lighting around the base. That gives it a simple look that can blend in with any environment.

When it comes to the insides, the PC features a power supply of 750 Watts that powers one of Intel's NUC Element boards that is a house for a 45 W Core i9-9980HK Coffee Lake processor with eight cores and 16 threads. When it comes to memory, it has 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of PCIe M.2 NVMe SSD storage, paired with a 2 TB hard drive. Razer offers users to upgrade memory and storage, while the CPU is soldered to the board. You can pre-order the Razer Tomahawk PC at a price starting at $2,399.99, while if you want to equip it with something like NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, you will be paying $3,199.99. If you already have a GPU to install, then you should just order the base.

AMD has launched its RDNA 2 based graphics cards, codenamed Navi 21. These GPUs are set to compete with NVIDIA's Ampere offerings, with the lineup covering the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT graphics cards. Until now, we have had reviews of the former two, but not the Radeon RX 6900 XT. That is because the card is coming at a later date, specifically on December 8th, in just a few days. As a reminder, the Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU is a Navi 21 XTX model with 80 Compute Units that give a total of 5120 Stream Processors. The graphics card uses a 256-bit bus that connects the GPU with 128 MB of its Infinity Cache to 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. When it comes to frequencies, it has a base clock of 1825 MHz, with a boost speed of 2250 MHz.

Today, in a GeekBench 5 submission, we get to see the first benchmarks of AMD's top-end Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. Running an OpenCL test suite, the card was paired with AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X 16C/32T CPU. The card managed to pass the OpenCL test benchmarks with a score of 169779 points. That makes the card 12% faster than RX 6800 XT GPU, but still slower than the competing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, which scores 177724 points. However, we need to wait for a few more benchmarks to appear to jump to any conclusions, including the TechPowerUp review, which is expected to arrive once NDA lifts. Below, you can compare the score to other GPUs in the GeekBench 5 OpenCL database.

AMD has just had quite an amazing year. From the launch of the Ryzen 5000 series CPUs based on Zen 3 architecture to RDNA 2 based graphics cards, the company has been delivering new solutions in a timely manner. With the upcoming tech conference being CES, we are wondering which companies are going to hold their keynotes virtually. Thanks to the official CES website, we have confirmation that AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su will hold a virtual keynote with the goal of "presenting the AMD vision for the future of research, education, work, entertainment, and gaming, including a portfolio of high-performance computing and graphics solutions." That could mean that we could possibly see some new directions for the company and how AMD plans to develop next-generation computing solutions, so stay tuned for more interesting information coming your way on January 11th, when CES kicks-off.

Today at AWS re:Invent 2020, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced EC2 instances that will leverage up to eight Habana Gaudi accelerators and deliver up to 40% better price performance than current graphics processing unit-based EC2 instances for machine learning workloads. Gaudi accelerators are specifically designed for training deep learning models for workloads that include natural language processing, object detection and machine learning training, classification, recommendation and personalization.

"We are proud that AWS has chosen Habana Gaudi processors for its forthcoming EC2 training instances. The Habana team looks forward to our continued collaboration with AWS to deliver on a roadmap that will provide customers with continuity and advances over time." -David Dahan, chief executive officer at Habana Labs, an Intel Company.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010 have started an interesting project. They created a goal to develop a new RISC-like Instruction Set Architecture that is simple and efficient while being open-source and royalty-free. Born out of that research was RISC-V ISA, the fifth iteration of Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) ideology. Over the years, the RISC-V ISA has become more common, and today, many companies are using it to design their processors and release new designs every day. One of those companies is Micro Magic Inc., a provider of silicon design tools, IP, and design services. The company has developed a RISC-V processor that is rather interesting.

Apart from the RISC-V ISA, the processor has an interesting feature. It runs at the whopping 5 GHz frequency, a clock speed unseen on the RISC-V chips before, at the power consumption of a mere one (yes that is 1) Watt. The chip ran at just 1.1 Volts, which means that a very low current needs to be supplied to the chip so it can achieve the 5 GHz mark. If you are wondering about performance, well the numbers show that at 5 GHz, the CPU can produce a score of 13000 CoreMarks. However, that is not the company's highest-performance RISC-V core. In yesterday's PR, Micro Magic published that their top-end design can achieve 110000 CoreMarks/Watt, so we are waiting to hear more details about it.

When AMD introduced its Smart Access Memory technology, everyone was wondering will other GPU and CPU providers, namely Intel and NVIDIA, develop a similar solution to complement their offerings. The SAM technology is just AMD's way of naming PCIe resizable Base Address Register (BAR) technology, which has been present in PCI specifications for years as an optional feature. Why it's emerging now you might wonder. Well, the currently used PCIe revision has reached enough bandwidth on the bus to complement the complex data movement that GPU requires and now supports the use of the wider VRAM frame buffer.

It appears that not only AMD has this technology in its portfolio. ASUS has updated its BIOS firmware for its ROG Maximus XII Apex motherboard based on the Intel Z490 chipset, with some pretty interesting features. According to Tom's Hardware, we have information that the next release of BIOS firmware update 1003 for the ROG Maximus XII Apex motherboard will bring support for resizable BAR, making it a first on an Intel platform. For now, the beta 1002 BIOS supports it, however, a stable version will roll out in BIOS 1003. With the motherboard using PCIe 3.0 standard, a lower-bandwidth revision compared to AMD's platform, it will be interesting to see how resizable BAR is performing once the first tests come.

Update 09:45 am UTC: Chris Wefers, ASUS PR Germany, has announced that resizable BAR will be coming to all ASUS motherboards with Intel Z490/H470/B460 chipset, with alleged 13.37% performance increase in Forza Horizon 4, per ASUSes testing. You can see the test configuration in the image below.

Minisforum, the leading innovator of mini PC products, has just released their another new product: the EliteMini UM700 which comes with the AMD Ryzen 7 3750H CPU up to 4.0 GHz, 4 cores 8 threads, total cache 4 MB, equipped with Radeon RX Vega 10 10 cores Graphics with frequency up to 1400 MHz. A few months ago, MINISFORUM had launched DeskMini DMAF5 with an AMD Ryzen 5 3550H processor on INDIEGOGO, now DMAF has completed the shipment. UM700 is an upgraded version of DMAF5, with higher performance and more powerful.

With a one-click design you can easily make upgrades, EliteMini UM700 supports different types of storage expansions—2.5 inch SATA HDD Slot (SATA 3.0 6.0 Gb/s) and M.2 2280 NVMe SSD Slot (support up to 2 TB), you can mix and match between HDD and SSD to better meet your needs. With windows 10 pro pre-installed, intel Wi-Fi6, BT5.1 and triple output. which allows you to freely enjoy quick response speed.

As a world leader in computer memory, TEAMGROUP understands the importance of getting ahead in the next generation of DDR technology, hence it will be releasing ELITE series DDR5 memory in 2021. With over 20 years of experience developing DDR3 and DDR4 products, the company has dazzled the world with its advanced R&D capabilities and excellent product quality. After the JEDEC announced the DDR5 memory standard, TEAMGROUP has been actively designing and working together with our IC manufacturing partners to pioneer and prepare for this new generation.

TEAMGROUP is leading the way with its first DDR5 memory under its global top-selling ELITE memory product line. It plans to release a 16 GB 4800 MHz module operating at 1.1 V, down from the 1.2 V of the previous generation. The data transfer rate is increased to 4,800-5,200 Mbps, an increase of up to 1.6 times while reducing power consumption by 10%. Today's DDR4 memory with error correction code (ECC) requires an additional chip installed on the PCB, whereas DDR5 supports on-die ECC, a feature that self-corrects single-bit errors, greatly improving system stability. Anticipation is high for the efficiency improvements brought by the new generation, which can be utilized for big data and AI computing and other related applications.

ASRock Rack, a branch of ASRock focused on making server products, has today launched a new motherboard that can accommodate up to 64 core AMD EPYC CPU. Built on the new, proprietary form factor called "Deep Mini-ITX", the ROMED4ID-2T motherboard is just a bit bigger than the standard ITX board. The standard ITX boards are 170 x 170 mm, while this Deep Mini-ITX form extends the board by a bit. It measures 170 x 208.28 mm, or 6.7" x 8.2" for all of the American readers. ASRock specifies that the board supports AMD's second-generation EPYC "Rome" 7002 series processors. Of course, the socket for these CPUs is socket SP3 (LGA4094) with 4094 pins.

The motherboard comes with 4 DDR4 DIMM slots, of any type. Supported DIMM types are R-DIMM, LR-DIMM, and NV-DIMM. If you want the best capacity, LR-DIMM use enables you to use up to 256 GB of memory. When it comes to expansion, you can hook-up any PCIe 4.0 device to the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. There is also an M.2 2280 key present, so you can fit in one of those high-speed PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSDs. For connection to the outside world, the board uses an Intel X550-AT2 controller that controls two RJ45 10 GbE connectors. There are also two Slimline (PCIe 4.0 x8 or 8 SATA 6 Gb/s), and four Slimline (PCIe 4.0 x8) storage U.2 ports.

Apple's silicon design team has recently launched its "fastest" CPU core ever, found inside the company's M1 processor designed for laptops and mini-PCs. Featuring an eight-core processor, where four cores are represented by low power small configurations, and four big, high-performance design cores, the M1 processor proved to be extremely fast. However, the Apple Silicon processor doesn't seem to cover anything higher than the 13-inch MacBook Pro. And that is about to change. When it comes to higher-end models like the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which provides more cooling area, it is logical that the processor for those designs is a higher performance design.

Enter the world of the Apple M1X processor. Designed for high-end laptops and the most demanding workloads, the new processor aims to create a new performance level. Featuring a 12-core CPU with eight big and four small cores, the M1X processor is going to deliver much better performance than M1. The graphics and memory configuration are currently unknown, so we have to wait and see how it will look like. The M1X is set to arrive sometime in Q1 of 2021, according to the source of the leak, so be patient and remember to take this information with a grain of salt.

Intel continues to "shed fat" on its business portfolio. After last year's sale of its smartphone modem chip business to Apple, the company is now parting ways with its power management circuitry division - Enpirion - and offloading it to Richtek, a division of Taiwanese MediaTek. The sale price of $85 million is a drop in the bucket for Intel's overall bottom line, so it's not a way for the company to cash in some desperately needed money - all accounts of Intel's troubles in the wake of its semiconductor manufacturing issues and AMD's market resurgence pale in comparison to Intel's revenues.

This actually looks like a company that's actually streamlining its R&D expenditures and focusing on execution for the markets Intel sees as most important for today and for tomorrow. Intel's Enpirion focuses on building power management chips for FPGA circuits, SoCs, CPUs, and ASICs, and will now serve to bolster MediaTek's SoC business while allowing the Taiwanese company to expand and diversify its business portfolio, even as Intel focuses on their core competencies.

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.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

Colorful, a Chinese manufacturer of PC components known for its graphics cards, is apparently preparing a special RAM version for AMD's Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. The new arrival is part of the iGame series that Colorful offers. Thanks to SMZDM forums, we have specifications of the upcoming iGame RAM tuned specifically for Ryzen 5000 series processors. Coming in with all white PCB without a heat spreader, the new Colorful iGame memory features Samsung's B-dies designed for maximum speed and performance. The dies are running at 4000 MT/s with some very strict timings. The memory features C14 (14-14-14-35) timings that are supposed to bring the system latency down and improve performance even further. It is estimated that such a configuration will require 1.5 Volts to power it. While the exact name, launch date, and pricing is unknown, we can only wait and see how Colorful plays it out.

AMD's Smart Access Memory (SAM) is a new technology that AMD decided to launch with its Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. The technology aims to solve the problem where a CPU can only access a fraction of GPU VRAM at once, making some bottlenecks in the system. By utilizing the bandwidth of PCIe, the SAM expands its data channels and uses all the speed that the PCIe connection offers. However, it appears that AMD might not be the only company offering such technology. Thanks to Gamer's Nexus, they got a reply from NVIDIA regarding a technology similar to AMD's SAM.

NVIDIA responded that: "The capability for resizable BAR is part of the PCI Express spec. NVIDIA hardware supports this functionality and will enable it on Ampere GPUs through future software updates. We have it working internally and are seeing similar performance results." And indeed, it has been a part of the PCIe specification since 2008. This document dating to 2008 says that "This optional ECN adds a capability for Functions with BARs to report various options for sizes of their memory mapped resources that will operate properly. Also added is an ability for software to program the size to configure the BAR to." Every PCIe compatible device can enable it with the driver update through the software.

When Apple announced that they are going to switch their Mac lineup from Intel-based x86 processors to the custom "Apple Silicon," everyone was wondering how the new processors will look and perform. To everyone's luck, Apple has just a few days ago announced its first Apple Silicon custom processor for MacBook. The M1, as the company calls it, is their first processor designed for higher-power and performance tasks The M1 features eight CPU cores (four high-performance and four-high efficiency) paired with eight cores dedicated to the graphics. On the die, there is also a 16-core neural engine made to accelerate machine learning tasks found in the new applications.

Today, we are getting the first GeekBench 5 CPU benchmarks that showcase just how far Apple has come with its custom design. What we have is the M1 processor found in MacBook Air. This Mac model features a passive cooling system, cooling a CPU with a base frequency of 3.2 GHz. The system scored 1719 points in the single-core result, and 6967 points in the multi-core result. The single-threaded results measure itself with some of the highest-end offerings from Intel and AMD, while the multi-threaded results are very good given the mix and match of small and big cores.

EK, the leading computer cooling solutions provider, announces the release of their EK-QuantumX Delta TEC water block. With more than 15 years of experience as a leader of premium quality cooling solutions, EK, in collaboration with Intel, has developed a next-level solution for enthusiasts seeking consistent thermal performance and enhanced overclocking on unlocked 10th Gen Intel Core desktop processors.

"Since the start of EK, our goal was to create innovative and viable solutions for gaming and PC enthusiasts," said Edvard König, Founder of EK. "I am proud to merge the consistent and proven performance of the EK Quantum cooling engine with Intel's sub-ambient cooling technology to achieve the best computing and gaming experience imaginable." The EK-QuantumX Delta TEC is exclusively powered by Intel Cryo Cooling Technology, a unique combination of hardware, software, and firmware designed to help unleash elite performance for gamers and overclockers.

Intel has just recently announced its next-generation Rocket Lake-S processor specifications designed to bring improved performance and newer platform technologies like PCIe 4.0. However, we are yet to see the first 10 nm CPU for desktop users. Today, thanks to the sources over at VideoCardz, we have the first look at Intel's next-next-generation processor called Alder Lake. The Alder Lake-S is a platform that brings many of the "firsts" for Intel. It will be the first architecture being built on the company's 10 nm SuperFin architecture. Alongside the new node, the platform will transition to the next-generation of technologies. Rumored are the transitions to PCIe 5.0 and perhaps, most importantly - DDR5.

Another new approach will be Intel's adaptation of Arm's big.LITTLE heterogeneous core structure. The processor will feature a few of the "little" cores for light tasks, and fire up the "big" cores for heavy computing. All of that will require a new socket to house the processor, which is the LGA1700. You can see the new processor below, compared to LGA1200 CPU from the previous generation.

Following the launch of its 5000 series AMD Ryzen processors based on the new Zen 3 core, AMD is preparing for market availability of these processors on November 5th. The reviews are going to arrive on that day as well, meaning that the consumers will know what to look for in the new CPU lineup. Thanks to a LinusTechTips forum member, Jumper118, we have some of the first benchmarks arriving just ahead of the official launch. The user has posted Cinebench R20, R15, and R11.5 scores of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6C/12T CPU. All of the benchmarks were recorded for the single-core values, revealing what we can expect from the new Zen 3 core.

Scoring 609 points in Cinebench R20, 272 and 258 points in R15, and 3.0 points in R11.5, the new Ryzen 5 5600X CPU shows that there is a good performance improvement to be gained from upgrading to the latest generation. Below, you can see the newly released Zen 3 core detailed by AMD, and the benchmark results of the new leak.

Just a few days ago, Intel has decided to surprise us and give out information about its upcoming Rocket Lake-S platform designed for desktop users. Arriving early next year (Q1) the Rocket Lake-S platform is yet another iteration of the company's 14 nm node. However, this time we are getting some real system changes with a new architecture design. Backporting its Golden Cove core to 14 nm, Intel has named this new core type Cypress Cove. What used to be the heart of Ice Lake CPUs, is now powering the Rocket Lake-S platform. Besides the new core, there are other features of the platform like PCIe 4.0, new Xe graphics, and updated media codecs. You can check that out here.

Today, we have gotten the first benchmarks of the Intel Rocket Lake-S system. In the Userbenchmark bench, an unknown eight-core Rocket Lake CPU has been compared to Intel's 10th generation Comet Lake-S processors. The Rocket Lake engineering sample ran at 4.2 GHz while scoring a single-core score of 179. Compared to the Core i9-10900K that runs at 5.3 GHz, which scored 152 points, the Cypress Cove design is 18% faster. And if the new design is compared to the equivalent 8C/16T Compet Lake CPU like Core i7-10700K clocked at 5.1 GHz and scoring 148 points, the new CPU uarch is up to 22% faster. This represents massive single-threaded performance increases, however, please take the information with a grain of salt, as we wait for the official reviews.

In a somewhat puzzling trend, this is yet another launch from CORSAIR's Hydro X series of custom watercooling components that has not been marketed by the company. It took a careful set of eyes to see the new CPU block, the Hydro X Series XC5, on their website and evidently this is a new release targeting even more a budget-friendly build compared to the Hydro XC7 and Hydro XC9 blocks. The XC5 block is a cost-down version of the XC7, with support for Intel LGA 115x/1200 and AMD AM4 CPU sockets depending on the SKU you go with. Gone is the transparent top, and instead we see a black nylon top with a patterned cutout for RGB lighting. The nickel-plated copper cold plate is replaced with passivated copper, which may also please all you pure copper folks out there, and the 16 RGB LEDs are now set up in 8 lighting zones (two LEDs per zone) as opposed to fully addressable 16 dRGB LEDs on the XC7. This means that the Hydro XC5 blocks can be had for $60/€60 before applicable taxes, which is $20 less than the XC7 on street pricing at the moment.