The Apple A14X Bionic is an upcoming processor from Apple which is expected to feature in the upcoming iPad Pro models and should be manufactured on TSMC's 5 nm node. Tech YouTuber Luke Miani has recently provided a performance graph for the A14X chip based on "leaked/suspected A14 info + average performance gains from previous X chips". In these graphs, the Apple A14X can be seen matching the Intel Core i9-9880H in Geekbench 5 with a score of 7480. The Intel Intel Core i9-9880H is a 45 W eight-core mobile CPU found in high-end notebooks such as the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro and requires significant cooling to keep thermals under control.

If these performance estimates are correct or even close then Apple will have a serious productivity device and will serve as a strong basis for Apple's transition to custom CPU's for it's MacBook's in 2021. Apple may use a custom version of the A14X with slightly higher clocks in their upcoming ARM MacBooks according to Luke Miani. These results are estimations at best so take them with a pinch of salt until Apple officially unveils the chip.

IBM today revealed the next generation of its IBM POWER central processing unit (CPU) family: IBM POWER10. Designed to offer a platform to meet the unique needs of enterprise hybrid cloud computing, the IBM POWER10 processor uses a design focused on energy efficiency and performance in a 7 nm form factor with an expected improvement of up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than the IBM POWER9 processor.

Designed over five years with hundreds of new and pending patents, the IBM POWER10 processor is an important evolution in IBM's roadmap for POWER. Systems taking advantage of IBM POWER10 are expected to be available in the second half of 2021. Some of the new processor innovations include:

Samsung Electronics has reportedly laid out a plan to become the number one Android application processor (AP) vendor in the industry with its plan to join forces with AMD and Arm. The report of Business Korea indicates that Samsung wants to use both company's knowledge and IP to produce the best possible silicon. In early November of last year, Samsung has decided to shut down its division responsible for making custom CPU designs, and to start licensing IP from Arm. Also last year, Samsung has announced a strategic partnership with AMD to use its RDNA graphics processors in smartphones.

So Samsung plans to license IPs from both companies and just put them in SoC that will be up to the task to deliver the best performance, as the company predicts. The CPU is reportedly going to be based on Arm's Cortex-X custom design that should deliver high-performance Samsung wants. In the past, the company had some problems with the heat-management of its CPUs as they were designed a bit inefficiently. To cover everything, Samsung also plans to increase the number of employees working on a neural processing unit (NPU) and make a good performing NPUs as well, to combine with the rest of IPs.

TechPowerUp has today released an update to widely popular ThrottleStop software made by Kevin Glynn. Used as a tool to "monitor for and correct the three main types of CPU throttling", the new ThrottleStop software received a major update that brings a heap of new features and improvements. Starting off, one of the biggest changes in the new version 9.2, is that the tool finally restores Windows 7 compatibility, which was unavailable for that OS in the previous version 9.0. Now, the tool also brings a few more options to the table like a new TS Bench feature that allows for random MHz testing, adds support for devices that use connected standby, and fixes base clock MHz reporting when using Core Isolation.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp ThrottleStop 9.2The change-log follows.

Intel's 12th Gen Core EVO "Alder Lake" processors in the LGA1700 package could introduce the company's hybrid core technology to the desktop platform. Coreboot code leaked to the web by Coelacanth's Dream sheds fascinating insights to the way Intel is segmenting these chips. The 10 nm chip will see Intel combine high-performance "Golden Cove" CPU cores with energy-efficient "Gracemont" CPU cores, and up to three tiers of the company's Gen12 Xe integrated graphics. The "Alder Lake" desktop processor has up to eight big cores, up to eight small ones, and up to three tiers of the iGPU (GT0 being disabled iGPU, GT1 being the lower tier, and GT2 being the higher tier).

Segmentation between the various brand extensions appears to be primarily determined by the number of big cores. The topmost SKU has all 8 big and 8 small cores enabled, along with GT1 (lower) tier of the iGPU (possibly to free up power headroom for those many cores). The slightly lower SKU has 8 big cores, 6 small cores, and GT1 graphics. Next up, is 8 big cores, 4 small cores, and GT1 graphics. Then 8+2+GT1, and lastly, 8+0+GT1. The next brand extension is based around 6 big cores, being led by 6+8+GT2, and progressively lower number of small cores and their various iGPU tiers. The lower brand extension is based around 4 big cores with similar segmentation of small cores, and the entry-level parts have 2 big cores, and up to 8 small cores.

AMD is preparing to launch its next-generation Ryzen 4000 series of desktop processors based on Zen 3 architecture, codenamed Vermeer. Thanks to the sources over at Igor's Lab, we have some new information about the clock speeds of a rumored Ryzen 9 4950X Vermeer model. Featuring 16 cores and 32 threads, the Ryzen 9 4950X is reportedly going to feature boost frequency of at least 4.8 GHz. Given that this is only an engineering sample, the final frequencies could be higher. In the report, the base frequency of the CPU is said to be 3.5 GHz. This is a very good frequency for a CPU that has that many cores. All of this information is coming from decoding the OPN code which states "100-000000059-52_ 48/35 _ Y". The 48 number indicates the boost, and 35 the base frequency. In the previous reports, we got OPN codes "100-000000059-14_46/37_Y" and "100-000000059-15_46/37_N" which suggested 4.6 GHz boost and base of 3.5 GHz, indicating that this is a new stepping.

The Korean NoFan Computer company has released a variety of cooling products that targeted quiet operations such as passive coolers, liquid coolers, and "silent" fans. Their CR-95C series of passive CPU coolers were released in 2012 for the enthusiast market and carried a significant price tag. The NoFan CR-80EH was released in 2013 and brought the technology used in the CR-95C to a cheaper product. The company hasn't released any new passive coolers since and has faced increased competition from the likes of Noctua and SilverStone. A new report from FanlessTech claims the company has ceased operations which is very likely given their site has been taken down and only limited stock remains. If you want a NoFan CR-80EH now might be your last chance as remaining stock sells out.

In data centers of hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and ones alike, there is a massive need for more computing power. Being that data centers are space-limited facilities, it is beneficial if there is a system that can pack as much computing power as possible, in a smaller form factor. Penguin Computing has thought exactly about this problem and has decided to launch a TundraAP platform, designed specifically as a high-density CPU system. Using an Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 processor, the company utilizes Intel's processor with the highest core count - 56 cores spread on two dies, brought together by a single BGA package.

The Penguin Computing TundraAP system relies on Intel's S9200WK server system. In a 1U server, Penguin Computing puts two of those in one system, with a twist. The company implements a power disaggregation system, which is designed to handle and remove the heat coming from those 400 W TPD monster processors. This means that the PSU is moved from the server itself and moved on a special rack, so the heat from the CPUs wouldn't affect PSUs. The company uses Open Compute Project standards and says it improves efficiency by 15%. To cool those chips, Penguin Computing uses a direct-to-chip liquid cooling system. And if you are wondering how much cores the company can fit in a rack, look no further as it is possible to have as much as 7616 Xeon Platinum cores in just one rack. This is a huge achievement as the density is quite big. The custom cooling and power delivery system that the company built enabled this, by only allowing compute elements to be present in the system.

ID-COOLING today announced SE-914-XT Series CPU air cooler, featuring a comparatively big heatsink in the section of 130 mm height. Both coolers have 4 direct-touch copper heatpipes, 92 mm PWM fan and newly designed metal-mecha mounting system which is proved user friendly on the previous SE-224-XT series. Model names are: SE-914-XT ARGB & SE-914-XT BASIC.

With a quite thick heatsink design, these two coolers are designed for a TDP max at 150 W. In a height of 131 mm for the ARGB version / 126 mm for the Basic version, they can fit very well into medium size cases. ARGB version has a black heatsink and a top ARGB cover while BASIC version has only a top black sticker for a stealthy look.

MediaTek today announced the Dimensity 720, its latest 5G SoC that will give consumers access to premium 5G experiences on mid-tier smartphones. The Dimensity 720, is part of MediaTek's 5G chipset family that includes range of chipsets from Dimensity 1000 for flagship 5G smartphones to the Dimensity 800 and 700 series for more accessible 5G mid-tier devices.

"The Dimensity 720 sets a new standard, delivering feature-packed 5G experiences and technology to devices that are more accessible to mass market consumers," said Dr. Yenchi Lee, Deputy General Manager, Wireless Communications Business Unit, MediaTek. "This chip is highly power-efficient, has impressive performance and advanced display and imaging technologies. All of that combined will help brands usher in differentiated 5G devices for consumers around the globe."

As we approach the launch of the Intel's Ice Lake-SP Xeon processors, which will be the company's first 10 nm product for servers, we find more details on the ways CPU operates and today's discovery is an interesting one. In the latest patch submitted to Linux kernel by Intel's engineers, we find out that Intel Ice Lake Xeons have a slower frequency ramp up, meaning that there could be some latency added. However, the engineers have patched this and it should perform as expected. The patch is described as the following: "On ICX platform, the CPU frequency will slowly ramp up when woken up from C-states deeper than/equals to C1E. Although this feature does save energy in many cases this might also cause unexpected result. For example, workload might get unstable performance due to the uncertainty of CPU frequency. Besides, the CPU frequency might not be locked to specific level when the CPU utilization is low."

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. unveiled the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus 5G Mobile Platform, a follow-on to the flagship Snapdragon 865 that has powered more than 140 devices (announced or in development) - the most individual premium-tier designs powered by a single mobile platform this year. The new Snapdragon 865 Plus is designed to deliver increased performance across the board for superior gameplay and insanely fast Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gaming experiences, truly global 5G, and ultra-intuitive AI.

"As we work to scale 5G, we continue to invest in our premium tier, 8-series mobile platforms, to push the envelope in terms of performance and power efficiency and deliver the next generation of camera, AI and gaming experiences," said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager, mobile, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "Building upon the success of Snapdragon 865, the new Snapdragon 865 Plus will deliver enhanced performance for the next wave of flagship smartphones."

MediaTek, the world's 4th largest global fabless semiconductor company, today launched its newest chips in the smartphone gaming-focused G series - the MediaTek Helio G25 and G35. The latest chips feature MediaTek HyperEngine game technology for faster, smoother performance, enhanced power efficiency, and brilliant graphics.

The new chipsets always keep you connected and deliver the lowest latency gaming experience. They also offer enhanced imaging features, making these G-series chipsets a perfect fit for photography enthusiasts and gamers alike.

The European Hardware Association (EHA), comprised of the nine largest independent technology news and review websites on the continent, has announced its hardware winners for 2020. And AMD has completely blindsided its competition in all possible metrics, whether you're talking about the GPU or CPU side of the equation. AMD's CPU division has completely razed Intel's offerings when it comes to awards, with no Intel CPU even being credited with a single prize. AMD's Ryzen 3000 series won the most-desired award in the form of the "Product of the Year" award. The Ryzen 3000 chiplet design in itself won the EHA "Best Technology" Award; and more specifically, AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X took home the "Best CPU" prize; the Ryzen 5 3600 won "Best Gaming Product"; and the Ryzen 3 3300X won "Best Overclocking Product".

But AMD didn't stop in the CPU category, besting even rival NVIDIA in the GPU side of the equation. AMD's Navi 10 GPU, used in the Radeon RX 5700 series, has won the "Best GPU" category, while the "Best AMD-based graphics card" award goes to the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+ (the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC won "Best NVIDIA Graphics Card" category). Another AMD-inside design won the "Best Gaming Notebook" Award - ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14, which packs AMD's mobile Renoir CPUs inside.

AMD has been working hard to prepare its next-generation Ryzen 4000 CPUs codenamed Vermeer, and we have some exciting news about it. Thanks to the sources over at Igor's Lab, we have information that AMD Vermeer CPUs are close to launching. Apparently, the CPUs have are now at B0 stepping and are going through the usual validation process. The B0 stepping is where the CPU is fully working and now it just needs to go on mass production. The next step for the CPU is high-volume manufacturing and in a very quick time, the CPUs will be ready to hit the market.

Usually, it takes 3-4 months for silicon to be manufactured, so if AMD has orders set at TSMC's factory for the manufacturing of its processors, we could get the processors very soon. Given that AMD is ready with the design, and there is a lack of competition from team blue, AMD is very flexible with timing. The processors can be ready whenever AMD needs them to be. After a while, AMD is in a position to dictate the market needs and tailor them to their own. This used to be a position where Intel was before the Ryzen era. Now if AMD needs to do a launch as quickly as possible they can. If not, they have the design ready and can push it a few months.

Ampere today announced further roadmap details of its Ampere Altra server processor family. In March the company announced Ampere Altra, the world's first cloud native processor, featuring 80 cores. Today, Ampere unveiled preliminary details of the expansion of the cloud-native processor family by adding Ampere Altra Max, which has 128 cores, providing customers with another cloud-optimized processor to maximize overall performance and cores-per-rack density.

Ampere Altra Max is ideal for applications that take advantage of scale-out and elastic cloud architectures. Compatible with the 80-core Ampere Altra and also supporting 2-socket platforms, Ampere Altra Max offers the industry's highest socket-level performance and I/O scalability. It will be sampling in the fourth quarter and additional details will be provided later this year.

A 3D mark entry uncovered by database spelunker Tum_Apisak, since shared on Twitter, points towards Microsoft incorporating AMD's latest and greatest mobility-geared CPU in one of their upcoming product refreshes. The database entry register an unknown Microsoft device carrying ÃMD's Ryzen 7 4800U CPU. All specs are correct for this CPU - GPU cores, GPU clock, as well as CPU base and boost clocks.

While we can't know for sure this is Microsoft's next iteration of the Surface Laptop, assuming it is just an educated guess. Microsoft's current-gen Surface Laptop 3 shipped in a special, AMD-inside edition in the form of the "Microsoft Surface Edition" Ryzen 5 3580U - and if Microsoft included an AMD Zen+ CPU manufactured in a 12 nm fabrication process inside their Surface Laptop, we would find it very hard to justify not including the much-improved Ryzen 7 4800U - the chip is better in any conceivable way compared to its last-gen counterpart. This is a sure way of improving overall performance and battery life of their Surface Laptops compared to what the competition has currently available.

AMD Ryzen 4000 series of desktop APUs are set to be released next month as a quiet launch. What we expected to see is a launch covering only a few models ranging from Ryzen 3 to Ryzen 7 level, meaning that there would be configurations equipped with anything from 4C/8T to 8C/16T. In the beginning thanks to all the leaks we expected to see six models (listed in the table below), however thanks to discovery, we could be looking at even more SKUs of the Renoir family of APUs. Mentioned in the table are some new entries to both consumer and pro-grade users which means AMD will probably do a launch of both editions, possibly on the same day. We are not sure if that is the case, however, it is just a speculation.

Intel CPUs have been rather notorious for system bugs recently. Starting from 2018's Spectre and Meltdown which used speculative execution to exploit systems, the string of new vulnerabilities just continued to this day. Recently we had CrossTalk exploit which represents a threat to cloud providers, where one user could compromise another just by using the same CPU from which the virtual instances are powered. These types of exploits are even more dangerous than ones that require local access, as that is already dangerous by itself. A lot of these issues are said to be ironed out by Intel's new microarchitecture designs like Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and future revisions.

However, it seems like Intel is encountering some problems with even the latest Ice Lake CPUs when it comes to system bugs. JetBrains, a Czech provider of software development tools has a Java programming language development environment called IntelliJ integrated development environment. It was recently reported that on MacBook Air 2020 and Microsoft Surface Pro models equipped with 10th generation Intel Ice Lake CPUs, IntelliJ IDE causes system restart or a complete OS crash. In the report, the CPU ran in a Linux VM that isolates itself from MacOS so the macOS XNU kernel is not to blame. In the report thread, another user running Windows on Microsoft Surface Pro experienced the crash as well.

AMD has confirmed it's bundling free PC copies of Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition with select Ryzen 3000 CPUs. Customers looking to purchase the Ryzen 5 3600, Ryzen 5 3600X, Ryzen 7 370X, Ryzen 7 3800X, Ryzen 9 3900X, and Ryzen 9 3950X processors will be eligible for the promotion. Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition codes will likely be in the form of Steam keys and will include all DLC content from PlayStation 4. The promotion is now live at Chillblast and Overclockers UK with more information from other retailers likely to surface soon.

Intel has had quite a lot of work trying to patch all vulnerabilities discovered in the past two years. Starting from Spectre and Meltdown which exploited speculative execution of the processor to execute malicious code. The entire process of speculative execution relies on the microarchitectural technique for adding more performance called speculative branch prediction. This technique predicts branch paths and prepared them for execution, so the processor spends less time figuring out where and how will instructions flow through the CPU. So far, lots of these bugs have been ironed out with software, but a lot of older CPUs are vulnerable.

However, an attacker has always thought about doing malicious code execution on a CPU core shared with the victim, and never on multiple cores. This is where the new CrossTalk vulnerability comes in. Dubbed Special Register Buffer Data Sampling (SRBDS) by Intel, it is labeled as CVE-2020-0543 in the vulnerability identifier system. The CrossTalk is bypassing all intra-core patches against Spectre and Meltdown so it can attack any CPU core on the processor. It enables attacker-controlled code execution on one CPU core to leak sensitive data from victim software executing on a different core. This technique is quite dangerous for users of shared systems like in the cloud. Often, one instance is shared across multiple customers and until now they were safe from each other. The vulnerability uses Intel's SGX security enclave against the processor so it can be executed. To read about CrossTalk in detail, please visit the page here.

At CES 2020, AMD detailed a new technology called SmartShift. With the launch of the Ryzen 4000 Series "Renoir" processors, AMD has brought this technology to the processors powering the next generation of laptops. Designed to bring better performance to the overall system, the technology uses TDP balancing to boost the performance of processors. What that means is that the technology dynamically relocates the TDP budget to where it is most needed. For example, if the application is CPU intensive, the CPU will get a bigger TDP budget and will get better performance. And it goes the same way for GPU. Of course, the technology works only on AMD CPU and GPU combinations.

To use the SmartShift technology, the platform designer needs to implement it. For example, if a notebook manufacturer decides not to do it in its system, then it will not work. So far, we have only seen one model with SmartShift technology launching this year. The model in question is Dell's G5 15 SE. And it is going to stay like that. Frank Azore of AMD, has come out on Twitter and said that the reason for the lack of other laptops using this technology is because it is brand new and Dell jumped on it first. "No more SmartShift laptops are coming this year but the team is working hard on having more options ASAP for 2021." - he added. Hopefully, we will see more models being powered by this technology as the 2021 starts.

AMD today announced that 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) C5a instances are now generally available in the AWS U.S. East, AWS U.S. West, AWS Europe and AWS Asia Pacific regions.

Powered by a 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor running at frequencies up to 3.3Ghz, the Amazon EC2 C5a instances are the sixth instance family at AWS powered by AMD EPYC processors. By using the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor, the C5a instance delivers leadership x86 price-performance for a broad set of compute-intensive workloads including batch processing, distributed analytics, data transformations, log analytics and web applications.

Last year Samsung and AMD announced their collaboration which promises to deliver smartphone chips with AMD RDNA 2 graphics at its heart. This collaboration is set to deliver first products sometime at the beginning of 2021 when Samsung will likely utilize new SoCs in their smartphones. In previous leaks, we have found that the GPU inside this processor is reportedly beating the competition form Qualcomm, where the AMD GPU was compared to Adreno 650. However, today we have obtained more information about the new SoC which is reportedly called "Ryzen C7" smartphone SoC. A new submission to a mobile phone leaks website called Slash Leaks has revealed a lot of new details to us.

The SoC looks like a beast. Manufactured on TSMC 5 nm process, it features two Gaugin Pro cores based on recently announced Arm Cortex-X1, two Gaugin cores based on Arm Cortex-A78, and four cores based on Arm Cortex-A55. This configuration represents a standard big.LITTLE CPU typical for smartphones. Two of the Cortex-X1 cores run at 3 GHz, two of Cortex-A78 run at 2.6 GHz, while four little cores are clocked at 2 GHz frequency. The GPU inside this piece of silicon is what is amazing. It features four cores of custom RDNA 2 based designs that are clocked at 700 MHz. These are reported to beat the Adreno 650 by 45% in performance measurements.

During this unprecedented global health crisis, we have experienced rapid societal changes in how we interact with and rely on technology to connect, aid, and support us. As a result of this we are increasingly living our lives on our smartphones, which have been essential in helping feed our families through application-based grocery or meal delivery services, as well as virtually seeing our colleagues and loved ones daily. Without question, our Arm-based smartphones are the computing hub of our lives.

However, even before this increased reliance on our smartphones, there was already growing interest among users to explore the limits of what is possible. The combination of these factors with the convergence of 5G and AI, are generating greater demand for more performance and efficiency in the palm of our hands.