Top-of-the-line gaming brand AORUS, reveals itself at the 2019 GAMESCOM trade show in Germany Cologne, in which the spotlight shines at the all-new 17 inch flagship gaming laptop, the AORUS 17. AORUS takes the lead yet again through the co-op with world renowned switch manufacture OMRON to innovate and develop a set of unique mechanical switches that is tailored for the AORUS 17, not only does the keys offer exceptional durability, it also offers one of the best feeling keys that gamers can find on a laptop. The AORUS greatness continues through the combination of the brand new Intel 8-core CPU, NVIDIA RTX graphics chip with Ray Tracing technology and an exclusive WINDFORCE INFINITY cooling system, the AORUS 17 steadily sits on the high-end gaming thrown with these specs.

AORUS leads the industry again by working with world renowned mechanical switch manufacture, OMRON in order to create a unique set of mechanical keys for the AORUS laptop, with gamer oriented design details, including an optimal 2.5 mm key travel and an actuation point of 1.6 mm, giving gamers both the sensational touch and sound of a crisp blue switch, which gamers can now enjoy the qualities of a full mechanical keyboard right on their AORUS laptop. AORUS pursues further by redesigning the key caps to produce stunning backlit keys with unique "concentric" keycaps, letting the LED underneath the keycap shine though evenly, increasing the overall lighting intensity by 27%, in addition to the AORUS exclusive FUSION 2.0 keyboard customization software, gamers can truly create a unique personal style.

It is no secret that AMD has made a huge success with its long awaited "Zen" CPUs and returned to PC market stronger than ever. Intel however has neglected AMD's presence and only recently admitted what an impact AMD made. At this year's Gamescon, Intel started a new campaign against AMD with a point that Intel's CPUs are still better performers with "real world benchmarks" backing that claim.

"A year ago when we introduced the i9 9900K," says Intel's Troy Severson, "it was dubbed the fastest gaming CPU in the world. And I can honestly say nothing's changed. It's still the fastest gaming CPU in the world. I think you've heard a lot of press from the competition recently, but when we go out and actually do the real-world testing, not the synthetic benchmarks, but doing real-world testing of how these games perform on our platform, we stack the 9900K against the Ryzen 9 3900X. They're running a 12-core part and we're running an eight-core," he adds. "I'll be very honest, very blunt, say, hey, they've done a great job closing the gap, but we still have the highest performing CPUs in the industry for gaming, and we're going to maintain that edge."

Intel's development of their Core architecture in the post-Ryzen world has been slow, with solutions slowly creeping up in core counts with every new CPU release - but much slowly than rival AMD's efforts. Before Intel can capitalize on a new, more scalable and power-efficient architecture, though, it has to deliver performance and core count increases across its product line to stay as relevant as possible against a much revitalized rival. Enter Comet Lake-S: the desktop parts of Intel's new round of consumer CPUs, which will reportedly see an increase in the maximum core count to a 10-core design. This 10-core design, however, comes with an increase in power consumption (up to 135 W), and the need, once again, for beefier power delivery systems in a new, LGA 1200 package (with 9 more pins that the current LGA 1151).

The move to a new socket and the more stringent power requirements give Intel the opportunity to refresh its chipset offerings once again. If everything stays the same (and there's no reason it should change), new Z470 and Z490 chipsets should be some of the higher tier offerings for builders to pair with their motherboards. The new Comet Lake-S CPUs will still be built in the now extremely refined 14 nm process, and allegedly keep the same 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes as current Coffee Lake Refresh offerings. The new CPU offerings from Intel are expected to roll out in Q1 2020.

Users that don't want to play the silicon lottery game have been using services that offer pre-binned and pre-overclocked chips for a while now. Silicon Lottery is one of the most well known players in this game, but German retailer Caseking is now offering the same for AMD's latest Ryzen 3000 processors. AMD's work on automatic overclocking and boost clocks for their Ryzen chips has rendered manual overclocking almost (read: almost) obsolete, and in some cases it may even be detrimental to the CPU's performance to set a manual overclock that overrides AMD's boost clock algorithm. This is because AMD's boost increases speed on a single core, with subsequent cores being clocked slightly lower according to their capabilities. In effect, this means that manually overclocking all cores to, say, 4.0 GHz can sometimes render lower performance in particular tasks, since the all-core overclock is, by necessity, handicapped by the least-overclockable core.

Caseking's offerings have been pre-overclocked, and are guaranteed to hit stable overclocks at the claimed frequency, thus saving users from getting a "bad" overclocker CPU from AMD. Caseking's offerings have been tested by their own King Mod team and overclocking superstar Roman "der8auer" Hartung, with Prime95 26.6 software being used to test the overclocked chips' stability with a FFT length of 1344 for at least one hour. This practice is backed by a two-year limited warranty on the CPU. Sadly, most CPUs are out of stock at the moment, so keep on checking availability, unless one of the offerings is exactly up your alley.

Intel today announced its future Intel Xeon Scalable processor family (codename Cooper Lake) will offer customers up to 56 processor cores per socket and built-in AI training acceleration in a standard, socketed CPU as part of its mainline Intel Xeon Scalable platforms, with availability in the first half of 2020. The breakthrough platform performance delivered within the high-core-count Cooper Lake processors will leverage the capabilities built into the Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 series, which today is gaining momentum among the world's most demanding HPC customers, including HLRN, Advania, 4Paradigm, and others.

"The Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 series that we introduced as part of our 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor family generated a lot of excitement among our customers who are deploying the technology to run their high-performance computing (HPC), advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and high-density infrastructure. Extended 56-core processor offerings into our mainline Intel Xeon Scalable platforms enables us to serve a much broader range of customers who hunger for more processor performance and memory bandwidth."
-Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager of Data Center Marketing, Intel Corporation

Today, Intel officially launched 11 new, highly integrated 10th Gen Intel Core processors designed for remarkably sleek 2 in 1s and laptops. The processors bring high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) to the PC at scale, feature new Intel Iris Plus graphics for stunning entertainment and enable the best connectivity with Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) and Thunderbolt 3. Systems are expected from PC manufacturers for the holiday season.

"These 10th Gen Intel Core processors shift the paradigm for what it means to deliver leadership in mobile PC platforms. With broad-scale AI for the first time on PCs, an all-new graphics architecture, best-in-class Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) and Thunderbolt 3 - all integrated onto the SoC, thanks to Intel's 10nm process technology and architecture design - we're opening the door to an entirely new range of experiences and innovations for the laptop."
-Chris Walker, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Mobility Client Platforms in the Client Computing Group

According to VideoCardz'es sources at ASUS, they have received confirmation that ASUS is working on new motherboards for AMD's unannounced chipset offerings, X590 and possibly even X599. In ASUS'es internal documentation two motherboards are appearing with X590 name, PRIME X590-PRO and ROG STRIX X590-E.

These motherboards are named similarly as the current offering from ASUS, the PRIME X570-PRO and ROG STRIX X570-E Gaming, so even though that we don't know if these models will ever hit the market, there is great possibility. Additionally, there is another chipset refresh coming, but now for the HEDT space. ASUS is working on ZENITH II EXTREME, an update to first ZENITH EXTREME motherboard (based on X399 chipset), which is expected to feature updated X599 chipset and should support new ThreadRipper 3000 series of CPUs. For now, we don't have any details of either two chipsets nor the improvements they will bring.

During its second quarter earnings call, Intel announced that it has started shipping of 10th generation "Core" CPUs to OEMs. Making use of 10 nm lithography, the 10th generation of "Core" CPUs, codenamed Ice Lake, were qualified by OEMs earlier in 2019 in order to be integrated into future products. Ice Lake is on track for holiday season 2019, meaning that we can expect products on-shelves by the end of this year. That is exciting news as the 10th generation of Core CPUs is bringing some exciting micro-architectural improvements along with the long awaited and delayed Intel's 10nm manufacturing process node.

The new CPUs are supposed to get around 18% IPC improvement on average when looking at direct comparison to previous generation of Intel CPUs, while being clocked at same frequency. This time, even regular mobile/desktop parts will get AVX512 support, alongside VNNI and Cryptography ISA extensions that are supposed to bring additional security and performance for the ever increasing number of tasks, especially new ones like Neural Network processing. Core configurations will be ranging from dual core i3 to quad core i7, where we will see total of 11 models available.

Silicon Lottery, a company specializing in the process called binning which involves testing of CPUs for particular features (overclocking potential in this case), has released its portfolio of 3rd generation of Ryzen CPUs. As of now, they are offering only Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 models, covering Ryzen 7 3700X, 3800X and Ryzen 9 3900X. Ryzen 9 3950X is said to be introduced in September and that is the date Silicon Lottery will reveal the information about overclocking potential of that model and frequencies they have achieved. Mid range Ryzen 5 models should be added at later date as well.

EK Water Blocks, the leading premium water cooling gear manufacturer, is introducing the new members of EK-Velocity lineup off high-performance water blocks for popular AMD and Intel CPU sockets. It features a newly developed aesthetical top with a diagonal strike-through design mixing matte black and silver or black nickel and black for an elegant and striking look. The 45-degree line across the center of the block perfectly matches with some of the high-end motherboards that are on the market today.

EK-Velocity Strike is featuring the 5th iteration of the award-winning EK cooling engine which is further tweaked to perfection. Built upon a decade of experience in liquid cooling, EK Velocity series CPU water blocks are a product of countless hours of simulations, research and market-leading engineering. The top is CNC machined out of a solid piece of brass which is coated with black chrome or matte black, while the aesthetic cover piece is made of black anodized brushed aluminium or pure brushed aluminium. The purest copper available on the market is used for the EK-Velocity Strike cold plate which is precisely machined to a dense micro-fin structure. The contact surface itself is machine polished for better contact with the CPU IHS.

With AMD's 3rd generation Ryzen processors finally falling into the hands of PC enthusiasts, many early-adopters are taking to tech communities such as ours, to share their experiences with others. A trend appears to be emerging of users reporting higher-than-usual voltages for these processors when idling. AMD investigated this phenomenon, and declared this to be a non-issue. Apparently, most modern CPU monitoring utilities cause what is known as "the observer effect:" the process of measuring the processor's load itself causes load on the processor.

In case of the Ryzen "Matisse" processors, monitoring software appear to be polling each processor core for load by sending it instruction at a high rate of speed - sending them a workload of 20 ms every 200 ms. This causes the processor's embedded firmware to think that the cores are being subjected to workload, and it responds by increasing the clock-speeds, and proportionately voltages of all CPU cores. Monitoring software poll each CPU core, and so core voltages are raised across the chip.

Today an article was posted on Intel's internal employee-only portal called "Circuit News". The post, titled "AMD competitive profile: Where we go toe-to-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs" goes into detail about the recent history of AMD and how the company achieved its tremendous growth in recent years. Further, Intel talks about where they see the biggest challenges with AMD's new products, and what the company's "secret sauce" is to fight against these improvements.The full article follows:

El Chapuzas Informático has posted an early review of the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 which was tested on a Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi motherboard, G.Skill FlareX DDR4 @ 3200 MHz and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE graphics card. Looking at the data presented, it becomes clear the performance on offer if real looks to be quite impressive. The site compared AMD's latest offering to the Intel Core i9-9900K and the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with the Ryzen 5 3600 typically slotting in between the two and in some cases beating both. This is interesting to note as the Ryzen 7 2700X offers similar clock speeds to the Ryzen 5 3600 but the former has a 2C/4T advantage. Even so, the newer AMD CPU tends to outpace the Zen+ based Ryzen 7 2700X in multiple tests. In Cinebench R15, for example, the Ryzen 5 3600 had the lead in single-core performance while multi-core was held by the Ryzen 7 2700X. Cinebench R20 roughly mimics these results as well.

While memory latency was quite high 80.5 ns, it didn't seem to impact performance to any serious degree. In fact, in wPrime 2.10 32M running on a single core showed the Ryzen 5 3600 coming in just behind the Intel Core i9-9900K while being faster than the previous generation Intel Core i7-8700K, i7-8600K, and AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and 1700X. That said, the previous generation Ryzen processors were far slower here were as the Intel chips were still competitive. In the multi-core test, the Ryzen 7 2700X took a slight lead while the Ryzen 7 1700X was a bit slower than the Ryzen 5 3600. One interesting quirk of note was the lack of write speed on the memory with the Ryzen 5 3600 only hitting 25.6 GB/s which is quite a drop from the 47 GB/s seen on the Ryzen 7 1700X and Ryzen 7 2700X. However this could be due to the X470 motherboard being used or maybe an issue with sub timings on the memory, something that will need to be verified in future reviews.

Intel has seemingly partnered with Samsung, one of the largest manufacturers of Integrated Circuits, in order to help reduce the CPU shortage currently affecting the PC market. It is the first time ever that Intel turned to Samsung for it's CPU manufacturing given that, historically, Intel's Client Computing Group (CCG) has always relied on Intel's internal fab to manufacture all of its components. But as resources in those fabs became constrained, Intel CCG started looking at other resources, such as TSMC, to manufacture the chipsets used in Intel-based motherboards.

In a report prepared by Sedialy, a South Korean news media, Intel turned to Samsung specifically to meet demand on its 14 nm products. This unexpected move came after negotiations which, if you believe the rumors before the news, were in progress for quite some time already. Samsung has formally agreed to manufacture Intel's CPUs of the microarchitecture code-named 'Rocket Lake', which will serve as processors for mini PCs, planned to be released in 2021.

Bitspower at COMPUTEX 2019 showcased new products and conceptual, advanced looks at products that are still being developed. The company showcased GPU waterblocks for both the NVIDIA RTX 20-series of graphics cards, as well as AMD's current top of the line Radeon VII. On the GPU waterblock side of things, they also showcased an in-development block with a rugged texture and design that carries Bitspower's logo, which would certainly look great on a vertically-mounted GPU.

Ian "8Pack" Parry is proud to announce his latest extreme machine, the Supernova XL. Built inside the CaseLabs STH10, the Supernova XL not only draws its inspiration from the very first 8Pack machine, but also gives one final moment in the sun to add to the already accomplished CaseLabs legacy. Standing at just under a metre the Supernova XL is a colossal machine, consisting of five custom acrylic pass through plates complete with mirrored internals. It's a showpiece to behold. The interior is also fitted with a light box, bathing the water-cooled components in a customisable light display.

Powering the Supernova XL you'll find one Intel's most exclusive processors, the i9-9990XE. Available in extremely limited quantities, through closed auction, this elusive processor is so exclusive it isn't even listed on the official Intel Ark database. The i9-9990XE is a 14 core processor, with a 4.0 GHz base clock pulling 255W TDP, it's capable of hitting a 5.0 GHz boost clock across all cores - straight out of the box. Cooled by a custom water-loop, with two dedicated radiators, the i9-9990XE is overclocked by 8Pack himself for a system that gives only world-class leading performance.

With AMD chipset based motherboards like X570 and next-generation Ryzen 3000 series CPUs delivering the 4.0 version of the PCIe protocol for consumers, products based on the faster protocol are bound to take advantage of its improvements - especially in terms of better bandwidth.

At their Computex booth, Gigabyte showed off some pretty impressive results of their PCIe 4.0 based SSD card. The so-called "Auros AIC Gen4 SSD" is a performance monster. It is able to pack up to four PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs that can go up to 2 TB of density each, for a maximum 8 TB total storage. Put them in RAID 0 configuration, though, and you will get some amazing performance numbers. Gigabyte demonstrated speeds exceeding 15 GB/s in sequential reads and writes, providing much more bandwidth than what has ever seen before ina consumer-geared product. The SSD comes with an aluminum shroud with pre-applied thermal pads to facilitate heat dissipation. Additionally, there is a blower fan attached to the card to keep a constant flow of fresh air, which seems like a must if you're packing four M.2 drives inside a tiny aluminum case.

Intel laid rest to speculation that post 9th generation, it could replace its Core brand with something else. The 10th generation Core processors, built around the 10 nm "Ice Lake" microachitecture, will feature the first noteworthy IPC increments since "Skylake" thanks to their new "Sunny Cove" CPU cores. These will also feature DLBoost, a fixed-function matrix-multiplication hardware that speeds up deep-neural net building and training by 5x, as well as certain AVX-512 instructions. The cores will be optimized to cope with 2.4 Gbps 802.11ax Wi-Fi and faster Ethernet standards. The first of these chips will target mobile computing platforms, and will be quad-core parts like the dies pictured below. To save notebook PCB real-estate, Intel will put the processor and PCH dies into a multi-chip module. It will be quite a wait for the desktop implementation, but at least you know what their case-badges look like.

An AMD-based system's most important performance pairing lies in the CPU and system RAM, as a million articles written ever since the introduction of AMD's first generation Ryzen CPUs have shown (remember the races for Samsung B-die based memory?). There are even tools that allow you to eke out the most performance out of your AMD system via fine memory overclocking and timings adjustment, which just goes to show the importance the enthusiast community derives from such tiny details that maximize your AMD Zen-based CPU performance. Now, notorious leaker @momomo_us has seemingly confirmed that AMD has worked wonders on its memory controller, achieving a base JEDEC 3200 MHz specification - up from the previously officially supported DDR4-2666 speeds in the first-gen Ryzen (updated to DDR4-2933 speeds on the 12 nm update).

ASUS is aware that a new sub-class of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs, called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), also known as ZombieLoad, RIDL, and Fallout, may allow information disclosure. Intel states that selected 8th and 9th Generation Intel Core processors, as well as the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor family, are not vulnerable to MDS. If you are using one of these processors, no further action is necessary.

For other Intel processors, ASUS is working closely with Intel to provide a solution in a forthcoming BIOS update. We recommend owners of affected products update both the BIOS and operating system as soon as these mitigations are available. Please find our first-wave model list below and download the appropriate BIOS update from the ASUS Support website. More details, including affected systems, will be added to this document as they become available.

As of yet unannounced, it seems that Cryorig may be preparing to launch a graphene-coated version of their popular low-profile C7Cu cooler. Cryorig's own website has a product page up for the part, which makes use of graphene's qualities in both durability, lightness and thermal conductivity to increase performance in the part of the market it arguably matters the most - small form factor. This could signal an improvement in heat dissipation capabilities for this small cooler. The C7 Cu version, in full copper, has a 115W TDP specification, so perhaps the C7G will improve in that front.

The C7G FAQ isn't uploaded as of yet, which speaks to the unannounced nature of the product. The only thing we have to go by, for now, is the image for the product on Cryorig's product page, and the users' manual, which while not giving away much in terms of specifications, but does show that there are a pair of mounting clips included for users to mount their 90 mm fans - whether in 14 mm or 25 mm depth.

The Fortune 500 lists the top 500 companies in the worold in terms of revenue. These are the most significant movers in the markets, be it of real estate, mining, hedge fund, or semiconductor nature (among others). AMD was "kicked" out of the Fortune 500 back in 2015, when the company was struggling with its Bulldozer-based processors and had an increasingly small marketshare - and thus revenue - that Zen came on to save. Now, thanks to the efforts of everyone involved in the company, they've been listed again on the #460 spot.

The company has been winning minds and wallets when it comes to their CPU solutions in both the mainstream and professional segments, with the company making very important forays into the HPC world mostly thanks to the strength of their CPU lineup - which, in some cases, like with the Frontier Supercomupter (expected to be the world's fastest), can bring wins in the GPU computing department as well. For comparison's sake, Intel stands at a commanding #43, while NVIDIA enjoys a comfortable #268 place.

The Hot Chips conference is one of the leading-edge grounds for discussion of new silicon-bound technologies, and AMD will, as usual, take to its grounds in an effort to detail their efforts in their technology fields. The conference's organization has already confirmed a number of participants in its conference schedule, which includes the likes of Intel, Microsoft, Alibaba, NVIDIA, Tesla and of course, AMD.

AMD will be delivering two keynotes: the first, on August 19th, is simply titled "Zen 2", and will therefore deal with the underpinnings of the Zen 2 microarchitecture, which will be pervasive to all of AMD's CPU product lines. A second conference will be held on the same day by AMD's CEO Lisa Su herself, and is titled "Delivering the Future of High-Performance Computing with System, Software and Silicon Co-Optimization". On the next day, August 20th, another AMD keynote is simply titled "7 nm Navi GPU", and we expect it to follow in the footsteps of the Zen 2 conference. So, with AMD diving deep into both architectures come August... it's extremely likely the company will have launched both product lines by then. Fingers crossed. You can find the abstract on AMD's CEO Lisa Su's conference after the break.

Apple has advised users that they should disable Intel's Hyper-Threading feature on the company's computers due to the recently exposed MDS vulnerabilities. Citing internal testing, Apple said that users can expect an up to 40% performance loss in such a scenario (depending on system and workload, naturally) in various benchmarks and multithreaded workloads. The performance loss is understandable - you're essentially halving the number of threads available for your CPU to process data.

Like Intel said, it becomes an issue of how much users value their performance compared to the security risks involved: a classic risk/benefit scenario, which shouldn't ever be in the equation, after all. If users buy a system with a CPU that has known performance levels, they will obviously expect those to be valid for the longevity of the product, unless otherwise stated and considering operational variances that fall within a margin of error/product obsolescence. Halving your performance because of a design flaw that resulted from an effort to achieve higher and higher IPC increases doesn't strike as a way to inspire confidence in your products.

We've all taken a look at AMD's March 2019 product roadmap, which showed us the upcoming 2019 tech the company would be bringing to the table in its "non-stop product momentum". However, it seems that this non-stop product momentum might be coming to an unexpected twist of fate that might delay it from entering the last station - the Zen 2-based Threadripper. In the company's latest May earnings call roadmap, the company silently removed the Zen 2 Threadripper from its product roadmap - where it used to sit right after the launch of Zen 2-based Ryzen products for consumers, is now just a big crop of the space it occupied.

This might mean many things, and a mistake on someone's part while cropping the PowerPoint slide could be the only thing going on here. However, the best and most plausible speculation that can be entertained when one considers this is simple - a supply problem. With the 7 nm node being the newest, most dense fabrication process possible, and with AMD having to share TSMC's 7 nm wafer production with a number of high profile companies - such as Qualcomm, for instance - may mean that supply is simply too tight to support Zen 2-based products across so many product stacks - Ryzen and Epyc - at the same time.