According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment, spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments, including dedicated and shared IT environments, increased 16.3% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2022 (4Q22) to $24.1 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment although the latter had strong growth in 4Q22 as well, increasing 9.4% year over year to $18.7 billion. For the full year, cloud infrastructure grew 19.4% to $87.7 billion, while non-cloud grew 13.6% to $66.7 billion. The market continues to benefit from high demand, large backlogs, rising prices, and an improving infrastructure supply chain.

Amazon is today expanding its Luna cloud gaming service into three new territories - Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. This is the first sign of the online retail giant's goal to broaden the service beyond the initial launch base in the USA. The company is clearly excited to offer their cloud games library to a larger customer base: "Gamers in the U.S. have been enjoying Luna for the past year and we're thrilled to expand the service, giving more customers the opportunity to play high-quality, immersive games without expensive gaming hardware or lengthy downloads."

These new territories have been granted access to Luna's full package which now consists of Ubisoft+, Jackbox Games, and Luna+ subscription services. The Luna app can be launched on 'select devices', which means a wide range of modern bits of kit can run it: Fire TV, Fire Tablets, Windows PCs, Chromebooks, Macs, iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. Amazon confirmed that its Official Luna Wireless Controller is also being made available to customers in Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom - which is an exclusive item to the Amazon Store. It should be noted that you can run other compatible control devices via Bluetooth, including a wireless keyboard and mouse, as well as the Xbox One and PlayStation DualShock 4 gamepads.

peel 3d, the developers of best-in-class professional-grade 3D scanners that offer superior value at unmatched price points, today announced the launch of peel 3 and peel 3.CAD—two new scanners that will elevate the 3D scanning experience for professional users across many different sectors without compromising affordability.

peel 3 and peel 3.CAD handle like a charm as they feature a revamped ergonomic design unlike any other on the market and an intuitive multi-function touchscreen interface. Industry-first haptic user communication through vibration simplifies generating high-quality 3D scans regardless of users' skill levels. Improved resolution and performance for more complex geometries, surfaces and colours provide additional versatility to 3D scan any type of object.

For those of you that are eagerly awaiting the Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, details of the potential pricing has appeared over at Canadian e-tailer DirectDial. @momomo_us was first to post the details on Twitter, but didn't provide any details of who the e-tailer was, but some sleuthing using the AMD ordering codes soon brought us to DirectDial. The company has listed the all four expected CPU models with pricing and it appears that AMD has decided to stop providing coolers entirely, as none of the four upcoming CPUs appear to be available with a cooler in the box. All the model names ending WOF are retail packaged CPUs and the ones missing WOF at the end of the product number are tray CPUs from what we can tell.

As for the pricing, the Ryzen 5 7600X is listed at CA$435 or about US$340, with the Ryzen 7 7700X coming in at CA$631 or US$494. The Ryzen 9 7900X is CA$798/US$625 and finally the Ryzen 9 7950X is a steep CA$1158/US$907. @momomo_us also found some tray pricing from a different retailer and these CPUs are priced a few bucks cheaper, but we were unable to locate who the retailer is. Note that electronics and computer parts appear to be priced a fair bit higher in Canada than the US on average. As such, these prices should only be taken as an indication of what the retail price in Canada might end up being and not what the actual MSRP will land at, when AMD decides to launch these CPUs. Currently the retail date is expected to be on the 15th of September.

Update 10:49 UTC: The tray CPU retailer is PC-Canada.

The Canadian government is getting ready to invest C$240 million (about US$187 million) into what the country calls the Semiconductor Challenge Callout. C$90 million of that will go towards the Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre (CPFC), which is as the name implies, a facility that engineers and manufactures a range of photonics products, mostly on the prototyping level. The remaining C$150 million is up for grabs through the Strategic Innovation Fund, which is a government fund set up to help Canadian companies grow.

François-Philippe Champagne, the Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry is quoted as saying "By investing in Canada's semiconductor industry, we are making a firm commitment to businesses looking to invest in Canada. Whether it's high-value or large-scale manufacturing, we want to see Canada be home to the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers.". Exactly which companies will be asking for a share of the money is currently up in the air, but according to The Register, the Canadian government is looking for a wide range of potential semiconductor related businesses. Some examples are 2.5D and 3D chip packaging, MEMS sensor manufacturing and so on. None of this is compared to what the US, EU, Taiwan, Korea and the PRC are currently working on, but it could very well end up being supplemental to much of what's going on in the US semiconductor market right now.

Growth rates remained strong in the enterprise segment of the wireless local area networking (WLAN) market in the second quarter of 2021 (2Q21) as the market increased 22.4% on a year-over-year basis to $1.7 billion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wireless LAN Tracker. In the consumer segment of the WLAN market, revenues declined 5.7% in the quarter to $2.3 billion, giving the combined enterprise and consumer WLAN markets year-over-year growth of 4.6% in 2Q21.

The growth in the enterprise-class segment of the market builds on a strong first quarter of 2021 when revenues increased 24.6% year over year. For the first half of 2021, the market increased 23.5% compared to first two quarters of 2020. Compared to the second quarter of 2019, 2Q21 revenues increased 10.8%, indicating that demand in the enterprise WLAN is strong.

SSUPD are experts with compact, well-ventilated gaming PC cases, made with premium materials. The company partners with TechPowerUp to bring you the SSUPD x TechPowerUp Meshlicious Giveaway, open to residents of Canada and the Continental US. There are six prizes up for grabs, four Full Mesh Meshlicious White with PCI-Express Gen4 riser cable; and two Mesh Meshlicious Black with tempered glass side-panel, and PCI-Express Gen3 riser. The Meshlicious cases are a family of compact, tower-type SFF gaming PC cases designed for high-end hardware, including full-length enthusiast graphics cards, AIO CLC cooling with radiators as big as 280 mm; and a sturdy construction with mesh panels at just the right spots for high airflow. To win, simply fill up a short form to help us get back to you if you've won. Good Luck!

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Electronic Arts Inc., a worldwide leader in interactive entertainment and sports gaming, announced the acquisition of Metalhead Software, a talented Canada-based video game studio and developer of the fan-favorite Super Mega Baseball franchise. EA SPORTS and Metalhead are teaming up to grow the Super Mega Baseball franchise as well as develop new gaming and sports experiences for players worldwide.

Metalhead co-founders Scott Drader and Christian Zuger started the company in 2009, and have since developed Super Mega Baseball into a highly rated and beloved gaming franchise, with an enthusiastic and loyal community. The Metalhead team will continue to work out of their Victoria, BC studio while partnering with the global EA SPORTS team to expand the Super Mega Baseball franchise as well as deliver new and engaging entertainment and sports experiences.

In response to reports of the PCIe riser cable of its H1 case posing a fire hazard, NZXT in February 2021 instituted a recall of the case in the U.S. and Canada. The flaw in the component's design came to light in early-2020, but it was only by November that it responded to the issue. In its original design, the PCIe riser component was improperly grounded, and a short-circuit could result in a fire. NZXT's first response to this was sending out non-conductive Nylon screws for the users to replace the metal ones the part originally shipped with. This solution wasn't found to be effective, and resulted in a product recall this February. Regulators in the U.S. and Canada directed NZXT to send out free repair kits to existing owners of the H1, along with disposal instructions for the entire case, if the user wishes to discontinue use. We got our Repair Kit, and decided to go hands-on.

The NZXT Repair Kit, and replacement riser card appears to be one of the most solidly built PCIe risers in the market. Thanks to the crypto-mining boom, the market is flooded with PCIe risers of all shapes and sizes, and the NZXT riser looks to be among the better designed ones. What sets this apart from the original design is that now, the downstream (female end) of the riser comes with grounding rings around the mounting holes, similar to motherboards. These are bits of exposed copper that facilitate contact between the ground layer of the PCB, with the sheet-metal of the case. The original design lacked grounding pads on either side of the PCB, and when installed with metal screws, certain PCB traces could get shorted, causing them to heat up and start a fire. NZXT's first solution to this problem was non-conductive Nylon screws. End users with an H1 case, can request this riser cable from here.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced that Tenstorrent, an AI semiconductor and software start-up developing next-generation computers, will license the new SiFive Intelligence X280 processor in its AI training and inference processor. SiFive will deliver more details of its SiFive Intelligence initiative including the SiFive Intelligence X280 processor at the Linley Spring Processor Conference on April 23rd.

Tenstorrent's novel approach to inference and training effectively and efficiently accommodates the exponential growth in the size of machine learning models while offering best-in-class performance.

AMD is readying its upcoming EPYC processors based on the refined Zen 3 core. Codenamed "Milan", the processor generation is supposed to bring the same number of PCIe lanes and quite possibly similar memory support. The pricing, along with the specifications, has been leaked and now we have information on every model ranging from eight cores to the whopping 64 cores. Thanks to @momomo_us on Twitter, we got ahold of Canadian pricing leaked on the Dell Canada website. Starting from the cheapest design listed here (many are missing here), you would be looking at the EPYC 7543 processor with 32 cores running at 2.8 GHz speed, 256 MB of L3 cache, and a TDP of 225 Watts. Such a processor will set you back as much as 2579.69 CAD, which is cheaper compared to the previous generation EPYC 7542 that costs 3214.70 CAD.

Whatever this represents more aggressive pricing to position itself better against the competition, we do not know. The same strategy is applied with the 64 core AMD EPYC 7763 processor (2.45 GHz speed, 256 MB cache, 280 W TDP) as the new Zen 3 based design is priced at 8069.69 CAD, which is cheaper than the 8180.10 CAD price tag of AMD EPYC 7762 CPU.

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."

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today is announcing a partnership with Northern Data AG to create a HPC mega-project with computing power of around 3.1 exaflops. GIGABYTE will supply GPU-based server systems equipped with proven AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Instinct accelerators from technology partner AMD, a leading provider of high performance computing and graphics technologies, to Northern Data.

Northern Data develops a distributed computing cluster based on the hardware at locations in Norway, Sweden and Canada, which in its final stage of deployment will provide FP32 computing power of around 3.1 exaflops (3.1 million teraflops and 274.54 petaflops FP64). The world's fastest supercomputer, the Japanese "Fukagu" (Fujitsu), has a calculation power of 1.07 exaflops FP32 and 415.3 petaflops FP64, whereas the second fastest, the US supercomputer "Summit" (IBM) has a calculation power of 0.414 exaflops FP32 and 148.0 petaflops FP64.

The Epic Games store has seen continuous updates since its launch in 2018 adding various additional features, now surpassing many other game launchers such as Origin, Uplay, and battle.net in terms of features and hot on the heels of Steam. In the latest update to the platform Epic has added support for five new local currencies, users in Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway can now pay for games on the launcher in their native currencies. This addition is one of many Epic have been releasing from their public roadmap which lists trending pages, mod support, and offline sign-in all as features coming soon.

TechPowerUp is partnering with Cooler Master and ASUS to bring our readers from the United States and Canada, a chance to receive a full set of components put together in a gaming desktop. The TUF Gaming brand was originally created by ASUS and represents aspiration and value for gamers putting together a stable and reliable rig on a budget. Our build set also includes components from AMD, Team Group, and Apacer.

One lucky winner takes all: ASUS TUF X470-Plus Gaming motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 2600 processor, ASUS GeForce RTX 2060 TUF Gaming graphics card, 16 GB Apacer Panther Rage RGB TUF Gaming Edition memory, Cooler Master MasterBox MB500 TUF Gaming Edition case, Team Group T-Force Delta S TUF RGB 250 GB SSD, Cooler Master MasterWatt 750 W TUF Gaming Edition power-supply, and a Cooler Master MasterAir MA410M TUF Gaming Edition CPU cooler. The winner gets a fully assembled, ready to go system with one each of these components. Open from today, the Giveaway ends on December 25. All you have to do is fill up a short form to help us get back to you if you've won. Good Luck!

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It seems that AMD either had a) unrevealed plans to launch their online store on more countries and markets alongside the introduction of the Navi-powered RX 5700 XT, or b) a change of mind when it comes to permitted availability of their collectors', limited-edition graphics card for the rest of the world. Originally reported to only be launched in the United States and China, an AMD representative (under the handle dprairie_AMD over at Reddit) has seemingly confirmed that the company will be bringing its limited-edition graphics cards to more markets than previously expected - though it still isn't a global release. The statement from Reddit follows.

Reddit user @dprairie_AMDHi all,
Friendly reminder that just because someone writes it doesn't mean it is true.... We will be expanding AMD.com sales to more countries, so we expect the 50th anniversary edition will also be available in: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Sorry we are not offering global availability at this point. We hear you on the desire. The team is focused on expanding into more regions/countries while making sure we can fully support customers.