As we witness Apple's generational updates of the M series of chips, the highly anticipated SKU of the 3rd generation of Apple M series yet-to-be-announced top-of-the-line M3 Ultra chip is growing speculations from industry insiders. The latest round of reports suggests that the M3 Ultra might step away from its predecessor's design, potentially adopting a monolithic architecture without the UltraFusion interconnect technology. In the past, Apple has relied on a dual-chip design for its Ultra variants, using the UltraFusion interconnect to combine two M series Max chips. For example, the second generation M Ultra chip, M2 Ultra, boasts 134 billion transistors across two 510 mm² chips. However, die-shots of the M3 Max have sparked discussions about the absence of dedicated chip space for the UltraFusion interconnect.

While the absence of visible interconnect space on early die-shots is not conclusive evidence, as seen with the M1 Max not having visible UltraFusion interconnect and still being a part of M1 Ultra with UltraFusion, industry has led the speculation that the M3 Ultra may indeed feature a monolithic design. Considering that the M3 Max has 92 billion transistors and is estimated to have a die size between 600 and 700 mm², going Ultra with these chips may be pushing the manufacturing limit. Considering the maximum die size limit of 848 mm² for the TSMC N3B process used by Apple, there may not be sufficient space for a dual-chip M3 Ultra design. The potential shift to a monolithic design for the M3 Ultra raises questions about how Apple will scale the chip's performance without the UltraFusion interconnect. Competing solutions, such as NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU, use a high-bandwidth C2C interface to connect two 104 billion transistor chips, achieving a bandwidth of 10 TB/s. In comparison, the M2 Ultra's UltraFusion interconnect provided a bandwidth of 2.5 TB/s.

Video interface and IP workflow innovator Magewell has announced that the company has joined the Q-SYS Technology Partner Program. This program enables software and hardware technology partners to create market-ready solutions that integrate seamlessly with Q-SYS, a cloud-manageable audio, video and control platform. The first result of the initiative—the Q-SYS Control plugin for Magewell's USB Fusion video capture, mixing and presentation device—has been endorsed with Q-SYS Certified status and is now available for download through the Q-SYS Designer Asset Manager found in Q-SYS Designer Software.

Magewell will showcase USB Fusion among other innovations in stand 5E710 at the ISE 2024 exhibition in Barcelona from January 30 to February 2. Magewell's USB Fusion hardware and accompanying app let users easily combine cameras, wired or wireless screenshares, and media file sources into visually compelling live presentations for streaming, live event production, online lectures, webinars, video conferencing and other applications. Users can switch between sources or combine inputs into attractive scene layouts.

What's New: As part of a collaboration with Intel and Dell Technologies, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab plan to build a "digital twin" of the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) prototype fusion power plant. The UKAEA will utilize the lab's supercomputer based on Intel technologies, including 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, distributed asynchronous object storage (DAOS) and oneAPI tools to streamline the development and delivery of fusion energy to the grid in the 2040s.

"Planning for the commercialization of fusion power requires organizations like UKAEA to utilize extreme amounts of computational resources and artificial intelligence for simulations. These HPC workloads may be performed using a variety of different architectures, which is why open software solutions that optimize performance needs can lend portability to code that isn't available in closed, proprietary systems. Overall, advanced hardware and software can make the journey to commercial fusion power lower risk and accelerated - a key benefit on the path to sustainable energy."—Adam Roe, Intel EMEA HPC technical director

The four major North American cloud service providers (CSPs) have made cuts to their server procurement quantities for this year because of economic headwinds and high inflation. Turning to server OEMs such as Dell and HPE, they are observed to have scaled back the production of server motherboards at their ODM partners. Given these developments, TrendForce now projects that global server shipments will grow by just 1.31% YoY to 14.43 million units for 2023. This latest figure is a downward correction from the earlier estimation. The revisions that server OEMs have made to their outlooks on shipments shows that the demand for end products has become much weaker than expected. They also highlight factors such as buyers of enterprise servers imposing a stricter control of their budgets and server OEMs' inventory corrections.

Magewell - the award-winning developer of innovative video interface and IP workflow solutions - today announced USB Fusion, a multi-input USB video capture device with integrated source switching and layout control. Building on the renowned ease-of-use of the company's market-leading USB Capture devices, the new hardware lets users combine camera and wired screenshare sources into attractive live presentations for online lectures, webinars, live streaming, video conferencing, news reporting, and other applications.

Featuring two HDMI inputs and one USB webcam input, USB Fusion lets users switch between 1080p60 HD sources or combine two inputs (picture-in-picture or side-by-side) into one output and bring the result into popular software via its USB 3.0 interface. Supporting the critical role of software in today's educational, corporate, and live event environments, the device is also ideal for houses of worship that wish to combine a camera signal with supporting visuals - such as lyrics displayed from a separate laptop - into a single live stream.

Encoding video is one of the significant tasks that modern hardware performs. Today, we have some data of AMD and NVIDIA solutions for the problem that shows how good GPU hardware encoders are. Thanks to Chips and Cheese tech media, we have information about AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) encoder found in RDNA2 GPUs and NVIDIA's NVENC (short for NVIDIA Encoder). The site managed to benchmark AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPUs. The AMD card features VCN 3.0, while the NVIDIA Turing card features a 6th generation NVENC design. Team red is represented by the latest work, while there exists a 7th generation of NVENC. C&C tested this because it means all that the reviewer possesses.

The metric used for video encoding was Netflix's Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) metric composed by the media giant. In addition to hardware acceleration, the site also tested software acceleration done by libx264, a software library used for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format. The libx264 software acceleration was running on AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. Benchmark runs included streaming, recording, and transcoding in Overwatch and Elder Scrolls Online.Below, you can find benchmarks of streaming, recording, transcoding, and transcoding speed.

Apple yesterday announced its M1 Ultra processor. It is designed to be one of the most powerful solutions ever envisioned for desktop users, and it leverages some of the already existing technologies. Essentially, the M1 Ultra chip combines two monolithic dies containing M1 Max designs. They are stitched together to create one massive chip behaving in a rather exciting way. To pair the two M1 Max dies together, Apple has designed a package called UltraFusion, which is a die-to-die interposer with more than 10,000 signals. It provides 2.5 TB/s low latency inter-processor bandwidth and enables seamless sharing of information across two dies.

What is more interesting is that this approach, called multi-chip module (MCM) design philosophy, allows the software to view these two dies as a single, unified processor. Memory is shared across a vast pool of processor cache and system memory in a single package. This approach is software agnostic and allows hardware to function efficiently with loads of bandwidth. Apple notes that no additional developer optimization is required for the new processor, and the already-existing stack of applications for M1 Max works out-of-the-box. Talking about numbers, the M1 Ultra chip has a potential main memory bandwidth of 800 GB/s, with up to 128 GB of unified system memory. We are yet to see how this design behaves as the first Mac Studio units start shipping, so we have to wait for more tests to check these claims out.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of premium gaming hardware, today announced the GIGABYTE WATERFORCE graphics card - GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING OC WATERFORCE WB 10G powered by the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. Whether users are looking to fulfill the demands of their high-end water-cooled systems, or to enjoy the benefits of water-cooled GPU and CPUs, GIGABYTE GAMING OC WATERFORCE graphics card is the best choice. GIGABYTE provides easy-to-install and quality-guaranteed water-cooled graphics cards for desktop PCs.

With the continuous increase in CPU power consumption, high-end water-cooled motherboards in the market are becoming more and more popular. The easy-to-install and quality-guaranteed GIGABYTE GAMING OC WATERFORCE graphics card is an easy choice for maximizing your graphics power. Just invest a little more than the GAMING OC air-cooled version and you can enjoy the water cooling benefits for the GPU and CPU. The GAMING OC WATERFORCE graphics card is equipped with a top-of-the-line overclocked GPU. It provides an all-around cooling solution for all key components of the graphics card, keeping the GPU, VRAM and MOSFET running cool to ensure stable overclock operation and longer durability.

Sonnet Technologies today announced the Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card, the latest product in the company's line of high-performance storage cards that enable the installation of SSDs into a computer's or Thunderbolt expansion system's PCIe card slot. The Fusion card supports two U.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, which share the same form factor as 2.5-inch SATA drives but deliver up to seven times the performance of the fastest SATA SSDs available.

The Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card enables users to install two enterprise-class U.2 SSDs (sold separately) into a full-length PCIe card slot, mounting and connecting the SSDs with no cables, adapters, or mounting trays required. For users who need to add storage to their computer setup and require ultra-high-speed data transfer speeds for a smooth workflow—such as video editors working with 6K and greater resolution footage—U.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 SSDs are ideal. Mainstream U.2 SSDs are currently available in capacities up to 16 TB and support data transfers at up to 3,500 MB/s. With two SSDs installed on the Sonnet card and configured as a RAID 0 set, sustained data transfers up to 6,250 MB/s are possible.

Akasa are proud to announce partnership with Razer, a leading global gamer's lifestyle brand, for its flagship and award-winning lighting technology: Razer Chroma.

Enabling Akasa's array of addressable RGB products to sync with Razer Chroma brings the full-spectrum of vivid RGB to your build. Taking full advantage of the Razer Chroma software platform and Akasa's addressable RGB devices such as the new Vegas TLY cooling fan and Dual M.2 PCIe SSD adapter with RGB LED light and heatsink, gamers can truly immerse themselves in popular games. Syncing individually addressable LED nodes adds RGB vibrancy and ambience to gamer's systems and surroundings for epic gaming experiences.

Following the success of their Touchaqua-branded Summit MS OLED CPU block earlier this year, which was for Intel platforms only at that time, Bitspower have decided to add the OLED display to their main brand in the form of the new Summit M CPU water block. The design is a departure from the squared-off Summit MS, with a smaller form factor that also increases CPU socket compatibility to the red camp out of the box. The OLED display is housed on a metal top plate, with an acrylic body enabling side views of the coolant, a temperature sensor enabling readout on the display, as well as the integrated dRGB LEDs for lighting options compatible with ASUS AURA Sync, GIGABYTE RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, and ASRock Polychrome.

The cooling engine uses a nickel-plated copper base plate, with 0.3 mm CNC-machined fins and microchannels that are part of a split central-inlet flow promising high coolant flow directly over the fins to remove as much heat from the CPU as possible. This is similar to the vast majority of CPU block designs in practice, but manufacturers tend to experiment with the flow schematic to see if they can do better, so time will tell how the Summit M fares on the TechPowerUp test bench. In the meantime, it is available for direct purchase from the Bitspower store for 4500 NTD (~$150 USD) before any applicable taxes and shipping costs.

LIAN LI Industrial Co. Ltd., a world leading manufacturer of aluminum chassis and peripherals, is proud to unveil the latest addition to its family of well-received RGB fan with the BORA Digital. Following the great success of the BORA and BORA Lite cooling fans, the price competitive BORA Digital is here to dominate in style with 3 frame finishes, built-in 12 addressable LEDs customizable via a RGB controller (or motherboard), and one of the most silent performances in the field, thanks to its adjustable speed and fluid dynamic bearings.

Bitspower, a leading supplier of water-cooling equipment for performance computers, has announced the release of their latest Intel CPU block, the Bitspower Touchaqua CPU Block Summit MS OLED for Intel Platform. This product combines the best of both performance and aesthetics to give you an ideal cooling solution for LGA 115x and LGA 2066 socket CPUs. In addition to a CNC-machined block top made of hardwearing acrylic and base made of high-quality copper, the block features a digital thermal sensor and a bright OLED display so you can monitor your water-cooling loop temperature in real time, as well as dazzling DRGB lighting.

The block incorporates a single piece of wiring that runs power to both the DRGB lighting, as well as the temperature gauge - ensuring that you can keep the design of your build as clean as possible. Furthermore, the water block's RGB LED Strip has been certified by ASUS AURA Sync, GIGABYTE RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, ASRock Polychrome and Razer Chroma-so it's highly compatible with a range of setups. Bitspower Touchaqua range offers the same quality as Bitspower's regular product lines, but features a range of unique functions and designs.

To go with their monitors and laptops Gigabyte also had multiple high-end motherboards and numerous graphics cards on display at CES 2019. Two of the motherboards that caught are attention were enthusiast offerings including the Z390 AORUS Xtreme which offered a 16 phase IR Digital VRM solution with Pow/Rstage. To go with the beefy VRM, they used a new cutting edge thermal design which uses a fins-array heatsink with a direct touch heat pipe and a NanoCarbon baseplate. Wireless networking has been included via an onboard Intel CNVI 802.11ac 2x2 Wave 2 Wi-Fi with AORUS Antenna. Meanwhile, standard networking is handled by an AQUANTIA 10 GbE BASE-T LAN and Intel Gigabit LAN with cFosSpeed. Other additions include Intel Thunderbolt 3, exclusive RGB Fan Commander and OC Touch. Finally rounding out its features is the 127dB SNR AMP-UP audio with high-end ESS SABRE 9018K2M DAC, LME 49720 and OPA1622 OP-AMP, and WIMA audio capacitors. Just be prepared to pay the price of entry as this motherboard comes with a $599 price tag.

Taking things a step further, Gigabyte also had the AORUS Z390 Xtreme Waterforce motherboard on hand as well. It offers many of the same features as the Z390 AORUS Xtreme but adds in an AORUS all-in-one monoblock for both the CPU and PCH area. It also has Triple Ultra-Fast M.2 slots with PCIe Gen3 x4 interfaces along with their Triple Thermal Guards. To afford this high-end board unless you are an extreme enthusiast you might need to sell a kidney considering its eye-watering $899 price tag. Other motherboards on hand included both the X299 AORUS Master and Z390 AORUS Master which are already available at retail.

GIGABYTE, the world's leading premium gaming hardware manufacturer, today announced the release of new AORUS gaming gear, the highly customizable AORUS M5 Gaming Mouse. Unveiled earlier at COMPUTEX 2018, this gaming mouse received much attention for its unlimited customization options. The revolutionary weight distribution system allows users to adjust the balance and find the optimal mouse weight for maximum control and flexibility. Powered by an advanced optical engine, the AORUS M5 is a perfect gaming weapon with pinpoint precision. The wired mouse offers incredible click response with the top-quality 50-million-click Omron switches, customizable RGB lighting and a clean, streamlined profile to meet the needs that gamers crave for the most.

EK Water Blocks, the Slovenia-based premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer is maintaining its market leadership by releasing a new AM4 socket based monoblock tailor made for GIGABYTE X370 motherboards. The EK-FB GA AX370 Gaming RGB Monoblock has an integrated 4-pin RGB LED strip which makes it compatible with GIGABYTE RGB Fusion, thus offering a full lighting customization experience. This is a complete all-in-one (CPU and motherboard) liquid cooling solution for several GIGABYTE AMD X370 Chipset AM4 socket based motherboards that support the latest generation of AMD Ryzen and 7th Generation A-series/Athlon processors.

Designed and engineered in cooperation with GIGABYTE, this monoblock uses award-winning EK-Supremacy EVO cooling engine to ensure best possible CPU cooling. This water block directly cools AMD AM4 socket type CPU, as well as the power regulation (MOSFET) module. Liquid flows directly over all critical areas, providing the enthusiasts with a great solution for high and stable overclocks. Like with every EK monoblock, EK-FB GA AX370 Gaming RGB features high flow design and this monoblock can be easily used with the system using a weaker water pump as well.

EK Water Blocks, the world renowned premium liquid cooling manufacturer, is proud to release the monoblock liquid cooling solution for GIGABYTE Z270X motherboards. EK-FB GA Z270X RGB Monoblock is compatible with GIGABYTE RGB Fusion, thus offering a full lighting customization experience!

EK-FB GA Z270X RGB Monoblock is a complete all-in-one (CPU and motherboard) liquid cooling solution for Intel LGA-1151 socket Kaby Lake and Sky Lake CPU's. This monoblock is compatible with the following GIGABYTE motherboards: GA-Z270X-Gaming 7; GA-Z270X-Gaming K7; GA-Z270X-Gaming 5; GA-Z270X-Gaming K5; GA-Z270X-Ultra Gaming; GA-Z270-Phoenix Gaming; GA-Z270-Gaming 3; GA-Z270-Gaming K3; GA-Z270X-UD5.

Phil Rogers, a senior Corporate Fellow with AMD, and one of its longest serving employees, left the company for rival NVIDIA. He was with AMD/ATI for 21 years. Rogers joined AMD in 1994, and was promoted to Corporate Fellow back in 2007. One of his key contributions to the company was seeing the potential in integrating CPU and GPU into one powerful chip, under the Fusion initiative. In his new job at NVIDIA, Rogers will be Chief Software Architect for compute servers. This is a big deal.

NVIDIA is investing a lot of money into cloud computing (as in computing on the cloud), in which people will not only play games rendered on the cloud, but also more serious applications based on deep-learning and AI could be cloud-driven. With the right cloud computing service subscribed, even a tiny personal device like a smartwatch can crunch complex problems. As a chipmaker with high TFLOP/s GPGPU chips, NVIDIA is eyeing itself a big slice of the emerging industry, and wants the best hands on the job. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has a personal interest in compute servers, and he has entrusted one of its most important jobs to Rogers. This is the second major event of attrition by innovative people at AMD. Recently, CPU architect Jim Keller left AMD after completing a stint at designing its new "Zen" micro-architecture.

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced broad support for VMware Horizon 6 and Virtual SAN with a series of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and end-user computing (EUC) solutions for Horizon 6, utilizing the award-winning ULLtraDIMM solid state drive (SSD) and Fusion ioMemory.

When coupled with VMware's Horizon 6, ULLtraDIMM and Fusion ioMemory allow customers to deploy high-performance, cost-effective virtual desktop infrastructure solutions and increase virtual desktop density. Additionally, through the combination of solid-state hardware and software technology, SanDisk enables enterprise organizations to select the right deployment option for their environment, providing greater flexibility and reducing barriers to adoption.

AMD is ready to launch the next generation of company's APUs in June, 2013, codenamed "Richland". The new Fusion S-Series "Richland" CPU Series will have an updated graphics code which turns out to be HD-8000 series graphics and support native DDR3-2133. Today, BIOSTAR full range FM2 motherboards are ready to support the new "Richland" series; users just need to update BIOS and Drivers which are available at BIOSTAR homepage.

TechPowerUp released version 0.6.7 of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information, monitoring, and diagnostic utility. The new release brings some feature-additions, support for more graphics processors, and stability improvements. To begin with, we made room in the GPU-Z window to display TMU (texture memory unit) count. Support for a large number of recently-launched GPUs, including Radeon HD 7870 "Tahiti LE," mobile GeForce 600 series MX, and from Quadro family, were added.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7 also brings a few UI enhancements. To begin with, GPU-Z remembers window position from its previous session, cutting you time for positioning it right for screenshots. Next up, when minimized, its tray icon does more than just show you the app is running. Its tooltip (visible when hovered), displays some important sensor data. A new "-tab" command line parameter allows proverclockers to script-launch GPU-Z showing a specific tab. Among the bugs fixed are one related to a crash occurring on CrossFire setups (a Catalyst-related bug), another crash occurring on NVIDIA setups when updating sensor data (GeForce driver-related bug), temperature reading on AMD "Llano" APUs is improved.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7, TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.6.7 ASUS ROG Themed

The change-log follows.

MSC Embedded Inc., manufacturer of highly integrated standard board level products and customer-specific boards and systems, today introduced a powerful, new COM Express Type 6 module family. This family, called MSC C6C-A7, is based on the AMD embedded R-Series processors also known as accelerated processing units (APUs). MSC C6C-A7 members are compact form factor computer-on-modules characterized by very powerful graphics and high parallel computing performance with low power dissipation.

The MSC C6C-A7 module family integrates AMD R-460L 2.0 GHz (2.8 GHz Turbo) or AMD R-452L 1.6 GHz (2.4 GHz Turbo) quad-core processors. The thermal design power (TDP) levels are 25 W and 19 W, respectively. The two dual-core versions are populated with the AMD R-260H 2.1 GHz (2.6 GHz Turbo) processor or the AMD R-252F 1.7 GHz (2.3 GHz Turbo) processor -- each featuring 17 W TDP. The processors support the AMD64 technology and the AMD-V virtualization technology. The AMD Fusion Controller Hub (FCH) A75 chipset was also selected. The main memory can be expanded to 16 GB DDR3-1600 dual-channel SDRAM via two SO DIMM sockets.

HWBot.org Test lab put the A10-5800K APU through its paces by overclocking its CPU component to 5.242 GHz (124.8 MHz x42 @1.644V), and its Radeon HD 7660D GPU component to 1.58 GHz (up from 1.275 GHz), to yield a 3DMark Vantage score of P10002 (performance preset), a level of performance unheard of for integrated graphics. The feat was made possible by picking the best of three A10-5800K chips cooled by Der8auer Fusion rev3 CPU pot, a Gigabyte FM2A85X-UP4 motherboard, G.SKILL RipjawsZ F3-19200CL9Q-16GBZMD 2x 4 GB memory, Corsair AX1200i PSU, and Windows 7 OS. Find more details in the source link below.

Toshiba's Digital Products Division (DPD), a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., today announced that its consumer line-up of Satellite laptops and Ultrabooks, Qosmio laptops as well as its All-in-One desktops featuring Windows 8 are available for pre-order starting today and will be widely available for purchase from select U.S. retailers and ToshibaDirect.com on October 26.

Toshiba's new laptops feature spacious touchpads with Windows 8 gesture support to allow users to perform gestures on the touchpad as they would on a touchscreen device. In addition, to help transition consumers to the innovative interface in Windows 8, Toshiba's new PCs come pre-installed with Toshiba Desktop Assist, a utility designed to give users easy access to their programs, control panel, as well as files and folders, similar to the Start Menu in previous versions of Windows.

AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2012 of $1.41 billion, net income of $37 million, or $0.05 per share, and operating income of $77 million. The company reported non-GAAP net income of $46 million, or $0.06 per share, and non-GAAP operating income of $86 million.

"Overall weakness in the global economy, softer consumer spending and lower channel demand for our desktop processors in China and Europe made the closing weeks of the quarter challenging," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "We are taking definitive steps to improve our performance and correct the issues within our control as we expect headwinds will continue in the third quarter as the industry sets a new baseline. We remain optimistic about our core businesses as well as future opportunities with our competitively differentiated next-generation Accelerated Processor Units (APUs). Our recently launched Trinity APU continues to gain traction with customers. We are committed to driving profitable growth."