It's been a tumultuous few days for AMD, as the company has seen Jim Anderson, Computing and Graphics Group leader after the departure of Raja Koduri, leave the company, at a time of soaring share value for the company (hitting $25.26 and leaving short positions well, short, by $2.67 billion.) However, there's one particular piece of news that is most relevant for the company: Globalfoundries' announcement to stop all ongoing development on the 7 nm node.

This is particularly important for a variety of reasons. The most important one is this: Globalfoundries' inability to execute on the 7 nm node leaves AMD fully free to procure chips and technology from competing foundries. If you remember, AMD's spin-off of GlobalFoundries left the former with the short end of the stick, having to cater to GlobalFoundries' special pricing, and paying for the privilege of accessing other foundries' inventories. Of course, the Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) that is in place will have to be amended - again - but the fact is this: AMD wants 7 nm products, and GlobalFoundries can't provide.To the forumites: this piece is marked as an editorial

Using Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the OpenVINO toolkit, Intel and Philips tested two healthcare use cases for deep learning inference models: one on X-rays of bones for bone-age-prediction modeling, the other on CT scans of lungs for lung segmentation. In these tests, Intel and Philips achieved a speed improvement of 188 times for the bone-age-prediction model, and a 38 times speed improvement for the lung-segmentation model over the baseline measurements.

Intel Xeon Scalable processors appear to be the right solution for this type of AI workload. Our customers can use their existing hardware to its maximum potential, while still aiming to achieve quality output resolution at exceptional speeds," said Vijayananda J., chief architect and fellow, Data Science and AI at Philips HealthSuite Insights.

NVIDIA today reinvented computer graphics with the launch of the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture. The greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.

These two engines - along with more powerful compute for simulation and enhanced rasterization - usher in a new generation of hybrid rendering to address the $250 billion visual effects industry. Hybrid rendering enables cinematic-quality interactive experiences, amazing new effects powered by neural networks and fluid interactivity on highly complex models.

Today, we are excited to announce a new addition to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) GPU family that's optimized for graphics-intensive applications and machine learning inference: the NVIDIA Tesla P4 GPU.

We've come a long way since we introduced our first-generation compute accelerator, the K80 GPU, adding along the way P100 and V100 GPUs that are optimized for machine learning and HPC workloads. The new P4 accelerators, now in beta, provide a good balance of price/performance for remote display applications and real-time machine learning inference.

DigiTimes, citing "sources from the upstream supply chain", is reporting an expected decrease in graphics card pricing for July. This move comes as a way for suppliers to reduce the inventory previously piled in expectation of continued demand from cryptocurrency miners and gamers in general. It's the economic system at work, with its strengths and weaknesses: now that demand has waned, somewhat speculative price increases of yore are being axed by suppliers to spur demand. This also acts as a countermeasure to an eventual flow of graphics cards from ceasing-to-be miners to the second-hand market, which would further place a negative stress on retailers' products.

Alongside this expected 20% retail price drop for graphics cards, revenue estimates for major semiconductor manufacturer TSMC and its partners is being revised towards lower than previously-projected values, as demand for graphics and ASIC chips is further reduced. DigiTimes' sources say that the worldwide graphics card market now has an inventory of several million units that is being found hard to move (perhaps because the products are already ancient in the usual hardware tech timeframes), and that Nvidia has around a million GPUs still pending logistical distribution. Almost as an afterthought, DigiTimes also adds that NVIDIA has decided to postpone launch of their next-gen products (both 12 nm and then, forcibly, 7 nm) until supply returns to safe levels.

One nifty new feature currently being deployed to Windows 10 Fast Ring users is the ability to see exactly how much power a given process is consuming in your system's hardware (CPU, GPU & Disk). The new feature, which appears as two additional Task Manager tabs, showcases the instantaneous power usage of a given process, but also features a trend calculator that covers a two-minute interval. This should be pretty handy, if the measurement process is close enough to the real power consumption. This could even be used as another flag for cryptomining malware or scripts in a given webpage. You can check the source for the additional updates that have been brought to build 17704 of the Windows Insider Program.

Reddit user 'dustinbrooks' has posted a photo of a prototype graphics card design that is clearly made by NVIDIA and "tested by a buddy of his that works for a company that tests NVIDIA boards". Dustin asked the community what he was looking at, which of course got tech enthusiasts interested.

The card is clearly made by NVIDIA as indicated by the markings near the PCI-Express x16 slot connector. What's also visible is three PCI-Express 8-pin power inputs and a huge VRM setup with four fans. Unfortunately the GPU in the center of the board is missing, but it should be GV102, the successor to GP102, since GDDR6 support is needed. The twelve GDDR6 memory chips located around the GPU's solder balls are marked as D9WCW, which decodes to MT61K256M32JE-14:A. These chips are Micron-made 8 Gbit GDDR6, specified for 14 Gb/s data rate, operating at 1.35 V. With twelve chips, this board has a 384-bit memory bus and 12 GB VRAM. The memory bandwidth at 14 Gbps data rate is a staggering 672 GB/s, which conclusively beats the 484 GB/s that Vega 64 and GTX 1080 Ti offer.

A few months ago we reported that Raja Koduri has left AMD to work at Intel on their new discrete GPU project. Looks like he's building a strong team, with the most recent addition being Tom Forsyth who is the father of Larrabee, which was Intel's first attempt at making an x86-based graphics processor. While Larrabee did not achieve its goal and is considered a failure by many, it brought some interesting improvements to the world, for example AVX512, and is now sold under the Xeon Phi brand.

Tom, who has previously worked at Oculus, Valve, and 3DLabs posted on Twitter that he's joining Intel in Raja's group, but he's "Not entirely sure what he'll be working on just yet." At Oculus and Valve he worked on Virtual Reality projects, for example he wrote big chunks of the Team Fortress 2 VR support for the Oculus Rift. Taking a look at Tom's papers suggests that he might join the Intel team as lead for VR-related projects, as that's without a doubt one of Raja's favorite topics to talk about.

Back at Computex, AMD showed a demo of their Vega 20 graphics processor, which is produced using a refined 7 nanometer process. We also reported that the chip has a twice-as-wide memory interface, effectively doubling memory bandwidth, and alsomaximum memory capacity. The smaller process promises improvements to power efficiency, which could let AMD run the chip at higher frequencies for more performance compared to the 14 nanometer process of existing Vega.

As indicated by AMD during Computex, the 7 nanometer Vega is a product targeted at High Performance Compute (HPC) applications, with no plans to release it for gaming. As they clarified later, the promise of "7 nanometer for gamers" is for Navi, which follows the Vega architecture. It's even more surprising to see AOTS results for a non-gaming card - my guess is that someone was curious how well it would do in gaming.

Job postings on LinkedIn reveal that Samsung is looking to hire a ton of graphics chip engineers to bring forward their own GPU design. In the past the company has licensed GPU IP from companies like ARM and Imagination Technologies, but these designs come with cost, low performance and low flexibility. With Samsung needing graphics IP for a large range of products like phones, tablets and exploring options in markets like automotive, machine learning and AI, it's not surprising that the company is now looking into rolling their own GPU - from scratch as indicated by a recruiter's posting:

"This is Samsung's proprietary IP. We will define the ISA, the architecture, the SW, the entire solution."

With tomorrow's opening bell, NVIDIA will join the Standard and Poors S&P 100 index, replacing Time Warner. The spot that NVIDIA is joining in has been freed up by the merger of Time Warner with AT&T. This marks a monumental moment for the company as membership in the S&P 100 is reserved for only the largest and most important corporations in the US. From the tech sector the list comprises illustrious names such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google Alphabet, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Oracle, Paypal, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.

NVIDIA's stock has seen massive gains over the last years, thanks to delivering record quarter after record quarter. Recent developments have transformed the company from a mostly gaming GPU manufacturer to a company that is leading in the fields of GPU compute, AI and machine learning. This of course inspires investors, so the NVIDIA stock has been highly sought after, now sitting above 265 USD, which brings the company's worth to over 160 billion USD. Congratulations!

At its Computex presser, leading up to its 7 nm Radeon Vega series unveil, AMD touched upon the massive proliferation of the Vega graphics architecture, which is found not only in discrete GPUs, but also APUs, and semi-custom SoCs of the latest generation 4K-capable game consoles. One such slide that created quite some flutter reads that "Vega" shipments are over 10 times greater than those of the "previous generation."

Normally you'd assume the previous-generation of "Vega" to be "Polaris," since we're talking about the architecture, and not an implementation of it (eg: "Vega 10" or "Raven Ridge," etc.). AMD later, at its post event round-table, clarified that it was referring to "Fiji," or the chip that went into building the Radeon R9 Fury X, R9 Nano, etc., and comparing its sales with that of products based on the "Vega 10" silicon. Growth in shipments of "Vega" based graphics cards is triggered by the crypto-mining industry, and for all intents and purposes, AMD considers the "Vega 10" silicon to be a commercial success.

Jon Peddie Research, the industry's market research firm for the graphics industry, has updated it's quarterly Market Watch report. Overall, the report finds the crypto-currency market is continuing to influence the PC graphics market, though its influence is waning. Market watch found that year-to-year total GPU shipments increased 3.4%, desktop graphics increased 14%, notebooks decreased -3%. GPU shipments decreased -10% from last quarter: AMD decreased -6%, Nvidia decreased -10%, and Intel decreased -11%.

AMD increased its market share again this quarter benefiting from new products for workstations, and crypto-currency mining, Nvidia held steady, and Intel decreased. Over three million add-in boards (AIBs) were sold to cryptocurrency miners worth $776 million in 2017, and an additional 1.7 million were sold in the quarter.

MSI is proud to present a brand new series based on AMD's "Polaris" chipsets, the Radeon graphics-based MECH series. Equipped with the new thermal design, the Radeon RX MECH series doesn't just allow for higher core and memory speeds but also provide increased performance in games. The outstanding shapes of the eye-catching MECH series cooler are intensified by a fiery red glow piercing through the cover, while the MSI dragon RGB LED on the top can be set to any of 16.7 million colors to match your mood or build. A completely custom PCB design featuring enhanced power design with Military Class 4 components enables higher stable performance to push your graphics card to the max. A classy matte black metal backplate shows the MECH 2 cards more structural strength and provides a nice finishing touch.

"AMD Radeon has always been committed to the best interest of gamers: a dedication to open innovation such as our contributions to the DirectX and Vulkan APIs, a commitment to true transparency through industry standards like Radeon FreeSync technology, and a desire to expand the PC gaming ecosystem by enabling developers everywhere. It is these values that result in a thriving PC gaming community, and explain why so many gamers continue to rally behind the AMD Radeon brand," said Scott Herkelman, vice president and general manager, AMD Radeon Technologies Group.

NVIDIA has posted a short (literally short) teaser, treating users to the promise of the "Ultimate Gaming Experience". This might mean something, such as the new, expected NVIDIA 11** series of graphics cards... Or it may mean something much less exciting, and have something to do with the 4K, HDR gaming experience that is supposed to be reaching gamers in a couple of weeks, at an expected cost of more kidneys than the average human has.

Officially, though, GTC 2018 Taiwan will revolve around artificial intelligence tech (what doesn't these days, really?) Translated, the teaser image reads something along the lines of "Utilizing GPU computing to explore the world's infinite possibilities - witness the power of artificial intelligence and the ultimate gaming experience in GTC Taiwan and Computex 2018." Remember, however, that marketing almost always has a way of blowing things out of proportion - don't hold your breath for a new graphics card series announcement.

ASUS today announced AREZ, a new brand identity for ASUS Radeon RX graphics cards. Derived from Ares, the Greek god of war, AREZ-branded graphics cards are built using industry-leading automated manufacturing to provide AMD gamers and enthusiasts with superior cooling technology and a robust software ecosystem. The new AREZ brand underlines the strong working partnership between ASUS and AMD that spans decades. Gamers and enthusiasts will enjoy a combination of exclusive ASUS innovations and technologies and AMD's Radeon graphics processors and software.

"Gamers around the world rally behind AMD Radeon because of what the Radeon name stands for: a dedication to open innovation such as our contributions to the DirectX and Vulkan APIs, a commitment to true transparency through industry standards like Radeon FreeSync technology, and a desire to expand the PC gaming ecosystem by enabling developers to take advantage of all graphics hardware, including AMD Radeon graphics. We invite gamers everywhere who believe in these values and the value of the exceptional gaming experience Radeon graphics delivers to join the Red team," said Scott Herkelman, Vice President and General Manager, AMD Radeon Technologies Group.

News of an upcoming AMD RX 500X series sprung like wildfire yesterday, as users and publications alike tried to quench a thirst for some more GPU solutions from the red camp. However, if recent leaked numbers and information from 3D Mark prove correct, it seems the RX 500X series will likely bring some disappointments to those who were hoping for a refined, Vega-imbued AMD Polaris redesign, or simply push for better clocks and power/performance ratios under a new manufacturing process.

AMD "Vega 20" is rumored to be an optical shrink of the current "Vega 10" GPU die to a newer process, either 12 nm, or 10 nm, or perhaps even 7 nm. Six new device IDs that point to "Vega 20" based products, surfaced on AMD's GPU drivers source code, with its latest commit made as recently as on 28th March. AMD "Vega 10" is a multi-chip module of a 14 nm GPU die, and two "10 nm-class" HBM2 memory stacks, sitting on a silicon interposer that facilitates high-density wiring between the three. In an effort to increase clock speeds, efficiency, or both, AMD could optically shrink the GPU die to a smaller silicon fabrication process, and carve out a new product line based on the resulting chip.

Corsair, in a welcome, interesting and heartfelt marketing ploy, has taken its place on the side of gamers worldwide against the unintended, hear-wrenching abuse felt by graphics cards used for mining everywhere. The soft, unyielding music does a great job of just showing how much of a "crying out" these graphics cards that are being put to sweaty, inhuman, ever-worsening working conditions are releasing.

If you were as touched as other users (and Corsair marketers) in doing this video, there are a lot of ways for you to donate and contribute to the liberation of these shackled miners. For your donation, Corsair will buy back a mining-set graphics card, and send you a photo of your "adopted" GPU happily crunching frames inside a gaming computer - its real home. Just contribute via PayPal, your choice of credit card, venmo, or... Bitcoin?

[The video has been removed since]

NVIDIA's DGX-2 is likely the reason why NVIDIA seems to be slightly less enamored with the consumer graphics card market as of late. Let's be honest: just look at that price-tag, and imagine the rivers of money NVIDIA is making on each of these systems sold. The data center and deep learning markets have been pouring money into NVIDIA's coffers, and so, the company is focusing its efforts in this space. Case in point: the DGX-2, which sports performance of 1920 TFLOPs (Tensor processing); 480 TFLOPs of FP16; half again that value at 240 TFLOPs for FP32 workloads; and 120 TFLOPs on FP64.

NVIDIA's DGX-2 builds upon the original DGX-1 in all ways thinkable. NVIDIA looks at these as readily-deployed processing powerhouses, which include everything any prospective user that requires gargantuan amounts of processing power can deploy in a single system. And the DGX-2 just runs laps around the DGX-1 (which originally sold for $150K) in all aspects: it features 16x 32GB Tesla V100 GPUs (the DGX-1 featured 8x 16 GB Tesla GPUs); 1.5 TB of system ram (the DGX-1 features a paltry 0.5 TB); 30 TB NVMe system storage (the DGX-1 sported 8 TB of such storage space), and even includes a pair of Xeon Platinum CPUs (admittedly, the lowest performance increase in the whole system).

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, today announced a new breakthrough product category called adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) that goes far beyond the capabilities of an FPGA. An ACAP is a highly integrated multi-core heterogeneous compute platform that can be changed at the hardware level to adapt to the needs of a wide range of applications and workloads. An ACAP's adaptability, which can be done dynamically during operation, delivers levels of performance and performance per-watt that is unmatched by CPUs or GPUs.

An ACAP is ideally suited to accelerate a broad set of applications in the emerging era of big data and artificial intelligence. These include: video transcoding, database, data compression, search, AI inference, genomics, machine vision, computational storage and network acceleration. Software and hardware developers will be able to design ACAP-based products for end point, edge and cloud applications. The first ACAP product family, codenamed "Everest," will be developed in TSMC 7nm process technology and will tape out later this year.

The title of this piece is both question and answer, though users that keep up with PC-related news knew the answer already. Jon Peddie Research, in a new report, pegs the number of total graphics cards sold to miners at a pretty respectable 3 million units (worth some $776 million). That's some 3 million gamers that could be enjoying video games on their PCs right now, or which would be able to enjoy them at a much lower price that they had to recently pay to have the privilege.

AMD has been the primary benefactor here - its GPU market share went up by 8.1%, while NVIDIA's dropped by 6% and Intel's by 1.9% (the fact that Intel's graphics processing units come embedded in the company's processors helps keep that number stable). As it is, attachment rates of GPUs to systems was over 100% at 136%, the result of miners buying more cards per system in an effort to maximize profits. Jon Peddie thinks that gaming will still be the key player to drive GPU sales, though "augmented by the demand from cryptocurrency miners." The firm also expects demand for GPUs to slacken, coeteris paribus, due to "increasing utilities costs and supply and demand forces that drive up AIB prices." However, for those looking for prices to drop before upgrading their system, the news aren't rosy: the article states that pricing will not drop in the foreseeable future, so owners of GPUs that can actually mine already are being encouraged to mine while not gaming, so as to try and offset the markups in the current GPU offerings.

Micron Technology, Inc., a leading memory and storage provider, today announced with Rambus Inc., Northwest Logic and Avery Design, their efforts to deliver a comprehensive solution for GDDR6, the world's fastest discrete memory. This first-of-its-kind solution would enable GDDR6 use in advanced applications such as high-performance networking, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure. Prior generations of GDDR memories, enabled by GPU vendors, were focused exclusively on the graphics market. While this allowed graphics and game console designs to take advantage of the significant performance advantage offered by GDDR, other applications could not because the necessary building blocks were not available.

ASUS today announced XG Station Pro, an external graphics card enclosure with a stylish aluminum chassis and advanced cooling that provides PC and Mac laptop users with high-end graphics performance, suitable for demanding professional applications, such as video rendering, 3D design and scientific modeling. With support for the latest NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and featuring fast and convenient Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, XG Station Pro enables a workstation-class experience when connected to a laptop and an external monitor without sacrificing mobility.

Premium, all-aluminum design
Designed in collaboration with In Win - the well-known maker of premium computer chassis - XG Station Pro has a highly functional and stylish design with an elegant, grey aluminum chassis that perfectly complements premium laptops. XG Station Pro fits a full-length, 2.5-slot graphics card, yet has a compact size that takes up minimal space on a desk or workspace. An external, 330W power supply drives even the most demanding graphics cards, reduces heat within the chassis, and enables XG Station Pro to have a smaller overall size.

We know AMD has been doing a great job keeping the lid on their Navi architecture with information being scarce at the moment. Aside from knowing that Navi is being fabricated on the 7 nm process, it is possible that the microarchitecture will quite possibly support next-generation memory like GDDR6 or HBM3. In a Navi discussion on the Beyond3D forums, a user found an entry in a Linux driver dated back to July that apparently mentions AMD's upcoming architecture - not by its real name, of course. The code is to add support for importing new asic definitions from a text file as opposed to adding support in code. Tom St Denis, a software engineer at AMD, listed the output that would be generated by using this functionality. However, the entry that caught our attention reads: new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET.enable [0: 0]. If our memory serves us right, the codename for Vega was GFX9. So by logic, Navi should carry the GFX10 codename. Obviously, the SUPER_SECRET part further backs up our theory or maybe AMD's just trolling us. The red team has been hiring personnel for their GFX10 projects, so we can assume they're working diligently to release Navi some time next year.