The host and producer, Geoff Keighley, has confirmed that Opening Night Live will be returning this August. Opening Night Live is the pre-show presentation or an opening show for Gamescom, held in Cologne, Germany.

The announcement comes as a welcomed news after E3 2023 cancellation and it appears that Gamescom 2023 will carry on the torch, as the last year show was the first in-person event since 2019. Opening Night Live last year was a big event, going for over two hours and featured more than 35 games. Geoff Keighley briefly tweeted that the show returns live on Tuesday, August 22nd and that he is "excited to be back in Cologne with the fans and industry, streaming video game news directly to you".

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.

It was only Monday this week that ASUS announced the official launch of the ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDM, but now retailers have started to put the display up for pre-order and it looks like for once, ASUS hasn't priced its products higher than the competition. In the US, it appears that the PG27AQDM will retail for US$999, which is the same price that LG is asking for its equivalent Ultragear OLED 27GR95QE-B. ASUS does claim to have higher typical brightness at 450 cd/m² vs a mere 200 cd/m² for the LG, yet somehow also claim to have half the power consumption.

A swift jump over the pond and the PG27AQDM looks a little less exciting, with it coming in at £1,098.95 in the UK and €1,299.99 in Germany and as much as 14,990 kr in Sweden, which puts all three nations at well over US$1,100 excluding any local VAT. That makes LG's Ultragear OLED the far more attractive option in Europe, as it's cheaper in all three countries by the equivalent of around US$100. For those still interested, the bad news is that the display won't arrive in retail until sometime in mid or end of April, depending on the country you live in.

To date, Intel has been promised almost €6.8 billion in subsidies from the federal German government, but apparently this isn't enough for Intel, as the company is now asking for an additional €3.2 billion, for a total of €10 billion is subsidies for its Magdeburg fab. The total investment in the fab in Magdeburg—which was announced back in March 2022—is said to be around €33 billion. In other words, Intel is asking Germany to pitch in almost a third of the cost for its shiny new fab. According to an Intel spokesperson quoted by the Register, Intel is worried about the current geopolitical situation and that the demand for semiconductors has declined, plus the fact that inflation has made everything much more expensive. Intel's Arizona fabs ended up costing an extra US$5 billion, which is about a third extra compared to the original cost estimate, so it's not hard to see why Intel is asking for more money here.

At the same time, the Vietnamese government jumped the gun and announced that Intel is looking at investing US$3.3 billion in the country, as part of an announcement of investments of a total of US$7.4 billion in Ho Chi Minh, by foreign companies. The additional US$4.1 billion investments apparently hinges on Intel's investment in the country, more specifically in the Saigon Hi-Tech Park. The official stance from Intel is that "Vietnam is an important part of our global manufacturing network, but we have not announced any new investments." It's unclear what the exact plans are, but Intel is said to have met up with government officials in Vietnam, according to Bloomberg. It's likely that it would be some kind of chip packaging facility, much like what Intel and AMD already has in Malaysia and China, among other places.

According to news out of Taiwan, TSMC will hold a ceremony to mark the official mass production start of its 3 nm node on the 29th of December. This is said to help "shatter doubts about de-Taiwanization" or in simpler terms, that Taiwan will lose its golden goose as TSMC invests abroad. The 3 nm fab—known as fab 18—is based in southern Taiwan's Tainan and the ceremony also marks the start of an expansion of TSMC's most advanced fab. TSMC is said to be kicking off its N3E node production sometime in the second half of 2023, followed by its N3P node in 2024, all of which should take place at fab 18, which also produces 5 nm wafers.

In related news, according to Reuters, a Japanese lawmaker from the ruling party has said that TSMC is considering a second plant in Japan, in addition to its current joint venture that is already under construction. TSMC's response to Reuters was that the company isn't ruling out Japan for future fabs, but that the company doesn't have any current plans. At the same time, TSMC is said to be sending executives to Dresden, Germany in early 2023, for a second round of talks about building a fab to help support the European auto industry, although this would be a 28/22 nm fab, which is far from cutting edge these days, although a lot more advanced than most fabs making chips for the auto industry.

AMD's next-generation Radeon RX 7900 high-end graphics cards are set to arrive next week and bring the new RDNA3 GPU architecture to the masses. However, it seems like the customers will have to fight for their purchase as the availability could be scarce at launch, leading to potentially increased prices with low stocks. According to Igor's Lab report, Germany will receive only 3,000 reference MBA (Made By AMD) units of Radeon RX 7900 series cards. In contrast, the rest of the EMEA region will receive only 7,000 MBA units. These numbers are lower than expected, so AIB partners may improve the supply once their designs hit shelves.

On the other hand, mainland China will not receive any MBA units of the new cards as a sign of increasing tension with Taiwan. Of course, AMD's board partners will supply their designs to China, and they are allowed to; however, it seems that only AMD is making a statement here. In addition to supply issues, the launch is rumored to be covered in BIOS issues such as memory leaks and the COVID-19 outbreak affecting production in closed factories. Of course, all of this information should be taken with a grain of salt, and we must wait for the official launch before making any further assumptions.

Intel and MediaTek today announced a strategic partnership to manufacture chips using Intel Foundry Services' (IFS) advanced process technologies. The agreement is designed to help MediaTek build a more balanced, resilient supply chain through the addition of a new foundry partner with significant capacity in the United States and Europe. MediaTek plans to use Intel process technologies to manufacture multiple chips for a range of smart edge devices. IFS offers a broad manufacturing platform with technologies optimized for high performance, low power and always-on connectivity built on a roadmap that spans production-proven three-dimensional FinFET transistors to next-generation breakthroughs.

"As one of the world's leading fabless chip designers powering more than 2 billion devices a year, MediaTek is a terrific partner for IFS as we enter our next phase of growth," said IFS President Randhir Thakur. "We have the right combination of advanced process technology and geographically diverse capacity to help MediaTek deliver the next billion connected devices across a range of applications."

Graphics card prices have been on a steady decline in the past few months, following their peak in May of last year when we saw double and triple pricing compared to the baseline MSRP value. According to the 3DCenter.org report, which tracks graphics card prices in Germany and Austria, we have information that AMD GPU prices have dipped below MSRP, while NVIDIA GPUs are very close to baseline listed prices. The report tracks Ethereum mining profitability and displays it in the yellow line. As the line is declining, so are the GPU prices. For AMD, the prices are now 8% below the 100% of MSRP. At 92%, consumers can find AMD GPUs at a slight discount. While AMD cards are slightly cheaper, NVIDIA GPUs are now at 102% of the MSRP, the lowest price point since the launch.

JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer, will be hosted by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. Exascale supercomputers are systems capable of performing more than a billion billion calculations per second and represent a significant milestone for Europe. By supporting the development of high-precision models of complex systems, they will have a major impact on European scientific excellence.

Quantum computing is an upcoming acceleration aiding classical computational methods to achieve monumental speed-ups at a few select problems. Unlike classical computers, quantum systems usually require sub-ambient cooling to make them work. At Quantum Brilliance, an Australian-Germany startup company, researchers have been developing quantum accelerators based on diamonds. Today, we got the world's first installation of room-temperature on-premises quantum computers at Australia's Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. While we don't have much information about the computational capability of the system, we know that it is paired with HPE Setonix, Pawsey's HPE Cray EX supercomputer.

In a brief YouTube video shared by Pawsey, it is highlighted that the benefits of using quantum accelerators are real, and they are figuring out ways to integrate it with the center's hardware and software stack for better usage. Meanwhile, Quantum Brilliance diamond accelerators are still a black box of some sort as the technology is known to the startup and its collaborating Australian universities. All we know is that the company is harnessing nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamonds, which supposedly have the longest coherence time of any room temperature quantum state. This translates to a qubit that can operate anywhere a classical computer can.

After months of rumors and speculations, it looks like we are finally going to receive official information from Intel regarding the exact country the company plans to do semiconductor R&D and manufacturing in within Europe. Today, the company published its media alert post, showing that we are finally going to receive exact information tomorrow. As we have previously reported, the current round of suggestions led to Intel building a fab inside Germany; however, it still remains to be confirmed. Once the information is out, we are going to report on it and finally see where team blue is headed next. You can find the announcement below.

As part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel is committed to investing in research and development (R&D) capabilities and manufacturing capacity to meet the surging demand for advanced semiconductors and to build a more resilient, globally balanced supply chain.

Join a webcast with CEO Pat Gelsinger where he will share details of Intel's latest plans for in semiconductor R&D and manufacturing in Europe.

When: 6 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. CET), Tuesday, March 15
Where: Watch live on the Intel Newsroom.
Event Replay: A video replay will be available on the Intel Newsroom following the webcast.

As we've known for a few months now, Intel is looking at setting up shop, or should that be fab, somewhere in Europe. The company already has fabs in Ireland, but now it looks like its second destination will be Magdeburg in Germany, at least if a story by MDR in Germany is to be trusted. The news outlet claims that the official announcement will take place sometime next week. It's not clear what kind of fab it'll be at this point in time, but hopefully we'll get more details once Intel makes an official announcement.

Magdeburg was apparently not the only location scouted by Intel in Germany, as Dresden was also in the running, the home of the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology among several other Fraunhofer Societies based in the city. Dresden also has twice the population of Magdeburg, which makes Intel's choice somewhat peculiar, as Magdeburg doesn't appear to have any particularly stand-out features that would make it the ideal choice of a semiconductor fab or even a packaging facility. It's possible that Intel chose the location based on the local supply chain, but that's just speculation at this point.

ASML, makers of vital semiconductor fabrication machinery powering the world's leading fabs, including TSMC, provided its first damage-assessment of the fire incident at one of its component plants near Berlin, on January 3. This plant manufactures several mechanical and optical components of semiconductor fabrication machinery, such as wafer tables and clamps, reticle chucks and mirror blocks.

ASML, in a press-release, disclosed that production of components used in DUV (deep-ultraviolet) machines, has been restarted, as that area of the plant is unaffected by the fire. A region of the plant that manufactures wafer clamps for use in its EUV (extreme ultraviolet) machines, however, has been affected by the fire. The company is still in the process of coming up with a recovery plan for this area, and will come up with a tentative date for restart of production only after that. EUV lithography is leveraged for 5 nm and upcoming 3 nm silicon fabrication nodes at TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. TSMC is known to be ASML's largest customer. ASML stated that it will release its Q4-2021 and full-year 2021 financial results on January 19, and it may provide more updates on the matter.The press-release follows.

A fight over who can announce the most new chip related investments seem to have broken out between Intel and TSMC, which both companies said to be eyeing Germany for their new foundry expansions. This is despite both companies having said that Europe isn't a particularly interesting market for new foundries, but it appears that the upcoming European Chips Act has changed their minds, despite there being no official word on how much the EU will invest.

Intel has already pledged investments in Europe of up to €80 billion, for as many as eight new foundries. It's not clear if this includes its current investments in Ireland or now, where Intel has already invested over €6 billion over the past couple of years. TSMC on the other hand hasn't promised anything as yet, but the company is in early talks with the German government according to news out of Taiwan. Time will tell if anything comes from this, but Intel is said to be making an announcement soon, possibly before the holiday season on where it's planning on building its next Fab in Europe, with Italy and France also being on the table.

The two leading companies in the quantum computing industry have combined to create Quantinuum, thereby accelerating the development of quantum computing and innovation of quantum technologies in a platform agnostic manner to deliver real-world quantum-enabled solutions for some of the most intractable problems that classical computers have not been able to solve.

Cambridge Quantum, the pioneer in quantum software, operating systems, and cybersecurity, and Honeywell Quantum Solutions, which has built the highest-performing quantum hardware, based on trapped-ion technologies, today announced they have satisfied all of the conditions required to close the business combination and formed the new company, now called Quantinuum.

IBM today announced its new 127-quantum bit (qubit) 'Eagle' processor at the IBM Quantum Summit 2021, its annual event to showcase milestones in quantum hardware, software, and the growth of the quantum ecosystem. The 'Eagle' processor is a breakthrough in tapping into the massive computing potential of devices based on quantum physics. It heralds the point in hardware development where quantum circuits cannot be reliably simulated exactly on a classical computer. IBM also previewed plans for IBM Quantum System Two, the next generation of quantum systems.

Quantum computing taps into the fundamental quantum nature of matter at subatomic levels to offer the possibility of vastly increased computing power. The fundamental computational unit of quantum computing is the quantum circuit, an arrangement of qubits into quantum gates and measurements. The more qubits a quantum processor possesses, the more complex and valuable the quantum circuits that it can run.

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.

TSMC, as part of its strategy to build cutting-edge semiconductor foundries in the US and EU, is looking to build a ground-up fab in Germany. The company's chairman, Mark Liu, made an announcement to this effect in the company's annual general meeting (AGM), addressing shareholders, held on July 26. This move is still in its "early stages," according to a DigiTimes report, with the company prospecting a suitable site across the country. The size and scale of TSMC's investment remains under the wraps.

TSMC's expedition to Germany aligns with an ambitious plan by the European Commission to make the EU a net-exporter of semiconductors and electronics by 2030. TSMC will have Intel Foundry Services for company in Germany, as an acquisition of Global Foundries would put Intel in control of its real-estate in Dresden. Intel is still prospecting the EU for a suitable place to invest €20 billion, besides ongoing investments in states such as the Republic of Ireland.

The German media outlet, 3D Center, has today published an updated report for July, measuring graphics card pricing in Germany and Austria, showing some pretty interesting results. The report is only measuring the pricing index of these two countries and their retailers, so it does not apply to other regions. An interesting discovery is that GPU prices have now hit the lowest point since February of this year when the sharp price incline started. At the time of reporting, GPU prices are exaggerated by around 53% over the MSRP listed prices. Not only did the prices drop, but the supply of GPUs like AMD Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti became much better, as consumers can get their hands on these now.

When looking at the graph below, note that MSRP is listed as 100%, and the percentage shown is the increase over that MSRP. When it comes to complete price reduction to the MSRP, 3D Center expects it to happen in 3-4 weeks possibly. If current data is to be believed, MSRP is slowly decreasing and supply is increasing rapidly. For more details and per-card pricing situation, head over to 3D Center website here. Here is an important statement from 3D Center about the current situation:

3D Center (translated from German)Of course, this means that current street prices for graphics cards are (mostly) still exaggerated - and above all that this is the worst possible time to buy a graphics card. Because the (now clearly verifiable) tendency points to clearly lower graphics card prices in the next few weeks, with a similar pace, street prices at list price level could be in sight in 3-4 weeks. It is possible that there will be a certain braking effect in the downward price movement beforehand - but at least the way up to that point should definitely be taken with you. Apparently the delivery quantities are currently sufficient, maybe the need is a bit lower because of the summer times (and no longer available on the part of the crypto miners)so that retailers receive more cards than they sell. Since the retailers usually bought their cards from the distributors at an exaggerated price, the big game is now about who can get rid of the expensive stock goods in time to make a profit at all in the face of constantly falling sales prices.

Intel is in talks with the German government to build a European chip factory hoping to counter the global chip shortages and help achieve the EU local chip manufacturing target. Germany is interested in attracting semiconductor companies to increase domestic chip production to improve security for their automotive industry which increasingly relies on foreign chips. Intel wants to open up manufacturing capacity at their foundries to external companies allowing them to compete with TSMC and Samsung in the high-end market. Intel is seeking large subsidies from the German government to the tune of several billion to help make the new factory a reality.

Robert Bosch GmbH, commonly known as just Bosch, has today unveiled the results of the company's biggest investment ever. On Monday, the company has unveiled its one billion Euro manufacturing facility, which roughly translates to 1.2 billion US Dollars. The manufacturing plant is located in Dresden, Germany, and it aims to supply the leading self-driving automobile companies with chips that are in great demand. As the main goal for the plant is to manufacture chips for the automotive industry, this new 7,200 m² Dresden facility is supposed to provide car makers with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) for power management and tasks such as triggering the automatic braking system of cars.

The one billion Euro facility was funded partly by the funds coming from the European Union investment scheme, which donated as much as 200 million Euros ($243 million). The goal of the plan is to start with the manufacturing of chips for power tools as early as July and start production of automotive chips in September. All of the chips will be manufactured on 300 mm wafers, which offers a major improvement in quantity compared to 200 and 150 mm wafers currently used by Bosch. The opening of this facility will surely help with the global chip shortages, which have even hit the automotive sector.

PsiQuantum, the leading quantum computing company focused on delivering a 1 million-plus qubit quantum computer, and GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the global leader in feature-rich semiconductor manufacturing, today announced a major breakthrough in their partnership to build the world's first full-scale commercial quantum computer. The two companies are now manufacturing the silicon photonic and electronic chips that form the foundation of the Q1 system, the first system milestone in PsiQuantum's roadmap to deliver a commercially viable quantum computer with one million qubits (the basic unit of quantum information) and beyond.

PsiQuantum and GF have now demonstrated a world-first ability to manufacture core quantum components, such as single-photon sources and single-photon detectors, with precision and in volume, using the standard manufacturing processes of GF's world-leading semiconductor fab. The companies have also installed proprietary production and manufacturing equipment in two of GF's 300 mm fabs to produce thousands of Q1 silicon photonic chips at its facility in upstate New York, and state-of-the-art electronic control chips at its Fab 1 facility in Dresden, Germany.

The global supply chain of graphics cards is currently not very well equipped to handle the massive demand that exists for the latest generation of GPUs. Just like we have seen with the launch of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series Ampere, and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series Big Navi SKUs, the latest generation graphics cards are experiencing massive demand. And manufacturers of these GPUs are not very well equipped to handle it all, so there is a huge scarce for GPUs in the global market. With AMD's recent announcement of the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, things are not looking any better, and the availability of this GPU could be very tight at launch.

According to information obtained by Igor's Lab, AMD could supply only a few thousand Radeon RX 6700 XT GPUs for Europe as a whole. To be precise, Igor's Lab notes that "If you condense the information of various board partners and distributors to a trend, then there are, depending on the manufacturer and model, only a few pieces (for Germany) to a few thousand for the EU as a whole." This could be a very bad indication of AMD's supply of these new GPUs globally, not just for Europe. The company is currently relying on the overbooked TSMC, which can only produce a limited amount of chips at the time, and we don't know how much capacity AMD allocated for the new chip.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the global leader in specialty semiconductor manufacturing, and Bosch will partner to develop and manufacture next-generation automotive radar technology.

Bosch chose GF as its partner to develop a mmWave automotive radar system-on-chip (SoC) for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) applications, manufactured using GF's 22FDX RF solution. ADAS applications help drivers stay safe by keeping a vehicle in the correct lane, warning of collisions, initiating emergency braking, assisting with parking, and more.

LIAN LI Industrial Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of aluminium chassis and PC accessories, hosts its second online event with the LIAN LI 2021 DIGITAL EXPO, which premiers February 18th, 9 am EST on YouTube (here). The 2021 DIGITAL EXPO unveils soon to be launched products, with new editions of the O11D MINI and UNI FANS, as well as exclusive looks at four prototypes. Each prototype will receive an in-depth look from case reviewers.

Q58: The Q58, a 14.3L SFF case, is equipped with split hinged panels made of tempered glass and aluminium mesh, and a dual-tone front solid aluminium panel. With support for MINI-ITX, 320 mm long GPUs, and up to 280 mm radiators, the Q58 is capable of supporting a variety of configurations with SFX PSUs or ATX PSUs due to an adjustable motherboard tray that can be moved for more clearance.