MSI, a world-leading laptop brand, has hold their brand new laptop virtual event MSIology: The Leap to Singularity today. Featuring the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs and up to 13th Gen Intel Core HX series processors which is now available for pre-order and early bird rewards.

MSI strives for perfection and a premium experience in the laptop lineup which comes with innovative technology breakthroughs, extremely powerful performance and aesthetic brand new design. "We have been leading the trends for high-end laptops, and it continues!" Said MSI Notebook Worldwide Sales & Marketing Director, Derek Chen.

ASUS today announced the all-new TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition, an all-AMD gaming laptop with a redesigned chassis and an incredibly immersive 16-inch display. The TUF Gaming A15, A17, F15 and F17 laptops also make a triumphant return, sporting the latest silicon from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA to power players into the next generation of gaming performance.

TUF A16 Advantage Edition announced
Built for serious gaming with subtle styling, the TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition is a sleek gaming laptop built to demolish the competition. Powered completely by AMD, the TUF Gaming A16 features up to an AMD Ryzen 9 Zen 4 processor and AMD Radeon RDNA 3 mobile graphics. "AMD and ASUS have partnered to deliver our latest 'Zen 4' and RDNA 3 technologies into the most innovative form factors," said Jason Banta, CVP and GM OEM PC. "The TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition delivers blistering gaming performance and outstanding power efficiency in a sleek portable chassis."

ASUS today announced the GeForce RTX 4080 Noctua Edition graphics card, a continuation of its collaboration with the legendary cooling company, building on the previous GeForce RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 Noctua variants. This year ASUS and Noctua have worked together to tame the power of the mighty GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card. Noctua fan-design prowess and an ASUS custom-built vapor chamber combine to create the quietest air-cooled RTX 4080 on the market.

Cool and quiet
The ASUS GeForce RTX 4080 Noctua Edition incorporates a pair of state-of-the-art Noctua NF-A12x25 fans to move air over a massive heatsink, developed in a partnership between the veteran ASUS thermal R&D team and the engineers at Noctua. The engineers successfully refined the fin density and heat pipe arrangement of the heatsink, optimizing it for the airflow characteristics of the NF-A12x25. To prioritize low noise levels, a smooth acoustic signature and high cooling performance while making room for the pair of 120 mm fans, ASUS expanded the card's total volume to occupy 4.3 slots of space. The card features a Dual BIOS switch, and Quiet mode is enabled by default to minimize noise right out of the box.

Big things are afoot at Intel's graphics chip division once again, as the company has just broken up its Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) business unit which will result in some big changes. For starters, Raja Koduri has been—what we can only refer to as—demoted, given he's back to being chief architect rather than being in charge of the AXG business unit. Some of his staff will be moved to other business units inside Intel as the AXG business unit will cease to exist. This doesn't mean Intel will stop making discrete consumer GPUs, with at least the Battlemage/Arc B-series launch still being planned to take place sometime in 2023.

At the same time, it looks like Raja Koduri will be out of action for what is likely to be at least a month since he posted on Twitter that he's had emergency back surgery while on a business trip. How this will affect his transition back to his role as chief architect is anyone's guess at this point in time. However, he will not be focusing solely on GPUs in the future, but the broader range of products that Intel offers—particularly the integration of GPU, CPU and AI architectures at Intel. We've posted an official statement from Intel after the break, which Intel provided to Tom's Hardware. We also wish Raja a speedy recovery!

With 11 days to go until the official launch of AMD's Radeon 7900-series graphics cards, PowerColor decided to share some more details about its upcoming cards. The two models appear to be the Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 XT, with both cards apparently sharing the same design and cooler. The cards appear to be at least triple-slot, but it's not entirely clear from the provided pictures. PowerColor is using a nine-blade fan design and the fans are of course kitted out with LEDs, where PowerColor is pushing what it calls an "amethyst purple" colour for this generation of Hellhound cards. The new fans are said to improve the GPU temperatures by as much as three degrees Celsius compared to the previous generation of fans.

More importantly, the cards have been given an improved backplate, as well as a larger copper plate for the heatsink, for improved cooling. The new copper plate doesn't just cover the GPU now, but also the VRAM chips. The copper plate is connected to eight 6 mm heatpipes. PowerColor also shared that it's using a 14-layer high TG PCB, which uses a two ounce copper power layer. The RX 7900 XTX is kitted out with 20 VRMs, although this appears to be straight from the AMD reference design. PowerColor appears to have implemented a dual BIOS on the card, as there's a switch for OC/Silent operation and the card also appears to have a hardware LED switch, which is nice for those that don't care about lighting up their computer like a Christmas tree. Keep in mind that this is not PowerColor's top-of-the-range card, which is the Red Devil, so we should expect more details on those cards in the future too.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the global leading motherboard, mini PC, notebook, mobile device, and smart solution provider, is proud to announce our participation at GITEX Global 2022 at the Dubai International Trade Centre HALL 4, E30, from October 10 to 14. ECS aims to showcase its latest LIVA mini PC series, AIO PCs, and motherboards for various vertical markets as well as for commercial applications.

The Mini PC Family - including the pocket-sized Q series, multi-functional Z series, and ultra-powerful One series - is ideal for smart retail, transportation, digital signage for hotels and hospital, smart conferencing for business, intelligent edge computing for AI solutions, and home computing for long-distance working and for education.

During its GTC 2022 session, NVIDIA introduced its new generation of gaming graphics cards based on the novel Ada Lovelace architecture. Dubbed NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series, it brings various updates like more CUDA cores, a new DLSS 3 version, 4th generation Tensor cores, 3rd generation Ray Tracing cores, and much more, which you can read about here. However, today, we also got a new Ada Lovelace card intended for the data center. Called the L40, NVIDIA updated its previous Ampere-based A40 design. While the NVIDIA website provides sparse, the new L40 GPU uses 48 GB GDDR6 memory with ECC error correction. Using NVLink, you can get 96GBs of VRAM. Paired with an unknown SKU, we assume that it uses AD102 with adjusted frequencies to lower the TDP and allow for passive cooling.

NVIDIA is calling this their Omniverse GPU, as it is a part of the push to separate its GPUs used for graphics and AI/HPC models. The "L" model in the current product stack is used to accelerate graphics, with display ports installed on the GPU, while the "H" models (H100) are there to accelerate HPC/AI installments where visual elements are a secondary task. This is a further separation of the entire GPU market, where the HPC/AI SKUs get their own architecture, and GPUs for graphics processing are built on a new architecture as well. You can see the specifications provided by NVIDIA below.

Intel's future Meteor Lake APUs seem to be playing catch-up to AMD's integrated graphics in more ways than one. Twitter user Coelacanth's Dream has dug up information that indicates Intel's commitment to bring ray tracing support to even its IGP (Integrated Graphics Processing) tiles. According to bits and pieces from Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) code patches, it seems to be confirmed that ray tracing support is indeed coming to the TSMC-made, 3 nm GPU tiles in Meteor Lake. The kicker here is the presence of flags that detect whether the iGPU is of the "iGFX_meteorlake" type - if so, IGC sets ray tracing support to enabled.

Puzzlingly, Intel's upscaling technology, Xe SuperSampling (XeSS) could be out of the picture - at least for now. It seems that IGC patches for the upcoming APU family still don't allow for DPAS (Dot Product Accumulate Systolic) instructions - instructions that rely on XMX (Intel Xe Matrix Extensions), the AI engines responsible for executing 128 FP16/BF16, 256 INT8, or 512 INT4/INT2 operations per clock. These low-precision operations are the soul of algorithmic supersampling technologies such as XeSS.

Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards span both gamer and creator/professional user market sector, where we witnessed Intel announce gamer and pro-vis GPU SKUs. Today, we are seeing the usage of the flagship Arc Alchemist SKU called A770 in Blender rendering with ray tracing enabled. The GPU is designed to have a DG2-512 GPU with 512 EUs, 4096 Shading Units, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, and 32 Xe cores for ray tracing, be a powerhouse for games, and handle some professional software as well. At SIGGRAPH 2022, Bob Duffy, Intel's Director of Graphics Community Engagement, showcased a system with Arc A770 GPU running Blender Cycles with ray tracing and denoising.

While we don't have any comparable data to showcase, the system managed to produce a decent rendering in Blender 3.3 LTS release, using Intel's oneAPI. The demo scene had 4,369,466 vertices, 8,702,031 edges, 4,349,606 faces, and 8,682,950 triangles, backed by ray tracing and live denoising. We are yet to see more detailed benchmarks and how the GPU fares against the competition.

Intel has today unveiled another addition to its discrete Arc Alchemist graphics card lineup, with a slight preference to the professional consumer market. Intel has prepared three models for creators and entry pro-vis solutions, called Intel Arc Pro graphics cards. All GPUs are AV1 accelerated, have ray tracing support, and are designed to handle AI acceleration inside applications like Adobe Premiere Pro. At the start, we have a small A30M mobile GPU aimed at laptop designs. It has a 3.5 TeraFLOP FP32 capability inside a configurable 35-50 Watt TDP envelope, has eight ray tracing cores, and 4 GB of GDDR6 memory. Its display output connectors depend on OEM's laptop design.

Next, we have the Arc A40 Pro discrete single-slot GPU. Having 3.5 TeraFLOPs of FP32 single-precision performance, it has eight ray tracing cores and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. The listed maximum TDP for this model is 50 Watts. It has four mini-DP ports for video output, and it can drive two monitors at 8K 60 Hz, one at 5K 240 Hz, two at 5K 120 Hz, or four at 4K 60 Hz refresh rate. Its bigger brother, the Arc A50 Pro, is a dual-slot design with 4.8 TeraFLOPs of single-precision FP32 computing, has eight ray tracing cores, and 6 GB of GDDR6 memory as well. It has the same video output capability as the Arc A40 Pro, with a beefier cooling setup to handle the 75 Watt TDP. All software developed using the OneAPI toolkit can be accelerated using these GPUs. Intel is working with the industry to adapt professional software for Arc Pro graphics.

Graphics card prices continue to fall in China with NVIDIA & AMD holding excessive stock of RTX 3000/RX 6000 cards without enough consumers interested in buying them. The companies have resisted pressure to lower the official MSRP of these cards with most retailers now offering discounts of between 5% and 30%. The largest drops are with flagship cards such as the NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti which is now available for 9499 RMB (1415 USD) which is 38% below MSRP while the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is 4999 RMB (744 USD) a 37.5% reduction. The prices for all graphics cards are now below MSRP with drops amounting to 20% on average for NVIDIA and 19% for AMD.

Intel's upcoming family of Arc Alchemist mobile graphics cards is just around the corner, and we are already starting to spot the company's reference systems utilizing the latest dedicated graphics. Thanks to the findings of @momomo_us, we have information that Intel is readying the NUC X15 laptop reference system codenamed "Alder Country." There are two SKUs, LAPAC71G and LAPAC71H, each with similar CPU and GPU configurations. Carrying an Intel Core i7-12700H processor with 14 cores and 20 threads, the CPU is paired with either Arc A550M on the LAPAC71G SKU or Arc A730M on LAPAC71H SKU.

As a reminder, Intel already made such NUC X15 reference laptop designs with Tiger Lake processors. However, they came with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 graphics instead of Intel Arc Alchemist. Implementations of NUC X15 appeared with partners such as ADATA XPG Xenia laptop. We could expect to see more OEMs adapt Alder Country if the performance of Arc Alchemist graphics proves good.

Intel is preparing to launch its next-generation desktop platform codenamed Rocket Lake-S. According to the presentation held by Intel today in Shenzen, China, we have official information regarding some of the platform features that Raptor Lake is bringing. Starting with memory support, Raptor Lake is still carrying the transitional DDR4 and DDR5 support, as the full swing towards DDR5 is still in progress. Unlike the previous generation Alder Lake, which brought DDR5-4800 support, Raptor Lake's integrated memory controller can drive DDR5 modules with a 5600 MT/s configuration. As DDR4 support remains, it is limited to 3200 MT/s speed.

Interesting information from the leaked slide points out that support for CPU-attached NVMe storage remains PCIe Gen4. While AMD will provide an AM5 socket with CPU-attached NMVe storage on PCIe Gen5 protocol, Intel is taking a step back and holding on to Gen4. The CPU is outputting 16 PCIe Gen5 lanes on its own. Motherboard vendors for the upcoming 700-series boards for Raptor Lake can still provide a PCIe Gen5 NVMe slot; however, it will have to subtract eight Gen5 lanes from the PCI Express Graphics (PEG) slot and route them to NVMe storage. As our testing shows, this will affect GPU's performance by a few percent. AMD's upcoming AM5 platform has no such issues, as the CPU provides both the PEG and CPU-attached NVMe storage with sufficient PCIe Gen5 bandwidth.

Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics cards launched in laptop/mobile space, and everyone is wondering just how well the first generation of discrete graphics performs in actual, GPU-accelerated workloads. Tellusim Technologies, a software company located in San Diego, has managed to get ahold of a laptop featuring an Intel Arc A370M mobile graphics card and benchmark it against other competing solutions. Instead of using Vulkan API, the team decided to use D3D12 API for tests, as the Vulkan usually produces lower results on the new 12th generation graphics. With the 30.0.101.1736 driver version, this GPU was mainly tested in the standard GPU working environment like triangles and batches. Meshlet size is set to 69/169, and the job is as big as 262K Meshlets. The total amount of geometry is 20 million vertices and 40 million triangles per frame.

Using the tests such as Single DIP (drawing 81 instances with u32 indices without going to Meshlet level), Mesh Indexing (Mesh Shader emulation), MDI/ICB (Multi-Draw Indirect or Indirect Command Buffer), Mesh Shader (Mesh Shaders rendering mode) and Compute Shader (Compute Shader rasterization), the Arc GPU produced some exciting numbers, measured in millions or billions of triangles. Below, you can see the results of these tests.

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.

Rumors of NVIDIA's upcoming Ada Lovelace graphics cards keep appearing. With every new update, it seems like the total power consumption is getting bigger, and today we are getting information about different SKUs, including mobile and desktop variants. According to a well-known leaker, kopite7kimi, we have information about the power limits of the upcoming GPUs. The new RTX 40 series GPUs will feature a few initial SKUs: AD102, AD103, AD104, and AD106. Every SKU, except the top AD102, will be available as well. The first in line, AD102, is the most power-hungry SKU with a maximum power limit rating of 800 Watts. This will require multiple power connectors and a very beefy cooling solution to keep it running.

Going down the stack, we have an AD103 SKU limited to 450 Watts on desktop and 175 Watts on mobile. The AD104 chip is limited to 400 Watts on desktop, while the mobile version is still 175 Watts. Additionally, the AD106 SKU is limited to 260 Watts on desktop and 140 Watts on mobile.

A part of the process of building a graphics card is designing compatibility to execute the latest graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. Today, we have confirmation that Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards will be compatible with Vulkan's latest iteration - version 1.3. In January, Khronos, the team behind Vulkan API, released their regular two-year update to the standard. Graphics card vendors like NVIDIA and AMD announced support immediately with their drivers. Today, the Khronos website officially lists Intel Arc Alchemist mobile graphics cards as compatible with Vulkan 1.3 with Intel Arc A770M, A730M, A550M, A370M, and A350M GPUs.

At the time of writing, there is no official announcement for the desktop cards yet. However, given that the mobile SKUs are supporting the latest standard, it is extremely likely that the desktop variants will also carry the same level of support.

AMD and ATI Technologies ULC have filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) against Realtek Semiconductor and TCL Industries holdings. The complaint lists five patent infringements from both companies, mostly related to graphics technologies such as texture decompression, a unified shader approach to graphics architectures, a multi-threaded graphics processing system, as well as methods to synchronize thread wavefront data and events and a patent covering a processing unit for asynchronous dispatch.

According to AMD, both companies integrated solutions based on AMD's intellectual property without appropriate, prior licensing. The USITC has already come forward with an investigation announcement towards a number of Realtek and TCL-designed products, including graphics systems, digital televisions, and assorted components, found in some products shipped and sold in the U.S. market. The lawsuit aims for an exclusion order and cease and desist on sales of affected products.

Frank Azor, Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions & Marketing at AMD, has posted an interesting slide on Twitter, claiming that AMD Radeon products possess higher FPS/$ value than NVIDIA's graphics offerings. According to the slide, AMD Radeon graphics cards are the best solutions for gamers looking at performance per dollar ratings and performance per watt. This means that AMD claims that Radeon products are inherently higher-value products than NVIDIA's offerings while also more efficient. As the chart shows, which you can see below, some AMD Radeon cards are offering up to 89% better FPS/$ value with up to 123% better FPS/Watt metric. This highest rating is dedicated to Radeon RX 6400 GPU; however, there are all GPUs included in comparison with up to the latest Radeon RX 6950 XT SKU.

Compared to TechPowerUp's own testing of AMD's Radeon cards and multiple reviews calculating the performance per dollar metric, we could not see numbers as high as AMD's. This means that AMD's marketing department probably uses a different selection of games that may perform better on AMD Radeon cards than NVIDIA GeForce RTX. Of course, as with any company marketing material, you should take it with a grain of salt, so please check some of our reviews for a non-biased comparison.

Intel has announced that it has bought 11 year old, veteran Finnish graphics IP developer Siru Innovations. You'd be forgiven if you've never heard about the company, but it has pedigree harking back to the late 1980's and early 1990's, as at least one of its founders was part of the legendary demogroup Future Crew that made some of the most impressive graphics and audio demo software during the BBS era. All three founders were at Bitboys when it was founded in the 1990's and if you haven't heard about Bitboys, you might simply not be old enough. The company was hyped for its Glaze3D graphics architecture that never actually launched, due to the fact that Infineon stopped manufacturing a very specific type of embedded memory that the GPUs were based on.

Bitboys was later acquired by ATI, who in turn of course was taken over by AMD. However, the story doesn't end here, as AMD sold the Imageon business unit to Qualcomm in 2009 and the three founders of Siru moved to Qualcomm for a couple of years, before starting Siru. Since the Intel announcement, the Siru website has been taken down, but the company was working on developing mobile graphics IP, as well as helping other companies develop their own graphics related IP, drivers and so on. As to what Intel is planning on doing with the Siru team isn't entirely clear, but Balaji Kanigicherla, Intel's VP and General Manager, AXG Custom Compute Group Innovating Custom Silicon & Platform Solutions in Blockchain, High Performance Edge Compute and Cloud Computing, Supercomputer, posted on LinkedIn saying that Siru will be joining the AXG Group. You can read the full post below.

With the release of Hopper, NVIDIA's cycle of new architecture releases is not yet over. Later this year, we expect to see next-generation gaming architecture codenamed Ada Lovelace. According to a well-known hardware leaker for NVIDIA products, @kopite7kimi, on Twitter, the green team is reportedly testing a potent variant of the upcoming AD102 SKU. As the leak indicates, we could see an Ada Lovelace AD102 SKU with a Total Graphics Power (TGP) of 900 Watts. While we don't know where this SKU is supposed to sit in the Ada Lovelace family, it could be the most powerful, Titan-like design making a comeback. Alternatively, this could be a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti SKU. It carries 48 GB of GDDR6X memory running at 24 Gbps speeds alongside monstrous TGP. Feeding the card are two 16-pin connectors.

Another confirmation from the leaker is that the upcoming RTX 4080 GPU uses the AD103 SKU variant, while the RTX 4090 uses AD102. For further information, we have to wait a few more months and see what NVIDIA decides to launch in the upcoming generation of gaming-oriented graphics cards.

A few days ago, Intel announced its first official discrete graphics card efforts, designed for laptops. Called the Arc Alchemist lineup, Intel has designed these SKUs to provide entry-level to high-end options covering a wide range of use cases. Today, AMD has responded with a rather exciting Tweet made by the company's @Radeon Twitter account. The company compared Intel's Arc Alchemist A370M GPU with AMD's Radeon RX 6500M mobile SKUs in the post. These GPUs are made on TSMC's N6 node, feature 4 GB GDDR6 64-bit memory, 1024 FP32 cores, and have the same configurable TDP range of 35-50 Watts.

Below, you can see AMD's benchmarks of the following select games: Hitman 3, Total War Saga: Troy, F1 2021, Strange Brigade (High), and Final Fantasy XIV. The Radeon RX 6500M GPU manages to win in all of these games, thus explaining AMD's "FTW" hashtag on Twitter. Remember that these are vendor-supplied benchmarks runs, so we have to wait for some media results to surface.

For decades, Intel has been a champion for PC platform innovation. We have delivered generations of CPUs that provide the computing horsepower for billions of people. We advanced connectivity through features like USB, Thunderbolt and Wi-Fi. And in partnership with the PC ecosystem, we developed the ground-breaking PCI architecture and the Intel Evo platform, pushing the boundary for what mobile products can do. Intel is uniquely positioned to deliver PC platform innovations that meet the ever-increasing computing demands of professionals, consumers, gamers and creators around the world. Now, we take the next big step.

Today, we are officially launching our Intel Arc graphics family for laptops, completing the Intel platform. These are the first discrete GPUs from our Intel Arc A-Series graphics portfolio for laptops, with our desktop and workstation products coming later this year. You can visit our Newsroom for our launch video, product details and technical demos, but I will summarize the highlights of how our Intel Arc platform and A-Series mobile GPU family will deliver hardware, software, services and - ultimately - high-performance graphics experiences.

According to TrendForce forecasts, average overall DRAM pricing in 2Q22 will drop by approximately 0~5%, due to marginally higher buyer and seller inventories coupled with the demand for products such as PCs, laptops, and smart phones being influenced in the short-term by the Russian-Ukrainian war and high inflation weakening consumer purchasing power. At present, the only remaining source of demand is on the server side, so overall DRAM stocks will remain oversupplied in 2Q22.

In terms of PC DRAM, PC OEMs are adopting a conservative stocking strategy for orders in 2Q22 due to the Russian-Ukrainian war, which may continue affecting orders during peak season in 2H22, and revising 2022 shipment targets downwards. Additionally, the overall supply of bits is still growing, so the PC DRAM price slump in 2Q22 will further expand to 3~8% and may continue to deteriorate.

ASRock Industrial launches a new range of industrial motherboards powered by 12th Gen Intel Core Processors (Alder Lake-S) with up to 16 cores and 24 threads, supporting the new Intel 600 Series W680, Q670, and H610 chipsets. Featuring high computing power with performance hybrid architecture and enhanced AI capabilities, rich IOs and expansions for up to quad displays 4K@60 Hz, USB 3.2 Gen2x2 (20 Gbit/s), triple Intel 2.5 GbE LANs with real-time TSN, multi M.2 Key M, ECC memory, plus TPM 2.0, and wide voltage support. The new series covers comprehensive form factors, including industrial Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX, and ATX motherboards for diverse applications, such as factory automation, kiosks, digital signage, smart cities, medical, and Edge AIoT applications.