GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, proudly introduced the new AORUS and HWiNFO co-branded proprietary OSD feature, which demonstrates again GIGABYTE's devotion to delivering premium PC user experience. ⁠GIGABYTE collaborated with HWiNFO in 2023 to launch a co-branded version featuring the exclusive AORUS theme.

Taking user experience as the top priority, GIGABYTE aims further to provide all PC users with a neat and friendly OSD (On-Screen Display) function with easy setup. Consequently, GIGABYTE deepened its partnership with HWiNFO to introduce the AORUS and HWiNFO co-branded OSD feature with no need for additional software installation. It can display values as text or graphs in an overlay or independent window, as well as within full-screen applications or games. This provides users with another convenient and free-of-charge option other than existing OSD software in the market.

HWiNFO v7.73-5370 Beta was released yesterday—the newly updated version includes a fully integrated On-Screen Display (OSD) feature. In the past, users have had to rely on external tools—for example; RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS)—to get vital information displayed on their monitor(s) of choice. Martin, HWiNFO's main author, revealed that this new addition is based on a Team Blue toolset—his February 13 official forum post stated: "(this) feature is based on Intel PresentMon and allows showing any value as a text or graph (with multiple values). Position, text font, size, weight and colors can be individually defined. It should work with any engine like DirectX 11, 12, OpenGL, Vulkan. The OSD is automatically placed over the most graphics intensive application currently running but it can also be manually targeted." Five days later he followed up with further information—HWInfo64's new OSD is "available in HWiNFO64 only," therefore making it incompatible with Windows XP. Similarly, MSI's Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta landed a week and a bit ago, without support for Microsoft's 2001-vintage operating system.

Martin reckons that the change could affect Windows Vista users: "Use legacy HWiNFO32 on these systems. We don't anticipate that these systems will benefit from 64-bit applications, nor require support of latest HWiNFO64 versions. So the impact of this (sad) limitation should be minimal. In case there will be a reasonable demand for new versions of HWiNFO64 on XP64 it's still possible to build such versions (without OSD support), but currently we don't expect to make such extra effort." Additionally, the popular monitoring application's latest upgrade brings enhanced sensor monitoring for ASUS NUC systems, improved health monitoring on a selection of NVMe drives (connected via Intel RST), and enhanced sensor monitoring on the ASUS TUF GAMING Z790-PRO WIFI motherboard model.

A Taiwan Economic Daily news article proposes that a couple of high profile clients are considering TSMC's 2 nanometer process—Apple is widely believed to be the first customer to join the foundry's queue for cutting edge services. The report posits that Intel is also signed up on the Taiwanese firm's 2 nm reservation list—TSMC is expected to start production in 2025—insiders reckon that Team Blue's "Nova Lake" CPU family is the prime candidate here. Its CPU tile is alleged to utilize TSMC 2 nm node. Intel's recent "Core" processor roadmaps do not display any technologies beyond 2025—many believe that "Nova Lake" is pencilled in for a loose 2026 launch window, perhaps within the second half of the year.

The existence of "Nova Lake" was revealed late last year by HWiNFO patch notes—a short entry mentioned preliminary support for the family's integrated GPU. Intel is engaged in hyping up of its own foundry's 20A and 18A processes, but remain reliant on TSMC plants for various bits of silicon. Industry tipsters reckon that aspects of "Lunar Lake" CPUs are based on the Taiwanese foundry's N3B node. Team Blue Corporation and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) announced a new development partnership last week, but initial offerings will arrive on a relatively passé "12-nanometer semiconductor process platform." TSMC's very advanced foundry services seem to be unmatched at this juncture.

Beating previous reports that AMD is increasing the CPU core count of its mobile monolithic processors from the present 8-core/16-thread to 12-core/24-thread; we are learning that the next-gen processor from the company, codenamed "Strix Point," will in fact be the company's first hybrid processor. The chip is expected to feature two kinds of CPU cores, with "Zen 5" being the microarchitecture behind the performance cores, and "Zen 5c" behind the efficiency cores. An engineering sample featuring 4 P-cores, and 8 E-cores, surfaced on the web, thanks to Performancedatabases. A HWiNFO screenshot reveals the engineering sample's core-configuration of 4x P-cores and 8x E-cores, with identical L1 cache sizes. Things get a little fuzzy with the L2 cache size detection, and L3 cache.

We know from the current "Zen 4c" core design that it is essentially a compacted version of "Zen 4" designed for higher-density chiplets that have 16 cores; and that it has both the same ISA and IPC as "Zen 4," with the only difference being that "Zen 4c" is designed with lower amounts of shared L3 caches at their disposal, are generally configured with lower clock speeds, and have higher energy efficiency than "Zen 4." "Zen 4c" cores also 35% smaller in die-area than "Zen 4." The company could develop "Zen 5c" CPU cores with similar design goals.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, is pleased to announce its close collaboration with HWiNFO, a comprehensive system information and diagnostic tool. This partnership aims to enhance the accuracy of hardware information and diagnostics, while introducing innovative features to benefit computer enthusiasts and professionals alike.

HWiNFO, known for its detailed system information and diagnostic capabilities, has partnered with GIGABYTE to integrate their technologies and deliver more precise and comprehensive hardware information to users. By combining GIGABYTE's expertise in hardware manufacturing and HWiNFO's advanced diagnostics, users can now access a wealth of information about their computer components with unparalleled accuracy.

Kevin Glynn, aka "Uncle Webb," our associate software author behind popular utilities such as ThrottleStop and RealTemp, developed a new utility named Counter Control, which lets you monitor and log the performance counters of Intel Core processors since 2008 (Core "Nehalem"). During development for ThrottleStop, Kevin discovered a fascinating bug with Windows Defender, the built-in security software of Windows, which causes significantly higher performance impact on the processor than it should normally have. Of course a security software is bound to have some (small) performance impact during real-time protection, but this is much bigger.The first sign that something is happening is that HWiNFO will be reporting a reduced "Effective Clock" speed when the CPU is fully loaded. A much bigger problem is that when Defender is affected by the bug, performance of your machine will be significantly reduced. For example, a Core i9-10850K running at 5.00 GHz all-core loses 1000 Cinebench points (or 6%). Such a performance loss has been reported by owners of Intel Core 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th Gen, both desktop and mobile CPUs, on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. AMD processors are not affected.

Based on details from multiple sources, least not the release notes for HWiNFO 7.17 beta, we now know that AMD is working on an answer to Intel's XMP memory profiles that should be called RAMP, or Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile. Not much is known about RAMP at this point in time, but hopefully it'll be as straightforward to use as Intel's XMP when it comes to configuring overclocked DIMMs.

Intel has of course updated XMP to version 3.0 which includes support for DDR5 memory, although it was reported that Intel was late when it came to finalising the specifics of XMP 3.0, which meant some early DDR5 modules intended for overclocking didn't end up getting any XMP profiles. Hopefully AMD will get its RAMP spec finished well ahead of time, so the memory makers that want to offer support for RAMP can do so well ahead of the launch of AMD's upcoming AM5 platform.

The release notes for the latest version of famous system utility HWiNFO have spilled the beans on an update to Intel's XMP. Currently at version 2.0, XMP (eXtreme Memory Profile) is a technology that allows the system-level BIOS to run DDR memory at speeds higher than those allowed by JEDEC, the governing specifications body for all things memory. It extends the performance profiles usually made available via SPD (Serial Presence Detect). An update to Intel's XMP (XMP 3.0) for DDR5 memory is referred to in the release notes for version 7.05 of the software. Not much more to look at here - it remains to be seen what changes are actually a part of XMP 3.0, and if any increased utility will be added to these profiles. Remember, however, that nor Intel nor AMD (via its A-XMP implementation) enable warranty coverage should XMP be enabled in your system.

Other relevant updates for the application include advanced early support for Zen 4 systems (looking at you, AMD), as well as per-core temperature monitoring for Zen-based CPUs. There are other additions to the supported hardware, which you can find in the screenshot below.

AMD's Zen 4 based systems are still in development, however, the company is already distributing firmware to give the new core design proper support once it arrives. By doing this, software providers are already able to distribute software with support for Zen 4 architecture. One of those examples is HWiNFO, popular monitoring, and diagnostics tool. In the pre-release of its upcoming version 7.05, which you can already download, the tool lists "Enhanced early support of some Zen4-based systems". This means that the software would likely be capable of monitoring a few components of the Zen 4 system, as the temperature for example. While we are not sure what the "enhanced" really means, only time will tell, as we await the launch of AMD's next-generation systems. You can download the pre-release 7.05 version of HWiNFO here, and you can check out the changelog below.

We are all still awaiting how NVIDIA's RTX 2000 series of GPUs will fare in independent reviews, but that has not stopped the rumor mill from extrapolating. There have been alleged leaks of the RTX 2080 Ti's performance and now we see HWiNFO add support to an unannounced NVIDIA Turing microarchitecture chip, the TU106. As a reminder, the currently announced members in RTX series are based off TU102 (RTX 2080 Ti), and TU104 (RTX 2080, RTX 2070). It is logical to expect a smaller die for upcoming RTX cards based on NVIDIA's history, and we may well see an RTX 2060 using the TU106 chip.

This addition to HWiNFO is to be taken with a grain of salt, however, as they have been wrong before. Even recently, they had added support for what, at the time, was speculated to be NVIDIA Volta microarchitecture which we now know as Turing. This has not stopped others from speculating further, however, as we see 3DCenter.org give their best estimates on how TU106 may fare in terms of die size, shader and TMU count, and more. Given that TSMC's 7 nm node will likely be preoccupied with Apple iPhone production through the end of this year, NVIDIA may well be using the same 12 nm FinFET process that TU102 and TU104 are being manufactured on. This mainstream GPU segment is NVIDIA's bread-and-butter for gross revenue, and so it is possible we may see an announcement with even retail availability towards the end of Q4 2018 to target holiday shoppers.

PC diagnostics tool HW Info has added support for future, as-of-yet unreleased AMD CPUs and GPUs, which seemingly confirm some earlier news on AMD's plans for their next-generation offerings. HWiNFO's v5.72 update adds support for upcoming AMD Navi GPUs, Pinnacle Ridge, 400-series motherboards (which should make their market debut alongside AMD's Zen+ CPUs), and enhanced support for AMD's Starship, Matisse and Radeon RX Vega M. We already touched upon AMD's Matisse codename in the past: it's expected to refer to the company's Zen 2 microarchitecture, which will bring architecture overhauls of the base Zen design - alongside a 7 nm process - in order to bring enhanced performance and better power consumption.

Starship, on the other hand, is a previously leaked evolution of AMD's current Naples offering that powers their EPYC server CPUs. Starship has been rumored to have been canceled, and then put back on the product schedule again; if anything, its inclusion in HWiNFO's latest version does point towards it having made the final cut, after all. Starship will bring to businesses an increased number of cores and threads (48/96) compared to Naples' current top-tier offering (32/64), alongside a 7 nm manufacturing process.

HWiNFO v. 5.7 has brought with it a smattering of improvements and additions, as is usually the case. These are worthier of a news piece than most, however, since we're looking at quite a number of interesting developments. For one, preliminary support has been added for Intel's Whiskey Lake, an upcoming mobile design that succeed's Intel's Kaby Lake products, and should bring the fight to AMD's Ryzen Mobile offerings. Furthermore, and still on the Intel camp, support for the upcoming 10 nm Ice Lake has also been added. Íf you'll remember, Ice Lake is expected to be Intel's first foray into the 10 nm+ process in the mobile camp (given away by the U/Y product codes), after numerous delays that made the company stick with its 14 nm process through three iterations and in-process improvements. These are not the only Intel developments, however; the team behind HWiNFO has also added a new feature that reveals your Intel CPU's Turbo Boost multipliers, which the company has since removed form their ARK pages and processor specifications - an issue that generated rivers of ink.

Stepping away from the blue giant's camp, there's added support for AMD's next revision of their Ryzen processors (Pinnacle Ridge, on a 12 nm process). There's also mention of upcoming support for AMD's 400-series chipsets, which should improve platform features of the AM4 socket. This addition comes after we've seen its first appearance in the PCI-SIG Integrators List.