On Monday 27 March U.S. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act in order to form a budget of $50 million, to be spent on domestic and Canadian production of printed circuit boards (aka PCBs). This move was deemed as important to matters of national defense, and technology has been cited as key part of North American security efforts. In a memo issued that day, Biden stated that without presidential action under the act: "United States industry cannot reasonably be expected to provide the capability for the needed industrial resource, material, or critical technology item in a timely manner."

PCBs form the basis of vital components that are integrated into military-purpose missiles and radars, in addition to electronics utilized for energy distribution and the nation's healthcare. The President continues to outline the importance of the Defense Production Act: "I find that action to expand the domestic production capability for printed circuit boards and advanced packaging is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability."

A combination of the Diablo IV Closed Beta and NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is proving lethal for the latter - community feedback has alerted Blizzard to take action, and they will be investigating the issue in the coming days, with assistance from NVIDIA. It is speculated that the game is exposing underlying hardware faults within an affected card, but it is odd that a specific model is generating the largest number of issues. Unlucky 3080 Ti owners participating in the closed beta are said to be experiencing unpleasant or inconsistent in-game performance at best, and BSODs followed by non-functional GPUs at worst.

A Blizzard forumite, ForANge, chimed in with their experience: "My graphics card also burned out. While playing, the fans of my Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti suddenly started running at maximum speed. At the same time, the signal from the monitor disappeared. After turning off the power and trying to turn it back on, I couldn't get it to work anymore. The card is just under a year old. It happened during a cutscene with flowers when they showed a snowy landscape."

Bigscreen today unveiled Bigscreen Beyond, the world's smallest VR headset. Weighing just 127 grams and measuring less than 1-inch at its thinnest point, Beyond has an unprecedented form factor that is 6X lighter than competing VR devices. Beyond features ultra-high resolution OLED displays, custom pancake optics, and
tethers to a PC for ultimate VR immersion. Each device is custom-built to the shape of a customer's face, providing unparalleled comfort for long duration VR
experiences.

"As passionate VR enthusiasts, we built the VR headset we wanted for ourselves," said Darshan Shankar, Bigscreen's Founder & CEO. "Today's leading VR headsets have doubled in weight compared to headsets from 2016. We built Beyond because we felt VR was too heavy, bulky, and uncomfortable. We invented new technologies to increase comfort, and developed ultra-high-end components like OLED microdisplays and pancake optics to increase immersion. To deliver the best software experience for watching movies in Bigscreen, we also had to build the best hardware with Bigscreen Beyond."

AMD's high-end X670E motherboard chipset combines two Promontory 21 chips working together to deliver a single solution. With regularly-sized ATX motherboards, having two chips to form a chipset is fine, as there is much room on the PCB. However, with Mini-ITX motherboards, packing two Promontory 21 chips is difficult as the PCB area is limited. To combat this, ASUS introduced an interesting solution to solve the problem and allowed the company to ship the high-end X670E chipset inside a Mini-ITX form factor. Thanks to UNIKO's Hardware's findings, we look at the exciting solution ASUS used to solve this problem.

Instead of two Promontory 21 chips side by side, one is placed on the motherboard directly, while the other stands vertically attached by M.2 PCIe slot. Below, the chipset's pictures and the highlight show how it looks disassembled.

Fortinet, the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, today announced FortiSP5, the latest breakthrough in ASIC technology from Fortinet, propelling major leaps forward in securing distributed network edges. Building on over 20 years of ASIC investment and innovation from Fortinet, FortiSP5 delivers significant secure computing power advantages over traditional CPU and network ASICs, lower cost and power consumption, the ability to enable new secure infrastructure across branch, campus, 5G, edge compute, operational technologies, and more.

"With the introduction of FortiSP5, Fortinet once again sets new industry records for performance, cost, and energy efficiency. As the only cybersecurity vendor leveraging purpose-built ASICs, an over 20-year investment in innovation, Fortinet delivers the secure computing power that will support the next generation of secure infrastructure." Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer at Fortinet

Intel's Xeon processors feature a wide range of embedded functionalities that the company has developed over the years. One such is the Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) that enabled the functionality of an NVMe RAID card on the CPU, simplifying the installation, cost, and maintenance of high-performance storage arrays. Debuting in 2017, it is present in some consumer-facing Core models and Xeon Scalable platforms where it sees the highest usage. However, on January 6, Intel posted a product change notice that notified the users that the VROC function would be discontinued, with the last orders being placed on January 23 and the last shipping with VROC being made on March 31. This caused confusion, especially in the enterprise sector, which utilizes Intel Xeon processors for their workloads and storage arrays.

Tom's Hardware has reached out to Intel for clarification and got the following statement:

Intel SpokespersonThe PCN [Product Change Notice] was prematurely posted while the decision was under evaluation. After discussing with the ecosystem and customers we realize there is significant demand for this product and intend to continue to support it.

Currently, the US has an exclusion in place when it comes to import tariffs relating to graphics cards and GPUs imported from China, but the exclusion is set to expire on the 31st of December this year. So far, the US government has been quiet on whether or not the import tariff will be reinstated or not. If the tariff was to be reinstated, US consumers are looking at a 25 percent import duty on graphics cards, starting on the 1st of January, 2023.

There's no easy way to circumvent the tariff either, as it includes items like "printed circuit assemblies, constituting unfinished logic boards," according to Tom's Hardware. Not all graphics cards are made in China though, but the majority of graphics cards are today. It's possible that NVIDIA's move of its logistics center from Hong Kong to Taiwan could have some relation to this as well, as NVIDIA would then be shipping products out of Taiwan, rather than China, depending on how the US Customs classifies Hong Kong these days. We should know what happens in a month's time, but a 25 percent import duty on graphics cards will likely kill most sales, as most people already find them overpriced. This would of course affect AMD and NVIDIA, as well as their partners in the same way, unless they make their graphics cards outside of China.

Yesterday, AMD announced its latest addition to the data center family of processors called EPYC Genoa. Named the 4th generation EPYC processors, they feature a Zen 4 design and bring additional I/O connectivity like PCIe 5.0, DDR5, and CXL support. To disrupt the cloud, enterprise, and HPC offerings, AMD decided to manufacture SKUs with up to 96 cores and 192 threads, an increase from the previous generation's 64C/128T designs. Today, we are learning more about the performance and power aspects of the 4th generation AMD EPYC Genoa 9654, 9554, and 9374F SKUs from 3rd party sources, and not the official AMD presentation. Tom's Hardware published a heap of benchmarks consisting of rendering, compilation, encoding, parallel computing, molecular dynamics, and much more.

In the comparison tests, we have AMD EPYC Milan 7763, 75F3, and Intel Xeon Platinum 8380, a current top-end Intel offering until Sapphire Rapids arrives. Comparing 3rd-gen EPYC 64C/128T SKUs with 4th-gen 64C/128T EPYC SKUs, the new generation brings about a 30% increase in compression and parallel compute benchmarks performance. When scaling to the 96C/192T SKU, the gap is widened, and AMD has a clear performance leader in the server marketplace. For more details about the benchmark results, go here to explore. As far as comparison to Intel offerings, AMD leads the pack as it has a more performant single and multi-threaded design. Of course, beating the Sapphire Rapids to market is a significant win for team red, so we are still waiting to see how the 4th generation Xeon stacks up against Genoa.

HaptX Inc., the leading provider of realistic haptic technology, today announced the availability of pre-orders of the company's new HaptX Gloves G1, a ground-breaking haptic device optimized for the enterprise metaverse. HaptX has engineered HaptX Gloves G1 with the features most requested by HaptX customers, including improved ergonomics, multiple glove sizes, wireless mobility, new and improved haptic functionality, and multiplayer collaboration, all priced as low as $4,500 per pair - a fraction of the cost of the award-winning HaptX Gloves DK2.

"With HaptX Gloves G1, we're making it possible for all organizations to leverage our lifelike haptics," said Jake Rubin, Founder and CEO of HaptX. "Touch is the cornerstone of the next generation of human-machine interface technologies, and the opportunities are endless." HaptX Gloves G1 leverages advances in materials science and the latest manufacturing techniques to deliver the first haptic gloves that fit like a conventional glove. The Gloves' digits, palm, and wrist are soft and flexible for uninhibited dexterity and comfort. Available in four sizes (Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large), these Gloves offer the best fit and performance for all adult hands. Inside the Gloves are hundreds of microfluidic actuators that physically displace your skin, so when you touch and interact with virtual objects, the objects feel real.

Meta today announced its next-generation AI platform, Grand Teton, including NVIDIA's collaboration on design. Compared to the company's previous generation Zion EX platform, the Grand Teton system packs in more memory, network bandwidth and compute capacity, said Alexis Bjorlin, vice president of Meta Infrastructure Hardware, at the 2022 OCP Global Summit, an Open Compute Project conference.

AI models are used extensively across Facebook for services such as news feed, content recommendations and hate-speech identification, among many other applications. "We're excited to showcase this newest family member here at the summit," Bjorlin said in prepared remarks for the conference, adding her thanks to NVIDIA for its deep collaboration on Grand Teton's design and continued support of OCP.

Today, we shared our vision for the next era of the Windows PC, where the PC and the cloud intersect and tap into innovative AI technology that unlocks new experiences. So that each of us can participate, be seen, heard and express our creativity.

For nearly 40 years, the Windows PC has held a place at the center of our lives. It's contributed to new levels of productivity, kept us all connected, and unlocked our creativity and potential through innovations we couldn't have imagined when we first began this journey. Just think about how far we've come in how people interact with it. From the very first text-based keyboard input to the precision of point and click with the mouse, up to today, where touch, voice, pen and gestures all help people use the Windows PC more naturally and intuitively. From its inception, Surface has been a catalyst for that change.

Intel Alder Lake source code for BIOS/UEFI building and optimization has been leaked in a massive 6 GB leak that appeared on 4chan and GitHub. While this number may seem small, it is a colossal codebase, given that the regular code files take up small space. We assume that the documentation is bundled there as well, however, we can not check ourselves as the repository has been taken down. Tom's Hardware has contacted an Intel representative to talk about the code leak and the rep issued a statement for the website.

Intel SpokespersonOur proprietary UEFI code appears to have been leaked by a third party. We do not believe this exposes any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure. This code is covered under our bug bounty program within the Project Circuit Breaker campaign, and we encourage any researchers who may identify potential vulnerabilities to bring them our attention through this program. We are reaching out to both customers and the security research community to keep them informed of this situation.

Yesterday Intel announced its 13th generation Raptor Lake processor lineup. The top-of-the-line model, Core i9-13900KS, features eight P-cores and 16 E-cores for a total of 24 cores in the SoC. However, that may not represent the maximum for Raptor Lake, as there appears to be another segment equipped with a Raptor Lake processor with 34 cores. According to findings of Tom's Hardware, the Intel Innovation event in San Jose had a surprise for everyone, as there was a booth to display Raptor Lake silicon wafers. After closer examination, the wafer had cutouts for dies that contained as many as 34 cores.

With all cores being the same size, it is assumed that those are P-cores interconnected on a mesh, unlike the traditional ring bus that the rest of Raptor Lake processors use. On the back of the wafer was a label stating, "Raptor Lake-S, 34 core". This suggests that the CPU is perhaps a part of the HEDT offerings that Intel will soon update with the 13th generation designs and that the company showcased a production wafer for those SKUs. We expect to hear more about this unknown 34-core configuration sometime in the future as the new Intel Core generation begins its rollout.

Apricorn, the leading manufacturer of software-free, 256-bit AES XTS hardware-encrypted USB drives, today announced the release of the USB 3.2 Gen 1 Aegis Secure Key 3 2 TB encrypted flash key. Designed for organizations that need large amounts of encrypted storage with a minimal footprint, the new 2 TB Aegis Secure Key 3 is the industry's first hardware-encrypted flash key of this size, marking a time-honored tradition of innovation from Apricorn. Currently, the Aegis Secure Key 3 has eight capacity options ranging from 16 GB to 2 TB, pricing from $129.00 - $999.00 U.S.

The Aegis Secure Key 3, originally introduced in 2015, was the first Apricorn device to feature AegisWare, Apricorn's patent-protected firmware that first introduced Forced Enrollment, Programmable PIN lengths, Unattended Auto Lock and Lock Override. At 256 GB, this original version was already double the storage capacity of any encrypted flash key on the market. Fifteen months later, that maximum size doubled to 480 GB, and again doubled to 1 TB in November of 2018. Seven years after its initial launch, the Aegis Secure Key 3 has been adopted in myriad government, military, and corporate environments and remains Apricorn's fastest, most rugged flash key in the line.

ROCCAT, Turtle Beach Corporation's (Nasdaq: HEAR) award-winning PC gaming peripherals brand, today revealed the all-new Kone XP Air Wireless RGB Customizable Gaming Mouse with Rapid Charge Dock. The Kone XP Air is the Stellar Wireless version of the recently released Kone XP - the culmination of 15 years of research and development to produce an industry-leading multi-purpose gaming mouse. With strong reviews and multiple Editor's Choice awards from key gaming and tech publications, including a 4.5/5 from Tom's Hardware and being named Best Premium Gaming Mouse with a 4.5/5 by PCMag.com, the wired Kone XP features meticulously perfected ergonomics, multiple buttons, and 29 assignable functions to make it one of the most customizable wireless PC gaming mice on the market. Adding a stylish AIMO-enabled RGB Rapid Charge Dock, ROCCAT's Stellar Wireless technology, and Bluetooth connectivity make the wireless Kone XP Air even more versatile. The Kone XP Air comes in Black or Arctic White, and gamers can pre-order today for a $169.99 MSRP at www.roccat.com and participating retailers worldwide. The Kone XP Air launches August 22, 2022.

"The Kone XP Air strikes the perfect mix of style, performance, and utility," said René Korte, ROCCAT Founder and General Manager for PC Peripherals at Turtle Beach. "The reception to the wired Kone XP has been amazing, with fans immediately asking for a wireless version, so we're excited to let everyone know the Kone XP Air is on its way and will be available less than a month from now."

When NVIDIA announced its Grace CPU Superchip, the company officially showed its efforts of creating an HPC-oriented processor to compete with Intel and AMD. The Grace CPU Superchip combines two Grace CPU modules that use the NVLink-C2C technology to deliver 144 Arm v9 cores and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. Each core is Arm Neoverse N2 Perseus design, configured to achieve the highest throughput and bandwidth. As far as performance is concerned, the only detail NVIDIA provides on its website is the estimated SPECrate 2017_int_base score of over 740. Thanks to the colleges over at Tom's Hardware, we have another performance figure to look at.

NVIDIA has made a slide about comparison with Intel's Ice Lake server processors. One Grace CPU Superchip was compared to two Xeon Platinum 8360Y Ice Lake CPUs configured in a dual-socket server node. The Grace CPU Superchip outperformed the Ice Lake configuration by two times and provided 2.3 times the efficiency in WRF simulation. This HPC application is CPU-bound, allowing the new Grace CPU to show off. This is all thanks to the Arm v9 Neoverse N2 cores pairing efficiently with outstanding performance. NVIDIA made a graph showcasing all HPC applications running on Arm today, with many more to come, which you can see below. Remember that NVIDIA provides this information, so we have to wait for the 2023 launch to see it in action.

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

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

Intel today launched its 12th Gen Core Processors with vPro. Released across the company's mobile and desktop product lines, these processors are targeted at pre-built commercial desktops and commercial notebooks that companies typically issue their employees, which come with a host of security and remote-management features suitable to a large corporate environment. With this generation, Intel is bringing vPro to even more market segments, including ultraportables designed under the Intel Evo banner; a new breed of enterprise-grade Chromebooks for businesses built entirely on the Chrome OS platform and cloud-based apps; and for the first time, an SMB version of vPro called vPro Essentials, which will make it to entry-level Core i5 processors with vPro.

Security, Productivity, and Future-readiness form the three areas in which Intel innovated for 12th Gen Core processors with vPro. The company added new capabilities for Threat Detection Technology, which can detect ransomware and supply-chain attacks, and can work with various endpoint security software. Intel Hardware Shield technology prevents attacks from "below" the software (below ring-0, or at the firmware, microcode, or hardware levels). This is achieved through hardware-accelerated virtualization and encryption of the entire software environment. Hardware-based protections extend to vPro Enterprise for Chrome.

Last week, NVIDIA systems were compromised by the attack of a hacking group called LAPSUS$. It has been a few days since the attack happened, and we managed to see source code of various software leaks through third-party anonymous tipsters and next-generation GPU codenames making an appearance. Today, NVIDIA issues a statement for the German PC enthusiast website Hardwareluxx, and we manage to see it below fully. The key takeaway from this quote is that NVIDIA believes that the compromised files will not impact the company's business in any meaningful manner, and operations continue as usual for NVIDIA's customers. The company's security team is analyzing the situation, and you can check out the complete statement below.

NVIDIA StatementOn February 23, 2022, NVIDIA became aware of a cybersecurity incident which impacted IT resources. Shortly after discovering the incident, we further hardened our network, engaged cybersecurity incident response experts, and notified law enforcement.

We have no evidence of ransomware being deployed on the NVIDIA environment or that this is related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. However, we are aware that the threat actor took employee credentials and some NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and has begun leaking it online. Our team is working to analyze that information. We do not anticipate any disruption to our business or our ability to serve our customers as a result of the incident.

Security is a continuous process that we take very seriously at NVIDIA - and we invest in the protection and quality of our code and products daily.

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has launched 3 new research and innovation projects. The projects aim to bring the EU and its partners in the EuroHPC JU closer to developing independent microprocessor and HPC technology and advance a sovereign European HPC ecosystem. The European Processor Initiative (EPI SGA2), The European PILOT and the European Pilot for Exascale (EUPEX) are interlinked projects and an important milestone towards a more autonomous European supply chain for digital technologies and specifically HPC.

With joint investments of €140 million from the European Union (EU) and the EuroHPC JU Participating States, the three projects will carry out research and innovation activities to contribute to the overarching goal of securing European autonomy and sovereignty in HPC components and technologies, especially in anticipation of the European exascale supercomputers.

Jon Peddie Research reports the growth of the global PC-based Graphics Processor Units (GPU) market reached 101 million units in Q3'21 and PC CPUs shipments increased by 9% year over year. Overall, GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of -1.1% during 2020-2025 and reach an installed base of 3,249 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPU) in the PC will grow to reach a level of 31%.

AMD's overall market share percentage from last quarter increased 1.4%, Intel's market share decreased by -6.2%, and Nvidia's market share increased 4.86%, as indicated in the following chart.

Intel's Arc Alchemist lineup of graphics cards, based on Xe-HPG GPU configuration, is nearing the launch. With the current situation with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs outputting graphics card prices over the default MSRP, we wonder how Intel would place pricing of its upcoming GPUs and fit inside the market. And today, we got the first round of speculations based on Intel's Arc Alchemist GPU giveaway called Xe-HPG Scavenger Hunt. There are two principal bundles: one worth $900 that includes Intel Arc merchandise, Xbox Game Pass PC for six months, Intel Premium Arc Alchemist graphics card, and one worth $700 that consists of three months of Xbox Game Pass PC, Intel Arc merchandise, and Intel Performance Arc Alchemist graphics card.

According to some preliminary calculations from Tom's Hardware, we assume that with the $900 bundle containing one Premium Arc Alchemist GPU and other prizes, the card will cost as much as $825 when all things get removed. Going down the ladder, Intel has paired a bundle worth $700 with a Performance Arc GPU, which is roughly worth $650 on its own. It indicates that the two Intel Performance and Premium Arch Alchemist graphics cards are respectfully worth $650 and $825. What will the final pricing look like? We don't know. However, we assume that it could be very similar to this. For more information we have to wait for the official launch.

Apple today announced M1 Pro and M1 Max, the next breakthrough chips for the Mac. Scaling up M1's transformational architecture, M1 Pro offers amazing performance with industry-leading power efficiency, while M1 Max takes these capabilities to new heights. The CPU in M1 Pro and M1 Max delivers up to 70 percent faster CPU performance than M1, so tasks like compiling projects in Xcode are faster than ever. The GPU in M1 Pro is up to 2x faster than M1, while M1 Max is up to an astonishing 4x faster than M1, allowing pro users to fly through the most demanding graphics workflows.

M1 Pro and M1 Max introduce a system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture to pro systems for the first time. The chips feature fast unified memory, industry-leading performance per watt, and incredible power efficiency, along with increased memory bandwidth and capacity. M1 Pro offers up to 200 GB/s of memory bandwidth with support for up to 32 GB of unified memory. M1 Max delivers up to 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth—2x that of M1 Pro and nearly 6x that of M1—and support for up to 64 GB of unified memory. And while the latest PC laptops top out at 16 GB of graphics memory, having this huge amount of memory enables graphics-intensive workflows previously unimaginable on a notebook. The efficient architecture of M1 Pro and M1 Max means they deliver the same level of performance whether MacBook Pro is plugged in or using the battery. M1 Pro and M1 Max also feature enhanced media engines with dedicated ProRes accelerators specifically for pro video processing. M1 Pro and M1 Max are by far the most powerful chips Apple has ever built.

The x86 instruction set architecture has experienced many issues, and today's announcement is no exception. Yesterday morning, the Linux kernel received an urgent set of patches that are supposed to fix "yet another hardware trainwreck," as Thomas Gleixner, the kernel developer, describes. This time, the problem occurs with the high precision event timer (HPET) that stops once x86 processors reach PC10 idle state. In that event, the timer stops even when the OS/kernel uses it and could potentially cause a vulnerability inside a processor that an attacker can exploit. The problem has been known for quite a while since, in 2019, the Linux kernel started removing HPET functionality from some Intel processors.

The priority of this patch for Linux Kernel version 5.15-rc5 is high and marked as an urgent update. A reliable hardware timer and an interrupt are a must for the proper function of a processor. The hardware fix for this will not happen soon, so the Linux kernel has to adapt to it and create a solution at the software level. According to Mr. Gleixner, "The probability that this problem is going to be solved in the forseeable future is close to zero, so the kernel has to be cluttered with heuristics to keep up with the ever growing amount of hardware and firmware trainwrecks. Hopefully some day hardware people will understand that the approach of "This can be fixed in software" is not sustainable. Hope dies last..."

Jon Peddie Research reports the growth of the global PC-based Graphics Processor Units (GPU) market reached 123 million units in Q2'21 and PC CPU shipments increased by 42% year-over-year. Overall, the installed base of GPUs will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3.5% during 2020-2025 to reach a total of 3,318 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPU) in the PC will grow to reach a level of 25%.

AMD's overall market share percentage from last quarter decreased by -0.2%, Intel's market share increased 0.1%, and Nvidia's market share increased 0.06%, as indicated in the following chart. Overall GPU unit shipments increased by 3.4% from last quarter, AMD shipments increased 2.3%, Intel's shipments rose 3.6%, and Nvidia's shipments increased 3.8%.