SambaNova Systems, provider of the fastest and most efficient chips and AI models, announced SambaNova Cloud, the world's fastest AI inference service enabled by the speed of its SN40L AI chip. Developers can log on for free via an API today — no waiting list — and create their own generative AI applications using both the largest and most capable model, Llama 3.1 405B, and the lightning-fast Llama 3.1 70B. SambaNova Cloud runs Llama 3.1 70B at 461 tokens per second (t/s) and 405B at 132 t/s at full precision.

"SambaNova Cloud is the fastest API service for developers. We deliver world record speed and in full 16-bit precision - all enabled by the world's fastest AI chip," said Rodrigo Liang, CEO of SambaNova Systems. "SambaNova Cloud is bringing the most accurate open source models to the vast developer community at speeds they have never experienced before."

2K and Firaxis Games today announced Sid Meier's Civilization VII will launch on February 11, 2025. Representing a revolutionary new chapter in the storied and esteemed strategy game franchise, which has sold-in more than 70 million copies worldwide, it will be available on PlayStation 5 (PS5), PlayStation 4 (PS4), Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, and Mac and Linux via Steam. Sid Meier's Civilization VII will feature support for cross-play and cross-progression, and is now available for pre-order.

Full details about Sid Meier's Civilization VII were shared during Gamescom Opening Night Live and an ensuing gameplay showcase that highlighted the title's innovative new features. The announcement also revealed Gwendoline Christie ("Game of Thrones," "Star Wars" franchise) as the new narrator of the game via an enthralling live-action trailer.

Intel announced that it has postponed the 2024 edition of its Innovation event to 2025. Among other things, the first-party event showcases innovations from the company's various business units made in the preceding year, includes a few key product launches, and teasers for what's next. The Innovation 2024 was poised to be particularly important for the company, as it was expected to launch its next generation Core Ultra "Arrow Lake" processors not just for mobiles, but even the desktop platform. Other key product showcase items include Xeon 6 server processors, and Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, besides updates from the company's foundry business, particularly the Intel 20A and Intel 18A nodes.

Intel's postponement of Innovation 2024 can be seen as a move to demonstrate sincerity that the company working to meet its goal of cutting cost of revenue by $10 billion through FY 2024, something that will bear results by mid-2025. It would have probably felt inappropriate for the company to host a lavish product showcase event in light of this. That said, there's no word on how this affects launch of products such as Core Ultra "Arrow Lake," it's possible that the company may launch them in a low-key dedicated media presentation.

NVIDIA may face delays in releasing its newest artificial intelligence chips due to design issues, according to anonymous sources involved in chip and server hardware production cited by The Information. The delay could extend to three months or more, potentially affecting major customers such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft. An unnamed Microsoft employee and another source claim that NVIDIA has already informed Microsoft about delays affecting the most advanced models in the Blackwell AI chip series. As a result, significant shipments are not expected until the first quarter of 2025.

When approached for comment, an NVIDIA spokesperson did not address communications with customers regarding the delay but stated that "production is on track to ramp" later this year. The Information reports that Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Meta declined to comment on the matter, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) did not respond to inquiries.

Western Digital has released a new budget friendly SSD that got a serious jump in model number, since the company decided to call it the SN5000. Its predecessor is the SN580 launched just under a year ago and price wise, it's the better option of the two. The new SN5000 uses the same BiCS 5 TLC NAND as the SN580 on the 500 GB to the 2 TB SKU, but according to Anandtech, the 4 TB uses BiCS 6 QLC NAND. The SN5000 is still a PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe drive, but the overall performance has been significantly improved. If we use the 1 TB SKU for comparison, then the sequential read speeds have gone up by 1 GB/s from 4150 MB/s to 5150 MB/s. The sequential write speed is up 750 MB/s from 4150 MB/s to 4900 MB/s.

As for random performance, the read IOPS are up from 600K IOPS to 730K IOPS and the write IOPS are up slightly from 750K to 770K. The 4 TB QLC SKU is said to deliver even better performance with the exception of the random read IOPS. The 1 TB SKU is said to have a write endurance of 600 TBW, but the 4 TB SKU only offers 1200 TBW. That's 0.33 drive writes per day (DWPD) for the 1 TB SKU vs. 0.16 DWPD for the 4 TB SKU, showing the weakness of the QLC NAND. A new feature for the SN5000 series compared to previous WD Blue NVMe drives is support for TGC Pyrite 2.01 encryption. The WD SN5000-series starts at US$70 for the 500 GB model, going up to US$80 for 1 TB, US$140 for 2 TB and topping out at US$280 for the 4 TB model. WD only seems to have the 500 GB model in stock, with all the others being available in 3-4 weeks time. All SKUs come with a five year warranty.

OpenAI's co-founder and ex-chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, has announced the formation of a new company promising a safe path to artificial superintelligence (ASI). Called Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the company has a simple mission: achieving ASI with safety at the front. "We approach safety and capabilities in tandem, as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs. We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead," notes the SSI website, adding that "Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures."

Interestingly, safety is a concern only a few frontier AI labs have. In recent history, OpenAI's safety team got the spotlight for being neglected, and the company's safety lead, Jan Leike, publically criticized safety practices before moving to Anthropic. Anthropic is focused on providing safe AI models, with its Claude Opus being one of the leading AI models to date. What is to come out of SSI? We still don't know. However, given the team of Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy, we assume they attracted the best-in-class talent for developing next-generation AI models, focusing on safety. With offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, SSI can tap a vast network of AI researchers and policymakers to establish safe ASI, free from short-term commercial pressure and focused on research and development. "Our team, investors, and business model are all aligned to achieve SSI," says the SSI website.

Expanding on the success of the O11D EVO, Lian Li has collaborated with Automobili Lamborghini to release a mid-tower case perfect for any petrolhead, the O11 EVO RGB Automobili Lamborghini.

Overview
Italian luxury meets Taiwanese innovation; the O11 EVO RGB Automobili Lamborghini is the next release from Lian Li in the O11 series. A mid-tower case crafted to be both aesthetically stunning and yet functional, the O11 EVO RGB Automobili Lamborghini case continues with the seamless look and dual chamber design of the O11 EVO RGB with additions to really drive home the Lamborghini collaboration.

HYTE, a leading manufacturer of cutting-edge PC components and peripherals, today announced the next generation of its viral Y70 Touch case, Y70 Touch Infinite, alongside the Y70 Touch Infinite Display Upgrade, as promised to its users. After the unfortunate discontinuation of Y70 Touch in February 2024, HYTE was diligent in its development and pursuit of an infinite touchscreen solution for one of its leading cases.

Y70 Touch Infinite
Introducing Y70 Touch Infinite with a larger 14.5" integrated touchscreen, 688 x 2560 resolution, and 183 PPI for improved compatibility and resource usage. Y70 Touch Infinite boasts a 33% closer dot pitch for a sharper-looking image alongside a 17% brighter LCD panel and a 25% higher contrast ratio. The 60Hz refresh rate with 50% faster pixel response time enables a smoother and more fluid visual experience than its predecessor.

During the Vision 2024 event, Intel announced its latest Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, promising significant improvements over its predecessor. Intel claims the Gaudi 3 offers up to 70% improvement in training performance, 50% better inference, and 40% better efficiency than Nvidia's H100 processors. The new AI accelerator is presented as a PCIe Gen 5 dual-slot add-in card with a 600 W TDP or an OAM module with 900 W. The PCIe card has the same peak 1,835 TeraFLOPS of FP8 performance as the OAM module despite a 300 W lower TDP. The PCIe version works as a group of four per system, while the OAM HL-325L modules can be run in an eight-accelerator configuration per server. This likely will result in a lower sustained performance, given the lower TDP, but it confirms that the same silicon is used, just finetuned with a lower frequency. Built on TSMC's N5 5 nm node, the AI accelerator features 64 Tensor Cores, delivering double the FP8 and quadruple FP16 performance over the previous generation Gaudi 2.

The Gaudi 3 AI chip comes with 128 GB of HBM2E with 3.7 TB/s of bandwidth and 24 200 Gbps Ethernet NICs, with dual 400 Gbps NICs used for scale-out. All of that is laid out on 10 tiles that make up the Gaudi 3 accelerator, which you can see pictured below. There is 96 MB of SRAM split between two compute tiles, which acts as a low-level cache that bridges data communication between Tensor Cores and HBM memory. Intel also announced support for the new performance-boosting standardized MXFP4 data format and is developing an AI NIC ASIC for Ultra Ethernet Consortium-compliant networking. The Gaudi 3 supports clusters of up to 8192 cards, coming from 1024 nodes comprised of systems with eight accelerators. It is on track for volume production in Q3, offering a cost-effective alternative to NVIDIA accelerators with the additional promise of a more open ecosystem. More information and a deeper dive can be found in the Gaudi 3 Whitepaper.

Over 500 games and applications feature RTX technologies, and barely a week goes by without new blockbuster games and incredible indie releases integrating NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, and advanced ray-traced effects to deliver the definitive PC experience for GeForce RTX gamers.

This week, we're highlighting the release of DLSS 3-accelerated release of Outpost: Infinity Siege, and the launch of Alone In The Dark and Lightyear Frontier, which both feature DLSS 2. This batch of great new RTX releases follows the release of Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, which boasted day-one support for NVIDIA DLSS 3, NVIDIA DLAA, and NVIDIA Reflex. Additionally, Diablo IV's ray tracing update is out now—learn more about each new announcement below.

Ahead of the 2024 Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC), MediaTek (last week) announced it is launching a next-generation custom ASIC design platform that includes the heterogeneous integration of both high-speed electrical and optical I/Os in the same ASIC implementation. MediaTek will be demonstrating a serviceable socketed implementation that combines 8x800G electrical links and 8x800G optical links for a more flexible deployment. It integrates both MediaTek's in-house SerDes for electrical I/O as well as co-packaged Odin optical engines from Ranovus for optical I/O. Leveraging the heterogeneous solution that includes both 112G LR SerDes and optical modules, this CPO demonstration delivers reduced board space and device costs, boosts bandwidth density, and lowers system power by up to 50% compared to existing solutions.

Additionally, Ranovus' Odin optical engine has the option to provide either internal or external laser optical modules to better align with practical usage scenarios. MediaTek's ASIC experience and capabilities in the 3 nm advanced process, 2.5D and 3D advanced packaging, thermal management, and reliability, combined with optical experience, makes it possible for customers to access the latest technology for high-performance computing (HPC), AI/ML and data center networking.

NVIDIA today announced its next-generation AI supercomputer—the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD powered by NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips—for processing trillion-parameter models with constant uptime for superscale generative AI training and inference workloads.

Featuring a new, highly efficient, liquid-cooled rack-scale architecture, the new DGX SuperPOD is built with NVIDIA DGX GB200 systems and provides 11.5 exaflops of AI supercomputing at FP4 precision and 240 terabytes of fast memory—scaling to more with additional racks.

During the 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged that the company's next-generation DGX systems, designed for AI and high-performance computing workloads, will require liquid cooling due to their immense power consumption. Huang also hinted that these new systems are set to be released in the near future. The revelation comes as no surprise, given the increasing power of GPUs needed to satisfy AI and machine learning applications. As computational requirements continue to grow, so does the need for more powerful hardware. However, with great power comes great heat generation, necessitating advanced cooling solutions to maintain optimal performance and system stability. Liquid cooling has long been a staple in high-end computing systems, offering superior thermal management compared to traditional air cooling methods.

By implementing liquid cooling in the upcoming DGX systems, NVIDIA aims to push the boundaries of performance while ensuring the hardware remains reliable and efficient. Although Huang did not provide a specific release date for the new DGX systems, his statement suggests that they are on the horizon. Whether the next generation of DGX systems uses the current NVIDIA H200 or the upcoming Blackwell B100 GPU as their primary accelerator, the performance will undoubtedly be delivered. As the AI and high-performance computing landscape continues to evolve, NVIDIA's position continues to strengthen, and liquid-cooled systems will certainly play a crucial role in shaping the future of these industries.

As of two days ago, the NVX System Integrators store (via Carousell Singapore) has allowed customers to pre-order the oft-leaked Intel Core i9-14900KS CPU—a S$1059 (~$794 USD) spend secures a "BX8071514900KS" Special Edition retail package for in-store pick only. Another pre-release discovery arrives courtesy of the ever vigilant tech watcher; momomo_us—SE Computer, a store located in the bustling streets of Kowloon, Hong Kong, has listed the incoming flagship Raptor Lake Refresh part with a price of HK$5500 (~$709.70 USD). An accompanying image appears to be a placeholder, since warehouse leaks have displayed "Special Edition" text on Intel's signature blue retail boxes.

Privileged members of the overclocking community are already playing around with Intel's selectively-binned 14th Gen Core processor—but mere mortals will have to wait patiently for an official retail rollout. VideoCardz has spent part of their weekend doing detective work—several early store listings point to a possible March 14 commencement. The graphics card news specialist has scoured online entities across Asia, France and Canada for price comparison purposes: "it appears that the KS 'Special Edition' variant is set to cost 19 to 30% more than the K variant. Pricing varies depending on the size of the retailer, where the offer was placed, and the region it is being sold." They thoroughly recommend that potential customers avoid pre-ordering the Intel Core i9-14900KS—asking prices could stabilize post-launch, and e-tailers rarely sell through the first batch of niche "KS" CPUs.

According to renowned Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is actively working on a foldable 20.3-inch MacBook, with mass production expected to begin in 2027. In a recent post on X/Twitter, Kuo stated that this foldable MacBook is currently Apple's only foldable product with a clear development schedule. Kuo's revelation comes amidst frequent inquiries about whether Apple plans to mass-produce a foldable iPhone or iPad in 2025 or 2026. His latest survey indicates that while Apple may explore these options, the foldable MacBook is the only device with a definitive timeline. This is not the first time rumors have circulated about a potential foldable MacBook from Apple. In 2022, display industry analyst Ross Young and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman both reported that Apple was interested in launching a foldable device with a screen size of around 20 inches.

Details about the foldable MacBook's design remain scarce, but it is expected to feature a single foldable OLED display that can be used in various configurations, such as a laptop mode with a virtual keyboard on the lower half of the screen or as a large tablet when fully unfolded. While competitors like Samsung, Motorola, and Huawei have already released foldable smartphones, Apple appears to be more cautious, focusing on perfecting the technology before bringing a product to market. As the foldable device market evolves, it will be interesting to see how Apple's unique take on the form factor fares. As Apple's first foldable product, it will be interesting to see what design choices are made and what hardware configuration will be present. But we are still relatively far away from the actual release of 2027.

Hello everyone! The Thaumaturge is out now! Traverse the complex tapestry of 1905 Warsaw where harsh reality intertwines with mysterious powers and dark entities. Use your mystical abilities to tame powerful salutors and investigate the city's deepest secrets. Step onto the culturally flourishing streets of Warsaw with an even more fashionable style in The Thaumaturge Digital Deluxe Edition.

The Thaumaturge bypasses traditional genre elements and features side quests seamlessly integrated with the main story, along with a meaningful, personal, narrative-driven adventure backed by a myriad of smaller stories. Influence and manipulate characters, carving your path in this world. Exercise caution, as each decision holds consequences that either restrain or feed your inner flaws such as pride, vehemence, or scheming. Give impactful responses through the choice-infused dialogue system. Immerse yourself in turn-based encounters elevated by salutors, ethereal entities commanded by the thaumaturge. Employ your perception to predict and overtake enemy moves, and utilize salutors' unique abilities for strategic dominance. Drawing inspiration from Slavic folklore, these entities feature psychic strikes and manipulation, along with a wide array of upgrades that transform Wiktor's skills in combat into an engaging dance of strength and strategy.

Nextorage Corporation's President, Katsuyuki Honda, has announced that the company will start selling its PCIe Gen 5.0-compliant NVMe SSDs "X Series" this month. The PCIe 5.0-compliant X Series is equipped with a high-performance controller and advanced NAND flash for unparalleled high-speed performance, making it ideal for professional use cases that require high-load processing, such as 4K/8K content creators and data scientists, as well as for users pursuing high-end gaming environments. It is ideal for users who pursue high-end gaming environments.

The NN5PRO-2000 is ideal for professional use cases such as 4K/8K content creators and data scientists who require high-load processing, as well as for users pursuing high-end gaming environments. Maximum read speed of 12,400 MB/s, maximum write speed of 11,800 MB/s—this is the measured values of Nextorage's NN5PRO-2 TB model.

Acer today announced new models of the Acer Swift Edge 16 and Acer Swift Go 14 laptops, blending AI power and innovative features in stylish thin and light devices. The latest additions to the Swift lineup feature AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processors with up to AMD Radeon 780M Graphics and equipped with Ryzen AI for versatile performance and support for Acer's AI-powered capabilities such as Acer PurifiedVoice, Acer PurfiedView, and the new Acer LiveArt photo-editing feature. Intuitive control and seamless navigation on the AI PCs are made possible thanks to the AcerSense application and Copilot in Windows with instant access through dedicated keys. Users can also appreciate clear images and rich colors when working or streaming through the OLED laptops' displays, as well as Microsoft Pluton technology, enabled by default, to help secure devices, personal data, and encryption keys.

Harnessing the Power of AI with AMD Ryzen 8040 Series Processors
Designed to deliver premium AI experiences and reliable performance for everyday productivity, the Swift Edge 16 and Swift Go 14 laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processors with Ryzen AI technology built in. AMD's latest processors enable the efficient distribution of AI workloads between accelerators on the NPU, GPU, and CPU, to advance user experiences with AI technology on the devices. It leverages AMD's "Zen 4" processor architecture with up to eight cores and delivers up to 16 threads of processing power, so creative professionals and mainstream users can expect fast, power-efficient computing and longer battery life on the ultrathin Swift laptops.

MAXSUN and DIY-APE revealed a collaborative motherboard model last November, as noticed by members of the TPU community—the H770YTX D5 WIFI Terminator board attracted attention due to its unusually wide (for the ITX class) dimensions. The Terminator's "YTX" form factor—245 × 175 mm—provides some extra room for backside power connectors, additional storage connectors and M.2 storage slots. A past weekend ITHome report has revealed that MAXSUN's fairly compact mid-range part is launching today via a JD.com store listing—release date pricing is 899 RMB (~$126).

The spec sheet matches previously released information—ITHome stated: "(MAXSUN's) Terminator H770 YTX motherboard uses 8+1+1 phase power supply, supports (Intel's) 12th, 13th, and 14th generation Core processors, PL2 can reach 253 W performance release, and also supports dual-channel DDR5 8000 memory. This motherboard has rich interfaces, with three Type-C interfaces at the front and rear. The PCIe 5.0 slot supports 8+8 split, provides four M.2 slots, SFF-8654 interfaces, and supports four SATA hard drives. It is equipped with Realtek Sound card and network card." They note that MAXSUN has another YTX form factor board in its back catalog—the H610 KING was an early 2023 release, in collaboration with partner brand DIY-APE.

Techlusive India has reported an exclusive announcement—courtesy of ASUS India's Arnold Su—the interviewee bears an elaborate and long job title: Vice President of Consumer and Gaming PC System Business Group. The wider discussion explores the region's gaming market conditions, although Su dropped a bombshell when discussing his company's current generation handheld gaming computer. The ASUS ROG Ally rolled out midway through 2023, as one of the first mainstream Windows 11 handheld gaming PCs. Competition in this market segment has ramped up significantly since then—Lenovo's Legion Go arrived last autumn, Valve's Steam Deck OLED refresh followed two months later, and MSI unveiled its Intel Meteor Lake-powered Claw at CES 2024.

Valve is not rushing out a proper next generation Steam Deck anytime soon—an urgent or immediate response to a lot of new competition is not necessary. An MSI representative revealed to gaming news media outlets (at CES 2024) that a Claw 2 model is already in the development pipeline. ASUS appears ready to launch new handheld hardware within a relatively short period—ASUS India's VP stated: "we most likely will launch a second generation (ROG Ally) this year. We will still keep the Windows (11) features, but we will focus more on gaming." He also revealed that original Ally models have sold "around 70,000 - 80,000 units" since the launch date in India—Techlusive labels this as a promising and "kind" response. Su's analysis of recent regional sales figures shows a trend of gaming branded laptops outpacing traditional desktop, in terms of adoption rates.

Experience an epic emotional drama. Two larger-than-life heroes brought together by the hand of fate, or perhaps something more sinister…Ichiban Kasuga, an unstoppable underdog who's no stranger to crawling up from rock bottom, and Kazuma Kiryu, a broken man facing down his last days. Join the fight with best-in-class RPG action. Experience one-of-a-kind combat with dynamic, fast-paced RPG battles where the battlefield becomes your weapon, and anything goes. Adapt your party's skills to the situation with outlandish jobs and customizations to strategically subdue enemies with over-the-top moves.

Prepare for infinite adventure—live it up in Japan and explore all that Hawaii has to offer in an adventure so big it spans the Pacific. Unforgettable moments await at every step of the journey with a unique mix of quests and activities to enjoy at your leisure. Will Kiryu accept his fate? How will Ichiban blaze a path of hope? And… wait, Tomizawa is a lovable what? Learn more about the personalities & motivations of the main characters from Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

Awaken, Flameborn! Enshrouded is finally OUT and available in Early Access! The realm of Embervale has been engulfed by the Shroud a long time ago, and has ever since been waiting for a hero. Or up to 16 heroes. We started this project 4 years ago with the idea of an adventure and survival game set in a world split between light and darkness. A world that players could appropriate and make theirs, to build fortresses and homes, go on adventures, explore, and everything else in-between. We could never have expected the response and the level of enthusiasm we've seen from all of you! From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. Enshrouded is the most ambitious game we've ever made, set in the most expansive world we've ever created. We chose Early Access because we wanted to get the community's input to help us steer our vision of the game, and make Enshrouded the best game it can be.

Since the Steam Next Fest Demo, we've been hard at work adding more and more content, polishing the game, optimizing performance and fixing issues. Ensuring that everyone can play Enshrouded in the best conditions will be our main focus for the upcoming weeks, so if you have any problems or feedback, press F1 in-game and select the appropriate option. In its current state, Enshrouded should already offer you and your friends many, many hours of fun, and we hope that you stick around in the community to help us make reclaiming Embervale an experience you'll think about for years to come.

We're excited to finally share The Elder Scrolls: Castles, our new mobile game from the team behind Fallout Shelter. The team has been hard at work on it for the last few years and we absolutely adore it. In Castles, you'll build your own dynasty where every day in our world is a year in the game's world. Citizens are born, they die, rulers change, and can be betrayed. This soft launch is one of the first steps as we get your feedback and make changes before it launches worldwide.

Let us know what you think and preregister at elderscrolls.bethesda.net/castles to be among the first to play! The Elder Scrolls: Castles is currently available in the Philippines and will be available to more countries in the coming months. For any questions, see our Customer Support page here.

According to the latest round of reports, AMD has decided not to include China in the initial global launch of its upcoming Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card. The RX 7600 XT, featuring 16 GB of memory and based on AMD's next-generation RDNA 3 architecture, was expected to launch soon at a price of around $300. However, the company is currently re-evaluating its Chinese GPU launch strategy due to the runaway success of its existing Radeon RX 6750 Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) series in the region. The RX 6750 GRE cards with 10 GB and 12 GB configurations retail between $269-$289 in China, offering exceptional value compared to rival NVIDIA RTX models. AMD seems hesitant to risk undercutting sales of its popular RX 6750 GPUs by launching the newer 7600 XT.

While the RX 7600 XT promises more raw performance thanks to advanced RDNA 3 architecture, 6750 GRE, with its RDNA 2 design, seemingly remains efficient enough for most Chinese mainstream gamers. With the RX 6750 GRE still selling strongly in China, AMD has postponed the RX 7600 XT introduction for this key market. Final launch timelines for the 7600 XT in China and globally remain unconfirmed by AMD at time of writing. The company appears to be treading cautiously amidst the shifting competitive landscape.

After years of delays, Chinese chipmaker Zhaoxin has finally launched its long-awaited KX-7000 series consumer CPUs, only one of its kind in China, based on the licensed x86-64 ISA. Zhaoxin claims the new 8-core processors based on "Century Avenue" uArch deliver double the performance of previous generations. Leveraging architectural improvements and 4X more cache, the KX-7000 represents essential progress for China's domestic semiconductor industry. While still likely lagging behind rival AMD and Intel chips in raw speed, the KX-7000 matches competitive specs in areas like DDR5 memory, PCIe 4.0, and USB4 support. For Chinese efforts to attain technological independence, closing feature gaps with foreign processors is just as crucial as boosting performance. Manufactured on a 16 nm process, the KX-7000 does not use the best silicon node available.

Other chip details include out-of-order execution (OoOE), 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, a 32 MB pool of L3 cache and 4 MB L2 cache, a base frequency of 3.2 GHz, and a boost clock of 3.7 GHz. Interestingly, the CPU also has VT-x, BT-d 2.5, SSE4.2/AVX/AVX2 support, most likely also licensed from the x86 makers Intel and/or AMD. Ultimately, surpassing Western processors is secondary for China next to attaining self-reliance. Instructions like SM encryption catering to domestic data protection priorities underscore how the KX-7000 advances strategic autonomy goals. With its x86 architecture license giving software compatibility and now a vastly upgraded platform, the KX-7000 will raise China's chip capabilities even if it is still trailing rivals' speeds. Ongoing progress closing that performance gap could position Zhaoxin as a mainstream alternative for local PC builders and buyers.