Last week, it surfaced that Alienware shipped certain m15 gaming laptops with GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPUs with fewer CUDA cores than what is standard—4,608 vs. 5,120, without properly advertising it in their marketing material. Over the weekend, the company's train-wreck of a response played out. First, from Alienware's parent company Dell; and later by Alienware itself.

Dell, in a statement to Jarrod's Tech, tried to normalize the practice. "CUDA core counts per NVIDIA baseline may change for individual OEM, such as ourselves [Dell], to allow to provide a more specific design and performance tuning. Be assured the changes made by our engineering team for this computer model was done after careful testing and design choices to bring the most stable and best performance possible for our customers, if at a later date more CUDA cores can be unlocked via a future update, we will be swift to make it available on our support website," the Dell statement read.

Today at Computex 2021, Intel announced two new additions to the lineup of 11th Gen Intel Core processors. These new processors, combined with Intel's co-engineering work with independent software vendors (ISVs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), continue Intel's leadership in mobile compute—delivering the world's best processors for thin-and-light Windows-based laptops. Intel also introduced its first 5G product for the next generation of PC experiences, Intel 5G Solution 5000, following the previously announced collaboration with MediaTek and Fibocom.

"We've taken the world's best processor for thin-and-light Windows laptops and made the experience even better with the addition of our two new 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics. In addition, we know real-world performance and connectivity are vital to our partners and the people who rely on PCs every day, so we're continuing that momentum with more platform capabilities and choice in the market with the launch of our first 5G product for PCs: the Intel 5G Solution 5000," said Chris Walker, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Mobility Client Platforms.

Total NAND Flash revenue for 1Q21 increased by 5.1% QoQ to US$14.82 billion, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, bit shipments rose by 11% QoQ, while the overall ASP dropped by 5% QoQ; hence, bit shipment growth offset the decline in the overall ASP. Although NAND Flash demand from notebook computer and smartphone manufacturers remained high, clients from the data center segment exhibited relatively weak demand, since this segment had yet to leave the state of NAND Flash oversupply. Contract prices for this quarter therefore still mostly showed a considerable QoQ drop. On the other hand, OEMs/ODMs of end products began to increase procurement of NAND Flash products from the second half of January onward because they noticed that the shortage of NAND Flash controller ICs was affecting the production of medium- and low-density storage products. Besides avoiding a possible supply crunch in the future, OEMs/ODMs were placing additional orders because they were preparing for a push to expand market share. On account of these developments, the overall NAND Flash demand surpassed expectations in 1Q21.

While demand for TVs underwent a slowdown in China and Europe due to the onset of the cyclical downturn, quarterly TV sales in North America reached a historical high in 1Q21 thanks to the proliferation of the stay-at-home economy and government-issued economic stimulus plans, such as the March 2021 handout of US$1,400 stimulus checks to most US citizens, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Bullish TV sales in North America propelled global TV shipment for 1Q21 to 49.96 million units, a 24.2% QoQ decrease but an 11.5% YoY increase.

TrendForce further indicates that Hisense has been particularly aggressive in expanding in the overseas markets via consumer-friendly prices. Not only did Hisense successfully enter the top five list of the largest TV brands in North America in 1Q21, but the company's market share also surpassed 10% and reached 11.1%, with a 4.19 million unit quarterly TV shipment, which represents an 8.8% increase YoY.

The discrete GPU market has been a duopoly for quite some time, and when Intel announced that the company is rebooting plans for its discrete GPU lineup, another player was about to break that duopoly. Today, that has been changed forever and Intel has officially become the third manufacturer of discrete GPUs, as we can see on the online listing. On BestBuy, CyberPowerPC has listed "Gamer Xtreme Gaming Desktop" powered exclusively by Intel components. When it comes to the CPU choice, Intel's 6C/12T Core i5-11400F CPU model is present without iGPU. Now comes the interesting part. The GPU powering the system is Intel Iris Xe discrete graphics card, which is a DG1 GPU based on Xe-LP SKU.

This model features 80 EUs, resulting in 640 shading units. While this is not any gaming beast, casual 1080p gaming should be just fine on this configuration. The system is listed for 750 US Dollars, and it is sold out, as of the time of writing this. While the performance of this configuration may not be something monumental, it is an important step towards Intel's inclusion in the discrete GPU market. By using OEMs, the GPU will reach a very large market without any major problems. We are waiting to see the first reviews of the system, which will surely take a good look at the card and examine its performance.

Dell notebooks and desktops dating all the way back since 2009—hundreds of millions of them the PC giant has shipped since—are vulnerable to unauthorized privilege escalation attacks, due to a faulty OEM driver the company uses to update the computer's BIOS or UEFI firmware, according to findings by cybersecurity researchers at SentinelLabs. "DBUtil," a driver that Dell machines load during automated or unattended BIOS/UEFI update processes initiated by the user from within the OS, is found to have vulnerabilities that malware can exploit to "escalate privileges from a non-administrator user to kernel mode privileges."

SentinelLabs chronicled its findings in CVE-2021-21551, which details five individual flaws. Two of these point out flaws that can escalate user privileges through controlled memory corruption, two with lack of input validation; and one with denial of service. Organizations that have remote updates enabled for their client machines are at risk, since the flaw can be exploited over network. "An attacker with access to an organization's network may also gain access to execute code on unpatched Dell systems and use this vulnerability to gain local elevation of privilege. Attackers can then leverage other techniques to pivot to the broader network, like lateral movement," writes SentielLabs in its paper.

The current supply of graphics cards has been very tight all over the world. Starting with the launch of the latest Radeon RX 6000 series of GPUs based on RDNA 2 architecture, AMD has found itself in big trouble when it comes to supply of the silicon, compared to the demand that exists for these new GPUs. We have discussed that many times in the past and saw that it represents a problem spanning everyone involved in getting the silicon chips to the hands of consumers. On Tuesday, April 27th, AMD held its Q1 2021 earnings call and webcast, where the company executives talked about the company's future, underlying problems, and ways of addressing them.

Among many topics covered in the call, AMD's President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, has talked about the GPU supply. According to Dr. Su, the company is ramping the production of its Radeon graphics cards, adding that the mobile Radeon GPU lineup is lurking. Here is a full quote from the earnings call.

Dr. Lisa Su—AMD Q1 2021 Earning CallAnd we're well-positioned for further growth as we have tripled our commercial notebook design wins with the largest OEMs this year. In graphics, revenue increased by a strong double-digit percentage year over year and sequentially, led by channel sales growth as revenue from our high-end Radeon 6000 GPUs more than doubled from the prior quarter. We introduced our Radeon 6700 XT desktop GPU with leadership 1440p gaming performance in March and are on track for the first notebooks featuring our leading-edge mobile RDNA 2 architecture to launch later this quarter. We expect Radeon 6000 Series GPU sales to grow significantly over the coming quarters as we ramp production.

Thanks to their flexible pricing schemes and diverse service offerings, CSPs have been a direct, major driver of enterprise demand for cloud services, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. As such, the rise of CSPs have in turn brought about a gradual shift in the prevailing business model of server supply chains from sales of traditional branded servers (that is, server OEMs) to ODM Direct sales instead. Incidentally, the global public cloud market operates as an oligopoly dominated by North American companies including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which collectively possess an above-50% share in this market. More specifically, GCP and AWS are the most aggressive in their data center build-outs. Each of these two companies is expected to increase its server procurement by 25-30% YoY this year, followed closely by Azure.

AMD seems to be preparing a chipset refresh, and this time, it is coming straight from the top-end market. When the company launched its high-end X570 chipset, it brought the PCIe 4.0 support, which many praised due to its capability to handle much faster NVMe drives. However, it seems like the company is not satisfied with that and it needs to release an updated chipset version called X570S. According to a popular hardware leaker, TUM_APISAK, we have discovered that GIGABYTE is preparing X570S Aorus Pro AX motherboard that will use the refreshed chipset. GIGABYTE already listed several Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) listings, so the new chipset is sure to hit the market, just at an unknown time.

The S denotes the word silent, meaning that these updated chipsets are capable of working with passive cooling and possibly having a lower TDP compared to 11 and 15 Watts of the X570 chipsets for consumer and enterprise motherboards, respectively. The test was conducted using AMD's newly announced Ryzen 7 5700G processor. The 5000-series of APUs are so far limited to OEMs, so one would guess that GIGABYTE itself made the leak by using a public entry of CPU-Z validation.

TrendForce's investigations find that DRAM suppliers and major PC OEMs are currently participating in the critical period of negotiating with each other over contract prices for 2Q21. Although these negotiations have yet to be finalized, the ASP of mainstream DDR4 1G*8 2666 Mbps modules has already increased by nearly 25% QoQ as of now, according to data on ongoing transactions. This represents a higher price hike than TrendForce's prior forecast of "nearly 20%". On the other hand, prices are likewise rising across various DRAM product categories in 2Q21, including DDR3/4 specialty DRAM, mobile DRAM, graphics DRAM, and in particular server DRAM, which is highly related to PC DRAM and is therefore also undergoing a higher price hike than previously expected. TrendForce is therefore revising up its forecast of overall DRAM price hike for 2Q21 from 13-18% QoQ to 18-23% QoQ instead. However, the actual increase in prices of various DRAM product categories will depend on the production capacities allocated to the respective products by DRAM suppliers.

Enterprise demand for cloud services has been rising steady in the past two years owing to the rapidly changing global markets and uncertainties brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. TrendForce's investigations find that most enterprises have been prioritizing cloud service adoption across applications ranging from AI to other emerging technologies as cloud services have relatively flexible costs. Case in point, demand from clients in the hyperscale data center segment constituted more than 40% of total demand for servers in 4Q20, while this figure may potentially approach 45% for 2021. For 2021, TrendForce expects global server shipment to increase by more than 5% YoY and ODM Direct server shipment to increase by more than 15% YoY.

AMD has today decided to launch the next generation of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), now in form of the 5000G lineup codenamed Cezanne. The APUs are getting launched as OEM-exclusive products for now, which means that only manufacturers like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. can have access to them. AMD is set to announce these processors for wider masses, such as consumer DIYers, later this year. So you must be wondering what is new about the 5000G APUs. For starters, the new APUs feature AMD's improved Zen 3 core with a notable IPC boost over Zen 2 found in last generation 4000G APUs. When it comes to graphics, the new APUs feature anywhere from 6-8 GPU cores, based on the Vega architecture.

When it comes to the available models, AMD lists six SKUs, all differentiating in CPU/GPU core count, TDP, and frequency. There are three regular SKUs, with their power-efficient variants. The regular SKUs are AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 5600G, and Ryzen 3 5300G. They are normal SKUs that have a TDP of 65 Watts, meaning a higher base frequency needing a more adequate cooling solution. However, as there are regular SKUs, there are also power-efficient, TDP-constrained models present. Called the AMD Ryzen 7 5700GE, Ryzen 5 5600GE, and Ryzen 3 5300GE, these models bring the TDP down to 35 Watts and reduce base frequency by a couple of hundreds of MHz.

AMD has quietly launched two new Zen 3 processors for the OEM market with the Ryzen 9 5900 and Ryzen 7 5800. The Ryzen 9 5900 is a 12 core 24 thread processor with a base clock of 3.0 GHz and a max boost clock of 4.7 GHz along with a TDP of 65 W. The clock speeds were lowered due to the 65 W TDP with a base clock is 700 MHz lower than the 5900X while the boost clock is only 100 MHz slower. The Ryzen 7 5800 is an 8 core 16 thread processor with a base clock of 3.4 GHz and a boost clock of 4.6 GHz along with a TDP of 65 W. The base clock is reduced by 400 MHz and the boost clock by 100 MHz compared to the 105 W TDP 5800X. The Ryzen 9 5900 is only ~5% slower than the Ryzen 9 5900X despite a 61.5% lower TDP and reduced clock speeds according to UserBenchmark results. These new processors are now shipping in systems from various integrators such as the Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced the latest addition to its 7-series portfolio, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 780G 5G Mobile Platform. Snapdragon 780G is designed to deliver powerful AI performance and brilliant camera capture backed by the Qualcomm Spectra 570 triple ISP and 6th generation Qualcomm AI Engine, allowing users to capture, enhance, and share their favorite moments seamlessly. This platform enables a selection of premium-tier features for the first time in the 7-series, making next generation experiences more broadly accessible.

"Since introducing the Snapdragon 7-series three years ago, more than 350 devices have launched based on 7-series mobile platforms. Today, we are continuing this momentum by introducing the Snapdragon 780G 5G Mobile Platform," said Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "Snapdragon 780G was designed to bring in-demand, premium experiences to more users around the world."

Demand for notebook computers is expected to remain strong throughout 2Q21 due to the persisting stay-at-home economy that arose in the wake of the pandemic, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In response to the high demand for notebooks, PC OEMs are actively raising a consistent inventory of components, including client SSDs. Nonetheless, client SSDs are now in increasingly tight supply because the preexisting shortage of NAND Flash controllers is now exacerbated by the power outage at Samsung's Austin-based semiconductor plant. SSD manufacturers are therefore preparing to raise the prices of SSDs. Accordingly, TrendForce has also revised up its forecast of client SSD prices for 2Q21 from "mostly flat" to a 3-8% increase QoQ instead.

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

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

AAEON, an industry leader in Edge Computing solutions, announces the SRG-3352C Compact Edge IoT Gateway System. The SRG-3352C brings reliable, cost effective gateway operations with expandability and wireless communication support designed to quickly deploy edge networks in a variety of environments.
The SRG-3352C builds upon the features, durability and reliability of the SRG-3352 Edge IoT Gateway System with expanded support for more connections and wireless communications. All of this is packed into a compact form factor that makes deploying the SRG-3352C even easier, powering more flexible edge network deployments.

The SRG-3352C is powered by the Arm Cortex-A8 800 MHz RISC processor. This innovative processor reduces the energy requirements of the system, allowing for a more efficient system to help save electricity costs. While powerful enough to connect edge networks together, the low energy usage can help cities with achieving green energy goals, and even allow the system to operate on solar power or batteries. It also eliminates the need for dedicated heatsinks, allowing the system to operate in wider temperatures, from 0°C up to 60°C without loss in performance.

Driven by such factors as the continued development of autonomous driving technologies and the build-out of 5G infrastructure, the demand for automotive memories will undergo a rapid growth going forward, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Take Tesla, which is the automotive industry leader in the application of autonomous vehicle technologies, as an example. Tesla has adopted GDDR5 DRAM products from the Model S and X onward because it has also adopted Nvidia's solutions for CPU and GPU. The GDDR5 series had the highest bandwidth at the time to complement these processors. The DRAM content has therefore reached at least 8 GB for vehicles across all model series under Tesla. The Model 3 is further equipped with 14 GB of DRAM, and the next-generation of Tesla vehicles will have 20 GB. If content per box is used as a reference for comparison, then Tesla far surpasses manufacturers of PCs and smartphones in DRAM consumption. TrendForce forecasts that the average DRAM content of cars will continue to grow in the next three years, with a CAGR of more than 30% for the period.

NAND Flash demand continues to rise as strong sales of notebook (laptop) computers spur PC OEMs to place additional orders for client SSDs, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Also, the supply-side inventory for NAND Flash memory has already fallen considerably due to the aggressive stock-up activities of some smartphone brands. With customers in the data center segment expected to ramp up procurement in 2Q21, NAND Flash suppliers have decided to scale back the supply of NAND Flash wafers. Compared with other product categories, wafers have a lower gross margin. As a result of these factors, the decline in contract prices of wafers has been easing over the past two months (i.e., from December of last year to January of this year).

The 11th Gen Intel Core H35 processors, the newest of Intel's H-series processors, are designed for ultraportable gaming on laptops. Packed with incredible gaming performance in an ultraportable form factor, the processors balance mobility and enthusiast-level gaming. The 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11375H Special Edition headlines the new H35 processors, and utilizes Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 to deliver up to 5.00 GHz Turbo frequencies.

The 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11375H Special Edition delivers the fastest single-threaded performance of any laptop processor and is matched only by the 10th Gen Intel Core i9-10980HK. 11th Gen Intel Core H35 processors enable enthusiast level gaming on the go. Users can play a majority of popular e-sports and AAA games in full high definition at high settings with the 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11375H Special Edition processor.

Intel has partnered with ASUS and Colorful to design and launch Intel Iris Xe discrete desktop graphics cards. The two new DG1 boards are targeted towards mainstream users and small to medium-size businesses. The cards will only be available to system integrators who will offer Iris Xe discrete graphics as part of pre-built systems.

These new desktop cards follow the launch of Intel Iris Xe MAX for notebooks, including many of the same features and specifications. The cards feature 80 execution units and 4 GB of LPDDR4X video memory which is 16 execution units less than the notebook version however we are unsure of what clock speed they will be running at. The desktop cards also feature the same three display outputs, hardware video decode and encode acceleration, including AV1 decode support, VESA Adaptive Sync, and Display HDR support along with artificial intelligence capabilities.

Update Jan 28th: Colorful has recently published an official statement clarifying that they will not be releasing an Intel Iris Xe Desktop Graphics Card, this means that Intel's other launch partner is currently unknown.

NVIDIA has quietly introduced a new entry-level desktop discrete GPU positioned a notch below even the GeForce GT 1030. The new GT 1010 is based on the "Pascal" graphics architecture circa 2016, and is cut further down from the 16 nm "GP108" silicon. The GT 1010 appears to be NVIDIA's move at replacing the "Kepler" based GT 710 from its bare entry-level, and helping the company clear out all remaining inventory of the "GP108" silicon from the channel, out to OEMs. The GT 1010 likely features 256 CUDA cores, 16 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 64-bit wide memory bus (40 GB/s bandwidth), with a maximum GPU Boost frequency of 1468 MHz. If the GT 1010 does make it to the retail channel, we expect a sub-$60 price. With these specs, the chip will be easily bested by the latest iGPUs from AMD and Intel.

BIWIN announced its own retail channel brand of memory products in the North American region, named Biwintech. BIWIN is a Shenzhen-based OEM of DRAM and NAND flash client-segment memory products that supplies to giants in the PC industry, such as HP. It is now bringing a sizable portfolio of memory products under its own Biwintech brand to the market, which include DDR4 UDIMM and SO-DIMM PC memory modules, M.2 NVMe SSDs, 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, USB portable SSDs; and memory cards, including SDXC and microSDXC cards, CFast cards, and CFexpress cards. Interestingly, the announcement doesn't mention UFDs (USB flash drives). Biwintech will go to market with 5-year warranties on all its products, including 9 to 5 phone- and 24-hour e-mail tech support.

Lenovo may have inadvertently disclosed the existence of several upcoming GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards. The Product Specifications Reference (PSREF) document for a certain Lenovo pre-built gaming desktop model, the Legion R5 28IMB05, lists out all its possible hardware options, covering CPU, graphics cards, and storage. The CPU options cover 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake-S" models that are already out; but things get interesting with the list of graphics options. In addition to certain RTX 20-series, and GTX 16-series SKUs, the list mentions certain RTX 30-series SKUs that haven't yet been announced by NVIDIA.

Among these unreleased GPUs are the GeForce RTX 3050, which is shown featuring 4 GB of GDDR6 memory; the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti with 6 GB of it; and the GeForce RTX 3060 (non-Ti) with 12 GB of it. The already-launched RTX 3070 also finds mention here. It's likely that these are OEM-exclusive SKUs, but if they're not, then we have our first look at how NVIDIA is handling product segmentation between the RTX 3050 Ti and the RTX 3060 (non-Ti), in a possible bid to avoid a repeat of the GTX 1060 3 GB vs. 6 GB confusion (where besides memory, the two SKUs also had different core-configurations). Based on the GA106 silicon, the GeForce RTX 3060 (non-Ti) is expected to feature a 192-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, which it populates with 12 GB of memory.

In the upstream semiconductor industry, the major foundries such as TSMC and UMC are reporting fully loaded capacities, while in the downstream, the available production capacity for OSAT is also lacking, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Given this situation, suppliers of NAND Flash controller ICs such as Phison and Silicon Motion are now unable to meet upside demand from their clients. Not only have many controller IC suppliers temporarily stopped offering quotes for new orders, but they are also even considering raising prices soon because the negotiations between NAND Flash suppliers and module houses over 1Q21 contracts are now at the critical juncture. The potential increases in prices of controller ICs from outsourced suppliers (IC design houses) are currently estimated to be the range of 15-20%.

With regards to the demand side, demand has risen significantly for eMMC solutions with medium- and low-density specifications (i.e., 64 GB and lower), for which NAND Flash suppliers have mostly stopped updating the NAND Flash process technology, while maintaining support with the legacy 2D NAND or the 64L 3D NAND process. This is on account of strong sales for Chromebook devices and TVs. As older processes gradually account for a lowering portion of bit output proportions from NAND Flash suppliers, these companies are exhibiting a lowered willingness to directly supply such eMMC products to clients. As a result, clients now need to turn to memory module houses, which are able to source NAND Flash components and controllers, to procure eMMC products in substantial quantities.