Global shipments of traditional PCs, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, declined 5.1% in the first quarter of 2022 (1Q22) but exceeded earlier forecasts, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The PC market is coming off two years of double-digit growth, so while the first quarter decline is a change in this momentum, it doesn't mean the industry is in a downward spiral. Despite ongoing supply chain and logistical challenges, vendors still shipped 80.5 million PCs during the quarter. The 1Q22 volume marks the seventh consecutive quarter where global shipments surpassed 80 million, a feat not seen since 2012.

"The focus shouldn't be on the year-over-year decline in PC volumes because that was to be expected. The focus should be on the PC industry managing to ship more than 80 million PCs at a time when logistics and supply chain are still a mess, accompanied by numerous geopolitical and pandemic-related challenges," said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "We have witnessed some slowdown in both the education and consumer markets, but all indicators show demand for commercial PCs remains very strong. We also believe that the consumer market will pick up again in the near future. The result of 1Q22 was PC shipment volumes that were near record levels for a first quarter."

Leading gaming accessories provider Turtle Beach Corporation (NASDAQ: HEAR) today announced the Designed for Xbox Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX as an all-new entry to the best-selling brand's Stealth 700 series of premium wireless gaming headsets. By simply flipping a switch, the Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX offers players the ability to connect lag-free via wireless USB or Bluetooth to more gaming systems, including Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, PS5 and PS4, plus Nintendo Switch, Windows PCs and Mac, and compatible iOS and Android mobile devices. Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX also increases battery life to 40+ hours, with 15-minutes of charge delivering over eight hours of playtime.

The Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX continues delivering the superior high-quality audio with powerful 3D spatial surround sound and ultimate comfort that have made it the best-selling and highly acclaimed premium wireless gaming headset. IGN recently included the Stealth 700 Gen 2 in its latest Best Gaming Headsets 2022 story, naming it the Best Xbox Series X|S Gaming Headset. The Stealth 700 Gen 2's premium features like large and powerful 50 mm Nanoclear drivers, Aerofit cooling gel-infused memory foam ear cushions, ProSpecs glasses-friendly comfort, Superhuman Hearing, a metal-reinforced headband, as well as Bluetooth for talking on Discord, taking calls, listening to music, and connecting to the mobile companion app - all make a return with the Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX. The Designed for Xbox Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX is available for pre-order today from www.turtlebeach.com and at participating retailers worldwide. Available in Black or Cobalt Blue, Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX for Xbox launches globally on May 8, 2022 for a $199.99 MSRP.

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

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

Today, 2K and Gearbox Software announced that Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, an all-new, fantasy-fueled looter shooter game from the unpredictable mind of Tiny Tina, is now available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC via the Epic Games Store. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands features the journey of the Fatemaker through an extraordinary tabletop realm where rules rarely apply. Joined by an all-star celebrity cast, players can create and customize their own multiclass heroes as they loot, shoot, slash, and cast their way through outlandish monsters and treasure-filled dungeons on a quest to stop the tyrannical Dragon Lord. The chaotic fantasy world is brought to life by the utterly unpredictable Tiny Tina, who makes the rules, changes the world on the fly, and guides players on their respective journeys.

"Since we founded Gearbox in 1999, it's always been a dream of ours to create a video game in a fantasy setting. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is the result of everyone on our team pouring their hearts and souls into making a title like that a reality - it's a love letter to anyone with a passion for role playing games or looter shooters," said Randy Pitchford, founder of the Gearbox Entertainment Company. "I hope you join us and our millions of fans around the world in experiencing this impossible culmination of years and years of pent-up creativity and passion that's finally manifested in this wild, all-new, one-of-a-kind video game, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands."

Intel's Arc discrete lineup of graphics card are set to hit the notebook/laptop segment first, and today's discovery is no different. BHPhotoVideo, one of the largest US tech retailers, has posted a listing of Samsung's Galaxy Book2 Pro laptop, spotting Intel's Arc discrete graphics solution. According to the listing, this model was spotting an undisclosed Intel Arc Graphics, 2.1 GHz 12-core CPU, 16 GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory, 512 GB of NVMe PCIe Gen4 storage, 15.6-inch 1080p AMOLED display, WiFi-6E, and came in just 1.13 KG body weight. All of this is packed at 1349.99 USD, which is an early sign of the structure of laptop prices carrying Intel's Arc GPUs.

BHPhotoVideo has now taken down the website listing; however, we still have evidence thanks to the leaker, which you can see below. For more information regarding the exact SKU and more Arc Alchemist data, we have to wait for the March 30th launch.

Elden Ring launched in late February to rave critic and consumer reviews. The game is an excellent showcase of From Software's gaming design ethos, but ultimately proves that the company's rendering engine still requires work after years of installments due to widely-reported stuttering issues - irrespective of hardware configuration. A fix for Elden Ring's stuttering issues has surfaced on late Monday - courtesy of Valve and its Proton wrapper, and only applicable to the Steam Deck. In a way, this turns Steam Deck into the smoothest device to play Elden Ring on.

The issue with Elden Ring's stuttering has been linked to the games' continuous shader loading. Apparently, Elden Ring allows users to enter its vast open-world without pre-compiling the required shaders (something that we've seen other games do through usually lengthy boot-up processes) for the specific hardware. This forces the game to constantly compile shaders as they're required (due to world loading, animation loading, among other triggers), which is responsible for the stuttering issues gamers on PC have been encountering.

Basemark launched today GPUScore, an all-new GPU (graphics processing unit) performance benchmarking suite for a wide device range from smartphones to high-end gaming PCs. GPUScore supports all modern graphics APIs, such as Vulkan, Metal and DirectX, and operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS.

GPUScore will consist of three different testing suites. Today, the first one of these was launched, named Relic of Life. It is available immediately. Basemark will introduce the two other GPUScore testing suites during the following months. Relic of Life is ideal for benchmarking high-end gaming PCs' discrete graphics cards' GPUs. It requires hardware accelerated ray tracing, supports Vulkan and DirectX, and is available for both Windows and Linux. GPUScore: Relic of Life is an ideal benchmark for comparing Vulkan and DirectX accelerated ray tracing performance.

Unless you have been living under a rock, chances are you are following the news about the Russia-Ukraine war disputes. Not to get too political, we are here to report about your favorite rivals—AMD and Intel—officially stopping the delivery of processors to Russia and Belarus. Firstly, an AMD representative told PCWorld that "Based on sanctions placed on Russia by the United States and other nations, at this time AMD is suspending its sales and distribution of our products into Russia and Belarus. It is all AMD products and products we power (PCs, etc) in Russia and Belarus." Additionally, Intel posted an official quote, which you can find below.

IntelIntel condemns the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and we have suspended all shipments to customers in both Russia and Belarus. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by this war, including the people of Ukraine and the surrounding countries and all those around the world with family, friends and loved ones in the region.

"We are working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, especially those with close ties to this region. We have launched an employee donation and matching campaign through the Intel Foundation that has already raised over $1.2 million for relief efforts, and we are proud of the work our teams in surrounding areas including Poland, Germany and Romania are doing to aid refugees. We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine and the global community in calling for an immediate end to this war and a swift return to peace.

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) today announced the industry's first 800 Gbps or 8x 100 Gbps multimode platform solution, that enables data center infrastructure to achieve dramatically higher speeds for short-reach optical modules and Active Optical Cable (AOC) applications. As artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications continue to drive greater bandwidth requirements, cloud-optimized solutions are needed that can bring lower power, latency and cost to short-range data center interconnections. The new 800G platform, which includes Marvell's PAM4 DSP with a multimode transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and Driver, enables faster data center speeds scaling to 800 Gbps, using conventional cost-effective vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) technology while accelerating time-to-market with plug-and-play deployment.

Today's data centers are packed with equipment utilizing optical modules or AOCs connected by multimode optical fiber optimized for communication over short distances within data centers. This 100G per lane multimode fiber provides cost-effective, low-power, short-reach connectivity. To support multi-gigabit transmissions, multimode architectures often use VCSEL transmitters, which offer the cost benefits of reliability, power efficiency and easy deployment.

In 4Q21, NAND Flash bit shipments grew by only 3.3% QoQ, a significant decrease from the nearly 10% in 3Q21, according to TrendForce's investigations. ASP fell by nearly 5% and the overall industry posted revenue of US$18.5 billion, a QoQ decrease of 2.1%. This was primarily due to a decline in the purchase demand of various products and a market shift to oversupply causing a drop in contract prices. In 4Q21, with the exception of enterprise SSD, the supply of which was limited by insufficient upstream components, the prices of other NAND Flash products such as eMMC, UFS, and client SSD, all fell.

TrendForce's summary of NAND Flash market sales performance in 2021 is as follows: although there have been signs of weakening since 2H21, thanks to remote services and cloud demand driven by the pandemic, revenue performance still grew significantly compared to 2020. Revenue reached US$68.6 billion, up 21.1% YoY, the second-biggest increase since 2018.

China is reacting to new outbreaks of the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus with partial lockdowns. This could further delay the availability of laptops with 12th Gen Intel Core processors and NVIDIA's Ti graphics cards, which debuted at the beginning of the year. The first factories have already been closed in Suzhou in the east of the country. Supply chain and logistics bottlenecks, a shortage of certain chip types and price increases are already on the horizon.

When Intel announced the company's first hybrid design, codenamed Alder Lake, we expected to see more of such design philosophies in future products. During Intel's 2022 investor meeting day, the company provided insights into future developments, and a successor to Alder Lake is no different. Codenamed "Raptor Lake," it features a novel Raptor Cove P-core design that is supposed to bring significant IPC uplift from the previous generation of processors. Using Intel 7 processor node, Raptor Lake brings a similar ecosystem of features to Alder Lake, however, with improved performance across the board.

Perhaps one of the most exciting things to note about Raptor Lake is the advancement in core count, specifically the increase in E-cores. Instead of eight P-cores and eight E-cores like Alder Lake, the Raptor Lake design will retain eight P-cores and double the E-core count to 16. It was a weird decision on Intel's end; however, it surely isn't anything terrible. The total number of cores now jumps to 24, and the total number of threads reaches 32. Additionally, Raptor Lake will bring some additional overclocking improvement features and retain socket compatibility with Alder Lake motherboards. That means that, at worst, you would need to perform a BIOS update to get your previous system ready for new hardware. We assume that Intel has been working with software vendors and its engineering team to optimize core utilization for this next-generation processor, even though they have more E-cores present. Below, we can see Intel's demonstration of Raptor Lake running Blender and Adobe Premiere and the CPU core utilization.

At Intel's 2022 Investor Meeting, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger and Intel's business leaders outlined key elements of the company's strategy and path for long-term growth. Intel's long-term plans will capitalize on transformative growth during an era of unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Among the presentations, Intel announced product roadmaps across its major business units and key execution milestones, including: Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, Intel Foundry Services, Software and Advanced Technology, Network and Edge, Technology Development, More: For more from Intel's Investor Meeting 2022, including the presentations and news, please visit the Intel Newsroom and Intel.com's Investor Meeting site.

WDC recently stated that certain materials were contaminated in late January at NAND Flash production lines in Yokkaichi and Kitakami, Japan which are joint ventures with Kioxia, according to TrendForce's investigations. Before this incident, TrendForce had forecast that the NAND Flash market will see a slight oversupply the entire year and average price from Q1 to Q2 will face downward pressure. However, the impact of WDC's material contamination issue is significant and Samsung's experience during the previous lockdown of Xi'an due to the pandemic has also retarded the magnitude of the NAND Flash price slump. Therefore, the Q1 price drop will diminish to 5~10%. In addition, according to TrendForce, the combined WDC/Kioxia NAND Flash market share in the 3Q21 was as high as 32.5%. The consequences of this latest incident may push the price of NAND Flash in Q2 to spike 5~10%.

The contaminated products in this incident are concentrated in 3D NAND (BICS) with an initial estimate of 6.5exabytes (approximately 6,500M GB) affected. According to TrendForce, damaged bits account for 13% of the group's output in 1Q22 and approximately 3% of the total output for the year. The normal production schedule for the entire line has yet to be confirmed. It is worth noting that the damages announced by WDC likely do not account for total losses stemming for this event and the number of damaged Kioxia parts has not been aggregated, so the total number of affected bits may increase further.

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.

Renowned hardware leaker kopike7kimi on Twitter revealed some purported details on NVIDIA's next-generation architecture for HPC (High Performance Computing), Hopper. According to the leaker, Hopper is still sporting a classic monolithic die design despite previous rumors, and it appears that NVIDIA's performance targets have led to the creation of a monstrous, ~1000 mm² die package for the GH100 chip, which usually maxes out the complexity and performance that can be achieved on a particular manufacturing process. This is despite the fact that Hopper is also rumored to be manufactured under TSMC's 5 nm technology, thus achieving higher transistor density and power efficiency compared to the 8 nm Samsung process that NVIDIA is currently contracting. At the very least, it means that the final die will be bigger than the already enormous 826 mm² of NVIDIA's GA100.

If this is indeed the case and NVIDIA isn't deploying a MCM (Multi-Chip Module) design on Hopper, which is designed for a market with increased profit margins, it likely means that less profitable consumer-oriented products from NVIDIA won't be featuring the technology either. MCM designs also make more sense in NVIDIA's HPC products, as they would enable higher theoretical performance when scaling - exactly what that market demands. Of course, NVIDIA could be looking to develop an MCM version of the GH100 still; but if that were to happen, the company could be looking to pair two of these chips together as another HPC product (rumored GH-102). ~2,000 mm² in a single GPU package, paired with increased density and architectural improvements might actually be what NVIDIA requires to achieve the 3x performance jump from the Ampere-based A100 the company is reportedly targeting.

MAINGEAR—an award-winning PC system integrator of custom gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations—today announced that new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics cards are now available to configure within MAINGEAR's product line of award-winning custom gaming desktop PCs and workstations. Featuring support for real-time ray tracing effects and AI technologies, MAINGEAR PCs equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 offer gamers next-generation ray-traced graphics and performance comparable to the latest consoles.

Powered by Ampere, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 features NVIDIA's 2nd gen Ray Tracing Cores and 3rd generation Tensor Cores. Combined with new streaming multiprocessors and high-speed G6 memory, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 can power the latest and greatest games. NVIDIA RTX on 30 Series GPUs deliver real-time ray tracing effects—including shadows, reflections, and Ambient Occlusion (AO). The groundbreaking NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) 2.0 AI technology utilizes Tensor Core AI processors to boost frame rates while producing sharp, uncompromised visual fidelity comparable to high native resolutions.

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of the next version of its High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM standard: JESD238 HBM3, available for download from the JEDEC website. HBM3 is an innovative approach to raising the data processing rate used in applications where higher bandwidth, lower power consumption and capacity per area are essential to a solution's market success, including graphics processing and high-performance computing and servers.

G.SKILL International Enterprise Co., Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and gaming peripherals, is thrilled to announce the achievement of a new overclocking world record for fastest memory frequency at DDR5-8888 CL88-88-88-88, in cooperation with ASUS. This amazing frequency speed was achieved by the extreme overclocker "lupin_no_musume" with G.SKILL Trident Z5 DDR5 memory, ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 APEX motherboard, and Intel Core i9-12900K processor. To see the moment this amazing overclocking world record was set, please click the following video link: https://youtu.be/OgQFbUOs6i8

DDR5-8888 CL88-88-88-88 - Pushing the Speed to the Limit
At the dawn of the DDR5 era, G.SKILL and ASUS have been constantly exploring the memory speed limitations of the latest Intel Z690 platform. Surpassing the previous DDR5-8704 world record in November 2021, a new memory frequency world record is achieved at DDR5-8888 under liquid nitrogen extreme cooling. The memory speed has been validated by CPU-Z. Please refer to the screenshot and validation link below: https://valid.x86.fr/qgvylc

Worldwide semiconductor revenue increased 25.1% in 2021 to total $583.5 billion, crossing the $500 billion threshold for the first time, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc.

"As the global economy bounced back in 2021, shortages appeared throughout the semiconductor supply chain, particularly in the automotive industry," said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner. "The resulting combination of strong demand as well as logistics and raw material price increases drove semiconductors' average selling price higher (ASP), contributing to overall revenue growth in 2021.

Driven by forces such as the pandemic, geopolitics, and the digital transformation of everyday life, there has been a shortage of global foundry production capacity for nearly two years and shortages have been especially severe for mature 1Xnm~180nm nodes, according to TrendForce's investigations. Although all foundries are furiously increasing capital expenditures to expand capacity, unrealized future expansion does not ease existing supply issues. In addition, the uneven distribution of supply chain resources that has exacerbated the shortage of parts and components has yet to be definitively alleviated. Circumstances as a whole will continue affecting shipments of related whole devices. Only the PC category is expected to emerge largely unscathed in 1Q22.

Moving into 1Q22, TrendForce states, due to the limited increase in production capacity, the market's supply situation is expected to be approximately the same as in 4Q21. However, some end products have entered their traditional off-season cycle and the slowdown in demand momentum is expected to alleviate the immediate pressure on OEMs and ODMs regarding supply chain stocking.

AMD's Ryzen 7000 series of desktop processors based on the novel Zen 4 core architecture are scheduled to arrive in the second half of 2022. While we are not sure just how big the architectural differences will be going from Zen 3 (with or without 3D V-cache) to the new Zen 4 core, we have some leaked information that confirms the existence of two SKUs that reveal additional details about the processor configuration. In the MilkyWay@Home project, aiming to create a model of the Milky Way galaxy by utilizing countless PCs across the globe, we found two next-generation Ryzen 7000 SKUs. The MilkyWay@Home project isn't a benchmark. However, it is a valuable reference where the next generation processors appeared.

First in line is the 100-000000666-21_N CPU, a codename for an eight-core, sixteen-threaded design. This model should correspond to the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X CPU, a successor to the Ryzen 7 5800X model. Next in line is the 100-000000665-21_N CPU with 16 cores and 32 threads, a successor to the Ryzen 9 5950X named Ryzen 9 7950X. One important thing to note is that these new CPUs feature different level two (L2) cache configurations. With the previous generation 5000 series "Vermeer" processors, the L2 cache was locked at 512 KB per core. However, according to today's leak, the upgraded Zen 4 IP will bring 1024 KB of L2 cache per core, doubling the cache size at one of the fastest levels.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions today announced AORUS RGB DDR5 6000 MHz 32 GB Memory Kit, which uplift frequency to 6000 MHz with RGB lighting for performance boost and striking accents. Enhanced by DDR5 XMP Booster and XMP 3.0 User Profile of GIGABYTE Z690 motherboards, and copper-aluminium heat spreaders with nano-carbon coating thermal design, the new memory kit promises the next-level performance with stability while dissipating heat efficiently under high-speed operation.

AORUS RGB DDR5 6000 MHz 32 GB Memory Kit features high clock speed and low power consumption by two 16 GB DDR5 XMP 6000 MHz dual-channel designs with 40-40-40-76 timings, which fit the support of DDR5 memory on Intel Z690 platform. Along with GIGABYTE Z690 AORUS motherboards, AORUS RGB DDR5 6000 MHz 32 GB memory kit can enable "DDR5 XMP Booster" function which detect the brand of memory IC in the BIOS setting to allow users to choose promptly from multiple built-in memory overclocking profiles, boosting the native DDR5 or XMP DDR5 memory speed. Furthermore, "XMP 3.0 User Profile" enables users to create and store XMP profiles of their own to unleash the extreme performance of memories.

Phanteks debuts a host of new products for the upcoming year at CES 2022 - The brand new Evolv Shift XT Mini-ITX Chassis and Revolt SFX Power Supplies, Matte White Editions for the Evolv X & Eclipse P600S Chassis, white SK PWM D-RGB Fans, white AMP Power Supply and a complete range of Gen4 PCIe Riser Cables and Gen4 Vertical GPU Bracket.

Brand new and unique Evolv Shift XT Mini-ITX Chassis and super compact Revolt SFX Power Supplies
Evolv Shift XT - Compact, Powerful, Futureproof
The Evolv Shift XT brings a unique small form factor that can extend in size to tailor to your cooling performance needs. The Evolv Shift XT has no compromise on performance with support for powerful hardware, whether in Compact, Aircooled, or Liquid Cooled Mode.

congatec - a leading vendor of embedded and edge computing technology - introduces the 12th Generation Intel Core mobile and desktop processors (formerly code named Alder Lake) on 10 new COM-HPC and COM Express Computer-on-Modules. Featuring the latest high performance cores from Intel, the new modules in COM-HPC Size A and C as well as COM Express Type 6 form factors offer major performance gains and improvements for the world of embedded and edge computing systems. Most impressive is the fact that engineers can now leverage Intel's innovative performance hybrid architecture. Offering of up to 14 cores/20 threads on BGA and 16 cores/24 threads on desktop variants (LGA mounted), 12th Gen Intel Core processors provide a quantum leap [1] in multitasking and scalability levels. Next-gen IoT and edge applications benefit from up to 6 or 8 (BGA/LGA) optimized Performance-cores (P-cores) plus up to 8 low power Efficient-cores (E-cores) and DDR5 memory support to accelerate multithreaded applications and execute background tasks more efficiently.