Samsung has invested heavily in semiconductor manufacturing technology to provide clients with a viable alternative to TSMC and its portfolio of nodes spanning anything from mobile to high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Today, we have information that Samsung will present its SF4X node to the public in this year's VLSI Symposium. Previously known as a 4HPC node, it is designed as a 4 nm-class node with a specialized use case for HPC processors, in contrast to the standard SF4 (4LPP) node that uses 4 nm transistors designed for low-power standards applicable to mobile/laptop space. According to the VLSI Symposium schedule, Samsung is set to present more info about the paper titled "Highly Reliable/Manufacturable 4nm FinFET Platform Technology (SF4X) for HPC Application with Dual-CPP/HP-HD Standard Cells."

As the brief introduction notes, "In this paper, the most upgraded 4nm (SF4X) ensuring HPC application was successfully demonstrated. Key features are (1) Significant performance +10% boosting with Power -23% reduction via advanced SD stress engineering, Transistor level DTCO (T-DTCO) and [middle-of-line] MOL scheme, (2) New HPC options: Ultra-Low-Vt device (ULVT), high speed SRAM and high Vdd operation guarantee with a newly developed MOL scheme. SF4X enhancement has been proved by a product to bring CPU Vmin reduction -60mV / IDDQ -10% variation reduction together with improved SRAM process margin. Moreover, to secure high Vdd operation, Contact-Gate breakdown voltage is improved by >1V without Performance degradation. This SF4X technology provides a tremendous performance benefits for various applications in a wide operation range." While we have no information on the reference for these claims, we suspect it is likely the regular SF4 node. More performance figures and an in-depth look will be available on Thursday, June 15, at Technology Session 16 at the symposium.

The recent growth in demand for training Large Language Models (LLMs) like Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has sparked the interest of many companies to invest in GPU solutions that are used to train these models. However, countries like China have struggled with US sanctions, and NVIDIA has to create custom models that meet US export regulations. Carrying two GPUs, H800 and A800, they represent cut-down versions of the original H100 and A100, respectively. We reported about H800; however, it remained as mysterious as A800 that we are talking about today. Thanks to MyDrivers, we have information that the A800 GPU performance is within 70% of the regular A100.

The regular A100 GPU manages 9.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64, 19.5 TeraFLOPS of FP64 Tensor, and up to 624 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPS with sparsity. A rough napkin math would suggest that 70% performance of the original (a 30% cut) would equal 6.8 TeraFLOPs of FP64 precision, 13.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64 Tensor, and 437 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPs with sparsity. MyDrivers notes that A800 can be had for 100,000 Yuan, translating to about 14,462 USD at the time of writing. This is not the most capable GPU that Chinese companies can acquire, as H800 exists. However, we don't have any information about its performance for now.

Real-time ray tracing (RT), using Microsoft DirectX ray tracing (DXR) and Vulkan Ray Tracing, adds a new level of incredible realism to games through effects like ray-traced reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination. Ray tracing is used in many of the latest games such as The Callisto Protocol, F1 22, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Returnal to maximize graphics fidelity and deliver the ultimate visual experience.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (AMD FSR 2) is the cutting-edge temporal upscaling technology designed to produce incredible image quality and boost framerates in supported games. AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series graphics feature advanced AMD RDNA 3 compute units with 2nd generation ray tracing accelerators to help deliver incredible RT performance in games.

Avalanche Software has released quite a big patch for Hogwarts Legacy, improving visual, performance, gameplay, and general stability. In addition to more than 500 bug fixes, it also brings the new Arachnophobia Mode.

Performance-wise, the newest patch resolves general crashes on the PC and various memory leaks, brings plenty of optimizations, fixes ray tracing issues, and more. It also updates minimum driver recommendation for NVIDIA graphics cards, updates NVIDIA DLSS to v3.1.2, AMD FSR to v2.2, and Intel XeSS to v1.1.

Solidigm, a leading global provider of innovative NAND flash memory solutions, has announced the launch of Solidigm Synergy 2.0 software. The Solidigm Synergy software suite improves overall system performance and delivers a better user experience than hardware alone can provide. This free download includes two elements, both optional, but highly recommended: the Solidigm Synergy Driver, which automatically improves the performance of Solidigm SSDs, and the Solidigm Synergy Toolkit, which offers useful SSD health reporting and tools for SSDs from any manufacturer.

Solidigm is the only company today that is investing in a solution with software built on top of the SSD that understands system behavior and adapts based on the user's needs. The latest Solidigm Synergy software improves the PC user experience for all SSD users. It increases performance where it matters most on Solidigm SSDs, and offers a host of useful drive management features for all SSDs, regardless of manufacturer. Solidigm is combining breakthrough SSD products with revolutionary software solutions and plans to introduce further innovations to deliver additional improvements to end-users.

Respawn Entertainment, the Star Wars division at Electronic Arts and Lucasfilm Games have today released their first patch for the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - some folks must have been working like mad over the weekend in order to address some of the problems encountered shortly after the game's launch last Friday (April 28). The EA Star Wars Twitter account issued a statement regarding the initial batch of patches for all platforms affected: "Today a patch has become available for the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and tomorrow (5/2) we'll also be issuing a patch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. We are hard at work on patches that will further improve performance and fix bugs across all platforms. There are more updates to come across all platforms, and we will share that timing when it is available."

The patch notes for today's PC update only mention "performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering" so it seems the developers have a lot more work to do over the coming weeks. The situation on current generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles looks to largely the same, and tomorrow's fix list is extensive (the same problems have already been addressed on PC with today's patch). TPU's own resident reviewer extraordinaire went in-depth and explored Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's technical issues this weekend - part of W1zzard's conclusion was very unkind: "We're now paying $70 to beta-test an unpolished turd that they call an AAA game—not the first time this year. I'm starting to wonder if these companies aren't slowly eroding their customer base by delivering broken products over and over again."

An online tipster, posting on the Chinese blog site Weibo, has let slip that Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile chipset is touted to pack some hefty graphical capabilities. The suggested Adreno "750" smartphone and tablet GPU is touted to offer a 50% increase over the present generation Adreno 740 - as featured on the recently released and cutting-edge Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset. The current generation top-of-the-range Snapdragon is no slouch when it comes to graphics benchmarks, where it outperforms Apple's prime contender - the Bionic A16 SoC.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC is expected to launch in the last quarter of 2023, but details of the flagship devices that it will power are non-existent at the time of writing. The tipster suggests that Qualcomm has decided to remain on TSMC's 4 nm process for its next generation mobile chipset - perhaps an all too safe decision when you consider that Apple has upped the stakes with the approach of its Bionic A17 SoC. It has been reported that the Cupertino, California-based company has chosen to fabricate via TSMC's 3 nm process, although the Taiwanese foundry is said to be struggling with its N3 production line. The engineers at Qualcomm's San Diego headquarters are alleged to be experimenting with increased clock speeds running on the next gen Adreno GPU - as high as 1.0 GHz - in order to eke out as much performance as possible, in anticipation of besting the Bionic A17 in graphics benchmarks. The tipster theorizes that Qualcomm will still have a hard time matching Apple in terms of pure CPU throughput, so the consolation prize will lie with a superior GPU getting rigged onto the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Microsoft's Window Defender engineering team has finally found the time to address a long term bug within its anti-malware software - relating to performance issues with Mozilla's Firefox web browser. User feedback stretching back to five years ago indicates extremely sluggish web surfing experiences, caused by a Windows "Anti-malware Service Executable" occupying significant chunks of CPU utilization (more than 30%). The combination of Firefox and Windows Defender running in parallel would guarantee a butting of (software) heads - up until last week's bug fix. A Microsoft issued update has reduced the "MsMpEng.exe" Defender component's CPU usage by a maximum of 75%.

Microsoft and Mozilla developers have collaborated on addressing the disharmonious relationship between Defender and Firefox. A plucky member of the latter's softwareengineering team has been very transparent about the sluggish browser experience. Yannis Juglaret has provided a string of project updates via Mozilla's Bugzilla tracking system - one of his latest entries provide details about the fix: "You may read online that Defender was making too many calls to VirtualProtect, and that global CPU usage will now go down by 75% when browsing with Firefox. This is absolutely wrong! The impact of this fix is that on all computers that rely on Microsoft Defender's Real-time Protection feature (which is enabled by default in Windows), MsMpEng.exe will consume much less CPU than before when monitoring the dynamic behavior of any program through Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Nothing less, nothing more."

Bethesda tweeted out an information update directed at Xbox Series console owners - and it has caused a stir within the fanbase - Redfall will be locked to "Quality Mode" upon launch in early May. PC gaming enthusiasts will have plenty to laugh about with these newly announced graphical performance restrictions, set for the green team's pair of current generation consoles. The frame rate will be capped at a maximum of 30 frames per second on both Xbox Series X and S, under the "Quality" performance mode. The version tuned for Series X will be able to output at the 4K UHD resolution standard (3840 x 2160), and the pixel count will be reduced for Microsoft's weaker console offering, at 1440p QHD (2560 x 1440).

Bethesda states that a 60 frames per second "Performance Mode" for Xbox Series X|S will be added at a later (unspecified) date, presumably via an online patch issued through Xbox Live. No further details were provided regarding the decision to cap frame rates, all the more strange given that Redfall is due to launch very soon. Arkane Studios (the Austin, TX branch) declared last month that it was also working on a removal of the always online requirement for the game's single player element - again, no time period for release has been established for this reversal. Redfall has attracted mounds of controversy over the past two months - including Sony's attention through litigation.

On Wednesday, the MLCommons team released the MLPerf 3.0 Inference numbers, and there was an exciting submission from NVIDIA. Reportedly, NVIDIA has used software optimization to improve the already staggering performance of its latest H100 GPU by up to 54%. For reference, NVIDIA's H100 GPU first appeared on MLPerf 2.1 back in September of 2022. In just six months, NVIDIA engineers worked on AI optimizations for the MLPerf 3.0 release to find that basic software optimization can catalyze performance increases anywhere from 7-54%. The workloads for measuring the inferencing speed suite included RNN-T speech recognition, 3D U-Net medical imaging, RetinaNet object detection, ResNet-50 object classification, DLRM recommendation, and BERT 99/99.9% natural language processing.

What is interesting is that NVIDIA's submission is a bit modified. There are open and closed categories that vendors have to compete in, where closed is the mathematical equivalent of a neural network. In contrast, the open category is flexible and allows vendors to submit results based on optimizations for their hardware. The closed submission aims to provide an "apples-to-apples" hardware comparison. Given that NVIDIA opted to use the closed category, performance optimization of other vendors such as Intel and Qualcomm are not accounted for here. Still, it is interesting that optimization can lead to a performance increase of up to 54% in NVIDIA's case with its H100 GPU. Another interesting takeaway is that some comparable hardware, like Qualcomm Cloud AI 100, Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+, and NeuChips's ReccAccel N3000, failed to finish all the workloads. This is shown as "X" on the slides made by NVIDIA, stressing the need for proper ML system software support, which is NVIDIA's strength and an extensive marketing claim.

[Editor's note: Our in-depth review of Antec Performance 1 FT Case is now live]

With outstanding cooling performance and lots of useful features, Antec Inc. presents the latest flagship of full towers, the new Performance 1 FT. Featuring an airflow-enhanced front panel design, magnetic front filter, and four pre-installed PWM fans, this new chassis provides efficient airflow and great cooling performance. The case is now commercially available from MSRP US$159.99.

The new Antec flagship supports the latest RTX 40 Series GPUs. Considering the increasing demands for CPU and GPU cooling, Antec designed the Performance 1 FT to enhance the air intake, improve the cable routing, and enable an easy installation with various options. The new temperature display function allows to keep control of the components. The display screen located on the case top allows users to check the temperature of the GPU and CPU at a glance. It addresses the need for temperature monitoring without purchasing expensive cooling kits.

Avalanche Software has released the latest March 8 patch for Hogwarts Legacy, that fixes various bugs and improves gameplay, performance, and stability. The extensive update also includes fixes for online, gameplay, audio, UI, cinematics, ray tracing, save game, display and miscellaneous issues.

The changelog includes major reworks, from patching out memory leaks, improved VRAM usage, to VFX crashes, lighting optimizations with NVIDIA drivers, improved stability and performance with ray tracing, directional light shadows and shadows on trees with ray tracing, various Ansel issues, and plenty of gameplay issues, including missions, broom flight, world events, and characters. The new patch also updates the minimum Nvidia and AMD graphics driver recommendations, which could be directly connected to the improved VRAM usage, as the game was easily going over 14 GB with RT enabled on 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p resolutions.

According to SkatterBench, a website known for incredible overclocking attempts, we get to see AMD's Ryzen 7000 series integrated GPU get up to 42% performance improvement from overclocking. Specifically, the SKU used in the attempt was the Ryzen 9 7900 non-X model with 12 cores and 24 threads, clocked at 3.7 GHz base frequency and 5.4 GHz boost speed. The SKU contains a basic AMD GPU integrated into the package; however, not meant for any serious gaming tasks. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see what a two-core RDNA2 GPU clocked at 2.2 GHz managed to achieve once overclocked. The memory clock of the GPU is set to 2.4 GHz at stock.

Running at the base voltage of 0.997 volts under Furmark workload, the iGPU consumes around 38.5 Watts. However, the overclocking attempt pushed the voltage to 1.395 Volts, resulting in a 3.1 GHz iGPU frequency. The GPU Memory clock is now set to 3200 MHz, and the GPU+SOC power is 60.689 Watts, almost double compared to the stock settings. The overclocker used a GFX curve optimizer with various system tweaks to achieve these numbers. While the OC attempt was successful, the most significant performance improvement was a 42% increase, with some game titles averaging less. Below, the blue bar indicates stock, while the green bar indicates OC'd performance. You can check out the YouTube video as well to see more details.

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

CORSAIR, a world leader in enthusiast components for gamers, creators, and PC builders, today launched a slew of upgrades to a wide range of its most acclaimed PC components. With its best performing RGB fan in the AF RGB ELITE, new liquid CPU cooler options in the iCUE ELITE CAPELLIX XT, ELITE LCD XT, and RGB ELITE Series, and new 4000D/5000D RGB AIRFLOW cases, CORSAIR is delivering stylish looks and upgraded performance in a large-scale coordinated launch to support enthusiasts building a brand-new performance PC or upgrading their system for the new year.

The AF RGB ELITE PWM fan takes the crown as CORSAIR's highest performing RGB fan, merging the fantastic airflow of the AF ELITE Series with eight brilliant individually addressable LEDs per fan. CORSAIR AirGuide technology concentrates airflow into a cone directed at your hottest components, with fan speeds reaching up to 2,100 RPM and 1,700 RPM for 120 mm and 140 mm, respectively. Fluid dynamic bearings ensure low-noise operation, with support for Zero RPM mode at low loads to eliminate fan noise altogether. AF RGB ELITE is available in multi-fan kits with an included iCUE Lighting Node CORE controller, or single fan expansions.

Apple today unveiled the new Mac mini, supercharged by M2 and the all-new M2 Pro. With the M2 chip, Mac mini is even more powerful, capable, and affordable with a new starting price of just $599. The new M2 Pro chip delivers pro-level performance to Mac mini for the first time, enabling users to run high-performance workflows that were previously unimaginable in such a compact design. Mac mini with M2 and M2 Pro delivers faster performance, even more unified memory, and advanced connectivity, including support for up to two displays on the M2 model, and up to three displays on the M2 Pro model. Paired with Studio Display and Magic accessories, along with the power and ease of macOS Ventura, Mac mini provides a phenomenal desktop experience that will take users' productivity and creativity to the next level. Customers can order the new Mac mini models today, with availability beginning Tuesday, January 24.

"With incredible capabilities and a wide array of connectivity in its compact design, Mac mini is used in so many places, in so many different ways. Today, we're excited to take it even further with M2 and M2 Pro," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "Bringing even more performance and a lower starting price, Mac mini with M2 is a tremendous value. And for users who need powerful pro performance, Mac mini with M2 Pro is unlike any other desktop in its class."

Apple today announced the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max, Apple's next-generation pro silicon that brings even more power-efficient performance and battery life to pro users. With M2 Pro and M2 Max—the world's most powerful and efficient chip for a pro laptop—MacBook Pro tackles demanding tasks, like effects rendering, which is up to 6x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro, and color grading, which is up to 2x faster. Building on the unprecedented power efficiency of Apple silicon, battery life on MacBook Pro is now up to 22 hours—the longest battery life ever in a Mac. For enhanced connectivity, the new MacBook Pro supports Wi-Fi 6E, which is up to twice as fast as the previous generation, as well as advanced HDMI, which supports 8K displays for the first time. With up to 96 GB of unified memory in the M2 Max model, creators can work on scenes so large that PC laptops can't even run them. Rounding out the unrivaled features of MacBook Pro are its renowned Liquid Retina XDR display, extensive array of connectivity, 1080p FaceTime HD camera, six-speaker sound system, and studio-quality mics. When combined with macOS Ventura, the MacBook Pro user experience is unrivaled. Customers can order the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro today, with availability beginning Tuesday, January 24.

Apple today announced M2 Pro and M2 Max, two next-generation SoCs (systems on a chip) that take the breakthrough power-efficient performance of Apple silicon to new heights. M2 Pro scales up the architecture of M2 to deliver an up to 12-core CPU and up to 19-core GPU, together with up to 32 GB of fast unified memory. M2 Max builds on the capabilities of M2 Pro, including an up to 38-core GPU, double the unified memory bandwidth, and up to 96 GB of unified memory. Its industry-leading performance per watt makes it the world's most powerful and power-efficient chip for a pro laptop. Both chips also feature enhanced custom technologies, including a faster 16-core Neural Engine and Apple's powerful media engine. M2 Pro brings pro performance to Mac mini for the first time, while M2 Pro and M2 Max take the game-changing performance and capabilities of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro even further.

"Only Apple is building SoCs like M2 Pro and M2 Max. They deliver incredible pro performance along with industry-leading power efficiency," said Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. "With an even more powerful CPU and GPU, support for a larger unified memory system, and an advanced media engine, M2 Pro and M2 Max represent astonishing advancements in Apple silicon."

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions today revealed the new PerfDrive technology on the Intel 700 series platform, which Integrates multiple GIGABYTE exclusive BIOS settings to allow users easily balance between different levels of performance, power consumption, and temperature according to their needs when using 13th gen Intel Core processors including i9-13900K CPU. In addition to the former released Instant 6 GHz, GIGABYTE PerfDrive technology also integrates newly developed BIOS settings of Optimization and Spec Enhance. Collaborating with the existing GCC software platform and GIGABYTE Ultra Durable design, GIGABYTE brings the most powerful 700 series platform with perfectly tuned motherboards in hardware, software, and firmware.

Enhanced by the supreme hardware design of power management, thermal, and stability, GIGABYTE Z790 motherboards not only smash the all-core overclocking world record on Cinebench R23 but also creates remarkable DDR overclocking performance of DDR5 9300. Now GIGABYTE PerfDrive technology makes it easy and attainable for users to enjoy the optimal performance of the Z790 platform, and benefit from the easy-tuning for 13th gen K-SKU Core CPUs on the B760 platform. Based on optimized HW design with multiple GIGABYTE unique BIOS setting, PerfDrive technology satisfy various users' needs with its intuitive graphical interface in the GIGABYTE UEFI BIOS.

SK hynix Inc. announced today that it will showcase a number of its core and brand-new products at the CES 2023, the most influential tech event in the world taking place in Las Vegas from Jan. 5th through Jan. 8th. The products, introduced under the theme of the "Green Digital Solution," as part of the SK Group's "Carbon-Free Future" campaign, are expected to attract Big Tech customers and experts given the significant improvement in performance and energy efficiency compared with the previous generation as well as the effect of lessening the impact on the environment.

Attention on energy-efficient memory chips has been on the rise as global tech companies pursue products that process data faster, while consuming less energy. SK hynix is confident that its products to be displayed at the CES 2023 will meet customers' such needs with outstanding performance per watt and performance. The core product put forward at the show is PS1010 E3.S, an eSSD product composed of multiple 176-layer 4D NAND that supports the fifth generation of the PCIe interface.

BAPCo, a non-profit consortium of leading PC hardware manufacturers, released SYSmark 30, the latest generation of the premier PC benchmark that measures and compares system performance using real-world applications and workloads.

The Office Application scenario features updated workloads for popular office suite-style applications. The General Productivity scenario features tasks like web browsing, file compression, and application installation. The new Photo Editing scenarios measure the responsiveness of creative photo management and manipulation usage models. The Advanced Content Creation scenario heavily uses photo and video editing applications, including multitasking.

YMTC today at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2022 unveiled its X3-9070 TLC 3D NAND flash powered by Xtacking 3.0 architecture. Since its debut show at FMS 2018, YMTC's Xtacking technology has become a hallmark of the company's vision for innovation, and the approach to hybrid bonding has been widely recognized as one of the key enablers of the industry's future growth. Built out to be a common growth platform that drives value and innovation in the semiconductor ecosystem, YMTC's Xtacking 3.0 architecture opens up a world of opportunities for diversified applications in 5G, AloT, and beyond.

From 1.0 to 3.0, YMTC's Xtacking technology, a heterogeneous 3D integration architecture, has established a proven track record of success, as evidenced by a diverse portfolio of Xtacking NAND-based system solutions, including SATA III, PCIe Gen3 & Gen4 SSDs, as well as eMMC & UFS for mobile and embedded applications, garnering recognition from leading OEMs.

According to TrendForce's research, the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries rose by 6% QoQ to US$35.21 billion for 3Q22 as the release of the new iPhone series during the second half of the year generated significant stock-up activities across Apple's supply chain. However, the global economy shows weak performances, and factors such as China's policy on containing COVID-19 outbreaks and high inflation continue to impact consumer confidence. As a result, peak-season demand in the second half of the year has been underwhelming, and inventory consumption is proceeding slower than anticipated. This situation has led to substantial downward corrections to foundry orders as well. For 4Q22, TrendForce forecasts that the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries will register a QoQ decline, thereby terminating the boom of the past two years—when there was an uninterrupted trend of QoQ revenue growth.

Regarding individual foundries' performances in 3Q22, the group of the top five was led by TSMC, followed by Samsung, UMC, GlobalFoundries, and SMIC. Their collective global market share (in revenue terms) came to 89.6%. Most foundries were directly impacted by clients slowing down their stock-up activities or significantly correcting down their orders. Only TSMC was able to make a notable gain due to Apple's strong stock-up demand for the SoCs deployed in this year's new iPhone models. TSMC saw its revenue rise by 11.1% QoQ to US$20.16 billion, and the corresponding market share expanded to 56.1%. The growth was mainly attributed to the ≤7 nm nodes, whose share in the foundry's revenue had kept climbing and reached 54% in the third quarter. Conversely, Samsung actually experienced a slight QoQ drop of 0.1% in foundry revenue even though it had also benefited from the component demand related to the new iPhone series. Partially impacted by the weakening of the Korean won, Samsung's market share fell to 15.5%.

Apple's ongoing pursuit of leading performance in custom silicon packages continues with each new generation of Apple Silicon. Today, we have alleged Geekbench performance figures of the upcoming M2 Max chip, designed for the upcoming Mac devices. Featuring the same configuration with two E-cores and eight P-cores, the chip is rumored to utilize TSMC's 3 nm design. However, that is yet to be confirmed by Apple, so we don't have the exact information. In the GB5 single-thread test, the CPU set a single-core performance target of 1899 points, while the multi-core score was 8737. While last year's M1 Max chips can reach 1787 single-core and 12826 multi-core scores, these configurations are benchmarked in a Mac Studio, which has better cooling and allows for higher clocks to be achieved.

Apples to apples (pun intended) comparison with the M1 Max chip inside of a MacBook Pro version with presumably the same cooling capacity, which gets 1497 single-core and 11506 multi-core score, the new M2 Max chip is 19.4% faster in single-core results. Multi-core improvements should follow, and this M2 Max result should be different from the final product. We await more benchmarks to confirm this performance increase and the correct semiconductor manufacturing node.

The 60th edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system is still the only true exascale machine on the list.

With an HPL score of 1.102 EFlop/s, the Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) did not improve upon the score it reached on the June 2022 list. That said, Frontier's near-tripling of the HPL score received by second-place winner is still a major victory for computer science. On top of that, Frontier demonstrated a score of 7.94 EFlop/s on the HPL-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and it relies on AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processor. The system has 8,730,112 cores and a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.