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.

Today, MLCommons published results of its industry AI performance benchmark in which both the 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor (code-named Sapphire Rapids) and Habana Gaudi 2 dedicated deep learning accelerator logged impressive training results.


"I'm proud of our team's continued progress since we last submitted leadership results on MLPerf in June. Intel's 4th gen Xeon Scalable processor and Gaudi 2 AI accelerator support a wide array of AI functions and deliver leadership performance for customers who require deep learning training and large-scale workloads." Sandra Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group

In what can only be called an unusual move, several Chinese fabless chip makers—such as Alibaba and Biren Technology—who manufacturers at TSMC, are looking at running their chips slower. The reason for this is that they're trying to circumvent the US sanctions against Chinese chip makers. It should be noted that these are chips that have already taped out and gone into sample production, such as Biren's BR100 GPU.As reported earlier today, Alibaba even had one of its chips delisted from the official SPEC ranking, due to being unavailable and it's possible that it's one of the chips that's affected by the US sanctions.

Considering that the Chinese chip makers are dependent on the same cutting edge nodes at TSMC as the likes of Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm etc. it would potentially lead to more capacity for these companies at TSMC. According to the report by the Financial Times, Biren has had to stop shipments of its GPUs, as the company is going to have to prove that its chips don't violate the US export control restrictions. Apparently the rules to work out if a chip falls under the US sanctions or not are anything but clear. One metric is apparently based on the bidirectional transfer rate, which is capped at below 600 GB/s between chips, but the tricky part is that this metric can be calculated in several different ways. As such, Biren has dropped the transfer rate from 640 to 576 GB/s according to the Financial Times. The sanctions are likely to cause longer term concerns for TSMC as well, as the company is likely to lose several big customers for its cutting edge nodes, at least for the time being.

Intel has been busy briefing its customers about its 13th gen Core processors and courtesy of a reader over at Videocardz, we now know a little bit more about Intel's positioning of its Core i9-13900K processor. In the slides, Intel is pitching its upcoming flagship CPU against AMD's current flagship, the Ryzen 9 7950X, which is hardly surprising, since it'll be its main competitor. Intel put the two CPUs through 12 game benchmarks using an unknown graphics card and on average, the Core i9-13900K leads by around 11 percent. As always, take the numbers with a sprinkle of salt, especially as we don't know the system configuration, or even what resolution was used, but we'd hazard a guess that it's 1080p or lower. Intel only allowed for one game win for AMD, with Intel being as much as 22 percent ahead in The Riftbreaker.

Intel also claims to lead in content creation, but this doesn't appear to be quite true, as AMD either comes out on top or ties with Intel in all of the Pugetbench tests. Intel is somewhat ahead in AutoCAD Catalyst and a healthy 16 percent ahead in Autodesk Revit, but as we know, the type of scene being rendered can have a huge impact in these types of tests, as we've seen from both camps. On the plus side, here it appears that content creators shouldn't have to worry too much about which CPU is in their system, as both should be performing exceptionally well. Intel is set to launch its 13th gen Core processors tomorrow, so it won't be long until we'll have some third party benchmarks comparing the two CPUs.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-core processor exhibits some strange behavior with regards to the max boost frequency spread among its cores. A multi-chip module with two 8-core CCDs (CPU complex dies); we noticed early on in our review that the cores located in CCD-1 boost to a higher frequency than the ones in CCD-2, with differences as high as 300 MHz. CapFrameX noticed that when CCD-2 is disabled on a machine running Windows 11 22H2, the processor actually puts out higher gaming performance, by as much as 10%. This is mainly because the cores in CCD-2, with a lower maximum boost frequency no longer handle processing load from the game; and with CCD-2 disabled, CCD-1 has all of the processor's power budget—up to 230 W—to itself, giving it much higher boost residency across its 8 cores.

More than 20 million Xfinity households across the country will soon be waking up to faster Internet, thanks to Xfinity. The country's largest gigabit network is boosting speeds on its most popular plans beginning this week, providing customers with an even better connectivity experience as they stream the latest 4K blockbuster, game online, videoconference, and more, all at the same time. With this latest round of speed increases, Xfinity continues to provide unparalleled value compared to other providers - including significantly faster speeds and better reliability than mobile and 5G Home Internet.

The announcement comes on the heels of Comcast's launch of the nation's largest- and fastest-ever multi-gig deployment that will reach more than 50 million homes and businesses with 2 Gbps speeds before the end of 2025. "The number of devices connected in Xfinity households has skyrocketed 12X since 2018, and the need for fast, reliable, and secure Internet will continue to grow," said Bill Connors, President of Xfinity, Comcast Cable. "That's why today, Xfinity is increasing speeds for most of our customers across the country."

When AMD announced that the company would deliver the world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier, the company also took a massive task to provide a machine capable of producing one ExaFLOP of total sustained ability to perform computing tasks. While the system is finally up and running, making a machine of that size run properly is challenging. In the world of High-Performance Computing, getting the hardware is only a portion of running the HPC center. In an interview with InsideHPC, Justin Whitt, program director for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), provided insight into what it is like to run the world's fastest supercomputer and what kinds of issues it is facing.

The Frontier system is powered by AMD EPYC 7A53s "Trento" 64-core 2.0 GHz CPUs and Instinct MI250X GPUs. Interconnecting everything is the HPE (Cray) Slingshot 64-port switch, which is responsible for sending data in and out of compute blades. The recent interview points out a rather interesting finding: exactly AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs and Slingshot interconnect cause hardware troubles for the Frontier. "It's mostly issues of scale coupled with the breadth of applications, so the issues we're encountering mostly relate to running very, very large jobs using the entire system … and getting all the hardware to work in concert to do that," says Justin Whitt. In addition to the limits of scale "The issues span lots of different categories, the GPUs are just one. A lot of challenges are focused around those, but that's not the majority of the challenges that we're seeing," he said. "It's a pretty good spread among common culprits of parts failures that have been a big part of it. I don't think that at this point that we have a lot of concern over the AMD products. We're dealing with a lot of the early-life kind of things we've seen with other machines that we've deployed, so it's nothing too out of the ordinary."

KIOXIA America, Inc. is at Intel Innovation this week to demonstrate its CM7 Series NVMe SSDs that deliver next-generation levels of performance to enterprise and data center workloads. The KIOXIA CM7 family is designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.51-inch form factors. These drives double performance from the prior generation and offer an expanded set of form factor options, larger capacities, and advanced features.

Intel Innovation is a technology showcase event that spotlights the tools, training and community created to empower developers to create what's next. CM7 demos will be conducted in the KIOXIA kiosk located in Intel Innovation's PCIe 5.0 and CXL Ecosystems Zone on the show floor of San Jose's McEnery Convention Center. KIOXIA will present a video showing its PCIe 5.0 drives demonstrating high performance, low latency and high bandwidth, in a 12th Gen Intel Core processor-based workstation. CM7 performance of up to 14 gigabytes per second sequential read throughput, utilizing the full bandwidth of PCIe 5.0 x4 speed, will be shown.

If you're running Windows 11 and installed the 22H2 update that was released recently, you might've noticed poor performance in games or some applications that rely on your NVIDIA graphics card. NVIDIA has released a fix that should resolve these issues and you can find a link to it below, where you can find an update for the GeForce Experience, which in turn will apply the patch. Exactly what caused these performance issues is unclear and NVIDIA hasn't provided any explanation as to what their fix resolves. This is currently a beta release, but NVIDIA is expecting to release a proper version later this week.

Last year Cooler Master unveiled a milestone in the history of contemporary technology: the very first small form factor power supply in the market with 850 W, V SFX Gold series. Today, Cooler Master takes the successor and pushes the limit to the maximum. Introducing V SFX Platinum, a series of small form factor power supply focused on high density and maximum power. While increasing the efficiency rate from Gold to Platinum, we also added ATX 3.0 and PCI-e Gen 5 connector so even with the Mini-ITX build; this will be your last stop when choosing the right power supply.

High Density / Performance-Focused
The V SFX Platinum comes with 2 different wattages: 1100 W and 1300 W targeting Mini-ITX system builders who wants to go bold with their setup, but doesn't have enough juice from the power supply. It also comes with a free SFX-ATX bracket that unlocks the limitations between each form factors, giving end-users more freedom and potential builds in the future. The V SFX Platinum are built with Full Bridge LLC design, quiet 92 mm silent fan and 100% Japanese capacitors. By adding PCIe Gen 5 connector, V SFX Platinum can unlock it's true potential and power up all Nvidia RTX 40 series GPU in the future.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, is announcing its most advanced GPU server, incorporating eight NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Due to its advanced airflow design, the new high-end GPU system will allow increased inlet temperatures, reducing a data center's overall Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) while maintaining the absolute highest performance profile. In addition, Supermicro is expanding its GPU server lineup with this new Universal GPU server, which is already the largest in the industry. Supermicro now offers three distinct Universal GPU systems: the 4U,5U, and new 8U 8GPU server. The Universal GPU platforms support both current and future Intel and AMD CPUs -- up to 400 W, 350 W, and higher.

"Supermicro is leading the industry with an extremely flexible and high-performance GPU server, which features the powerful NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPU," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO, of Supermicro. "This new server will support the next generation of CPUs and GPUs and is designed with maximum cooling capacity using the same chassis. We constantly look for innovative ways to deliver total IT Solutions to our growing customer base."

The latest Community Update 1 patch of "Dying Light: Stay Human" adds support for the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0) performance enhancement. This adds several more quality-performance presets that improve visuals over FSR 1.0 at a given frame-rate, or improve frame-rate at a given quality-level. The update also improves the game's memory-management of the GPU's video memory in DirectX 12 mode, which should benefit features such as real-time ray tracing. There are other minor fixes for SSAO and TAA temporal anti-aliasing.

Corsair decided it was time to start teasing its upcoming MP700 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, although the company didn't bother providing any images of the drive itself, or any specifications in the teaser. However, Corsair did provide some sequential performance figures, which end up being impressive and disappointing at the same time. The MP700 is said to offer sequential read speeds of up to 10 GB/s or 10,000 MB/s if you prefer and sequential write speeds of 9.5 GB/s. These are obviously very fast speeds, but quite far from what the PCIe 5.0 can deliver and the performance figures are only a bit faster than the best PCIe 4.0 drives. It's likely that we'll see better performance from second generation controllers, just as we did with PCIe 4.0 SSDs, as this gives both the SSD controller makers and the SSD makers a chance to refresh their products a year or two down the line.

SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. ("SMART"), a division of SGH and a global leader in memory solutions, solid-state drives, and hybrid storage products announces its SMART Zefr Memory, a proprietary process that eliminates more than 90% of memory reliability failures and optimizes memory subsystems for maximum uptime. System start-up delays are frequently attributed to memory errors. These failures reduce system efficiency and may also lead to higher maintenance costs and lower system yield rates. These failures reduce system efficiency and may also lead to higher maintenance costs and lower system yield rates. SMART Zefr Memory has been tested under real-world conditions to identify and filter out marginal components that may undermine memory reliability.

SMART Zefr Memory uses a proprietary screening process developed by SMART that when performed on memory modules ensures the industry's highest levels of uptime and reliability. SMART Zefr Memory is ideally suited for data centers, hyperscalers, high performance computing (HPC) platforms, and other environments that run large memory applications and depend on uptime for customers.

MaxLinear Inc. today announced the availability of Panther III, the latest in the company's Panther series of storage accelerators. The company is showcasing this product at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA, August 2 - 4. Booth 111. Businesses need immediate access to larger and larger amounts of data and, at the same time, are faced with security and CAPEX costs challenges. With its 16 nanometer (nm) DPU architecture, Panther III provides breakthrough data reduction, encryption, deduplication, and data protection and sets a new standard in storage acceleration with a high throughput of 200 Gbps and ultra-low single-pass transformation latency.

Panther III opens new opportunities within the storage market, including all-flash-array and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) systems. As with previous generations of Panther products, Panther III offers powerful data reduction technology that intelligently offloads the CPU to open all tiers of storage to their full bandwidth potential with no CPU or software limitations. These capabilities enable intelligent and faster dataset delivery, high-performance analytics, and improved workload accuracy in fast-growing Edge to disaggregated computing of the public cloud.

[Editor's Note: We Reviewed Razer DeathStalker V2 Pro Optical Keyboard here.]

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced the return of the acclaimed DeathStalker keyboard in the form of the new DeathStalker V2 Pro, DeathStalker V2 Pro Tenkeyless, and DeathStalker V2.

With a clean, low-profile design language running across the range, the new DeathStalker V2 line is ideal for gamers looking for a clutter-free desktop set-up. Boasting a sleek, low-profile design, the DeathStalker V2 line is all about high-profile performance, featuring both linear and clicky variants of the Razer Low-profile Optical Switches across the range. Adding to the premium experience are a slim-line aluminium top plate for superb durability, and laser-etched keycaps with an ultra-durable coating for even greater longevity.

It's been a busy couple of days when it comes to Intel and its Arc graphics cards, as not only has the company showed off the Arc A770—which looks identical to the Arc A750—but the company has also refuted that it was ever planning to release an Arc A780 card, despite the existence of the A380 and supposedly an A580. A leak with price brackets and performance tiering has also leaked, which gives us a much better understanding of how Intel is planning on positioning its Arc graphics cards versus NVIDIA and AMD and it doesn't look like Intel is as confident as it sounded just a few months ago.

LinusTechTips got the honour to reveal the Arc A770 card, although there appear to be minuscule differences to the physical appearance between it and the Arc A750. The only thing noticeable is a 3-pin header, possibly for some kind of RGB syncing, next to the 8- and 6-pin power connectors, something not present on the A750 card that Gamers Nexus showed off earlier this week. The good news is that the Arc A770 seems to be running cool, as the card was reportedly only hitting 69 degrees C during some hands-on time, although this will apparently be covered in a separate video next week.

Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc., all run their cloud divisions with a specific goal. To provide their hardware to someone else in a form called instance and have the user pay for it by the hour. However, instances are usually bound by a specific CPU and memory configuration, which you can not configure yourself. But instead, you can only choose from the few available options that are listed. For example, when selecting one virtual CPU core, you get two GB of RAM and can go as high as you want with CPU cores. However, the available RAM will also double, even though you might not need it. When renting an instance, the allocated CPU cores and memory are yours until the instance is turned off.

And it is precisely this that hyperscalers are dealing with. Many instances don't fully utilize their DRAM, making the whole data center usage inefficient. Microsoft Azure, one of the largest cloud providers, measured that 50% of all VMs never touch 50% of their rented memory. This makes memory stranded in a rented VM, making it unusable for anything else.

At Azure, we find that a major contributor to DRAM inefficiency is platform-level memory stranding. Memory stranding occurs when a server's cores are fully rented to virtual machines (VMs), but unrented memory remains. With the cores exhausted, the remaining memory is unrentable on its own, and is thus stranded. Surprisingly, we find that up to 25% of DRAM may become stranded at any given moment.

Kevin Glynn, aka "Uncle Webb," our associate software author behind popular utilities such as ThrottleStop and RealTemp, developed a new utility named Counter Control, which lets you monitor and log the performance counters of Intel Core processors since 2008 (Core "Nehalem"). During development for ThrottleStop, Kevin discovered a fascinating bug with Windows Defender, the built-in security software of Windows, which causes significantly higher performance impact on the processor than it should normally have. Of course a security software is bound to have some (small) performance impact during real-time protection, but this is much bigger.The first sign that something is happening is that HWiNFO will be reporting a reduced "Effective Clock" speed when the CPU is fully loaded. A much bigger problem is that when Defender is affected by the bug, performance of your machine will be significantly reduced. For example, a Core i9-10850K running at 5.00 GHz all-core loses 1000 Cinebench points (or 6%). Such a performance loss has been reported by owners of Intel Core 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th Gen, both desktop and mobile CPUs, on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. AMD processors are not affected.

Intel's semiconductors nodes have been quite controversial with the arrival of the 10 nm design. Years in the making, the node got delayed multiple times, and only recently did the general public get the first 10 nm chips. Today, at IEEE's annual VLSI Symposium, we get more details about Intel's upcoming nodes, called Intel 4. Previously referred to as a 7 nm process, Intel 4 is the company's first node to use EUV lithography accompanied by various technologies. The first thing when a new process node is discussed is density. Compared to Intel 7, Intel 4 will double the transistor count for the same area and enable 20% higher performing transistors.

Looking at individual transistor size, the new Intel 4 node represents a very tiny piece of silicon that is even smaller than its predecessor. With a Fin Pitch of 30 nm, Contact Gate Poly Pitch of 50 nm between gates, and Minimum Metal Pitch (M0) of 50 nm, the Intel 4 transistor is significantly smaller compared to the Intel 7 cell, listed in the table below. For scaling, Intel 4 provides double the number of transistors in the same area compared to Intel 7. However, this reasoning is applied only to logic. For SRAM, the new PDK provides 0.77 area reduction, meaning that the same SoC built on Intel 7 will not be half the size of Intel 4, as SRAM plays a significant role in chip design. The Intel 7 HP library can put 80 million transistors on a square millimeter, while Intel 4 HP is capable of 160 million transistors per square millimeter.

Supercomputing game has been chasing various barriers over the years. This has included MegaFLOP, GigaFLOP, TeraFLOP, PetaFLOP, and now ExaFLOP computing. Today, we are witnessing for the first time an introduction of an Exascale-level machine contained at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Called the Frontier, this system is not really new. We have known about its upcoming features for months now. What is new is the fact that it was completed and is successfully running at ORNL's facilities. Based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture, the system uses 3rd Gen AMD EPYC 64-core processors with a 2 GHz frequency. In total, the system has 8,730,112 cores that work in conjunction with AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs.

As of today's TOP500 supercomputers list, the system is overtaking Fugaku's spot to become the fastest supercomputer on the planet. Delivering a sustained HPL (High-Performance Linpack) score of 1.102 Exaflop/s, it features a 52.23 GigaFLOPs/watt power efficiency rating. In the HPL-AI metric, dedicated to measuring the system's AI capabilities, the Frontier machine can output 6.86 exaFLOPs at reduced precisions. This alone is, of course, not a capable metric for Exascale machines as AI works with INT8/FP16/FP32 formats, while the official results are measured in FP64 double-precision form. Fugaku, the previous number one, scores about 2 ExaFLOPs in HPL-AI while delivering "only" 442 PetaFlop/s in HPL FP64 benchmarks.

Today, Logitech expanded its Master Series with two new mechanical keyboards - the full-size MX Mechanical and minimalist MX Mechanical Mini - and MX Master 3S mouse. Logitech's Master Series brings advanced digital creators ultimate productivity tools, featuring high performance mechanical typing and precision tracking. "There is a growing community of software developers who fell in love with mechanical keyboards when they started playing games, and now they want the same feeling of precision and control with their professional desktop keyboard," said Tolya Polyanker, head of the MX Series for Creativity and Productivity at Logitech. "MX Mechanical combines the best of both - Logitech's gaming keyboard expertise with MX Master Series signature experiences."

MX Mechanical and MX Mechanical Mini offer the latest generation of low profile mechanical switches. Tactile Quiet (Brown) key switch makes it Logitech's quietest mechanical keyboard ever with an amazing mechanical typing feel. Clicky (Blue) and Linear (Red) switch options are also available in select markets. The keyboards are designed with dual-colored keycaps for an optimized peripheral view. Smart backlighting, in six lighting options, automatically adjusts brightness for ambient light and switches off when not needed for efficient battery consumption.

DeepCool, a global brand in designing and manufacturing high-performance computer components for enthusiasts worldwide, announces a highly compatible CPU air cooler that offers impressive heat dissipation power in a compact and efficient design. With a slim profile, the AK400 air cooler serves as a thermal solution that can easily fit into mainstream ATX/MATX system builds. the unique design of the matrix form fin-stack and the non-RGB cover top offers a special aesthetic value to particular users.

The DeepCool AK400 Performance CPU Cooler is highly compatible and offers impressive heat dissipation power of 220 W in a compact and efficient design. Four direct touch copper heat pipes quickly transfer heat away from the processor into a dense matrix fin array heat sink for effective cooling performance.