AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2020 of $1.93 billion, operating income of $173 million, net income of $157 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.13. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $233 million, net income was $216 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.18. "We delivered strong second quarter results, led by record notebook and server processor sales as Ryzen and EPYC revenue more than doubled from a year ago," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "Despite some macroeconomic uncertainty, we are raising our full-year revenue outlook as we enter our next phase of growth driven by the acceleration of our business in multiple markets."

MSI has found some ways to reduce pricing on their Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming X series, and has materialized these savings on a new product. The RX 5600 XT Gaming M(X) sees itself as a lower-priced variant of the card, featuring 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory and making use of a cooler that is more alike the Armor series we know from the RX 580 models.

The new graphics card still features a dual-fan cooling solution, dual 8-pin power connectors, and I/O is assured by 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI. The Gaming M features slightly lower clocks than the Gaming or Gaming X series: 1130 MHz Base, 1375 MHz Game, and 1560 MHz Boost clocks is the quoted transistor ticking speed. The packaging still features the red stylized X employed on MSI's Gaming X series though, which may cause some confusion when it comes to shop around.

HKEPC's retail market scouts discovered that some AMD Ryzen 5 3600 desktop processors are shipping in paperboard boxes meant for the company's Ryzen 3000G series "Picasso" desktop APUs. Depending on factors such as iGPU, or the size of the included cooling solution, AMD uses common box sizes among various processor models. The largest cube-shaped boxes hold SKUs with the largest Wraith Prism RGB coolers, a slightly smaller, through still cube-shaped box is meant for SKUs with the Wraith Spire. Smaller cuboid boxes are meant for SKUs that either have the smaller Wraith Stealth coolers, or completely exclude a cooling solution.

Much of the SKU differentiation comes from a prominent brand extension (3/5/7/9) motif on the front-face, besides the top label that lists out the model name, OPN, serial number, and doubles up as a security seal. Boxes for the company's APUs (processors with integrated graphics), however, have a prominent "processor with AMD Radeon graphics" chrome insert on the front- and top faces. The 3600 shipping in such a box could confuse some buyers, particularly those shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, as they'd expect an iGPU where none exists. It's only the SKU sticker on the top-face that has the cautionary note "discrete graphics required." Other retail boxes (meant for non-APU products) have this note prominently printed on the box.

The leading global motherboard, graphics card and mini PC manufacturer, ASRock, has launched new Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger Pro 6G OC three-fan graphics card. The Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger Pro 6G OC features ASRock's new styled shroud design with upgraded cooling fins, AMD's second-generation Radeon RX 5600 XT 7 nm GPU, plus 6 GB 192-bit GDDR6 memory and PCI Express 4.0 bus. The ASRock Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger Pro 6G OC graphics card provides excellent overclocking settings, which enables users to enjoy a smooth 1080p gaming experience.

The ASRock Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger Pro 6G OC adopts AMD's second-generation Radeon RX 5600 XT GPU. With factory default GPU base/game/boost clock settings, this new graphics card can reach 1420/1615/up to 1750 MHz respectively. The boost clock setting is 4% higher than the AMD's standard settings. Furthermore, the clock frequency of GDDR6 memory is set as 1750 MHz, which is 17% faster than AMD's memory default value - 1500 MHz. The ASRock Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger Pro 6G OC is equipped with 3-fan cooler, 6 GB 192-bit GDDR6 memory and latest PCI Express 4.0 bus standard; ideally partnering with AMD Ryzen 3000 CPU systems and ASRock B550 and X570 motherboards. These premium specifications allow Radeon RX 5600 XT Challenger Pro 6G OC graphics card to have outstanding performance and bring users excellent 1080p gaming experience.

AMD today announced availability of the new AMD Radeon Pro 5600M mobile GPU for the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Designed to deliver desktop-class graphics performance in an efficient mobile form factor, this new GPU powers computationally heavy workloads, enabling pro users to maximize productivity while on-the-go.

The AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU is built upon industry-leading 7 nm process technology and advanced AMD RDNA architecture to power a diverse range of pro applications, including video editing, color grading, application development, game creation and more. With 40 compute units and 8 GB of ultra-fast, low-power High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU delivers superfast performance and excellent power efficiency in a single GPU package.

AMD is updating the Radeon logo yet again, as spotted by Casmoden on Twitter. The new logo was tucked away in the main branding screen of a "Godfall" trailer that revealed the game's Holiday 2020 release date. Tucked away besides developer- and console platform logos is the new AMD Radeon logo, indicating optimization for AMD GPUs. The new logo features a Ryzen logo typeset (resembling the ESPN logo, with floating tops of the letters E, R, and D). In a March 2020 tweet, AMD Radeon RX group head Scott Herkelman mentioned that the lack of logo alignment between Ryzen, EPYC, and Radeon had been "bugging them." For reference, there's the current AMD Radeon logo in a company slide. AMD could likely debut the new Radeon logo with its upcoming RDNA2-based "Big Navi" graphics card that is expected to be announced in September.

The Polaris architecture was debuted by AMD in the RX 400 series almost 4 years ago, since then AMD has released two new generations of graphics processors, Vega and Navi. It seems that the Polaris architecture will be living on a bit longer with the release of the ASUS Phoenix Radeon 550 2GB GPU, based on the Polaris 12 GPU.

This product may seem familiar and that's because ASUS released the Phoenix Radeon RX 550 back in 2017, the new Phoenix Radeon 550 uses a different memory configuration of 2 GB GDDR5 / 64-bit / 6 Gbps which is a significant step down from the 2/4 GB GDDR5 / 128-bit / 7 Gbps of the Phoenix Radeon RX 550 especially considering that card was released 3 years ago. This new card seems to have been available to OEM's for some time and is only now making it's way to retail at a hopefully cheap price.

BIOSTAR, a leading brand of motherboards, graphics cards, and storage devices, today introduces the FX9830M SoC motherboard with a built-in AMD Bristol Ridge, 7th generation Quad Core processor. Highly Popular for their SoC motherboard range, BIOSTAR has yet again delivered a highly versatile motherboard catering to a variety of user requirements such as small business owners who are looking for a reliable and affordable solution that has the capability of running daily business operations with ease.

The BIOSTAR FX9830M SoC motherboard is arguably one of the best choices amongst its rivals, designed with a built-in Quad Core AMD FX-9830P processor and support for AMD Radeon R7 Graphics. It is undoubtedly a great investment to make when considering your next business workstation that can take advantage of the powerful multi-core platform and all its additional features.

Kaby Lake-G was the result of one of the strangest collaborations in the industry - though that may not be a just way of looking at it. It made total sense at the time - a product that combined the world's best CPU design with one of the foremost graphics architectures seems a recipe for success. However, the Intel-AMD collaboration was an unexpected one, as these two rivals were never expected to look eye to eye in any sort of meaningful way. Kaby Lake-G was revolutionary in how it combined both AMD and Intel IP in an EMIB-capable design, but it wasn't one built to last.

Now, after Intel has announced a stop to product manufacturing and order capacity, it's come the time for AMD to pull driver support. The company's latest Windows 10 version 2004 update-compatible drivers don't install on Kaby Lake-G powered systems, citing an unsupported hardware configuration. Tom's Hardware contacted Intel, who said they're working with AMD to bring back "Radeon graphics driver support to Intel NUC 8 Extreme Mini PCs (previously codenamed "Hades Canyon")." AMD, however, still hasn't commented on the story.

Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices has become the world's highest-paid CEO, according to a recent survey from The Associated Press on CEO compensation. Lisa Su's pay package was valued at $58.5 million after some extremely impressive company performance over her last five years as CEO on the back of the wild success of EPYC, Ryzen, and Radeon. This pay package comprised a base salary of $1 million, a performance bonus of $1.2 million, $56 million in stocks. This makes Lisa Su the first woman to become the highest-paid CEO and one of only 20 women on the list, versus 309 men.

Linux kernel patches reference an AMD "Sienna Cichlid" GPU, which Phoronix believes could be the fabled "Big Navi" GPU. We know this is a GPU and not a headless CDNA scalar processor as the patches include code for VCN 3.0 video encoding capabilities (RDNA2's media engine), and DCN3 (RDNA2's display engine), which constitute bulk that AMD could get rid of on CDNA chips. The unusual internal codename could reference AMD's next generation RDNA2 architecture based flagship GPU, armed with 80 compute units (5,120 stream processors), Radeon Intersection Engines (accelerate real-time ray-tracing). The codename comes across as unusual, but AMD does tend to use wacky internal codenames to detect sources of leaks.

Adobe is releasing an important feature update to Premiere Pro later this week, which promises to introduce significant improvements to video encoding performance by better leveraging GPU acceleration. The new version 14.2 of Premiere Pro will leverage NVENC to boost encoding by over 5 times compared to CPU. The suite leveraged shaders to accelerate video effects and improving export times, but until now hadn't leveraged NVIDIA's hardware encoder. For machines with GeForce and Quadro GPUs, this means improved export times on H.264, H.265, and HEVC codecs. Without getting into specifics, Adobe mentioned that Premiere Pro will tap into video hardware acceleration capabilities of AMD Radeon GPUs, too.

Update 07:55 UTC: Adobe posted release notes of the latest version 14.2 of Premiere Pro. The list of system requirements needed for hardware-accelerated H.264 and HEVC encoding appears vague beyond pointing out that you need a compatible graphics solution. The list of compatible GPUs includes a wide selection of NVIDIA GPUs covering both its professional Quadro and consumer GeForce brands. On the AMD front, however, only the professional Radeon Pro SKUs are listed, and no consumer Radeon RX series SKUs.

MAINGEAR, an award-winning PC system integrator of custom gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations, today launched the MAINGEAR Pro WS, a highly-versatile workstation designed to meet the needs of professional creatives and content producers, pairing best-in-class hardware configurations with MAINGEAR's lifetime customer support to deliver maximum performance and mission-critical reliability. The MAINGEAR Pro WS is available now in customizable and pre-configured systems for several leading creative applications, including "Recommended By Luxion (Makers of KeyShot)" MAINGEAR Pro WS configurations for 3D rendering.

AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2020 of $1.79 billion, operating income of $177 million, net income of $162 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.14. On a non-GAAP* basis, operating income was $236 million, net income was $222 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.18.

"We executed well in the first quarter, navigating the challenging environment to deliver 40 percent year-over-year revenue growth and significant gross margin expansion driven by our Ryzen and EPYC processors," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "While we expect some uncertainty in the near-term demand environment, our financial foundation is solid and our strong product portfolio positions us well across a diverse set of resilient end markets. We remain focused on strong business execution while ensuring the safety of our employees and supporting our customers, partners and communities. Our strategy and long-term growth plans are unchanged."

AMD has today released an update to its Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020, in the so-called edition 20.4.2. The new driver revision brings a heap of features and improvements that fix a lot of issues that users have experienced. AMD now brings support for titles like Gears Tactics and Predator: Hunting Grounds. Some of the fixes are big ones for RX Vega cards like the resolvent of system hang or black screen when running Folding@Home while also running an application using hardware acceleration of video content. Others include a fix for a system crash or hang that may be experienced when using the Edge browser to play Netflix content. For a full list of features and improvements please check out the list below.

DOWNLOAD: Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.4.2

AMD is preparing to launch its next-generation of Radeon Instinct GPUs based on the new CDNA architecture designed for enterprise deployments. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker _rogame (@_rogame) we have some information about the configuration of the upcoming Radeon Instinct MI100 "Arcturus" server GPU. Previously, we obtained the BIOS of the Arcturus GPU that showed a configuration of 128 Compute Units (CUs), which resulted in 8,192 of CDNA cores. That configuration had a specific setup of 1334 MHz GPU clock, SoC frequency of 1091 MHz, and memory speed of 1000 MHz. However, there was another GPU test board spotted which featured a bit different specification.

The reported configuration is an Arcturus GPU with 120 CUs, resulting in a CDNA core count of 7,680 cores. These cores are running at frequencies of 878 MHz for the core clock, 750 MHz SoC clock, and a surprising 1200 MHz memory clock. While the SoC and core clocks are lower than the previous report, along with the CU count, the memory clock is up by 200 MHz. It is important to note that this is just a test board/variation of the MI100, and actual frequencies should be different.

Microsoft's flight simulator, an upcoming game designed to bring real-life scenarios of flying an airplane, just got a list of system requirements needed to run a game. To play with Flight Simulator, you would at least need to have a quad-core CPU like AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-4460 equipped system, along with 8 GB of RAM. For graphics, you would need a GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM, where the requirement is either AMD Radeon RX 570 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 GPU. Another interesting observation is the requirement of 150 GB of drive space, meaning that this game will be pretty big. Internet connection needs to be 5 Mbps at minimum, and as you up the resolution and graphics, you would need a faster connection. You can check out the entire table below.

The need for incrementally faster connection comes out of one reason - adaptive streaming. The game looks stunning, and if you wish to play at the highest quality, parts of the game will be rendered in the cloud. Microsoft is using its Azure infrastructure to help and render parts of the game and stream it down to your PC. This ensures that your PC is capable of playing the game and Microsoft is showing how they can tap the power of cloud for uses like this.

Today, HP Inc. unveiled its newest Z by HP mobile workstation and HP ENVY portfolio - designed for creators who push the envelope of what's possible. The HP ZBook Studio, HP ZBook Create, and the HP ENVY 15 are the latest additions to the HP Create Ecosystem, which launched at Adobe MAX in 2019.

The powerful line-up enables all levels of creators, including consumers, prosumers and professionals, to capture, create, and bring to life digital concepts and ideas that can be shared, enjoyed, and experienced. In the past, creators had to choose between heavy workstations or bulky gaming devices to get the power they require for work and play. Today, HP is pushing the boundaries of engineering and creative productivity by allowing photographers, vloggers, graphic designers, architects, film makers, and everyone in between, to achieve what was never thought possible.

AMD today announced in the form of a blog post that its upcoming graphics cards based on RDNA 2 architecture will feature support for Microsoft's latest DirectX 12 Ultimate API. "With this architecture powering both the next generation of AMD Radeon graphics cards and the forthcoming Xbox Series X gaming console, we've been working very closely with Microsoft to help move gaming graphics to a new level of photorealism and smoothness thanks to the four key DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics features -- DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Mesh Shaders, and Sampler Feedback." - said AMD in the blog.

Reportedly, Microsoft and AMD have worked closely to enable this feature set and provide the best possible support for RDNA 2 based hardware, meaning that future GPUs and consoles are getting the best possible integration of the new API standard.

Microsoft Thursday released the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo. This is not a new API with any new features, but rather a differentiator for graphics cards and game consoles that support four key modern features of DirectX 12. This helps consumers recognize the newer and upcoming GPUs, and tell them apart from some older DirectX 12 capable GPUs that were released in the mid-2010s. For a GPU to be eligible for the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo, it must feature hardware acceleration for ray-tracing with the DXR API; must support Mesh Shaders, Variable Rate Shading (VRS), and Sampler Feedback (all of the four). The upcoming Xbox Series X console features this logo by default. Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo isn't meant as a compatibility barrier, and that these games will work on older hardware, too.

As it stands, the "Navi"-based Radeon RX 5000 series are "obsolete", just like some Turing cards from the GeForce GTX 16-series. At this time, the only shipping product which features the logo is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series and the TITAN RTX, as they support all the above features.

AMD Financial Analyst Day presents an opportunity for AMD to talk straight with the finance industry about the company's current financial health, and a taste of what's to come. Guidance and product teasers made during this time are usually very accurate due to the nature of the audience. In this live blog, we will post information from the Financial Analyst Day 2020 as it unfolds.20:59 UTC: The event has started as of 1 PM PST. CEO Dr Lisa Su takes stage.

AMD has been on a roll in both consumer, professional, and exascale computing environments, and it has just snagged itself another hugely important contract. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has just announced the winners for their next-gen, exascale supercomputer that aims to be the world's fastest. Dubbed "El Capitan", the new supercomputer will be powered by AMD's next-gen EPYC Genoa processors (Zen 4 architecture) and Radeon GPUs. This is the first such exascale contract where AMD is the sole purveyor of both CPUs and GPUs, with AMD's other design win with EPYC in the Cray Shasta being paired with NVIDIA graphics cards.

El Capitan will be a $600 million investment to be deployed in late 2022 and operational in 2023. Undoubtedly, next-gen proposals from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA were presented, with AMD winning the shootout in a big way. While initially the DOE projected El Capitan to provide some 1.5 exaflops of computing power, it has now revised their performance goals to a pure 2 exaflop machine. El Capitan willl thus be ten times faster than the current leader of the supercomputing world, Summit.

AMD has just re-released Radeon Software 20.1.3 as WHQL. These drivers are identical to the Adrenalin 20.1.3 Beta drivers posted earlier this month, with the only difference being WHQL certification. It looks like AMD's driver team is hard at work fixing the various issues reported. 20.1.3 WHQL is an important release as it now gives RX 5600 XT owners a WHQL driver — previously they had to resort to beta drivers to power their new purchase.

Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.1.4 Beta was released just days ago and does include additional changes that aren't integrated in 20.1.3 WHQL yet, because Microsoft's WHQL certification process takes some time. A few days ago we reported that AMD silently patched a driver security issue with 20.1.1 Beta, maybe that's a reason, too, why we're seeing a WHQL version today.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.1.3 WHQL

CORSAIR, a world leader in high-performance gaming peripherals and enthusiast components, today announced its new models of stunning AMD-powered gaming PCs, the CORSAIR VENGEANCE 6100 Series. Starting with the VENGEANCE 6180 and VENGEANCE 6182, these cutting-edge gaming PCs combine the power of 3rd generation AMD Ryzen processors and AMD Radeon RX 5700 Series graphics with high-quality CORSAIR components, all in a compact cube form factor that's 33% smaller than a standard mid-tower and brimming with fully customizable RGB lighting.

Since launching in 2018, the CORSAIR VENGEANCE family has emerged as one of the most awarded and sought-after gaming PCs on the market thanks to its impressive power, distinctive style, and deeply embedded customizable RGB lighting. Both the CORSAIR VENGEANCE 6180 and 6182 incorporate a liquid-cooled AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU with eight cores and 16 threads, an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8 GB graphics card, and 16 GB of CORSAIR VENGEANCE RGB PRO DDR4-3200 Memory. Both models are cooled by a CORSAIR Hydro Series H100i RGB PLATINUM Liquid CPU cooler and powered by a CORSAIR RM650 80 PLUS Gold power supply.

AMD today unveiled AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition, the next generation of its software suite for AMD Radeon graphics, providing gamers, creators and enthusiasts with a unique set of features and capabilities that deliver unparalleled visual fidelity and phenomenal gaming experiences. Featuring a fully redesigned gaming application, AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition puts powerful capabilities at gamers' fingertips. It includes the new Radeon Boost feature, bringing enhanced performance and fluidity to fast-motion gameplay, new Integer Display Scaling technology that rejuvenates old games for modern displays, as well as significant enhancements to the acclaimed AMD Link mobile application, to Radeon Image Sharpening, Radeon Anti-Lag, and much more.

Our detailed write-up, including performance testing on Navi, Vega and Polaris can be found here.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 19.12.2 WHQL"With each Radeon Software release, we laser-focus on bringing innovative features gamers demand, significant performance improvements, and the ultimate in software stability and reliability," said Andrej Zdravkovic, corporate vice president of software development at AMD. "AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition takes gaming on Radeon graphics to the next level with breathtaking visual quality, faster performance, and a host of unique, must-have features that dramatically improve the overall user experience."