A Taiwanese PC hardware news outlet, Benchlife, has been talking to insider sources positioned within several of NVIDIA's add-in-board (AIB) partners - the author reports that these organizations are experiencing significant changeovers. The AIB informants indicate that production of GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti models is accelerating, following rumors of the older Ampere-based RTX 3060 Ti card being discontinued. The article's author was seeking further clarification and confirmation from industry insiders, given that most of the recent leaks have emerged from Chinese technology discussion boards. Forumites have posited that NVIDIA has stopped supplying its AIB partners with RTX 3060 Ti silicon. It is difficult to tell whether (via translation) the AIB tipsters have concluded that the older card is totally done for, but NVIDIA is prioritizing the launch of new products.

It would make sense for Team Green to clear the way for the much newer Ada Lovelace-based lineups, but their entry level RTX 3060 cards have remained firm favorites with PC hardware buyers, so it could be quite tricky to play catch up with succeeding product lines. NVIDIA's component suppliers have stated (back in mid-April) that RTX 4000-series GPU production was not ramping up, due to a possible slow uptake of existing cards - in particular the recently released RTX 4070. Given the vast popularity of budget graphics card models, it seems that NVIDIA is preparing to embrace that market segment once again with its latest offerings - due for launch at the end of this month.

Earlier today Nintendo released its financial/earning reports for the fiscal year ending March 2023, and company president Shuntaro Furukawa has briefed investors about sales forecasts, according to a report published by Bloomberg. Furukawa-san predicts that the Switch gaming console will only sell 15 million units over the next fiscal year - sales have been slowing down for a while according to Nintendo's figures, with almost 18 million units purchased throughout 2022-23. The numbers are still very impressive when you consider that Nintendo's flagship gaming platform has been on the market for just over six years - across that span of time, total unit sales have hit the 125.62 million mark.

Furukawa also informed shareholders about the prospect of a Switch console successor arriving within the next fiscal period - Bloomberg's article brings the bad news at this point - it seems that Nintendo is not anticipating a new hardware launch within that time frame. Nintendo's software release schedule - especially in regards to first party titles - looks very threadbare for the rest of the year. The much anticipated Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on Friday (May 12) followed by Pikmin 4 in July, but things look to be quiet after that - unless Nintendo has a few surprises lined up for June's preview event season. Rumors of a next generation Switch have been doing the rounds since 2020, back then a "Pro" model was often touted - fans later found out that Nintendo had simply refreshed the system with an OLED panel, some tweaks to chipset efficiency, and updated the docking system to modern output standards - this premium model hit the market in late 2021.

A couple of TPU readers will be happy to learn of more rumors relating to Sony's "in the works" PlayStation 5 Pro model - following on from last week's news about about a possible interim modular model - and curious commenters asking for additional information. Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson has been a notorious source of PS5-related leaks for a while - the aforementioned modular console variant has been leading topic for the guy and today he provides a small update on the matter: "You're probably already sick of hearing about the new PlayStation 5 with a detachable disc drive that should release later this year. Although reports have dubbed the new PlayStation 5 as the PS5 Slim, Insider Gaming understands that the console will be almost identical to the PlayStation 5 but feature a detachable disc drive. In fact, it's understood that the new PlayStation 5 will completely phase out the old design within a year."

His newly reformed and theorized PlayStation future timeline also contains an update about the PlayStation 5's "Pro" refresh - Sony is rumored to preparing this more powerful hardware variant for a Q4 2024 launch and Henderson insists that his past findings have been consistent and on point: "Our report in March was dismissed as being inaccurate by many when it was first reported and although the PlayStation 5 Pro could be canceled at any given time, Insider Gaming can report with a 100% degree of certainty that the PlayStation 5 Pro is currently in development." He claims that his industry sources have provided him with fresh batches of evidence: "Whilst we cannot report on any more specifics at this time, we understand that the first dev kit prototypes will be going to 1st party developers within the next couple of months, with 3rd party developers receiving them by the end of the year." Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are normally very guarded about development and prototype hardware, so very few developers (with access to these bits of kit) have been brave enough to break signed NDAs. Sony has once again chosen to be extremely secretive - no official information has been released about upcoming refreshed PS5 consoles or related accessories.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has filed a patent that is now viewable to the public - as spotted by SegmentNext today - and the newly registered device could be designed to function as part of an updated variant of the PlayStation 5 home video game console. The 2020-era patent document showcases a type of detachable optical disc drive, and industry experts reckon that this mountable media reading device is destined, following past rumors, to feature in an upcoming PlayStation 5 hardware revision.

No reference is made to Sony's popular gaming console within the patent filing, but it is highly likely that the new optical drive will factor into the refreshed console's modular makeup - its overall shape shares design aesthetics with the PS5. Sony currently offers customers two variants of the PlayStation 5 - the more advanced model is fitted with an internal 4K Blu-Ray compatible disc drive, while the other one functions as a purely digital download device. The modular revamp is expected to arrive later this year, in a more compact form factor that industry insiders have called "D chassis" - it is not known whether this variant will outright replace the older models. A more powerful PlayStation 5 "Pro" model is expected to arrive after the modular redesign, with tipsters pointing to a launch window in mid-to-late 2024.

Samsung's unannounced Exynos 2400 mobile chipset has been linked to the upcoming Galaxy S24 smartphone family, but internet tipsters have speculated that the in-house SoC will be reserved for the baseline model only. The more expensive Plus and Ultra variants could be the main targets for flagship smartphone fetishists - it is possible that Qualcomm's upper echelon Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset is set to feature within these premium devices. Samsung's Exynos processors are not considered to be fan favorites, but industry insiders reckon that the latest performance figures indicate that Samsung's up-and-comer has the potential to turn some heads. Exact specifications for the Exynos 2400 are not public knowledge - one of the tipsters suggests that a 10-core layout has been settled on by Samsung, as well as a recent bump up in GPU core count - from 6 to 12. The company's own 4 nm SF4P process is the apparent choice set for production line.

A leaker has posted benchmark scores generated by an unknown device that was running an Exynos 2400 SoC - the Geekbench 5 results indicate an average single-core score of 1530 with a peak of 1711. The multi-core average score is shown to be 6210, and the highest number achieved is 6967. Therefore the Exynos 2400 is 31% percent faster (in multi-core performance) than the refreshed Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 variant currently found in Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphones, but the divide between the two in terms of single-core performance is not so great. The 2400 manages to outpace (by 30%) Apple's present generation Bionic A16's average multi-core score, although the latter beats the presumed engineering sample's single-core result by 20%. The Exynos 2400 will face a new lineup of rival mobile processors in 2024 - namely Apple's next generation Bionic A17 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, so it is difficult to extrapolate today's leaked figures into a future scenario.

Conflicting reports are flying around about Apple's next generation MacBook Air lineup, mostly surrounding suggestions of a firm release date or debut reveal at WWDC 2023. 9to5Mac claims that its insider sources have pointed to a new range of M3 chipset powered MacBook Air extra thin laptops offered up in two different screen sizes: 13-inch and 15-inch. An insider claimed last month that Apple's upcoming laptop lineup was in an advanced stage of production, and was far along enough to warrant an "imminent" launch window. A Taiwanese publication has presented new evidence this week, and it posits that Apple could drop M3 chipset-based laptops from announcement presentations organized for this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, which is set to take place from June 5 to 9.

According to the financial section of Taiwan's UDN news site, Apple's key decision makers could be in favor of fielding laptops based on its current generation M2 SoC, instead of an entry-level M3-based range, due to delays and changes in priority for the N3B node at TSMC foundries. This is seen as an odd move given reports from earlier this month of Apple requesting a reduction in factory output for its M2 chips, following a slump in demand. Apple could be changing its strategy with regards to the alleged surplus of M2 silicon - the article theorizes that the company will spend more time fitting the older generation chipsets into a new range of laptops and desktop computers. An M3-based product line could be delayed into late 2023, and it is alleged that TSMC has been instructed to concentrate mostly on manufacturing Apple's Bionix A17 mobile chipset via the cutting edge 3 nm FinFet technology process (N3B) - earmarked to debut on the iPhone 15 Pro in autumn 2023.

Smartphone specialists Oppo and OnePlus have responded to the rumors of both companies exiting several European markets, as well as the UK. In a joint statement provided to Android Authority the message was a promise to stay put in 2023: "OPPO and OnePlus are committed to all the existing European markets. We had a great start in 2023 with the successful launches of several products in Europe and have a line-up of upcoming products for the rest of the year. As always, OPPO and OnePlus will continue to provide more innovative products and the best-in-class service for users moving forward."

Starting yesterday, industry tipsters issued posts about Oppo and OnePlus withdrawing from markets in Europe, with more immediate exits from key territories - France, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The cited reasons for exiting the aforementioned markets include a massive slowdown in regional sales and legal cases levied by competitors in regard to patent infringements on Oppo's part. The lawsuits that were levied by Nokia have resulted in a number of Oppo and OnePlus devices being banned from sale in Germany.

MSI was conspicuous with its lack of Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards at launch, with neither product announcements, nor even placeholder product pages on its website as of this writing. Rumors started to fly on social media that the company is skipping the RX 7900 series, and that all is not well between MSI and AMD Radeon group. MSI last week laid many of these rumors to rest, with its MSI Gaming Twitter handle quote-tweeting an AMD Radeon handle with the message "Available Soon."

Andreas Schilling of HardwareLuxx.de added more clarity on the issue with some first-hand info: although MSI skipped the December 12/13 launch dates, the company is preparing to release some custom-design RX 7900 series cards, and will present them in Q1-2023. The company is however skipping the launch of reference-design MBA (made by AMD) cards under its own brand—something most other AMD add-in board (AIB) partners did release on December 12. Although AMD directly sells reference-design cards, it also sells them through its AIB partners, by allowing them to use their own brand identity, custom packaging, inclusions, and product warranty specific to the brand.

An alleged AMD client product roadmap slide leaked to the web confirms the Ryzen 7000X3D series. This also builds on a confirmation by Robert Hallock that 3DV Cache technology remains a continued part of the company's client processor roadmap. The 3DV Cache tech played in instrumental role in shoring up gaming performance of AMD's previous-generation "Zen 3" microarchitecture to levels matching or exceeding those of the Intel "Alder Lake," with a performance uplift in the range of 10 to 25 percent. The expectations for 3DV Cache to work a similar miracle with "Zen 4" are set rather high.

While "Zen 4" has achieved gaming performance parity with "Alder Lake," Intel's next-generation "Raptor Lake" is right around the corner, with the company claiming 10-15% single-threaded performance uplifts that should restore the its gaming performance leadership over AMD. The alleged AMD roadmap does not specify when exactly the Ryzen 7000X3D comes out, but is part of the block that spans Q3-2022, deep into 2023. Rumors are abuzz that the company could unveil the 7000X3D in the first half of 2023.

Intel's accelerated computing group head Raja Koduri, who heads the team behind the Arc "Alchemist" graphics, on late-Sunday, refuted rumors about the company shutting down the Arc graphics product line. Responding to a question to that effect on Twitter, Koduri tweeted "we are shrugging about these rumors as well. They don't help the team working hard to bring these to market, they don't help the PC graphics community..one must wonder, who do they help?..we are still in first gen and yes we had more obstacles than planned to overcome, but we persisted."

Rumors about Intel dropping the axe on Arc have been around for some time now, after repeated delays in getting the products to market, limited regional launches; and gathered steam as Intel closed down the Optane Memory business last quarter. Last week, after Intel presented a less-than-perfect outlook for its processor business hinted that it could exit "other" unprofitable businesses.

Nintendo Switch is one of the most successful gaming console launches in the past few years. It has seen massive consumer adoption, and Nintendo is even expanding its production. The only logical thing for other companies watching this would be to step in the game and launch their console. That is exactly was the latest rumor suggests about Apple. According to a rumor coming from the South Korean forum, Apple could be preparing a Switch-like design, just with its custom Apple ecosystem surrounding it. As the rumors suggest, the fruit company could get into the console gaming market by launching a product based on custom hardware. Rumors suggest that Apple could use a custom processor to power the console, which wouldn't be like M or A versions the company currently uses. Of course, this is just a rumor and it should be treated as such.

Rumors of AMD refreshing its 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processor family are growing louder. On Friday (22/05), reports of the "Matisse Refresh" processor family surfaced, with talk of "Ryzen 7 3850X" and "Ryzen 7 3750X" processors headed for a June 2020 announcement followed by July availability. Turns out AMD has a different naming scheme in mind, targeted at wooing gamers. The company is reportedly bringing its "XT" brand extension over from its Radeon graphics card family over to the Ryzen line.

There are three SKUs AMD is developing, the Ryzen 9 3900XT, the Ryzen 7 3800XT, and the Ryzen 5 3600 XT. All three are likely to retain core counts of the SKUs they are displacing from current price points - with the 3900XT likely being a 12-core/24-thread part; the 3800XT an 8-core/16-thread part, and the 3600XT a 6-core/12-thread part. AMD is likely to give the three a major clock speed increase to shore up gaming performance. It won't surprise us if AMD tinkers with boost algorithms, either. GIGABYTE has already referenced "Matisse Refresh" in its motherboard product roadmaps, which adds plenty of credibilty to this rumor. With "Zen 3" based 4th gen Ryzen processors unlikely to relieve the embattled 3900X, 3800X, and 3600X in the wake of Intel's 10th gen Core "Comet Lake" launch until Q4-2020, it makes sense for AMD to plan a product stack refresh to bolster its competitiveness. AMD is reportedly planning a June 16 product announcement, followed by July 7 availability.

AMD is planning to immediately update its product stack to counter the Intel 10th gen Core "Comet Lake-S" desktop processor family. Codenamed "Matisse Refresh," the processor will use existing IP, based on the 7 nm "Zen 2" microarchitecture, but could improve in areas such as clock-speeds. As it now stands, the Ryzen 9 3900X appears unfazed by the i9-10900K and i7-10700K at its new $410 price, however, competitiveness of the 3800X and 3700X could buckle under pressure from the i7-10700 series (K, KF, non-K, and F), as well as the Core i5-10600 series. To this effect, we're hearing rumors of a "Ryzen 7 3750X" and "Ryzen 7 3850X" seeing the light of the day soon, with an early-June announcement, and early-July market availability. References to the 3750X date back to October 2019.

Rumors of "Matisse Refresh" gained traction when WCCFTech editor Hassan Mujtaba tweeted a slide from a GIGABYTE AMD B550 motherboard series pre-launch presentation, which references GIGABYTE's own interpretation of AMD's roadmap. It lists out every CPU microarchitecture for the AM4 platform, and right next to "Matisse" is "& Refresh," confirming that "Matisse Refresh" is real. A microarchitecture "refresh" needn't even involve any physical changes to the processor design, core-counts, or architecture, and can sometimes even indicate something as simple as a second major wave of SKUs that replace existing SKUs in the market, leading to their phase-out (eg: Intel "Haswell Refresh" retaining the 4th gen Core model numbering). The slide also adds weight to the theory that desktop "Renoir," like its mobile counterpart, lacks PCIe gen 4.0. The slide also talks about AMD introducing the entry-level A520 desktop chipset in August, which will support PCIe gen 4 when paired with a capable processor.

PC hardware focused YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead published a juicy tech-spec reveal of NVIDIA's next-generation "Ampere" based flagship consumer graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, citing correspondence with sources within NVIDIA. The report talks of big changes to NVIDIA's Founders Edition (reference) board design, as well as what's on the silicon. To begin with, the RTX 3080 Ti reference-design card features a triple-fan cooling solution unlike the RTX 20-series. This cooler is reportedly quieter than the RTX 2080 Ti FE cooling solution. The card pulls power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs include three DP, and one each of HDMI and VirtualLink USB-C. The source confirms that "Ampere" will implement PCI-Express gen 4.0 x16 host interface.

With "Ampere," NVIDIA is developing three tiers of high-end GPUs, with the "GA102" leading the pack and succeeding the "TU102," the "GA104" holding the upper-performance segment and succeeding today's "TU104," but a new silicon between the two, codenamed "GA103," with no predecessor from the current-generation. The "GA102" reportedly features 5,376 "Ampere" CUDA cores (up to 10% higher IPC than "Turing"). The silicon also taps into the rumored 7 nm-class silicon fabrication node to dial up GPU clock speeds well above 2.20 GHz even for the "GA102." Smaller chips in the series can boost beyond 2.50 GHz, according to the report. Even with the "GA102" being slightly cut-down for the RTX 3080 Ti, the silicon could end up with FP32 compute performance in excess of 21 TFLOPs. The card uses faster 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, ending up with 863 GB/s of memory bandwidth that's 40% higher than that of the RTX 2080 Ti (if the memory bus width ends up 384-bit). Below are screengrabs from the Moore's Law is Dead video presentation, and not NVIDIA slides.

Apple released the third developer preview of its OS X "Mountain Lion" operating system for Macs and Macbooks. The Developer Preview 3 (Build 12A178q) was released to members of the Mac Developer Program. While a change-log is not listed, a number of new known issues with the build were listed, which Apple, along with its MDP partners are working on. OS X "Mountain Lion" is Apple's next major operating system for Macs, Macbooks, Mac Pro, and Mac Servers. It is slated for late Summer, 2012.

To capitalize on its dominant iPad brand, and offer devices at untapped price-points, Apple is said to be working on a smaller variant, so far referred to as "iPad Mini". This little fellow will pack a smaller 7.85-inch screen compared to the 9.7-inch screen on standard-sized iPad. The fresh round of rumors were supported by sources in the video games industry, who tend to be aware of upcoming iPad products, since it's a gaming platform with sizable reach. The iPad Mini could start at a staggering price of US $199, and is headed for a Q3, 2012 release.

Finally, next generation gaming consoles are around the corner. It will have an uplifting effect on the entire gaming industry as it will raise the bar for visual and technical detail in games. Many of today's games are designed keeping consoles in mind, and so their PC platform versions don't look much more than what has come to be known as "console-ports". There are a few exceptions to this, but it would be refreshing to see most game developers move on to creating games that take advantage of today's insanely powerful PC platform, because the console platform will have caught up technologically.

Rumors have it, that Microsoft will be developing not one, but two product lines that succeed the Xbox 360, and we're not talking about product variants here, but two distinct lines. The first of the two will be an entry-level console designed more like a set-top box, designed around the Kinect controller (perhaps something to compete against Nintendo Wii U). The second product line will be the one that will be supercharged with the latest technologies that will raise the bar in graphics. It will compete with whatever succeeds the Playstation 3. There is talk that it will pack a 6 core processor, an AMD-made GPU, and 2 GB of fast DDR3 memory. This console could be unveiled to the world (although not launched), at the CES event held in January. Meanwhile, Microsoft is allowing TSMC some time to refine its 28 nm bulk process.

AMD is attempting to revive its competitiveness that took a beating with NVIDIA's introduction of 55 nm G200b-based graphics accelerators. The method AMD seems to be adopting is by giving its existing flagship GPU, the RV770, a series of design improvements that facilitate higher clock-speeds, in turn, better performance on offer.

A lot has been said about RV790 till date, with each commentator coming up with a new version of the story. It has been more or less established that the RV790 will be a improvement over the RV770, though not a revolutionary one. Fresh information gathered by PC Games Hardware places a realistic estimate on up to where RV790 is going to push the performance envelope for AMD.

Intel is planning on serving a heaping pile of pain to AMD's revenue/stock figures again in a few months, by developing a six-core juggernaut. While AMD is still tweaking on a way to merely get four cores to work in tandem, Intel is hard at work shoving two more cores on one die. This six-core monstrosity will be succeeded by the even beefier Nehalem micro-architecture, which could have up to eight cores on one die. Most of the Dunnington project is still top-secret, but some say that Intel already has most of the hard work done.

Intel has already put together a die, the size of a postage stamp, with three dual-core 45nm Penryn chips on it sharing a 16MB L3 cache. Allegedly, we'll see the Dunnington in either Q2 or Q3, this year

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The title says it all. Chinese magazine Bloomberg recently discovered plans of AMD to outsource chip manufacturing. Most likely, this move would be done to reduce capital expenditure. AMD has already been testing outsourcing with IBM, and is now ready to go all the way. This is all part of a strategy Hector Ruiz likes to call "asset light". Nobody on earth other than Ruiz seems to know what, exactly, asset light is, and Ruiz refuses to elaborate upon it at this point.

Enjoy. The little dashes indicate unavailable data, and the asterisks indicate unconfirmed data (which should still be reasonably accurate).Please follow the source link for a chart of the current speculated clocks and/or specifications.

Things are definitely looking up for AMD, especially if this little rumor turns out to be true. ASUS just might have placed a very large order of AMD Sempron CPUs. If ASUS did, in fact, buy a bunch of Semprons, it would be a sign that ASUS is trying to get AMD some market recognition, and that AMD is going to get some revenue this fiscal quarter. These Semprons would most likely find themselves in EeePCs, especially considering ASUS announced plans to make more EeePCs.

According to several graphics manufacturers, the first midrange cards from NVIDIA's GeForce 9 series will start finding themselves on market shelves on February 21st. Please take this with a grain of salt, as the old saying goes, because NVIDIA refused to comment on this, citing that they cannot comment on unreleased products. Keep in mind, also, that only a few makers will be pushing out GeForce 9 cards on the 21st. The early birds will price their cards around US$169-189 MSRP, pushing the cards they are replacing (8600GTS) down to US$139-149 MSRP. For those of you who would like an introduction to the 9600 series...

The 9600 GT adopts a 65nm process and is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The GPU sees an increase in processing units, 64, and memory bus width, 256-bit, over previous 8600 GTS cards, 32 and 128-bit. The GPU's performance should see an increase of over 40% compared to the 8600 GTS. The new GPU also introduces Dual-Streaming Decode technology which allows two high-definition image decoding processes to be performed at the same time and provides picture in picture (PIP) functionality.

It's apparently the season for oddball game pitches. Except, this time, the game pitch has already been accepted and is in development. Publisher Mastiff recently took up the concept for a game that will be called "Major League Eating", based off of what some call America's favorite past time. The game itself sounds like something out of a 7-year old's dream. The contest of the "world's greatest gurgitory athletes" will play much like many other fighting games, such as Mortal Kombat. However, instead of using swords and fists, the aforementioned athletes will attack and defend using "burps, belches, and mustard gas", all while making sure that they get their fair share of munchies. Mastiff's announcement did not mention any timeframe for release, or finalize any platforms.

As Neoseeker puts it, "even 3D Realms didn't believe" the latest rumors of an upcoming Duke Nukem Forever release. For those of you who don't know, there was a rumor going around that 3DRealms was planning on sending out a retail version of Duke Nukem Forever within 2008. While geeks and true fans of the series had warm smiles on their faces, alarm bells went off at 3DRealms HQ. 3DRealms was very quick in eliminating false hope, and says, with a hint of disgust, that Duke Nukem Forever is still on the "when it's done" release timeframe. While there are still a lot of months left in 2008, it's very unlikely that we're going to see any hint of Duke Nukem Forever for quite some time. Release platforms have not been announced or finalized.