Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids processors have faced multiple delays over the past few years. Built on Intel 7 manufacturing process, the CPU is supposed to bring new advances for Intel's clients and significant performance uplifts. However, TrendForce reports that the mass production of Sapphire Rapids processors will be delayed from Q4 of 2022 to the first half of 2023. The reason for this (yet another) delay is that the Sapphire Rapids MCC die is facing a meager yield on Intel 7 manufacturing technology, estimated to be at only 50-60% at the time of writing. Economically, this die-yielding percentage is not profitable for Intel since many dies are turning out to be defective.

This move will stop many OEMs and cloud service providers (CSPs) from rolling out products based on the Sapphire Rapids design and will have to delay it until next year's mass production. On the contrary, AMD is likely to reap the benefits of Intel's delay, and AMD's x86 server market share will jump from 15% in 2022 to 23% in 2023. Given that AMD ships processors with the highest core counts, many companies will opt for AMD's solutions in their data centers. With more companies being concerned by their TCO measures with rising energy costs, favors fall in the hand of single-socket servers.

AR/VR device shipments revised up to 14.19 million units in 2022, with an annual growth rate of 43.9%, according to TrendForce research. Growth momentum will come from increased demand for remote interactivity stemming from the pandemic, as well as Oculus Quest 2's price reduction strategy. Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Oculus Quest 2 are first in market share for AR and VR, respectively.

According to TrendForce, the topic of the Metaverse has driven brands to actively plan for and stimulate product shipment performance. However, the AR/VR device market has yet to experienced explosive growth due to two factors: component shortages and the difficulty of developing new technologies. In addition, cosmetic and size considerations have made the more optically and technically difficult Pancake design the first choice for new high-end products. Furthermore, various embedded tracking feedback technologies key to enhancing the user's immersive experience such as eye tracking and 6DoF further affect the development progress of a new product as a whole. Since there are no new foreboding products on the horizon, TrendForce believes, no other branded products have a chance at supplanting the current mainstream status of Oculus or Microsoft until at least 2023.

From 2020 to 2025, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12-inch equivalent wafer capacity at the world's top ten foundries will be approximately 10% with the majority of these companies focusing on 12-inch capacity expansion, which will see a CAGR of approximately 13.2%, according to TrendForce's research. In terms of 8-inch wafers, due to factors such as difficult to obtain equipment and whether capacity expansion is cost-effective, most fabs can only expand production slightly by means of capacity optimization, equating to a CAGR of only 3.3%. In terms of demand, the products primarily derived from 8-inch wafers, PMIC and Power Discrete, are driven by demand for electric vehicles, 5G smartphones, and servers. Stocking momentum has not fallen off, resulting in a serious shortage of 8-inch wafer production capacity that has festered since 2H19. Therefore, in order to mitigate competition for 8-inch capacity, a trend of shifting certain products to 12-inch production has gradually emerged. However, if shortages in overall 8-inch capacity is to be effectively alleviated, it is still necessary to wait for a large number of mainstream products to migrate to 12-inch production. The timeframe for this migration is estimated to be close to 2H23 into 2024.

Server processors tend to be one of the most profitable businesses for AMD and Intel. Thus, investment groups and analysts closely monitor happenings in the server and data center world. A report from Mizuho Securities (investment bank) Managing Director Jordan Klein states that many upcoming changes on the server processor front are coming this year. Mr. Klein cites sources over at Insupur Systems, one of the most prominent server vendors. More precisely, Dolly Wu is the VP and GM of Datacenter/Cloud at Inspur. According to the report, AMD and Intel will change their strategy in the server market going forward in 2022.

As far as AMD is concerned, the company plans to increase the pricing of its EPYC processors by 10-30%. This increase should be a bit easier on the strategic cloud customers. The report also indicates that as the demand far exceeds the supply of EPYC processors, AMD increases prices and makes a "take it or leave it" offer, resulting in most customers accepting the increased costs. Another interesting tidbit from the report was the talk about Intel. The blue team laid out its strategy to launch highly-anticipated Sapphire Rapids Xeons in Q2 of 2022. However, it will maybe get delayed to Q3 of 2022. Intel doesn't plan to increase prices to remain competitive with AMD, so the server space will see Intel fighting to regain the lost market share.

Samsung's ambitious 3 nm silicon fabrication node that leverages the Gate All Around FET transistors, has reportedly been delayed to 2024. The company brands this specific node as 3GAE. 2024 is the earliest date when Samsung will be able to mass-produce chips on 3GAE, which means the company, along with Intel, will begin to fall significantly behind TSMC on foundry technology. The Taiwanese semiconductor fabrication giant will target 2 nm-class nodes around 2024, which leverages EUV multi-patterning, extensive use of cobalt in contacts and interconnects, germanium doped channels, and other in-house innovations. With Intel's foundry technology development slowing to a crawl in the sub-10 nm domain, Samsung is the only viable alternative to TSMC for cutting-edge logic chip manufacturing.

The upcoming ASUS CMP 40HX mining card has been tested and appears to offer mining speeds of up to 43.77 MH/s which is significantly higher than the 36 MH/s advertised by NVIDIA. The ASUS CMP 40HX cards were working in a power-optimized cluster and likely had memory clock speeds adjusted to achieve the 21% increase in hash speeds. The NVIDIA CMP 40HX is based on the TU106-100 GPU and was expected to launch in the first quarter but this release has been delayed with board partners still testing. The ASUS CMP 40HX will reportedly launch for 699 USD while the ASUS CMP 30HX launch price will be reduced from 799 USD to 599 USD.

Oh the irony! Hacking was a very viable way to develop your character and play Cyberpunk 2077, but CD Projekt RED did not think their 2021 would be made worse due to an IRL hack. Not only did they lose out invaluable source code to hackers, but said hackers also sold the codes in a move that jeopardizes the structural integrity of a video game developer. You could make jokes about the 90's meme letter the hackers sent to the company, however they clearly don't see the humor in this situation as this has taken up resources which otherwise were meant to go towards patching Cyberpunk 2077- especially on older gen consoles.

CD Projekt RED took to twitter earlier today to inform us that the patch is delayed, as many speculated, but also that the additional time will also contribute towards increasing the scope of the patch beyond earlier updates. Indeed, in a situation where they simply can't seem to catch a break, perhaps transparency and downplaying expectations would have been the way to go. As it stands, the public feedback to this news is a gentle reminder to the sane TPU reader to keep social media and public comments at arm's length to maintain said sanity. We sympathize with CD Projekt RED and hope that they come out better to do better by their paying customers alike.

Launch of Noctua's large fanless CPU cooler designed for high TDP scenarios - more realistically, running premium desktops fanless - has been delayed to Q1 2021, according to a FanlessTech report citing a company roadmap. Noctua has been working on this cooler for some time now, with the early prototypes exhibited back in the 2019 Computex. In May 2020, we reported citing OC3D that the cooler was closer to launch, and expected to come out within 2020. Noctua's product roadmap looks pretty spartan for the remainder of 2020, with Black trims of the NH-D15S and NH-U9S expected in Q3, and Redux variants of various CPU coolers expected in Q4. Several CPU cooler launches have been pushed to Q1 2021, possibly bunched up for CES. Unfortunately, CTA put out some bad news on Tuesday.

TSMC has been the backbone of silicon designers for a long time. Whenever you question where you can use the latest technology and get some good supply capacity, TSMC got everyone covered. That case seems to be similar to Intel and its struggles. When Intel announced that its 7 nm semiconductor node is going to be delayed a full year, the company's customers and contractors surely became worried about the future releases of products and their delivery, like the case is with Aurora exascale supercomputer made for Argonne National Laboratory, which relies on Intel's 7 nm Ponte Vecchio graphics cards for most of the computation power.

To manage to deliver this, Intel is reportedly in talks with TSMC to prepare capacity for the GPUs and deliver them on time. However, according to industry sources of DigiTimes, TSMC is unlikely to build additional capacity for Intel, besides what it can deliver now. According to those sources, TSMC does not see Intel as a long-term customer and it is unknown what treatment will Intel get from TSMC. Surely, Intel will be able to make a deal with TSMC and secure enough of the present capacity for delivering next-generation processors.

Intel's silicon fabrication woes refuse to torment the company's product roadmaps, with the company disclosing in its Q2-2020 financial results release that the company's first CPUs built on the 7 nanometer silicon fabrication node are delayed by a year due to a further 6-month delay from prior expectations. The company will focus on getting its 10 nm node up to scale in the meantime.

The company mentioned that the 10 nm "Tiger Lake" mobile processor and "Ice Lake-SP" enterprise processor remains on-track for 2020. The company's 12th Generation Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop processors won't arrive before the second half of 2021. In the meantime, Intel will launch its 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" processor on the 14 nm node, but with increased IPC from the new "Cypress Cove" CPU cores. Also in 2H-2021, the company will launch its "Sapphire Rapids" enterprise processors that come with next-gen connectivity and updated CPU cores.

CD Projekt Red has announced another delay for what most certainly is the most anticipated game of this year. Cyberpunk 2077, which had a release date set for September, had already been delayed from its original release date in April. Now, the developers have announced they need some more time with the game before they let it loose on soon-to-be-empty shelves and digital storefronts.

Fret not: the game is apparently in great development shape. The announcement that was made today makes it clear that the game is already technically finished: all the quests, cutscenes, skills, items, and functionality are already in place. However, the game itself has become so complex that CD Projekt Red wants these extra months to get balance and bugs just right for the games' release. This makes sense, as it seems that CD Projekt Red's systems will be intertwined in a much more organic way than they ever did in The Witcher 3, which could result in some emergent gameplay and consequences for the games' systems. CD Projekt has already started distributing the game to specific outlets and gaming media who will be releasing their previews after the Night City Wire event, set for June 25th (itself delayed from June 11th as a show of respect for the Black Lives Matter movement). To their credit, the team at CD Projekt keeps their promises once again: the game will ship. When it's ready.

Kojima Productions announced that in light of temporary closure of its offices, the PC platform release of "Death Stranding" has been delayed. The game will now release on 14 July, 2020. The delay was necessitated by the development teams falling behind schedule amidst work-from-home orders in Japan. "Following the temporary closure of KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS, we have had to delay the PC launch of DEATH STRANDING to July 14, 2020, to allow more development time amidst the current work-from-home orders in place. Thank you all for your patience and continued support," reads the brief statement by Kojima on its English Twitter handle.

Microsoft has decided to shift its focus away from Windows 10X dual-screen laptop solutions in the near term, according to the report from ZDNet. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has happened recently, Microsoft's Chief Product Officer Panos Panay internally informed his team that Microsoft will not be focusing its efforts on delivering the Windows 10X based dual-screen laptops this year. However, Microsoft is committed to that idea and will not shift away from it completely, it is just taking a rest for now. This is bad news for everyone that was hoping to get Surface Neo dual-screen laptop that was meant for the Holiday season of 2020. In addition to Surface Neo not shipping this year, Microsoft isn't enabling any new Windows 10X dual-screen device to ship this year either.

What Microsoft is focusing on, however, is to get Windows 10X firstly on single-screen devices. That means that regular laptops should be getting the Windows 10X treatment sometime this year so vendors can launch products to compete with Chromebook devices, based on Google's ChromeOS.

For the second time in history, Computex, one of the flagship electronics shows in the industry, and our favorite event, has been postponed. Many years ago, it was delayed in 2003 due to the SARS outbreak, however, it happened again today. Following the outbreak of COVID-19. Instead of cancelling, the Computex organizer TAITRA has decided to postpone their 2020 event. Originally scheduled for June, Computex has been moved to September 28th, when the event will officially start. It will last only three days instead of the usual five, ending on the 30th.

This is especially relevant given that the event now shares the same three days with Innovex, the partnering startup-focused show that happens on the last 2-3 days of Computex each year, so the two shows have to share the spotlight on the same time. Making things tighter is confirmation from TAITRA that Computex, and Innovex, will both be sharing Hall 2 of the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, as opposed to having both Hall 1 and 2 available for Computex. This shortened timeframe and smaller booth space is a heavy indication that the agency expects a smaller turnaround at this time, and indeed several companies are already expressing concerns about whether Computex 2020 should have just been cancelled altogether. Some companies have told us they still plan to have an online event in June given they have planned product lifecycles around it already, and the new event in September is just a hiccup they are not confident about handling. We hope to bring you the latest Computex news live from the trade show, once it happens, so stay tuned.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been delayed, according to developer Hardsuit Labs (Paradox Interactive makes a cameo here as publisher). The game, which builds upon the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines released way back in 2004, aims to provide a "deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness" that can additionally be played in either first or third person perspective. According to the developer, pushing for a Q1 2020 release would mean compromise in those areas, as well as in polish for the final version of the game.

Of course, one other reason for the delay might be the fact that Q1 2020 is already jam-packed with heavy-hitting franchises and games such as the hugely awaited Cyberpunk 2077, the remastered Final Fantasy 7, The Last of us 2, and Doom Eternal, just to name a few. Perhaps the developer (and publisher Paradox Interactive) saw history in danger of repeating itself with the release of the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which went toe to toe with Half Life 2, Halo 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - not the best time to launch a game. That decision eventually led to the shuttering of then-developer Troika Games. Expect the game to still drop around 2020, though no firm release date was set alongside the delay announcement.