[Editor's Note: Our review of the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X is out already, and that of the Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX will follow soon after.]

Today, AMD announced availability of two additional 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor models, 2970WX with 24 cores and 48 threads and the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X with 12 cores and 24 threads. The Ryzen Threadripper WX series commands class-leading core counts, purpose-built for prosumers focused on raw computational power for the heaviest workloads. In turn, Ryzen Threadripper X series provides enthusiasts, gamers, and streamers high performance with a beautiful and smooth gaming experience based on higher base and boost processor clock speeds than the previous generation.

"The dramatic transformation in the HEDT and overall PC market is driven by AMD leadership and innovation, and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper family is central to this global excitement," said Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, Client Compute, AMD. "We are expanding this excitement while also ensuring the HEDT market remains accessible to a broader range of creators and gamers with two new Threadripper processors that start at $649."

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter 2018 financial results. Third-quarter revenue of $19.2 billion was an all-time record, up 19 percent YoY driven by broad business strength and customer preference for performance-leading products. The Client Computing Group (CCG), the Data Center Group (DCG), the Internet of Things Group (IOTG), the Non-volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG) and Mobileye all achieved record revenue. Collectively, data-centric businesses grew 22 percent, led by 26 percent YoY growth in DCG. PC-centric revenue was up 16 percent on continued strength in the commercial and gaming segments. Excellent operating margin leverage and a lower tax rate drove record quarterly EPS.

"Stronger than expected customer demand across our PC and data-centric businesses continued in the third quarter. This drove record revenue and another raise to our full-year outlook, which is now up more than six billion dollars from our January expectations. We are thrilled that in a highly competitive market, customers continue to choose Intel," said Bob Swan, Intel CFO and Interim CEO. "In the fourth quarter, we remain focused on the challenge of supplying the incredible market demand for Intel products to support our customers' growth. We expect 2018 will be another record year for Intel, and our transformation positions us to win share in an expanded $300 billion total addressable market."

I'm pretty sure many of our readers devote part of their time not only to enjoy video games, but also to broadcast their games via YouTube, Twitch, Mixer or some other alternative. Live Streaming has become a phenomenon for users, but also for hardware & software developers. Suddenly a new, juicy cake appears on the market, and everyone wants a piece.

That's precisely what Streamlabs, developer of Streamlabs OBS is announcing. This free broadcasting app offers more options and a faster and easier startup for beginners than the original solution, OBS (Open Broadcast Software). The company has teamed up with Intel to develop PCs specially dedicated to live streaming. They won't be alone, as they've also partnered with Shuttle, SimplyNUC, ZOTAC and Acer. All of them will join forces to offer hardware solutions with Streamlabs OBS (which by the way, is still in beta stage) and various optimizations for this field already pre-installed.

Ryan Shrout, lead editor of PC Perspective late Wednesday, announced his departure from the publication. He will be joining Intel as the Chief Performance Strategist, and his role will be to identify the nature of the demands from the computing industry, and draw out strategies for the various silicon divisions to create products for. Shrout takes with him experience not just as the face of PC Perspective, but also Shrout Research, a market research firm.

In his farewell post, Shrout concludes: "As for PC Perspective, I am confident it will continue doing reviews, news, and analysis of the hardware you love for as long as you, the reader, support them. As I said earlier; they have already been running the show without me for some time, and they will continue doing the excellent job that has brought PCPer.com to where it stands today."

Go get 'em Ryan!

Intel's next major CPU microarchitecture being designed for the 10 nm silicon fabrication process, codenamed "Ice Lake," could introduce the first major core redesign in over three years. Keen observers of Geekbench database submissions of dual-core "Ice Lake" processor engineering samples noticed something curious - Intel has increased its L1 and L2 cache sizes from previous generations.

The L1 data cache has been enlarged to 48 KB from 32 KB of current-generation "Coffee Lake," and more interestingly, the L2 cache has been doubled in size to 512 KB, from 256 KB. The L1 instruction cache is still 32 KB in size, while the shared L3 cache for this dual-core chip is 4 MB. The "Ice Lake" chip in question is still a "mainstream" rendition of the microarchitecture, and not an enterprise version, which has had a "re-balanced" cache hierarchy since "Skylake-X," which combined large 1 MB L2 caches with relatively smaller shared L3 caches.

Update: Intel has made an official statement on Twitter denying this and explaining that "Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue. We are making good progress on 10nm. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report."

Intel has been talking for years about the leap to the 10 nm process, a technology whose launch has been delayed time and time again. We were supposed to start seeing these microprocessors in 2016, but that date was postponed to 2017 and later to 2018. The manufacturer assumed the problems once again this year, but made a new promise: you will have 10 nm processors by the end of 2019.

The market seems to continue to trust Intel despite everything. Others, on the other hand, say that Intel is about to announce the total cancellation of this project. You have to take this news of Charlie Demerjian in SemiAccurate not with a grain of salt, but with a lot of grains of salt, because according to their sources, Intel would have already killed the process of 10 nm. This analyst has maintained the theory that Intel would never take that step, and in his analysis indicates that in his opinion this is the right decision. Evidently there has not been any official confirmation or comment from Intel, so for the moment Demerjian's statement raises many doubts and could be mere speculation.

Shuttle Inc., the global leader in small form factor computer technology, today announced the upgrade of its XPC cube series, the SH310R4. The SH310R4 is an entry-level mini PC with Intel 8th Gen processors. It sustained a small-form-factor of the previous-gen cube systems, but provides a significant boost in performance.

The new SH310R4 aims at a customer base of individuals and businesses whose need increased computing capability. Built upon Intel H310 chipset and support for 8th Gen Intel processors with up to six cores, the SH310R4 provides multicore and multithreaded performance for unprecedented power and responsiveness. It supports up to 32GB DDR4 memory, M.2 storage and Intel UHD graphics which give users true visual perfection in high-definition.

Intel late last week released a PCN (product change notification), which stated that it has assigned its manufacturing facilities in Vietnam as an "additional site for test and finish." This would entail final quality assurance testing of its nearly-ready products and "finishing," which involves final retail packaging. The Intel facility in Vietnam will work in concert with its largest Asian manufacturing facility, located in Malaysia. "While Assembly, Test and Finish will continue to be done in PGAT (Malaysia), Intel will also have assembled material sent to VNAT (Vietnam) to perform the Test/Finish portions of the manufacturing process. Please note that Vietnam has been certified equivalent (form, fit, function, and reliability) for the affected products and technologies of this change," the PCN reads.

The products named in the PCN are the company's new flagship MSDT processor, the 8-core/16-thread Core i9-9900K, the second-best 8-core/8-thread Core i7-9700K, and the 6-core/-6-thread Core i5-9600K. "Fab, Sort and Assembly Test Manufacturing follow a philosophy, enables delivery of product from multiple production sites, which operate as a virtual factory that performs consistently and independent of the manufacturing source site. Additional benefits include faster production ramps that improve product availability and improved consistency to quality performance," it concludes. Intel had, earlier this year, raised its capital expenditure by an additional $1 billion YoY to around $16 billion, in a bid to increase its volumes as the industry faces supply shortages from Intel, which the company claims is due to "increased demand," rather than a short-supply. Intel has also roped in its small foundry located in Leixlip, Ireland.

We kept seeing hints regarding Intel's 9000-series processors running hot, including from their own board partners. As it turned out, the actual results are a mixed bag with some running very hot and most others ending up being power-limited more so than temperature-limited. Our own review sample showed overall better load temperatures relative to the predecessor 8000-series processors thanks to the soldered TIM (sTIM) used here, to give you some context. But that did not stop overclocker extraordinaire Roman "Der8auer" Hartung from de-lidding the processor to see why they were not generally better as expected.

As it turns out, there are a few things involved here. For one, replacing sTIM with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut (Der8auer has a financial interest in the company, but he does disclose it publicly) alone improves p95 average load temperatures across all eight cores by ~9 °C. This is to be expected given that the liquid metal has a vastly higher thermal conductivity than the various sTIM compositions used in the industry. Of more interest, however, is that both the PCB and the die are thicker with the Core i9-9900K compared to the Core i7-8700K, and lapping the die to reduce thickness by a few microns also does a lot to lower the CPU temperatures relatively. Overall, Intel have still done a good job using sTIM- especially compared to how it was before- but the current state of things means that we have a slightly better stock product with little scope for improvement within easy means to the consumer.

The Intel-Micron partnership pertaining to memory technologies is drawing to a close, with Micron today announcing they'd be acquiring remaining interest in IM Flash Technologies. IM Flash Technologies is the literal embodiment of the Intel-Micron partnership, and Micron acquiring the entire stake of it means that Intel is left out of any investment/development of 3D XPoint memory.

Micron expects to pay approximately $1.5 billion in cash for the transaction, dissolving Intel's non-controlling interest in IM Flash, and the two companies will independently drive their own future technology roadmaps. Based on prior agreements, Micron will sell 3D XPoint memory wafers to Intel for up to a year after close.

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have been a real nightmare throughout this year. Those affected were quick (maybe too much) to mitigate the problems with different solutions, but months later even the most recent Intel chips aren't completely safe. Hardware fixes only work for certain Meltdown variants, while the rest are still mitigated with firmware and OS updates that have certain impact on performance.

Intel will have to redesign certain features on their future processors to finally forget Meltdown and Spectre, but meanwhile others have jumped to give some options. MIT researchers have developed a way to partition and isolate memory caches with 'protection domains'. Unlike Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT), MIT's technology, called DAWG (Dynamically Allocated Way Guard) disallows hits across those protection domains. This is important, because attackers targeting this vulnerabilities take advantage of 'cache timing attacks' and can get access to sensible, private data.

We are still waiting for 10 nm to happen at Intel, and although we have recently received some good news about those chips, they won't be available until the end of 2019. The problems at Intel could be alleviated thanks to a strategic change that the company is proposing. Sohail Ahmed, who was in charge of the manufacturing group since 2016, will retire next month, and that will lead to a number of major changes in manufacturing management at Intel.

Intel will divide its manufacturing group into three new segments led by different managers, but there is no information on how the three groups will collaborate. The decision to split the manufacturing division is important, and comes at a weird time given that there hasn't been a replacement for Krzanich, who left the company in June 2018 after violating Intel's non-fraternization policy. Chief Financial Officer Bob Swan is leading the company as the interim CEO, but the six month process to find a new leader should clarify things at the company.

AMD's first response to Intel's 9th generation Core "Coffee Lake Refresh" processors could be that of 5-10% price-cuts of its Ryzen "Pinnacle Ridge" processors across the board, according to a pricing list compiled by Techspot. These cuts could see the company's Ryzen 7 2700X priced just below the $300-mark. These cuts will be introduced not just by AMD, but also retailers.

The $200-300 segment could get crowded, with the 8-core/16-thread 2700X at around $295, the Ryzen 7 2700 (non-X) at $265, and the 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 2600X drop to around $210. Intel's only sub-$300 offering from its 9th generation family is the 6-core/6-thread Core i5-9600K. The sub-$200 segment will see the Ryzen 5 2600 go for $160, a rather compelling price for a 6-core/12-thread chip, given that Intel's cheapest 6-core offering, the i5-8400, is now retailing for $220, and that the company only has the quad-core i3-8350K around this price, at $170.

It seems that by the time NDA drops on Intel's latest and greatest mainstream processor platform, we will have known more about it than ever before with similar launches. GIGABYTE joined the club with the release of their Z390 overclocking (OC) guide specific to their AORUS-branded motherboards. This contains a lot of useful information in general, and we certainly recommend taking a look at it in the source linked in the full post. As it is, a few items in the guide caught our eye- in particular, a direct quote saying "As you can tell from the last screenshots, the CPU temperature of the i9-9900k is quite high. This is something that we've noticed on almost all the processors. For this reason we suggest you to use a custom water-cooling and adjust the TjMAX Temperature to 110°C."

The quote references their guide to achieve a stable 5 GHz overclock on all cores on the Core i9-9900K, which was cooled via a custom watercooled setup and a Vcore ranging from 1.3-1.4 V. GIGABYTE's internal testing thus indicates that these higher end, unlocked 9000-series CPUs will run incredibly hot if you wish to push them, and the soldered IHS may not be as effective in cooling these dense processors as we may have hoped. Indeed, with news of the 28-core Xeon using thermal paste for the IHS, it appears that Intel may be conflicted on optimal cooling when battling the Core Wars with AMD.

The first official data we have received about the performance of the new Intel processors are not exactly spectacular. The Core i9-9900K has aroused considerable controversy due to the unfair Principled Technologies test bench. The results have been reviewed and confirm that the performance gain is debatable, but independent analyses have yet to appear for Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K and Core i5-9600K processors.

Today we have some info about one of them: a new video in China shows a Core i5-9600K being benchmarked with a MSI Z390 MEG Godlike motherboard with 16GB of DDR4 memory and a Silver Arrow Extreme cooler from Thermalright. We don't have game benchmarks, but at least we have some Cinebench results both with the processor working with its 3.7 GHz base clock and overcloked to 5.2 GHz. That process was done without problems despite using an air cooler.

Soldered thermal interface material, or STIM, has been one of Intel's key feature-additions to its high-end 9th generation Core i7 and Core i9 processors. Besides higher clock-speeds, STIM is the only feature that sets its refreshed Core X 9000-series family apart from Core X 7000-series. STIM is also only given to the i9-9900K and i7-9700K in the mainstream-desktop space. The 28-core Xeon W-3175X was touted by Intel to be a high-end desktop (HEDT) processor initially, before Intel decided to retain the Xeon brand and target the gray-area between HEDTs and workstations. This also means that the W-3175X will lack STIM, as confirmed by an Intel spokesperson in an interview with PC World.

Soldered TIM is preferred by PC enthusiasts as it offers superior heat-transfer between the CPU die and the integrated heatspreader. Intel's decision to equip the Core X 9000-series and higher-end Coffee Lake-Refresh parts with it, is aimed at improving the thermals and overclocking headrooms of its products. The lack of STIM for the W-3175X speaks for its intended use-case - a workstation processor that can be overclocked, provided it's de-lidded and cooled by exotic methods such as liquid nitrogen evaporators. Intel's branding decisions could be guided by AMD's decision to side-brand its 24-core and 32-core Ryzen Threadripper processors as "WX," which focuses on their workstation proficiency while slightly toning down their PC enthusiast appeal.

With its "Zen" CPU microarchitecture, AMD removed support for the FMA4 instruction-set, on paper. This, while retaining FMA3. Level1Techs discovered that "Zen" CPUs do support FMA4 instructions, even through the instruction-set is not exposed to the operating system. FMA, or fused multiply add, is an efficient way to compute linear algebra. FMA3 and FMA4 are not generations of the instruction-set (unlike SSE3 and SSE4), but rather the digit denotes the number of operands per instruction. Support for both were introduced by AMD in 2012 with its FX-series processors, while Intel added FMA3 support in 2013 with "Haswell."

The exact reasons why AMD deprecated FMA4 with "Zen" are unknown, but some developers speculate it's because AMD's implementation of FMA4 is buggy, even though it's more efficient (33% more throughput). Intel's adoption of FMA3 made it more popular, and hence more stable over the years. Level1Techs used an OpenBLAS FMA4 test-program to confirm that feeding "Zen" processors with FMA4 instructions won't just return a "illegal instruction" error, but also the processor will go ahead and complete the operation. This is interesting because FMA4 isn't exposed as a CPUID bit, and the operating system has no idea the processor even supports the instruction. For linear algebra, FMA4 has proven more efficient than AVX in both single- and double-precision.

Principled Technologies Wednesday published its first response to allegations of flawed and misleading "independent" comparison between the $319 AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and the 66% pricier $530 (pre-order price) Intel Core i9-9900K, which Intel used in its launch event to woo gamers and investors. In its response, the company elaborated on the reasons why it tested the AMD chip with memory and cooler settings reputed hardware reviewers found sub-optimal. "One goal of this study was to test the CPUs and their graphics subsystems, not the GPUs, so we ran the tests at the most common gaming resolution (62.06%), 1920×1080," reads the response, touting a foregone conclusion that gamers with $500 8-core processors still game at 1920 x 1080. We get that they, like every CPU reviewer, are trying to simulate a CPU-limited scenario, but to justify their settings with Steam Hardware Survey data as "the most common resolution," is a disingenuous argument.

We next see Principled Technologies justify the use of NH-U14S TR4-SP3 cooler on the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX. Noctua, in its own TDP Guide for this cooler, states that 250W TDP (which also happens to be the TDP of the 2990WX), is the design limit of this air cooler, and goes as far as to mention that an additional NF-A15 fan, which is not included with the cooler, is recommended to be able to "increase Precision Boost headroom," implying that out of the box, the cooler is already bottlenecking the 2990WX. The Core i9-9980XE, on the other hand, has a rated TDP of 165W, and Noctua provides no additional guidance for 165W TDP Core X family processors, such as the Core i9-7980XE. Principled Technologies' reasoning for memory configuration proves they either continue to lack basic knowledge on AMD Ryzen memory controller limitations, or are deliberately disregarding it in an attempt to cripple AMD chips.

Today, we have seen several reports that suggested Principled Technologies (PT) published misleading information in our recent study comparing Intel's gaming processors to AMD's. We apologize for our delay in responding, but it's been a busy day, and we wanted to be as thorough as possible in addressing inquiries concerning our testing. We'll address specific questions and share more detail on our methodology in a moment, but we first must respond directly to attempts to call our integrity into question.

For almost 16 years, we have tested products for our clients because they trust our integrity. We have worked not just for any one company but for dozens of the leading technology firms, including rivals such as Intel and AMD, Microsoft and Google, Dell and HP, and many others.

Well, that proverbial storm of dirty undies did serve to rile up some people over at Intel and their paid-for stint with Principled Technologies, whose name begs for a change for honesty's sake. In wake of the controversy regarding its... flawed... testing of AMD's Ryzen 2700X performance in gaming workloads, Principled technologies has now come forward to say it's retesting AMD's processors in less... biased circumstances.

Let's start with the glass half-full part of this retesting: initial reports of memory timings on AMD's system being set in an almost "whatever" kind of way apparently weren't fair, since Principled Technologies have said they used D.O.C.P. settings for AMD's XMP-equivalent memory settings (not properly disclosed in the initial report, so, it's their own fault this happened). The good stuff ends there, though; numerous other flaws in the methodology, such as the usage of AMD's stock cooling solutions against a Noctua cooler for the Intel system (which they'll now fix on retesting), and the usage of AMD's Game Mode on their consumer Ryzen processors, which meant the usually 8-core processor was working in a 4-core mode (really, now?)... The company will now retest both CPUs in a more even-footed way. How's that for a change?

The new 9th generation Intel Core processors arrived yesterday with a series of improvements made to entice gamers and content creators. These improvements, however, join others that go beyond pure performance. Intel has introduced several architectural changes to fix the infamous Spectre & Meltdown vulnerabilities, and the new processors mitigate most of the variants of these attacks through a combination of hardware, firmware and OS fixes.

The big changes come to two of the six variants of those vulnerabilities. In both "Rogue Data Cache Load" (Meltdown, variant 3) and "L1 Terminal Fault" (Meltdown, Variant 5) vulnerabilities these new processors have hardware fixes that are new and not present on the rest of the current portfolio of Intel chips. This includes the new Xeon W-3175X (Core-X Skylake-X Refresh), which still depend on firmware fixes to mitigate those problems.

Intel took their opportunity to add a golden sheen to their new 9th Gen CPUs by going as far as showcasing their extreme overclocking capabilities right from the launch event. partering with world-renowned overclocker Splave, Intel showcased how a Core i9-9900K can withstand up to 1.7V Vcore, with a little aid from yours truly liquid nitrogen.

That scorchingly high Vcore paired with the sub-zero temperatures of LN2 allowed for all CPU cores to be overclocked up to 6.9 GHz, with Splave saying some samples could reach 7.1 GHz across all cores. Intel then went on to show some of the increased performance benchmarks - which, as you'd expect, don't showcase a linear performance improvement with increased frequency. Still, it's an impressive pure voltage and frequency feat. Splave went on to say that these new 9th Gen Intel processors can now achieve some 5.3 GHz under watercooling and at a much more mundane 1.4V Vcore. We'll all be able to test that for ourselves soon now won't we?

Although the big stars of today's Intel event have been the new desktop processors, the company also wanted to take this opportunity to launch its new beasts for the workstation field. These are the Intel Xeon W-3175X, which are destined to conquer ambitious users in that professional segment. These unlocked microprocessors, similar (but not equal) to what we saw at Computex in June, have 28 cores, 56 threads and base frequencies of 3.1 GHz, although they can reach 4.3 GHz.

These chips support 68 PCIe 3.0 lanes (44 on the CPU, 24 on the chipset), and there is another important feature on the memory front: the 6-channel DDR4 support allows the user to configure these systems with up to 512 GB at 2666 MHz (ECC and standard). This processor's TDP is 255 W and is based on Intel's Skylake-X architecture.

Anand Srivatsa, Vice President of Intel, officially announced their all-new 9th generation of core processors in today's live stream. While the Coffee Lake refresh has certainly been no secret, a few facts were confirmed today. The Core i9-9900k will be Intel's first broad volume 5 GHz processor and is their first mainstream 8 core, 16 thread offering. In order to facilitate better overclocking results for enthusiasts, the company also confirmed that they will use solder TIM for the whole range of products, which should result in not only better overclocking potential but much lower thermals as well.

NZXT today announces the N7 Z390, its newest motherboard designed around Intel's Z390 chipset and supporting the latest Intel 9th Gen CPUs. With the new N7 everything you need to build a stunning and powerful gaming PC is available right out-of-the-box.

All the essentials are included, along with built-in wireless and Bluetooth connectivity, digital fan control, and HUE 2 integrated RGB lighting channels. Get the N7 into your build even faster with an integrated rear I/O shield. The N7's signature all-metal motherboard cover returns to perfectly match the color and finish of your case, creating a visually seamless backdrop for your components. Additionally, NZXT's CAM software gives you full control over your system's lighting, cooling, and performance straight from your desktop.