MSI, a world leader in gaming hardware, proudly introduces the new Trident X compact desktop with the latest MSI GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards and Intel 9th Generation Core K series processors. The MSI Trident X is the first compact desktop PC to incorporate an SFX power supply and the highest performing new MSI GeForce RTX graphics cards into a small 10-liter case. The Trident X is a completely new PC experience that rivals the performance of much larger traditional desktop PCs.

The Trident X comes equipped with up to an Intel Core i9-9900K processor for up 50 percent more performance. The i9 provides massive, overclockable performance in a small chassis. Additionally, gamers can take advantage of the newest innovations in graphics and raytracing with up to NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti graphics. With these components, the Trident X provides impressive performance in a small footprint for any task, including gaming or video editing.

Smartphones or TVs may be Samsung's most popular products, but they are certainly not the most profitable for the company. The South Korea electronics giant has announced its estimates for the third quarter of the year, and that data points to the company achieving the highest operating profit in its entire history. Samsung is set to reach 17.5 trillion won ($15.8 billion), up 20% from the same period last year. Not only that: revenues will also reach a record 65 trillion won ($57.3 billion), almost 5% more than last year.

The surprise of these results lies precisely in the products that have been the main protagonists of these revenues and profits. It wasn't smartphones, and in fact in the second quarter those lost more market share than any other manufacturer with a Galaxy S9 and a Galaxy S9+ whose sales haven't been as good as expected. TVs weren't that succesful either.

The leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, is pleased to announce the launch of the new Intel Z390 motherboard series, and also the Phantom Gaming Motherboards, the latest addition to the company's popular Phantom Gaming line up. These versatile new motherboards support the latest 9th Generation Intel Core processors with socket 1151.

A Blazingly Fast Gaming Network Experience
Fast internet will be the trend of the future, it is certain that the old-fashioned 1 Gbps Ethernet with soon be replaced by the more advanced 2.5 Gbps LAN interface, giving network performance boost to up to 2.5x the speed of old-fashioned gigabit Ethernet. The Z390 Phantom Gaming motherboards will be the first to adopt this new industry standard and provides blazing fast 2.5 Gbps LAN, supporting next generation networking standards, for an unbeatable experience. The intelligent Phantom Gaming 2.5Gb/s LAN platform is designed for the demanding requirements of home networking, content creators, online gamers and users of high-quality streaming media. Also ASRock's Phantom Gaming network software is able to automatically accelerate critical gaming network traffic ahead of other data to provide smoother, stutter-free game performance and give gamers the ultimate competitive edge.

Intel will join the National Association of Manufacturers on Friday, Oct. 5, 2018, to celebrate Manufacturing Day. The majority of Intel's advanced manufacturing and research and development is in the United States, creating high-precision, high-value, IP-driven products that enable industries and businesses to innovate around the world. Intel Corp.'s U.S. manufacturing and research and development facilities are in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. They operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The release of Windows 10 October 2018 Update has had the side-effects of new driver releases from a variety of manufacturers. NVIDIA released its GeForce 416.16 WHQL drivers today, and now Intel has also released the first driver update for its graphics chips following the release of this major Windows 10 update. This WDDM 2.5 driver introduces HDR10 on internal displays, support for Wide Color Gamut on capable displays, as well as improvements in EDR Quality.

The driver also introduces performance improvements for Microsoft WinML-based applications on 7th Generation Intel Core processors and higher. Power optimizations are also included even when the display is in standby. This driver also has performance improvements for Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 (DirectX 11 version) on 6th Generation Intel Core processors or higher.

The leak train for Intel's latest and greatest mainstream CPU platform is showing no signs of stopping before hitting the final stop when Intel formalizes it officially. Yesterday, we had MSI do a long preview video with everything but the Z390 branding visible, and today we got word of Newegg Canada deciding it could do better. Indeed, searching for "Z390" on their website shows up, at the time of this post, 15 Z390 motherboards from MSI and Gigabyte alike.

Noting that these are in Canadian dollars, the respective Z370 offerings from the same website are priced 30-40% lower at this time where applicable courtesy of some sales but also a direct MSRP-to-MSRP comparison. Keep in mind also that the features may not be identical, and that may contribute also to the pricing strategy we see employed here. These do not look to be placeholders either, given the precision down to two decimal points, but we will have to wait for USD prices to know if this is price gouging from a retailer or a blanket increase worldwide. In anticipation of these links being taken down sooner than later, we just saved a web archive of the page that can be seen here.

Intel's mainstream-desktop flagship Core i7-8700K processor is now retailing north of USD $400, a departure from its launch price of $359, which erodes its competitiveness to the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, which can be had for as low as $319. Prices of 8th generation Core processors remain on the boil across the board as reports emerge of the industry facing supply shortages from Intel. In its defense, Intel claims that the shortage is triggered by a spike in demand, and not a drop in supply.

The company raised its capex by $1 billion YoY to increase its manufacturing output, and has even outsourced manufacturing of non-processor components such as chipsets, to other semiconductor foundries such as TSMC. Prices of other popular SKUs are also on the rise. The Core i5-8400, which launched at $184, is now hovering $225, which is supposed to be the launch price of the i5-8600 (non-K). The i5-8600K is fast approaching the $300-mark. Prices of AMD Ryzen processors remain not just stable, but also a touch lower than their launch prices.

In a recent live stream, MSI gave a sneak peek at their next generation of motherboards. The first one shown was a new red and black themed Gaming Plus model reminiscent of the early days in the MSI Gaming brand. It features a few quality of life improvements one of which is an enlarged PCIe latch making GPU removal a bit easier in cramped environments or when you happen to have a beefy air cooler. Keep out zones were also highlighted on the back of the motherboard giving users a visual cue to make sure other components, standoffs, screws etc do not come into contact with those particular regions. Furthermore, they also included an angled slot in the board's design for easier access to both the SATA ports and USB 3.0.

Intel processor integrated graphics will get its first major hardware update in 4 years since Gen 9.5 "Skylake," with the introduction of the Gen11 architecture that debuts with the company's "Ice lake" processors. The company confirmed in an XDC 2018 conference presentation that the iGPU will support DisplayPort 1.4a along with VESA DSC (display stream compression), enabling it to support display resolutions as high as 5K (5120 x 2880 pixels) with 120 Hz refresh-rate.

Without DSC, 5K-120 Hz requires 42.4 Gbps of bandwidth (not counting interconnect and protocol overheads), which even DisplayPort with HBR3 cannot provide, as it caps out at 32.4 Gbps. DSC offers "visually lossless" compression of the 5K-120 display stream down to roughly 14 Gbps, which can be comfortably handled by DisplayPort 1.4a. 8K (8192 x 4320 pixels) at 60 Hz also becomes possible. Merely supporting these new high resolutions doesn't imply Gen11 iGPUs can game at those resolutions. Support for them is necessitated by rapid increases in resolutions (pixel densities) and refresh-rates of high-end notebooks and ultra-portable devices.The complete slide-deck follows.

The tides at Intel have been blacker than they have been blue due to woes in silicon production - and the slow, sure steps of their rival AMD. It's been a rough, domino-powered ride: Intel has faced delay after delay of their 10 nm fabrication process technology. This, in turn, has constrained their production capacity, leading top shortages and increasing prices of Intel processors, and expensive chipset redesigns, moving them up from Intel's top-of-the-line 14 nm process back to 22 nm. So, yeah, after such a stream of lows, the first high note to be struck leaves a much lasting impact - and this has happened on Intel's stock pricing.

A research report from Steve Mullane, analyst at BlueFin Research Partners, says that Intel could be looking on sooner-than-expected ramp-up of their 10 nm process - slated for a June 2019 timeframe. "Intel's second-half production levels suggest upside to analyst revenue estimates for the fourth quarter and first quarter of 2019," further stating that suppliers believe production of new 10 nm silicon could be pulled forward from the June 2019 timeline by four to six weeks. This news brought about a jump in Intel share price up by 5%, while simultaneously reducing AMD's stock price by some 3.6%. At the end of trade day, these highs and lows converted to a 3.55% increase for Intel and a 7.65% drop for AMD.

Intel has submitted the first patches with Vulkan support to their open-source OpenCV library, which is designed to accelerate Computer Vision. The library is widely used for real-time applications as it comes with 1st-class optimizations for Intel processors and multi-core x86 in general. With Vulkan support, existing users can immediately move their neural network workloads to the GPU compute space without having to rewrite their code base.

At this point in time, the Vulkan backend supports Convolution, Concat, ReLU, LRN, PriorBox, Softmax, MaxPooling, AvePooling, and Permute. According to the source code changes, this is just "a beginning work for Vulkan in OpenCV DNN, more layer types will be supported and performance tuning is on the way."

It seems that now, with their own GPU development underway, Intel has found new love for the GPU-accelerated compute space. The choice of Vulkan is also interesting as the API is available on a wide range of platforms, which could mean that Intel is trying to turn Vulkan into a CUDA killer. Of course there's still a lot of work needed to achieve that goal, since NVIDIA has had almost a decade of head start.

Intel could very soon fork its high-end desktop platform into two, with the introduction of the new Z399 socket LGA2066 chipset later this quarter; and the fabled X599 chipset powering LGA3647 processors. The move is probably triggered by AMD's introduction of new 24-core and 32-core Ryzen Threadripper processors that wipe out competitiveness of its existing "Basin Falls" X299 platform. The X599 could essentially be a C629 with the addition of some client-segment features (and the subtraction of some enterprise-segment ones), whereas the Z399 is a whole different beast.

With the introduction X599 and LGA3647, Intel could restore competitiveness at the >$1,500 market segment with new 24-core, 26-core, and 28-core "Skylake-X" XCC (extended/extreme core count) processors; whereas the introduction of Z399 could be necessitated with a that of a new 22-core chip for the LGA2066 socket, from which Intel can carve out new 20-core and 22-core SKUs. Existing Skylake-X LCC and HCC chips could be forwards-compatible with Z399, and X299 motherboards could still be eligible for supporting new 20-core and 22-core processors via BIOS updates. The Z399 could introduce a handful of new client-segment features Intel is introducing with the Z390.

Growing anger among PC manufacturers, retailers, and consumers in general, over supply issues with Intel processors, compounded with rising prices, and prompted Bob Swan, CFO and Interim-CEO of Intel, to write an open-letter, addressed to customers and partners, which counts you, since we received it in our main news channel from Intel. The language in the e-mail is straightforward and we wouldn't want to interpret it further than Intel grappling with a combination of massive demand from both its cloud-computing customers, and PC manufacturers hit by a surge of customers upgrading their machines (probably because it took Intel 10 years to increase CPU core counts, giving people a reason to upgrade).

To mitigate this, Intel is firing up all its manufacturing assets, across Oregon, Arizona, Ireland and Israel, in addition to its main foundries, by pumping in an additional $1 billion in capital expenditure (which is now at $15 billion). The letter doesn't miss out mentioning 10 nm, that the company is making progress with yields, and that volume production should roll out in 2019 (without offering guidance as to when). Intel also reassured PC OEMs that their supply teams will be in closer contact with them over the coming weeks. Without further ado, the open-letter follows verbatim.The letter follows.

In a statement that could refute speculation that Intel processors are in short-supply because the company is allocating its fabs for 9th generation processor launch, Compal President Martin Wong stated that supply issues with Intel processors could go on till the second half of 2019 (at least 9 more months). The issues threaten to undermine worldwide notebook shipments, he added. Compal is a major Taiwan-based notebook ODM and whitebox electronics manufacturer that supplies to major notebook brands.

Wong is miffed that Intel hasn't provided any clear schedule for restoration of supply normalcy. Intel responded that it is "cooperating closely" with its partners to manage the extra orders, and that supply priority will be given to Xeon and Core processors, including Core brand extensions "U-series" (ultraportable) and "Y-series" (ultra low-power).

Intel's in-house sub-10 nanometer silicon fabrication dreams seem more distant by the day. Raymond James analyst Chris Caso, in an interview with CNBC stated that Intel's 10 nm process development could set the company back by at least 5 years behind TSMC. In its most recent financial results call, Intel revised its 10 nm outlook to reflect that the first 10 nm processors could only come out by the end of 2019. "Intel's biggest strategic problem is their delay on 10nm production - we don't expect a 10nm server chip from Intel for two years," analyst Chris Caso said in a note to clients Tuesday. "10nm delays create a window for competitors, and the window may never again close."

By that time, Intel will have missed several competitive milestones behind TSMC, which is in final stages of quantitatively rolling out its 7 nm process. Caso predicts that by the time Intel goes sub-10 nm (7 nm or something in that nanoscopic ballpark), TSMC and Samsung could each be readying their 5 nm or 3 nm process roll-outs. A Rosenblatt Securities report that came out late-August was even more gloomy about the situation at Intel foundry. It predicted that foundry delays could set the company back "5, 6, or even 7" years behind rivals. Intel is already beginning offload some of its 14 nm manufacturing to TSMC. Meanwhile, AMD is reportedly planning to entirely rely on TSMC to make its future generations of "Zen" processors.

Intel today introduced 1.5 TB variants of the Optane 905p SSD that implements 3D XPoint memory. The drive comes in half-height PCI-Express 3.0 x4 add-on card, and 15 mm-thick 2.5-inch form-factor with U.2 interface. Both variants offer sequential transfer rates of up to 2,600 MB/s reads, with up to 2,200 MB/s writes. Random access speeds are rated at up to 575,000 IOPS reads, with up to 550,000 IOPS writes. A function of its sheer capacity and 3D XPoint, endurance for these drives is rated at 27.37 PB (bytes written). The drives retain the feature set of their less capacious siblings, including 256-bit AES native encryption. The company didn't release pricing.

In a continued effort to support the PC platform, BANDAI NAMCO previously announced they would be releasing Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown on PC. At the time, there was no mention of what the game's system requirements would be. However, thanks to an NVIDIA blog post, we now know not only the game's system requirements but an estimate on system performance as well- at least with their own graphics solutions.

Overall, the minimum and recommended requirements appear to be quite reasonable. BANDAI NAMCO even went so far as to make note that the recommended requirements are representative of what is needed to run the game at the 1920x1080 resolution with max settings. NVIDIA's own testing backs up those claims with the GeForce GTX 1060 offering a comfortable 100 FPS at 1920x1080, and 60 FPS at 2560x1440 resolutions. Meanwhile, those wanting to push the game at 4K will need a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or better which should offer a steady 60+ FPS.

Silicon Lottery is an online retailer that sells computer hardware its employees personally bin to pick out the best performing parts, at higher-than-MSRP prices. It listed its pricing for the upcoming Intel Core i9-9900K 8-core/16-thread processor, and the Core i7-9700K 8-core/8-thread part. The site currently reports both parts as "sold out" either because they've actually sold out all their pre-order inventory, or because they have't built inventories yet. Regardless, the i9-9900K is listed at USD $479.99, and the i7-9700K at $369.99.

We've been actively tracking down possible list prices of Intel's 9th generation Core processors. Our most recent article on the topic predicts the i9-9900K to be priced around $450, the i7-9700K at $350, and the i5-9600K at $250. Either Silicon Lottery's listings don't include any premiums, or Intel could surprise us with prices lower than our predictions.

A report coming out of Digitimes earlier today forecasts AMD to continue their momentum in the desktop CPU market thus far in 2018, with as much as a 30% market share globally by the final quarter as per their correspondents. Their unnamed industry sources say, and we quote, "AMD has drastically changed its foundry strategy, loosening ties with Globalfoundries and contracting TSMC to fabricate its GPUs, server and PC processors on 7nm process. The policy change has sent AMD share prices rallying all the way since mid-2018 amid market expectations for better chip yield rates and performances as well as normal shipments to customers."

Intel's woes with the 14 nm process node has been reported before, let alone the troubled transition to the 10 nm process, which further helps AMD's case. The report further claims that board partners including ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte "have ramped up production and shipments of devices fitted with AMD processors, driving up the chipmaker's share of the desktop processor market to over 20% in the third quarter. The company is very likely to see the figure further rebound to the level of 30% again." This, in addition to the recently announced AMD EPYC implementation contracts with Ciscoand HPE, can make that 30% number more plausible as well. It remains to be seen what the following months hold for Intel and AMD in the desktop processor market, but there is no denying that things are competitive in multiple segments at the same time, and that is always a good thing for the consumer.

Intel today extended its field programmable gate array (FPGA) acceleration platform portfolio with the addition of the new Intel Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) with Intel Stratix 10 SX FPGA, Intel's most powerful FPGA. This high-bandwidth card leverages the Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon CPU with FPGAs, providing data center developers a robust platform to deploy FPGA-based accelerated workloads. Hewlett Packard Enterprise* will be the first OEM to incorporate the Intel PAC with Stratix 10 SX FPGA along with the Intel Acceleration Stack for Intel Xeon Scalable processor with FPGAs into its server offering.

"We're seeing a growing market for FPGA-based accelerators, and with Intel's new FPGA solution, more developers - no matter their expertise - can adopt the tool and benefit from workload acceleration. We plan to use the Intel Stratix 10 PAC and acceleration stack in our offerings to enable customers to easily manage complex, emerging workloads," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Group, HPE.

Intel is hit by crippling inventory shortages for many of its fast-selling 8th generation Core desktop processor SKUs. A number of factors are contributing to these shortages, as we discussed in this article. A key short-term consequence of shortages in Intel's inventories is more uninitiated buyers discovering AMD processors, now that they've achieved the highest levels of competitiveness against Intel in over a decade. Stock market analyst firm Jefferies has raised AMD's outlook for Q4-2018, and projects that its $30 stock price could hit $36, by raising its target price.

OEMs are not happy with Intel. Haphazard roadmap and platform changes have forced them to revise their product designs way too frequently, and now they're faced with the prospect of a short-supply. A report from research firm Fubon predicts that by next year, 1 in every 3 personal computers sold by HP (Hewlett Packard) will run an AMD processor. "Fubon's report that Intel will undersupply the PC market between 4Q18 and 2Q19 leaves us with higher conviction that AMD will report improving revenue, pricing and margins near term, and that is positioned to take share in the high end PC MPU and server market long term," said stock market analyst Mark Lipacis. He predicts that AMD's CPU market-share climbing to 30% through next year (a very huge feat for AMD).

Intel today announced details on the expansion of its portfolio of 100G silicon photonics transceivers beyond the data center and into the network edge. At the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Rome, Intel unveiled specifics on new silicon photonics products that are optimized to accelerate the movement of massive amounts of data being generated by new 5G use cases and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The latest 100G silicon photonics transceivers are optimized to meet the bandwidth requirements of next-generation communications infrastructure while withstanding harsh environmental conditions.

"Our hyperscale cloud customers are currently using Intel's 100G silicon photonics transceivers to deliver high-performance data center infrastructure at scale. By extending this technology outside the data center and into 5G infrastructure at the edge of the network, we can provide the same benefits to communications service providers while supporting 5G fronthaul bandwidth needs," said Dr. Hong Hou, vice president and general manager of Intel's Silicon Photonics Product Division.

Things seem to be taking turns to the worse at Intel in accordance to Murphy's law. Not only was the company hit with a multitude of security flaws embedded in their CPUs, which puts their michroarchitecture design chops in jeopardy, but now they also have to contend with silicon fabrication snags. That Intel's 14 nm fabs are being hit with overwhelming demand for their output capacity is already a known quantity, with rising prices of Intel mainstream CPUs and reports of the company outsourcing 14 nm chip production to TSMC in a bid to increase availability - a first since the company became vertically integrated with both design and manufacturing of their own chips.

BIOSTAR, a leader in crypto mining motherboards, introduces two new BTC series professional crypto mining motherboards - TB360-BTC Expert and TB360-BTC PRO. Fully optimized for professional crypto mining, the TB360-BTC Expert and TB360-BTC PRO support 17 x PCI-E 3.0 and 12 x PCI-E 3.0 expansion slots respectively. Packed with features for scaling up professional mining operations of any size, the TB360-BTC Expert and TB360-BTC PRO ensure a rock-solid mining system with improved mining performance. The BIOSTAR TB360-BTC series is also the first crypto mining motherboards based on the B360 and H370 chipset, which can support 8th generation Intel Core processors.

Jim Cramer of CNBC Mad Money interviewed AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su on the floor of the NYSE remarking her company as the year's biggest tech turnaround stories. The two spoke a variety of topics, including how the company went from a single-digit stock and a loss-making entity to one of the hottest tech-stocks, which threatens both Intel and NVIDIA. Dr. Su placed emphasis on taking long term strategic decisions that bear fruit years down the line.

"We decided to make the right investments. Technology is all about making the right choices, where we're going to invest, and where we're not going to invest...three or four years ago, it was mobile phones, tablets, and IoT that were the sexy things, and we were like 'hey we know that those are good markets, but those are not AMD.' We focused on what we thought the future would hold for us," said Dr. Su. "We are making decisions now that you won't see the outcome of for the next 3-5 years. We're making some good decisions," she added.