MSI, a world-leading gaming brand, announces the all-new AMD-powered gaming laptop, Delta 15 and the revamped Alpha 15/17, equipped with the AMD Ryzen 5000 H Series Mobile Processors and the up to latest AMD Radeon RX6700M Series Mobile Graphics. MSI continues to fulfill the diverse demand of gaming and leverage the strength in the AMD product line.

Delta 15 and Alpha 15/17 all come with the latest Radeon RX6000M Series Mobile Graphics, 1.5x faster performance compared to previous generations AMD graphics. * Powered by the AMD Radeon RX 6700M, Delta 15 provides ultra-high frame rates, while the Alpha 15/17, equipped with the AMD Radeon RX 6600M, delivers 1080p gaming at max settings.

AMD CEO Lisa Su at the Hot Chips conference answered some questions from the attending press. One of these regarded AMD's stance on CrossFire and whether or not it remains a focus for the company. Once the poster child for a scalable consumer graphics future, with AMD even going as far as enabling mixed-GPU support (with debatable merits). Lisa Su came out and said what we all have been seeing happening in the background: "To be honest, the software is going faster than the hardware, I would say that CrossFire isn't a significant focus".

There isn't anything really new here; we've all seen the consumer GPU trends as of late, with CrossFire barely being deserving of mention (and the NVIDIA camp does the same for their SLI technology, which has been cut from all but the higher-tier graphics cards). Support seems to be enabled as more of an afterthought than a "focus", and that's just the way things are. It seems that the old, old practice of buying a lower-tier GPU at launch and then buying an additional graphics processor further down the line to leapfrog performance of higher-performance, single GPU solutions is going the way of the proverbial dodo - at least until an MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) approach sees the light of day, paired with a hardware syncing solution that does away with the software side of things. A true, integrated, software-blind multi-GPU solution comprised of two or more smaller dies than a single monolithic solution seems to be the way to go. We'll see.

NVIDIA is giving finishing touches to its first GeForce RTX 20-series Mobility GPUs for notebooks, based on the "Turing" architecture, with product launches expected from Q1-2019. The company could debut the series with a high-end part first, the GeForce RTX 2080 Mobility Max-Q. The rest of the lineup includes the RTX 2070 Mobility Max-Q, RTX 2060 Ti Mobility, RTX 2060 Mobility, RTX 2050 Ti Mobility, and RTX 2050 Mobility. What's interesting about this list is that NVIDIA is limiting the Max-Q design to its top-tier RTX 2080 Mobility and RTX 2070 Mobility parts.

Max-Q is an all-encompassing laptop thermal-design methodology, which allows gaming notebook designers to come up with thinner notebooks with higher performance. One of the key aspects is special Max-Q ready variants of the GPUs, which are probably binned to run the coolest, and least voltages. With a device ID 1eab, the RTX 2080 Mobility Max-Q is based on the TU104M chip, while other SKUs could be carved from the TU106M or a chip even smaller. It's being reported that with this generation, NVIDIA is playing a more active role in helping its partners engineer their Max-Q notebooks, and helping them meet NVIDIA's strict Z-height minimums.

An AMD representative recently answered PC World's query regarding the absence of "CrossFire" branding on their latest Radeon Software release, which introduced multi-GPU support for AMD's Vega line of graphics cards. According to the AMD representative, it goes down to a technicality, in that "CrossFire isn't mentioned because it technically refers to DX11 applications. In DirectX 12, we reference multi-GPU as applications must support mGPU, whereas AMD has to create the profiles for DX11. We've accordingly moved away from using the CrossFire tag for multi-GPU gaming."