Welcome to the first week of April and the month kicks off on the slow side. This week's major release is a remaster of a game that launched on the PS4 in 2020, which is why we decided to avoid calling it a AAA release, even though the original console game was. This is followed by some parkour, going on adventures with a puppy, some mechs, running a roman outpost and finally being in charge of some police officers.

The Last of Us Part II Remastered / This week's major release / Thursday 3 April
Five years after their dangerous journey across the post-pandemic United States, Ellie and Joel have settled down in Jackson, Wyoming. Living amongst a thriving community of survivors has allowed them peace and stability, despite the constant threat of the infected and other, more desperate survivors. When a violent event disrupts that peace, Ellie embarks on a relentless journey to carry out justice and find closure. Steam link

Late last month, industry insiders posited that pleasing progress was being made with Samsung's cutting-edge 2 nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) node process. The rumored abandonment of an older 3 nm GAA-based project—in late 2024—has likely sent the South Korean foundry team into overdrive. A speculated Exynos 2500 flagship mobile processor was previously linked to said 3 nm node, but industry watchdogs believe that company engineers are experimenting with a 2 nm GAA manufacturing process. According to the latest insider report—from FN News SK—Samsung Foundry (SF) has assembled a special "task force (TF)." Allegedly, this elite team will be dedicated to getting a newer "Exynos 2600 chip" over the finish line—suggesting an abandonment of the older "2500" design, or a simple renaming.

Samsung's recent launch of Galaxy S25 series smartphones was reportedly viewed as a disappointing compromise—with all models being powered by Qualcomm's "first-of-its-kind customized Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform," instead of in-house devised chipsets. According to industry moles, one of the SF task force's main goals is a boosting of 2 nm GAA production yields up to "economically viable" levels (roughly 60-70%)—apparently last month's best result was ~30%. Mass production of prototype chipsets is tipped to start by May. Samsung's reported target of "stabilizing their Exynos 2600" SoC design will ensure that "Galaxy S26 series" devices will not become reliant on Qualcomm internals. Additionally, FN News proposes a bigger picture scenario: "the stabilization of 2 nm (SF2/GAA) products, is expected to speed up the acquisition of customers for Samsung Electronics' foundry division, which is thirsty for leading-edge process customers." A forthcoming rival next-gen mobile chip—Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2—is supposedly in the pipeline. The smartphone industry inside track reckons that Qualcomm has signed up with TSMC; with a 2 nm manufacturing process in mind.

On Monday (March 3), Qualcomm introduced its Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Elite model—advertised as the world's first 5G Advanced-capable FWA platform. Inevitably, the company's brand-new Snapdragon X85 5G modem will be compared to a rival design—Apple's proprietary C1 chip launched last month; as featured in the A18 SoC-powered iPhone 16e series. The two companies were closely intertwined for a number of years; with a longer than anticipated co-development of 5G solutions for multiple iPhone product generations. Cristiano Amon—the CEO of Qualcomm—believes that his team's X85 5G design will end up as the victor, when pitched against Apple's C1. In a CNBC-conducted interview, he boasted: "it's the first modem that has so much AI, it actually increases the range of performance of the modem—so the modem can deal with weaker signals. What that will do will set a huge delta between the performance of premium Android devices, and iOS devices, when you compare what Qualcomm can do versus what Apple is doing."

Smartphone industry watchdogs reckon that Apple's C1 model will leverage superior power efficiency; courtesy of the contained modem and receiver being based on TSMC 4 nm and 7 nm processes (respectively). Qualcomm has not revealed the fundamental aspects of its new Snapdragon X85, so it is difficult to project its power consumption habits. Official press material concentrates on two big selling points: downlink speeds up to 12.5 Gbps, and 40 TOPS of NPU processing power. Insiders have posited that the in-house designed C1 modem will make its way into next-gen iPads and Apple wearables—additionally, the development of a successor is rumored. Despite doing less business with Apple, Amon thinks that the future is peachy: "if modem is relevant there's always a place for Qualcomm technology. In the age of AI, modems are going to be more important than they have ever been. And I think that's going to drive consumer preference about do they want the best possible modem in the computer that's in their hand all the time." Qualcomm's chief expects that the supply of Snapdragon 5G Modem‑RF Systems—to Apple—will end in 2027.

Welcome to another week of new game releases and this week's AAA title takes place in the same world as Pillars of Eternity, for those that were a fan of that game from a decade ago. If RPG games aren't your cup of tea, how about a face full of Norwegian snow, or maybe the summer of 1995? How about some equestrian challenges, some pirate ninjas or maybe something a bit more dystopian? If so, we got the games for you this week.

Avowed / This week's AAA title / Tuesday 18 February
Avowed is a first-person fantasy RPG set in the world of Eora, where your choices carve a path through war, intrigue, and ancient mysteries. Navigate a land in turmoil, forge powerful alliances or deadly rivalries, and wield magic and steel to shape the fate of the Living Lands—and your own destiny. Steam link

Intel has implemented substantial price cuts across its Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" server processor lineup, marking a significant shift in its data center strategy. The reductions, quietly introduced and reflected in Intel's ARK database, come just four months after the processors' September launch. The most dramatic cut affects Intel's flagship 128-core Xeon 6980P, which saw its price drop from $17,800 by 30% to $12,460. This aggressive pricing positions the processor below AMD's competing EPYC "Turin" 9755 128-core CPU both absolute and per-core pricing, intensifying the rivalry between the two semiconductor giants. AMD's SKU at 128 cores is now pricier at $12,984, with higher core count SKUs reaching up to $14,813 for 192-core EPYC 9965 CPU based on Zen 5c core. Intel is expected to release 288-core "Sierra Forest" Xeon SKUs this quarter, so we can get an updated pricing structure and compare it to AMD.

Additionally, Intel's price adjustments extend beyond the flagship model, with three of the five Granite Rapids processors receiving substantial reductions. The 96-core Xeon 6972P and 6952P models have been marked down by 13% and 20% respectively. These cuts make Intel's offerings particularly attractive to cloud providers who prioritize core density and cost efficiency. However, Intel's competitive pricing comes with trade-offs. The higher power consumption of Intel's processors—exemplified by the 96-core Xeon 6972P's 500 W requirement, which exceeds AMD's comparable model by 100 W—could offset the initial savings through increased operational costs. Ultimately, most of the data center buildout will be won by whoever can serve the most CPU volume shipped (read wafer production capacity) and the best TCO/ROI balance, including power consumption and performance.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the delay of Black Myth Wukong on Xbox is not due to the platform's technological limitations but something else entirely. Black Myth: Wukong is a widely known game, reaching a large amount of sales within few months after launch. This well known Black Myth: Wukong, is available for PC and PlayStation 5 players, however one direct competitor is missing. Microsoft's representatives reiterate that Black Myth: Wukong would launch on Xbox soon, but the delay is not due to technological limitations but a case of timed exclusivity by a direct rival, Sony PlayStation.

This claim by the Microsoft representative may be true, after all, before the current generations, Microsoft boasted that their Xbox Series X would be the most powerful household console till date, that surpasses the performance of direct rivals. So that alone may clear the doubts about delay of the game due to platform limitations. Another reason to believe it is because, this isn't the first time we've heard that Sony signed a timed exclusivity contract with devs of a highly potential game title. To avoid competition with direct competitors and just watch the show from the front seat, it's possible that Sony may have done the same again. But then again, it could also be that the developers found out about the technological gaps between the two platforms and decided to hold back the game for a few optimizations before launch. And what the representatives are saying, is just a way to divert the attention from the platform's limitations.

According to sources close to Bloomberg, Intel plans to cut 10,000 jobs from its global workforce. The news comes amid heavy pressure on the semiconductor giant, which has been on a steady decline over the years, while other industry rivals like AMD and NVIDIA have been rising and taking market share in various areas from Intel. It is reported that Intel currently has 110,000 employees globally, and reducing the workforce by 10,000 would net Intel around 100,000 global employees left. These figures exclude employees from spun-out units like Altera FPGA company, which is under Intel's ownership. Intel's aim to reduce its workforce is expected to come with a significant cost benefit to the company, with projected savings of $10 billion by 2025.

The news isn't yet official, but it is expected to see the light of the day as soon as this week. As Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger invests heavily into the fab construction and development of next-generation products, there have been a few notes that Intel would have to overcome some challenges shortly to reach its long-term goals like more advanced silicon manufacturing facilities and new products for AI/HPC and client sector. One of those short-term measures is reducing the workforce to cut down expenses. Intel has reduced its workforce before. In 2022, the company announced reduced spending in non-critical areas and reducing the workforce, and in 2023, cut the workforce by 5% to 124,800 employees last year, only to be left with 110,000 employees in 2024.

During its 55th annual shareholders' meeting, Samsung Electronics announced its entry into the AI processor market with the upcoming launch of its Mach-1 AI accelerator chips in early 2025. The South Korean tech giant revealed its plans to compete with established players like NVIDIA in the rapidly growing AI hardware sector. The Mach-1 generation of chips is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design equipped with LPDDR memory that is envisioned to excel in edge computing applications. While Samsung does not aim to directly rival NVIDIA's ultra-high-end AI solutions like the H100, B100, or B200, the company's strategy focuses on carving out a niche in the market by offering unique features and performance enhancements at the edge, where low power and efficient computing is what matters the most.

According to SeDaily, the Mach-1 chips boast a groundbreaking feature that significantly reduces memory bandwidth requirements for inference to approximately 0.125x compared to existing designs, which is an 87.5% reduction. This innovation could give Samsung a competitive edge in terms of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. As the demand for AI-powered devices and services continues to soar, Samsung's foray into the AI chip market is expected to intensify competition and drive innovation in the industry. While NVIDIA currently holds a dominant position, Samsung's cutting-edge technology and access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing nodes could make it a formidable contender. The Mach-1 has been field-verified on an FPGA, while the final design is currently going through a physical design for SoC, which includes placement, routing, and other layout optimizations.

NVIDIA is anticipating supply issues for its upcoming Blackwell GPUs, which are expected to significantly improve artificial intelligence compute performance. "We expect our next-generation products to be supply constrained as demand far exceeds supply," said Colette Kress, NVIDIA's chief financial officer, during a recent earnings call. This prediction of scarcity comes just days after an analyst noted much shorter lead times for NVIDIA's current flagship Hopper-based H100 GPUs tailored to AI and high-performance computing. The eagerly anticipated Blackwell architecture and B100 GPUs built on it promise major leaps in capability—likely spurring NVIDIA's existing customers to place pre-orders already. With skyrocketing demand in the red-hot AI compute market, NVIDIA appears poised to capitalize on the insatiable appetite for ever-greater processing power.

However, the scarcity of NVIDIA's products may present an excellent opportunity for significant rivals like AMD and Intel. If both companies can offer a product that could beat NVIDIA's current H100 and provide a suitable software stack, customers would be willing to jump to their offerings and not wait many months for the anticipated high lead times. Intel is preparing the next-generation Gaudi 3 and working on the Falcon Shores accelerator for AI and HPC. AMD is shipping its Instinct MI300 accelerator, a highly competitive product, while already working on the MI400 generation. It remains to be seen if AI companies will begin the adoption of non-NVIDIA hardware or if they will remain a loyal customer and agree to the higher lead times of the new Blackwell generation. However, capacity constrain should only be a problem at launch, where the availability should improve from quarter to quarter. As TSMC improves CoWoS packaging capacity and 3 nm production, NVIDIA's allocation of the 3 nm wafers will likely improve over time as the company moves its priority from H100 to B100.

Japanese tech billionaire and founder of the SoftBank Group, Masayoshi Son, is embarking on a hugely ambitious new project to build an AI chip company that aims to rival NVIDIA, the current leader in AI semiconductor solutions. Codenamed "Izanagi" after the Japanese god of creation, Son aims to raise up to $100 billion in funding for the new venture. With his company SoftBank having recently scaled back investments in startups, Son is now setting his sights on the red-hot AI chip sector. Izanagi would leverage SoftBank's existing chip design firm, Arm, to develop advanced semiconductors tailored for artificial intelligence computing. The startup would use Arm's instruction set for the chip's processing elements. This could pit Izanagi directly against NVIDIA's leadership position in AI chips. Son has a chest of $41 billion in cash at SoftBank that he can deploy for Izanagi.

Additionally, he is courting sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East to contribute up to $70 billion in additional capital. In total, Son may be seeking up to $100 billion to bankroll Izanagi into a chip powerhouse. AI chips are seeing surging demand as machine learning and neural networks require specialized semiconductors that can process massive datasets. NVIDIA and other names like Intel, AMD, and select startups have capitalized on this trend. However, Son believes the market has room for another major player. Izanagi would focus squarely on developing bleeding-edge AI chip architectures to power the next generation of artificial intelligence applications. It is still unclear if this would be an AI training or AI inference project, but given that the training market is currently bigger as we are in the early buildout phase of AI infrastructure, the consensus might settle on training. With his track record of bold bets, Son is aiming very high with Izanagi. It's a hugely ambitious goal, but Son has defied expectations before. Project Izanagi will test the limits of even his vision and financial firepower.

Early details of MediaTek's next generation mobile chipset have emerged this week, courtesy of renowned leaker Digital Chat Station via their blog on Weibo. The successor to MediaTek's current flagship Dimensity 9200 mobile chipset will likely be called "Dimensity 9300" - a very imaginative bump up in numbering - with smartphone brand Vivo involved as a collaborator. The tipster thinks that the fabless semiconductor company has contracted with TSMC for fabrication of the Dimensity 9300 chipset - and the foundry's N4P process has been selected by MediaTek, which could provide a bump in generational performance when compared to the older 4 nm and 5 nm standards used for past Dimensity SoC ranges. It should be noted that the current generation Dimensity 9200 chipset is presently manufactured via TSMC's N4P process.

MediaTek is seeking to turnaround its fortunes in the area of flagship mobile chipsets - industry watchdogs have cited a limited uptake of the Taiwanese company's Dimensity 9200 SoC as a motivating factor in the creation of a very powerful successor. Digital Chat Station suggests that the upcoming 9300 model will pack enough of a hardware punch to rival Qualcomm's forthcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC - both chipsets are touted to release within the same time period of late 2023. According to previous speculation, Qualcomm has also contracted with TSMC's factory to pump out the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 via the N4P (4 nm) process.

Last Tuesday, Alibaba announced its intentions to put out its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot product called Tongyi Qianwen - another rival to take on OpenAI's pioneering ChatGPT natural language processing tool. The Chinese technology giant is hoping to retrofit the new chatbot system into several arms of its business operations. Alibaba had revealed initial plans for chatbot integration earlier this year, and mentioned that it was providing an alternative to the already well established ChatGPT tool. Alibaba's workplace messaging application - DingTalk - is slated to receive the first AI-powered update in the near future, although the company did not provide a firm timeline for Tongyi Qianwen's release window.

The product name "Tongyi Qianwen" loosely translates to "seeking an answer by asking a thousand questions" - Alibaba did not provide an official English language translation at last week's press conference. Their chatbot is reported to function in both Mandarin and English language modes. Advanced AI voice recognition is set for usage in the Tmall Genie range of smart speakers (similar in function to the Amazon Echo). Alibaba expects to expand Tongyi Qianwen's reach into applications relating to e-commerce and mapping services.