In a recent announcement, Nvidia revealed that their GPUs would make their way back into chip factories. Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) play a significant role in speeding up the computational lithography process. This is fundamental to the production of increasingly compact transistor gates.

On the other hand, KLA Group, Applied Materials, and Hitachi implement the company’s parallel-processing silicon in their e-beam and optical wafer inspections.

Traditionally, CPU cores have been tasked with handling these computationally heavy workloads. However, GPUs have recently emerged as a potent solution. They can accelerate these tasks when optimally tweaked.

This shift is reflected in the manufacturing process of most chips, which entails etching silicon by projecting specific light wavelengths through a photomask.

A Step to Expedite Complexity

The process has necessitated ingenious solutions to prevent distortions. In addition, it has highlighted the need to clearly etch the transistors’ intricate features. Nvidia’s GPU acceleration is touted to expedite this complex process. According to Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, the process could be “sped up by 50x.”

This is particularly significant given the current global push towards more sustainable and cost-effective solutions.

The utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) is also gaining traction within chip manufacturing. Although Nvidia has not integrated AI into its cuLitho software stack, sources suggest it will be an imminent development.

At the ITF semiconductor conference, Huang underscored the potential of AI to revitalize Moore’s Law. He also pointed to the significance of enhancing the chip manufacturing process.

The Timely Shift

Nvidia’s interest in chip manufacturing is a timely shift in strategy. At least, the slump in the consumer GPU market and the enduring crypto winter suggest so.

With an expansion in foundry projects led by major operators like Samsung, TSMC, Intel, and SK Hynix, Nvidia is seemingly leading the convoy of advanced chip development.

Automation and AI could also address the scarcity of skilled workers in the semiconductor sector. This can be concerning for the US as it seeks to re-shore its semiconductor manufacturing.

The Center for Security and Emerging Technology gas warned that lacking skilled workers could stall the initiative. Presently, there’s an immediate need for an additional 27,000 workers. AI and increased automation, therefore, present viable solutions to fill this gap and manage costs.

The evolving landscape of chip manufacturing, with Nvidia’s GPUs at the forefront, coupled with the use of AI, heralds a transformation of the sector. This development is expected to provide a solution to technical challenges.

The post Nvidia GPUs: A Silicon Phoenix Reborn and Rediscovered appeared first on The Tech Report.

Computer consultants have created entire careers dedicated to the task of determining the best time to upgrade computer hardware or software.

When is it time to upgrade my computer hardware and software?

Many companies hire computer consultants to advise them on when to upgrade their hardware. Should you go with the latest and greatest? On the other hand, should you stick with what has worked in the past?

As with any business choice, the topic of cost versus benefit must be considered. However, determining the costs and benefits of hardware might be difficult to determine. Listed below are some considerations to keep in mind while deciding whether or not to upgrade.

If you find that it is time to upgrade or replace, HP’s Back to School sale is running from Sunday 7/31 through Saturday 8/13. For our viewers, HP gave additional Savings with the following promo codes:

• extra 5% off carts over $599+ w/ code SCHOOLHP5,
• and extra 10% off carts over $1099+ w/ code SCHOOLHP10.

There are over 40 laptops on sale with new intra-day sales daily.

The Uncovering of the Hidden Costs of Upgrading

With a computer upgrade, there is first the expense of your new system. After that, there is the investment of time, work, and money in the process.

In addition, remember the work of migrating your data to your new system. On top of that, if there is a problem during the migration, data may be lost. Is it possible to put a monetary value on all of your company’s data?

If you are considering upgrading solely for the sake of having the most up-to-date equipment, think again.

It looks awesome to be loaded with all the bells and whistles. However, reconsider what it may cost in terms of other losses. First, demonstrate a compelling business case for upgrading. If you cannot do that, your money is better invested somewhere else instead.

Stopgap Measures for the Short Term

If it’s bells and whistles you’re after, it’s possible to incorporate them yourself.

The addition of RAM, or random access memory is a good option. RAM is the memory that allows your computer to perform its functions. Adding more is a terrific way to speed up your system. Additionally, it’s quite simple to do, even for non-technical individuals.

Online setup calculators are available from the majority of RAM retailers, like Crucial and TigerDirect. These help you determine exactly how much RAM your system requires. It’s as simple as opening your computer case and snapping the RAM into place once you’ve found the proper amount of RAM.

In addition to memory upgrades, consider installing extra devices such as CD/DVD drives and burners. After that, bring in additional hard drives.

These are, however, a little more complicated than the prior memory upgrade detailed above. If you are unable to complete the upgrade yourself and must employ a professional, carefully consider your options. Take into account the cost of the parts and the labor. It may be more cost-effective to purchase a completely new system.

When Should You Upgrade?

It should be standard practice to upgrade when the cost of not updating outweighs the cost of upgrading.

You should be able to work more quickly and efficiently with new hardware. Alternatively, you may require hardware upgrades in order to run new software applications that increase your productivity. The best course of action in this scenario is to upgrade your system.

A malfunctioning computer or a computer that crashes frequently are symptoms of an outdated system. In addition, if you have a computer that prevents you from accomplishing the task you need to do, it may be time for an upgrade. Clearly, in each of these situations, delaying the upgrade costs more than simply going ahead and upgrading.

So you did the math and determined that you need to upgrade. However, don’t just go out and buy the most visually appealing or fastest computer.

Furthermore, the most expensive computer you can find may not be the one you need. Choose the most effective strategy to delay the inevitable obsolescence of your next computer. To do this, make sure that it fits all of your business requirements. Perhaps even check with a specialist for a second opinion about your system.

Upgrading Best Practices

Always consider your present computer needs when purchasing a new system.

However, also look at what you expect your prospective computing requirements to be in the future. Do you see yourself needing a database application with a wide range of features in the future? Do you foresee running graphics programs that consume a lot of memory? Have you considered the future possibilities of the need for other specialized applications?

In addition, does your new machine have the ability to communicate with your existing network? Doing a little research saves you a significant amount of money in the long run. These and more considerations help you make an informed decision about upgrading.

The post Computer Upgrade Time? Yes or No? appeared first on The Tech Report.

If you have an old MacBook, odds are good that it is not performing optimally. In some cases, having a poorly performing computer becomes an issue because you can’t complete work on time. Random crashes, freezes, and even restarts are disrupting to workflow.

Anyone who wants to improve Mac performance should read through the tips below. Implementing any or all of these simple suggestions is likely to boost laptop performance.

1. Scan for cybersecurity threats.

The first suggestion is to find and remove potential cybersecurity threats. Even minor viruses or malware can snowball out of control if left unchecked. The more of these threats you have stored on your computer, the more damage they will do over time.

XProtect is the default antivirus that comes bundled with MacOS. However, some users have reported that the software is not sufficient to ensure the safety of their Mac laptops. Thus, it would probably be better to purchase a different antivirus tool and use it instead of XProtect.

In addition to having antivirus software, you can protect the computer and your privacy by using virtual private networks when surfing the net. Enabling the MacBook’s Firewall ought to help as well.

2. Improve Mac performance by removing the dust inside.

Dust is a serious issue to address when you want to improve the performance of your Mac. Old internal MacBook fans may not be enough to keep up with your demands. If the background processes consume more resources than the MacBook can handle, you will need to clean the dust that accumulates inside the laptop. However, if you decide to clean it yourself, be careful with the internal hardware. If you damage it, there will be consequences for any and all warranties.

Besides removing the filth inside, it’s worth investing in a cooling pad. This inexpensive accessory should come in handy by providing the MacBook with cool air and lowering the temperature when the computer starts to overheat.

3. Keep enough free space on your hard drive.

Not having enough free space on the MacBook’s drive is a common problem. Despite its sleek design and great performance, Macs are not the best when it comes to available storage. Additionally, if you purchased a cheaper model and have had it for a while, it’s likely that there is too much clutter on the laptop’s drive.

For starters, you want to get rid of temporary system junk like old system backups and app caches. Some of the best tools for the job would be software like CleanMyMac X that clears the junk data for you.

Other than the temporary data, you should also delete old applications, downloads, and other files you no longer need.

Transferring less-needed data to external storage is a good option as well. External hard drives are now relatively inexpensive. Besides external hard drives, there are also cloud-based storage services such as iCloud and Dropbox that offer a few gigabytes of free space with the option to upgrade that by paying a monthly fee.

4. Manage your system resources.

Keep close tabs on system resources by checking the Activity Monitor regularly. If you notice that some processes are consuming more RAM or energy than they should, you may need to disable them.

There will be some exceptions. These include communication tools you use for work or antivirus software running in the background to scan and eliminate cybersecurity threats. However, if there are one or two or even more redundant apps in the background, you should quit them. Doing so should improve the overall Mac performance.

5. Maintain a clutter-free desktop.

For some computer owners, it’s more convenient to keep documents and app shortcuts on the desktop to access them quickly. However, a cluttered MacBook desktop may spell trouble since the MacOS has to render each icon when users switch between the desktop and other tabs.

It may be difficult to change this habit, but try to maintain a clutter-free desktop. Keep shortcuts and documents in another location and use the search feature when you need to access them.

6. Upgrade computer hardware.

Hardware upgrades on a MacBook are not as simple as they are on a custom-built personal computer. However, there are still a few modifiable areas. For example, it is possible to add extra RAM and replace hard drives with solid-state drives in some models. An external graphics processing unit is also an available hardware upgrade you might consider.

7. Optimize all internet browsers.

If your internet browser causes the most problems when you are using the computer, make some changes. Other than switching to an entirely different internet browser, you should remove unnecessary browser extensions and add-ons. Clearing browser cache is also a good way to improve performance.

8. Installing OS updates will improve Mac performance.

The last bit of advice is about being quick to install MacOS updates. Even if an update takes a while to download and install, it’s still worth it for a couple of reasons.

The first is new features. Bigger MacOS updates introduce neat features that enrich the user experience. Security updates are also a common reason why Apple engineers release OS updates. They react to the latest threats and want to ensure that Mac owners do not expose their computers to the latest malware and viruses.

Lastly, having the latest MacOS version also means having the latest performance upgrades that could make a significant difference.

It’s easy to get so caught up in workload that you begin to ignore the warning signs of diminished laptop performance. It might help to block out chunks of time every so often to run these simple system checks and adjust where needed. A computer is much like a car. If you keep driving your vehicle when it’s low on oil, you can set yourself up for expensive repair bills later on. Most of us focus on having a strong WiFi signal and then get straight to work, but a little preventive maintenance as a weekly ritual will save you bigger headaches in the future.

The post Improve Mac Performance by Following These Eight Simple Suggestions appeared first on The Tech Report.

GPU maker Nvidia is acquiring British CPU designer Arm for $40 billion, the company announced Sunday evening. The purchase comes after months of rumors and courting of Arm (and current owner SoftBank) by Nvidia.

Nvidia said in its press release that the move “brings together Nvidia’s leading AI computing platform and Arm’s vast ecosystem” to create the “premiere computing company for the age of artificial intelligence.”

The Age of Artificial Intelligence

“AI is the most powerful technology force of our time and has launched a new wave of computing,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “In the years ahead, trillions of computers running AI will create a new internet-of-things that is thousands of times larger than today’s internet-of-people. Our combination will create a company fabulously positioned for the age of AI.”

While Nvidia is generally considered primarily as a supplier of consumer graphics cards and GPUs, the company recently saw its datacenter revenue surpass its consumer GPU revenue.

The company with the golden Arm

Despite the purchase, it sounds like Nvidia is going to leave Arm alone. Arm will stay at its current HQ in Cambridge, where Nvidia plans to expand the campus. Nvidia says its wants to build a “world-class AI research facility” to support industries like healthcare, life sciences, robotics, and self-driving cars. The company also plans to build a state-of-the-art AI supercomputer powered by Arm CPUs at that Cambridge campus.

Further, Arm will continue to operate its open licensing model and to maintain customer neutrality. Arm has deals with many of Nvidia’s competitors and other companies in the silicon business. Nvidia says those companies not only will see no change to their business deals with Arm, but also that they’ll benefit from Nvidia’s contributions to Arm’s business. The GPU maker also plans to retain the Arm name and brand. Arm’s intellectual property will stay registered in the UK, too.

Nvidia will pay $12 billion in cash and $21.5 billion in Nvidia common stock. SoftBank, Arm’s current owner, will retain an ownership stake in Nvidia expected to stay below 10%.

Regulation Imminent

SoftBank purchased Arm in 2016 for $31 billion. Journalist Alistair Barr points out that when SoftBank paid that price, Nvidia was worth just $30 billion (a huge sum, but paltry in comparison), and adds that Nvidia has generated $40 billion in market value since rumors of the purchase first hit in July.

This purchase will certainly kick off all manner of regulatory investigation. Bloomberg notes that China, the UK, the European Union, and US authorities must sign off on the deal. That process may take well over a year, past Nvidia’s estimated purchase completion date of September 2021. Arm customers like Apple are sure to raise a stink, too; That’s despite Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s assurance that he doesn’t want to do anything to scare off existing clients. Current owner SoftBank is more of a holdings company and doesn’t otherwise compete with any of Arm’s competitors the way Nvidia does.

Nvidia’s purchase of Arm is going to be in the news for months if not years to come. Already, though, this is considered the biggest purchase ever in the semiconductor industry.

The post Nvidia to acquire Arm for $40 billion appeared first on The Tech Report.

Is there such a thing as a reinforced wallet? This fall is virtually begging for one with how much hardware is heading our way. Now, AMD has announced a pair of presentations aimed at you and me–the consumer–to fully reveal its new Zen 3/Ryzen 4000-series CPUs and RDNA2 Radeon cards.

Ryzen comes first

With the next wave of AMD Ryzen processors and the all-new Zen 3 architecture, @AMD is taking its PC gaming and content creation leadership to new heights. Learn more October 8. pic.twitter.com/PAvA5m3FGo

— AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) September 9, 2020

The first presentation, which zooms in on the Zen 3 CPUs, comes on October 8 at 9 a.m. PST/12 p.m. EST:

We are incredibly excited to invite you to learn more about the next wave of Ryzen desktop processors with “Zen 3” architecture, taking our PC gaming and content creation leadership to new heights. Dr. Lisa Su and other AMD senior executives will kick-off this new journey for “Zen 3” and AMD Ryzen at 12 p.m. ET, October 8^th.

Radeon to follow

AMD #RDNA2 architecture and Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards will bring the best of Radeon to gamers worldwide. Learn more October 28. pic.twitter.com/CZJRxTBe6m

— AMD Radeon (@amdradeon) September 9, 2020

The second presentation covers the RDNA 2 GPUs AMD has been teasing and begins at 9 a.m. PST/12 p.m. EST on October 28:

This comes hot on the heels of Nvidia’s reveal of its RTX 30-series GPUs, which features the RTX 3070, a GPU that costs just $499 but outpaces the $1000+ RTX 2080 Ti; and that’s the third most powerful card. AMD has a lot to prove. While the Ryzen series has become a powerful competitor in the CPU space, Radeon continues to lag in GPUs. AMD’s most powerful 5000-series card is the AMD Radeon 5700 XT, and that card really only competes with AMD’s mid-range RTX 2070–minus the ray tracing capability.

Radeon 6000 will mark the introduction of hardware ray tracing into AMD’s toolkit, along with variable-rate shading. This is the same tech powering the graphics for both the Xbox Series S & X and PlayStation 5 consoles. The hardware is expected to be fairly competitive with Nvidia’s, but Nvidia’s aggressive pricing suggests that AMD might struggle to offer the same price::performance ratio that Nvidia’s new cards are offering. But if AMD can compete with both Intel and Nvidia, it’ll truly be a sight to behold.

The post AMD schedules October Zen 3 and RDNA presentations appeared first on The Tech Report.

Things are getting hot in the laptop space. Is it time to upgrade our laptops along with our CPUs, GPUs, and game consoles this fall? Intel unveiled its 11th-Gen Tiger Lake platform yesterday with some pretty appealing specs.

The CPU giant has 9 new chips on the way, and it says the Tiger Lake platform is the “best CPU for thin-&-light laptops,” taking direct aim at AMD’s Ryzen 4000 mobile chips.

The fastest of the chips is the Intel Core i7-1185G7, which features 4 cores and 8 threads onboard. It has a 3.0 GHz base clock and turbos on a single core up to 4.8 GHz (4.3 GHz on all cores). The chip has Intel’s Iris Xe graphics onboard with 96 Execution Units (EUs), and runs at between 12 and 28 watts. At the bottom is the Core i3-1110G4. This CPU has 2 cores and 4 threads, 1.8 GHz base clock (3.9 boost on one or all cores), and uses Intel UHD graphics.

These chips are built on Intel’s 10nm SuperFin process, which the company says offers improved performance for reduced power draw. Intel offers some vague numbers to back this up, saying that these chips are 20% faster at performing “office tasks” but with 20% increase in “system level power,” amounting to more than an hour of extra battery life. That sounds great, but it offers us almost nothing objective to go off of.

Tiger Lake feature set

The Tiger Lake chips come along with Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 4 support. The Iris Xe graphics are available only on the Core i5 and i7 chips, though, while the i3 chips use Intel UHD graphics. The Xe graphics offer support for up to 8K resolution (or four 4K HDR displays), if you really want to do that on a laptop for whatever reason. The chips also feature Intel’s AI engine, which it’ll use for things like blurring the background on video calls and the like.

Tiger Lake also signals the beginning of Intel’s new Evo branding. Evo is the latest incarnation of Project Athena, Intel’s laptop certification program, a program designed to help users know what a laptop actually offers in terms of things like battery life and features. This program is supposed to be more stringent than Project Athena. It requires nine-plus hour battery life on a single charge in real-world use on a 1080p laptop. It also requires Fast Charging (to the tune of four hours of battery life in 30 minutes). For features, Evo requires Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 4, and it also requires system wake time of less than one second. This all sounds great, but Samsung’s gorgeous Galaxy Chromebook laptop was supposed to be Project Athena compliant and it really wasn’t. So take that with a grain of salt.

Intel says there are 150 Tiger Lake laptops on the way before the end of 2020 from makers like Lenovo, Asus, Dell, LG, and more, 20 of which are Evo-certified systems. We’re looking forward to seeing how Tiger Lake and Ryzen 4000 fare in real-world testing. Again, there’s a lot of new hardware this fall, and we want to know if we should be upgrading our laptops along with everything else.

The post Intel reveals suite of Tiger Lake laptop CPUs appeared first on The Tech Report.

It’s not hard to remember a time when it seemed like Intel was an unbeatable, immovable giant in computing, with AMD filling in the low end of the spectrum and ARM-designed chips on mobile. But apparently, all you have to do to get a giant to fall is to let it trip itself. Intel has struggled to offer competitive products in recent years and is now seeing pressure from AMD, Nvidia, and ARM. Now, a major delay has kicked off some reorganization within the company.

Last week, Intel announced that it would delay its transition to the 7-nm node, and won’t deliver even a 10-nm chip until the latter half of 2021. The company is introducing its its 10-nm Tiger Lake CPUs soon, along with Ice Lake CPUs intended for use in servers. Its Alder Lake desktop CPUs and Sapphire Rapids server CPUs, built on the 10-nm node, in the second half of 2021. Intel pushed out its 7-nm plans by a full 12 months.

As a result of this delay, Intel announced that it will begin reorganization within the company. According to PCWorld, the company will break up its Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group, and executive officer dr. Murthy Renduchintala is leaving the organization. His TSCG group will be broken up into five teams, each of which will report to Intel CEO Bob Swan.

Dr. Ann Kelleher will head Technology Development; Keyvan Esfarjani will lead Manufacturing and Operations; Raja Koduri will continue to run Architecture, Software and Graphics, and Dr. Randhir Thakur will continue to head Supply Chain.

The company is looking at shifting some of its silicon production to TSMC–particularly for its upcoming Xe GPU architecture–though DigiTimes reports (via TechPowerUp) that TSMC is likely to increase capacity for its new client.

New Logos, More Competition

INTEL EVO POWERED BY CORE I5 Trademark Application of Intel Corporation – Serial Number 90069922 :: Justia Trademarkshttps://t.co/dPneHQD88s pic.twitter.com/t29IM5zrew

— 188号 (@momomo_us) July 29, 2020

Intel is also in the process of overhauling its corporate identity, having registered a bunch of new trademarks with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, including a new look for the Intel Inside logo.

Intel is hardly dead, of course. Intel’s market cap dwarfs that of AMD at $205 billion versus $90 billion. But Intel is seeing pressure from all sides. Not only are ARM-powered mobile devices more popular than ever, Apple is switching to its own ARM-based silicon. On the processor front, AMD continues to offer CPUs with more cores and better prices. Intel still wins the per-core race, but the competition is hot. And now, Intel is looking to get into offering GPUs at almost every level from integrated GPUs to discrete gaming GPUs up through HPC, and that puts them in Nvidia‘s sights. That’s a lot for one company to compete with, so it’s hardly surprising that the company is struggling to keep up.

The post Intel to reorg following 7-nm process delay appeared first on The Tech Report.

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company will build a new fabrication facility in the United States, the company has announced. Rumors slipped out through the Wall Street Journal late last week, but the company has since announced the move itself with a formal press release (via TechPowerUp).

TSMC is building the facility in Arizona with plans to start construction in 2021. Production will finish in 2024, the company says. The facility will start with TSMC’s 5-nm fabrication technology and expects a 20,000 semiconductor-wafer-per-month capacity. The company says the facility will create 1,600 high-tech jobs for Arizona, and “thousands of indirect jobs in the semiconductor ecosystem.” TSMC is going to put $12 billion into the project between the 2021 start date until 2029.

The decision apparently comes as a result of involvement from the government. TSMC mentions a “continued and strong partnership with the U.S. administration and the state of Arizona” on the project. The company also has a fabrication facility in Camas, WA, as well as design facilities in Austin, TX and San Jose, CA.

TSMC’s skillset is in high demand right now, as the company is handling orders from Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. With COVID-19 making importing goods more difficult, it makes sense that a company doing a lot of importing like TSMC is would want to skip a step where possible.

The post TSMC to build Arizona silicon fab facility appeared first on The Tech Report.

Hot on the heels of last week’s exposure of an unfixable security vulnerability hard-coded into Intel CPUs, an additional security vulnerability in Intel CPUs has been made public this week. Unlike the vulnerability exposed last week, this vulnerability is another transient execution vulnerability stemming from speculative execution optimization. It follows a long history of similar vulnerabilities, including Spectre, Meltdown, SPOILER, Foreshadow, SwapGS, ZombieLoad, RIDL, Fallout, and recently, CacheOut.

This new vulnerability is being called LVI, which stands for Load Value Injection. LVI bypasses the current patches intended to mitigate transient execution vulnerabilities by taking a different approach to data extraction.

Instead of directly leaking data from the victim to the attacker, we proceed in the opposite direction: we smuggle — “inject” — the attacker’s data through hidden processor buffers into a victim program and hijack transient execution to acquire sensitive information, such as the victim’s fingerprints or passwords.

According to the research team behind the discovery of LVI, the attack “can affect virtually any access to memory.” That said, one of the members of the team told The Register that “LVI is less practical and more difficult to mount in a non-SGX setting where the operating system and VMM are trusted.” Nevertheless, a vulnerability that allows access to data from SGX enclaves is a serious matter. Intel’s SGX is intended to create a strongly encrypted secure vault isolated at the hardware level, so non-authorized, outside access to this vault is clearly problematic.

The research team discovered and reported the vulnerability back in April of last year, but did not go public with it until yesterday (PDF). However, last month, a research team from Bitdefender independently speculated (PDF) the possibility of a particular variant of LVI. The vulnerability has been assigned the identifiers CVE-2020-0551 and Intel-SA-00334, and has a vulnerability score of 5.6 (medium). Intel has its own deep dive into LVI that you can read here.

The research team reports that prototype implementations of full LVI mitigation slow down SGX enclave computations by a factor anywhere from two to nineteen.

Fully mitigating our attacks requires serializing the processor pipeline with lfence instructions after possibly every memory load. Additionally and even worse, due to implicit loads, certain instructions have to be blacklisted, including the ubiquitous x86 ret instruction. Intel plans compiler and assembler-based full mitigations that will allow at least SGX enclave programs to remain secure on LVI-vulnerable systems.

The post Intel CPUs might take a performance hit to mitigate new LVI security vulnerability appeared first on The Tech Report.

A little over a month ago, we reported on a speculative execution vulnerability found in Intel CPUs, adding to the growing list of similar vulnerabilities. However, yesterday, a team of security researchers revealed a new kind of vulnerability in Intel CPUs. Positive Technologies published a blog post detailing a flaw in Intel’s Converged Security and Management Engine (CSME) firmware.

Intel CSME is the cryptographic basis for hardware security technologies developed by Intel and used everywhere, such as DRM, fTPM, and Intel Identity Protection.

This flaw is located in the Read-Only-Memory (ROM), which means it is hard-coded and so cannot be fixed. This feature of the vulnerability sets it apart from all the speculative execution vulnerabilities, which can be patched. That said, according to the blog post, when the security group reached out to Intel in order to report the vulnerability, they found that Intel already knew about the vulnerability and was attempting to address it. The vulnerability was registered last year in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures system as CVE-2019-0090, and has a vulnerability score of 7.1 (high).

Intel understands they cannot fix the vulnerability in the ROM of existing hardware. So they are trying to block all possible exploitation vectors. The patch for CVE-2019-0090 addresses only one potential attack vector, involving the Integrated Sensors Hub (ISH). We think there might be many ways to exploit this vulnerability in ROM. Some of them might require local access; others need physical access.

The vulnerability affects all Intel chipsets and SoCs currently available, excepting Ice Point. The widespread nature of the vulnerability is not good news for those who own devices with Intel CPUs manufactured in the last five years.

By exploiting vulnerability CVE-2019-0090, a local attacker could extract the chipset key stored on the PCH microchip and obtain access to data encrypted with the key. Worse still, it is impossible to detect such a key breach. With the chipset key, attackers can decrypt data stored on a target computer and even forge its Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) attestation, or in other words, pass off an attacker computer as the victim’s computer. EPID is used in DRM, financial transactions, and attestation of IoT devices.

The post Unfixable vulnerability found in Intel CPUs appeared first on The Tech Report.

With how many chips run our many computing and “smart” devices these days, chances are that you own something made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Chips that began life at TSMC’s semiconductor foundry in Taiwan are in computers, video cards, smartphones, and more. Now, TSMC is gearing up for the next generation of semiconductors with plans to hire staff for 4,000 new jobs according to a report from Focus Taiwan.

Focus Taiwan writes that TSMC has listed a bunch of job openings on the recruitment site TaiwanJobs. Further, the company is actively recruiting on college campuses. The openings run the full gamut required for semiconductor research and production. Focus Taiwan spotted openings for things like electrical engineering, optoelectronics, physics, production, chemicals, and even human resources and labor relations.

TSMC is in mass production of its 7-nm process right now. It plans to push its 5-nm process into production in the first half of 2020, with 3 nm coming in 2022. The company expects to spend $15 – $16 billion in 2020 as it digs into the development and manufacturing of these processes. Of that $15-plus billion, TSMC has said that previously that 80% will go toward these newer, thinner processes. Increasing demand for 5G and High-Performance Computing will help push the new development ahead and keep demand high.

Background on TSMC

TSMC’s semiconductor foundry was the first dedicated of such facilities in the world when Morris Chang founded the company back in 1987. The company continues to supply semiconductors for some of the biggest companies in computing, including AMD, Nvidia, and Apple. TSMC’s market share hovers around 50% of the market depending on the year, having been just below this last year.

The post TSMC to hire 4,000 for high-end process development appeared first on The Tech Report.

Finally, AMD and Intel have some competition. Well, probably not, but this is still worth a look: chipmaker Zhaoxin has rolled out its first consumer-directed CPU according to Anandtech. Zhaoxin is a joint venture between Via Technologies and the Chinese government and has been selling systems to the Chinese government for some time. The Zhaoxin KX-6780A marks the company’s first move into the consumer market.

The Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-6780A is only available in China at the moment and is only available as an embedded processor soldered to its mini-ITX motherboard. The KX-6780A is an 8-core, 64-bit, x86 CPU. It has 8 MB of L2 cache, a dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory controller, and features modern I/O interfaces like PCIe, as well as DirectX 11.1-capable graphics.

Zhaoxin says the chip compares to a 7th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, but that’s also coming straight from the company; take it with a grain of salt. Even if it’s true, it’s going to be true only conditionally. Intel’s 7th-gen Core i5 chips were quad-core, non-Hyper Threaded CPUs, and any comparison between chips is not going to be exactly 1:1 until the chip is in the hand of independent testers.

The CPU is made using TSMC’s 16-nm process and supports modern CPU instructions sets. It can run both Windows and Linux.

It has ports, too

Photo Credit: Anandtech

The board itself has a pretty standard-looking, though unimpressive feature set. You can pump integrated graphics out through HDMI or VGA ports and supports 4K video playback. On the board itself, you’ll find a 24-pin power supply connector and a PCIe slot that provides compatibility with discrete graphics cards. There’s also room for two SO-DIMMs and two M.2 slots. On the back of the board are HDMI and VGA outputs, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and two RJ-45 Ethernet ports. The board accepts power through a DC power port.

The board and its embedded KX-6780A chip are on sale on Taobao for the equivalent of about $620, and a mini-PC is allegedly coming along in March.

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The discoveries of the last few years concerning speculative execution have not been kind to Intel. The discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were just the beginning, with even more vulnerabilities identified since then, including SPOILER, Foreshadow, SwapGS, ZombieLoad, RIDL, and Fallout. A new vulnerability was added to that list yesterday.

The researchers have named this vulnerability “CacheOut” based on the exploitation’s ability to evict targeted data from the CPU’s cache memory. The landing page describes the uniqueness of this vulnerability:

[U]nlike previous MDS issues, we show in our work how an attacker can exploit the CPU’s caching mechanisms to select what data to leak, as opposed to waiting for the data to be available.

The paper (PDF), written by Stephan van Schaik, Marina Minkin, Andrew Kwong, Daniel Genkin, and Yuval Yarom, provides the above schematic overview and explains the exploit as follows:

At a high level, CacheOut forces contention on the L1-D cache to evict the data it targets from the cache. We describe two variants. First, in the case that the cache contains data modified by the victim, the contents of the cache line transits through the LFBs while being written to memory. Second, when the attacker wishes to leak data that the victim does not modify, the attacker first evicts the data from the cache, and then obtains it when it transits through the line fill buffers to satisfy a concurrent victim read.

CacheOut appears in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures system and National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2020-0549. Intel has given the vulnerability the title “L1D Eviction Sampling (L1Des) Leakage” and a severity rating of “medium” with a CVSS score of 6.5. You can find a full list of affected processors here. According to Intel’s advisory page for the vulnerability,

Intel will release Intel® Processor microcode updates to our customers and partners as part of our regular Intel Platform Update (IPU) process.

 

Intel recommends that users of affected Intel® Processors check with their system manufacturers and system software vendors and update to the latest microcode update when available.

The post New “CacheOut” speculative execution vulnerability for Intel CPUs appeared first on The Tech Report.

Intel has been struggling with a chip shortage since 2018, and the company says the shortage could even outlast 2019 and persist into 2020. Now, the company is looking to revive its Haswell Pentium G3420, necromancer-style, from its grave.

According to a Product Change notification from Intel, the company is “canceling this product discontinuance completely per new roadmap decision and enabling the product long term once again.” In other words, Intel is canceling the cancellation of the G3420.

As NotebookCheck notes, this chip isn’t likely to see much play with builders. Aside from it being a four-year-old chip, the G3420 is built on the older 22-nm process. It’s a dual-core chip with two Haswell-era that clock at 3.2 GHz and a locked multiplier. It also slots into the outdated LGA 1150 form factor.

Instead, the chip will likely prove popular with OEMs, which might end up re-implementing the chip for office machines.

With AMD approaching its 7nm process, Intel reviving a dead 22nm chip seems to indicate just what a bind Intel’s chip shortage has the company in. Even if it alleviates the supply problems Intel is having in terms of getting chips to OEMs, it’s not a great look for the company.

The post Intel revives Haswell-era chip amid 14nm shortage appeared first on The Tech Report.

AMD announced this week a trio of new processors that run the whole gamut from starter chip to high-end beasts. AMD detailed what its 3rd-gen Threadripper will look like, showed off the new Ryzen 9 3950X, and even released a new Athlon APU, the 3000G.

Ryzen 9 3950X

The Ryzen 9 3950X is the one most of us are going to be eyeballing. The 3950X is a 16-core, 32-thread AM4 CPU. If you already have an AM4 motherboard, this chip will slot right in there provided you have the latest BIOS update. The 3950X offers a 3.5 GHz base frequency, and a 4.7 GHz maximum boost. It also has a 105W TDP just like its 3900X sibling. The chip has 512KB of dedicated L2 cache for each core, 64MB of shared L3 cache; That’s 72MB of total cache. That’s 25% more L2 cache when compared to the Ryzen 9 3900X.

AMD offered up some performance numbers for us to peruse, too. The company says the 3950X is 22% higher in single-threaded performance when compared to its own Ryzen 7 2700X in Cinebench R20. Meanwhile, on the multi-threaded side, AMD compared it to Intel’s big boy, the Core i9-9900K, and says their chip is 79% higher there. Gaming performance should be on-par with the 9900K, too.

Like Intel’s 9900K, AMD says the 3950X is optimized for liquid cooling and recommends at least a 240mm x 150mm AIO cooler to go with this chip.

The Ryzen 9 3950X will retail for $749 USD starting November 25.

3rd-Gen Threadrippers Revealed

AMD also talked about its high-end desktop processors, the 3rd generation of its Threadripper series. The series will debut with two chips: the Threadripper 3960X and Threadripper 3970X.

The 3960X is a 24-core, 48-thread chip with a 3.8 GHz base clock that boosts up to 4.5 GHz maximum. and 140MB of L2 and L3 cache combined. That one is going for $1,399.

The 3970X, meanwhile, is a 32-core, 64-thread monstrosity with 3.7 GHz base clocks and 4.5 GHz boost. Take a deep breath before you read the price: $1,999. Like the 3950X, these will be available on November 25.

They’re both sTRX4 socket chips that are compatible with AMD’s TRX4 chipset and motherboards. While it does use the new socket, the new Threadripper will be backward compatible with TR4 cooling solutions. Any cooler or waterblock you used with your TR4 Threadripper should make the jump if you decide to upgrade. Compared to the Ryzen chips above, the 3rd-Gen Threadripper will be a power-hungry chip, with a TDP of 280W.

AMD says the sTRX4 Threadrippres have a quad-channel DDR4 memory interface that can handle up to 2TB of memory. The chips have a total of 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes, with 48 dedicated toward PCIe x16 slots, 8 toward the chipset bus, and 8 lanes that can be dedicated toward a pair of NVMe slots, x4 onboard devices (Ethernet, WiFi, USB, etc), or additional SATA ports.

ECO mode

AMD also talked about its new ECO mode, which will come to all AM4 processors with Zen 2 cores. In short, it’ll let you configure the maximum power draw in AMD’s Ryzen Master software so that you can crank down the performance when you don’t need all that juice. AMD picks on its new 3950X chip to demonstrate the effectiveness of this feature; turn ECO mode on and you’ll see 77% of your performance with an impressive 44% less power draw and an estimated 7°C lower temperatures.

AMD Athlon 3000G

You wouldn’t want all that CPU power to leak out the bottom, though, and so AMD also revealed its Athlon 3000G. This 12-nm chip combines 2 Zen+ CPU cores (4 threads total) and Radeon Vega 3 graphics with 3 Vega Next-Generation Compute Units (NGCU). The CPU has a base clock of 3.5 GHz, and AMD is offering an unlocked base-clock multiplier. In other words, this thing is meant to be overclocked. The price seems to confirm that – the 3000G will be just $49 when it comes out on November 19.

The post AMD shows Ryzen 9 3950X, 3rd Gen Threadripper appeared first on The Tech Report.

It isn’t just how many semiconductors you have, it’s what you do with them. That’s how the saying goes, right? AMD is preparing to roll out a new microcode update soon according to hardware vendor MSI. This microcode, which tells the CPU how to operate at the most basic level, will have over 100 updates and improvements for Ryzen CPUs.

Word came out during the MSI Insider show on YouTube, where MSI Marketing Director Eric van Beurden also talked about the company’s upcoming X570 Unify motherboard. Skip to about 40 minutes in to see the particulars.

Once the microcode is ready, AMD will roll that out to the BIOS vendors which are responsible for updating the BIOS code. Those vendors then pass their updates to the motherboard manufacturers. The manufacturers will likely tune the updates to better suit their motherboard models before rolling the update out to the public.

MSI says the improvements aren’t just a matter of fixing bugs and problems, but also about adding features as well. The code will definitely apply to the current 3000-generation chips, but we’re hoping it’ll hit the previous Ryzen generations as well. AMD hasn’t said yet what these updates and improvements will do for the end-user. They could do anything from making the processor slightly more efficient, to helping the operating system figure out how best to use the many cores on the chips.

We’re hoping that AMD and BIOS manufacturers work through releasing the update soon. AMD has struggled with the gap between promises and reality when it comes to hitting Ryzen 3000 boost clocks, for example, so every little update will help the vendor ride the wave of goodwill it’s currently on.

The post AMD Ryzen CPUs to get microcode update this fall appeared first on The Tech Report.

AMD began its Zen-aissance with the first-generation Ryzen CPUs in 2017, proving that it was not to be discounted from the high-performance CPU race just yet. While those CPUs weren’t perfect, they offered high-end desktop core counts at formerly unheard-of prices.

Barely a year later, AMD launched the second-generation Ryzen CPUs. Smarter dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, a lower-latency memory controller, and higher peak clock speeds went a long way to make Ryzen more attractive to gamers and other folks who may not necessarily have had much use for a whole pile of processor cores.

Now, AMD is taking a step rarely seen in the history of CPUs: it’s migrating to a next-generation semiconductor fabrication process ahead of arch-rival Intel. With TSMC’s 7-nm foundries at its disposal, AMD has used this genuine, Moore’s Law-compliant advance in transistor density and performance to introduce a family of processors powered by its Zen 2 architecture.

The specific processors that AMD provided for us are the Ryzen 7 3700X and the Ryzen 9 3900X. You can see the most important specifications for these chips in the chart above. As you’re probably aware, these CPUs are not only the first releases with AMD’s new Zen 2 processor core, but they’re also the first CPUs from AMD assembled using multiple heterogeneous “chiplets” in a single package. Get used to that word—chiplet—because we suspect you’re going to be hearing it quite a bit over the next few years.

Chip(let)s’ challenge

So what is a “chiplet?” From the name, you can infer that it’s a little chip. Specifically, AMD refers to its new bits of silicon as chiplets because they are not traditional monolithic processors that function independently. Instead, one of these third-generation Ryzen CPUs is based on two or three chiplets from two different types. One type of chiplet is the CCD, or “Core Chiplet Die,” and the other is the IOD (the “I/O die”). The actual processing happens on one or more CCDs, while the IOD contains the memory controller, high-speed I/O, and other functions.

A diagram of a Socket AM4 third-generation Ryzen CPU. Source: AMD

This change was likely spurred by a number of factors. Notably, it allows AMD to use the same CCD chiplets for every single product across its range. While the company only explicitly names “client products” such as the ones we’re looking at today, all signs point to AMD re-using these same chiplets as one brick in the foundation for its next-generation Epyc CPUs, code-named Rome.

Along similar lines, there’s nothing stopping the company from sticking these same CCDs in everything from game consoles to ultra-mobile processors. In the end, this move allows AMD to improve yields, density, and scalability at the cost of drastically increased design complexity.

Snarky internet commenters have already pointed out that this is not really all that different from the way things used to work when we had both north- and south-bridge chips on our motherboards. The difference between a distant chip on the motherboard and a separate chiplet on the same package is monumental, though. AMD says that “from the perspective of cache and memory access” these new processors “behave monolithically” aside from 1-2 nanoseconds of wire latency on cache accesses. We’ll see if that’s true when we get to our performance testing, but let’s talk a little bit more about Zen 2 first.

Zen, once more with feeling

Don’t be confused: even though these are the third-generation Ryzen processors, the CPU cores inside are based on the “Zen 2” architecture. That design is itself a major revision of the Zen+ architecture inside the second-generation Ryzen processors. Despite the radical shift in processor design to a chiplet-based paradigm, the most pertinent changes in these processors, for our purposes, are those made to the cores and caches.

A diagram of a Zen 2 processor core. Source: AMD

I’m not a CPU architect, so some of the modifications that AMD made go over my head. Still, there are a couple of changes that are easy to understand. Firstly, AMD doubled the width of the core’s AVX units, allowing them to handle 256-bit floating-point data in a single operation. That change alone doubles the speed of Zen 2 cores on crunchy vector math operations compared to their forebears, and brings the core design up to par in that regard with Intel’s desktop chips. More and more applications are starting to use AVX instructions to accelerate vector math operations, so this is a big deal.

Even more importantly, AMD doubled the L3 cache on Zen 2. As with Zen and Zen+, Zen 2’s CPU cores are further subdivided within an 8-core CCD into two quad-core Core CompleXes (CCX). On previous-generation designs, each CCX had 8MB of L3 cache to call its own, but on Zen 2 each CCX now has 16MB of L3 cache. Doing simple arithmetic, that gives parts with one CCD 32MB of L3 cache, and parts with two CCDs fully 64MB of L3 cache. It’s possible AMD that could disable part of the cache for future CPUs, but all of the parts launching today are fully enabled.

AMD specifically says this change was made possible by the move to 7nm fabrication. That’s easy to believe, because 32MB of cache is a huge chunk of the CCD chiplet. Microprocessor makers don’t dedicate enormous swaths of silicon to specific features without a good reason, and we think the big block of cache is there to help mitigate a memory latency penalty brought on by these CPUs’ unique packaging.

AMD is so impressed by the potential difference that the extra cache makes that it has a marketing buzzword for the feature: AMD GameCache. If you see it in the future, know that it doesn’t really mean anything; it’s just branding born from the idea that Zen 2-based CPUs see a significant boost—14%, according to AMD—in game performance as a direct result of the larger cache.

Zen 2 also brings support for the UEFI Collaborative Power and Performance Control (CPPC2) interface. This is not unlike a vendor-neutral version of Intel’s SpeedShift technology. When CPPC2 is enabled, third-generation Ryzen processors take control of their per-core clock rates away from the OS and manage it themselves. Instead of requiring some 30ms to ramp up CPU core clocks in response to incoming work, the CPU can instead hit top speed within 1-2ms. This is a tremendous benefit for brief and bursty workloads such as webpage rendering and application launches. As it requires OS support, using this feature requires the very latest version of Windows 10.

Other major changes in Zen 2 include a double-size micro-op cache (up to 4K), an all-new “tagged geometric” branch predictor, an extra address generation unit, and a larger 180-entry register file. AMD also says it has improved fetch and pre-fetch capabilities, and generally improved load/store bandwidth throughput the device. Overall, Zen 2 looks to shore up the weaknesses of Zen+, and AMD claims that the new chips’ instructions-per-clock (IPC) is up by 15% over second-generation Ryzen. If you’re thirsty for more specific details about the changes in Zen 2, hit up Wikichip Fuse’s in-depth article.

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• We usually write up sales on the Intel 660p, but this time around we have something much faster: the Sabrent Rocket family of speedy NVMe SSDs. Although the company isn’t one of the major players in the space, its SSDs hit all the right spots. We have three today, with capacities ranging from 512 GB to 2 TB, all on sale at absurd prices. The 512 GB model can do 3400 MB/s in sequential reads and 2000 MB/s in writes, and 357K IOPS in random reads and 456K IOPS for writes. It’s going for just $49.99 at Amazon. The next one up is the 1 TB model, with 3400/3000 MB/s for sequential data, and a whopping 650K random read IOPS and 640K write IOPS. This one will set you back an almost-even $99.99. The biggest unit is the 2 TB model, with 3400/3700 MB/s sequential speeds, and 490K/540K IOPS for random I/O. You can pick this one up for $219.99.

• Today’s cheap RAM pack is the Adata XPG Gammix D10 16 GB set with 3000 MT/s sticks. The silver heatsinks should look good under any kind of lighting, and the timings are set at 16-20-20. The folks at Rakuten are asking but $53.54 for the pair with the checkout code SAVE15. The manufacturer offers lifetime warranty.

• It’s a hot season for Ryzen builds, and we have just the board for that. The Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro WiFi is one fine lookin’ circuit board with two PCIe x4 M.2 slots under heatsinks, a souped-up ALC1220-VB audio codec with WIMA capacitors, an Intel Ethernet chip, and metal casing on the main PCIe slot. You also get USB 3.1 Gen2 ports in both Type-C and Type-A flavors, along with Intel-powered 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The VRMs sit under decently sized heatsinks, and there’s onboard RGB LED lighting for good measure. This mobo hits all the right notes, and it’ll set you back just $109.99 at Newegg.

• If an Intel machine is more your speed, then check out the Core i3-9100F processor. This is one of the top low-end processors you can get your hands on, as its four cores clocked at up to 4.2 GHz make for a potent gaming concoction, especially when paired with a discrete graphics cards. As it happens, the “F” suffix for this model means that it does away with an IGP, making it suitable for that exact type of build. Pick this processor up from Newegg for only $84.99 with the cart code EMCTCTV38.

• It’s time to go mobile. The Lenovo Flex 15 (81SR000QUS) is a fold-back convertible with a 15.6″ 1920×1080 touch-screen, and it’s powered by a snappy Intel Core i7-8565U chip (four cores, eight threads at up to 4.6 GHz) next to 8 GB of RAM (in a 4+4 configuration) and a 256 GB NVMe solid-state drive. The machine’s just 0.81″ (20.5 mm) thick, and the price tag is equally as thin at $564.99 with the cart code LEN110.

• For a meatier hardware selection, we have just the machine. The Dell G3 15 gaming laptop (I3590-7957BLK-PUS) is one heck of a geared-up portable, powered by an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, a six-core, twelve-thread affair with a 4.5 GHz turbo and 12 MB of cache. Sitting next to the CPU are 16 GB of RAM and a roomy 512 GB NVMe solid-state drive. Pixels find their way to the screen at speed thanks to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card with 6 GB of its own memory. The port selection includes both Type-A and Type-C USB ports, as well as an HDMI output. You can get your hands on this fast-moving beast for $1079.99 at Best Buy.

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• In our view, the RTX 2060 strikes a pretty good balance between horsepower and price as graphics cards go these days. The Gigabyte RTX 2060 OC is a simple-but-solid take on that card with a nominal boost clock is 1755 MHz. It’s fitted with a dual-fan cooler with alternate spinning fans sitting atop a big honkin’ chunk of metal. You get a free copy of Wolfenstein: Youngblood with the purchase, and the price is currently $339.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTBVD23.

• Quality mechanical keyboards used to be luxury items, but they’re quite affordable nowadays. The HP Omen Sequencer keyboard is a fine example of the breed, and it comes fited with an opto-mechanical variant of Cherry MX Blue switches that affords a 0.2 ms response time. There’s also a set of macro keys and multimedia controls. All the gear sits on an island-style aluminum frame. There’s a USB pass-through port and the requisite per-key RGB LED backlighting. The price is set at just $69.99 at Best Buy.

• Cheap mass storage is back in fashion, as you can tell from looking at this here Western Digital Elements 8 TB external hard drive. It’s roomy, simple, and comes with backup software. You can pick one up from Newegg for $124.99 with the cart code EMCTBVD22.

• The prodigal son Intel 660p 1 TB NVMe SSD returns. You’re probably groaning “not again” at this point, but its price just keeps dropping. For reference, this variant can push 1800 MB/s sequentially in either direction, while the random I/O figures clock in at 150K read IOPS and 220K write IOPS. Today’s price is $87.99 at Newegg Flash. Did we mention this is a flash deal? I’ll see myself out.

• Let’s combo it up. The Core i9-9900KF is one heck of a desktop CPU thanks to its eight threads and 16 cores clocked at up to a whopping 5 GHz. This is one of the best chips of the moment thanks to its ability to both game and work with aplomb. The “KF” mark means this model is unlocked but devoid of an integrated graphics processor that’d probably go to waste in a high-end build anyway. Newegg is selling this CPU together with an HP EX900 250 GB NVMe drive, all for the sum of $459.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTBVC22. You’re basically getting the SSD for free.

• We end today’s deals with a fancy rodent. The Corsair M65 RGB Elite is fitted with an 18,000 DPI optical sensor and Omron switches undenearth the eight buttons. The aluminum underside has spots for fitting weights and can be used as a blunt weapon in an emergency. Around the side, there’s a well-placed sniper button, and naturally, there’s onboard RGB LED lighting. You can grab one of these for $39.99 from Best Buy, or also for $39.99 from the folks at Amazon.

That’s all for today, folks! There’s a chance you’re looking for something we haven’t covered. If that’s the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you’re out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam’s Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard’s shop.

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Filippo, an alumnus of the University of Oklahoma and Rice University, has an impressive history in systems design. He got his start at AMD, where he was involved in the designs of multiple generations of Athlon and Opteron processors. After that, from 2004 to 2009, he was lead architect an HPC chip for a 24-core, 96-thread behemoth SoC and played a role in several cache designs. Most recently at ARM, Filippo was the lead architect for many of the company’s processor cores, including the A76, the next-generation high-end mobile core codenamed “Hercules”, and several infrastructure and server-focused CPUs like Neoverse N1 (codenamed “Ares”).

Presumably Filippo’s hiring is a little late for working on designs that have been rumored to launch next year. These designs typically take quite a while to complete. For instance, Jim Keller famously discussed AMD’s Zen microarchitecture at AMD’s Innovation Summit some three full years before Ryzen launched. The timing could indicate that Apple’s plans aren’t as far along as previously rumored, or it could indicate nothing at all. Apple’s design team was an IPC powerhouse long before this hiring, and Filippo has experience in system architecture that stretches beyond just the ARM ISA.

The post Apple hires former ARM, Intel, and AMD chip architect Mike Filippo appeared first on The Tech Report.

PC enthusiasts have been overclocking their hardware since before I owned a PC. At the risk of sounding like an old person, I had to move jumpers around on my Shuttle HOT-555A to get that Socket 7’s motherboard to run its front-side bus at 83 MHz instead of 66. That took my Pentium MMX 166 MHz up to 207 MHz. The prevailing thought among enthusiasts seemed to be “why not overclock? It’s free performance.” The process was a little intimidating to me at first, and many average PC users either didn’t know about it or were afraid to mess with the default settings.

Fast forward a few years and motherboards started to make things easier. Abit’s KT7 was the first motherboard I can think of that had a jumper-free overclocking experience. You could press a hotkey at boot time and mess around with voltages and bus timings right on your PC monitor. While those interfaces have improved over the years, tweakers still get their hands dirty in the firmware interface to tune their gear to the bleeding edge of stability. Who among us didn’t buy a Northwood Pentium 4C 2.4 GHz or a Barton Athlon XP 2500+ and crank that sucker up? Whoa. I just felt a wave of nostalgia.

What’s the next step in overclocking, though? These days you can control those same manual switches and knobs in Windows-based tools, but the methods are still the same. Are we destined to live lives of endless toil, tweaking voltages and multipliers? Should we carry on perfecting our AVX offsets and obsessing over stability with Prime 95?

Many motherboards these days have some degree of automatic overclocking, but those features tend to be somewhat coarse and overly conservative. Motherboard one-click overclocking tools often have higher-than-necessary voltages and lower-than-optimal boost clocks to accommodate the largest portion of hardware without doing a lot of strenuous testing. What if you could run a utility that would automatically run tests, tweak speeds and voltages, and come up with the perfect overclock? If I were to climb up on Santa’s knee when I first started tinkering with PC hardware, that might be what I’d ask of him.

Intel Claus recently dropped a gift down the chimney of all the good owners of the company’s unlocked 9th-generation CPUs: Performance Maximizer. This utility brings official overclocking to the masses with a single click, or so the pitch goes. There’s quite a bit more to it than that, but we’ll get to that. First off, we’ll ruin the fun of some gerbils early on: sorry, non-9th-gen owners, this isn’t for you. To use Performance Maximizer, you need to have not only one of the six CPU models on the list below, but also a Z390 motherboard running Windows 10 version 1809 or later.

Recently, I was in the market for a new gaming PC. While I think Ryzen is great (cue the “My other PC has a Ryzen 5 2400G” bumper sticker), I elected to go for raw gaming power over a robust multi-tasking system. Despite AMD’s progress on the single-threaded performance front, Intel still wins those battles more often than not. So for that reason, I selected a Core i5-9600K. It’s rather fortuitous that Performance Maximizer dropped a few days later. I had just dialed in what I thought was the perfect overclock, but I figured I’d take Intel’s tool for a spin.

There are two versions of Performance Maximizer, so be sure to get the right one. One is for Core i9 processors and the other is for any supported CPU without Hyper-Threading. Regardless of whether you download the version for the Core i9-9900K or the one for non-HyperThreaded CPUs, the installer will weigh in at a whopping 1.5 GB. If that sounds like a lot of space for an auto-overclock tool, just wait until you run it.

The post Official Overclocking: Intel’s Performance Maximizer reviewed appeared first on The Tech Report.

How short is the supply of Intel CPUs? Are supplies constrained enough to turn even part of its processor production over to another foundry? If a report from SE Daily is accurate, the answer to that question is yes. Intel may be contracting Samsung to produce some CPUs on the Korean chip giant’s 14-nanometer process.

None of the TR staff can read Korean, and the Google Translation of the article is rough, to say the least. However, what seems clear from the report is that Samsung will produce CPUs with the codename “Rocket Lake” for Intel starting sometime towards the end of 2020 with a planned release in 2021. The report gives no indication as to what those CPUs are, but a report from Dutch website Tweakers.net claims that those chips will feature glue discrete chiplets that handle graphics duties.

A source familiar with the negotiations told SE Daily that contract negotiations between the world’s largest x86 vendor and the Korean foundry are “in the final stages.” A quick look at the the calendar tells us that 2021 is still a ways off. That could mean that Intel will still feel the crunch for a while longer, and will sell a lot of 14-nanometer silicon for the foreseeable future.

Purportedly, Intel’s decision to use Samsung was based partly on TSMC’s decision to continue fabricating chips for Huawei, which is the subject of a trade ban after the U.S. Commerce Department added the Chinese device maker to its Entity List. Intel CEO Robert Swan (or “Bob Hong” in the translated SE Daily article) told Bloomberg that the company is reevaluating its supply chain in the wake of sanctions against Huawei.

Update 6/19/2019 10:00 AM: According to a report by Tom’s Hardware, a source “close to the matter” says that Samsung will potentially fabricate simpler chips like Intel’s desktop and notebook chipsets and not CPUs. Tom’s Hardware says that by using Samsung’s Korean facilities, Intel can likely sidestep higher U.S.-imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. The source specifically mentioned that Rocket Lake will not come from Samsung’s fabs.

The post Updated: Report: Intel turns to Samsung for 14-nm relief appeared first on The Tech Report.

• Judging by my Mark I eyeball, graphics card prices are starting a slow descent. Today’s bit of evidence is the EVGA RTX 2060 SC pixel-pusher. This mighty mid-range card has two fans sitting atop a generously sized cooler and a 1755 MHz boost clock. The card comes with Gripand the RTX-enabled Wolfenstein Youngblood. You can grab one of these for only $319.99 at Amazon. For what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of EVGA due to the easy RMA process, cheap warranty extensions, and 90-day Step Up window. Nvidia recently announced a spate of RTX-improved games to take advantage of the special silicon in the chip at E3, too.

• Samsung’s line of higher-end SSD has always been well-respected and well-reviewed, and find one of its members on sale today today. The Samsung 970 EVO 500 GB NVMe drive is a beast. It can do 3400 MB/s on sequential reads and 2300 MB/s when writing, and its random I/O figures clock in at 370K random read IOPS and 450K write IOPS. Yowza. No wonder the drive got a TR Recommended award. You can pick it up from Amazon for only $99.99 right now. I’m using one of these as a system drive in this very system I’m typing on, and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

• Here’s a combo with fast silicon, along with big silicon. The Intel Core i9-9900K is one of the tastiest chips to ever come out of Intel, packing eight cores and 16 threads clocked at up to a whopping 5 GHz. That makes for a chip that’s close to the fastest in existence for gaming, and equally powerful when working. The CPU comes in a bundle with the big honkin’ Intel 660p 2 TB drive, which I’m sure you’re all familiar with by now. The whole package will set you back $634.98 at Newegg, or $55 off the regular combined total.

• Speaking of big, how about a gigantic display? The LG 43MU79-B measures all of 43″ across its diagonal and has an IPS panel with a resolution of 3840×2160. The 60 Hz refresh rate isn’t going to win it any gaming awards, but that’s hardly the raison d’être for this monitor. Four onboard HDMI inputs are joined by a USB Type-C connector, and a remote control allows users to fiddle with mulitple types of picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture functions from a distance. The asking price is only $399.99 at Newegg. That works out to $9.3 for each 4K-enabled inch.

• I can personally attest that an iPad is one of the handiest items to have around the house or accompanying you when traveling. The latest-generation Apple iPad with 128 GB of storage and Wi-Fi is one heck of a tablet. It’s powered by an Apple A10 Fusion chip with four cores in a 2+2 arrangement and a PowerVR Series 7XT Plus IGP. The gorgeous 2048×1536 display has a pixel density of 264 PPI, and there’s 2 GB of RAM on tap. The price tag currently reads only $328 at the shores of Walmart.

• The last item today is a TP-Link Deco m4 mesh Wi-Fi three-piece system. This dual-band AC1200 system can cover a gigantic abode and handle up to 100 connected devices. It’s easy to setup and manage thanks to mobile apps, and there’s Alexa voice control on tap, parental controls, and an Ethernet backbone option for good measure. Pick the set up from Amazon for $159.99.

• Oh, right, before we forget, Newegg’s running a big SSD sale. You can find dozens of models at discounted prices if you use the cart code EMCTBUW25. Just click this link right here to browse the selection.

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AMD just wrapped up its Next Horizon Gaming event at E3, and as the company promised at Computex, it served up some details on the company’s upcoming Radeon products. That’s not all we got, though—in the presentation’s final moments, AMD dropped a sixteen-core bomb on us in the form of the Ryzen 9 3950X. I’ll get to that in a moment; first, let’s talk about these new Radeons for a moment.

So right away, the above chart will probably give gerbils pause. “What is ‘Game clock’?” you wonder. Simply put, AMD’s old “Boost clock” was the maximum clock rate that the card would hit. Since that was more of a theoretical measure, the card wouldn’t always hit that speed during gameplay, so for added transparency, AMD is now offering this “Game clock” metric to help gamers get a better idea of the card’s typical clock rate during gameplay.

With that curiosity resolved, AMD is launching two new video cards in July: the Radeon RX 5700XT, and a slightly de-tuned version that drops the “XT” suffix. The return to the “XT” branding for the top model is nostalgic, even more than the use of the familiar “5700 series” moniker. As the company said at Computex, the new cards are based on the RDNA architecture, which is derived from but not identical to the GCN architecture that has powered the company’s cards since 2011.

AMD CEO Lisa Su holds a Radeon RX 5700XT Anniversary Edition card bearing her signature on the shroud.

There’s also a factory-overclocked model of the faster card on the way to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. That move reminds us of competitor Nvidia’s “Founders Edition” cards, as well as AMD’s own “RX Vega Frontier Edition” card. The grey-and-gold heatsink shroud comes with Lisa Su’s signature, and AMD says the Anniversary Edition will only be available direct from the company’s website.

AMD compared itself to the competition in World War Z.

On stage, AMD once again compared the Radeon RX 5700XT to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2070 as it did at Computex, and this time claimed victory in a brief World War Z benchmark. We’ll quickly note that World War Z is a Vulkan title that performs very well on AMD hardware, so take these results with a bit of salt (as you should any vendor-provided benchmark.)

The company then compared the Radeon RX 5700 against the GeForce RTX 2060 in an odd impromptu “benchmark” in Apex Legends, where one character spammed incendiary grenades at another. The RX 5700 held a more stable frame rate than the GeForce card, but we can’t say how representative this test is.

AMD went on to talk about some of the new software coming to Radeon cards, including FidelityFX, Radeon Image Sharpening, and Radeon Anti-Lag. The company demoed each feature very briefly. FidelityFX appears to be a red-team version of Nvidia’s Gameworks library that offers AMD-authored visual effects for developers to use in their games, although AMD’s version is open-source. It’s not clear at all what Radeon Image Sharpening is. We’ll have to try and get more details from AMD about what this feature actually does.

Meanwhile, AMD claims Radeon Anti-Lag actually reduces input lag, or “motion to photon latency.” The “demo” of this feature was little more than an on-screen number decreasing, and honestly was a little underwhelming. However, if it works as described, it could be pretty great for reaction-heavy games.

AMD didn’t offer many new details about the RDNA architecture on the stream, and unfortunately, we’re not there at E3 to talk to the company about the new chips. However, the boys from Anandtech are on the scene, and Ryan Smith over there already has a pretty solid preliminary write-up posted. Check out his article for some info about RDNA.

On the CPU side of things, AMD covered the new Ryzen CPUs that it announced at Computex pretty thoroughly in the beginning of its E3 show, and we—like most viewers, we imagine—tuned out afterward, feeling a bit let-down by the lack of a 16-core CPU announcement. As it turns out, Lisa Su saved the best for last, and introduced the Ryzen 9 3950X to close out the show.

Yes, indeed: it has 16 cores, 32 threads, runs 3.5 GHz at base and boosts to 4.7 GHz. It has 64 MB of L3 cache, and it still fits in Socket AM4 at a 105W TDP. It’s impressive stuff, and while the $749 price tag seems high, consider that AMD probably can’t afford to build that many of these chips. We reckon those big 64-core EPYC CPUs get dibs on the best fully enabled Zen 2 chiplets.

AMD also announced release dates for all the new stuff. Release “date,” anyway—aside from the Ryzen 9 3950X (which is coming some time in September), everything else is launching world-wide on July 7.

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• Apple's WDDC was yesterday, and keeping with that theme (by pure chance, really) our leading deal today is the iPad 32 GB with Wi-Fi (2018, latest model). This speedy, practical tablet has a pretty 2048×1536 display and is powered by an Apple A10 Fusion quad-core SoC with four CPU cores in a 2+2 arrangement and PowerVR Series7XT Plus graphics. The 2 GB of RAM might feel a little tight, but in yours truly's experience with his own iPad Air 2, that's more than fine for iOS. Right now Walmart wants but $249 for this nice tablet in gray, silver, or gold finishes.

• Next up, a positively gorgeous display that can fight on two fronts. The Aorus AD27QD is a 27" monitor with a 2560×1440 IPS panel capable of hitting a 144 Hz refresh rate. That's serious gamer cred already, but get this, the 10-bit panel's color gamut can cover a whopping 95% of the DCI-P3 space. That's more than good enough for video and photography work in your free time. The included stand offers swivel, pivot, tild, and height adjustments, and the asking price is just $539.99 at Newegg with the promo code EMCTBTW25.

• This wouldn't be a 2019 deals post without some RAM, so here we go. The G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB dual-channel kit with 3600 MT/s DIMMs is both capacious and darn fast. The timings are set to 19-20-20-40. The heatsinks are red and there's no RGB LED lighting, but jeez, at just $159.99 at Newegg, who cares?

• It's time for a c-c-combo. The Core i5-9600K is one sweet (and unlocked) mid-range CPU with six cores capable of hitting 4.6 GHz. That makes for one mean gaming machine, and the current deal has this chip going out the door with an Intel 660p 512 GB NVMe SSD. Newegg will hand you both items for $312.98, or $15 off the regular total.

• Next up, a great all-round laptop. The Asus VivoBook Slim (S530FN-BH73) is a 15.6" laptop with a thin-bezel 1920×1080 display. Inside its thin chassis sits an Intel Core i7-8656U processor, a four-core, eight-thread affair with a 4.6 GHz turbo. The chip is served by 8 GB of RAM, while a combo storage setup with a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB hard drive offers more than enough room for nearly any task. You can do some light gaming on this machine, too, thanks to the Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics card. Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and a Type-C USB port round out the specs list. Newegg is selling this machine for just $799.99.

• The final item today should go nicely into your living room, or perhaps an extra-fancy gaming setup. We're talking about the Pioneer VSX-933 7.2 receiver. This box o' watts can push 80 W per stereo pair and supports, well, everything. There's DTS:X and Dolby Atmos, all the HDR specs you can think of (HDR10, HLG, BT.2020), Dolby Vision compatibility, and multiple types of phase alignment functionality. Additionally, you get built-in Chromecast support, DTS Play-Fi, and about a hundred other alphabet-soup standards. The price reads just $239.99 at Newegg.

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• The memory returns, in the form of the G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB dual-channel kit with 3000 MT/s DIMMs. These sticks are simple, with generously sized heatsinks and no RGB LED lighting. The timings read 16-18-18-38, and the price tag reads just $134.99 at Newegg. Essentially, you're getting 32 GB for what 16 GB cost not all that long ago.

• Look who's back too! The Intel 660p 1 TB SSD is a staple of our deals posts, thanks to its ever-dropping price. This simple-but-solid NVMe drive can push 1800 MB/s in either direction, and it can do 150K random read IOPS and 220K random write IOPS. This drive's been off the news lately because there's only so low you can go… or is there? Newegg will currently sell you one for $90.99 with the cart code EMCTAWU22.

• If you're an I/O speed demon, then check out the Sabrent Rocket 1 TB drive instead. The company's not a household name, but the drive's got it where it counts, as it can do 3400 MB/s sequential read and 3000 MB/s write speeds. The drive's selling for just $113.65 at Amazon right now, making it apparently a budget Samsung 970 EVO.

• The last system component today is the Intel Core i7-8700 processor. This is mighty chip might not be of the latest-gen crop, but it nonetheless has everything it needs: six cores, 12 threads, and a turbo clock of 4.6 GHz. If you're looking for an upper-midrange, balanced chip, this is it. It comes with an included cooler, and it's currently priced at $284.99 at Newegg with the promo code EMCTAWT22.

• Shall we move to the mobile aisle? The Lenovo Legion Y530 (81LB003MUS) is one nice mid-range gaming machine. It's got an Intel Core i5-8300H processor (four cores, eight threads, 4 GHz turbo), 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB solid-state drive. Pixels find their way onto the 300-nit 1920×1080 display thanks to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB graphics card. If there's one word to describe this laptop, it's definitely "balanced." Get it for $879.99 from Newegg.

  

• The final item today is a potent one. The Dell XPS 13 9370 (dncwy620h) is a real beast. Inside the well-manufactured chassis sits an Intel Core i7-8550U processor sitting next to 8 GB of RAM and a 512 GB NVMe drive. The star of the show, however, is the positively gorgeous wide-gamut 4K display with touch capability. This is a quality machine great build quality, keyboard, and trackpad. It's selling for just $1059.99 at Rakuten with the checkout code DELL109.

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Intel held its Computex keynote Monday night (US time), and if we can be completely honest, we weren't exactly blown away by the company's announcements. There was the Core i9-9900KS that you've no doubt heard about—more or less a Core i9-9900K with "multi-core enhancement" built right in—and some new Xeon E-series CPUs, as well as a few other topics we'll be talking about eventually.

The real news came almost as an afterthought at the end of Intel's show: the company is apparently shipping 10nm Ice Lake-family mobile CPUs to its partners as I write this. There are purportedly 11 different processors coming, ranging from Core i3s to Core i7s. All of the chips on the way at this time are Ice Lake-U and Ice Lake-Y models. That means "ultra low voltage" and "extremely low power" for those who aren't intimately familiar with Intel's nomenclature.

Even though we don't have a detailed list of the incoming CPUs, there's a lot to talk about. These chips, which Intel is calling "10th Generation Core," are built using Intel's second go at 10nm, the so-called 10nm+ process. (Recall that the barely–there Cannon Lake CPUs were the first attempt.) Rather than being yet another rehash of the Skylake architecture, these chips are based on the Sunny Cove core design that the company has been talking up for a while. The graphics in Ice Lake are based on Intel's Gen11 design, and the chips have quite a few other tricks, too: integrated Wi-Fi 6, Thunderbolt 3, and an on-die MIPI CSI 2 interface for mobile camera devices.

Hopefully at some point we'll get to do an architectural deep dive on Sunny Cove as we have in the past. For now, we'll have to be content with what Intel tells us.  The company claims that Sunny Cove offers an average 18% uplift in instructions-per-clock (IPC) compared to Skylake, which is quite significant indeed. Rival AMD's Zen 2 cores are supposedly a tremendous leap over that organization's previous-generation hardware, and those chips are "only" purported to step things up by some 15%, clock-for-clock. 

IPC isn't everything, of course. Keep in mind those words: "per clock." The products on the way are low-power parts for sure, but even at 15 W, a 4.1 GHz max boost clock looks a bit anemic next to the Whiskey Lake-based Core i7-8665U's 4.8 GHz. It will be interesting to see if the slightly lower boost clocks are the result of the fatter Sunny Cove core design or simply a limitation of Intel's beleaguered 10nm fabrication process. We're also interested to see if the bump in IPC can overcome the relative deficit in clock rate.

TechPowerUp got some pics of Ice Lake. They have a better, close-up shot over there. You should check it out.

These chips support dual-channel DDR4 RAM running at up to 3200 MT/s out of the box—no overclocking needed. Yet more interesting is their ability to hook up to four 32-bit channels of LPDDR4X memory running at an eye-watering 3733 MT/s. That extra memory bandwidth should come in handy for feeding the chips' thirsty Gen11 graphics. Intel has made a whole pile of architectural improvements to its graphics parts since Skylake's launch, but none are likely as significant as the 50% increase in functional units. The "GT2" variant found in most "UHD Graphics" parts contains 32 execution units (EUs) in these Ice Lake parts (up from 24 on Gen 9), while certain Ice Lake-U models will come with Iris Plus graphics built with 48 or even 64 EUs.

1920×1080 resolution. Intel claims Gen11 is 80% faster than Gen9, clock for clock.

Intel claims the largest model is capable of 1.12 TFLOPs of single-precision compute, or 2.25 TFLOPs of half-precision. In combination with the CPU's DLBoost acceleration, that's quite a pile of performance for AI inferencing. The implications for graphics are less clear-cut—GPU compute doesn't cleanly correlate to graphics performance—but Intel also says that the rasterizer is capable of shading 16 pixels per clock and texturing twice that number. That puts the top-end Iris Plus configuration squarely in the realm of AMD's Vega 8 GPU built into the (65 W) Ryzen 3 2200G, which isn't bad at all for a 28-W chip.

Other interesting tidbits about the graphics in these Ice Lake processors include their official support (finally) for VESA Adaptive Sync, their "tier 2" support for DX12 variable-rate shading, and their trio of display pipelines that enable them to run three UHD 4K HDR displays simultaneously—assuming your system board has the requisite DisplayPort connections. Sadly, there's nary a mention of HDMI 2.1, but the display controller does support HDMI 2.0b's 10-bit formats.

I wasn't kidding when I said that this news seemed like an afterthought. Besides the fact that it was a very quick announcement right at the end of Intel's keynote, Intel didn't talk about specific models, pricing, availability, or anything else, really. Intel had representatives from its biggest partners on stage to show off their upcoming hardware, but it's anyone's guess when you'll actually be able to buy one. Generally speaking, I'd rather have the technical details in hand and have to wait for the mundane stuff rather than vice versa, but it's pretty unusual that we can't even tell you when to look out for systems packing this hardware with any more precision than "later this year."

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• Last week, we lead our deals with a high-end graphics card, and today's the time for a modest offering to shine. The PowerColor Radeon RX 570 4 GB is probably the choice pixel-pusher for those with modest needs or modest budgets. This unit in particular has a generously sized heatsink with two fans atop and a 1250 MHz boost clock. The shroud has a red-on-black dragon motif that could signify House Targaryen. The asking price right now at Newegg is a scant $119.99 with the cart code EMCTAVD55. The folks at AMD also throw in The Division 2 Gold and World War Z for free.

• Keeping with the budget theme, here are the potential processor and motherboard to go with the card above. The Ryzen 5 1600 is a six-core, 12-thread Zen processor capable of hitting a 3.6 GHz boost speed. It might not be the latest-and-greatest model, but it's still pretty potent and more than good enough for for a modest machine. The chip comes with a cooler and arrives into town with the ASRock B450-HDV motherboard, a fine circuit slab with a PCIe x4 M.2 socket. This set of two will set you back only $139.98 at Newegg, or $45 off the regular total.

• An capacious hard drive is always a handy item to have, whether it's for backups or just for storing cheese pictures. One of the most popular drives is the Western Digital MyBook 6 TB external spinner, a simple USB 3.0 affair that comes with included backup software and hardware encryption. You can currently pick one up for $95.96 from Amazon.

• Now, it's time for compact and mobile systems. The Intel NUC (NUC8i7BEH1) has horsepower that far belies its diminutive dimensions. Inside sits a Core i7-8559U processor, a 28 W affair that packs four cores and eight threads with a 4.5 GHz turbo clock. The chip also includes Iris Plus 655 graphics silicon with 128 MB of eDRAM—a cut well above your standard IGP, and more than capable for light gaming in a pinch. Newegg's currently selling this machine for $484.99, and it'll throw in a Corsair 8 GB SO-DIMM, an item with a $37 value. We'd suggest grabbing the pack plus another one of those DIMMs for a dual-channel 16 GB setup, and you'll be golden.

• Over on the mobility aisle, you'll find the Lenovo Ideapad 530S 14" laptop. This well-built machine comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U processor, a quad-core, eight-thread affair with a 3.6 GHz boost clock. Next to the chip sit 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB NVMe solid-state drive. The display is a 14" 1920×1080 affair, and the keyboard is backlit. You can pick this machine up for $424.99 from Rakuten with the checkout code SAVE15.

• The final bit of kit today is the ROG Strix Hero II gaming laptop (GL504GM-DS74). On the outside sits a 15.6" display with extra-thin bezels and a whopping 144 Hz refresh rate. To slap frames on the screen at that speed, the machine uses an Intel Core i7-8750H processor sitting next to 16 GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB graphics card. For storing your game collection, you get a 256 GB NVMe SSD and a 1 TB hard drive. The cooling system uses two fans, and the keyboard has RGB LED backlighting. The price tag reads just $1099.99 at Newegg with the promo code EMCTAVD32.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

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AMD is going head-to-head with two of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, and perhaps the red team seeks to take the initiative against its blue and green rivals, because it is charging into battle with standard held high. Exactly as expected, AMD CEO Lisa Su announced a whole pile of new products during her opening keynote at Computex. Dr. Su specifically spoke about the third-generation Ryzen CPUs sporting the Zen 2 architecture and the Navi-based Radeon RX 5000-series graphics cards, but the Ryzen 3000-series CPUs are coming along with the new X570 chipset, too.

AMD CEO Lisa Su holds a Ryzen 9 3900X CPU on stage at Computex.

The good Doctor's most exciting announcements were about the third-generation Ryzen desktop CPUs, also known as the Ryzen 3000 family. AMD says that the 7nm chips offer a 15% functional improvement in instructions-per-clock over Zen+. The chips also have enormous caches; AMD doubled the L3 cache from 16MB to 32MB per eight-core die. That distinction is important, because Lisa Su confirmed that AMD can and will stick multiple eight-core CPU dice on a single CPU package by announcing the Ryzen 9 3900X. This is obviously the first CPU in the Ryzen 9 family, and it comes with 12 cores and 24 threads clocked at up to 4.6 GHz. Here, just look at the table:

AMD directly compared the Ryzen 7 3700X against the Core i7-9700K and in its own testing found that its chip beat the Intel offering by 1% in single-threaded workloads, and 30% in multi-threaded tasks—not that surprising given the latter chip's lack of Hyper-Threading, but still impressive considering the Ryzen chip's 26W TDP disadvantage. This writer was more impressed with AMD's demo showing the Ryzen 7 3800X putting up a fight against the Core i9-9900K in PUBG. Also, the Ryzen 9 3900X edged out the Core i9-9920X in a Blender render in an on-stage demo. For those who don't know, that Core i9 is an LGA 2066-socket chip with quad-channel memory.

There's more to talk about here, including the massive L3 caches and the presence of PCIe 4.0, but the real newsworthy bits here are those prices. AMD will apparently be asking just $330 for an 8-core CPU that boosts up to 4.4 GHz, and only $500 for a 12-core CPU. AMD's own Threadripper 2920X 12-core HEDT CPU goes for $629 on Newegg as I write this, and while that's a larger and more complex processor than the Ryzen 9 3900X, it surely isn't as fast—at anything. Also interesting is that these chips will slot into existing systems, even including some motherboards based around the first-generation X370 and B350 chipsets. Not all boards will work, though, so check your manufacturer's site to make sure.

Speaking of motherboards, there's that new X570 chipset, too. AMD says ASRock, Asus, Colorful, Gigabyte, and MSI are bringing out "over 50 new motherboard models" based on the X570 chipset, and there's actually ample reason to upgrade. Unlike previous Socket AM4 chipsets, X570 is an in-house AMD design that offers up 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0 capability. That's right—both the Ryzen 3000 CPUs and their chipset support PCI Express 4.0; a total of 40 lanes altogether if you count the 4 that will be used to connect the CPU to the chipset. There's a bevy of boards to behold, and we'll look at some of them in detail tomorrow when the whole staff isn't on holiday.

Of course, aside from CPUs and system boards, AMD also announced new graphics parts. We fully expected AMD to trot out GCN one last time for us to gawp at, but instead, the company surprised us by announcing that Navi is based on what is purportedly a new graphics architecture called "Radeon DNA", or RDNA for short. Dr. Su claimed on stage that RDNA offers the Navi graphics chips—which she officially christened as the Radeon RX 5000 series—a 25% boost in performance-per-clock and a 50% improvement in performance-per-watt over the company's Vega architecture.

Given that AMD's CEO explicitly referenced both design and process in her statement, that 50% improvement in performance-per-watt clearly includes the move to 7nm fabrication, so the comparison is against Vega 64, not the Radeon VII. The company performed a short on-stage demo of what Scott Herkelman, AMD RTG's GM, referred to as a Radeon RX 5700, running Strange Brigade against a GeForce RTX 2070. The Navi-based Radeon pulled out around a 10% advantage in the canned benchmark, which is particularly decent given that the chip Lisa Su held in her hand was quite small indeed. That fits in neatly with earlier rumors that Navi would reside in the mid-range, at least at first.

We're as thirsty as you are for more details about the next Radeons. AMD says cards bearing those chips will be available in July, and that the company will hold a livestream on June 10 from E3 with more details. The third-generation Ryzen chips, on the other hand, have a set release date: AMD says all five of the new CPUs, as well as new X570-based motherboards to mount them, should be stocked on store shelves on July 7.

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Hi there good fellows! I'm back to writing terrible introductions to deals posts again. On today's episode, I'm happy to report that my rather worrying shoulder and back problems are on a good track to recovery. Ever since a couple or three months ago, I've been regularly doing stretches multiple times a day and undergoing physical therapy, including but not limited to ultrasonic cannons, needle poking, electrical torture, and vice-grip squeezing. My chiropractor has also done great work in piecing out and rearranging the parts that comprise my upper spine to roughly, sorta, more-or-less where they should be… ish.

At any rate, I'm feeling much better both physically and mentally, because when one has a bad shoulder and back and proceeds to lose feeling on a thumb, one tends to execute evaluation of all sorts of potential not-happy outcomes. With that slowly getting out of the way, here's today's collections of PC hardware deals.

• Leading with Apple hardware is unusual for us, but hey, it's good to shake things up every now and then. The topmost deal today is the MacBook Pro 13" (MPXQ2LL/A). Outside, there's a gorgeous 2560×1600 display with a 500 cd/m² brightness rating and capable of reproducing the near-entirety of the rather wide DCI-P3 color space. Two Thunderbolt 3 ports stand ready to connect high-speed peripherals, and a top-notch trackpad awaits for user input. Inside sits an Intel Core i5-7360U dual-core, four-thread processor that can turbo to 3.6 GHz and has 64 MB of eDRAM next to the Iris Plus Graphics 640 GPU. Eight gigabytes of RAM and a 128 GB NVMe SSD round out the main specs. This machine may not be of the recently-announced latest crop, but it's selling for just $999.99 at Best Buy. If you prefer a similarly configured Macbook Air instead, Best Buy will hand you one for $949.99.

• If pure tablet computing is a primary occupation for you, then the iPad Pro 11" with 64 GB and Wi-Fi connectivity will be right up your alley. Its bright 2388×1668 display has a 120 Hz refresh rate (insane for a tablet) and covers almost all of the DCI-P3 color space. The machine is powered by an Apple A12X Bionic chip, a 7 nm mean machine with eight CPU cores in a 4+4 arrangement and a custom, high-end Apple GPU. A 4K camera sits on the back, while an HDR camera graces the front. The RAM allocation for this version is 4 GB, a generous allotment for iOS. You can have one of these from Best Buy for $674.99.

• And we're back to our scheduled programming. The Intel Core i5-9600K is one heck of a midrange CPU. While its six cores will easily make short work of multi-threaded tasks, gamers in particular should take notice as this chip can turbo to a whopping 4.6 GHz. As they say, there's no replacement for displacement, and that kind of clocks coupled with an IPC-effective architecture pay out frame time dividends. The price for this chip is only $264.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTAVY43.

• If all you need is a good, affordable CPU for a budget box, then you'll be quite hard-pressed to find a better one than the Ryzen 3 1200. This chip has four Zen cores and a boost clock of 3.4 GHz. The box includes a Wraith Stealth cooler for good measure. Newegg is asking but $54.99 for this processor if you input the cart code EMCTAVW24—an exceedingly low price. Consider that the cooler alone is easy $20, after all.

• Over in the monitor aisle, we have the Acer CZ350CK (bmiiphx), a big honkin' 35" ultra-wide curved display. It sports a VA panel with a resolution of 3440×1440 and a 100 Hz refresh rate. That's pretty nice already, but there's also FreeSync support on tap. The included stand offers height adjustment, a feature not always seen in affordable ultra-wide monitors. The price is only $399.99 at Newegg. Remember when these monitors were $900and up?

• Need to go faster? Here's the Alienware AW2518HF. It's 25" across and has a TN panel with a resolution of 1920×1080. Ho-hum, right? Well, there's a lot more the story. The refresh rate is a ridiculous 240 Hz, and naturally there's FreeSync support on tap. The monitor includes a host of connectivity options and a gorgeous stand with height, pivot, swivel, and tilt adjustments. The amount of $279.99 is all you'll need to take this super-fast gaming monitor home from Rakuten.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

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• Here's quite the shocking deal. RAM prices have been quite low of late, but what if we had a kit that's fast and capacious and cheap? Yep, it's the G.Skill Ripjaws V dual-channel 32 GB set with 3600 MT/s sticks. No, that's not a typo—these things really go that fast, and it's a total of thirty-two gigabytes. The timings are 19-20-20-40, and the price is (drumroll) only $159.99. As usual, G.Skill offers lifetime warranty coverage. Best hurry up and grab these before they're gone.

• It's the return of the combos. The AMD Ryzen 5 2600X processor is as balanced a mid-range chip as they come, packing six Zen+ cores and twelve threads, each capable of ticking away at up to 4.2 GHz. There's a Wraith Spire cooler in the box, and AMD throws The Division 2 Gold and World War Z as freebies. Meanwhile, the Gigabyte X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming is one fine Ryzen motherboard. It sports an Intel Ethernet controller, a souped-up Realtek ALC1220-VB audio codec, and two M.2 sockets, one of which sits underneath a heatsink. There's a decent amount of metal over the VRMs and onboard LED lighting for good measure. Newegg will throw both these bits of kit in a box for the amount of $244.98, or $70 off what they'd normally go for separately.

• There's an additional combo deal today. The Intel 660p 512 GB NVMe drive should be a stranger to no-one, thanks to its ubiquity in our deals posts. It can push 1500 MB/s in sequential reads and 1000 MB/s when writing. Its combo companion is the MSI Radeon RX 70 Armor 8 GB OC graphics card, a well-known pixel-pusher with a 1268 MHz core clock. The price for the entire combo is just $189.98, or a $36 savings compared to the regular total. However, Newegg also throws in a $20 mail-in rebate that could bring the endgame total to $169.98.

• Any self-respecting desktop these days needs a good power supply to get it going, like the Corsair TX850M. This unit has semi-modular cabling and an 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating. There's a 140-mm fan inside, and the 12 V rail can push 62 A. The price is $89.99 at Newegg with the promo code EMCTAUB28, and there's a $20 rebate card on tap.

• Our cheap SSD storage today is of a slightly different breed. Sabrent might not be a household name, but the company makes some pretty darn fast SSDs. The Sabrent Rocket family of NVMe drives can push up to 3450 MB/s in sequential reads and 3000 MB/s when writing. Right now, you can pick up the 512 GB drive for $65.99 from Amazon with the checkout code 12HFT7HA, the version with 1 TB of capacity for $133.65 with the code 153EBNHY, or the big honkin' 2 TB model for $269 if you input 13BDRYQA.

• The last item today is the Asus Vivobook 15" laptop (F505ZA-DH51). Contrary to most portables, this one is powered by an AMD chip: the quad-core, eight-thread Ryzen 5 2500U with Radeon Vega 8 integrated graphics. Next to this chip sit 8 GB of RAM along with a 256 GB SSD. The display has a resolution of 1920×1080, and the price is currently set at $499 at Amazon.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: 32 GB of 3600 MT/s RAM for $160 and much, much more appeared first on The Tech Report.

• Who wants a quality portable that can make short of work of heavy-duty number crunching but also game with the best? The Dell G15 5590 (gnvca5cr1000smp) is one mean machine, fitted with a spankin' new Core i9-9750H processor sitting next to 8 GB of dual-channel RAM. For pixel-pushing prowess, you'll find a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card with 6 GB of VRAM, while storage duties are taken care of by a combo setup with a 256 GB NVMe solid-state drive and a 1 TB hard drive. That's darn impressive enough already, but we saved the best for last: the display is a 1920×1080 IPS unit with a 144 Hz refresh rate and G-Sync adaptive refresh rate support. The price tag reads just $1179.99 at Rakuten. Daaaang, right?

• Want a cheap pack o' RAM? Right this way, good gerbil. The G.Skill Aegis 32 GB dual-channel kit with 2666 MT/s DIMMs is heckin' capacious and has 19-19-19-43 timings. The price is a silly low (drum roll) $124.99 at Newegg. That was the price for 16 GB not too long ago. If you prefer a kit with lower capacity but a higher speed, the Team T-Force Vulkan 16 GB set with 3000 MT/s sticks is going for $72.99, also at the fresh ovum.

• There's a ton of discounted storage today, starting with NAND flash. The Intel 660p 1 TB NVMe drive says "s'mee again" and brings its 1800 MB/s sequential read and write speeds to the table, as well as a good helping of random I/O at 150K read IOPs and 180K write IOPs. The price is now under a Benjamin: only $92.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTAUY22.

• Nobody should be forced to employ a rodent of poor upbringing. Affordable quality choices are now plentiful, like the SteelSeries Rival 310. We liked it well enough back when we reviewed it—particularly its accurate 1:1 sensor, and the sensible shape and button placement. Whereas we weren't enamored with the price tag back then, that's a complete non-issue today as you can obtain one for only $29.99 from Amazon. If you prefer a different take on an affordable mouse, the Logitech G402 Hyperion Fury has a distinct shape and sensor, but a similar price: $28.70, also at Amazon.

• The months-long drought of affordable mass storage seems to be coming to an end. The Western Digital EasyStore 8 TB spinner is a simple and straighforward external drive, and it'll set you back just $129.99 at Best Buy, or $16.25 a terabyte. The bigger model, the Western Digital EasyStore 10 TB, is comparatively even cheaper at $159.99 at the same e-tailer, or $16 per TB. Finally you have somewhere to store your cheese picture collection.

• Now here's something off left field: a monitor that you can game and do color-critical work on, from a place you wouldn't expect. The Aorus AD27QD is a 27" display with a resolution of 2560×1440. So far so good, but it uses a IPS panel with a 144-Hz refresh rate and—get this—10-bit color reproduction, leading to a color gamut that should cover 95% of the DCI-P3 color space. There's HDR support on tap and a 1 ms blur-reduction mode, too. If you were looking for a monitor that can do everything, this one is it. Get it for $539.99 from Newegg with the cart code EMCTAUY55.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: a Dell G5 with a Core i9 and a 144 Hz G-Sync display for $1180, and more appeared first on The Tech Report.

AMD CEO Lisa Su previewed the still-upcoming Ryzen 3000 CPUs at CES.

For those who don't know, the extant Ryzen CPUs are all based on fundamentally the same microarchitecture. The Zen and Zen+ cores used in Ryzen 1000- and 2000-series chips aren't identical, but we understand the incoming Zen 2 design to be radically different from its predecessors. Rather than having all of the CPU's parts on one big die, Zen 2 will be fabricated using separate dice for the CPU cores and for what Intel would call the "uncore"—comprising the high-speed I/O connections, the memory controller, and so on.

It's perhaps a bit ironic that the company which originally introduced the integrated memory controller in desktop CPUs would be de-integrating it in this way. Make no mistake, though—it's still part of the CPU, just a separate chip. Splitting things out into "chiplets" this way should allow AMD greater flexibility in terms of core configuration and product segmentation. It also helps alleviate overstressed 7nm foundries.

Zen2 ES 16 Core
Base clock 3.3 Ghzฺ
Boost clock 4.2 Ghz
MB X570
This CPU name can't decode by decode chart

PS(ภาพหน้าจออาจจะอัพโหลดให้ในภายหลัง)

— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) May 9, 2019

All of that was known, though. What you may not have known is that reknowned Thai leaker APISAK apparently got his hands on a Zen 2-based engineering sample with 16 cores. Rumors have swirled for some time now that AMD's next-generation desktop chips would stuff 16 cores into the same AM4 socket used on existing motherboards, but this would seem to be the most solid confirmation of such a thing that we've seen.

The leaker's tweet goes on to indicate that the chip has a base clock of 3.3 GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.2 GHz. Neither of those numbers set our hearts alight, but recall that engineering samples of the original Ryzen clocked some 800 MHz slower than the finally-released top-end chip. It's possible these engineering samples could be a lot slower than the final third-generation Ryzen CPUs.

The different dies on the Ryzen 3000 chips are all but assuredly still connected using Infinity Fabric (IF). That's the same interconnect that AMD uses currently to connect the "core complexes" (CCXes) on existing Ryzen processors, as well as the different processor dies on Threadripper and EPYC CPUs. Ryzen's memory controller and IF links share a clock domain. That's the main reason that Ryzen struggles to hit high memory clocks in comparison to the competition, and if TechPowerUp's Yuri "1usmus" Bubliy is to be believed, that's going to continue to be the case on Ryzen 3000-series CPUs.

If anyone would know, it's the guy who wrote Ryzen Timing Checker—oh, that's 1usmus.

The site goes on to say that Zen 2-based processors installed in motherboards with 500-series chipsets will support a divider mode that runs the on-package IF links at just one-half the rate of the memory clock. In other words, taking your RAM all the way up to 5000 MT/s will apparently only require running the IF link at 1.25 GHz, rather than 2.5 GHz. If that's correct, it should be much easier to reach stratospheric memory clocks on the next-generation Ryzen CPUs. We'll be interested to see what such a setting does to multi-processor performance.

Finally, on the topic of 500-series chipsets and the motherboards they go on: just today, Biostar posted up the latest version of its product catalog (PDF). In said catalog, the company lists a very interesting motherboard: the Racing X570GT8. It doesn't take a genius to realize that this motherboard is apparently based on the as-yet-unreleased X570 chipset from AMD.

Overall, the specifications on the board aren't too different from the previous-generation Racing X470GT8 listed right alongside, but a few things stick out. Biostar says the new board will take its memory up to 4000 MT/s, which is not bad at all. The board will also have three M.2 sockets—a real rarity on Ryzen boards—and apparently, they'll be wired up with four lanes of PCI Express 4.0. That could be a typo, but it's been expected for some time that Ryzen 3000 chips would have PCIe 4.0 connectivity. It's not impossible that the new chipset does as well.

Further reinforcing that idea is that the picture of the Racing X570GT8 appears to have a rather large heatsink with a fan over the motherboard chipset. All three of the board's M.2 sockets are visible, so that fan is just for the chipset. Now, we haven't seen active cooling on a motherboard chipset in quite some time, and we're not too keen on the idea. However, if the AMD-designed chipset's TDP is high enough to warrant active cooling, it may indeed support PCIe 4.0 as well. The relatively weak high-speed I/O on offer from AMD's X370 and X470 chispets was a sore point for some users, so it's pretty exciting to think that X570 could leapfrog ahead in this way. Thanks to Videocardz for pointing out Biostar's gaffe.

Ryzen's launch made CPUs exciting again after totally stagnating for most of the early part of this decade, and Zen 2 looks to take things up another notch. While we are—as ever—keenly interested to see how AMD's Zen 2 processors fare in single-threaded workloads compared to their predecessors, it's hard not to get excited about the idea of having sixteen CPU cores handling 32 threads at once without plunking down for an expensive HEDT motherboard. We expect AMD to announce the third-generation Ryzen CPUs at Computex starting on May 28, and hopefully products will actually launch by the time of E3 on June 11.

The post Cores, clocks and memory: a Ryzen 3000-series rumor roundup appeared first on The Tech Report.

• It's time for a c-c-c-combo. The Intel 660p 512 GB NVMe drive has been in our deals posts more times than we can remember, thanks for its 1500 MB/s sequential read and 1000 MB/s write speeds. Today, it's joined by the Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB dual-channel kit with 3000 MT/s DIMMs, a simple but effective affair with low-profile heatsinks. Right now, Newegg will hand you both small boxes for the low sum of only $124.98. That's $24 off the regular combined price, and it's the perfect set of items for new builds and upgrades both.

• We usually save mobile devices for last, but today there's a real juicy deal on a Microsoft Surface Pro 6 convertible. The exact model on hand has an Intel Core i5-8250U processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB NVMe SSD. The wide-gamut touchscreen on this device is quite gorgeous and has a resolution of 2736×1824. This particular deal includes the keyboard-and-touchpad Type Cover, and it's currently selling for $999.99 at Newegg. There's more to the story, though—you get a $100 Newegg gift card with your purchase, bringing the effective amount down to only $899.99.

• AMD's apparently running an aggressive desktop pricing game, and enthusiasts everywhere are reaping the benefits. The AMD Ryzen 7 2700 processor is a meaty mid-range chip that needs little introduction. We'll quickly rattle off key specs: eight Zen+ cores and 16 threads, each capable of hitting a 4.1 GHz boost speed, and 16 MB of L3 cache. There's a Wraith Spire RGB LED cooler in the box, and the price is just $194.99 at Amazon. We think this higher-end model is definitely worth the outlay, but if that amount is a little dear, then you should totally check out the six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 2600X for $159.99, also at Amazon, also with an included cooler. No matter the model, you get The Division 2 and World War Z for free courtesy of AMD.

• Basic-looking RAM is a good fit for any system, but you may be looking for something a little more ritzy, like the Geil Super Luce RGB Sync 16 GB kit of 3000 MT/s DIMMs. These sticks have technicolor lighting and diffusers at the top, don't need an additional cable to do their light dance, and they're compatible with Asus' Aura Sync. The asking price is just $79.99 at Newegg provided you use the cart code EMCTAUT26.

• Solid-state drives are real cheap these days, and we're getting to the point where it's practical and cheaper to get a big honkin' SSD for your, well, everything. The Intel 660p 2 TB NVMe drive is the biggest in the family, and it can do 1800 MB/s pushing data sequentially in either direction. Random I/O figures ring in at a healthy 220K IOPS both ways. The price tag reads but $184.99 at Newegg Flash with the cart code NEFPBN29. Get'em while they're hot; we doubt stocks are going to last long.

• The final deal today is a rather simple one: the Western Digital Elements 8 TB external hard drive. There ain't much to discuss, as it's a simple affair that just works. The price currently sits at $124.99 at Newegg if you input the cart code EMCTAUT54, an amount that works out to $15.62 a terabyte.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: an Intel 660p 512 GB SSD and 16 GB of 3000 MT/s RAM for $125 and more appeared first on The Tech Report.

Source: AMD

CEO Lisa Su said in the company's conference call that demand for Ryzen 7 and 5 desktop CPUs is strong. Dr. Su also says that Ryzen mobile sales are on track to increase by 50% in this calendar year. Graphics sales weren't as rosy, though. Channel sales for the quarter were down from the year-ago quarter, when crytpocurrency mining was still a big boom industry. However, she also says that Radeon Vega GPU sales were up "a strong double-digit percentage" both year-over-year and sequentially due to increased adoption across OEM, gaming, and data center customers. 

The company expects the second quarter will turn things around a bit. CFO Devinder Kumar says to expect revenues in the $1.52 billion range. While that would represent a substantial sequential uptick, that figure still represents a 13% year-over-year decline. The company expects the graphics sales decline to continue into the next quarter due to lower graphics channel sales, lower semi-custom revenue, and "negligible blockchain-related GPU revenue."

The conference call also provided a look into the near-future for AMD. Su says that the second quarter represents a "transition" for the company's portfolio. AMD's CEO confirmed earlier rumors that the chip maker expects to start shipping 7-nanometer products in the third quarter. Su specifically mentioned Rome-based EPYC processors and Navi graphics processors. AMD has already confirmed that Dr. Su will deliver a keynote presentation at Computex, so we'll likely find out more about the company's 7-nanometer plans then. 

The post AMD mixes Navi and Zen 2 details into Q1 financials appeared first on The Tech Report.

• AMD's desktop chips are often discounted, and today we have not one, but two deals on Ryzen chips. The first one is the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor. This model might not be the latest-and-greatest on paper, but it's still the company's previous-generation top dog. Underneath its heatspreader sit a total of eight Zen cores and 16 threads, each ticking away at up to 4 GHz. Rakuten's currently asking for only $178.40 for this processor if you input the checkout code SAVE15.

• The second CPU offering today is the AMD Ryzen 5 2600. This meaty chip comes fitted with six Zen+ cores and twelve threads. The maximum clock speed for each of those is 3.9 GHz, and there are 16 MB of L3 cache on tap. The box includes a Wraith Stealth cooler that's just fine for the job and then some. AMD will hand you keys for The Division 2 Gold Edition and World War Z with your purchase. The price is just $149.99 at Newegg with the promo code EMCTYWT23.

• RAM deals come as a pair today, too. We'll start with the fanciest, the G.Skill Trident Z RGB 32 GB kit with 3000 MT/s sticks. As we're sure you can tell, these DIMMs are rather spiffy-looking thanks to their integrated diffuser, and they forgo any extra cabling to get their lighting on. The timings are 16-18-18-38, and the price is a silly low $174.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTYWT23.

• Don't need that much RAM? That's fine, check out the Micron Ballistix Sport LT 16 GB kit with 3200 MT/s DIMMs. The white heatsinks on them look slick but not too flashy, and the timings are set to 16-18-18. The price is but $81.29 at Newegg so long as you input the code EMCTYVB43 in your cart. If black's more like your thing, you can pick up the DIMMs in that color for the same $81.29, but with the code EMCTYVB38.

• There are few things in the world worse than a computer with a bad PSU. That's why you'll want to check out the EVGA 850 GQ power supply. This modular unit comes fitted with Japan-made capacitors and generously sized 135 mm fan. There's enough outputs for an entire house and its kitchen sink, and EVGA offers five-year warranty coverage. The price is just $89.99 at Newegg (a low amount for a PSU this big) and there's a $20 rebate card on hand.

• The final item today is actually a triptych of Wi-Fi signal goodness. The Netgear Orbi AC2200 Wi-Fi mesh system comes with a total of three speedy, unobtrusive units that all together should be enough to cover your gerbil mansion in wireless signal goodness. The Orbis (as they're known to friends) use a tri-band comms system and come pre-paired for easy installation and setup. The maximum aggregate speed is 2.2 Gbps, and each node has two Ethernet ports for connecting devices like desktop PCs,  set-top boxes, or smart TVs. The whole shebang will set you back only $209.99 at Amazon if you click the in-page coupon.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: a Ryzen 7 1800X for $178, a Ryzen 5 2600 for $150, and more appeared first on The Tech Report.

Are you a die-hard AMD fanboy? Do you have the original green logo tattooed on your body? If so, then you definitely don't need me to tell you that AMD's just released the 50th Anniversary "Gold Editions" of its Ryzen 7 2700X CPU and Radeon VII graphics card. Yes, indeed; AMD's fastest single-chip CPU to date is now available in a fancy black-and-gold box, while the Radeon VII comes with a red shroud.

Kidding aside, those aren't the only unique characteristics of the new parts. The CPU has AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su's signature on its heatspreader alongside a special "AMD50" marking. Its box also includes a golden sticker that likewise bears the good doctor's autograph and the AMD50 logo. Plus, you get a coupon for an AMD50 T-shirt, as well as a digital code to enter a drawing to win a free Zen 2 processor on launch. Finally, the usual Wraith Prism RGB LED CPU cooler comes along, of course.

Oh, the CPU itself? It's still called "Ryzen 7 2700X", so while we don't have confirmation on this from AMD, we expect that it's the same Pinnacle Ridge CPU that we all know and love. That gets you eight cores and 16 threads of Zen+ starting at 3.7 GHz and ticking up to 4.3 GHz under load. It's the top of AMD's Socket AM4 lineup, and we were tickled pink with it when we tested it. It's still possible that AMD has fiddled with CPU's functionality—after all, Intel's similar Core i7-8086K had a bumped single-core turbo clock—but we don't see any indication of that.

There are less details available about the Radeon VII Gold Edition. As far as we can tell, it likewise seems to be the same product as its standard model, save for a Radeon Red heatsink shroud. Like the CPU, it includes the autographed sticker and the ticket for the T-shirt, but it doesn't appear to include the code to enter the Zen 2 drawing.

If you buy one of these 50th Anniversary Edition parts right now, you get two free games: The Division 2 and World War Z. However, that's true for a number of other AMD products right now, including all second-generation Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs as well as Radeon RX 570, RX 580, RX 590, and RX Vega graphics cards. The Division 2 comes as the Gold Edition of the game, which includes the "Year 1" season pass as well as some bonus content.

Fancy.

The prices further fuel our speculation that these parts aren't significantly altered from their standard versions. The Ryzen 7 2700X Gold Edition is selling for just $330. That's lower than the standard version's premiere price, and not much more than its current Newegg price of $295.

On the other hand, we couldn't find the Radeon VII Gold Edition anywhere but on AMD's site, where it goes for exactly the same $699 as a regular Radeon VII. If you're interested, you may want to jump on one of these offers, as we suspect they won't be around for long. You also can check out AMD's 50th Anniversary site here.

The post AMD releases 50th Anniversary “Gold Edition” versions of its top Ryzen and Radeon parts appeared first on The Tech Report.

• Mid-range CPUs are usually where the best performance-per-dollar lies, as is the case with the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X. This chip is a long-time TR favorite, thanks to its accoutrement of eight Zen+ cores and 16 threads, each capable of ticking away up to 4.3 GHz. There's a rather-good RGB-LED-lit Wraith Prism cooler in the box, too. Meanwhile, the HP EX900 250 NVMe SSD is a fine entry-level PCI Express drive, capable of pushing up to 2100 MB/s in sequential reads and 1500 MB/s when writing. Newegg will hand you both pieces of kit for just $294.99. Just add the processor to your cart and the solid-state drive will follow.

• If you live on the Intel side of the border, you'll probably be interested in the spiffy Asus ROG Strix Z390-E motherboard. It covers pretty much all the bases for most any high-end LGA1151 build. You get USB 3.1 Gen2 ports in Type-A and Type-C flavors, two M.2 slots, an Intel I219-V Ethernet controller along with an Intel Wireless-AC 9560 chip for 2×2 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, SLI and CrossFireX support, and a souped-up Realtek S1220A audio codec. Additional accoutrements include a built-in I/O shield, RGB LED lighting, and metal reinforcement around the main PCIe slots. Boards this nice are usually quite dear, but not today: $199.99 is all you need to take one home from Newegg so long as you apply the cart code EMCTYVB24.

• We usually post deals on regular-looking RAM sticks, but we have something today with a little more pizazz. The Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 16 GB kit of 3000 MT/s DIMMs are quite the lookers thanks to their diffused RGB LEDs and dark gray heatsinks. The timings are set to 16-20-20-38, and the price is just $99.99 at Newegg.

• 'Tis becoming the season again for capacious spinning storage. The Western Digital Elements 6 TB external drive is a simple-but-steady affair. It's got a USB 3.0 connection, subdued looks, and will set you back only $99.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTYVB36.

• The mobiles are up next. The Dell XPS 13 (xnita3ws607h) is one of the best laptops around, and the model we have on hand today is fitted with a colorful 1920×1080 display with 400 cd/m² maximum brightness, an Intel Core i5-8265U processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB NVMe solid-state drive. Connectivity options include two Thunderbolt 3 connectors. The asking price is but $1019.99 at Rakuten with the checkout code Q52H-HMJJ-HMV9-K7PT.

• If you'd rather have a bigger machine packed to the gills with powerful hardware, then you'll want the Dell G15 5590 (GNvca5ch7043hmp). This machine packs an Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a mighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB graphics card. That GPU can push out pixels at rather accelerated pace, and it'll go handy with the 1920×1080 display with 144 Hz refresh rate. Grab this machine for $1232.49 from Rakuten so long as you input the code Q52H-HMJJ-HMV9-K7PT during checkout.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: a Ryzen 7 2700X and a 250 GB NVMe SSD for $295 and more appeared first on The Tech Report.

Intel's launching six new mobile Core processors, all from the Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 families. The segmentation is fairly straightforward. All six chips have Hyper-Threading enabled, and the core counts scale evenly up the range: Core i5s have four cores, i7s have six cores, and i9s have eight cores. Surprisingly, all the ninth-generation mobile Core processors come stamped with a 45 W TDP even though the top-end model, the unlocked-for-overclocking Core i9-9980HK, sports 16 threads, 16 MB of L3 cache, and a maximum single-core turbo clock of 5 GHz.

The two new Core i9 CPUs include support for Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB). To recap, Intel describes TVB as "a feature that opportunistically increases clock frequency above single-core and multi-core Turbo Boost Technology frequencies based on how much the processor is operating below its maximum temperature and whether turbo power budget is available." If that sounds familiar, it's because it's an analog to AMD's eXtended Frequency Range (XFR) functionality. In practice, it means these chips could run 200 MHz faster than advertised as long as they're under 50°C. That low a CPU temperature seems unlikely in a gaming laptop under a heavy load, but TVB should  kick in often enough when the processor's not too busy.

On the desktop side, there are a lot more new chips. Multiplier-locked versions of the Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700, and Core i5-9600—processors that in past days would have been suffixed with an "S" indicating their 65 W TDP—come along with a pile of Core i3 CPUs. Intel is also launching a series of 35-W "T" processors, and a number of new Pentium Gold and Celeron chips. You can see the new desktop CPUs highlighted in yellow on a darker blue background above and below.

As seen before with the Core i3-9350KF, it seems the entire ninth-generation Core i3 family is equipped with Turbo Boost. Core i3 CPUs historically didn't have Turbo and simply ran at their full speed any time they were not idling. Now, it seems "Core i3" has become shorthand for "quad-core" in the new lineup. The core count pattern is the same as with the laptop chips: Core i5s have six cores and Core i7s have eight. Unlike the mobile processors, though, Hyper-Threading is all but completely absent here outside of the top-end Core i9 CPUs.

Stepping down from the Core i-series chips, it looks like the Pentium Gold and Celeron processors still haven't gotten the Turbo Boost treatment. This area is pretty clearly segmented too, for once: Pentium Gold chips are dual-core chips with Hyper-Threading, while Celerons do without the feature.

Interestingly, all of the above processors have gained Optane Memory support. It's not the higher-end version of the feature that allows Optane DIMMs; rather, Intel is simply no longer preventing folks buying budget CPUs from pairing said chips with Optane M.2 drives intended for disk caching. That's a nice little win, as we've always felt that technology was best-suited for ultra-low-cost machines anyway.

As usual, Intel lays out recommended customer prices for all of the desktop CPUs. Going over the list, there really aren't any surprises here; everything is pretty much in line with the pricing established by the already-released ninth-generation chips. You can probably expect the street prices on the low-power "T"-chips to be higher than recommended owing to their relative rarity. It will be interesting to see what effect AMD's third-generation Ryzen processors have on these prices when they launch later this year.

The post Intel fills out its roster of ninth-generation desktop and mobile Core CPUs appeared first on The Tech Report.

• We've run what felt like hundreds of RAM deals in the past few months. Prices have stabilized in the meantime, and cheap's the new normal. It takes an outstanding discount to make the cut these days, but that's exactly what we have here with the G.Skill Ripjaws 32 GB kit of 3600 MT/s DIMMs. They're capacious, speedy, and ring in at a belief-begging $179.99 at Newegg.

• Builders with a penchant for many-cored machines are probably eyeing the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X processor. Underneath its massive heatspreader sit 16 cores and a total of 32 threads accompanied by 40 MB of cache. Each individual core can hit a 4.4 GHz boost frequency, and there are a total of 64 PCIe lanes on tap, all ready to hook up to high-speed devices. The pretty box containing this CPU can be yours for $679 from Amazon. This deal ends today, so hit it ASAP.

This portable SSD is definitely not to scale. Spot the USB-C port.

• A while back, we took a long, hard look at SanDisk's Extreme Portable SSD, and we gave it an Editor's Choice award for its massive speed and build quality. If you fancied something like that but felt it was a little dear, you're in luck. The SanDisk Extreme Portable 2 TB SSD is rugged, solidly built, and can push data into its host device at up to 550 MB via a USB Type-C port. Until the end of today, you can pick up this drive for $279.99 from Amazon.

• Since we're discussing storage, how about a tiny card instead? The SanDisk Ultra 400 GB microSDSX UHS-I card is one of the best offerings out there, and it's capable of 100 MB/s read speeds and has an A1 app performance rating. Amazon's selling these for just $64.17 at the moment—we figure they won't last long.

• Over at the Aisle of Portability, you'll find the Dell XPS 15 9570 (fncwxb1652h). The specific model at hand has a 1920×1080 display with 400 cd{m2} maximum brightness, a four-core, eight-thread Intel Core i5-8300H CPU coupled with 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB NVMe SSD. This quality portable has top-notch build quality, trackpad, and keyboard, and a price tag of just $899.99 at Newegg Flash while stocks last.

• The next portable in line is the Razer Blade Stealth (RZ09-02393E32-R3U1). This stylish 13.3" laptop has a drool-provoking  high-res 3200×1800 IGZO display. Inside the aluminum chassis sits a Core i7-8550U chip next to 16 GB of RAM and a capacious 512 GB NVMe SSD. The machine weighs only 3 lb (1.36 kg) and is just 0.5" (12.7 mm) thick. The port selection includes Thunderbolt 3 connectivity for good measure. Best Buy will happily hand you this machine for just $1189.99.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: $180 for 32 GB of super-fast RAM, a $680 Threadripper 2950X, and more appeared first on The Tech Report.

A fair day, good gerbils. While I'd like to think that I have a decent enough moral compass, I've been considering the infliction of bodily harm these past couple days. You see, my apartment building is glued to the next one over, and someone over there is apparently doing some serious remodeling. Given that I work remotely with a multiple-hour timezone difference, I usually sleep over the morning. The hammers started at 08:00. I'm becoming angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. The only thing that soothes me right now is sweet PC hardware deals. Here's today's catch.

• Our leading item is one heck of a combo pack. The AMD Ryzen 2700X is one of the best mid-range CPU choices of the moment, thanks to its eight Zen+ cores and sixteen threads, each capable of hitting 4.3 GHz. The chip will go nicely into the Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming 3 mobo, a straightforward but capable affair with metal jackets around the main PCIe slots, an M.2 PCIe x4 slot, and a souped-up Realtek ALC1220 audio codec. The folks at Newegg will sell you both pieces for $319.98, or $75 off the regular total.

• You can link that awesome combo with this hyper combo for an ultra combo finish. The first item in this here pack is the Intel 660p 512 GB—probably the SSD of the moment, thanks to its combination of low price and good performance, capable of pushing 1500 MB/s in sequential reads and 1800 MB/s writing. That drive goes well with the G.Skill Aegis 16 GB kit with 3000 MT/s DIMMs, a no-frills set that just does its job. Newegg will box you both items for just $129.98, an amount that's $28 off the regular combined total and that would get you only the RAM kit just a few months back.

• That processor above is pretty nice, but if you want something with even more grunt, we have yet another combo deal that could also go with the SSD-and-RAM pack. The Intel Core i9-9900K is a top-shelf CPU that's nigh on the best gaming chip around, and it's also a productivity beast. After all, eight cores and sixteen threads of Coffee Lake clocked at up to a sky-high 5 GHz pack some serious punch. Since that processor needs as suitable home, the Asus ROG Strix Z390-E motherboard should fit the bill. It's got sizable heatsinks sitting next to an integrated I/O shield, two M.2 slots, a high-end S1220A audio codec, Intel-powered Ethernet and Wi-Fi, USB Type-A and Type-C ports, and, naturally, RGB LED lighting. Grab both these high-end pieces of kit for $684.98 from Newegg, or $100 off what they'd cost separately.

• How about an affordable gaming monitor that hits every note just right? The Acer ED242QR is a 24" display with a resolution of 1920×1080. That's as banal as banal comes, but there's more than meets the eye. The VA panel is curved and has a maximum refresh rate of 144 Hz. There's FreeSync adaptive refresh rate support on tap, and an input selection with DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort connectors. The price? A mere $149.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTYTA35. That's insane.

• Bigger is oftentimes better, and that may well be the case with the LG 34UC79-G display. It's a humoungous 34" display with a resolution of 2560×1080 and a 144 Hz refresh rate. As befits a good gaming monitor, there's FreeSync support on tap. As an added bonus, this display comes with a 1 ms motion blur reduction feature that'll certainly come in handy. The price is just $454.99 at Newegg.

• The final bit of kit today is a powerful one. The Seasonic Focus Plus 550 W power supply is a quality box o' watts. It's got fully modular cabling, semi-passive cooling, and enough connectors for most any rig. The efficiency rating is 80+ Gold, and the price is $74.99 at Newegg. That's not bad, but the trick here is the $25 rebate card that can bring the endgame total to just $49.99.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: a Ryzen 7 2700X and a mobo for $320 and much more appeared first on The Tech Report.

• It's a pretty safe bet that most gerbils would love an Intel Core i9-9900K. After all, it's simply one of the best-performing chips in recent memory, thanks to its consistently high performance with barely any weak spots. Its eight Coffee Lake cores and sixteen threads tick away at up to a whopping 5 GHz (you read that right), making for a chip that's ideal for gaming and working both. It's usually pretty expensive, too, but right now you can pick one up for $489.99 from Amazon or from the folks at Walmart for that same amount.

• You didn't think there would be a deals posts without RAM and SSDs, right? On the memory front, we have the Team T-Force Vulcan 16 GB kit of 3000 MT/s DIMMs. The sticks have unobtrusive red-and-black heatsinks, and the timings are 16-18-18-38. The price currently sits at a silly $74.99 with the cart code EMCTYTD26 at Newegg.

• That e-tailer has had a hot streak of solid-state drive deals lately, as evidenced by the HP EX900 500 GB drive. This gumstick can push up to 2100 MB/s when reading and 1500 MB/s on writes, and its random I/O figures ring in at 120K random read IOPS and 108K write IOPS. For only $64.99, you can take one home from Newegg.

• If you a need bigger bucket o' NAND, then the Intel 660p 1 TB SSD should fit the bill nicely. It can do 1800 MB/s in sequential operations in either direction, 150K random read IOPS, and 180K random write IOPS. It's currently going for just $102.99 at Newegg with the cart code EMCTYTE43. If that's still not big enough for you, then the Intel 660p 2 TB version is sitting at $199.99 with the cart code NEFPBK55, while stocks last.

• Over at the monitor aisle, we have a big one. The MSI Optix MAG341CQ is a 34" ultra-wide behemoth, with a 3440×1440 VA panel with a 3000:1 contrast ratio. Its refresh rate can hit 100 Hz, and there's FreeSync support on hand for good measure. You'd think that dollar tags are largely proportional to monitor inches, but this model's priced at just $399.99 with the cart code EMCTYTE64 at Newegg. There's an additional $20 rebate card on top of that, too.

• Moving on to portables, check out the MSI GV62 8RE-015 15.6" laptop. Ignore the weird model name and focus on the hardware inside: an Intel Core i7-8750H processor accompanied by 16 GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB graphics card. There's a combo setup with a 128 GB NVMe solid-state drive and a 1 TB hard drive for storage, and the display has a resolution of 1920×1080. Newegg will hand you one of these for $1019 with the cart code EMCTYTE49. That's not bad already, but the gigantic $150 rebate card can turn this into a $879 purchase.

• The final item today is another laptop, the Acer Swift 3 (NX.GQJAA.003). It's a sleek, thin affair clad in a gorgeous blue finish. Inside, there's an Intel Core i5-8250U processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256-GB solid-state drive. Acer says the battery should be good for 10 hours, and there's a fingerprint reader on hand. The price? Just $529.99 at the good ol' Newegg.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: an Intel Core i9-9900K for $490 and much more appeared first on The Tech Report.

Have you tried a laptop with one of AMD's recent Ryzen Mobile APUs? They're actually pretty great. My buddy picked up a machine with a Ryzen 5 3500U and after putting an SSD in it (because, sigh, it came with only a hard drive), it's super speedy. If you'd like to deploy a whole bunch of similar systems to your corporate workforce, don't worry—AMD's just released "Pro" versions of some models from that series. Check 'em out:

Only four of the second-generation Ryzen Mobile chips—just the 15 W models—made it to the Pro lineup, and unsurprisingly, the core configurations, clock rates, and basically everything else remain the same as the non-Pro chips. One of the chips that made the grade is the Athlon 300U, now christened the Athlon Pro 300U. It's interesting to see AMD offering such a low-end processor in "Pro" form given that to get Intel's similar vPro technology you'll have to step all the way up to a Core i5.

As we noted back when these same chips launched in non-Pro format, the Ryzen 7 3700U's ability to pack four two-thread Zen+ cores and ten Vega compute units into a 15W package that can hit 4 GHz is pretty darn impressive. AMD pits that chip in benchmarks against Intel's Core i7-8650U and claims that its processor comes out ahead in various tests, including Cinebench, Photoshop, PCMark, and 3DMark.

If you're not familiar with AMD's Pro lineup, you can refer to some of our earlier coverage to get caught up. The short version is that these processors offer management and security features that aren't available in the regular desktop and laptop Ryzen chips. AMD's Pro-series chips have been a little difficult to find in the past, but the chipmaker has a whole page on its site that lists available machines mounting its microprocessors.

Of course, none of the systems on that site are equipped with the latest chips listed above. AMD says it expects "commercial systems from HP and Lenovo" later this quarter with other OEMs and "further platform updates" coming in the second half of the year.

The post AMD’s second-generation Ryzen Mobile APUs go Pro appeared first on The Tech Report.

Obviously, the biggest news of the day is that Intel has launched its second-generation Xeon Scalable processors. These chips are the successors to the Skylake-based platform launched in 2017, and they were supposed to arrive at the end of last year. That didn't happen, but the chips are out now, and according to Intel you should be able to order machine with one as I write this.

The new Xeons haven't showed up on ARK yet, but Intel says there are "over 50" chips in the family. The company was eager to point out during its presentation that that number does not include some portion of bespoke processors. The chips range from single-socket eight-core models all the way up to a 400-W, 56-core behemoth with two CPU dice and a full twelve memory channels. All of the new chips are based on a revised CPU core that includes "DLBoost" instructions to accelerate AI inferencing as well as hardware mitigations for most Spectre variants.

Navin Shenoy holds up a stick of Optane DC persistent memory.

Most of the new chips—but not all—also support Optane persistent memory. That sounds exactly like what it is: regular old DIMMs, but with Optane memory onboard instead of DDR4. As long as the machine has at least one module of DDR4 DRAM, the rest of its slots can be packed with extremely high-density Optane DIMMs. Intel says that this enables up to 4.5 TB of memory per socket, which is certainly extremely impressive, though we're curious to see what the performance implications of such a configuration would be once software is written to take advantage of it.

Besides the big Xeons, Intel briefly showed the next series of Xeon D processors. Like those that came before, the new Xeon D-1600 family uses the same full-fat CPU cores as its heavyweight cousins, but stuffs them into an SoC-style package that Intel says can go as low as 27W. These chips are primarily intended for network applications, and as such integrate Intel's QuickAssist technology for hardware-accelerated encryption. Unfortunately, that's about all Intel had to say on these chips.

Other than Xeons, Intel very quickly announced a fair few non-CPU components. On the storage side of things, we saw a version of the Optane SSD DC D4800X with dual U.2 ports. That feature isn't designed to improve performance, but instead to increase availability. The company also showed the SSD D5-P4326 in EDSFF "ruler" form factor. These drives use QLC NAND flash to cram nearly 31 TB into a stick roughly the size of a typical classroom straight-edge. Intel says you could use these drives to stuff around a petabyte of storage in a 1U enclosure.

On the network side of things, Intel announced the 800-Series Ethernet adapters, codenamed Columbiaville. The add-in cards Intel showed hook up to 100-gigabit Ethernet, which is the sort of transfer rate that us mere mortals can only imagine. Intel talked about several technologies that these controllers offer: Application Design Queues are a form of hardware quality-of-service assurance, while Dynamic Device Personalization—carried over from the 700-series adapters—allows extensive reconfiguration of the adapter without resetting the system.

Finally, Intel showed off its first-ever FPGAs developed and built right at home: the Agilex series. It's an all-new brand for the company, and it describes a series of 10-nm FPGAs that use Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridges (EMIBs) to hook up to chiplets offering various I/O and other functionality. These are the only products that Intel announced today which won't be coming to market anytime soon; the very first samples of Agilex will be available in Q3 of this year. Intel claims that these chips will deliver up to 40 TFLOPs of DSP performance.

The post Intel reveals a whole arsenal of enterprise hardware at its Data-Centric Innovation Day appeared first on The Tech Report.

AMD's CEO holding a pre-release Ryzen Threadripper CPU.

In the above-linked press release, TAITRA announces that Computex will, for the first time ever, have its opening keynote speech before the show actually opens at the pre-show international press conference. None other than AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su herself will conduct the keynote speech, titled "The Next Generation of High-Performance Computing." The press release doesn't explicitly say what Dr. Su will discuss, though it does mention the executive will "highlight new details of upcoming products."

Our buddies over at TechPowerUp took things a step further this morning, bombastically stating that AMD will launch or unveil a new generation of both Ryzen and Radeon processors at the show, with products coming in June. The site doesn't list its sources, but such a statement seems at least plausible given what we've heard in the past. TechPowerUp goes on to specifically state that the site expects AMD to launch or unveil "at least four" new product lines, and suggests EPYC and Instinct as the third and fourth possible reveals—a claim that sounds more dubious to us.

Whatever may happen after, the only confirmed info is that Dr. Lisa Su will have some big news for us at her keynote kicking off Computex on May 27. When the time comes, expect to read all about whatever she says right here.

The post Rumor: AMD could launch third-gen Ryzen and Radeon Navi at Computex appeared first on The Tech Report.

• The big-hitter deal of the day is the Intel 660p NVMe 2 TB solid-state drive. This is a workhorse drive fit for any general-purpose machine, and it can push 1800 MB/s on sequential reads and 1800 MB/s when writing. The random I/O figures are actually pretty decent at 220 K IOPS in either direction. You can slap this gumstick in your PC for just $199.99 from Newegg with the cart code EMCTYTV23.

• Might as well continue along the same lines, with the Crucial P1 TB NVMe drive. This offering is roughly in the same performance bracket as the drive above, and it can push 2000 MB/s in sequential reads and 1700 MB/s when writing. When it comes to random I/O, this model clocks in at 170K IOPS for random reads and 240K IOPS when writing. You can find this drive for the same exact price at two large e-tailers right now: $104.99 at the good ol' Newegg, and $104.99 from the folks at Amazon.

• Next up, a combo deal. The AMD Ryzen 7 2700 doesn't need a lot of introduction around these parts. It's got eight Zen+ cores, 16 threads, and each core can clock up to 4.1 GHz. Those are all good things, and that's 'nuff said. That chip will slot nicely into the MSI B450-A Pro motherboard. This simple-but-straightforward affair has a metal-jacketed main PCIe slot, an M.2 slot, and actual VRM heatsinks. Newegg is packaging up both items for $289.98, or $50 off the regular combined price.

• Here's one heck of a speedy display. The Asus ROG Swift PG258Q is a 25" display with a resolution of 1920×1080. So far so banal, but there are quite a few tricks up its sleeve. For starters the maximum brightness rating is 400 cd/m², and the refresh rate is a whopping 240 Hz. Finally, there's support for G-Sync adaptive refresh rate tech and a nitfy height-adjustable stand. Grab this monitor from Newegg for $489.99 with the cart code PG258QSALE.

• Moving on to the topic of potent portables, here's a hot model: the Dell G5 15" 5587 (fncwG5F703RPhMP) gaming laptop. This quality machine comes fitted with an Intel Core i7-8750H processor sitting next to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB graphics card. There's 16 GB of RAM on tap, thankfully in a dual-channel configuration. A combo setup with a 128 GB NVMe drive and a 1 TB hard drive handles storage duties. The 15.6" display inside the lid has a resolution of 1920×1080. Rakuten asks but $887.49 for this laptop if you input the code DELL150 during the checkout process.

• Our second mobile machine today is similar to the one above, yet different. The Asus ROG Strix Hero II laptop we have on hand also has an Intel Core i7-8750H processor and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB graphics card, but most of the similarities stop right there. The RAM allotment is 8 GB, but there's a 256 GB NVMe solid-state drive. The hottest piece of kit, though, is the display: a 15.6" 1920×1080 with a 144-Hz refresh rate and a 3-ms response time, a fine fit for fantastic fast-paced gaming action. Walmart is selling this machine for $949.99 right now.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: an Intel 660p 2 TB NVMe drive for $200 and much more appeared first on The Tech Report.

• At first glance, a super-cheap high-end CPU sure looks like an oxymoron. There's a story behind that today, though. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X is a mighty X399 processor with a total of 12 cores supporting SMT, for a total of 24 threads. Sheesh. Each individual core can hit a 4 GHz turbo speed, and there's 32 MB of L3 cache on tap. This CPU is kind of the gateway drug to the world of high-end desktop and workstation computing, and it's selling for a stupid-low $279.99 at Amazon. I'd hurry up and order if I was you, we suspect that deal won't last long. Thanks to Shinare at the TR forums for the hot tip.

• There's been a string of great NVMe drive deals lately, and the one we have today is for the Silicon Power P34A80 1 TB NVMe SSD. This unassuming-looking drive packs a real punch, as it's underpinned by a Phison E12 controller and Toshiba 3D TLC NAND. It's rated for sequential speeds of up to 3200 MB/s on reads and 3000 MB/s on writes. It's also covered by a five-year warranty to boot. That list of specs is more often seen on marked-up drives of bigger brands, but you can currently have this model for just $144.99 from Amazon.

• You've got the processor up above, now check out the RAM. The Geil Super Luce RGB Sync 16 GB kit at 3000 MT/s is a spiffy-looking set of sticks. The generously-sized heatsinks ensconce RGB LED lighting compatible with Asus' Aura Sync software, ready to make your build stand out. The price is particularly palatable at just $89.99 at Newegg.

• How about you stop trying to aim in games and just do it? For that, you'll need a quality rodent like the Razer DeathAdder Elite. It's got an uncomplicated shape, just the right amount of buttons, rubber side grips, a 16,000-DPI sensor, and RGB LED lighting. In short, everything you need, and nothing you don't. The asking price is currently $37.99 at Amazon, a figure that we suspect won't last long.

• Let's hear it for thin-and-light portables. We have a pair of those today, and the first one is the Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533FD-NS76). This 15.6" machine has a 1920×1080 display surrounded by thin bezels, and it's powered by a might Intel Core i7-8565U chip, a quad-core, eight-thread affair with a doubletake-inducing 4.6 GHz turbo speed. The chip sits next to 16 GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 1050 Max-Q graphics card with 2 GB of its own VRAM. Digital pack rats will be extra-happy to know that this machine comes with a 1 TB NVMe SSD (jeez). As the proverbial cherry on top, there's an IR camera with Windows hello support, a USB Type-C port, and Bluetooth 5.0. Grab this portable for just $1299.99 from Newegg.

• You might prefer a slightly smaller, simpler machine like the Acer Swift 3 (NX.GQJAA.003). This blue-shaded laptop comes fitted with an Intel Core i5-8250U processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256-GB solid-state drive. The 14" 1920×1080 display sits inside a metal chassis. There's 802.11ac Wi-Fi in a 2×2 arrangement with MIMO support, too. The amount of $529.99 is all you'll need to take this laptop home from Newegg.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: a Threadripper 1920X for $280, a 1 TB NVMe SSD for $145, and more appeared first on The Tech Report.

• Look who's back! Most everyone is a fan of AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 processor, and with good reason. It's a balanced chip, with eight Zen+ cores and sixteen threads (count'em), each clocked at up to 4.1 GHz. There's 16 MB of L3 cache on tap and a spiffy Wraith Spire cooler with RGB LED lighting in the box. Amazon is asking for only $219.99 for the package right now.

• Modern chips love them some speedy RAM, like the G.Skill Aegis 16 GB kit of 3000 MT/s DIMMs. There isn't much to say about these, and we reckon that's fine. The timings are 16-18-18-38, the heatsinks are unobtrustive, and the price is just $79.99 at Newegg, while stocks last.

• Say, those sticks above are a particularly good pick for a tiny rig, like the one that could go inside the Fractal Design Nano S case. Folks, this is probably one of the finest ITX cases around. It's got room for 280-mm radiators (!!), a ton of fans, and can generally be described as "everything a regular case is, only just slightly smaller." Those words sound simple, but they're rarely true in the ITX case world. There are removable dust filters, brackets for mounting reservoirs, and a host of assorted niceties. You can get one of these right now for just $39.99 from Newegg. Dang.

• Looking for a large, fast monitor with a vibrant picture and a decent resolution, that won't break the bank? The MSI Optix AG32CQ is a large 32" VA display with a resolution of 2560×1440. Its contrast ratio is 3000:1, and it should have even better color accuracy than many productivity displays as MSI says its color gamut can cover 110% of the sRGB space. As befits a nice gaming display, the refresh rate is a healthy 144 Hz, and there's FreeSync support on tap. The amount of $399.99 is all you'll need to take this home from Newegg. You also get a $20 rebate card.

• Next up, a couple of portables. We'll start with the meatiest one, the Dell G15 5590 (GNvca5ch7043hmp). That letter soup means this is a 15.6" machine with a 1920×1080 display with a nice 144-Hz refresh rate, powered by an Intel Core i7-8750H processor chip sitting next to a mighty GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card with 6 GB of VRAM. For storage purposes, there's a 256-GB NVMe SSD coupled with a 1-TB hard drive. The RAM allotment is 8 GB in only one stick, but we figure that enterprising gerbils will have little to no trouble adding another 8 GB. Rakuten will get you this machine for just $1286.49.

• Chances are you just want a solid workhorse portable like the Asus VivoBook (S530FN-BH73). This is also a 15.6" machine with a 1920×1080 screen, but it employs an Intel Core i7-8565U processor sitting next to 8 GB of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics card. There's a combo setup with a 256-GB solid-state drive plus a 1 TB hard drive for storage. You shouldn't have problems plugging peripherals into this machine, as it's got two USB 2.0 ports along with two Gen1 USB 3.1 ports in Type-A and Type-C flavors. Take this laptop home for $799.99 from Newegg.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: a Ryzen 7 2700 for $220 and much, much more appeared first on The Tech Report.

• A great CPU deal has arisen today. The AMD Ryzen 7 2700 packs a total of eight Zen+ cores and sixteen threads, each with a 4.1 GHz boost clock. It's one of the higher-end chips in AMD's desktop lineup, and it's bundled with a spiffy Wraith Spire cooler with RGB LED lighting. Newegg is running a sale on this processor and will hand it to you in exchange for just $229.99. If you want to save even more dollars, you can check out this page with a listing of a handful of tasty combo deals including the Ryzen 7 2700 and a selection of system components.

• We're pretty happy that the price of pretty much every type of component is on a downward trend. System memory is a prime example of that. Both the Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro and the G.Skill Trident Z RGB are memory kits with 16 GB of capacity spread across a couple of sticks clocked at 3000 MT/s. Whatever style and brand you choose, you get speedy RAM and Technicolor lighting. The Corsair kit is going for $109.99 at Newegg. Not surprisingly, the G.Skill set is priced at exactly the same $109.99.

• If you have no need for fancy lighting and would rather have chips with a few more MT/s, then check out the G.Skill Ripjaws V 16 GB dual-channel kit at 3200 MT/s. That one will set you back $99.99 at Newegg.

• Who doesn't love a mouse with a handy shape and that requires no wires? The Corsair Dark Core RGB says hello. This rodent can be used both with a wire attached or in glorious 2.4 GHz wireless mode. It has a 16,000 DPI optical sensor, a total of seven programmable buttons including a sniper button, and interchangeable side grips. Did we mention the multi-zone fancy lighting? Darn right. Get it from Newegg for just $49.99 with cart code EMCTWUV42. Good wireless mice tend to go for twice that, folks.

• Fast and cheap solid-state drives? Right this way, sir. The Intel 660p 512 GB NVMe SSD is an affordable-but-speedy affair, capable of pushing 1500 MB/s on sequential reads and 1000 MB/s when writing. As befitting an NVMe drive, it can do 90 K IOPS when reading and 220 K IOPS when writing. This bit bucket can be yours from Newegg for a silly low $62.99 with cart code EMCTWUV24.

• Need to power up a high-end rig? The Corsair RM850x is one of the finest power supplies you can get your hands on. It's modular, 80 Plus Gold certified, has semi-passive cooling, and comes with enough cables for just about any system. Corsair also offers a ten-year warranty on it. I'm running the 750 W version on my own box, and I reckon this is about as perfect as a PSU gets. Grab the RM850x from Newegg for $109.99 with cart code EMCTWUV35, and use the included mail-in rebate to get another $20 back.

• The final bit of kit today will be right at home in your living room, or perhaps as a part of your PC setup: the Pioneer VSX-933 7.2 receiver. It can push 80 W per channel, uses a 32-bit DAC, and has support for pretty much every alphabet-soup audio and video format of the current age including HDR10, BT.2020, DTS:X and Dolby Atmos. Around the back, you'll find six HDMI inputs as well as Wi-Fi antennas and an Ethernet port. You can add this beast to your setup for just $259.99 at Newegg.

That's all for today, folks! There's a chance you're looking for something we haven't covered. If that's the case, you can help The Tech Report by using the following referral links when you're out shopping: Not only do we have a partnership with Newegg and Amazon, but we also work with Best Buy, Adorama, Rakuten, Walmart, and Sam's Club. For more specific needs, you can also shop with our links at Das Keyboard's shop.

The post Bargain basement: a Ryzen 7 2700 for $230 and a ton of cheap system components appeared first on The Tech Report.