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A record in SiSoftware’s Sandra benchmark database has offered up two new pieces of information in regard to AMD’s upcoming Zen 2-based products. Firstly, the entry shows that MSI is developing hardware in the form of an X570 motherboard to support the expected Ryzen desktop processors, and secondly a mysterious AMD processor was involved in the test.

The names of three new Gigabyte motherboards have been revealed bearing the “X499” designation. It’s believed at least one of the boards will be capable of offering 10 GbE network data rates. AMD is expected to introduce the X499 chipset specifically for the 3rd Gen HEDT Ryzen Threadripper processors.

A list of X570 motherboards from Gigabyte has been leaked thanks to data published online by the Eurasian Economic Committee (EEC). Various OEMs are gearing up for the upcoming release of AMD’s 3rd Generation of Ryzen desktop processors, which are based on the power-efficient Zen 2 microarchitecture.

The new, ultra-compact Vnopn K1 does without a fan and has no moving parts, which helps keep its form factor down. Vnopn has equipped the K1 with an AMD processor too unlike many other PCs of its size.

There is a rumor that AMD has been working on its own version of ray-tracing technology that could be incorporated into the red team’s expected Navi 20 series. The same source speculates that this high-end lineup could challenge or even surpass the ray-tracing capabilities of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards.

UDOO recently ran a campaign on Kickstarter for the UDOO BOLT single-board computer, and the developers of the device managed to secure US$635,769 in crowd-sourced funding. It’s likely many investors were attracted by the claim that the BOLT is “almost twice as fast as the MacBook Pro 13”. The Ryzen-powered board should start shipping by the end of the month.

Leaked information about some potential upcoming laptops from Asus suggests that the Taiwanese manufacturer is preparing to reveal devices that feature both Picasso and Turing technology. Three different models are mentioned that combine two different AMD Ryzen APUs with seemingly three Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Asus has already released gaming laptops with the new Picasso chips but not with an Nvidia GPU.

Prices for second-generation AMD Ryzen CPUs have dropped, with US$50 being shaved off a performance-level Ryzen 7 2700 CPU on Newegg. A number of CPUs based on the Zen+ microarchitecture have been discounted, leading to speculation that AMD is making space in its inventory for the upcoming Zen 2-based Ryzen chips.

AMD's use of a multi-chip module (MCM) approach offers quite a few advantages for AMD in terms utilizing TSMC's lines efficiently and also in driving down costs. We are now getting to know that Ryzen 3000 sports a new Infinity Fabric version that offers twice the bandwidth of the previous generation. The chiplet design should also enable AMD to disable cores with minimal loss to cater to the entry level and mid-range markets.

Users of AMD X470 chipset-based motherboards who have updated to the latest AGESA 0.0.7.x offered by some OEMs over the past week are reporting that the update cripples the Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) from working automatically, requiring manual adjustments via Ryzen Master. The issue seems to have affected some Asus and MSI X470 boards and the only recourse is to downgrade the BIOS (if possible) or wait till a fix for the PBO issue is released.

The new AMD X570 chipset is expected to be launched soon and a list of motherboards produced by Asus for this particular generation has been leaked. The products being prepared cover a number of well-known Asus lines, including ROG and TUF. ASRock’s upcoming line-up of X570 boards has also been published online.

The 1st-Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X CPU is currently priced at US$299.99 on Newegg. This Zen-based high-end desktop processor (HEDT) was originally released in August 2017 and cost US$549 at the time of launch. The chip has eight cores and 16 threads, and it can offer a boost clock of up to 4 GHz.

A market analyst for financial services company Cowen has predicted that Google will utilize AMD’s upcoming EPYC 2 server CPUs, codenamed “Rome”, for its own services. This would be a huge deal for AMD, which has already been selected to provide customized GPUs for the Google Stadia cloud gaming service.

The AMD 'Matisse' Ryzen 3000 CPUs are still a couple of months away from launch but motherboards OEMs have started prepping for it by offering new AGESA updates that support the new processors. MSI, Asus, and BioStar have started rolling out AGESA v0.0.7.x that includes support for Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 CPUs. Other OEMs are expected to follow suit as we head closer to launch.

A leaked email allegedly from Phil Spencer, the Xbox head executive, has given some ambiguous details about how Microsoft and Xbox will challenge Google’s recent massive announcement about its Stadia game-streaming service. It seems something big is going to happen at E3 though, which officially starts on June 11.

Google has officially announced its Stadia cloud gaming service at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Google Stadia will allow users to play games from any computer, smartphone, smart television or tablet that has an Internet connection. The GPUs that have been selected for the service’s hardware are custom Radeon chips from AMD.

HP will be bringing some of its previously exclusive Spectre features to its mid-range Envy lineup this year. The 15.6-inch Envy 15 in particular will get an AMOLED option while all models will have a physical camera kill switch to electronically disable the webcam.

The team behind the much-delayed Atari VCS has announced an APU replacement for the game console. Previously, a customized A10 chip from AMD’s Bristol Ridge series was going to be installed, but perhaps wisely the developer has now upgraded that choice to a more modern dual-core Ryzen processor. Graphics will be processed by a Radeon Vega GPU rather than the R7 GPU.

A number of recent Geekbench listings alluded to the existence of two new Pocophone devices: The Poco F1 Lite and Poco F2. We were skeptical in our coverage of both stories and it turns out were right to be, as it was all just a ruse by the enthusiast community to see how the media would handle the false information.

AMD has announced that the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.3.2 installation package is ready for download. The package includes various fixes and support for games, and it is currently available for Windows 10 64-bit and Windows 7 64-bit (with SP1 or higher).

AMD could be planning on some serious product discounting soon. A Gigabyte Radeon RX Vega 56 GAMING OC 8G card has been priced at a very tempting US$279.99 on Newegg for limited time sales, and there has been an RX 590 Special Edition card from Sapphire available from the same retailer for US$219.99 – the same price as the cheapest new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 cards.

Intel has kept its huge lead over AMD in Steam’s survey for processor usage. The blue team has even managed to slightly increase its share in systems utilizing a Windows OS, but AMD has taken a nibble out of Intel’s share on machines operating on Linux. Steam users have also shown a preference for high-end chips.

A rumored launch date of August has been reported for the upcoming 7 nm Navi GPU series. The highly anticipated hardware from AMD has been surrounded in mystery, with details and specifications being comparatively thin on the ground. However, it seems Navi could be upon us right after AMD has finished with its Ryzen 3000-series launch.

Steam has published its hardware and software survey for February 2019, and once again Nvidia dominates the PC video card usage charts. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti have all enjoyed growth over the month. However, the RTX 2060 graphics card doesn’t even feature in the chart at all. The GeForce GTX 1060 is still the most used GPU in the survey.

AMD has announced the availability of the Radeon RX 560 XT graphics card for just the Chinese market. The GPU bridges the wide gap between the Radeon RX 560 and RX 570 and offers a base clock of 973 MHz and a boost clock of 1073 MHz. The card comes with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory.

References to an unknown AMD GPU, AMD 66AF:F1, have popped up in the CompuBench benchmark site leading to speculation that this could be one of the Navi SKUs. From the initial numbers, we get to see that this GPU offers improved numbers in several memory-intensive compute tests over the Vega 56 but still trails behind the Vega 64. However, this GPU does seem to have significant leads over the Vega 64 when it comes to graphics performance.

The Ryzen 5 3550H and Ryzen 7 3750H are comparable to the Intel Core i5-8300H. It's up to laptop makers now to pair these Zen+ processors with Nvidia GPUs for potentially cheaper prices than the usual Intel-Nvidia offering.

Although Nvidia mightn’t have sold as many RTX 20-series GPUs as it would like, it is still running rings around its chief competitor, AMD. The latest analyst estimates show that for every 4 GPUs Nvidia sells AMD only sells one.

AMD has been sharing important information in an investor presentation, including a roadmap for its upcoming processors. Next in line for release is the 2nd Gen Ryzen Pro Mobile, followed by the 3rd Gen Ryzen desktop processors. Making a surprise appearance at the end of the 2019 roadmap is the 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper CPU.

The Adrenalin 2019 Edition unifies Radeon and Vega GPUs under a single software umbrella for faster updates. Owners of Kaby Lake-G laptops and NUCs, however, will be out of luck.

A new leak associated with the upcoming Ryzen 3000 series has surfaced. It is a pricelist that has been distributed by the IT seller Bizgram, which has an address in Singapore. This document baldly lists all the new Threadripper variants, as well as the prices at which they may be sold.

John Peddie Research has released its review of the GPU market for Q4 2018. Overall GPU shipments were down by 2.65% from the previous quarter, with Nvidia shipments decreasing by 7.62%, AMD’s by 6.81%, and Intel’s GPU shipments falling by 0.67%. However, GPU shipments for notebooks increased as the cryptocurrency crash continued to affect desktop GPU demand.

A United States Patent Application made by AMD for variable rate shading (VRS) has been discovered. At present, the little-used technology only features in Turing-based cards from Nvidia; VRS can offer an fps increase in games that utilize it. It has been speculated that AMD plans to incorporate variable rate shading in its upcoming 7 nm Navi GPUs.

There is a rumor that Microsoft will take center stage at E3 2019 by revealing the expected new Xbox consoles. The consoles, codenamed Lockhart and Anaconda, are believed to feature SSDs, custom CPUs based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture, and custom Navi-based GPUs. However, the release schedule for the latest Xbox hardware is still a long way off: End of 2020.

The upcoming mainstream Lenovo IdeaPad C340 family will be one of the first to offer Zen+ Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 7 processor options that were initially unveiled at CES 2019. The AMD options should be comparable to Intel Whiskey Lake-U for at least $50 USD less when the Lenovo convertible launches next month.

The affordable IdeaPad S340 and S540 series will carry GeForce MX250 and Radeon RX Vega 10 options when they launch in the next couple of months. The AMD-based IdeaPad S540 SKU in particular will retail for $730 compared to $880 for the Intel variant.

It has been reported that TSMC could have a 5 nm FinFET process ready for commercial use by 2020, and the rumored Apple A14 SoC would be one of the first chips to benefit from the advanced technology. The semiconductor foundry has announced it will start risk production for 5 nm technology in the second half of this year.

In the wake of NVIDIA announcing the 'Turing' GTX 1660 Ti GPU, AMD announced a limited period offer for the Vega 56 by bringing down the price of the card to the same US$279 price point. Unfortunately, though, the card appears to have been sold out and it is not known if and when AMD will reinstate the offer again.

The upcoming 'Navi' GPUs from AMD could offer much better power-efficiency according to notes from AMD's recent Linux driver patches. The patches detail that 'future ASICS' could use a new sw SMU framework superceding the current PowerPlay driver. In all likelihood, the new sw SMU might enable dynamic per-core voltage and frequency adjustment found in Ryzen APUs potentially resulting in less power-hungry GPUs and more performance per Watt.

July 7 will see the launch of AMD's 7 nm parts including the Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Navi GPUs alongside the new X570 chipset. A detailed announcement is expected during Computex 2019 in June followed by wide availability in July. AMD is also expected to announce 12 and 16-core Ryzen CPUs in the July to September timeframe. While Zen 2 is mostly on track, the simultaneous launch of Navi depends on whether TSMC is able to cater to the demand.

One variant of the new Ryzen 3000 mobile CPU series, the 3550H, has been launched in the form of the ASUS TUF Gaming FX505 and FX507 notebooks. They are 15- and 17-inch laptops, respectively, both of which feature 4GB of inbuilt RX 560X graphics memory. They also have 16:9 FHD displays with minimal bezels and options on Radeon FreeSync.

Steam has released the details of its hardware and software survey for January 2019. In terms of PC video card usage, Nvidia absolutely dominates the chart with 74% of users having a GPU from the green team. The GeForce GTX 1060 is the most popular graphics card, while the highest-ranked non-Nvidia product is AMD’s Radeon R7 Graphics in 14th place.

2019 could be the year when the Smach Z handheld Windows gaming device finally becomes reality. Smach is still trying to hype things up, as it recently updated the official site with new prices and specs, plus it added a few videos showing various gaming sessions. There is no specific 2019 launch date mentioned, so delays may still occur.

AMD has released its final financial report for 2018. It shows that the company had made nearly US$6.5 billion for this year, which is a 23% increase compared to 2017. The company also claims to have posted a net income of $337 million, whereas it had made a net loss the previous year. Analysis has also shown that AMD has increased its share of server and PC markets.