Desktop

The industrial-grade rugged enclosure made of aluminum featured with the Mini Multi Display PC does not come with any active cooling in order to protect against dust, debris and moisture. The system is powered by AMD's Ryzen Embedded V1605B APU with integrated Vega 8 GPU that supports four 4K video connections, and can be equipped with up to 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and up to 2 TB M.2 SSD storage.

The LGA 4677 platform will add support for PCIe 5.0 and 8-channel DDR5 RAM for the upcoming 10 nm+++ Sapphire Rapids and 7 nm Granite Rapids server-grade Xeon CPUs, which are supposed to compete with AMD's EPYC Milan and Genoa processors. The first 7 nm server CPUs from Intel are expected to launch in 2022, so desktop-grade CPUs supporting those new features will be released later on.

Fresh rumors have surfaced indicating that Intel would scrap 10nm on the desktop altogether and instead, directly launch 7nm Meteor Lake chips sometime in 2022 as 10nm has not yet reached the high clocks and yields required for desktops. However, Intel has refuted these rumors and clarified that 'great progress' is being made on 10nm that also includes desktop products.

Even though it might be a short-lived standard, the PCIe 4.0 is slowly seeing more adoption, and the latest price cuts for the NVMe 4.0 SSDs should certainly make things more affordable for AMD users who want to pair their Ryzen 3000 CPUs with faster storage solutions.

It seems that AMD has listened to its customers, having added support for its Radeon Image Sharpening algorithm to Radeon Vega GPUs. Last month the company claimed it had no immediate plans to do so, but it would bring RIS to the Vega series if there was enough interest. Good news then, Radeon RX Vega 56, RX Vega 64, Vega Frontier Edition and Radeon VII owners?

References to DirectX ray tracing were found in the latest AMD drivers indicating that AMD could be enabling ray tracing support for the RX 5000-series Navi GPUs with the release of the December update for Radeon Adrenalin Software. Although just a software fix for now, this could pave the way for hardware-accelerated ray tracing in the upcoming Navi GPUs based on RDNA 2.0.

The Intel Comet Lake Core i3-10100 has surfaced on the Sisoftware database confirming that it is indeed a 4C/8T part as speculated. Not much information is there about the processor itself apart from the fact that it has a base speed of 3.6 GHz and a 6 MB L3 cache. Intel Comet Lake CPUs are part of the 10th generation and will continue to be fabbed on the 14nm process.

At this year's IDC event in Tokyo, Intel disclosed a few more details about the upcoming Xe GPU architecture. Besides the hardware-level ray tracing support on the discrete GPUs launching in mid-2020, Intel also intends to double the performance of the current Ice Lake Iris Plus iGPUs on the Gen 12 Xe GPUs integrated with the Tiger Lake CPUs.

Codenamed "the Element," Intel's modular concept is based on PCIe boards that integrate CPU, RAM, SSD and a variety of connectors. These boards use 16 PCIe lanes and can be combined with other accelerators like GPUs, compute units etc. Furthermore, the CPU, RAM and SSD can be upgraded separately, or the entire module can be swapped for an upgraded one.

Intel announced its new Xeon W-2200 HEDT CPUs earlier this week. The Cascade Lake-X chips offer some upgrades over the current Xeon silicon, including clock speeds up to 4.8 GHz and 18-core/36 thread CPUs. Most interestingly, Intel is pricing the Xeon W-2200 family of processors significantly lower than previous Xeon CPUs.

Both CPUs feature a 65 W TDP and support 24/16 PCIe 4 lanes. The Ryzen 9 3900 comes with 12 cores and 24 threads clocked at 3.1 GHz (4.3 GHz boost) and integrates 70 MB total cache memory, while the Ryzen 5 3500X gets only 6 cores and 6 threads clocked at 3.6 GHz (4.1 GHz boost) plus 35 MB total cache memory.

The jump from 8-layer to 12-layer 3D TSV DRAM designs will enable AIB integrators to include as much as 96 GB of HBM2 DRAM on a single board, increasing the memory bus to 4,096-bit. The resulting increase in memory bandwidth will prove beneficial to AI, HPC and FPGA applications.

New research has shown that the market for semiconductors is estimated to grow to US$573 billion in 5 years. This may be driven by a demand for these materials in wireless communications, vehicles and online connectivity. However, the common-or-garden integrated circuit will continue to influence the market into the next decade.

New research has found that nearly 50% of all US households with broadband subscribe to 2 or more subscription-based services in 2019, whereas this figure was 33% in 2017 and only 20% in 2014. The apparent demand has driven the number of individual services to match in the country. It has grown by 1.4 times since 2014.

AMD recently unveiled a roadmap for its EPYC line of server-grade CPUs. The Zen 3 ("Milan") and Zen 4 ("Genoa") EPYC CPUs look like they will continue to pressure Intel's enterprise business. While Milan looks more like a refinement of the current Rome EPYC CPUs, Genoa may bring support for DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0.

Turtle Beach has released the Atlas Edge, a new USB adapter for any conventional wired headset. It is intended to enhance any headset connected to it with an in-house panel of software called Control Studio. This suite is designed to convert audio through the Atlas Edge into a "full panoramic 3D audio experience".

The latest Insider's version of Windows 10 updates the Your Phone app so that it is compatible with the Samsung Galaxy S10 series, as well as the Galaxy Fold. This allows a user to monitor battery levels, screen-mirror and sync data. However, Microsoft has stated that these new features will be available to certain regions only to start off with.

AMD announced two new GPUs today. The Radeon RX 5500 and its mobile equivalent, the Radeon RX 5500M, will make their debuts in various machines before the end of the year. The RX 5500M, in particular, will appear in the MSI Alpha 15, which we should get in our lab later this month. The RX 5500M should offer performance somewhere between the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, which would make it suitable for gaming at FHD/High settings.

Intel has hinted that the first of its eagerly anticipated Xe discrete GPUs will launch in June 2020. The launch date has been discerned from a cryptic tweet posted by the head of the project and former AMD GPU chief Raja Koduri.

Nvidia’s successor to the Turing architecture powering its current line of Turing based RTX 20 series GPUs isn’t far away. According to the latest rumors, the graphics powerhouse will be releasing its new chips based on Samsung’s 7nm EUV process in the first half of 2020.

Computational photography - or imaging that depends at least as much on software as on hardware - was worth US$7.9 billion as a market in 2018. However, the latest analysis indicates that this valuation will grow to $29 billion over the next 5 years. This market is led by companies such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Alphabet and Apple.

Google has announced that Red Dead Redemption 2 will come to its Stadia platform on it November 2019 launch. The wildly popular Rockstar game will thus be available for streaming via the new service from its very first day. At present, it is not clear if this title will allow saving across platforms.

Google has announced the re-institution of its Shopping service, albeit for users located in the US only. The company claims that the renewed feature can analyse millions of retail listings and other data in order to show customers the best deals. It is also now possible to order the resulting items directly through Google.

Expected to be released in early November via BIOS updates from all mobo manufacturers, the new CPU microcode is said to bring needed fixes, stability improvements and even new features to all Ryzen 3000 processors, as well as to the older 1000 / 2000-series.

NVIDIA looks set to have a busy end of the month, at least if latest rumors are to be believed. Chinese insiders claim that the company will release the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER in the final week of October, a week after it is expected to unleash the GeForce GTX 1650 Ti. The GTX 1660 SUPER will sit between the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, with NVIDIA likely pitching it against AMD's upcoming Navi 12 and Navi 14 GPUs.

Preliminary reports position the upcoming Navi-14-based Radeon RX 5500 GPu as a direct competitor for Nvidia's GTX 1660 solutions. Even though the memory bus is not as wide compared to the Nvidia GPUs, the RX 5500 compensates with up to 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM plus higher core and memory clocks.

TSMC strikes back with a "retaliatory litigation", claiming that GlobalFoundries infringed on 25 of its patents that include FinFET designs for the 40 through 12 nm nodes. Unlike GlobalFoundries who sued TSMC's fab-less companies like Apple and Nvidia, TSMC is looking to halt all GlobalFoundries production and sale processes for the infringed nodes.

Intel has not only confirmed the product stack of its Cascade Lake-X series but has also priced it unbelievably competitively. The series starts at just US$590 for the 10 core Core i9-10900X, before rising to US$979 for the 18 core Core i9-10980XE. Your move, AMD.

DNS over HTTPS is a new way of connecting to websites proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2018. Google is reportedly working on implementing it in an upcoming version of its Chrome browser. However, an anti-trust task force associated with the US Congress has taken issue with this new measure.

The Compubench site has added a listing for a "genuine" Intel CPU that is integrated with a "Gen12 Mobile Graphics Controller". This, then, may be the integrated graphics solution that is said to launch alongside Tiger Lake chipsets. The benchmark indicates that it has 96 execution units (EUs) and goes at 1.1GHz.

The x86 architecture has been hitting something of a wall lately but AMD looks like it could be set to inject it with a fresh breath of life. According to the rumor mill, the company has finalized the Zen 3 design and it introduces a new SMT4 feature that will allow each core to execute four threads simultaneously.

We have already seen 10 core, 12 core and 18 core representatives from Intel's upcoming Cascade Lake-X (CL-X) series hit Geekbench, and now a 14 core SKU has appeared online. While previous results have shown a demonstrable difference between the CL-X series, this new 14 core chip only edges its 12 core sibling despite having 2 additional cores. The successor to the Core i9-9940X only outscores the 12 core Ryzen 9 3900X by 5% in multicore workloads too.

Current PCBs are eating too much space and researchers think these can easily be replaced with a new silicon-interconnect fabric that would lead to more powerful devices in reduced form-factors. The use of such new fabrics would also cut production costs and improve heat dissipation. Smartphone SoCs and servers may also benefit from the more streamlined design introduced with the silicon-interconnect fabric.

The efforts to reduce the dependence on U.S. technology are constantly fueled with new developments endorsed by the Chinese government. After the Jhaoxin CPUs and the Jingjia Micro GPUs, China is now preparing to enter the memory market with the ChangXin DRAM modules that are expected to be available in 2020.

Yet more of the Cascade Lake-X product stack has appeared on Geekbench, with someone now testing the successor to the Core i9-9920X. The processor in question looks to be an engineering sample based on the clock speeds that Geekbench reports, but the 12 core and 24 thread CPU can already match the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and outscore the Threadripper 2920X by up to 22% in multicore workloads. Albeit, the Core i9-10920X will probably cost up to 3x the price of comparable AMD chips.

Gears of Wars 5 running in 8K is too much even for the most expensive gaming GPUs out there. While 4K @60 fps is starting to look "doable" these days, running Gears 5 in 8K at 30 fps is already an impossible task for GPUs like the Titan RTX. 8K displays are not exactly mainstream either, so we might see GPUs properly handling the monstrous resolutions in 2-3 years.

Navi 14 may be arriving earlier than we expected and in the form of pre-built desktops, at least according to new HP machines. The upcoming graphics chip looks set to be marketed as the Radeon RX 5300 series, which would suggest that Navi 12 will be the RX 5500 series. You will be able to get your hands on the RX 5300 XT from October 8, although perhaps initially only in pre-built form.

AMD has officially stated that the Ryzen 9 3950X desktop processor and the next generation of Ryzen Threadripper chips will be launched in November. Although some will be disappointed about the delay of the 16-core Matisse CPU, others will be excited about the confirmation of the HEDT chips, which start with 24-core SKUs.

We have already seen the 10 core Core i9-10900X achieving a Geekbench multi-core score close to 40,000 points, and now the Core i9-10980XE is flexing its muscles. The 18 core Cascade Lake-X processor breezes past all before it, except for upcoming Zen 2 Ryzen Threadripper 3000 chips and? Well, its predecessor too.

Puro Sound Labs describes itself as "the world's leading manufacturer of premium, safe-listening headphones". It has developed the PuroGamer, a "studio-grade" headset with 50-millimeter (mm) graphene drivers for better audio at lower volumes. This product also has a noise-canceling, detachable boom mic.

Curve Digital & Kuju have announced that they are bringing a title based on the Netflix show Narcos to PCs and consoles. It will allow a user to play either for the Cartel in question or against it a DEA agent. This original content will be set in the 1980s El Patron era, and is available as a digital download from now.

Chinese retailer JD.com has jumped the gun and listed the Ryzen 5 3500X on its website before AMD has even formally announced it. The listing confirms the tip that prolific leaker @TUM_APISAK posted last month, with AMD marketing material pitting its upcoming Zen 2 processor against the Intel Core i5-9400F. The listing reports that the Ryzen 5 3500X will clock between 3.6 and 4.1 GHz, but that its 6 cores will not support Simultaneous multithreading (SMT).

We all need a little fun. With Borderlands 3, Gearbox seamlessly carries the tradition of the loot shooter series forward: Brightly colored comic graphics and exuberant action are supposed to create a popcorn mood for players. In our benchmark test, we clarify whether the technology generates enthusiasm too.

This is not the fastest quantum computer to date, as Google already has a 72-qubit computer and is working on even better ones, but IBM intends to make the new 53-qubit model the fastest commercially available prototype this October. This way, more clients can access the quantum processing power and provide solutions to problems that cannot be solved via traditional computing methods.

The upcoming GTX 1650 Ti is supposed to give AMD's Radeon RX 5600 a run for the money, replacing the older GTX 1050 Ti. Chinese insiders claim that the GTX 1650 Ti is scheduled for a late-October release, with an MSRP close to US$155, which would most likely translate to a US$185 pricing in the West.

Intel is lining up its next-generation High-End Desktop (HEDT) processors, which it will still base on its 14 nm FinFET process. A new Threadripper 3000 Geekbench listing demonstrates how far Intel is behind AMD in the HEDT space though, with a 32 core SKU exceeding 65,000 points again in multicore work. The Zen 2-based series looks set to be compatible with Socket TR4 and the X570 chipset too.

Another 10 core Cascade Lake-X processor has appeared on Geekbench, with the numbering scheme of Intel's next High-End Desktop (HEDT) series now seemingly having been confirmed. The upcoming processor even gets within 10% of the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X in multicore workloads and scores 10% more than the Threadripper 2950X too. However, Cascade Lake-X does not seem to offer much competition with the Zen 2-based Threadripper CPUs that are on the horizon too.