Weekly News Roundup #4
Monday
Intel challenges AMD to "beat us in real world gaming"
https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/131558-intel-challenges-amd-beat-us-real-world-gaming/
This will probably be a double hitter with tomorrows AMD event. Intel is going into E3 saying that it is the best at “Gaming” and I will not deny this as of last gen, However what the argument for AMD was not best performance it is the price per performance. And you have to pay a big premium for the extra 50% performance in some games most games are between 20-30%. That was a hard sell last generation and with rumours going around that lead looks to be shrinking allot. Which means a 50% premium for a possible <10% performance boost will be an absolutely stupid decision. Here is the grain of salt time, now don't judge the new processors by AMD’s slides tonight wait for the testing by reviewers like Gamers-Nexus, Linus and Jayztwocents. And hopefully AMD won't do an Intel and have a testing house release some flawed benchmarks before everyone else.
Tuesday
AMD Next Horizon E3 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxPBXNuX6Xs
Here we are again, More AMD news. This event had more specifics regarding the CPU’s announced 2 weeks ago at Computex with some charts showing performance numbers against their competitor SKU’s. Now while we have to take these numbers at face value for now as there will not be any 3rd party testing till the 7th of July there was a surprise. AMD’s new CPUs was treading equally if not better than their Intel competition, This was also with the spector, meltdown and zombieland patches not applied to the intel CPUs. This could mean when there is 3rd party testing done there might have jumped intel entirely, which would mean the price premium that intel is commanding right now becomes completely worthless. But as i have said we will have to wait for the actual results now.
AMD also released the details of their now RDNA cards the RX5700 and the RX5700XT. Quite a few people were hoping for “Navi” to be a RX2080TI killer, For now at least AMD is focusing on the Mid Tier with the XT costing $449. We may see a higher tier launching later but for now this is what we have, and looking at the preliminary numbers it's not a bad release judging by the AMD numbers with both cards out-performing their nvidia counterparts (RTX2060, RTX2070). Again we will have to wait for 3rd party testing of these cards in september, I for one will probably be swapping out the RX580 in my TVPC for one of these as the performance and price looks solid.
Lastly AMD has now formally announced their 16c32t monster desktop CPU, This can apparently outperform the 9900k in single thread performance and will most definitely out do it in multi core (it has 8 more cores it's a no brainer). Now while i could see intel trying to use 14nm and cram another 2 cored into their desktop line up I don't think they have the space or the thermal headroom, So i don't see an intel response to this coming until the 11th generation. Which is fine by me as AMD has been on the back of this race for a while and they deserve a win. Intel also deserves this kick in the pants after keeping the worlds desktops on 4c for so long. If the performance holds up in September I will be looking to make this a part of my main PC.
Wednesday
Enemy of the Matebook: Huawei shuts up laptop shop. When is it back? Depends on America's Entity List
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/12/huawei_matebook/
Another disappointment in the Huawei saga. Now while i have never used their Matebooks I can recognise the value of them. The company can no longer produce this product because 2 critical parts the CPU and OS are both produced by american entities that cannot trade with Huawei because of the list they were put on. I will continue to harp on the fact that we have still seen no evidence of spying on behalf of the chinease government by Hwawei. This is a market segment that they can not compete in anymore (X86/64 Windows) due to the only providers being located in america, This shows that there needs to be some separation in some of this technology. Such as the underlying X86/64 architecture becoming open source or licensed so that other manufacturers can enter the ring, Right now both are american companies and they have shown no intention of licencing or opening the instruction sets out for others to use.
Thursday
TSMC becomes first to announce R&D for 2nm node
https://hexus.net/business/news/components/131687-tsmc-becomes-first-announce-rd-2nm-node/
As we approach of the first mass 7nm chip launch we now see the reveal of research into 2nm. This is where we are starting to get unfeasibly small, Soon we may get to a point where we cannot shrink our transistors any more using silicon as the main semiconductor. Im hoping we don't get an industry wide Node lull like the one intel has been suffering form with 14nm.
Friday
EXCLUSIVE: AMD Is Working On A Monster 64-Core Threadripper, Landing As Early As Q4 2019
With the die shrink ryzen 3 has brought this was possible, But with the lack of news from AMD and the release of 16 cores on Ryzen desktop most thought Threadripper was on its way out. I like the idea of stupid amounts of cores being made available however its not really practical for 99% of users. But for those with ideas and horsepower needed this is amazing news as intel currently tops out at 18 cores in their HEDT. As well as the eye watering core and thread count there price is also going to be as eye watering for the average user, But at $46 per core (based on rumor price) this is almost half the cost you pay per core for the 9980XE which puts this behemoth at a great value.