Intel’s Discrete GPU Era Begins: Intel Launches Iris Xe MAX For Entry-Level Laptops

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Today may be Halloween, but what Intel is up to is no trick. Almost a year after showing off their alpha silicon, Intel’s first discrete GPU in over two decades has been released and is now shipping in OEM laptops. The first of several planned products using the DG1 GPU, Intel’s initial outing in their new era of discrete graphics is in the laptop space, where today they are launching their Iris Xe MAX graphics solution. Designed to complement Intel’s Xe-LP integrated graphics in their new Tiger Lake CPUs, Xe MAX will be showing up in thin-and-light laptops as an upgraded graphics option, and with a focus on mobile creation.

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Intel’s Discrete GPU Era Begins: Intel Launches Iris Xe MAX For Entry-Level Laptops

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Today may be Halloween, but what Intel is up to is no trick. Almost a year after showing off their alpha silicon, Intel’s first discrete GPU in over two decades has been released and is now shipping in OEM laptops. The first of several planned products using the DG1 GPU, Intel’s initial outing in their new era of discrete graphics is in the laptop space, where today they are launching their Iris Xe MAX graphics solution. Designed to complement Intel’s Xe-LP integrated graphics in their new Tiger Lake CPUs, Xe MAX will be showing up in thin-and-light laptops as an upgraded graphics option, and with a focus on mobile creation.

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ASUS ROG Strix B550-XE Gaming WiFi Preview

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With the next generation of Ryzen CPUs on the horizon it's the perfect time to take a look at the kind of motherboard that would be perfect for your new CPU.

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Best Intel Motherboards: October 2020

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Looking ahead into October, Intel not only announced its financial results for Q3 2020, but it also revealed that it plans to release its latest Rocket Lake CPUs with PCIe 4.0 sometime in Q1 2021. Along with Rocket Lake, there will be a wave of new 500-series LGA1200 motherboards to accompany it, but until then, Z490 is its current flagship chipset and will be for months to come. It's time to take a look at our Intel-based motherboard selections for October 2020.

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Intel’s 11th Gen Core Rocket Lake Detailed: Ice Lake Core with Xe Graphics

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During a time of increased competitor activity, Intel has decided to disclose some of the high level details surrounding its next generation consumer processor, known as Rocket Lake or Intel’s 11^th Gen Core. The new processor family is due in the market in the first quarter of 2021, and is expected to share a socket and motherboard compatibility with the current 10^th Gen Comet Lake processors, providing an upgrade path even for those with a Core i9-10900K, Intel’s highest performing desktop processor to date. New 500-series motherboards are also expected to be available.

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This CPU Cooler is SO GOOD – Arctic Freezer 50 Review

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The Arctic Freezer 50 claims to be the best CPU air cooler released in 2020 and its hard to find any fault with that claim from a performance standpoint

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AMD Reports Q3 2020 Earnings: Making Money and Settings Records Yet Again

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As part of this morning’s announcement from AMD that the company would be buying FPGA maker Xilinx for $35 billion in stock, the company also released its Q3 earnings report alongside the buyout news. An atypical earnings release to say the least, an early-morning release allowed AMD investors and others to get a look at the very latest in AMD’s financials while also digesting the decision to use the company’s sizable market capitalization to buy another company – and ultimately to help AMD justify why they’re in such a good position now to make the transaction. Coming on the heels of a record Q2 for the company, AMD closed out the third quarter of the year setting revenue records once again all the while trebling its profits.

For the third quarter of 2020, AMD reported $2.8B in revenue, a 56% jump over the same quarter a year ago. As a result, AMD has once again set new revenue records for the company, posting both their best Q3 ever, and their best single quarter period. Driving this was further growth in both of AMD’s major segments, with everything from consumer CPU sales to EPYC and semi-custom sales reported as being on the rise.

AMD Q3 2020 Financial Results (GAAP)
	Q3'2020	Q3'2019	Q2'2020
Revenue	$2.8B	$1.8B	$1.93B
Gross Margin	44%	43%	44%
Operating Income	$449M	$186M	$173M
Net Income	$390M	$120M	$157M
Earnings Per Share	$0.32	$0.11	$0.13

Most eye-popping, perhaps, has been AMD’s net income, which more than trebled over the year-ago quarter. For Q3’20, AMD booked $390M in GAAP net income, a 225% increase that dwarfs the $120M they took home at this point last year. Even on a quarterly basis AMD’s revenues and profits were up significantly across the board, with AMD again more than doubling its net income versus Q2. In fact the only aspect of AMD’s financials not showing significant growth at the moment is AMD’s gross margin, which at 44% is only up 1% over last year. According to the company, GM growth is being limited by relatively low margin semi-custom sales, with the PS5/XSX ramp-up counterbalancing the increase in CPU sales.

Breaking down the numbers by segment, AMD’s Computing and Graphics segment enjoyed a strong quarter based in large part on an increase in Ryzen processor sales. Overall the segment booked $1.67B in revenue, which is up 31% over the year-ago quarter. Carrying the segment were sizable increases in both AMD’s desktop and notebook CPU shipments, with AMD reporting double-digit growth in both and setting a new record for notebook processor shipments. AMD’s graphics division was the odd man out, however; the run-up to the RX 6000 series means that graphics revenue was down versus Q3’19.

AMD Q3 2020 Computing and Graphics
	Q3'2020	Q3'2019	Q2'2020
Revenue	$1667M	$1276M	$1367M
Operating Income	$384M	$179M	$200M

As for product average selling prices (ASPs), AMD is reporting that both client processor and graphics ASPs have taken a hit on a yearly basis. Graphics ASPs were down due to AMD’s current-generation RX 5000 products approaching the end of their lifecycle, while CPU ASPs declined due to higher sales of mobile chips, which tend to carry lower prices. Both of these should change for AMD in the next quarter, as the launch of Zen 3 and the Radeon RX 6000 series will put a fresh round of products on the market that can fetch higher prices.

Meanwhile, AMD’s Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom segment saw another greater quarter with Q3, with shipments of everything from EPYC processors to console SoCs on the rise. With the former, AMD has continued to grow its market share in the server space, and on the company’s earnings call CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that server sales have more than doubled over Q3’19, citing improved cloud and enterprise adoption. Meanwhile the ramp-up for the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X has pushed semi-custom sales higher as well, and that’s expected to grow even more in Q4.

AMD Q3 2020 Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom
	Q3'2020	Q3'2019	Q2'2020
Revenue	$1134M	$525M	$565M
Operating Income	$141M	$61M	$33M

And, like the consumer side of AMD’s business, the enterprise side is about to benefit as well from the launch of next-generation products. AMD has confirmed that their Zen 3 architecture-based EPYC “Milan” processors will begin shipping this quarter as previously promised, with the initial chips going out to cloud and “select HPC” customers. Meanwhile general OEM availability will follow in the first quarter of 2021.

Overall, AMD has a lot to be happy about for Q3, and even more to look forward to in Q4. With AMD posting record revenue and their traditionally strongest quarter still to come, the company is expecting an even better Q4. The combination of Zen 3 CPUs for desktops and servers, along with new Radeon hardware will mean that AMD has momentum and new products on their side. All of which comes at a critical time for the industry, as AMD seeks to use its technology advantages to carve a larger piece of the x86 processor market from an uncharacteristically dazed Intel.

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NVIDIA 3070 Founders Edition Review

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NVIDIA has released its newest graphics card, the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Founders Edition. Based on the current 3000 series card architecture we get a graphics card that is lower in price and lower in performance. With a suggested retail price of $499.00 USD, this makes the 3070 FE very affordable for almost everyone. But the biggest question is can it handle the workload or our demanding games we like to play. Can we crank up the graphics to the max and not have to worry about slow down? Make sure you watch the video for more insight into the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Founders Edition.

 

The NVIDIA 3070 FE has all the same visual features that the 3080 and 3090 Founders Edition graphics card have. The new bold style is quite different than what we have seen in the past. With a more refined and sleeker look, it kind of gives you the feeling that you are looking at a luxury vehicle.

The top of the 3070 FE is just as sleek with a solid back cover over two-thirds of the card. The remainder of the card is taken up by a pass-thru cooling fan.

A closer look does show us that the air pass through the card and a good portion of the cooling heat pipes and fins. The air that does exit the card here will be pushed up towards the top of a PC case and should be helped along with the normal fans mounted at the top. Thus this will help minimize any warm air that could be sucked into an air cooler. If you are water cooling your CPU you have nothing to really worry about.

 

This the other side of the pass-through fan that is located at the right side of the 3070 FE

The fan located on the left side of the card is identical to the other one, but this cooling fan does the normal job of pushing the air out through the card and exit out the rear where the video connections are located. The RTX 3070 flow-through system is up to 16dBA quieter and has a 44% higher thermal performance than the RTX 2070 Founders Edition.

 

 

Like the 3080 and 3090 FE card, the 3070 Founders Edition also uses the new 12 pin connector to power the card. But unlike the larger FE cards, this unit only requires 220 watts of power which not that much more than a 2070 but way less than the power-hungry 3090. We can also see some cooling vents, which are located in the middle of the card along with the 12 pin power connector

 

Connections to the NVIDIA 3070 FE is pretty normal with a single HDMI and three display ports. But the HDMI 2.1 — GeForce RTX 3070 GPUs (and all of the 3000 series cards) are the first available to feature HDMI 2.1 support with support for 4K@120Hz (4K120). HDMI 2.1 increases total bandwidth over HDMI 2.0b from 18Gigabits/sec to 48 and adds support for high-dynamic-range (HDR) supporting brighter images with higher contrast and more vibrant colors with better shadows and highlights.

 

The NVIDIA Ampere architecture Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) is the building block of the GPU, and it’s full of different Cores and Units and memory. One of the big changes in the NVIDIA Ampere architecture SM is with a 32-bit floating-point (FP32) throughput. NVIDIA designed a new datapath for FP32 and INT32 operations, which results in all four partitions combined executing 128 FP32 operations per clock. Does this help gaming? Yes. Graphics and compute operations and algorithms rely on FP32 executions, and so do modern shader workloads. Ray tracing denoising shaders benefit from FP32 speedups, too. The heavier the ray tracing rendering workload, the bigger the performance gains relative to the previous generation.

 

Let’s look at the numbers: RTX 3070 has 5888 CUDA cores—over twice the CUDA cores that the RTX 2070 has. It delivers 20.3 TFLOPs of shader performance plus dedicated RT Cores with the equivalent 39.7 TFLOPs of performance, for a total of 60 effective TFLOPs of performance while ray tracing.

 

 

GPU	GeForce RTX 2070 (Founders Edition)	GeForce RTX 3070 (Founders Edition)
SMs	36	46
CUDA Cores	2304	5888
Tensor Cores	288 (2nd Generation)	184 (3rd Generation)
RT Cores	36 (1st Generation)	46 (2nd Generation)
Texture Units	144	184
ROPs	64	96
GPU Boost Clock	1710 MHz	1725 MHz
Memory Clock	7000 MHz	7000 MHz
Total Video Memory	8192 MB GDDR6	8192 MB GDDR6
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/s	448 GB/s
TGP	185 Watts	220 Watts

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AMD in $35 Billion All-Stock Acquisition of Xilinx

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After a couple of weeks of rumor, as well as a couple of years of hearsay, AMD has gone feet first into a full acquisition of FPGA manufacturer Xilinx. The deal involves an all-stock transaction, leveraging AMD’s sizeable share price in order to enable an equivalent $143 per Xilinx share – current AMD stockholders will still own 74% of the combined company, while Xilinx stockholders will own 26%. The combined $135 billion entity will total 13000 engineers, and expand AMD’s total addressable market to $110. It is believed that the key reasons for the acquisition lie in Xilinx’s adaptive computing solutions for the data center market.

 

This is breaking news. Will be updated.
Carousel Image is of AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su and Xilinx CEO Victor Peng

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AMD vs Intel CPUs for Game Loading

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Following up to last week's load time battle, instead of comparing storage with vastly different performance specs, today we're going to see how CPUs can make a difference in game loading times.





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Lenovo's Legion Slim 7 laptop weighs in at just 4 pounds, powered by Ryzen 9 4900H

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When Lenovo refreshed its Legion gaming laptop line this year, one of the notable changes was the addition of Ryzen 4000 mobile processors as an alternative to Intel's 10th-gen Comet Lake-H CPUs. The company is now introducing a new member into the family in the form of the Legion Slim...





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AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X is a ripper, notches top spot in PassMark single thread CPU test

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In PassMark’s CPU Mark test measuring single thread performance, the Ryzen 5 5600X scored a chart-topping 3,495 points. The next highest score on the list belongs to the Intel Core i9-10900K (a $550 CPU) at 3,175. Ouch.





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Quad GeForce RTX 3090 tested on a single PC running workstation benchmarks

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Here at Puget Systems, our customers range from those needing relatively modest workstations, all the way up to those that need the most powerful system possible. These extreme workstations used to be dual or quad CPU systems, but recently, the shift has been to quad GPU setups. Having this much...





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Intel: DG1 GPU Now Shipping, Xe-HPG DG2 GPU In Labs

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Alongside today’s profitable-but-uneasy earnings report from Intel, the company’s earnings presentation also offered a short update on the status of their discrete GPUs. As of today, Intel’s DG1 GPU is now shipping. Meanwhile the company announced their next GPU, appropriately named DG2, which is based on their upcoming Xe-HPG architecture. This GPU is now back from the fab and is in Intel’s lab, and is now far enough along to have been powered on.

First and foremost we have DG1, or as it’s better known by its commercial product name, Iris Xe Max. Intel’s first discrete GPU in over two decades, the company has since the beginning of this year been touting it as a companion to their Tiger Lake CPUs, pitching it as an upgraded graphics option for thin & light notebooks, and a successor of sorts to Intel’s GT3e and GT4e iGPU configurations from past generations. Until recently, we weren’t quite sure when it would show up in commercial products, but recent OEM notebook reveals along with Intel’s earnings announcement are now confirming that the GPU is shipping to OEMs. According to Intel, DG1-equipped notebooks are expected later in Q4. In the meantime, there are still scant few details on DG1 itself, such as expected performance and power consumption; so hopefully Intel will be getting ahead of its OEM partners on this one to set some expectations.

Meanwhile, today’s notes also announce for the very first time the next discrete GPU to come out of Intel, DG2. While obviously still some time off, Intel has completed tape-out and fabbing of the initial alpha silicon, with the company reporting that they’ve powered-on the GPU in their labs.

Somewhat surprisingly, CEO Bob Swan has also confirmed that this isn’t just a DG1 successor, but instead is a higher performing GPU based on the company’s forthcoming Xe-HPG(aming) architecture. First revealed this summer, Xe-HPG is Intel’s enthusiast/gamer-focused architecture, incorporating marquee features found in similar dGPUs like ray tracing. It’s also being manufactured completely external of Intel; while the company hasn’t said which fab and process node is being used, it’s none of Intel’s nodes. So this is the first major piece of external fabbed silicon that we know of to be up and running at Intel.

But like all teasers/financial disclosures, Intel isn’t saying too much more at this time. Nothing new was revealed about the Xe-HPG architecture, and Intel hasn’t clarified whether DG2 is a big, flagship-grade chip, or a more modest, high-volume part. For now, the company is simply saying that DG2 will “take our discrete graphics capability up the stack into the enthusiast segment.”

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Intel Reports Q3 2020 Earnings: Still Very Profitable, But Challenging Times Ahead

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Once again kicking off our earnings season coverage for the tech industry is Intel, who reported their Q3 2020 financial results this afternoon. The traditional leader of the pack in more than one way, Intel has been under more intense scrutiny as of late, particularly due to their previously disclosed delay in their 7nm manufacturing schedule. None the less, Intel has been posting record revenues and profits in recent quarters – even with a global pandemic going on – which has been keeping Intel in good shape. It’s only now, with Q3 behind them, that Intel is starting to feel the pinch of market shifts and technical debt – and even then the company is still well into the black.

For the third quarter of 2020, Intel reported $18.3B in revenue. A drop of $0.9B over the year-ago quarter. As previously mentioned, Intel has been setting a string of record revenues in previous quarters, but the boom is coming to an end as margins and revenues are slipping. Those declines are also having the expected knock-on effect to Intel’s profitability, with the company reporting $4.3B in net income, a 29% drop versus Q3’19.

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AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X CPU reportedly hits 5 GHz in benchmarks

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AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed the Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors based on the Zen 3 architecture earlier this month. At least on paper, these come with a lot of improvements such as a unified L3 cache, 19 percent average throughput improvement in terms of instructions per clock over Zen...





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