Bitspower Quietly Launches its First Ever Air CPU Cooler, The Phantom

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More known for its custom water cooling components, Bitspower has released its first-ever air-based CPU cooler, the Phantom. Designed for the entry-level market, the Phantom includes a single 120 mm RGB enabled cooling fan and supports Intel's latest LGA1700 desktop socket and AMD's AM4 socket.

With a height of 158 mm, the Phantom is compatible with most desktop cases. It is constructed of aluminum, with four copper heat pipes attaching the large aluminum fin stack to the cold plate. To aid in heat dissipation, it uses a single 120 mm cooling fan which includes RGB for users looking to add a bit of flair to their system. The cooling fan included has a maximum speed of 1800 RPM, which Bitspower claims the fan has an airflow rating of 80 CFM, and it operates with a maximum volume of 34 dBA.

The Bitspower Phantom CPU Cooler is installed onto a mini-ITX motherboard.

Despite the official listing on the Bitspower website not providing much information on specification and capability, I reached out to Bitspower CEO Vincent Yu and confirmed what the webpage leaves out. This includes the official dimensions of the Bitspower Phantom CPU cooler, which has a relatively small footprint of 116 x 51 x 158 mn. Vincent Yu also confirmed that the Bitspower Phantom could dissipate heat from most desktop processors, with a rated TDP of 200 W. 

The Bitspower Phantom air cooler is available directly from its website for 1450 TWD. Still, Bitspower has confirmed to me that it will be available in other regions soon with an expected MSRP of $55.

Gallery: Bitspower Quietly Launches The Phantom CPU Air Cooler

Source: Bitspower

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Intel CPUs are clawing back sales as AMD seemingly stalls

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Intel is making serious headway in the desktop CPU market, going by some fresh evidence from two separate sources.

As VideoCardz highlights, these are stats pertaining to buyers of standalone desktop CPUs in Japan, and also the breakdown of processor share obtained from PassMark (the popular benchmarking software).

Let’s start with PassMark, which compiles stats based on the systems using its benchmarking tools, and in the CPU category, has found that in recent times, Intel has been surging upwards.

To be precise, in Q3 and Q4 of last year, Intel’s share of CPUs has increased from around 50% to almost 60%, a pretty big swing in Team Blue’s favor for the second half of 2021, as PassMark pointed out on Twitter.

Note that those stats are for all desktop PCs, of course, whereas the second batch of figures is for DIY sales only (standalone CPUs, not prebuilt machines), and comes from Japan.

Going by the analysis of the Japanese market as carried out by BCNR, Intel desktop processor sales have been on the rise since mid-2021 (again), with sales of Core i5 CPUs booming in particular, and also Core i7 models up fairly strongly, with a marked decline in AMD’s sales powerhouse which is Ryzen 5 chips.

Earlier in 2020, Ryzen 5 sales in Japan crested over 40% market share (briefly), but have since sunk to just 12.6% of the market in January 2022, with Core i5 processors from Intel surging to 35.7% in the same month (and Core i7 hitting 25%).

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Analysis: Is AMD set to stagnate further near-term, losing more share to Intel?

Both these sets of figures show that from mid-2021 – or actually, slightly earlier than that in Japan – Intel has witnessed a marked increase in CPU market share. Of course, even two separate sources are hardly representative of the whole desktop processor market (remember, the Japan stats apply to standalone or DIY sales only), but we have seen Intel making progress elsewhere.

For example, German retailer MindFactory showed Intel hitting a 30% CPU share in November 2021, the highest level seen all year (previously, Team Blue had only managed to secure a 25% share at best for CPU sales from this retail outlet). Alder Lake certainly made a difference in those figures, and is no doubt at least part of the reason for the gains seen in the two reports we talked about above – the new hybrid tech-toting processors have been well-received on the whole.

AMD may also have been slipping due to its own issues with supply and production of processors, and the lack of any fresh Ryzen blood for a good long time now. All we’ve had is a reveal of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D as a stopgap chip, and rumor has it that even this single processor could be very thin on the ground when it launches (we’re not even sure when that’ll be, either).

The danger for AMD is that it just stagnates and Intel carves even further into its desktop CPU territory. And to top all this off, there’s the threat of Intel getting next-gen Raptor Lake chips out in good time later this year – maybe in September, and potentially before AMD’s Zen 4 CPUs arrive, which would be even more damaging for Team Red’s sales. No wonder some other speculation holds that AMD is really trying to ramp up the launch schedule for Zen 4.

• Check out the best PC components for your rig

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Intel Launches Alder Lake U and P Series Processors: Ultraportable Laptops Coming In March

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Following the January launch of Intel’s first Alder Lake-based 12^th Gen Core mobile processors, the Alder Lake-H family, Intel this morning is following that up with the formal launch of the rest of their mobile product stack. Designed to fill out the lower-power portion of Intel’s product stack for smaller thin and light laptops, today the company is launching the 28 watt Alder Lake-P series processors, as well as the 15 watt and 9 watt Alder Lake-U series processors. Laptops based on both processor sub-families are set to become available in March, where they will be competing against rival AMD’s recently launched Ryzen 6000 Mobile series.

Technically, today’s announcement from Intel is largely a redux in terms of information. The company announced the Alder Lake P and U series alongside the H series chips back at CES, though in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion, as the bulk of Intel’s efforts were focused around the more imminent H series. But now that the H series launch has passed and the first U/P series laptops are about to hit the market, Intel is giving its lower power processors their moment in the sun.

Along with reiterating on the specifications of the U/P series processors, including clockspeeds, core counts, and integrated GPU configurations, today’s announcement also offers some new concrete details on the overall platform. In particular, we now have confirmation of what I/O options are included for the various low-power chip configurations, as well as the number of USB ports and PCIe lanes available. As well, Intel is also offering a full update on its Evo design program, outlining the updated requirements for Alder Lake Evo laptops.

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Intel’s 13th-gen then 14th-gen CPUs could launch at a pace that’ll worry AMD

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Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop CPUs could launch in just over six months’ time, and rumor has it that these chips will provide a beefy performance boost. What’s more, next-gen Meteor Lake could arrive hot on the 13th-generation’s heels to put more pressure on AMD’s Ryzen processors.

Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID) has a new video out on YouTube which, among other topics, addresses Raptor Lake and its rumored launch date, as well as the kind of performance boost we can expect from the next-gen CPUs.

The leaker believes we’ll witness the arrival of Raptor Lake processors late in Q3 2022, which presumably means September. Interestingly, this echoes a previous leak on Twitter which also pointed to a third quarter debut for Intel’s 13th-gen chips.

Perhaps even more interesting is the revelation that MLID believes Meteor Lake will land less than a year after Raptor Lake, so that could mean August 2023 (maybe even slightly earlier).

Bear in mind that this is the prediction for Raptor Lake desktop models, with mobile CPUs debuting in laptops in the fourth quarter.

MLID claims that with Raptor Lake, we’re looking at an 8% to 15% single-thread performance uplift compared to Alder Lake, which is a laudable boost, and more optimistic sounding than Intel’s recent (much vaguer) claim of ‘up to’ a double digit boost.

In multi-threaded workloads, we can supposedly expect a bigger 30% to 40% surge in performance.

On the whole, this sounds pretty impressive for what is just a simple refresh of Alder Lake, with no big changes to the formula. We already know that Intel is planning to boost efficiency cores with the flagship Raptor Lake chip, and in fact double them up to 16, but performance cores will stick with a configuration of 8.

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Analysis: AMD set to come under serious pressure?

As we’ve recently seen, the rumor mill believes that AMD has stepped up its intentions with the incoming next-gen Zen 4 launch in an effort to get these Ryzen processors out the door in Q3. As we theorized earlier this month, this could be a reaction to the news that Raptor Lake might come in Q3 (which was floated in a previous rumor), and that Team Red may be aiming to steal Intel’s thunder.

However, if it’s true that Raptor Lake is due in September, and Meteor Lake could follow in the summer of 2023 – shifting to 7nm, and providing nearly as good a boost as Raptor Lake, according to MLID, even if the 14th-gen will purportedly focus more on mobile CPUs – then AMD will seriously have its work cut out to respond to that kind of pace of development.

While Ryzen has ruled the desktop CPU roost in recent times, Alder Lake has swung some momentum back Intel’s way since it launched, and it looks like Team Blue really doesn’t want to let up the pressure.

• Check out the best PC components for your rig

Via VideoCardz

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From There to Here, and Beyond

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I’ll be the first to admit, I had no history with AnandTech before I joined. It was by sheer chance, meeting one of the writers at an overclocking event, that led me to first become a reader, then a writer, to what has become my career in journalism. If you’re new to AnandTech then welcome! It’s been my home for over a decade, where we’ve always had the goal of pushing the boundaries for all things technical and engineering-related.  For all the old hands - I know many of you work at the companies we report on around the industry, and we’ve been forever glad for your continued support and interactions. Long may it continue, especially in an industry that is slowly consolidating around a few key players, both in technical and publishing – for as long as the audience demands it, AnandTech will aim to provide.

Personally, I was always into computers, but it was overclocking that got me into hardware. Not just getting more frames in my games, but actual competitive overclocking, trying to get the best scores in the world. People liken it to the Formula 1 or car tuning, when in reality it feels like drag racing – 8 hours of preparation for a 10 seconds quarter mile. Studying chemistry at the time, on the surface there seemed to be not much more than a little overlap, except for a desire to learn more about what I was doing, the why, and how it all worked. That oblivious-yet-determined manner led to Rajinder Gill, senior motherboard editor at the time, suggesting that Anand bring me on as a freelancer back in 2010. Initially with news, I transitioned into Rajinder’s role rather quickly after he left, and starting from the Sandy Bridge launch in early 2011, I spent the next five years reviewing motherboards at AnandTech as my day job after graduating my PhD. I still look back on my first proper motherboard review, the ASRock P67 Extreme4, with rose-tinted spectacles. It was a great board for the time, and I still have it in my collection.

That’s what got me to AnandTech, and after 11 years I feel the need to change, so I have decided to take up a new position in the industry. When Anand left in 2014, after 18 years at the helm, I was still quite green in my role and didn’t really take his words to heart at the time. Looking back at them today, I see a lot of parallels, even though I’ve never sat in that senior role. Since Anand left, I was promoted to Senior CPU Editor, and Ryan Smith has taken the Editor-in-Chief role with grace and poise – he’s consistently talked me down from a ledge when this industry has piled on, and all I’ve wanted to do is lash out! After Anand left, it was Ryan who brought me on as a full-time employee, and helped navigate AnandTech through two acquisitions, to where the brand currently sits today with Future. Despite being (roughly) the same age, Ryan has been a mentor and a director for a lot of the content I’ve written, for which I’m very thankful. I hope he knows how much it has meant over the years.

I’ve really enjoyed working at AnandTech. I love getting my teeth into the latest technical details, and getting advance briefings from the researchers never ceases to be a great pleasure of mine. It doesn’t matter whether that’s for an upcoming product, attending technical IEEE conferences, or for Hot Chips talk, or seeing inside the secret R&D room at Computex. In a lot of ways, my academic experience has overlapped with my coverage that I would never have predicted - we're on the cusp of finding out how we need More Than Moore's Law in the modern era. My travel in 2019 topped 200,000 miles, which doesn’t really bother me in the slightest, as I’ve been able to meet and discuss with key industry movers and shakers. A crowning moment was talking AMD into making its 64-core Threadripper into a better price the evening before the announcement. Or biting one of Intel’s 10nm wafers. Being able to travel around and visit companies has shown me just how many amazing people and stories there are in our industry, and it’s a shame there aren’t enough hours in the day to focus on them all, as I know a lot of you would want to hear about them. I hope I've also been able to bring a little bit of humor and fun to my content too.

If there’s one thing that has remained through all that time, it’s the dedication of AnandTech’s writers to provide as many detailed technical write-ups as we can. Over the years I’ve worked with some incredible talent, especially Andrei, and I’ve managed individuals that I’ve seen improve leaps and bounds, especially Gavin who now leads our motherboard coverage. Big shoutouts go to the rest of the team over the years: Ryan, Brett, Ganesh, Billy, Kristian, Tracy, Anton, Joe, Matt, Matt, Josh, Nate, Rajinder, Gary, Virginia, and Howard. You’ve all meant a lot to me in so many different ways. Then there’s also the audience, who have always provided copious feedback, either here, on social media, or through our email conversations. Please don’t stop giving all of us constructive criticism on how to do our jobs better, regardless of where we are or who we work for.

As for me, I’m finding new ventures: a mixture of behind-the-scenes and public-facing opportunities, as well as continued consulting, but still within this tech industry that we love to analyze. We're on the cusp of finding out how we need More Than Moore's Law in the modern era. I’ll still be that loud voice on Twitter, critiquing every financial disclosure and presentation, and if you’re interested in what I’m doing next, then I’m likely to announce my future roles over there or on LinkedIn in short course. While today is my final day at AnandTech, don't be surprised if my name pops up again here over the next week or two, as I’ve prepared some content in advance, including our AMD Rembrandt review and an interview with Raja Koduri. Stay tuned for those.

To all of the readers over the years, thank you so much for this opportunity. I couldn’t have done it without you. I hope that you’ll continue to give all the AnandTech writers the support you have shown me.

~Ian

 

 

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AnandTech Interview with Dr. Ann Kelleher: EVP and GM of Intel’s Technology Development

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It’s somewhat of an understatement to say that Intel’s future roadmap on its process node development is one of the most aggressive in the history of semiconductor design. The company is promising to pump out process nodes quicker than we’ve ever seen, despite having gone through a recent development struggle. Even with CEO Pat Gelsinger promising more than ever before, it’s up to Intel’s Technology Development (TD) team to pick up the ball and run with it in innovative ways to make that happen. In charge of it all is Dr. Ann Kelleher, EVP and GM of Intel’s Technology Development, and on the back of some strong announcements last year we reached out for the chance to interview her regarding Intel’s strategy.

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EVGA Unleashes Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition Motherboard: Alder Lake Goes Extreme

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Although these long, cold, and dark nights are starting to come to an end, EVGA has launched its darkest and most devilish desktop motherboard to date, the EVGA Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition. Designed in collaboration with legendary extreme overclocker Vince 'K|NGP|N' Lucido, the Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition boasts an impressive feature set including support for DDR5-6600 memory, three PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, eight SATA ports, and a large 21-phase power delivery to push Intel's Alder Lake to the extreme.

Built around the Intel's high-end Z690 chipset, the EVGA Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition isn't a conventional motherboard by any stretch of the imagination. It is based on the E-ATX form factor and has interesting design characteristics, including a transposed LGA1700 socket that allows extreme overclockers to mount LN2 pots more easily.

To make the board more robust, EVGA includes a large black metal backplate on the rear of the board to reinforce the PCB. This also includes right-angled connectors, including two 8-pin 12V ATX CPU power inputs and a 24-pin 12V ATX motherboard power input that intrudes into the PCB with a handy cutout designed to make cable management more effortless. It also includes an impressive accessories pack that features an EVGA flat test bench plate that we saw in our previous review of the EVGA Z590 Dark motherboard.

Looking at the feature set, the Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition includes two full-length PCIe 5.0 slots that can operate at x16 and x8/x8, with three PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots that sit in between the PCIe slots and underneath a large black finned 'Dark' branded heatsink. There are eight SATA ports for conventional storage and optical drives, six of which are from the chipset with RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 support, and two that come via an ASMedia ASM1061 SATA controller.

Even though the Z690 Dark has a solid feature set for enthusiasts, the real focus by EVGA with this model is on extreme overclocking. This includes a large 21-phase power delivery cooled by an active heatsink with two fans. It also has a 10-layer PCB throughout and contains an overclocker's toolkit in the top right-hand corner that consists of dual two-digit LED debuggers, a power button, a reset button, dip-switches to disable PCIe slots, and a slow mode switch. There's also a probe-lt header where users can monitor voltages in real-time from various components on the board, such as the CPU and power inputs.

The large black metal backplate on the rear of the EVGA Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition

In terms of connectivity, there's plenty on the rear panel, including one USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C, four USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, and two USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports. For networking, EVGA uses two Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE controllers and includes Intel's latest AX211 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi. Despite focusing on performance, EVGA has also gone with a premium audio solution, including a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec and an EVGA NU Audio SV3H615 headphone amplifier with five 3.5 mm audio jacks and a single S/PDIF optical output.

The EVGA Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition is currently available to purchase at the EVGA website for $830. However, at the time of writing, purchases are limited to one per household, and it seems as though it's only available to EVGA Elite Members at this time.

Gallery: EVGA Unleases Z690 Dark K|NGP|N Edition Motherboard, Alder Lake Goes Extreme

Source: EVGA

Related Reading

• The MSI MEG Z690 Unify (DDR5) Motherboard Review: The All-Black Option
• CES 2022: ASRock Unveils Z690 Aqua and Z690 Aqua OC Motherboards
• The Intel Z690 Motherboard Overview (DDR5): Over 50+ New Models
• The Intel Z690 Motherboard Overview (DDR4): Over 30+ New Models

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Intel Discloses Multi-Generation Xeon Scalable Roadmap: New E-Core Only Xeons in 2024

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It’s no secret that Intel’s enterprise processor platform has been stretched in recent generations. Compared to the competition, Intel is chasing its multi-die strategy while relying on a manufacturing platform that hasn’t offered the best in the market. That being said, Intel is quoting more shipments of its latest Xeon products in December than AMD shipped in all of 2021, and the company is launching the next generation Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable platform later in 2022. Beyond Sapphire Rapids has been somewhat under the hood, with minor leaks here and there, but today Intel is lifting the lid on that roadmap.

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Intel Goes Full XPU: Falcon Shores to Combine x86 and Xe For Supercomputers

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One of Intel’s more interesting initiatives over the past few years has been XPU – the idea of using a variety of compute architectures in order to best meet the execution needs of a single workload. In practice, this has led to Intel developing everything from CPUs and GPUs to more specialty hardware like FPGAs and VPUs. All of this hardware, in turn, is overseen at the software level by Intel’s oneAPI software stack, which is designed to abstract away many of the hardware differences to allow easier multi-architecture development.

Intel has always indicated that their XPU initiative was just a beginning, and as part of today’s annual investor meeting, Intel is finally disclosing the next step in the evolution of the XPU concept with a new project codenamed Falcon Shores. Aimed at the supercomputing/HPC market, Falcon Shores is a new processor architecture that will combine x86 CPU and Xe GPU hardware into a single Xeon socket chip. And when it is released in 2024, Intel is expecting it to offer better than 5x the performance-per-watt and 5x the memory capacity of their current platforms.

At a very high level, Falcon Shores appears to be an HPC-grade APU/SoC/XPU for servers. While Intel is offering only the barest of details at this time, the company is being upfront in that they are combining x86 CPU and Xe GPU hardware into a single chip, with an eye on leveraging the synergy between the two. And, given the mention of advanced packaging technologies, it’s a safe bet that Intel has something more complex than a monolithic die planned, be it separate CPU/GPU tiles, HBM memory (e.g. Sapphire Rapids), or something else entirely.

Diving a bit deeper, while integrating discrete components often pays benefits over the long run, the nature of the announcement strongly indicates that there’s more to Intel’s plan here than just integrating a CPU and GPU into a single chip (something they already do today in consumer parts). Rather, the presentation from Raja Koduri, Intel’s SVP and GM of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group, makes it clear that Intel is looking to go after the market for HPC users with absolutely massive datasets – the kind that can’t easily fit into the relatively limited memory capacity of a discrete GPU.

A singular chip, in comparison, would be much better prepared to work from large pools of DDR memory without having to (relatively) slowly shuffle data in and out of VRAM, which remains a drawback of discrete GPUs today. In those cases, even with high speed interfaces like NVLink and AMD’s Infinity Fabric, the latency and bandwidth penalties of going between the CPU and GPU remain quite high compared to the speed at which HPC-class processors can actually manipulate data, so making that link as short as physically possible can potentially offer performance and energy savings.

Meanwhile, Intel is also touting Falcon Shores as offering a flexible ratio between x86 and Xe cores. The devil is in the details here, but at a high level it sounds like the company is looking at offering multiple SKUs with different numbers of cores – likely enabled by varying the number of x86 and Xe titles.

From a hardware perspective then, Intel seems to be planning to throw most of their next-generation technologies at Falcon Shores, which is fitting for its supercomputing target market. The chip is slated to be built on an “angstrom era process”, which given the 2024 date is likely Intel’s 20A process. And along with future x86/Xe cores, will also incorporate what Intel is calling “extreme bandwidth shared memory”.

With all of that tech underpinning Falcon Shores, Intel is currently projecting a 5x increase over their current-generation products in several metrics. This includes a 5x increase in performance-per-watt, a 5x increase in compute density for a single (Xeon) socket, a 5x increase in memory capacity, and a 5x increase in memory bandwidth. In short, the company has high expectations for the performance of Falcon Shores, which is fitting given the highly competitive HPC market it’s slated for.

And perhaps most interestingly of all, to get that performance Intel isn’t just tackling things from the raw hardware throughput side of matters. The Falcon Shores announcement also mentions that developers will have access to a "vastly simplified GPU programming model" for the chip, indicating that Intel isn’t just slapping some Xe cores into the chip and calling it a day. Just what this entails remains to be seen, but simplifying GPU programming remains a major goal in the GPU computing industry, especially for heterogeneous processors that combine CPU and GPU processing. Making it easier to program these high throughput chips not only makes them more accessible to developers, but reducing/eliminating synchronization and data preparation requirements can also go a long way towards improving performance.

Like everything else being announced as part of today’s investor meeting, this announcement is more of a teaser for Intel. So expect to hear a lot more about Falcon Shores over the next couple of years as Intel continues their work to bringing it to market.

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Intel Meteor Lake Client Processors to use Arc Graphics Chiplets

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Continuing with this morning’s spate of Intel news coming from Intel’s annual Investor meeting, we also have some new information on Intel’s forthcoming Meteor Lake processors, courtesy of this morning’s graphics presentation. Intel’s 2023 client processor platform, Meteor Lake was previously confirmed by the company to use a chiplet/tile approach. Now the company is offering a bit more detail on their tile approach, confirming that Meteor Lake will use a separate graphics tile, and offering the first visual mock-up of what this tiled approach will look like.

First revealed back in March of 2021, Meteor Lake is Intel’s client platform that will follow Raptor Lake – the latter of which is Alder Lake’s successor. In other words, we’re looking at Intel’s plans for their client platform two generations down the line. Among the handful of details revealed so far about Meteor Lake, we know that it will take a tiled approach, and that the compute tile will be built on the Intel 4 process, the company’s first EUV-based process.

Now, thanks to this morning’s investor presentation, we have our first look at the graphics side of Meteor Lake. For Intel’s 2023/2024 platform, Intel isn’t just offering a compute tile separate from an IO/SoC tile, but graphics will be their own tile as well. And that graphics tile, in turn, will be based on Intel’s Arc graphics technologies – presumably the Battlemage architecture.

In describing the significance of this change to Intel’s investor audience, GPU frontman Raja Koduri underscored that the tiled approach will enable Intel to offer performance more along the lines of traditional discrete GPUs while retaining the power efficiency of traditional integrated GPUs. More pragmatically, Battlemage should also be a significant step up from Intel’s existing Xe-LP integrated GPU architecture in terms of features, offering at least the full DirectX 12 Ultimate (FL 12_2) feature set in an integrated GPU. Per this schedule, this will put Intel roughly a year and a half to two years behind arch-rival AMD in terms of integrated graphics feature sets, as AMD’s brand-new Ryzen 6000 “Rembrandt” APUs are launching today with a DX12U-capable GPU architecture.

Past that, we’re expecting that Intel may have a bit more information on Meteor Lake this afternoon, as the company will deliver its client (Core) and server (Xeon) updates to investors as part of their live session later today. Of particular interest will be whether Intel embraces the tiled approach for the entire Meteor Lake family, or if they’ll hit a crossover point where they’ll want to produce a more traditional monolithic chip for the lower-end portion of the product stack. The Foveros technology being used to package Meteor Lake is cutting-edge technology, and cutting-edge tech often has cost drawbacks.

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Intel Arc Update: Alchemist Laptops Q1, Desktops Q2; 4mil GPUs Total for 2022

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As part of Intel’s annual investor meeting taking place today, Raja Koduri, Intel’s SVP and GM of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group delivered an update to investors on the state of Intel’s GPU and accelerator group, including some fresh news on the state of Intel’s first generation of Arc graphics products. Among other things, the GPU frontman confirmed that while Intel will indeed ship the first Arc mobile products in the current quarter, desktop products will not come until Q2. Meanwhile, in the first disclosure of chip volumes, Intel is now projecting that they’ll ship 4mil+ Arc GPUs this year.

In terms of timing, today’s disclosure confirms some earlier suspicions that developed following Intel’s CES 2022 presentation: that the company would get its mobile Arc products out before their desktop products. Desktop products will now follow in the second quarter of this year, a couple of months behind the mobile parts. And finally, workstation products, which Intel has previously hinted at, are on their way and will land in Q3.

The pre-recorded presentation from Koduri does not offer any further details as to why Intel has their much-awaited Arc Alchemist architecture-based desktop products trailing their mobile products by a quarter. We know from previous announcements that the Alchemist family is comprised of two GPUs, so it may be that Intel is farther ahead on manufacturing and delivering the smaller of the two GPUs, which would be best suited for laptops. Alternatively, the company may be opting to focus on laptops first since it would allow them to start with OEM devices, and then expand into the more complex add-in board market a bit later. In any case, it’s a notable departure from the traditional top-to-bottom, desktop-then-laptop style launches that current GPU titans NVIDIA and AMD have favored. And this means that eager enthusiasts looking for an apples-to-apples look at how Intel’s first high-end GPU architecture fares, we’re going to be waiting a bit longer than initially expected.

Meanwhile, between mobile, desktop, and workstation products, Intel is expecting to ship over 4 million units/GPUs for 2022. To put this in some kind of reference, Jon Peddie Research estimates that the GPU AIB industry shipped 12.7 million boards in Q3’21. Which, pending Q4 numbers being released, would have put the industry as having shipped over 40 million discrete boards altogether over 2021. And while this is a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison since Intel is counting both AIB desktop and mobile products, it does underscore the overall low volume of Alchemist chips that Intel is expecting to sell this year. Assuming AMD and NVIDIA deliver as many chips in 2022 as they did in 2021, Intel will be adding at most no more than another 10% to the overall volume of GPUs sold.

On the whole, this isn’t too surprising given both current manufacturing constraints and Intel’s newcomer status. The company is using TSMC’s N6 process to fab their Alchemist GPUs, and TSMC remains capacity constrained during the current chip crunch; so how many wafers Intel could hope to get was always going to be limited. Meanwhile as a relative newcomer to the discrete GPU space – a market that has been an NVIDIA/AMD duopoly for most of the past two decades – Intel doesn’t have the customer inertia that comes from offering decades of products. So even if Alchemist products perform very well relative to the competition, the company still needs time to grow into AMD and NVIDIA-sized shoes and to woo over the relatively conservative OEM base.

Celestial Architecture Under Development: Targeting Ultra Enthusiast Market

Along with the update on Alchemist, Koduri’s presentation also offered a very (very) brief update on Celestial, Intel’s third Arc architecture. Celestial is now under development, and at this point, Intel is expecting it to be their first product to address the ultra-enthusiast market (i.e. the performance crown). GPUs based on the Celestial architecture are expected in the “2024+” timeframe; which is to say that at this far out Intel doesn’t seem to know for sure if they’ll be 2024 or 2025 products.

Covering the gap between Alchemist and Celestial will be Battlemage, the second of Intel’s Arc GPU architectures. Battlemage now has a 2023-2024 release date, with Intel expecting the architecture to improve performance over Alchemist to the point where Battlemage will be competitive in the enthusiast GPU market – but not quite reaching the ultra-enthusiasts that Celestial will.

Finally, by virtue of this disclosure, it would seem that Battlemage will be the first Arc GPU architecture to make it into Intel’s CPUs. The company has it slated to be implemented as a tile on Meteor Lake CPUs, making this the crossover point where Intel’s current Xe-LP GPU architecture finally gets retired in favor of a newer GPU architecture.

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Corsair’s DDR5 RAM is fast, flashy, and easy to control

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We’re at a point of generational leaps in computers. It was a hop and a skip as we went from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 and then right on to 5.0 for incredible bandwidth going to connected peripherals and storage drives. Now, we’re making the jump from DDR4 memory to DDR5, and Corsair is here to provide some blisteringly fast memory that’s easy to manage.

When it comes to memory, few brands have been as good at showing off just how far the envelope can be pushed. Corsair has a long history of venturing out ahead of the pack with high-speed memory that outstrips the JEDEC standards — the baseline specifications on a wide variety of memory you’d find on store shelves — by leaps and bounds. 

In the first DDR memory generation, Corsair hit DDR-400 before JEDEC made it an official spec. Corsair hit DDR2-1066 while JEDEC capped at DDR2-800, and similarly, Corsair pushed DDR3-3000, nearly doubling JEDEC’s DDR3-1600 standard. 

It was almost the same story with DDR4 memory, as Corsair was able to throw down DDR4-5133 to simply trounce the DDR4-2666 standard established by JEDEC. 

This history of going well beyond “standard” is continuing into the DDR5 generation. Corsair is already cruising ahead with DDR5-6400 — speeds we wouldn’t have dreamt of without exotic cooling just a few years ago — while JEDEC is just at DDR5-4800. A 33% boost is not to be overlooked when it’s the speed of the memory supplying your CPU with all the data it needs to operate. This is especially handy for APUs (Accelerated Processing Unit), which can benefit from all the extra memory speeds and bandwidth to feed the on-board graphics processing. 

Not only is Corsair delivering that supremely fast memory, but Corsair iCUE makes it incredibly simple to manage that memory.

There will be some applications where you may want to run your system with the RAM running at full bore with clock frequencies maxed out, such as in games where the faster memory can improve framerates, while creative applications may benefit from tighter timings on the memory while enjoying improved stability. 

With Corsair iCUE’s XMP manager, you can create and save two XMP (Extreme Memory Profiles) profiles to your memory modules, making it easy to set up and switch between them. No more muddling around in your system BIOS for hours tediously creating XMP profiles that might not even work.

(Image credit: Corsair)

Of course, a computer that’s decked out with Corsair’s high-performance DDR5 memory deserves to be as flashy as it is speedy, and it can be with Corsair iCUE lighting controls. 

Using the same iCUE software you used to control the performance of your RAM, you can customize the lighting on your memory modules down to the finest details. 

You’ll get control over individual LEDs, can create lighting layers, and can build out profiles to easily switch the style up. If you’ve got other Corsair RGB-lit peripherals or hardware inside your system, iCUE can let you sync them all up for a dazzling light show.

Corsair iCUE also supports software and game integrations, the RGB lighting in your system can change color and brightness to reflect things happening in your games. 

To max out your next build’s speed and style, check out Corsair’s DDR5 memory here.

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New Nvidia GeForce drivers pave way for Elden Ring and RTX 3080 Ti laptops

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Nvidia’s latest GeForce Game Ready drivers, 511.79 WHQL, have now been released, and it’s a pretty exciting launch – at least, as far as driver releases go.

These drivers pave the way for day one support for some highly anticipated games, including the much-hyped Elden Ring and Total War: Warhammer III.

This means that by having this driver installed for your Nvidia GPU, when you get these games on release, they should run as well as possible. Support for Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is also included, and it brings Nvidia Reflex support to iRacing, a racing simulation game. 

Nvidia Reflex is a handy tool that speeds up the communication between the CPU and GPU in supported games. This reduces latency, making games feel much faster and more responsive when you move. For competitive titles like racing games, this can make a big difference.

Various bug fixes have also been addressed, which means this is well worth installing for any owner of an Nvidia GPU. You can install the drivers from Nvidia’s download page, or use the GeForce Experience app to download and install them (if you don’t have this installed, it’s well worth doing, as it’s a handy app that can be downloaded from the GeForce Experience website).

Modern gaming laptops get some love too

This new driver also brings support for new gaming laptops with Nvidia’s cutting edge RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti laptop graphics.

Announced at CES 2022 at the beginning of the year, these new laptop GPUs bring impressive performance to new gaming laptops, even rivalling many of the best gaming PCs.

This new Nvidia driver release means we should hopefully start seeing more RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti-powered laptops coming soon. For many people still trying to get hold of a new desktop GPU, these new laptops may be a better option. While they won’t be quite what you’re after if you have a desktop PC, they will offer exceptional gaming performance. We should be getting in a steady stream of these laptops to review soon.

• These are the best gaming laptops of 2022

Via TweakTown

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AMD’s next-gen Zen 4 CPUs could arrive in July to steal Intel’s Raptor Lake thunder

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AMD’s next-gen Zen 4 desktop CPUs could be out much earlier than we thought, and indeed might just be revealed at Computex in June.

This theory has been floated by hardware leaker Greymon55, who simply tweeted ‘Zen 4 Q4’ with a big cross next to it, indicating that this previously expected launch timeframe is no longer the case. Remember, all AMD has officially said is that what’ll presumably be Ryzen 7000 models will arrive in the second half of 2022, and that has recently been confirmed as still on track.

ZEN4 Q4 ❌February 11, 2022

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In that Twitter thread, the leaker elaborates that AMD’s plan is “very different from the early days,” and suggests that we might see something happen at Computex 2022. That show is in May, so clearly, that’s too early for next-gen Ryzen to go on sale – it’s not H2 2022 – but we could conceivably see a reveal there, followed by the chips hitting shelves early in Q3.

The suggestion seems to be this could happen in July, which is the earliest point of the second half of the year, of course. And as previously the rumor mill has thought Q4 was the target date – meaning at the earliest, October – this is quite a leap forward in the timing.

Greymon further observes that AM5 motherboards (for Zen 4, you’ll need a motherboard upgrade) will be ready for production samples ‘soon’ and that could even be later this month (or next), which again points to things ramping up with the next-gen timing.

Take this with an appropriate amount of skepticism, of course, because it’s just a rumor, but the underlying suggestion is that AMD is trying to speed things up and bring Zen 4 CPUs to us sooner rather than later (and quite a bit sooner, if Greymon is on or near the money).

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Analysis: Stepping up with Zen 4 to counter the Raptor?

One plausible theory here could be that AMD is feeling the heat from Intel’s new Alder Lake processors, which have been a big win for Team Blue with their fresh hybrid (mixed core) approach. And what Team Red can’t allow to happen, we’re guessing, is for Intel to unleash even more powerful Raptor Lake CPUs – which will be a refresh of Alder Lake, but with a considerable performance boost for gamers if rumors are right – before Ryzen 7000 even arrives.

Remember that Raptor Lake may arrive more quickly than we anticipated, with some speculation suggesting that a Q3 launch could be in the cards.

So, it seems reasonable that AMD might be looking to Q3 itself, in order that there’s no danger the perception might be that Team Red is starting to fall behind. Another point here is that this could explain why the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the 3D V-cache-toting refresh, is rumored to only be coming in small amounts – mainly because it’s only going to be needed for maybe just a few months. It’s positioned simply as a brief stopgap to carry AMD over to Zen 4.

All that said, there’s obviously a limit to how hard AMD can push to launch a new family of processors earlier – ultimately, the chips won’t be ready until they’re ready.

• Intel vs AMD: which is best?

Via Wccftech

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Intel's 13th-Gen Core i9 flagship teases us with leaked benchmark

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We're getting another glimpse of Intel’s next-gen Raptor Lake processors, following the discovery of test results for the incoming Intel Core i9-13900K flagship CPU within the Ashes of The Singularity benchmark.

Previous leaks have already indicated that this new flagship processor will feature up to 32 threads, something that has now been further reinforced by the Ashes of The Singularity benchmark results that lists the CPU with 32 logical cores. 

We can't completely take this as gospel, as stated by WCCFTech in its own report, as that particular benchmark isn't able to differentiate between physical and logical cores within hybrid processors.

There is also the chance that this could be subject to change, as with any engineering samples that appear in the wild months prior to a full release. As it stands, we're not expecting the official launch of the Raptor Lake series until around Q3 2022, which gives Intel plenty of time to make any adjustments.

(Image credit: WCCFTech / Ashes of The Singularity )

The benchmark states that the Intel Core i9-13900K CPU was tested alongside an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card and 32GB RAM, of which we presume to be DDR5 though nothing actually states as much. Overall, this benchmark doesn't provide us with much new information other than to add weight to existing rumors, but it's certainly exciting to see Intel is testing the product ahead of launch. 

It's also worth bearing in mind that Ashes of The Singularity isn't the ideal benchmark to get accurate information on the latest hardware given the age of the benchmark, so we could get a very different picture when the full shelf-ready version is tested in more suitable applications.

It's been previously mentioned in the rumor mill that the 13th-gen flagship will be a 24-core CPU, with 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, so in the latter case, that would be double what the current 12900K has, which would make for a healthy 50% improvement in cores and a 33% improvement in thread count over the previous generation. Incredible if true, but we will have to wait for the official announcement to know for sure.

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Analysis: Don’t read much into this just yet

Benchmarks for unreleased products are always exciting as they can give a great insight into what performance we can come to expect when the full version hits the shelves, but this is very early days. The tests were almost certainly run using an engineering sample, so it’s doubtless restricted to slow clock speeds and probably doesn’t reflect the performance of the final product which should emerge later in 2022.

There are also a lot of rumors still floating around that Raptor Lake will be a simple refresh of Alder Lake, as much as the above tests would suggest otherwise. This is a very roundabout way of saying that we really don't have an accurate insight as to what could be released later this year.

That said, Intel can't afford to be complacent. AMD's processors are steadily gaining market share thanks to their high quality and more affordable prices (when not being scalped due to low production), so team Blue will have to start ramping up and getting innovative if it wants to make some similar waves in the industry.

• Check out the best PC components for your rig

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AMD smashes CPU market share record – but it’s not all bad news for Intel

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The CPU wars wage on, and AMD continues to eat away at Intel’s dominance, with new figures showing AMD now has its highest ever share of the market.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, AMD hit 25.6% of the overall x86 CPU market. While this may not seem like a huge number, it represents a major milestone, as this is the first time AMD has gained so much of the market, and as Tom’s Hardware reports, it beats the company’s previous record, when it hit 25.3% way back in 2006.

AMD’s comeback has been pretty remarkable to witness. Not only has it regained market share through a series of excellent releases with its critically-acclaimed Ryzen lineup of processors, but it has done so in a much more competitive marketplace. Intel, AMD’s biggest rival, remains a formidable foe, and still accounts for the vast majority of x86 CPU sales.

There’s also a growing market for x86 alternatives, such as ARM-based processors, perhaps the most famous of which is the new Apple M1 series of chips.

This means AMD’s success is particularly impressive, and the increased pressure has meant that Intel has had to respond with more innovative products. The results come from Mercury Research.

According to AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, AMD has “gained client processor revenue share for the seventh straight quarter.”

The company has also been doing very well in the lucrative server business, with Tom’s Hardware reporting that the company has just had its 11th straight quarter of CPU growth. AMD has also benefited from the continued success of the new PS5 and Xbox Series X games consoles, both of which use AMD chips.

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Analysis: Intel is also doing well

Normally, news of AMD doing well means it’s bad news for Intel, but it actually seems like both companies are doing well. Intel still remains the market leader by quite some margin, and it’s also increased its unit share in desktop and laptop processors. AMD has been impacted chip shortages, which has led to the company focussing on higher-margin products to keep up profitability.

This is Intel taking back some of the market share it lost to AMD in the previous year, with its Tiger Lake processors aimed at gamers and high-end enthusiasts leading the charge. It has also just launched its Alder Lake desktop and laptop processors, and early hype for these processors has been strong as well, which could lead to even more gains.

It’s on the server side where Intel is losing ground, then, and while that may not seem like a glamourous market compared to high-end gaming CPUs, it’s still worth huge amounts of money, so Intel must be looking to reverse its fortunes there.

As we’ve said in the past, healthy competition between Intel and AMD is great for consumers, as it means more innovative and competitive products from them both as they battle for our custom. Intel has certainly raised its games in the face of a renewed onslaught from AMD, and both hardware makers will be behind some of the most exciting laptops coming out in 2022 as well.

• These are the best processors you can buy in 2022

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The Noctua NH-P1 Passive CPU Cooler Review: Silent Giant

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In today's review, we are having a look at a truly innovative cooler by Noctua, the NH-P1. The NH-P1 is a CPU cooler of colossal proportions, designed from the ground up with passive (fanless) operation in mind. Can a modern CPU operate seamlessly without a cooling fan? Noctua is here to prove that it can.

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AMD RX 6950 XT could land in April to combat Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti GPU

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AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 refresh could arrive earlier than previously rumored, but will only consist of a new flagship GPU, if the latest from the grapevine turns out to be correct.

We’ve heard a fair few rumors around the supposedly incoming RDNA 2 revamp, and this fresh nugget is from hardware leaker Coreteks on Twitter, who directly replied to a leak we covered yesterday courtesy of Greymon55.

6950XT is planned for mid-april. There's no 6850XT etc as far as I know 🤷February 3, 2022

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As you can see, the theory here is that the refresh only consists of a new RX 6950 XT to take over from the 6900 XT at the top of the Radeon tree – with no overhauled GPU further down the range, like a 6850 XT – and that it’ll arrive in April, earlier than the June or July potential launch timeframe Greymon floated.

Greymon also told us that this refresh would not come on a new process, and drop to 6nm as some other chatter has theorized, and Coreteks didn’t disagree with that.

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Analysis: This timing seems more on the money to us

This makes more sense to us in terms of a release schedule for AMD, if the company is going to push out a refreshed RDNA 2 card (or cards). Mainly because Team Red just confirmed next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs are on track for release later this year, likely in Q4, and Greymon reckons it could be early in that quarter, so possibly October.

That being the case, it seems odd to push out a refresh for current graphics cards in, say, July, with maybe only a few months to go before the next-gen arrives. An April release date would give a bit more breathing room for any revamped cards, for sure.

A limited refresh of just the one card, the flagship, also makes sense in terms of this being just a stopgap thing – and given the pressures of component shortages which still abound. In much the same way that the Ryzen 3D V-cache refresh is only one processor, the 5800X3D.

We’ve also previously discussed the theories out there on the grapevine that Nvidia’s RTX 3090 Ti (which has been announced, back at CES 2022) could be a tentative effort just to get a more powerful GPU out there to tackle what AMD has planned – a card which Nvidia may not deploy in much quantity at all – and again, that’s in line with Team Red coming out with an RX 6950 XT.

Or you could look at it the other way around, and see the 6950 XT as a reply to what Nvidia has planned, but either way, the contention is that both companies will eventually push out a supercharged flagship.

Whether anyone wants to buy either, if this does turn out to be the case, is obviously debatable given what will doubtless be eye-watering pricing, and with the (presumably) RX 7000 and RTX 4000 families due later this year. But there will always be gamers who want the absolute best GPU available at any given time (although availability could bring its own issues, of course, at least until later in 2022).

• Check out all the best gaming PCs

Via Wccftech

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AMD Reports Q4 2021 and FY 2021 Earnings: Turning Silicon Into Gold

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As the full year 2021 earnings season rolls along, the next major chip maker out of the gate is AMD, who has been enjoying a very positive trajectory in revenue and profits over the past few years. The company has continued to build upon the success of its Zen architecture-based CPUs and APUs in both the client and server spaces, as well as a full year’s revenue for the APUs powering the hard-to-find Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. As a result, these products have propelled AMD to another record quarter and another record year, as the company continues to hit revenue records while recording some sizable profits in the process.

For the fourth quarter of 2021, AMD reported $4.8B in revenue, a 49% jump over the same quarter a year ago. As a result, Q4’2021 was (yet again) AMD’s best quarter ever, built on the back of strong sales across the entire company. Meanwhile, due to last year’s unusual, one-off gain related to an income tax valuation allowance, AMD’s GAAP net income did dip on a year-over-year basis, to $974M. In lieu of that, AMD’s quarterly non-GAAP net income (which excludes the tax allowance) was up 77% year-over-year, which is an even bigger jump than what we saw in Q4’20.

AMD’s continued growth and overall success has also boosted the company’s gross margin to 50%, marking the first time since at least the turn of the century that AMD has crossed the 50% mark. Besides underscoring the overall profitability of AMD’s operations, gross margins are also a good indicator of the health of a company; and for a fab-less semiconductor firm, 50% is a very good number to beat indeed. AMD is now within 5 percentage points of Intel’s gross margins, a feat that at one time seemed impossible, and highlighting AMD’s ascent to a top-tier chip firm.

AMD Q4 2021 Financial Results (GAAP)
	Q4'2021	Q4'2020	Q3'2021	Y/Y	Q/Q
Revenue	$4.8B	$3.2B	$4.3B	+49%	+12%
Gross Margin	50%	45%	48%	+5.6pp	+1.9pp
Operating Income	$1.2B	$570M	$948M	+112%	+27%
Net Income	$974M	$1781M*	$923M	-45%	+6%
Earnings Per Share	$0.80	$1.45	$0.75	-45%	+7%

As for AMD’s full-year earnings, the company has been having great quarters all year now, so unsurprisingly this is reflected in their full-year results. Overall, for 2021 AMD booked $16.4B in revenue, which was an increase of 68% over 2019, and, of course, sets a new record for the company. AMD’s gross margin for the year was 48%, up 3.7 percentage points from FY2020, and reflecting how AMD’s gross margins have been on the rise throughout the entire year.

All of this has played out nicely for AMD’s profitability, as well. For the year AMD booked $3.2 billion in net income, and unlike 2020, there are no one-off tax valuations inflating those numbers. Amusingly, even with that $1.3B valuation for 2020, AMD still beat their 2020 net income by a wide margin this year, bringing home $672M more. Or to look at things on a non-GAAP basis, net income was up 118% in a year, more than doubling 2020’s figures. Suffice it to say, the chip crunch has been very kind to AMD’s bottom line in the past year.

AMD FY 2021 Financial Results (GAAP)
	FY 2021	FY 2020	FY 2019	Y/Y
Revenue	$16.4B	$9.8B	$6.7B	+68%
Gross Margin	48%	45%	43%	+3.7pp
Operating Income	$3.6B	$1369M	$631M	+166%
Net Income	$3.2B	$2490M*	$341M	+27%
Earnings Per Share	$2.57	$2.06	$0.30	+25%

Moving on to individual reporting segments, 2021 was a year where all of AMD’s business units were seemingly firing on all cylinders. Client CPUs, GPUs, server CPUs, game consoles; 2021 will go down as the year where nobody could get enough of AMD’s silicon.

For Q4’21, AMD’s Computing and Graphics segment booked $2.6B in revenue, a 32% improvement over the year-ago quarter. According to the company, both Ryzen and Radeon sales have done very well here, with both product lines seeing further sales growth. On the CPU/APU front, average sale prices were up on both a yearly and quarterly basis, reflecting the fact that higher priced products are making up a larger share of AMD’s processor sales. And while AMD doesn’t offer a specific percentage breakdown, the company is reporting that notebook sales were once again the leading factor in AMD’s Ryzen revenue growth, coming on the back of strong demand for higher margin premium notebooks. And, based on overall growth in the number of processors sold, AMD believes that they’ve increased their market share (by revenue) for what would be the seventh straight quarter.

Meanwhile on the GPU front, AMD is reporting that graphics revenue has doubled on a year-over-year basis. According to the company, GPU ASPs are up on a year-over-year basis as well, though interestingly, they’re actually down on a quarterly basis due to what the company is attributing to the product mix – which in turn is presumably the ramp-up and launch of their first Navi 24-based products such as the RX 6500 XT. AMD’s prepared remarks don’t include any mentions of cryptocurrency, but it goes without saying that for the last year AMD has encountered little trouble in selling virtually every GPU it can get fabbed.

Finally, AMD also folds its data center/enterprise GPU sales under the C&G segment. There, AMD is reporting that revenue has more than doubled on a YoY basis, thanks to last year’s launch of the Instinct MI200 accelerator family. Unfortunately, AMD doesn’t offer any unit or revenue breakouts here to get a better idea of what data center shipments are like, or how much of those sales were MI250X accelerators for the Frontier supercomputer.

AMD Q4 2021 Reporting Segments
	Q4'2021	Q4'2020	Q3'2021
Computing and Graphics
Revenue	$2584M	$1960M	$2398M
Operating Income	$566M	$420M	$513M
Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom
Revenue	$2242M	$1284M	$1915M
Operating Income	$762M	$243M	$542M

Meanwhile, AMD’s Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment booked $2.2B in revenue for the quarter. The 75% year-over-year increase in revenue was driven by both improved EPYC sales as well as higher semi-custom sales.

As is usually the case, AMD doesn’t break apart EPYC and semi-custom sales figures, but the company is noting that data center, server, and cloud revenue – essentially everything EPYC except HPC – all more than doubled versus the year-ago quarter. All of which propelled AMD to doubling EPYC sales versus Q4’20, setting new records in the process. AMD has also noted that they’ve shipped their first V-cache enabled EPYC CPUs (Milan-X) to Microsoft, who is using them in an upcoming Azure instance type.

As for semi-custom sales, AMD is riding a wave of unprecedented demand for game consoles that has Sony and Microsoft taking every console APU they can get. Furthermore, despite this going on now for the last year and a half, AMD still expects semi-custom sales revenue to further grow in 2022 on the back of continued orders from console makers.

With all of that said, however, as AMD’s revenues have increased, so have their costs. For both the Client and Enterprise segments, the company is reporting that operating income growth has been partially offset by higher operating expenses. This encompasses both higher wafer prices from TSMC, as well as higher costs for things such as shipping. AMD can more than absorb the hit, of course, but it’s a reflection on how AMD has needed to spend more in order to secure wafers and supplies on an ongoing basis.

Looking forward, AMD is (understandably) once again expecting a very promising first quarter of 2022 and beyond. AMD has enjoyed significant revenue and market share growth over the past few years, and the company’s official forecasts are for that to continue into 2022. And, especially in the midst of the current and ongoing chip crunch, so long as demand holds, silicon may as well be gold for as valuable as it is to some of AMD’s customers.

To that end, AMD is officially projecting revenue growth of 31% for 2022, which would bring AMD to around $21.5B in sales. Given AMD’s 2021 estimate, this is likely once again conservative, though it is noteworthy in that it’s a bit less growth than AMD was projecting at this point a year ago for 2021. More interestingly, perhaps, is that AMD expects the non-GAAP gross margin for the year to land at around 51%, which even if it’s also a conservative estimate, would still be a big accomplishment for AMD.

Driving this growth will be a new slate of products for many of AMD’s important product lines. Along with ramping deliveries of Milan-X EPYC processors, AMD is also slated to deliver their Genoa EPYC processors, based on AMD’s Zen 4 CPU architecture, later this year. Zen 4 will also be making its appearance in Ryzen processors in H2’22, and in the meantime AMD has just launched their Zen3+ based Ryzen 6000 APUs for laptops. Finally, GPUs based on AMD’s forthcoming RDNA 3 architecture remain on the roadmap to be launched later this year as well.

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Intel Arc GPUs could give gamers a reason to drop Windows 11 for Linux

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Intel's developers are working on bringing Resizable BAR (or ReBAR) to its upcoming ARC graphics cards for Linux, which is great news for PC gamers who are looking to jump ship from another operating system like Windows 11.

As reported by Phoronix, DG2/Alchemist support has already been spotted within the Linux kernel and Mesa drivers already, but performance optimization is still a bit shaky. A set of patches for small BAR recovery support for the Intel kernel graphics driver have already been released last week for testing and are currently under review, so we're expecting to see them introduced in the Linux V5.18 kernel.

A note within the patch states that "Starting from DG2 we will have resizable BAR support for device local-memory, but in some cases the final BAR size might still be smaller than the total local-memory size. In such cases only part of local-memory will be CPU accessible, while the remainder is only accessible via the GPU. This series adds the basic enablers needed to ensure that the entire local-memory range is usable."

For those unaware, ReBAR is a PCI Express interface technology that can boost the frame rate performance by removing the 256MB block read limiter, allowing your CPU to have full access to the frame buffer. What this means is that rather than smaller, 'chopped up' sections of data being sent from the CPU to the GPU, the GPU can now ask for much larger files or data chunks and get them sent by the CPU all at once.

The only downside right now is that not many games actually support ReBAR, although these do include plenty of top games like Hitman 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and even Cyberpunk 2077, and some early tests actually resulted in lower performance rather than improved ones.

Nvidia added ReBAR support back in March 2021 for most of its Ampere line, and AMD also has had a similar tech called Smart Access Memory (SAM) which creates a digital 'switch' within the BIOS. With Intel joining the rest of the market with offering ReBAR, there are hopes that more games will be introduced that support the feature, as well as introducing it to existing games where players could reap the benefits of those additional few frames.

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Analysis: market monopolies are bad m'kay?

Intel's imminent arrival on the graphics card market can't come soon enough if you look at the current state of the market. Both GPU stock availability and pricing have had their ups and downs over the last 14 months since both AMD and Nvidia released their current generation of graphics cards, and the typically affordable options are often the models worst affected, with people scrambling to get a budget-friendly GPU for their system.

It's doubtful that Intel is going to sweep in and save the day, but people have expressed a keen interest in Intel joining the party. ReBAR might be a pretty small consideration to some, but ensuring that all three cards can offer a similar experience across Linux could prevent folks who feel stuck using the Windows 11 or previous Windows 10 operating system. As the system requirements for Windows 11 are so high, older hardware that's physically unable to make the upgrade could become dedicated Linux machines.

It's getting some time in the spotlight too, as Linux has also finally had its opportunity to shine in recent months with the SteamDeck running a Linux-based OS and more companies expanding their drivers and compatibility to ensure Linux systems are supported. 

It's early days, but all this increased support might result in more people taking the plunge into using Linux over other operating systems. Intel could have added ReBAR for Linux users at a later date, or even omitted it entirely given how small the market share of Linux users is, but announcing that drivers are in development prior to the ARC GPU release is a sign that we could see a boost to Linux users over the next few years.

• These are the best graphics cards

Via PCGamer

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