Both the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G APU Geekbench benchmark results have been leaked, showcasing single and multithread performance.
The AMD Ryzen 7 8700G tested is the highest Hawk Point APU with eight cores, 16 threads, 16 MB of L3 and eight MB of L2 cache. It also has a base clock speed of 4.2 GHz, a boost clock speed of 5.1 GHz, and a TDP of 65W. According to the report from Wccftech, it scored on the single-core 2,720 and on the multi-core 14,326.
Meanwhile, the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G is a six-core and 12-thread APU with 16 MB of L3 and 6 MB of L2 cache. It has a base clock speed of 4.3 GHz and a boost clock speed of 5.0 GHz with a 65W TDP as well. On the single-core it received 2,474 and on the multi-core 11,453.
Compared to the AMD Ryzen 5700G’s performance, the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G has a 64% boost in multi-core and a 37% boost in single-core performance. Compared to the same CPU, the Ryzen 5 8600G has a 50% increase in multi-threaded and a 29% increase in single-threaded performance.
These are some truly impressive performances from these APUs, especially considering the price points of the chips being $329 and $229, respectively. Great mid-range priced APUs that the market desperately needs.
AMD may be gunning for Apple
It seems that AMD is looking to compete with Apple’s M3 silicon with its APU line and become some of the best processors on the market, especially the AMD Strix Point Halo APU. For instance, the most powerful Strix Point Halo APU is rumored to have 16 cores and an RDNA 3.5 GPU with 40 Compute Units (CUs).
The only thing that might stop the Strix Point Halo APU in its tracks in terms of being competition for the M3 are rumors that production has been pushed back to 2025. But the Strix Point should still be launching in 2024, however, which should still be a major challenge for Apple.
I say, bring on the extra competition, since as it continues we get to reap the benefits of what the tech giants sow.
AMD’s incoming Strix Point Halo APUs – all-in-one chips with processors and integrated graphics that are expected to be seriously powerful – have just been spotted.
The rumor mill holds that Strix Point APUs will likely arrive later this year, and will be followed by top-end Strix Point Halo chips.
Excitingly, we’ve just had a sighting of Strix Point Halo for the first time, with the APUs mentioned in patches for ROCm, AMD’s open source software platform for GPU computation, as VideoCardz noticed that Kepler pointed out on X (formerly Twitter).
Strix Point Halo will use AMD’s next-gen Zen 5 processor cores, which are expected to be a solid step on from current Zen 4 chips, and the integrated graphics will be RDNA 3+ (also referred to as RDNA 3.5). AMD uses the RDNA 3 architecture for its current-gen GPUs, so RDNA 3.5 is a refresh of this. It’ll also have an XDNA 2-powered NPU for accelerating AI workloads, to boot.
The most powerful Strix Point Halo APU is rumored to have 16-cores and an RDNA 3.5 GPU with 40 Compute Units (CUs).
Analysis: A worry for Apple
To give you some idea of how powerful we’re talking about here for a CPU plus GPU solution, this complements 16 full Zen 5 cores on the processor side with the equivalent of integrated graphics which are more powerful than AMD’s next-in-line GPU, the RX 7600 XT (which goes on sale tomorrow, in fact). That model has 32 CUs compared to 40 CUs for the flagship Strix Point Halo, and don’t forget the latter is on an improved refresh of the current graphics architecture, so it could be more than a little ahead of the 7600 XT.
If the rumors around the spec are right, Strix Point Halo really will be a mammoth step forward for AMD’s APUs, bringing in a chip to rival what Apple is doing with its M series of processors (and Apple is going great guns with them, of course).
One slight catch with Strix Point Halo is that while earlier rumors pegged it as having a 2024 launch, the latest chatter is that this has slipped to 2025. So in theory, we’ll get Strix Point this year, but not the Halo silicon until next year (hopefully early in 2025, mind).
This is certainly a chip that could worry Apple, then. Perhaps the main concern when throwing around all these juicy specs and forecasts of a storming high-performance AMD APU is the price tag that might be attached. A thin and premium gaming laptop powered by the flagship Strix Point Halo chip is likely to cost a pretty penny (or three hundred thousand of them).
Mind you, it’s not like MacBooks are cheap either (unless you spot a great deal). Strix Point Halo is certainly one to watch, though, in terms of the most powerful performers for APUs, even though Strix Point will be the more prevalent proposition with more mainstream pricing.
Strix Point Halo won’t just be about thin-and-light laptops, either – there are also small form-factor PCs to consider here, where dispensing with a separate GPU is obviously a major boon. The Halo silicon is another sign that the days of discrete GPUs might be numbered, at least at the lower-end of the market.
If you were hoping to see some seriously powerful gaming laptops driven by the next-in-line top-end mobile silicon from AMD and Intel later this year, those expectations might fail to be met, or at least that’s the latest gossip from the rumor mill.
Wccftech spotted that hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade – a source with a reasonable track record – made a comment on Weibo to the effect that there are no new high-end mobile processors coming this year.
That statement pertained to the future Xiaomi Redmi G Pro laptop refresh, which will have a high-end (HX series) Intel Arrow Lake CPU, but Wccftech points out that the comment refers to launches across the board. So, in theory that also includes AMD’s incoming Strix Point family of mobile processors (to some extent – we’ll come back to that).
In short, the most powerful laptop CPUs will remain Intel’s top-end Raptor Lake Refresh (HX) and AMD’s Dragon Range HX (alongside Hawk Point below that) for some time yet. At least in theory, as we should heap on the seasoning here.
Analysis: Intel delay seems quite possible
We can believe that Intel’s next HX series chips might be pushed to early 2025, and the same is true for AMD’s Strix Point Halo, the very beefiest versions of Strix Point processors. Indeed, there has already been speculation that Strix Point Halo will be delayed to 2025, so that makes sense (at least based on past rumors). Fire Range HX, the successor to Dragon Range, also isn’t rumored to debut until 2025.
However, we should still get vanilla Strix Point APUs for laptops (mixing Zen 5 with RDNA 3.5 graphics) in 2024, even though Wccftech appears to draw a broader conclusion here that Zen 5 mobile won't be arriving in 2024. Plain Strix Point will still be powerful notebook chips and should arrive late in the summer of 2024.
Zen 5 desktop will certainly be out at some stage later in 2024 – very likely before Arrow Lake desktop, according to rumors. Arrow Lake desktop is supposed to arrive late in 2024 from what we’ve heard, so having the laptop chips run slightly later, into early 2025, seems believable enough.
Still, we should be skeptical about all of this info as already noted.
Battlemage GPUs may not have anything to offer beyond the lower-end of the market, with the rumored mid-range graphics card for the 2nd-generation of Intel’s Arc series supposedly in danger of being canceled, according to fresh word from the grapevine.
This comes courtesy of the latest video from RedGamingTech (RGT), a YouTube leaker, although it’s not all bad news about Battlemage thankfully.
The main point made, though, is disappointing; there’s a “very good chance” that the previously rumored enthusiast class GPU – the one featuring 56 Xe cores, known as G10, and in theory being about equivalent to the current RTX 4070 Ti, or thereabouts – isn’t going to be released. However, we’re told that decision hasn’t actually been made at Intel yet.
Why might G10 be canceled (with the emphasis on the might)? It’s not due to hardware issues, or problems realizing the graphics card in the technical sense, but rather it is financial considerations that are in play here. In short, the fear is that the mid-range GPU may not be profitable enough to make sense.
We should again underline that this is just a possibility right now – Intel could still go ahead with this graphics card. Alternatively, Team Blue could hedge its bets and either delay the launch of G10, or just have it come out with a very low volume of production (which would effectively mitigate any financial concerns to some extent, as a kind of compromise).
If Battlemage doesn’t have the G10 with 56 Xe cores in the end, what will it have, then? RGT’s sources believe that a more modestly pitched model will have 40 Xe cores, so the good news is that isn’t a million miles away. But is it an enthusiast-class GPU? No, it’s a lower-tier affair (or it will be by the time Battlemage is released, probably towards the very end of 2024 from what we’re hearing, when AMD’s RDNA 4 will be here, and Nvidia’s Blackwell too, most likely, or it’ll be imminent).
The other more positive news is that if G10 does happen, it currently has faster clock speeds than previously rumored, and a special type of cache called ‘Adamantine’ which will hopefully help to pep up performance too. (The 40 Xe cores graphics card won’t have this Adamantine cache, though, if you were wondering – this cache was rumored for Meteor Lake CPUs, actually, but didn’t happen for those chips in the end).
Analysis: A merry dance of rumors
Okay, so there’s a lot to digest here, and the principal point we should bear in mind is that the G10 graphics card is not dead yet – there are just big question marks hanging over it. That’s not great for those wanting more from Battlemage than lower-end offerings, of course, but still – hope remains. And besides, this is only a rumor anyway.
We’ve been treading a very winding trail following these Intel Arc rumors, for sure. Originally, we were given the expectation that Battlemage was going to be powerful enough to best Nvidia’s Lovelace GPUs, and indeed in the above YouTube clip, RGT does mention that there was an 80 Xe cores variant in the works at one time, but it got ditched.
Then we were told Battlemage was going to be just low-end GPUs, only to later be informed that the G10 upper-mid-ranger was in the pipeline. So, now we’re back to lower-end only – or maybe that being the case, anyway.
Still, even if all we get from Intel’s Battlemage is a 40 Xe cores graphics card as the highest tier product, that could still make a big impact on the wider GPU market if it’s priced competitively. Let’s face it, more affordable graphics cards are what we really need in the way of rivals for AMD and Nvidia, because Team Green in particular appears to have rather forgotten about budget GPUs. Arguably, this could allow Intel to put all its resources into budget challengers, which might ultimately work out for the better.
What could also play into Intel’s decision to drop the G10 is that AMD is apparently firmly targeting the mid-range with RDNA 4, and those GPUs will supposedly top out there – but with potent products. And those cards could be tricky for Team Blue to take on, so it might just swerve the whole idea. Maybe Intel is partly waiting to see what’s in the works with RDNA 4, as more leaks spill forth, before making the final decision on G10.
Who knows, and we can continue to speculate, but the tentative picture right now for the future of the GPU market is Nvidia owning the high-end with Blackwell – with not even AMD challenging there – and Team Red focusing its efforts squarely on the mid-range, with Intel retreating to the lower tiers. Possibly, anyway – though if Team Blue can produce compelling low-end offerings, and supercharged integrated graphics with Battlemage, that could be enough to tide things over until bigger moves are made with Celestial (its third-gen GPUs).
Next-gen Battlemage graphics cards are progressing well and should arrive before CES 2025, we’ve heard from Intel.
Specifically this came from Tom Petersen, Intel Fellow, who was interviewed by PC World at CES 2024 (see the YouTube clip below) as highlighted by PC Gamer.
Petersen said he’s excited about Battlemage which has moved onto development on the software side in the main – with 30% of Intel’s engineers working on it, we’re told – and the hardware team has already moved onto Celestial (3rd-gen graphics cards).
Petersen enthused: “So, think about it [as Battlemage] already has its first silicon in the labs which is very exciting and there’s more good news coming which I can’t talk about right now. We hope we are going to see it before CES 25.”
Analysis: Hoping for the best with Battlemage
The fact that there’s more good news coming is intriguing, of course, and it seems that Battlemage is on track for its previously rumored launch at some point in 2024. We were hoping for maybe a mid-2024 release timeframe, but realistically we were thinking that later in the year is probably more likely – and Peterson’s comment here makes it seem like it’ll be towards the very end of 2024.
Indeed, Petersen is talking in terms of ‘hoping’ rather than knowing, so we could be looking at an early 2025 launch (at CES 2025, perhaps). Although to be fair, it’s standard practice to keep things vague for the timing of any future hardware launch, of course.
Hopefully what we won’t see is a repeat of the Arc Alchemist launch which was plagued with delays, but given that there was a whole lot more to do to get things together for the original GPUs – particularly on the software side with drivers – it isn’t likely that’ll happen again.
Again, going by past rumors, Battlemage is set to be much like Alchemist in that it’ll top out at the mid-range – or maybe upper-mid-range (enthusiast class) – and won’t challenge the likes of high-end GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. (Although RDNA 4 may give the high-end a swerve, too, based on chatter from the grapevine, leaving Team Green with sole dominion in that expensive price bracket).
We’re hopeful that with lessons learned from Alchemist, and continual Arc driver improvements throughout 2024 – as witnessed consistently over the course of 2023 – Battlemage GPUs will be good candidates to grab spots on our roundup of the best graphics cards (and moreover, perhaps, the best cheap GPUs).
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Some good news from Intel, as revealed at CES 2024, is that its APO tech will be coming to older CPUs, not just the newest Raptor Lake Refresh chips on our best processors list.
APO or Application Performance Optimization is a tech that optimizes supported games and boosts frame rates, and it was something Intel introduced with its 14th-gen CPUs.
Back at the time, we were told that this tech was for the new processors only, and wouldn’t come to previous generations – but now Intel has revealed it will be brought to some 13th-gen (Raptor Lake) and 12th-gen (Alder Lake) CPUs.
As we remarked at the time, because those previous two generations use the same architecture for their efficiency cores (Gracemont), there’s no technical reason in theory why APO wouldn’t work across all these chips. And indeed that has proved to be the case.
In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a quick refresher on APO: in basic terms it gets more out of the efficiency cores on the CPU (Intel’s hybrid tech splits the cores into performance and efficiency cores, ever since the release of Alder Lake).
Typically, those efficiency cores can run relatively slowly when gaming, and tests we’ve seen with APO and 14th-gen CPUs point to a doubling of speed in some circumstances, giving a nice performance boost.
Sadly, Intel didn’t give us a firm date of when these older processors will get APO support, but presumably it’ll be in the near future (fingers crossed).
Analysis: Better performance and efficiency to boot
The catch is that the performance cores are still the main engine of an Intel processor that do most of the grunt work when it comes to gaming (or any demanding application for that matter).
However, having efficiency cores, and maybe lots of them, running at say 2GHz instead of 1GHz will make a noticeable difference in certain scenarios. It can mean maybe 10% faster frame rates, or even more (early testing has observed 20% boosts in some cases). On top of this, power efficiency is improved somewhat, too.
So, this is really worthwhile to have for 12th-gen and 13th-gen CPUs, and gamers with these chips will doubtless be pleased. Although do note the other major caveat here which is that the game needs to support APO, and that only certain Raptor Lake and Alder Lake processors will get the benefit (namely unlocked ‘K’ models, the chips that can be overclocked).
How many PC games are supported for APO? Intel says it’s soon to be 14, and as PC Gamer, which spotted this development, points out, that includes the following: Rainbow Six: Siege, Metro Exodus, Guardians of the Galaxy, F1 22, Strange Brigade, World War Z, Dirt 5, and World of Warcraft.
Hopefully we can expect much wider games support down the line, because as noted, the performance boosts are definitely worth having. We won’t get more processor support, though, because hybrid tech (and efficiency cores) didn’t exist before Alder Lake (well, Lakefield aside, but that was a niche thing in the mobile silicon arena).
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The Intel Core i9-14900KS processor may have just been spotted online thanks to a leaked photo, indicating that Intel might not be quite done with its 14th-gen Core lineup just yet.
With Intel understandably focused on the launch of its new Meteor Lake processors, not a lot of attention has been paid to its Raptor Lake Refresh chips since they launched late last year. But a new photo posted to Twitter (or X, if you insist) by user 9550pro appears to show a rather pristine-looking production version of the i9-14900KS processor, rather than a more cryptic engineering sample. Since Intel hasn't officially disclosed any details about its potential flagship chip, there's no way to tell if the chip is genuine, something 9550pro acknowledges in their post.
(Image credit: 9550pro / X)
However, as PCGamesN points out, recent developments suggest that more information may emerge soon. If the Core i9-14900KS is on the horizon, it is poised to become Intel's best processor for gaming, though whether it will be capable of dethroning the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains to be seen.
The 14900KS is expected to follow the pattern of previous KS processors, offering similar specifications to the Core i9-14900K but with higher clock speeds. Current speculation suggests it could achieve clock speeds of up to 6.20GHz out of the box, but with the Intel Core i9-14900K falling behind the best AMD processor for gaming, this chip is probably better off with the enthusiast crowd and creative pros who can better leverage that extra 200MHz.
And, if past is prologue, the higher price of the i9-14900KS will likely mean enthusiasts are going to be the only ones willing to shell out the cash necessary to pick one up if it does launch.
Enthusiasts' last hurrah before Arrow Lake?
With Meteor Lake seemingly restricted to laptops and all-in-one PCs for the moment (it's still uncertain whether a Meteor Lake desktop processor will sell on its own), the Intel Core i9-14900KS might be the last high-end desktop processor to go on sale for several months.
Intel says it is still committed to releasing both Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake in 2024, which means the Core i9-14900KS won't be the last Intel processor we see go on sale this year.
Still, it might be just enough to hold the enthusiast crowd over until the new chips are released later this year, and given the somewhat lackluster gen-on-gen performance gain of the Intel Core i9-14900K, having that extra clock speed that the KS label brings with it might offer performance more in line with gamers and enthusiasts' expectations.
We’re almost done with 2023, and as ever at TechRadar, it’s time to look back at how the various tech giants performed over the past year. In AMD’s case, we saw some inspiring new products introduced for its consumer processor and GPU ranges, and renewed gusto in its pursuit of AI.
There were also shakier times for Team Red, though, notably a string of blunders – the vapor chamber cooling debacle is one that springs immediately to mind, but there were other incidents, and a few too many of them. Join us as we explore the ups and downs of AMD’s 2023, weighing everything up at the end.
(Image credit: Future/John Loeffler)
Zen 4 gets 3D V-Cache
One of AMD’s big moves this year was the introduction of 3D V-Cache for AMD’s Ryzen 7000 desktop processors.
There were a trio of X3D models introduced, with the higher-end Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D hitting the shelves first in February. These were good CPUs and we liked them, particularly the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which is a sterling processor, albeit very pricey (similarly, we felt the price of the 7900X3D held it back somewhat).
What everyone was really waiting for, though, was the more affordable mid-range 3D V-Cache chip, and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D turned up in April. We praised the 7800X3D’s outstanding gaming performance and it’s the best choice for a gaming PC as we conclude in our roundup of the best processors. This was a definite highlight in AMD’s releases this year.
We were also treated to an interesting diversion in the form of a new last-gen X3D processor which AMD chose a very different tactic for. The Ryzen 5 5600X3D arrived in July as a cheap CPU that’s great for an affordable gaming PC, the catch being that it only went on sale through Micro Center stores in the US. For those who couldn’t get that, though, there was always the old Ryzen 5800X3D which dipped to some really low price tags at various points throughout the year. For gamers, AMD had some tempting pricing, that’s for sure.
Away from the world of 3D V-Cache, AMD also pushed out a few vanilla Ryzen 7000 CPUs right at the start of the year, namely the Ryzen 9 7900, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 5 7600, the siblings of the already released ‘X’ versions of these processors. They were useful choices to be thrown into the mix offering a bit more affordability for the Zen 4 range.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
RDNA 3 arrives for real
AMD unleashed its RDNA 3 graphics cards right at the close of 2022, but only the top-tier models, the Radeon RX 7900 series. And the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT were all we had until 2023 was surprisingly far along – it wasn’t until May that the RX 7600 pitched up at the other end of the GPU spectrum.
The RX 7600 very much did its job as a wallet-friendly graphics card, mind you, and this GPU seriously impressed us with its outstanding performance at 1080p and excellent value proposition overall. Indeed, the RX 7600 claimed the title of our best cheap graphics card for this year, quite an achievement, beating out Nvidia’s RTX 4060.
Then we had another sizeable pause – which witnessed gamers getting rather impatient – for the gap, or rather gulf, to be filled in between the RX 7600 and RX 7900 models. Enter stage left the RX 7800 XT and the 7700 XT as mid-range contenders in September, one of which really punched its weight.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
That was the RX 7800 XT and even though it only marginally outdid its predecessor for pure performance, this new RDNA 3 mid-ranger did so well in terms of its price/performance ratio versus its RTX 4070 rival that the AMD GPU scooped the coveted top spot in our best graphics card roundup. (Deposing the RTX 4070, in fact, which had held the number one position since its release six months prior).
As for the RX 7700 XT, that was rather overshadowed by its bigger mid-range sibling here, not making as much sense value-wise as the 7800 XT.
Still, the long and short of it is that AMD bagged both the title of the best GPU for this year, as well as the best budget offering – not too shabby indeed.
From what we saw of sales reports – anecdotally and via the rumor mill – these new desktop graphics cards pepped up AMD’s sales a good deal. While the RX 7900 series GPUs were struggling against Nvidia early in 2023, towards the end of the year, the 7800 XT in particular was really shifting a lot of units (more than the RTX 4070).
While Nvidia is still the dominant desktop GPU power by far, it’s a sure bet AMD regained some turf with these popular RDNA 3 launches in 2023.
(Image credit: AMD)
FSR 3 finally turns up
We did a fair bit of waiting for stuff from AMD this year as already observed, and another item to add to the list where patience was definitely required was FSR 3.
FSR is, of course, AMD’s rival to DLSS for boosting frame rates in games, and more specifically, FSR 3 was Team Red’s response to DLSS 3 that uses frame generation technology (inserting extra frames into the game to artificially boost the frame rate).
FSR 3 was actually announced in November 2022 – as we covered in our roundup of AMD’s highlights for last year – and we predicted back then that it wouldn’t turn up for ages.
However, it wasn’t a simple case of that’s that and AMD was level-pegging with Nvidia suddenly. For starters, Nvidia went ahead and pushed out DLSS 3.5 (featuring ray reconstruction), and frankly, AMD’s frame generation feature was quite some way behind Team Green’s in its initial incarnation. It was also not nearly as widely supported – and remains so – with adoption moving at a sluggish pace, and only four games available that make use of FSR 3 so far.
But at least it’s here, and AMD made another important move in December, as the year drew to a close, releasing an improved version of FSR 3. We saw with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – the third game to introduce support – that the new version of FSR (3.0.3) runs a good deal more slickly, at least according to some reports.
(Image credit: AMD / Ubisoft)
On top of this, AMD also made FSR 3 open source. That means more games should be supported soon enough (and modders can, and already have, started introducing FSR 3 to some titles, but unofficial support will never be quite the same as the developer implementing the tech).
Furthermore, in terms of better support for games, Team Red did make another move at the same time as FSR 3. We’re talking about AMD’s Fluid Motion Frame (AFMF) tech which as well as being part of FSR 3 is integrated separately at a driver level.
This allows for frame generation boosts to be applied to all games – via the driver, with no need for the game to be coded to support it – with the caveat being that it only works with RX 7000 and 6000 GPUs. Now that’s great, but note that what you’re getting here is a ‘lite’ version of the frame generation process applied in FSR.
As 2023 now comes to a close, AFMF is still in preview (testing) and somewhat wonky, though Team Red has improved the tech a fair bit since launch, much like FSR 3.
In short, it looks like AMD is getting there, and also ushering in innovations such as anti-lag+ (for reducing input latency, with RX 7000 and supported games only, although this has had its own issues). Not to mention the company is wrapping up all this tech in HYPR-RX, an easy-to-use one-click tuning mode that’ll apply relevant (supported) features to make a given game perform optimally (hopefully).
But there’s still that inevitable feeling of following in Nvidia’s wake when it comes to FSR and related features, with AMD rather struggling to keep up with the good ship Jensen.
Still, AMD appears to have an overarching vision it’s making solid, if somewhat slow, progress towards, but we certainly need to see more games that (officially) support FSR 3 – with an implementation impressive enough to equal DLSS 3 (or get close to it).
(Image credit: Future)
Portable goodness
This year saw some interesting launches from AMD on the portable device front, not the least of which was the Ryzen Z1 APU. Built on Zen 4, this mobile processor emerged in April to be the engine that several gaming handhelds were built around, notably the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.
There were two versions of the Z1, the 6-core vanilla chip, and a Z1 Extreme variant which was an 8-core CPU but crucially had a lot more graphics grunt (12 RDNA 3 CUs, rather than just 4 CUs for the baseline processor). The Z1 Extreme proved to be an immense boon to these Windows-powered gaming handhelds, driving the Legion Go to become what we called the true Steam Deck rival in our review.
The weakness of those Windows-toting Steam Deck rivals is, of course, the battery life trade-off (particularly when driving demanding games at more taxing settings). AMD was on hand to help here, too, introducing HYPR-RX Eco profiles to its graphics driver late in the year, which should offer a convenient way to tap into considerable power-savings (without too much performance trade-off – we hope).
Away from handhelds, in December we were also treated to the launch of a range of Ryzen 8000 CPUs for laptops. These ‘Hawk Point’ chips aren’t out yet, but will debut in notebooks in early 2024, although note that they’re Zen 4-based (the same as Ryzen 7000 silicon).
The line-up is led by the flagship Ryzen 9 8945HS, an 8-core processor with integrated graphics (Radeon 780M) that’ll be great for 1080p gaming (with some details toned down, mind). These chips will also benefit from AMD’s XDNA NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for accelerating AI tasks, and Team Red asserted that Hawk Point chips will be 1.4x faster than the Ryzen 7040 series in generative AI workloads – a pretty tasty upgrade.
(Image credit: AMD)
AI bandwagon
Those Hawk Point mobile CPUs showed AMD’s growing focus on AI, and this was a broader push for Team Red throughout the year, which comes as no surprise – everyone who was anyone in tech, after all, was investing in artificial intelligence. Moreover, Nvidia made an absolute fortune in the AI space this year, and obviously that didn’t go unnoticed at AMD towers.
As well as incorporating heftier NPUs in its processors, in May AMD tapped Microsoft for resources and cash to help develop AI chips (for the gain of both companies). But the real power move for Team Red came late in the year, when in December AMD revealed a Zen 4 APU for AI applications (the largest chip it has ever made, in fact, bristling with 153 billion transistors).
The Instinct MI300A is loaded with 24 CPU cores plus a GPU with 228 CDNA 3 CUs and eight stacks of HBM3 memory, posing a genuine threat to Nvidia’s AI dominance. AMD’s testing indicates that the MI300A is about on par with Nvidia’s mighty H100 for AI performance, and as the year ended, we heard that firms like Microsoft and Meta are interested in adopting the tech.
AMD said that the Instinct MI300A will be priced competitively to poach customers from Nvidia, as you might expect, while acknowledging that Team Green will of course remain dominant in this space in the near future. However, Lisa Su intends for her firm to take a “nice piece” of a huge AI market going forward, and if the MI300A is anything to go by, we don’t doubt it.
(Image credit: Reshetnikov_art / Shutterstock)
Year of the gremlins
While AMD had plenty of success stories in 2023, as we’ve seen, there were also lots of things that went wrong. Little things, medium-sized things, and great hulking gremlins crawling around in the works and making life difficult – or even miserable – for the owners of some AMD products who got unlucky.
Indeed, AMD was dogged by lots of issues early in the year, most notably a serious misstep with the cooling (vapor chamber) for RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. Although the flaw only affected a small percentage of reference boards, it’s absolutely one of the biggest GPU blunders we can recall in recent years. (Nvidia’s melting cables with the RTX 4090 being another obvious one).
Not to mention RX 7000 graphics cards consuming far too much power when idling in some PC setups (multiple monitors, or high refresh rate screens – a problem not resolved until near the end of the year, in fact).
There were other hitches besides, but you get the idea – 2023 was a less than ideal time for AMD in terms of gaffes and failures of various natures.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Concluding thoughts
Clearly, AMD tried the patience of gamers in some respects this year. First of all with those glaring assorted blunders which doubtless proved a source of frustration for some owners of their products. And secondly, purely due to making gamers wait an excessively lengthy time for features like FSR 3 – which seemed to take an age to come through – and ditto for filling out the rest of the RDNA 3 range, as those graphics cards took quite some time to arrive.
However, the latter were very much worth the wait. The double whammy for GPUs was a real coup for AMD, releasing the top budget graphics card in the RX 7600, and our favorite GPU of them all, the reigning RX 7800 XT that sits atop our ranking of the top boards available right now.
There were plenty of other highlights, such as releasing the best gaming CPU ever made – in the form of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D – which was a pretty sharp move this year. We also received a top-notch mobile APU for handhelds in the Ryzen Z1 Extreme.
AMD’s GPU sales were appropriately stoked as 2023 rolled on, and FSR – plus other related game boosting tech – seems to be coming together finally, albeit in an overly slow but steady manner as mentioned. In the field of AI, Team Red is suitably ramping up its CPUs, and with the Instinct MI300A accelerator it’s providing a meaningful challenge to Nvidia’s dominance.
In short, despite some worrying wobbles, 2023 was a good year for AMD. The future looks pretty rosy, too, certainly with next-gen Zen 5 processors that look set to get the drop on Intel’s Arrow Lake silicon next year. And some even more tantalizing Zen 5 laptop chips (‘Strix Point’ – sitting above Hawk Point, and sporting XDNA 2 and RDNA 3.5) are inbound for 2024.
Next-gen Radeon GPUs are a little sketchier – RDNA 4 is coming next year, but the range may top out at mid-tier products, as AMD refocuses more on AI graphics cards (as expected in terms of going where the profits are). Those RDNA 4 cards could still pack a value punch, though, and looking at the current mid-range champ, the RX 7800 XT, we’d be shocked if they didn’t.
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Intel’s Core i3-14100 processor has had its price leaked by a US retailer, ahead of the CPU’s rumored reveal next month at CES 2024 (along with the rest of the Raptor Lake Refresh line-up not yet released by Team Blue).
On X (formerly Twitter), @momomo_us was hawk-eyed enough to spot the retailer, BLT, posting the price of this 14th-gen processor as $150 (around £120, AU$220). Unlike most leaks, though, this isn’t the retail price, but the price for bulk buying trays of the CPU.
The Core i3-14100 is a quad-core chip (with 8 threads – and no efficiency cores), and represents the least powerful Raptor Lake Refresh processor on the desktop – and thus the most affordable.
Compared to the Core i3-13100, it’ll stay pretty much the same, but the boost speed gets an uplift, so the rumors reckon. It’s 4.7GHz, so 200MHz faster, which is quite believable seeing as this is the case with other 14th-gen CPUs. Intel appears to be targeting a 200MHz uptick with most (but not all) of this silicon.
In theory, we will see this CPU, and other non-K processors for the 14th-gen, on January 8. (Thus far, only ‘K’ chips, which are unlocked for overclocking, have been released – non-K models can’t be overclocked, and run a little slower than any ‘K’ equivalent).
Analysis: Price considerations
With the price of the 14100 being for volume purchases here (retailers or PC makers buying trays of chips), you might shrug your shoulders and wonder what the relevance is to the average consumer.
Well, the screenshot the leaker provides shows the tray price for the 13100, and it’s almost the same – just a touch under, actually, at $148.
Indeed, in the US, the current retail price for the 13100 stands at this level – $148 (at Newegg, at the time of writing) – so add seasoning, but the intention for Intel would seem to be to debut the Core i3-14100 at just about the same price, or maybe a touch more, for the consumer.
That makes sense as the currently released Raptor Lake Refresh models are pitched at about the same price as their Raptor Lake counterparts. (The 14900K is the same price, with the 14700K and 14600K actually dropping very slightly, but they’re all around the same ballpark as the last-gen really).
It’s possible Intel may go the other direction and notch things up a tiny bit with lower-end CPUs, certainly – but it’s unlikely we’ll see any meaningful increase, or anything to worry about, as this leak suggests.
Intel Core Ultra is officially here with Intel's AI Everywhere event kicking off today, December 14, 2023.
The new processors, first announced at Intel Innovations a couple of months ago, are Intel's first chips to feature a neural processing unit (NPU).
“AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in an Intel press release. “Intel is developing the technologies and solutions that empower customers to seamlessly integrate and effectively run AI in all their applications — in the cloud and, increasingly, locally at the PC and edge, where data is generated and used.”
This means that AI applications like those powering ChatGPT and Midjourney are set to become much more ubiquitous, though those apps require data to be sent over the internet to servers run by OpenAI and others in order to produce an output. Intel's new chips hold the promise that applications like those might start being processed offline on your device rather than on someone elses, a huge improvement in data security, especially for business and enterprise users.
(Image credit: Future / Philip Berne)
Bringing the biggest CPU architecture upgrade to the everyday laptop
Intel's new Core Ultra processors introduce three new major architecture features to its laptop portfolio.
To begin with, there is the move to a multi-chiplet-module (MCM) design, which leaves behind the single-silicon-die design paradigm that Intel pioneered decades ago in favor of several smaller silicon chiplets bonded together to form a single chip. This allows for more versatility in the chip design than previous generations of processors in terms of what functionality the resulting chip will have.
Next, there is the neural processor. The NPU is speciallized hardware in the chip that processes machine learning tasks that are at the heart of the various artificial intelligence applications we've seen explode into the mainstream this year, like ChatGPT. Those apps require you to send data elsewhere, however, meaning that it's not good for anything requiring security. This will ultimately allow for more personal AI applications like photo editing and document drafting to occur on device.
You also have the integration of the new Intel Arc GPU. With up to 8 XE GPU cores, this is roughly equivalent to having an Intel Arc 370M discrete GPU integrated right into the processor, minus the dedicated video memory. An integrated GPU will never be able to match a current-gen discrete GPU in a laptop, but it does mean that more casual users will have access to more powerful graphics technology like real-time ray tracing and hardware-accelerated resolution upscaling, both of which are increasingly used in modern PC games.
Finally, there is the inclusion of new low-power efficiency (LPE) cores, which in addition to high-power performance cores and more modest efficiency cores, further improves the efficiency of Intel's laptop lineup, something that took a bit of a hit with the past two generations of Intel chips.
We expect that Intel Evo, Intel's laptop certification that requires at least a nine-hour battery life, will actually become much more common again thanks to these new processors.
(Image credit: Apple)
Can it compete with the Apple M3 and an increased interest in AMD mobile chips?
Of course, the biggest question is whether the new Intel Core and Core Ultra processors will be able to compete with Apple's newest M3 processors. Apple's chips, which power the Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch, are some of the best processors ever made, so it remains to be seen how well Intel's new chips stack up.
That said, Intel has about a 70% market share for laptop CPUs, though that number is a bit fuzzy given the huge number and variety of "laptops" on the market. Still, with Apple's move to in-house silicon, Intel is facing unexpected competition from Apple devices while fending off a surge in competition from AMD's mobile procesors which are increasingly sought after in the best gaming laptops.
Many of the best laptops on the market though still sport Intel chips, and that's not likely to change anytime soon, but Intel's new Core and Core Ultra processors are launching in a much more competitive environment than previous releases to say the least.
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Indeed, AMD might be worried about the challenge posed to its Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip which is the engine of choice for various popular gaming portables (like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go).
The leak is a 3DMark gaming test where the Core Ultra 7 155H processor with integrated Arc Alchemist graphics is put through its paces (on Bilibili, plus a Cinebench score is provided).
As PC Gamer reports, this was flagged up by regular leaker HXL on X (formerly Twitter), and as ever, season rumors liberally.
We can see that the Core Ultra 7 155H (which has 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores) scores 3,339 in Time Spy (with a graphics score of 3,077 and a CPU score of 6,465).
How does that stack up to AMD’s Z1 Extreme? Our sister site PC Gamer ran a comparison and found the Asus ROG Ally (with Z1 Extreme) managed a Time Spy score of 3,150 (with its integrated RDNA 3 graphics scoring 2,834, alongside a CPU score of 8,574).
So, we can see that while the Z1 Extreme is a little ahead overall, and a great deal ahead in processor performance, the Intel Core Ultra 7 wins the battle of the graphics – the most important consideration for gaming, of course.
To some extent, the disparity in CPU performance may be down to the Intel chip only running on performance cores, and not bringing its efficiency cores into play – we don’t know what’s going on under the hood with this leak exactly.
Interestingly, the Cinebench R23 shows that AMD’s APU is around 15% quicker (for single and multi-core), so that’s not as much of a gap as the difference in CPU scores above – and at least suggests that things will be closer in this respect.
Analysis: Promising early signs
Whatever the case, overall processor performance looks to be a solid win for AMD, but in the graphics department, the Meteor Lake chip appears to have the edge. That’s exciting because the power of the on-board integrated graphics is crucial for budget gaming laptops and gaming handhelds alike.
And it’s promising given that the Core Ultra 7 is a 28W chip compared to the Z1 running at 30W (docked) in PC Gamer’s testing, so Intel’s silicon has a slight power advantage here.
That said, this is just a single synthetic test, and the bigger picture is inevitably focused on real-world gaming tests, and averaged multiple runs across different titles.
We’ll get the broader swathe of testing soon enough, but it looks like the Core Ultra 7 packs a good bit of graphics grunt in a reasonable power envelope – and of course, regarding the latter, battery life will be an important part of the equation for portable devices of all kinds.
Nvidia might be preparing to replace the RTX 3050 graphics card with a new version – a cheaper one, with less VRAM – and there’s a hint that this move may be about making room for another model at the budget end of the spectrum, perhaps an RTX 4050.
The latter bit is an airier piece of speculation, mind – and indeed we should take all this with a healthy spoonful of salt (or maybe not so healthy) – but we have already heard from the rumor mill that a new RTX 3050 variant could be inbound.
The previously rumored theory, now backed up by Chinese tech site Benchlife (hat tip to VideoCardz), is that Nvidia is scrapping the RTX 3050 as it stands, which is equipped with 8GB of VRAM, and bringing in a refreshed version with a cut-down 6GB (and a trimmed down memory bus, too).
This would mean the RTX 3050 6GB could be pitched at a cheaper $179 to $189, or thereabouts, in the US (and in line with that pricing elsewhere – so about 10% to 15% less than the RTX 3050 8GB currently sells for, roughly).
Previous buzz from the grapevine has suggested that the RTX 3050 6GB could be cut down for CUDA cores as well – shedding up to 20% of its core count, perhaps – and it’d also have a much lower power usage in theory.
Nvidia will supposedly deploy this new RTX 3050 6GB in January 2024, we’re told.
Benchlife adds that there is speculation that Nvidia may be planning a “new GeForce RTX 40 series graphics card to meet consumers in different price ranges,” referring to something to fill the gap between the cheaper RTX 3050 6GB and the RTX 4060. And that must surely be an RTX 4050 – if it exists.
Analysis: Stiff budget competition
The rumor about the RTX 4050 is couched in very vague terms, and as we already mentioned, we should be especially skeptical here as a result. It is something that gamers on a budget have been hoping for, and an RTX 4050 does exist in laptop form already – so who knows, we may just see it.
Or the idea of bringing out a new RTX 3050 6GB that can be sold at a cheaper price point could simply be Nvidia trying to make itself a bit more compelling at the budget end of the market, though the rumored cut-backs for the graphics card make it seem not so tempting.
If the CUDA cores are indeed dropped down substantially (from the existing 2,560 cores) as some rumors have suggested, that’s going to make this an unappealing option – and surely it’d be more cheaply priced, if that was the case?
What’s more likely is that the VRAM and memory bus will be dropped, but not the core count – if the purported price is correct, that’d make much more sense. It’d also align with the refreshed RTX 3050 laptop GPU (which emerged at the start of the year and has 2,560 cores).
Whatever Nvidia does, it will surely have to pitch this rumored new RTX 3050 to compete with AMD’s RX 6600, a rival last-gen option that represents pretty stiff budget competition currently in the best cheap GPU department, with its price having dropped pretty low these days.
On a more general note, it’s good to see a trend of repurposing older generations of silicon into wallet-friendly contemporary products – not just from Nvidia, but also AMD with its rumored moves on the CPU front, bringing in new 3D V-Cache processors from Zen 3 (supposedly the Ryzen 5700X3D and 5500X3D, which could be seriously popular options at the low-end).
Hot on the heels of a catty attack from Intel, AMD has just announced the next lineup of Ryzen processors that we’ll be seeing in next year’s best laptops - a whopping nine new chips, all bearing the Ryzen 8040 name and equipped with AMD’s ‘XDNA’ AI technology.
The new processors, codenamed ‘Hawk Point’, are already on their way to laptop manufacturers and will be available in new devices in early 2024. All of them will use AMD’s Zen 4 CPU core architecture and RDNA 3 graphics architecture, with the flagship being the Ryzen 9 8945HS (catchy, I know). I was pleased to see that AMD isn’t ditching the low-spec chips either, with a quad-core Ryzen 3 8440U set to bring the XDNA neural engine to more affordable laptops.
While a lot of the press release from AMD was quite focused on enterprise applications of on-chip AI (rather than consumer use cases), the key takeaway here - other than the fact that we’re getting a bunch of new chips - is that local AI is about to become a lot more widespread.
Bot in your laptop
AMD already introduced its neural processing unit (NPU) in the Ryzen 7040 series, and it represented an important step forward in the expansion of local AI. For the uninitiated, ‘local’ AI refers to on-chip machine learning capabilities, letting you run AI-powered workloads locally - as opposed to popular AI tools like ChatGPT, which currently use cloud computing for users to access them from their devices.
There are plenty of advantages to on-chip AI: for starters, it won’t require a mandatory internet connection to use, since there’s no cloud server involved. Keeping things on your device (in this case, a spate of new Ryzen laptops from key manufacturers like Asus, Acer, and Lenovo) also helps mitigate some security concerns surrounding AI, since you won’t need to upload any data to an external platform.
The Ryzen 8040 news came alongside an ‘AI roadmap’ from AMD, detailing that 2024 will also play host to the next-gen ‘Strix Point’ processors - which, importantly, will feature the second-generation XDNA 2 NPU. AMD promises ‘more than 3x generative AI NPU performance’ compared to the first-gen XDNA NPU, a big step up if Team Red can deliver.
Setting Strix Point aside, the upcoming Hawk Point chips look very impressive. AMD has claimed that the chips offer a 1.4x performance uptick in generative AI workloads compared to the Ryzen 7040 series, and also provided some comparative figures to Intel’s current i9-13900H, noting that the flagship 8040 chip should outperform its Intel counterpart in virtually every area. Needless to say, these could be some of the best processors around, and I’m excited to get my hands on one of these new laptops!
The rivalry between Intel and AMD runs deep, with the two companies constantly vying to take the best processor crown. But few people would have expected the aggression contained in a new playbook presented by Intel, which insinuates that AMD is selling “snake oil” to unsuspecting customers.
The claims were made in a slide deck dubbed “Core Truths,” the main argument of which is that AMD’s CPU naming conventions may confuse consumers and disguise old architecture inside newer-seeming products.
For instance, Intel directly calls out the Ryzen 5 7520U chip, which it notes is built on Zen 2 architecture that debuted in 2019, despite the chip going on sale in 2022. Intel says its own comparable chip (the Core i5 1335U) is 83% faster than the Ryzen 5 7520U, even though AMD markets its chip as containing brand-new tech.
Intel goes beyond merely arguing that this is misleading, instead putting it alongside images of a snake oil seller and a dodgy-looking used car salesman. The inference from Intel is clear: AMD's product-naming is intentionally confusing and could end up bamboozling buyers.
Does Intel have a point?
(Image credit: AMD)
It’s hard to argue that Intel’s slide deck is entirely over the top. AMD’s CPU naming convention is somewhat confusing. It works like this: instead of differentiating CPU architecture by generation, AMD now says that all of its mobile chips fall under the latest Ryzen 7000 name.
The third number in the chip’s name denotes the architecture – the two in 7520U means Zen 2, for instance – but that departs from AMD’s long-held naming practices and could confuse buyers, who may see the seven and assume they’re getting a brand-new architecture.
But Intel itself doesn’t have entirely clean hands. The company’s (just released) 14th-generation desktop chips are essentially refreshed 13th-generation Raptor Lake processors, while the upcoming Core 100 series is rumored to also recycle Raptor Lake parts.
So yes, Intel does have a point in calling out AMD’s confusing chip naming system, and we shouldn’t ignore that. But it might be seen as a somewhat cynical play when Intel itself has been guilty of incorporating old architectures into new products. It just underlines the fact that when shopping for PC parts, you need to do your research to ensure you get exactly what you’re expecting.
Gigabyte just told us that AMD’s next-gen APUs for the desktop will be out later in January.
A press release from the motherboard maker was published over the weekend for its new beta BIOS release for AM5 (the chipset for current-gen Ryzen 7000 processors).
That release mentions the incoming desktop APUs specifically, saying: “The forthcoming AM5 next gen APU will be launched at the end of January 2024.”
If true, with CES 2024 happening at the start of January, we’d expect AMD to hold an initial reveal at this event.
These processors are purportedly Ryzen 8000G models, as previous chatter from the grapevine has indicated. Note the ‘G’ which means they are APUs with relatively powerful graphics (for an on-board solution) intended to be used in desktops so a discrete GPU isn’t needed (saving money).
In theory – as reported by HKEPC previously – the top-end Ryzen 8000G model will extend to eight cores (16-threads) and will offer integrated RDNA 3 graphics with 12 compute units.
Purportedly there’ll be four chips in the line-up, all based on Zen 4 architecture (but also incorporating more compact Zen 4c cores in a hybrid design).
While Ryzen 8000 has been previously mentioned a lot in the context of Zen 5 processors – the next generation to succeed Ryzen 7000 – as noted, these ‘G’ suffixed APUs are rather different in their focus on providing an all-in-one desktop solution (dispensing with the need for a separate GPU).
The Ryzen 8000G models have been given considerably more pep (in theory) thanks to more powerful integrated graphics, with the shift to RDNA 3 being a big step up.
Now, while we say that, don’t think that these chips will work for serious gaming needs – but they’ll be fine for more casual gamers, delivering palatable enough 1080p performance in general. Demanding gaming will still require one of the models at the top of the tree in our best processors roundup.
The successor to the current-gen Ryzen 7000 processors, based on Zen 5, are going to turn up a bit later next year – we’re not sure when, but probably mid-year, most likely – and they may be called Ryzen 9000 models to differentiate them. That’s the latest rumor anyway.
This comes from Igor’s Lab – a German site which has previously conducted similar tests – and involved some 600 of Intel’s processors, both 14th-gen and 13th-gen for comparison. All these chips were split up among five intrepid overclockers for testing (one of those being Igor).
Given the vast number of CPUs being covered, the testing employed was necessarily limited, with the processors placed in an Asus Maximus Z790 Hero motherboard, and Silicon Prediction (SP) values recorded (indicating the quality of the chip essentially).
Furthermore, the voltage drawn was measured when at the maximum rated Turbo clock speed (with a lower voltage meaning the chip is better quality – as there’s more headroom to crank up the voltage for a bigger overclock).
There’s a mountain of results to wade through, as you can imagine, so we’ll pick out some brief highlights.
The overall conclusion is that Raptor Lake Refresh processors are better binned (of a higher silicon quality) compared to their predecessors, Raptor Lake chips, but then you’d expect that really (given generational process and manufacturing refinements).
For example, looking at maximum voltages, the 14900K needed as low as 1398mV in four cases to hit full Turbo, and the lowest the 13900KS managed was 1433mV (25 of the 14900K CPUS were below that value, in fact). This shows that with specs otherwise identical, the 14900K is a superior piece of silicon overall (though there will be variances, and it’s important to note the 13900KS sample size is much smaller here, which could have an impact).
As mentioned, with more headroom to allow voltage to be pushed in general, Raptor Lake Refresh is giving overclockers more scope for juicing up clock speeds that little bit more.
Another interesting point is that the report compares the standard 14900K against the 14900KF version (which is the same, but lacks integrated graphics). Was there any marked difference in the two spins on the flagship?
The 14900KF chips had a spread of SP values ranging from 90 to 104, whereas the 14900K was between 92 and 112, indicating a higher quality for the latter.
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)
Analysis: No alarms and no surprises…
Looking at those last SP scores, the 14900K looks a better proposition, but we have to remember that even a sample of 600 processors hardly tells a definitive story, whether that’s pertaining to individual head-to-head CPU performances, or the overall picture.
That said, as noted it’s not surprising to see Raptor Lake Refresh is better binned than the previous-gen Raptor Lake chips, and indeed that the new CPUs overclock better. If you recall, it was even the case that long before the 14th-gen processors emerged there were leaks indicating that Raptor Lake Refresh was going to be a solid step forward on the overclocking front.
So really, there are no big surprises here, but the result of that 14900K versus 14900KF battle is interesting to see.
Still, any Raptor Lake Refresh buying decision will be based on how much of an upgrade it’ll be from what you’re currently running, and the performance improvements for the 14900K aren’t impressive gen-on-gen as we pointed out in our full review.
If you’re intending to overclock, though, there is definitely a bit more mileage in this new generation of Intel silicon, and the report certainly makes this clear (just make sure you get yourself a top-notch CPU cooler).
