https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adata-...e-impacted

Quote:A report has emerged that Adata has altered its XPG SX8200 Pro again by swapping in SK Hynix flash, making this the fourth known SSD configuration. According to the report, the latest revision is purportedly 23.6% percent slower in sequential read speed than the previous revision, and it also takes a 14.3% haircut in sequential write performance. As before, Adata ships this drive with the same model number as the original SSD.
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Adata’s XPG SX8200 Pro was once hailed as the best SSD in its category in terms of offering the best bang for your buck. Unfortunately, the SSD also received its fair share of bad press as Adata switched out the original components for slower parts, without publicizing the change. While swapping out different types of flash certainly isn't unheard of, Adata's tactic involved swapping the SSD controller, a first. In addition to the original SX8200 Pro, our testing identified two more revisions that delivered substantially lower performance than the original SSD.

Now it appears that Adata has quietly revamped the SX8200 Pro again. Redditor svartchimpans recently purchased an SX8200 Pro that doesn't match the specs of any previous revisions we've tested. That means there could now be a total of four different variants of the SX8200 Pro. However, given the timeframe, we don't expect to find the original SX8200 Pro anymore.
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Synthetic benchmarks don't always paint the entire picture, and we would need to thoroughly test the new revision to see how much slower it is compared to the other three variants. According to the Redditor's results, however, the SX8200 Pro with Samsung 64-layer NAND (the previous revision) delivered up to 30.8% and 16.7% higher sequential read and write speeds than the latest variant that comes with SK Hynix 96-layer NAND.

Keep in mind that the user was testing the two other drives that he bought with nearly all of the capacity used while the SK hynix-powered version was empty. A full drive is always much, much slower than an empty one. So the delta between the drives would be further apart if they were all at the same usage level.

For instance, the empty drive with SK Hynix flash delivered 2.8% higher sequential read performance than the 94% full drive with Samsung flash. However, the latter still pumped out 7.6% higher sequential writes than the empty drive with SK hynix flash.

Performance is just one side of the coin, though. It remains to be seen whether the new NAND will impact the SX8200 Pro's endurance. The SX8200 Pro is available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. Adata rated the original drives with endurance ratings of 160TBW, 320TBW, 640TBW and 1,280TBW. Given that Adata hasn't modified these values in the specification sheet, we can only assume that the SK Hynix drives should be as durable as the original ones.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-relea...-Corp.html

Quote:Corsair Gaming, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRSR) (“Corsair”), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators and its subsidiaries Scuf Gaming and Ironburg Inventions Ltd., announce that on February 1, 2021 in the patent infringement case, Ironburg Inventions Ltd. v. Valve Corp, US District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle the jury unanimously found that Valve Corp infringed Ironburg’s 8,641,525 controller patent and awarded Ironburg over $4 million. In addition, the jury unanimously found willful infringement by Valve Corp. The jury verdict of willful infringement is the first step to a potential award of enhanced damages up to the statutory limit of treble damages.

Quote:Long story short, in designing and producing the Steam Controller, Valve knowingly infringed on patents that were the property of Ironburg Inventions, a sub-firm of SCUF. Ironburg Inventions warned Valve about this in 2014, but Valve continued to sell the Steam controller, a total of 1.6-million units, before hitting the kill switch.

Corsair acquired SCUF in 2019 and picked up the fight. The culprit: the rear-facing side controls. Valve could have avoided all this by licensing the technology from SCUF, just like Microsoft has for select Xbox controllers, including the Xbox Elite controller.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-...hree-years

Quote:The Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the fourth quarter of 2020, with the headline news being that Intel has clawed back share from AMD in the desktop PC market for the first time in three years. Intel also stopped its slide in the notebook PC segment, gaining share for as far as our records go back (2018). AMD also lost share in the overall x86 market during the quarter, but notched a solid gain for the year. Meanwhile, AMD continued to make its steady gains in the server market.

It's noteworthy that the fourth quarter of 2020 was anything but typical: The PC market continued its pandemic-fueled surge, seeing its largest growth in a decade. For example, while AMD lost share in the overall x86 market (less IoT) during the quarter, Mercury Research pegs the overall x86 market growth rate at an explosive 20.1%.

Intel obviously captured more of that growth than AMD, but it's important to remember that losing a slight bit of share in the midst of an explosive growth environment doesn't equate to declining sales - AMD grew its processor revenue by 50% last year and posted record financial results for the year.

Shortages have plagued AMD due to ongoing supply chain issues. Given the lack of AMD products on shelves, the company is obviously selling all of the silicon it can punch out, signaling strong demand. AMD expects to see 'tightness' throughout the first half of 2021 until added production capacity comes online, meaning we could see a limited supply of AMD's PC and console chips until the middle of the year.

Those shortages led to a scarcity of AMD's chips during the critical holiday shopping season in the fourth quarter, while Intel's chips were widely available and often selling at a discount. That obviously helped Intel recoup some share. During its recent earnings call, Intel also cited improving supply of lower-end processors, like those destined for Chromebooks, as a contributing factor. Intel CEO Bob Swan noted the company increased its PC CPU units by 33% during the fourth quarter.

Intel has also expanded its chip production by leaps and bounds over the last several years as it recovered from its own shortage of production capacity. The advantages of its IDM model are on clear display during the pandemic - the company's tight control of its supply chain and production facilities have allowed it to better weather disruptions.

That said, given the dynamic nature of the market, it's hard to draw firm conclusions on several of the categories below without more information. Dean McCarron of Mercury Research will provide us with detailed breakdowns for each segment in the morning, and we'll add his analysis as soon as it is available. For now, here's our analysis of the raw numbers.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...rk-scandal

Quote:The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), an industry consortium that develops performance benchmarks for servers and data centers and includes names like AMD, Intel, and IBM, has accused Nvidia of violating the TPC’s Fair Use Policy. To compare the performance of its GPUs against other machines, Nvidia presented results from workloads derived from official TPC benchmark workloads and compared them to official TPC results, a violation of the group's fair use policy.

At its GTC Fall 2020 virtual event last year, Nvidia presented a paper called State of RAPIDS: Bridging the GPU Data Science Ecosystem. In the paper, Nvidia demonstrated the advantages of its RAPIDS suite of GPU-accelerated software libraries for data science workflows over competing hardware and software platforms.
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The GPU giant claimed that its platform "outperformed by nearly 20x the record for running the standard big data analytics benchmark, known as TPCx-BB." However, Nvidia didn't run the workloads designed by TPC and used similar workloads instead, which violates TPC's policies and makes such comparisons invalid and generally unfair. However, Nvidia did mark the version of the TPCx-BB benchmark it used as 'not official.'

"The TPC actively encourages publicizing of TPC results by all organizations, including the press, market researchers, financial analysts and non-profit organizations," said Mike Brey, chairman of the TPC Steering Committee. "However, to ensure that users and readers of TPC results are given a fair and complete representation of TPC data, the TPC requests that all users follow the Fair Use rules, outlined in TPC policies, when publishing or publicizing results."

The TPC said it was working with Nvidia to correct the issue.

TPC is led by companies that produce CPUs, servers, and business software, including AMD, IBM, and Intel. It also includes cloud data center operators like Alibaba, Microsoft, and Oracle. Nvidia is not a member of the TPC.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...e-products

Quote:Intel has announced it will discontinue all of its Optane drives in the consumer space, even the top-end enthusiast-oriented products. This isn’t entirely surprising given how the storage market has performed these past few years, but we’re hoping it’s a tactical retreat, not a complete pullback.

According to new Product Discontinuation Notices, Intel has discontinued the M10, 800P, 900P, and 905P SSDs. That’s the entirety of the Optane desktop family, and the company does not plan to provide an immediate replacement. The discontinuation notice for the 905P family states: “Intel will not provide a new large capacity Optane Memory SSD as a transition product for the client market segment. Intel will focus on the new Optane Memory H20 with Solid State Storage for the client market segment.”
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This has undoubtedly hurt the adoption of Optane, which has remained far more expensive than NAND. This is scarcely unusual for emerging memory technology, but it hit Optane doubly hard. The performance arguments in favor of Optane are modest outside of certain server and enterprise workloads, but they exist. Had both technologies remained more competitive, Intel would have had more luck driving adoption. With NAND prices down so dramatically, there was less market for Optane as an SSD replacement or even an Optane cache drive.

Intel’s third-generation Optane — which won’t appear for a few years — is supposed to bring some genuine performance improvements, so we may have to wait a few years to see if Intel can scale 3DXPoint to the point that it leads NAND flash in all cases. If it can, we’ll probably see the technology reappear in consumer products. For now, however, Optane will be an enterprise-only option.

1-6-2021

Woman shot and killed in Capitol building is first casualty of the start of U.S. Civil War II.

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https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia...-gpu-rumor

Quote:Nvidia's Ampere architecture has just fairly recently arrived to consumers (at least for those who've managed to find it in stock), but that hasn't stopped leakers from figuring out what's next on Nvidia's agenda, at least for its future gaming architectures. 3dCenter.org Tweeted on new rumored specifications for Nvidia's future "Lovelace" AD102 chip, which might include 144 SMs and 18432 CUDA cores with around 66 TFlops of computing performance.

Beware, this is entirely based on rumors, and with how little we know about Nvidia's next GPU architectures, there's a huge chance most of this info is wrong. But, at least this post can give us some clues as to where Nvidia is headed.

One part of this rumor that does make sense is the codename "Lovelace"; Jensen a few years back at CES of 2018 was wearing a T-shirt with several names of popular mathematicians all through history. And with Nvidia's love for codenaming architectures with names of mathematicians, many believe Jensen was leaking the names of future architectures on his T-Shirt. One of those names was Lovelace.
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If you were wondering about Nvidia's other rumored architecture, Hopper, it seems right now that both Hopper and Lovelace are in the works. What makes Hopper interesting is its multi-die design, which would be a first for Nvidia. What we could see is Lovelace being Nvidia's gaming architecture, as one die decreases latency, then we could see Hopper as being a data center exclusive.

Quote:The rumor mill has begun grinding with details about NVIDIA's next-gen graphics processors based on the "Lovelace" architecture, with Kopite7kimi (a reliable source with NVIDIA leaks) predicting a 71% increase in shader units for the "AD102" GPU that succeeds the "GA102," with 12 GPCs holding 6 TPCs (12 SMs), each. 3DCenter.org extrapolates on this to predict a CUDA core count of 18.432 spread across 144 streaming multiprocessors, which at a theoretical 1.80 GHz core clock could put out an FP32 compute throughput of around 66 TFLOP/s.

The timing of this leak is interesting, as it's only 3 months into the market cycle of "Ampere." NVIDIA appears unsettled with AMD RDNA2 being competitive with "Ampere" at the enthusiast segment, and is probably bringing in its successor, "Lovelace" (after Ada Lovelace), out sooner than expected. Its previous generation "Turing" architecture saw market presence for close to two years. "Lovelace" could leverage the 5 nm silicon fabrication process and its significantly higher transistor density, to step up performance.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/comput...ts-in-2021

Quote:Computex, one of the largest tech tradeshows, has announced that they'll be one of the first conferences to bring back onsite in-person tradeshows in the aftermath of the Covid-19 shutdowns. Its upcoming show, Computer 2021, will occur from June 1st thru June 4th, 2021, and will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, at the normal locations: Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center and the Taipei International Convention Center.

https://www.techpowerup.com/275825/alleg...-showcased

Quote:Today, thanks to the ServeTheHome forum member "111alan", we have the first pictures of the alleged Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon processor. Pictured is what appears to be a dual-die design similar to Cascade Lake-SP design with 56 cores and 112 threads that uses two dies. The Sapphire Rapids is a 10 nm SuperFin design that allegedly comes even in the dual-die configuration. To host this processor, the motherboard needs an LGA4677 socket with 4677 pins present. The new LGA socket, along with the new 10 nm Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors are set for delivery in 2021 when Intel is expected to launch its new processors and their respective platforms.

The processor pictured is clearly a dual-die design, meaning that Intel used some of its Multi-Chip Package (MCM) technology that uses EMIB to interconnect the silicon using an active interposer. As a reminder, the new 10 nm Sapphire Rapids platform is supposed to bring many new features like a DDR5 memory controller paired with Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA); a brand new PCIe 5.0 standard protocol with a 32 GT/s data transfer rate, and a CXL 1.1 support for next-generation accelerators. The exact configuration of this processor is unknown, however, it is an engineering sample with a clock frequency of a modest 2.0 GHz.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asrock...phics-card

Quote:ASRock has introduced its first graphics card in an M.2-2280 form-factor. The M_2 VGA module is designed to add legacy display connectivity to any system that has an M.2 slot with a PCIe interface.

The ASRock M_2 VGA module uses Silicon Motion's SM750 display controller with 16MB of embedded memory and a PCIe x1 interface. The card has a 15-pin header to connect a D-Sub output that supports resolutions of up to 1920×1440. Since this is a single-chip board, its power consumption is rated at 1.49 Watts, which is almost negligible by today's standards in the PC world. Meanwhile, the unit still has an additional power connector.

The Silicon Motion SM750 is a rather simplistic display controller that only supports 2D graphics and a basic video engine. The chip features two display engines and has two 300 MHz RAMDACs, one TMDS transmitter, and one LVDS transmitter.
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ASRock Rack traditionally does not disclose prices of its products. Given that the M2_VGA module is to a large degree a niche device, it will be available only from resellers specializing in this kind of products.