Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the past week we already covered at Google stadia and a standalone piece right after the announcement so check that out if you want that news but for this one we're focusing back on PC hardware and one of the bigger news items headlining this one is AMD and Samsung and now it's not they're working together on a strategic partnership to license the rDNA architecture for mobile devices that's one of the bigger news items of today's show we also have a further discussion on the us-china trade war and how it's impacting PC prices and the PC industry some layoffs recently as well and then we'll be talking about AMD and its x86 licensing to China for first generation and what's happening after that along with some critical updates to Windows that you'll definitely want to grab before that this video is brought to you by Thermal Grizzlies conduct a not liquid metal conductor nada is what we've used in all of our liquid metal and delayed thermal tests capable of dropping CV thermals significantly and replacing the stock thermal interface over CPU thermals don't just allow better overclocks but also lower noise levels because the transfer efficiency is increased the mix of gallium and indium makes for a thermal conductivity of 73 watts per meter Kelvin outclassing traditional pastes significantly learn more at the link in the description below so quick GN Store news item first we restocked the blue with gold trim beer glasses if wanting one of those they are on store like Aaron's Nexus dotnet fully restocked and all the SKUs thank you for your patience on that Andy and Sam son announcing a strategic partnership for Radeon intellectual property Andy and Sam son are looking to form a joint multi-year partnership that would see AMD licensing its Radeon graphics IP to Samsung Samsung plans to leverage the AMD graphics technology specifically the rDNA architecture that was disclosed at Computex a couple weeks ago and these keynote for use with its own ARM based Exynos chips inside of mobile devices and our DNA is what lisa sue onstage was talking about being used to four at na'vi coming up on the desktop side this will likely allow Samsung to replace its existing Mally GPUs which is more ARM based intellectual property and it also gives Andy Radeon graphics yet another platform and revenue stream to grow up on this is something Andy has struggled with in the past where it's well up until risin and even for horizon first gen Andy has had to work with semi custom solutions somebody custom partners like the consoles with pretty low margins to try and gain some market share wealth to try and gain some money back so that they can then try and get in some market share back in the discrete component space so what's going on here is it looks like Andy having made inroads with its graphics IP outside of the PC industry is going to have a continually successful semi custom strategy and should start to build some additional revenue that it can then divert for other investments internally Andy hopes to deliver solutions and is already on tap for delivering solutions for the immediate next-gen consoles by both Sony and Microsoft and this is in addition to Google stadia which again we discussed in a separate piece a couple yesterday at the time this one live for stadia using Radeon graphics so Andy's got a couple of olive branches out there right now and it looks like even if some of these are lower margin it's starting to build a platform upon which it can potentially scale to maybe grow its discrete GPU division again because that is where Andy's hurting a lot right now versus Nvidia in the PC industry so partnering with one of the biggest phone manufacturers is certainly a potentially beneficial move for Andy we don't know the details obviously on the partnership in terms of financials but I it should be a good move certainly you'd hope they're not losing money so AMD may be able to carve out a new path to market its Radeon and rDNA architecture moving forward and this is something that we'll pay attention to even though we don't cover mobile devices this is relevant to the PC industry AMD is a it's not a small company but relative to Intel it is a small silicon manufacturer when you look at the the sheer size of someone like Intel or even on video which is a massive company as well so given that AMD is the smallest of the big three that we work with on this channel any move like working with Samson or Sony or Microsoft will impact how AMD grows and performs financially in our industry as well because it's it's a small enough company not small but small enough relative to the others that partnerships like these impacts the bottom line and potentially a significant way as they begin to accumulate so that's interesting news for AMD and something that we look forward to following more closely speaking of AMD an additional handy news the other big announcement of the past week other than stadia was the new Mac Pro which has received unrelenting mockery online particularly for its monitor stand and this isn't really technically in in the news document today I think we think when Eric was working on this one he decided it wasn't worth giving a further beating but the the note here I'll make is that there was a monitor stand announced it was at Apple's event it's it's a mod understand that's that's literally all it does it's not special it's not magical as Apple likes to call their devices it doesn't even have one button the thing Apple is best known for no it's it's a monitor stand and it's literally a thousand dollars that's all it is it is a one thousand dollar monitor stand for your monitor that does not come with its own stand anyway alongside the groundbreaking revolutionary monitor stand news which has undoubtedly over actually not even not even jokingly it has legitimately overshadowed pretty much everything else because of the mockery its received aside from the monitor stand there was also some AMD component reused in the new Mac Pro and this is interesting stuff because it's not something that was released separately for the DIY market so inside of Apple's new cheese grater there are AMD workstation class GPUs that will come in two flavors there's the AMD Pro Vega 2 and the Andy Pro Vega 2 duo for the time being and it seems and these newest cards will be solely available inside Apple's newest Mac Pro workstation although we'll hopefully see this change the new AMD Pro Vega 2 cards are based on AMD second generation Vega architecture while using seven nanometer Vega 20 silicon the Andy Pro Vega 2 offers 64 compute units or 4096 stream processors the cards clock rate tops out at 1700 megahertz and it's capable of 14.2 teraflops of FP 32 compute performance the pro Vega 2 card will also make use of 32 gigabytes of HB m to memory across a 4096 bit memory bus delivering up to one terabyte per second memory bandwidth and the reason this is fun for enthusiasts is because the pro vega 2 duo returns an d to its dual GPU days something we haven't seen for a little while 295x2 is probably one of the more recent ones that we can all remember so this offers to Vega 20 dies atop the same PCB and the pro vega 2 effectively doubles the previous specifications 128 to use equal to 81 92 stream processors between the two devices 28.4 teraflops of FP 32 if you'd like to add it that way and you can't really can't really do this but 64 gigabytes of HP m2 cumulatively between the tier now ultimately if each one has its own Bank of 32 gigabytes so but still it's a lot of memory on on one card and now of course Andy's infinity fabric is the connecting link for all of this so the interconnect the GPS will communicate through is infinitive an infinity fabric branded and it's got 84 gigabytes per second of bandwidth per direction and no word on price yet individually anyway but the GPS will likely cost as much as a good used car the Mac Pro though so Eric Hamilton does our news roundup since Krypton does a fantastic job of it but Eric did not put the Mac Pro in here and I'm actually glad about that because the hell I was meant to go off-script for a second did anyone see that the Mac Pro thing we don't really follow Mac too much but we're Apple but um so the the case design it's something that it seems like it leans more on the performance side it's got holes in it so that's actually good it's something we like seeing we probably won't realistically be able to test it with our ATX test bench it doesn't look like it'll fit we'd have to custom modify it and the problem is the only way we're working on this thing is if we buy it and then after reviewing it turn it and I'm out sure they'll take it back if I take a dremel to the case but maybe I could say it came that way so anyway we're probably not gonna look at it if we do we'll look up the whole system it doesn't look like a TX case benchmarking is going to work in this one without modifications and we they're like six thousand dollars there's some things I'll pay for we're not only not going to make ROI on six grand we will lose a lot of money so I'm not sure that'll happen a lot of you have requested a tow so I didn't want to address it anyway Samsung could ours TSMC as Nvidia's at foundry partner of choice for seven nanometer that's another big news item here it's it's a lot of silicon manufacturing news lately so according to some of the reports in the industry lately one of them being from industry soothsayers digit times who publish a lot of actually really interesting stories and videos intending to tap Samsung as its fab partner for seven nanometer ampere as far as we know ampere is intended as the successor to taurine and if that's not the name it doesn't matter there's a successor to Torian at some point that's what we're talking about there are precious little details about the architecture other than a 2020 release window for the next one it's been expected that Nvidia would continue its long partnership with TSM C but another report by EE x claims that samsung is quote aggressively undercutting tsmc with its own seven nanometer EUV note samsung landing and vidya as its seven nanometer partner is certainly something that would take the shine away from TSMC who've been leading the pack in terms of foundry processes lately and landing major deals with people like AMD who are growing right now quite a lot the EE Times report said quote separately one source said that Samsung is aggressively undercutting prices we're at 7 nanometer node with UV or extreme ultraviolet lithography offering some startups a full mask set for less than a multi-layer mask MLM said at its rival TSMC introduced the MLM mask sets in 2007 to lower cost for small volume runs they are said to be about 60% of the cost of a full mask set as Tom's Hardware notes cabassa could also be a consideration TSM sees at seven nanometer node has been seen a burgeoning demand as of late with AMD's rise in 3000 and epic roam as well as apples a 13 ship coming later in the year this news item is going to be a little bit longer but the us-china relations as it pertains to trade and tariffs do impact the industry it impacts PC hardware prices at some level already has and will continue to do so in fact at Computex just about a week ago when we were closing out the show we were talking to some of the case manufacturers and what their price targets were for cases coming out and a lot of them were about $10 higher for the US than they had been planned when the cases were in development for the past maybe between 6 and 18 months to put in what case it was so it is impacting things now there's more to talk about here MSI is apparently preparing for the worst and its own words the EVGA has now publicly mentioned some layoffs internally and there are server server market pains as well also DRAM market pains although no one feels bad for Dean or at matrix right now given the last several quarters of borderline gouging prices the u.s. trying to trade conflicts continues to have adverse effects on many facets of the tech industry tensions between the US and China for example have resulted in Huawei getting more or less blacklisted some of the ramifications from that haven't fully been realized yet either on top of that many American tech companies are being forced to drop their business with Huawei from that specific example and the newest revelation is the impact that this will likely have on the DRAM market so DRAM exchange a division of trend force pointed out that quote as ripples from the US band continued to spread Huawei's shipments of smartphone and server products are feared to face heavy obstacles for the next two to three quarters impacting peak season demand for drm products for second half and the time of price precipitation trend Force officially adjusts its outlook for a third quarter DRAM prices from its original prediction of a 10% decline to a widened 10 to 15% decline this was posted on DRAM exchange the report also notes that DRAM could rebound in 2020 behind bottoming prices and limited bit growth until then it's unlikely that anyone empathizes with the do game makers given the last several quarters of again really high prices and murmurings of price fixing and actual government investigations into it meanwhile PC vendors like MSI have been caught directly in the crossfire of the tariff increases in the trade war and Tom's Hardware was able to catch up with MSI CEO Charles Jian at Computex 2019 where he stated MSI was preparing for the worst the full quote was I've been very very busy lately you always need to prepare for the worst right right now the 200 billion dollar in trade is already at 25% tariff and then we were worried the next wave will be 325 billion dollars in goods at 25% tariff that's why we need to prepare for the worst so what I'm doing right now we will move more and more capacity back to Taiwan it is our short and midterm strategy in the long term we will go to Vietnam or somewhere but Taiwan is the short term solution that is the only way we can do it right now and that's the quote from MSI CEO directly as obtained by Tom's Hardware who were at the show as well this isn't the first company we've heard of moving manufacturing back to Taiwan or not China in general we visited MSI's factory in China not long ago and about March just before all of this started happening and when we were there they had already told us that there was about a 50% workforce reduction over the past few years as the company has moved to automate a lot of its lines now from what the company and other companies in China have also told us apparently it's not so easy to get the factory laborers that you would typically employ for those positions anymore because in Shenzhen and dong-gwon a lot of the workforce has moved more towards the service industry and away from the the factory life but that was largely surmounted with automation and a lot of it but now it looks like these companies are mostly moving their operations to Taiwan despite a lot of the the larger of the manufacturers owning the factories that they use in China and that's pretty rare most the time companies will source factories but don't actually own them so not sure exactly which companies we we can publicly say our back in Taiwan for manufacturing but suffice to say most of the board partners that we work with regularly are either actively moving or have already moved manufacturing to Taiwan and gigabyte publicly has a factory in Taiwan which is at more or less maximum capacity now more than previously and that's a factory we've actually toured two gigabyte is using that factory primarily for high-end boards and then they're still in China for most of their other stuff and we'll be looking at other solutions for longer term so some vendors have been able to absorb the first wave of the tariffs without sacrificing pricing others are trying to wait it out some like MSI for instance are moving product lines out of China altogether or trying to with a little to no incentive to return at least not in the immediate future the terrorists have already affected our products as well @gn so the mod mats we took a there was a tariff hiked ten percent last year 2018 end of year and we absorbed that cost ourselves the tariff hike now will impact us again and we were worried that the tariffs might force us to increase mod net prices but I've spent the personally the better half of the last week working with our our partners our distribution partners and manufacturing partners in trying to find ways to cut costs elsewhere without cutting product manufacturing costs without reducing the quality of the product and without increasing our prices so we found some good solutions where we eat a little bit of margin again so it's starting to suck a lot but we're not losing money so that's good and we're making enough money where we can justify making the mats obviously and we don't have to raise the prices which is fantastic but to do that required a lot of work on on on my part on our partners side of things and the end result is that we found a few clever places to cut some of our cost without sacrificing anything and a lot of those have to do with with things like I mean shipping and logistics like do we put more of them on a boat instead of a plane that saves a lot of money but it does mean that we have a 60 day cycle between Matt inventory arriving so we've managed to split the orders a bit in a way that saves us some money gets the mats and early enough to meet the next orders and then the rest of them will be following that on a bit of a latency but the cost comes down in a way that we don't have to increase the prices so anyway long story short it affects us too so finally the server market continues to see some uncertainties as well as a result of the us-china trade war and there's another quote here from digit times this one says as suppliers for the cloud computing data center segment are still clearing their inventory and us-china trade tensions have created uncertainties demand for data center servers has been decreasing since early 2019 and may cause Intel's data center business group to suffer its first on your revenue decline in 10 years in 2019 so the problem that the server market faces appears to be two-pronged Huawei's blacklisting will cause major server outfitters like Intel and NVIDIA to lose revenue and more to the point China could retaliate by boycotting some US goods cutting server companies off from the Chinese market period or in large part and then back to the mod mats briefly being a smaller manufacturer we're able to allocate all of our time for the amount of time needed to figure out pricing in a way that it doesn't go up for people buying the product we I personally really don't want the price to go up like we're pretty happy with where they are losing margins not fun obviously but we'd rather take a bit more of a margin hit again then increase the prices so can't guarantee this forever if the tariffs keep going up it will eventually force us to increase prices we're doing our best to stay ahead of it we are very proactive in this and anyway obviously our number-one goal here as a smaller manufacturer where I'm directly involved it's not like some CEO super top level 20 steps above the product being made I mean this was my product my goal is to make sure people can actually get it at the price that we want to sell it for not at a higher price then you know that starts pricing people out so anyway that's the goal moving on and they will no longer license x86 chip designs to China and these 2016 technology licensing deal it struck with China come well well come to an end as Lisa suit confirmed with Tom's Hardware last week China will still be able to develop chips based on Andy's first generation of Zen and this encompasses Rison and epic Naples as well however Andy will not extend its more recent x86 IP including the recent Zen to architecture and Rome to to China for the licensee this was known as the Tianjin higuaín advanced technology invents investments Company Limited go figure it's the English word I'd screw up on deal between AMD and China serves as both a path to the lucrative Chinese market for Andy and a chance for China to develop its own x86 technology regarding the future of this group Lisa sue stated quote we are not discussing any additional technology transfers and said that this was a single generation technology license and there are no additional technology licenses on to Intel quote x4 99 news few things here so X 499 a n X 499 motherboard in quotes was shown at Computex we spoke to gigabyte about this so this first was brought to my attention when we were on with PC world on one of their videos and Gordon mentioned to me on camera did you see the gigabyte X 499 leaked and do you think it was real leaked so the story as it goes was that there was a sticker on top of the the name and someone peeled it off and gotcha they they caught gigabyte and it's an export night and Ford to disappoint everyone that was not an X $4.99 board so a few things here one of them come do this a lot motherboard manufacturers start developing their product before the chips that's available to them and we've seen this we've seen it with X 578 470 and even 370 and when I say we I mean sometimes us exclusively without the ability to publish it and sometimes we've been able to publish it even as much as looking at the motherboards on camera but what is often not allowed in those circumstances is the removal of a chipset heatsink and that's because although the board might be ready like the PCB in the vrm or partially ready and although the name of the board might be ready and printed on to the engineering sample there's not actually that chipset on it so again x5 74 73 70 even Z 390 C 370z to set basically every board we've ever reported on where we got to see it in advance whether we could tell you about it or not they did not have the chips that's on them when it was far enough in advance that the launch was still several months away so they were engineering boards often with the older chipset for testing and validation purposes now raises the question is it still an x5 70 board then is it still an X 499 board then well the answer is no it's not but it might eventually be one the question in this instance though expands to will it ever be X 499 or is it just going to stay X 299 and this is where we can read some of the statement that I got from gigabyte which we've already published on our YouTube community page but we'll go through it here here's what we've posted on the YouTube community page we said we asked gigabyte about that X 499 motherboard spotted at Computex 2019 when we talked about in the video on PC world and gigabyte officially confirmed to GM that the board is X 299 the chipset is the same as two years ago and the sticker is a mix up or a mistake X 499 doesn't presently exist as a chip set we went on to say it might close er to launch but that board didn't have it that's a placeholder gigabyte might call that board and probably will X 299 G to differentiate the newer SKUs but it's the same X 299 ships head-on that convention show board and just we just wanted to follow up with gigabyte officially now we've spoken to some more people since then and our understanding is that it will remain X 299 G is gigabyte thing gigabyte decided to add the G to the end of X $2.99 that is not Intel gigabyte does it to differentiate the newer or the refresh SKUs versus the older ones as we understand it Intel has no current plans to release a new X $4.99 chipset that could change but if they do there probably won't be massive changes to the chips I will see that part we're a little uncertain on what we are absolutely certain on is the board at Computex was not X $4.99 it was X $2.99 g as gigabyte calls it but X $2.99 anyway probably not going to be an export native 9 chipset for the update Glacier Falls I think they call it later this year but that's what we know so X 49 unfortunately not actually at the show is something that a little insight information for you though a lot of the times the boards that say they have a new chipset if it's like the only one you've seen from a show like that one they don't actually have a new chipset they're just named that and then the real trick is was the person showing it able to with or without the company knowing remove the chipset heatsink and if they did take a good look at the chipset and see if it physically looks different than the previous models or if it's got a laser etched a name in it then even easier and that may tell you if it's actually the new chipset or not that's not just this launch that's all of them going forward keep that in mind move it on Windows Patch blue keep and the exploit and then Windows 10 getting variable refresh rate toggles in the OS not long ago we reported on a wearable exploit that warranted enough caution from Microsoft to deliver a critical update to the ancient Windows XP the exploit has since earned the name blue keep and Microsoft has doubled down on its warning to update and patch almost all Windows versions even the NSA has added its voice to the chorus quotes the National Security Agency is urging Microsoft Windows administrators and users to ensure they are using a patch and updated system in the face of growing threats recent warnings by Microsoft stressed the importance of installing patches to address the protocol vulnerability and older versions of Windows they went on to say that this is a were mobile flaw that could be fixed so TLDR update Windows it's that it actually matters this time and then finally and we'll keep this one short because we're running lon the may 20 19 steam hardware survey shows RT acts as a slow burner despite the aspiring competition in the epic game store steam is the for most PC gaming platform still and its new a PC hardware survey shows some information on RT X the most notable observations that RT acts at card adoption rate is on the rise slowly but surely the install base for Nvidia's RT X cards rose roughly is 0.31% between April and May with the RTS 2060 accounting for the bulk of that growth unsurprisingly and videos 1060 and 1050 I still remain the most popular cards outside of GPUs most gamers are still using quad-core CPUs with hexa core and octa core processors being a distant second and third place Windows 10 is still the OS of choice and 1920 by 1080 is still the most dominant resolution for the majority of gamers on the platform so that will cap our news recap for the week subscribe for more go to store documents access net sports directly or grab one of our mod mats they will be on backorder once again now that we've figured out the issues with the tariffs and patriotic a transaxle behind the scenes videos thank you for watching we'll see you all next time