Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome back to another hardware news episode this one is packed with some really cool stories that's why we decided to film another one so close to the last one couple things here AMD is working with a China based vendor to work on some new CPUs they are licensing there's an architecture for that so that's big news also be talking about Taiwan tech company trade secrets being stolen by their China based company counterparts and also DIY soldered CPUs by one mr. dare Bauer the overclocker trying to solder his own CPU because I guess if Intel's not gonna do it he wants to try and also scientific advancements and coolant materials some Jeon exclusive leaks about vago laptops incoming and more before that this video is brought to you by Thermaltake and the view 71 enclosure the view 71 is a full tower case that's capable of fitting three video cards and most configurations it's also one of the better cooling cases in our recent case testing bench lineup the view 71 has hinged a tempered glass doors on either side that make it easy to open and show off and it comes with at least one rain fan though you can get the RGB version if you prefer learn more at the link in the description below so the GN news first first off we have an overclocking livestream with the 8086 cake coming up this week it'll be tomorrow I think at the time this video airs so Wednesday is the day we're doing a livestream Wednesday July 11th at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and tune in for that basically you know overclock the 8086 K as far as we can a lot of it will be figured out live because I haven't had a whole lot of hands-on time with it other than to make sure the thing works so definitely tune in for that stream will be a lot of fun and then also we had an issue with this this location almost burning down so I've got some photos of a breaker panel and I just wanted to share this because it's it's we're very lucky that this did not turn into a bigger issue but basically we had some circuits installed for testing and one of the circuits installed was a 20 amp circuit for power supply to a scene you may remember that we got a Sun Moon power supply tester recently so that didn't cause any of the issues but the new circuit put in the electricians we had I'm out left as I understand it some wires hanging inside of the panel which caused one of the breakers to jump or bridge to the busbar there was a lot of very loud arcing you could hear from outside the building even so the fact that you could hear arcing electricity from a hundred feet away through a wall it tells you how much power was really involved in this scenario and basically it almost burned down the house and so there's scorch marks everywhere has results of it in addition to leaving the wire hanging and arcing things the electricians also installed incompatible breakers with our breaker panel that I obviously wasn't aware of so that was a problem those were the first ones that melted it was actually a sort of series event firefighters responded we were able to keep it controlled nothing actually burned down but it was a close one so obviously we're very mindful of these things now this wasn't even caused by us this was just an electrician not doing their job properly so $1,600 mistake that hopefully I get refunded for later we're working on that but we had to replace the entire panel so that was a bit of a dilemma and what I'm getting at is we were taken down for a couple of days there to get new electrical panel and installed and all that stuff so that was a lot of fun but just goes to show that there's I guess make sure your electricians bring out someone to inspect it is what I'm getting at here so anyway that set us back a little bit then we have the the NASA almost dying problem with which set us back some more but we have that all fixed up now so everything's good to go and we have a lot going on this week livestream is one of them specialized throw and paste testing that I'll tell you more about later 8086 k thermal testing special CPU overclocking features that we won't go into detail yet on and the in one a one review so this week will be packed with really good content if you've been looking forward to some more testing base stuff I know the last week or two were a bit dry on testing but a lot of that's because of all of the administrative and catastrophic failures that we've had to deal with in terms of the panel and the size of the sign ology nast both of which are now resolved thankfully all right first major news item is the Andy a news item about CPUs and and seeing the Zen architecture and x86 to a new company in the space and II is licensing its Zen architecture to Chinese manufacturer hi GaN the new x86 processor is codenamed Deanna and uses Andy's Zen architecture as part of China's made in China 2025 program which is part of China's plan to become a global technology capital not just a manufacturing country as for x86 licensing that's the tricky part Tom's Hardware reports the following quote as part of the licensing agreement AMD established a joint venture in China called the Tianjin higuaín advanced technology investment co limited or aesthetic I guess is the easier way to say it and agreed to license its x86 and SOC IP for chip development that it consists of Andy and both public and private Chinese companies including the Chinese Academy of Sciences that is heavily influenced by the Chinese government to stay within legal boundaries HMC licenses its IP to high gan which designs the x86 chips and then sells the design back to HMC so quoting Tom's Hardware therefore that part the reason that's all very important is because if you don't know Intel owns the x86 license and the owns the 64-bit license and they cross license with each other so each one can work within those parameters but to bring a new company into the space for cpu development and get x86 is more or less impossible because you're relying on Intel who hold the x86 license to actually grant that license to the new contender in the space so that's pretty interesting and it shows I don't know it's it's a roundabout way for AMD - I suppose sub license to this new company that is based in China also these deana chips are only intended for the Chinese market so don't expect to see them outside of China next story is very interesting so this is something published by The Wall Street Journal that we didn't really encourage you to read it's by the tech industry and it's about Taiwan technology companies having some corporate espionage issues with other companies in the space so the Wall Street Journal published an excellent story about the technology industry trade secrets and the practices of keeping those secret as a whole including the theft of those trade secrets so we wanted to bring more attention to the story enough they need the help but I will link it in the show notes below if you want to check it out the gist of it is this in 2016 a state-owned Chinese semiconductor manufacturer Shanghai Holi micro electronics Corp infiltrated Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company which many of you are likely familiar with TSM C it is often called in our space so TSM C makes things like GPS there's silicon manufacturer they work with Nvidia they work with AMD they work with bit mains become a big customer of theirs so TSM C had an issue with this company where the state-owned Chinese semiconductor manufacturer was able to illegally access quote reams of trade secrets to quote The Wall Street Journal and the employee implicated in this corporate espionage was sentenced to a suspended 18-month prison term for IP theft we can also see moves involving micron lately where Chinese courts have suddenly expressed an interest in IP and copyright lawsuits that benefit Chinese competition particularly state-owned competition the country is looking to launch its own memory supplier if you weren't aware of that and would basically offer competition to SK Hynix Samsung and micron and of course none of these three companies are necessarily innocent of doing non shady things either but there will be a new vendor potentially joining the space recently a micron engineer was recruited by UMC the company that just had a preliminary injunction imposed on micron in China and that engineer has been indicted on charges of trade secret theft as he moved from micron to UMC although UMC is a taiwan based competitor the illegally taken documents were used to design chips for Fujian genoise integrated circuit company a Chinese semiconductor company or manufacturer Nonya is another one that you might be familiar with this is a smaller dram and NAND manufacturer and one of the smallest in the industry Nonya is responsible for most of the SSD DRAM caching modules that you'll find on Mt - and 2.5 inch SSDs so there's DRAM cache they probably make it they recently sued one of their engineers or former engineers for supply and manufacturing photographs - Sinha Yuna group Limited which the Wall Street Journal reports is China's largest state-owned chip maker so according to this write-up by a Wall Street Journal technology theft has allegedly doubled in the last few years vs. 2013 and it's actually the whole articles are really fascinating to read about our industry's intellectual property and trade secret practices protecting those practices and the corporate espionage so that's definitely the most interesting part but encourage you to check out the story check out the show notes below if you need a link for it but pretty interesting stuff that's very related to our industry and what we can expect over the next few years the next story moves away from Asia and back to Germany where we have der Bauer who recently tried to solder a CPU so this comes back to something that a lot of you have asked us in the past which is well if Intel is not going to solder it and you're replacing the thermal paste with liquid metal why not just solder it while you're at it and our answers as always has always been it's really basically not feasible at least not for us there Bauer had access to a couple of extra tools though and bought some for this and he worked with a Trinity APU partly because it was a non soldered component it's old it's not really worth anything so the chances of screwing up the AP are really not high risk and we'll save the conclusion for his video if you want to see the conclusion go check it out but to give you an idea part of what Durbar learned is that the process for soldering a CPU is actually obviously pretty complex and what he did is went and looked at the patent documents by intel on their soldering process because those are all public and he looked at it and tried to use that as a guideline for what he wanted to do working with a couple of soldering engineering companies in the space to figure out the best solution that was feasible for someone in a knot fabrication plant environment to solder a CPU some of the things he learned were that you have to coat the backside of the wafer there has to be a mix of titanium nickel and gold and then a solder sheet and a couple of materials in there as well it's just a big stack of materials he's got a diagram of it in his video you can't use normal solder because the melting point is too high which is a big problem that he faced in his attempt to solve this problem additional coating of layers on the wafer including gold are necessary to protect the CPU and actually make contact with anything and then he also had to edge the indium oxide layer with hydrochloric acid every hour or so while working on this because it would build up I suppose an oxidation layer on the outside of the components he was working with soldering and also could not get straight indium to just stick to the service and had to find an alloy of some kind which I believe used some percentage of silver maybe 3% silver in there as well with the indium and ultimately face an issue with thickness of the layers of solder this is something we've talked out with our d-lighting practices where a lot of the performance gain is actually from getting rid of the thickness between the dye and the IHS so you're bringing the IHS down closer to the dye and thinning out the thermal interface between it whether that's solder or something else it doesn't matter the idea is the same which is that the more you reduce the thermal interface between them the more heat can transfer just straight into the IHS and get out of there rather than something where you've got gaps and thicker layers that can have some uncharacteristic or or improper thermal results for what we're going for which is ultimately to reduce the temperature of the dye not to increase the temperature of the dye so go watch their bowers video for the results I've left them out just because you should watch his video really it's very interesting we it's worth it and check out the link below if you want to see that one next one is scientific advancements in cooling materials that were put out this week so science journal recently published a research paper detailing efforts to create a highly thermally conductive semiconductor that can be worked with as a replacement to silicon so it's electrically similar to silicon but with higher thermal conductivity the researchers stated that thermal conductivity of their non-toxic boron arsenide solution is now reaching 1,000 watts per meter Kelvin for comparison copper would be at around 405 watts per meter Kelvin at 25 degrees Celsius with aluminum at around 200 watts per meter Kelvin silicon's thermal conductivity tends to be around 150 watts per meter Kelvin and that ranks the boron arsenide material as about seven times more thermally conductive than traditional silicon this would allow heat to exit the silicon faster and spread across the service area faster and then into the attached cooling devices we're currently unclear on if this boron arsenide solution will be able to replace silicon components and things we're used to working with or if it's more of a specialized component for the future for example in highly thermally sensitive scenarios like in a spaceship or an Intel I 9 CPU for example they're about the same really it might be a future engineering Avenue and something to pay attention to but this is still in the research paper phase and they have actually been designing and working with the material but we're not anywhere close to any kind of mass production or adoption just yet the next one is about Vega laptops incoming this is a note that we received so gamers X has received information from close to AMD that Vega mobile devices are on the way at this point and the first one from what we understand is basically a cut-down Vega GPU from the GPU architecture on desktop that we already know so architectural II won't be all that different from Vega 56 or 64 however it's going down to 1792 stream processors typically you just multiply by 64 so 56 times 64 64 times 64 is 4096 so you'd have 4096 stream processors on Vega 64 1792 is the cut-down version and it's going to have at least four gigabytes of HP m2 and it will be using 40 nanometer process so far not a whole lot of changes clocks will likely be in the range of 1100 to 1350 megahertz depending on the thermal scenario and final engineering decisions that we might not be privy to right now over clocks are also supposed to be at least unlocked on some devices from what we understand and our sources have further informed us that it's essentially again a cut-down Vega architecture GPU just in a laptop so there is some debate potentially going on of if there's going to be a higher capacity solution in terms of memory then four gigabytes could be eight be a bit odd to do six but certainly possible just cause at that point you're doing two stacks anyway so we'll go with eight but we're unclear on what the final choice was there so anyway coming to the laptops soon TM not clear on when but it might be towards the end of the year would make the most sense based on a and these other announcements next up workstation performance GPU testing our friends over at Tech Age just published a detailed benchmark of workstation performance with different GPUs this is something we don't get too far into on our side of testing but we wanted to highlight Rob Williams work on benchmarking high-end GPUs for non-gaming workloads the testing included 3ds max 2019 rendering or the Titan X Peas managed to outperform the 1080i and quad rose and also blender where the AMD rx Vegas 64 card excelled to a point of only being outperformed by dual Titan XP cards tech gauge has also tested Vegas and other software not to be confused with Vegas but Vegas the editing software find the rest of their tests at the link in our show notes we're go to tech age comm look for their workstation GPU test we've previously reported on Arctic cool ins plans to bring completely passive coolers to market the company has finally launched its coolers it names the Alpine 12 series and aims to offer them at around $15 the coolers have pre applied mx2 compound no fans included as is the nature of passive cooling and use a simple aluminum fin stack atop the socket these aren't rated for much they can take about 47 Watts TDP depending how you measure it and will work with both a m4 and low-end Intel 11 5 X components and socket types finally hardware sales for the week cooler masters original H 500 P yes that one the one that fell apart and then later has been significantly improved that case is on sale for about 110 bucks but it includes a $30 rebate if you count those not everyone does which is fair and if you do count it it brings down to about 80 bucks so the case still has every single problem that we didn't like about it originally they're trying to clear the channel because as those go out of stock the stuff with the changes that fixed all the problems we had and everyone else had will come in to stock so they're clearly trying to clear stock that said if you're willing to put about half an hour of work into it and find mesh somewhere you could do the math mod that we did and you'll basically have an aged 500 P mesh which is actually case we highly recommend for 80 bucks plus the cost of 30 minutes of your time and a filter so we would not recommend it as a standalone purchase but if you are okay with modding or I think it might be a fun project it would be worthwhile at that price because it is actually a pretty good deal and you come in under the age 500 PMS still and come out ahead Corsairs vengeance lpx memories also sort of on sale as much as memory can be these days that is available in 16 gigabyte to buy capacities at 3000 megahertz for around 176 which is likely marked down and part due to its green PCB which I'm sure Corsair is ashamed of now that they've stuck RGB and black PCBs on every single thing that they make so that's on sale sort of and then EVGA is new 750 PQ supernova power supplies the Platinum certified ones that just came out are sort of markdown as well for about 14 percent off on new life but anyway links below for those if you're interested in any of them as always show notes and the links in the description below if you want to try out the sources for any of this stuff you go to store documents nexus dotnet let's pick up one of our blue print shirts that we just restocked except you've also already bought a lot of them but thank you for the support and go to patreon.com/scishow to join our patreon discord thank you for watching I'll see you all next time