Gadgetory

hey ron i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and this is your weekly hardware news recap first up for this week is the patent lawsuit between Nvidia and Samsung that is still progressing not a big surprise though and if you recall one of our last updates and Vidya actually lost its case against Samsung and NVIDIA is appealing that decision so the quick history here is that Nvidia issued a patent lawsuit against Samsung for alleged GPU patent technology infringement and Samson then countersued Nvidia on four counts of alleged patent infringement but from samson side they were alleging that Nvidia had infringed upon intellectual property involving memory technology memory chips and these were of course used in GPU so both major companies have been fighting each other to try and stop or prohibit sales of one device or another from either company and that would be a pretty big somewhat vicious movement that I actually played through on either side but so far NVIDIA has lost its claims against Samson and actually Nvidia had one of its patents invalidated in the process samsung had its four claims looked at by a judge and so forth and the first one fell through the second two were ruled a mistrial and then the last patent infringement count that samson was bringing to levy against and vidya was ultimately ruled on by a jury which found that just recently and video was not infringing on any patent technology which of course made nvidia very happy as they note in their statements so so far the main thing going on right now is an appeal process between Nvidia and Sam somewhere and videos trying to appeal their decision where they were pursuing Samsung or patent infringement for GPU technology so that is where things stand right now next up is a pretty major announcement from micron which is one of the world's leading memory manufacturers they work on SSDs and on DRM and also on vram and this news pertains to the vram market so micron has its gddr5 x memory which is not the same as gddr5 and it is not the same as hbm so there's gddr5 in the middle is 5x on the far speed is hbm and hpm version 2 is coming soon sometime this year likely with Pascal and the other architecture updates so the deal here with GDR 5x is it's a bit faster actually forty-seven percent faster than gddr5 non ex and that is because the non x version has a throughput of 8 gigabits per second whereas the new gddr5 x version of the GPU memory is actually a 13 gigabits per second quite a speed increase again forty-seven percent so that will be major for the GPUs that don't feature hbm or hbm version 2 for reasons like cost and hbm is a bit too expensive right now to be hitting the lower end market maybe even the mid-range markets we don't know exactly how much cost but it's certainly too much for low-end and in these certain applications the memory used will either be gddr5 or microns brand-new gddr5 X which will be a bit faster be cheaper than hbm and actually gddr5 X is a lower power consumption as well so it's good all around it's just a matter of implementation at this point and mass production is already rolling out micron has already tested its initial samples and they've claimed that things are looking good so far we've got a quick news item on the game in front so this one is about unity which of course is one of the most popular and prolific game engines on the market it is competing most directly with CryEngine and that's made by Crytek and unreal engine made of course by epic game so these are the sort of the big three engines right now and just as a quick aside lumberyard which is an amazon engine that is sort of ill-fated ly named amazon lumberyard isn't exactly the greatest selection of two words that you can put next to each other but that is another new engine that is based on CryEngine so we've got four but three major engines that have some tenure in the industry that's unity unreal and cry engine and the news item here is that unity engine has just added support officially for steam or valve vr and that would include the HTC vive which is manufactured by HTC they use their production lines and their advantage with certain technologies like displays and it is engineered by valve who have built up this contract so the I've will be supported through unity and that is good news for game development all around because hopefully this helps the major issue that we've talked about with virtual reality which is a Content problem this was further solved in another news item from the past week by assistance from gabe newell from valve so in a recent steam event a steam vr event the HTC vive was provided for free too many many developers and this was a gesture on Valve's part to try and improve the content upon initial launch which will hopefully trickle down to the consumer in a way that makes steam VR or the HTC vive a more immediately valuable product upon purchase in partnership with AMD HP the hewlett-packard company that produces laptops and computers has started to move free sync technology into its AMD apu laptop so any a series laptop the HP cells or at least most of them going forward we'll be featuring some version of free sync this is for a few reasons I one of course they're pushing the adaptive synchronization angle where you get this adaptive frame rate synchronization thing going on if you are a gamer but the main news item here probably for the laptop argument of things is as reduce power consumption so if you have an adaptive sync technology like free sync there should actually theoretically be slightly lower power consumption that could impact battery life we have not validated this internally I would love to do that but of course until that time I can't really say for sure what the real world impact is but that is certainly the advertised impact from both HP and AMD the last news item is a pretty major one this is about CPU architectures of course I'm talking about zen and the news here is that CERN the European research firm that works with nuclear and particle acceleration and all these different types of scientific technologies they had a conference where they talked about zen and if you're wondering why it's because these processor architectures are pretty critical to the advancement of science early research and they're normally looking at things that are very heavily threaded looking at 64 or even in some cases hundreds or thousands of cores and threads but on our end we also benefit from the advancements of new architecture so relevant to us as gamer the majors n updates that were announced recently are an alleged forty percent improvement in IPC which is an aspect of processing that intel currently excels at which directly relates to gaming performance for the most part and that's because a lot of games are very heavily single-threaded dual threaded and they like those higher instructions per clock or per cycle that intel is generally advantaged with on the zen that's moving forty percent forward in a good direction hopefully to achieve some level of parity with intel and then the next major item is that zen will be on 14 nanometer FinFET process which we discussed in our AMD polaris video live from the show floor of CES so FinFET just a very very brief and quick recap with processing nodes you have the transistors that are the item described by the nanometer so that's sort of what we're talking about when we say 14 nanometer FinFET we are specifically talking about the process or the manufacturing fabrication process used to create those transistors FinFET the word thin is as in shark fin and that very literally means there's a fin on either side of the transistor so you create this bucket it's straight down on the sides and flat on the bottom more or less anyway that's sort of a very simplistic overview of it and this means that there's less power leakage and it contains its power a bit better all these things are beneficial especially to Andy who have needed the power and wat draw advantage in recent years and that is shown on Polaris and hopefully will be shown in AMD Zen so then we'll be using FinFET 49 abou process just like their new GPUs and it's also theoretically got a 40-percent IPC increase from the previous architecture which would include the fx-8350 for example which is a number of years old now so very exciting news all around if Andy can actually deliver on these things because it's been as I said a number of years since a major processor architecture from the company other than just more and more refresh is and for more news as always subscribe to the channel hit the patreon link commercial video if you want holds out directly and I will see you all next time