Gadgetory

everyone so we're at GTCC 2018 sort of the end of it at this point and we're doing a recap for news for the past ten days or so there's been some stuff here I'll be talking about stuff we saw at the conference Jensen's keynote which was about three hours long and entirely a hunter ai and deep learning automation things like that and I also be talking about a couple of other news items for the past week CTS labs once again we have an update there we have some news on meltdown and Specter that we got here at the conference actually some pretty cool stuff in terms of performance information and high performance applications and then a couple of other minor news items for the past week this video is brought to you by the gamers Nexus anti-static mod mat our mod mat uses a high quality anti-static surface with a rubberized finish we also have a custom paint job on it which includes reference points and cheat sheets for PCIe eps 12 volt and other power cables along with quick reference thermal paste application guides a screw sorter for your video card tear downs and it includes a common ground point and a grounding strap to help protect the products you are working on from electrostatic discharge order your mat now at the link in the description below so first news item than the keynote at GTCC the graphics technology or GPU technology conference historically there have been a couple of launches here for GPUs the Titan X was one of them nothing here this time we did get some valuable information though we had a video where we spoke with SK Hynix about G DDR 6 and its inclusion on future NVIDIA GPUs a couple of things I wanted to go over now that we didn't talk about Foley in that video for one if you haven't seen that video go watch it but basically the the point we're getting across is GG dr6 is expected for mass production from hynek's in about three months so that would be June July timeframe and Samsung has already been in mass production for GG dr6 so they've been on the way our understanding presently is that hynek's is supposed to be one of the launch partners for the new and video GPUs if that's accurate what we've been told is accurate then it would be reasonable to assume short of trickling out GG dr6 that Nvidia's next major gaming consumer GPU launch won't be for at least three months since that's when mass production starts on the hynek's g6 memory but again lots of things are considered there one is if they've been trickling out memory for the last few months then they could still have launched product even if it's not mass production the other one is Samsung it's in the game too so if they're the major launch vendor things could still happen sooner than it greater than or equal to three months from now that said NVIDIA has in the past launched gaming grade GPUs in the September to October window and if history repeats itself that seems like it would be reasonable to happen again they're not under a lot of pressure from AMD right now they're not under a lot of pressure from their own architecture right now because they're still selling through Pascal partly thanks to crypto partly thanks to demand in general and that said I've received a lot of emails from you all in the past week about the lack of a pre-order button on Nvidia's website where they've removed it and just said that the cards are out of stock now as opposed to enabling you to preorder the cards for the next round so the fact that that's going away as many of you have indicated is potentially the start of the end for some of the Pascal cards that they might be winding down in production if they won't be selling them directly that could also just be completely unrelated in coincidental but either way from the GDR six-story it looks like we're at least three months out assuming hynek's is in fact a launch partner and assuming that informations correct so we're looking at a little while for consumer grade GPUs if you haven't seen the keynote if you save you some time if you are not interested in deep learning machine learning machine intelligence AI autonomous vehicles anything like that don't bother the keynote will not interest you if you're interested in those things then at a top level you've got a recap if you're beyond top level you need more than it will not interest you so a couple other things we saw here at the conference one was a quick AI for locomotion and animation talk that we went to it's pretty interesting basically talking about the usage of AI routines to allow pathfinding in animations and models and games as characters NVC or PC navigate their way through complex terrain so we have some clips of that some of its kind of funny but basically they create a reward system so the AI as its training is rewarded with something something good from the system from the program if it's able to balance correctly navigate terrain correctly etc if it falls down it does not get that reward so it's basically a deep learning version or a machine learning version to get AI to train itself how to navigate terrain but whether that can be used completely independently from actors or whether there's a use case outside of a crowd simulation for example remains to be seen for crowd simulation makes a lot of sense because there's some physics there's some physical interactions there think of assassin's creed for example push your way through a crowd maybe some NPC characters lose balance or maybe they they step in a specific way in relation to how you are moving through them not something you really want for a hero character you don't want the hero character randomly falling over because they lose balance but for a crowd simulation it makes a lot of sense so that's something we saw here we also talked or saw a talk about meltdown inspector that was given from somebody at Red Hat and Red Hat's local to us back home so we'll try and talk with them about this in greater detail but of interest to you all the primary impact from meltdown inspector from this talk was largely going to be on database and from the standpoint of database the impact is mostly looking at 7 to 20 percent hit performance it for disk intensive i/o intensive and database applications whereas more consumer facing applications as we've seen in the past should expect a much smaller performance hit from meltdown inspector mitigation updates whether that software firmware mostly microcode and firmware at this point so it's kind of good news for consumer face and stuff bad news for anyone who does a lot of work with databases we're gonna try and talk with red hat and follow up more on that get some one-on-one time for a future interview but that's what we got for now basically impact is looking at 7 to 20 percent for database and that range shrinks if you're using ret pulling verse is IBRS which i believe are some of the patches they were talking about or mitigation techniques with rat pulling being a lot less and IBRS being a bit more 12 to 20 percent performance it next one so outside of those we also I guess just recap II here look for major GPUs nothing at the show sorry we did get some good information that while here from Nvidia employees from SK Hynix from others and we have an interview going up with Tom Peterson of Nvidia about ray tracing and that'll be soon so check back for that additionally there's some msi gigabyte stuff in the last week we know we saw it we've been trying to loop back with these companies and others to figure out exactly what's going on in the GP p space if you missed the news msi had a giant missed F and gaff and one of the MSI India Facebook page Managers for for the MSI India page sort of stepped out of line and made some comments that looked pretty bad basically picking favorites of Nvidia so MSI's apologize for that they've deleted those comments but that hasn't stopped people from noticing the fact that there's a plane going over my head but that hasn't stopped people from noticing the fact that MSI's product pages have had limited rx series gaming and branded offerings because of the current GPP climate I think there's been a lot of speculation that it could be related to GPP we don't have any concrete evidence of that I have spoken with MSI I'm having a hard time getting anywhere and it's pretty frustrating but the good news is I do have a couple of contact leads of where I can get some proper information because my main contacts have failed me there but what I can tell you this is this from speaking with people here mostly off-the-record the gigabyte product the gaming box the external GPU for am DS RX series cards as I understand it for since it's been in production has been planned to not have the word on the box there are to take so takeaways here one takeaway is that okay maybe they genuinely never planned to have the gaming branding on that external GPU enclosure for AMD that's possible if it's been in production that way for the last year it is one of the feasible outcomes the other is that perhaps if we are taking the GPP conspiracy side which may not be a conspiracy we need to find out still but if you're taking outside then if gbv has been in place for the past year maybe they just started planning very early on that and it's been in effect longer than we think I'll have more information for you soon on on all of that at some point still talking to a lot of people it's a really slow process the fact that this has been in the news now for a little while means that some companies have tightened down on talking about it some people don't want to talk about it or genuinely know nothing about it and so it's going to take me some time to work through contacts in the industry and figure out is GPP legitimately as large of an issue as it has been made to appear at this point or it or not and I don't know I don't have an answer but I've been talking to people and I'm working on it so give me time give everyone else time at this point that's what it's gonna take because the story is out there so it just takes a while to talk to everyone collect enough feedback that we feel confident in presenting some kind of outcome either way though gigabyte box as I understand it has been planned without the aorist branding for quite some time now that does not mean GPP didn't influence it but it's something it's a data point to consider in that storyline MSI doesn't have an answer for me on why rx gaming stuff is lacking from the product pages but they've basically said we don't think we've had any gaming products in stock for a long time the rx 500 series so maybe that's why I don't know but I have a contact now so I'm gonna look further into that outside of GBP and NVIDIA all sort of 4k 144 Hertz displays will be arriving in April these were shown quite some time ago at least a year ago now never made it to market but now they finally will be so Nvidia is expecting the arrival of the 4k 144 Hertz g-sync displays their HDR displays that they've shown previously by the end of quarter one for their fiscal year videos q1 ends April 29th 2018 so we can infer that Nvidia believes the new displays will ship in April at CES last year a strand issues both had prototypes based on a reference designed by Nvidia since that time they've been able to expand on that and customize them and the promised 2017 release window was delayed for unknown reasons but they're coming out eventually Acer's predator X 27 and asus rog swift PG 27 UQ are both based on the reference design and were based on an au Optronics panel which specifically if you're curious is the m270 QA n 0 to 2 a hva panel next one 3d mark direct x ray tracing demo this will be a short one for you future mark is launching a new direct tax rate racing demonstration that includes it non screen space reflections so quick primer here if I'm the camera in the game that's my screen space and everything behind me is outside of screen space so if we have a shiny object in front of me like a mirror facing my camera perspective there's an object behind me that is outside of screen space and we have a reflection of the object in the shiny object in front of me then those would be non screen space reflections so 3d marks working on some ray tracing stuff including some advanced reflections and these should run on things outside of just Volta unlike the RT X features that we've been told about and they will be using Microsoft DirectX 12 ray tracing feature set expect that by end of year also in the news and these Radeon Ray's this was announced around the same time and GP profiler 1.2 which is actually a pretty cool application so Radeon Rays is AMD's Vulcan based ray tracing engine and Radeon Rays will use asynchronous compute in conjunction with AMD silicon GPU CVS ApS etc to create real time ray tracing capabilities the engine is open source and it conforms to the opencl 1.2 standard so it can be deployed with non AMD hardware across multiple OS environments and also announced was a new version of there are GP Radian graphics profiler and that will offer compatibility with rendered interestingly improves frame and graphics debugging and detailed barrier codes and improves frame overviews this is a pretty useful application if you're a developer and can make use of something like that next one Corsair h-60 refresh really short on this course there's got a couple of new product lines in the a i/o or CLC market and the h-60 is coming out or out already for 2018 has a new mounting bracket design upgraded fan and a redesigned pump block and radiator and the new look is identical to the recent h1 50 I and H 150 I Pro coolers but NICs is the RGB lighting in favor of static white backlight last two here power colors got a new red dragon rx Vega 56 and no one's gonna be able to buy it so actually it might be available I don't know but Vega has been pretty hard to come by also sort of all GPUs either way the red dragon version is not that different from Vega 56 in general it's got a different cooler it didn't disclose pricing that announcement and amidst the inflated GPU market that's kind of irrelevant to anyway but currently the new egg and eBay store list third party retailer lists or $800 so don't buy it but if it comes down maybe it'll be worth it Andy and our CTS labs updates last one here since last time AMD has publicly addressed the findings of CTS labs and has announced plans to mitigate the vulnerabilities a week or two ago CTS labs disclosed an alleged 13 security vulnerabilities for Rison epic so forth and am these chipsets even and alongside those findings crazy people Viceroy research published a 30 page raving report brazenly declaring the expiry of AMD as stock saying that it should be 0.00 dollars so if you missed that stuff go check it out it was a vitriolic insane diatribe of a lunatic but either way Viceroy pretty much discredited most of the stuff just on the basis of looking insane as far as actual security vulnerabilities we did talk about in our initial coverage and some people seem to forget this that the vulnerabilities themselves seem to be valid we talked to security experts who disk and Advanced Research of meltdown inspector and they all told us at the beginning of this whole saga when we initially reported on it that the researchers of meltdown inspector thought the bugs the exploits to be legitimate but their concerns were basically in the presentation of those exploits just like those were our concerns we still have a lot of concerns with that it seems awfully odd and maybe financially motivated though that's hard to prove one way or the other either way AMD did address the report and in the report they basically acknowledged that the security flaws to some extent exist giving a small amount of credibility to CTS labs and AMD kept it to the point they basically said the following exploitation requires administrative access of which once acquired many more attacks not listed by CTS could be perpetrated the security threats are not related to the AMD Xen architecture but firmware and chipsets associated with some a m4 in tr4 sockets and these planned mitigation is in the form of firmware and BIOS updates from OMS no performance impact is expected so basically although you don't need physical Hardware access you need root level access administrator access to the entire system once you have root level access to the system you do whatever you want so I think and these address of these issues is kind of like brushing them off to the side although they do acknowledge that they're real but the fact remains that cts Labs presentation was awful and it really looked like a hit job so maybe improve on that in the future CTS labs if you'd like to retain credibility either way that's it for the nature last two weeks check back for more as always subscribe go to patreon.com/scishow cameras Nexus I was that direct directly and go to store it on cameras Nexus dotnet to pick up one of these hoodies or the mod map but either one's good with us I won't I won't pick a favorite just one of them thanks for watching I'll see you next time you