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HW News: Radeon Chief Leaves AMD for Intel, RAM Supply Surge

2017-11-08
so the the xbox 1x that we took apart has an extra screw I guess they just included it in the box so it's just laying around after done rebuilding the thing so this is our hardware news recap for the week we have the big of course Intel and AMD combo item news and some still pending stories about rajasah Dory's potential departure from AMD be talking about Backblaze reliability testing on their drives as they release annually at this point and then some news from the DRAM side of the industry where samsung has apparently caught wind that oh actually there is limited memory supply right now so they're gonna start making more memory so that took a little while but that's what we've got this week before we get into that this content is brought to you by the Thermaltake flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a three hundred sixty millimeter radiator plus three 120 fans that are RGB illuminated the if then we'll take it rain fans at that this is a 4.5 done a detect pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below so first one is recapping a news story that we published on the website a few days ago this is Intel and Andy working together to build a new mobile chip so as the title of the article said when we published it in other news hell has frozen over so Antonio they are actually working together this is legitimate news at this point they both threw these press releases and basically what's going to happen is they're working on a new ultra-thin product so this should maybe kind of look at the specs the power requirements things like that it should be able to outdo just about anything Nvidia can do at the same form factor so if it comes together the pen how many ciues are in the GPU element that Andy is providing it could be a pretty powerful chip now this is an addition to Andy's rise in mobile announcement where they already are sort of vying for more mobile and portable market share so Intel and AMD working together it's going to be using the Intel 8j Coffee like CPU for the foundation and then we don't know exactly what Radeon graphics solution is in there yet but we do know it is a Radeon graphics solution and we do know it's using HP AM - we just don't know what the Cu count is at this point the GPU is still technically discrete but it is integrated in a different way so there will still be the IGP from Intel and that'll still be on the coffee like thigh however there's also going to be the Radeon discrete GPU sort of that's connected by email which we'll go over in a moment and this will allow toggling between the two GPUs so for low load video encode decode watching YouTube at 4k things like that you use the IGP from Intel and then for anything more taxing you use the AMD radeon GPU which should help with power consumption concerns but also still provide a pretty hefty GPU compute capability that theoretically will be competitive with int with nvidia primarily at the form factor so that's what we're looking at for the new collaboration between AMD and Intel so then the new chip package will again be part of the eighth generation lineup and it's going to combine a core h-series processor with a custom and the Radeon graphics solution with stacked HBM to the silicon will be housed on one package or substrate and we'll use Intel's e mabh or embedded multi die interconnect bridge to share a power and communication framework anytime there are multiple chips or dyes on one package there's an issue of managing power bandwidth coms between them and this is an issue that Andy's already pretty much solved at their infinity fabric and it's unlikely that sharing proprietary technology is within the purview of this arrangement essentially email will allow for heterogeneous pieces of silicon to communicate back and forth so this does a few major things one is it eliminates the need to use an inner poser which you would need to do for for example Vega uses an inner poser that's the bit that the HB on of the corset on top of or the GPU die so it eliminates that which means that your in cost and it simplifies the packaging process well there's there's new challenges in packaging but it removes one step from the manufacturing process because interposer yield is also a concern so that's eliminated and emmab also reduces concerns of running into the radical limit when you're dealing with large monolithic dyes so it's sort of modular eyeses and pieces out the different components of the cpu or whatever the component may be rather than making a gigantic monolithic die where you the larger you go with the die the more you have issues with yield so your yields go down which means your costs a consumer goes up because your cost to make it goes up you're throwing away more chips as a result of the lower yields and also there are just technological lithographic limitations to how large dye can actually be when it's coming out of the fab based on the radical limit so that's a problem and that's also resolved by taking this approach it's very similar to some other things we've seen Intel has been doing this with FPGA boards for a little while now and Andy of course famously has introduced the multi die solution to a product with Rison and theoretically with Navi in the future this looks to be the way of the future NVIDIA has released its own white papers on multi chip modules and using them to resolve for lithographic limitations reduced size of the individual die components then yields not as big of a problem and you can somewhat modularize the design so you pick and choose the parts you want based on what the customer is who the customer is so it's really interesting this Intel and Andy combo I think we'll see how it shapes out but right now it definitely looks pretty competitive for the ultra thin market to the point where they're going to be able to reduce the size of the motherboard within the laptop which changes a whole lot of parameters one of which is the size of the laptop of course and it reduces about 2.9 square inches and that means that you could either use that space for other things we get rid of it and reduce the size laptop as a whole it's a really cool stuff something to pay attention to we have an article on it on the website and then I'll give a shout to an attack who have their own article on it that's also pretty good and worth checking out if you are interested in learning more this next story is still technically unofficial so subject to change depending on this may become official or may be debunked by the time we publish but looks pretty legitimate so hexxus reports that it has allegedly obtained an internal letter from radion technologies group head roger Kaduri and the letter allegedly states that roger will be moving on from AMD with an indeterminate future in the industry we don't know what he's doing next we've previously worked with roger Kaduri so we have I think to interview videos with him shot in there Sunnyvale California offices where Kaduri talks about the future of big graphic solutions in general including large scale much higher resolution VR which was less a point about VR and more a point about achieving very high resolution graphics that are ultra realistic so we talked with him about things like that about the time scale for making those things rajae basically said to me that his goal was I want to be able to play I figure out the resolution was but I want to be able to play ultra realistic VR before I'm dead or retired that was his goal so it's a very ambitious goal and if he leaves AMD and leaves RTG it's definitely a big impact to the the face of the that part of the company at least to the RTG the Radeon technologies group Raja is a smart guy the interviews with him if you haven't seen them they're worth going back and checking on our channel just search for probably Raja Kaduri and you'll find them but until we've got more confirmed here there's not much else to say but it does sound like Raja will be leaving in the company if not if he hasn't left already and this follows the 40 days sabbatical that he took previously which I think that number 40 that he he uses or it sounds like he's trying to use symbolically in the letter I think that is the same number he gave me when we were talking about the future of VR or the future of super high-resolution graphics I think we were talking about 40 years in the future or something like that so he's got he's got a an interesting fixation on the number 40 that if you watch some of the previous discussions we had with him it does sort of come together so yeah interesting news we'll see if it turns out to be true or not in our next story back play is an online data backup and storage service has reported their reliability numbers for the last quarter and at Backblaze is responsible for backing up your files business files things like that they buy thousands of hard drives and they take careful note of who made said failed drive so that they can not buy those again in the future so the newest study shows that it primarily focuses on large drives including 10 and 12 terabyte drives the first time they looking at things that large as a report for a quarter 3 of 2017 as at most other cloud storage enterprises they are moving to high-capacity drives like these and so far they've deployed 1220 10 terabyte drives and 2012 terabyte drives smaller sample size there of these drives none have failed yet with the combines I guess they're actually getting towards 13,000 Drive days in operation for those higher capacity drives so they've had no failures with those just yet the report does also suggest that there's a narrow gap between enterprise and consumer drives in terms of reliability Backblaze found a difference of 0.1 percent between the two I don't know what their error margins are but generally speaking that's pretty much within them so one point one at one point two percent failure globally across all the tribes between enterprise and consumer and then this is 2013 the 2017 cumulative data here now for drive failure rates put annualized there at five percent total for three terabyte drives regardless of make and brand two percent failure for four terabyte drives 1.9 percent failure for six terabyte drives and 10.1 percent failure for eight terabyte drive so going down for the higher capacity drives as we move forward the next news item is a thread refer block this is water cool heat killer block and it's supposed to be a dedicated block for the thread Ripper TR for socket specifically and it was originally targeted for September release but they were delayed for so far unknown reasons the heat killer for thread Ripper block will come in a few different SKUs including one that has pre-installed RGB LEDs compatible with x3 99 motherboards and as we've shown in previous content full coverage blocks on thread Ripper matter the most it's the most important thing is to cover that whole IHS and get the heat away from it so pay attention to that if you are buying thread River so the next one this one had been asked about a lot Lian Li announced an alpha 550 case when we were at combi tags and we showed it we haven't seen it since Computex but that is finally ready for market it's basically all steel and glass it's not aluminum for once really only they don't only do peasant materials like steel but they've done it this time so that people can actually buy it and this is a bit of a departure from their styling because of that it has four tempered glass panels enclosing the steel chassis and then it comes with three 120 millimeter RGB fans for the front with the alpha 550 also accommodating vertical GD orientation via riser cables also a big trend now and offering the radiator support in the front and the top at 360 and for 20 millimeters respectively and it's also supposed to come in black and white finishes and will sell for around $240 which is very cheap for Lian Li but still pretty expensive we're gonna try and look at that one I don't have a contact active contact with Liang Li I don't think we'll try and get it next once Amazon sews Amazon is set to increase DRAM production they say according to a report published by Electronic Times Samsung is currently unhappy with the DRAM market at present apparently Samsung has been gearing up to bolsters over there somebody conduct their lines since early October with mass production in mind for first quarter 2018 Samsung is the biggest memory maker in the world and assuming the reports are true it could mean that Samsung the increased output could disrupt the tight supply and finally dilute RAM prices a bit samsung's current plan would increase DRAM supply by more than 20 percent from their lines and hopefully that actually happens because right now it Paul has a video about this that's very popular for good reason right now building pcs kind of sucks in some ways this is why one of the earliest backbones of the site if gamers access net before the YouTube channel was posting PC builds sometimes weekly always at least monthly and those are pretty much stopped for the last several months that's because memory prices are so high a GPU prices have been all over the place so if we could just get one of those components back to normal that would be great that'd make it a lot more feasible to build a new system as opposed to try and part stuff out used last news item of the week is the Titan XP collector's edition Star Wars video cards so some of you asked what I thought of the Titan XP collector's edition earlier this week when it was a 12 second teaser video and I basically said I have no thoughts until they reveal more well they've basically revealed that their Star Wars Edition cards so if you're a major Star Wars fan I guess the cards have that look to them they're $1200 so technically they're the same price as the Titan XP when it launched that doesn't change the fact that the 1080 Ti is a way better buy for 98 percent of our audience because if your gaming just get the 1080i and honestly if you're doing that anyway you're spending seven to eight hundred dollars on a 1080i you could probably spend less than the difference to the Titan XP and have some mod it for you and do a pretty good job but yeah I I don't really have any thoughts on this I guess this probably partly comes down to limited competition because it's just like what else is nvidia gonna do they can they can rebadge the card and sell it for the same amount or more or whatever and there's no reason for them not to as far as they're concerned so what was that Star Wars quote so I guess if you like Star Wars it's worth it I'm sorry but no not really no that's all for the news a quick note on Xbox content we're working on so we have some FPS benchmarks that are probably done by the time this goes live it's the first time we've ever done the FPS benchmarks for a console we've got software for it that we developed in the house pretty excited about it definitely check back for that shortly within the next day or so if not sooner and we also have thermals and power testing for the Xbox during the same workloads some errata for the Xbox content we published already the frequency the GPU frequency is actually 1172 megahertz not 1720 and the memory frequency effective or actual memory frequency is 1700 megahertz so some original information disseminated by by Luke that was seventeen hundred megahertz but yeah it's it's actually eleven seventy two so just wanted to point that out because I said 1700 as well because I source from them because we don't have a contact on Microsoft so correction there but still Polaris still for TCU's at eleven seventy two megahertz it's not too far off from 480 reference clocks but it is it is definitely not higher than it so a note on that but we'll have benchmarks for this pretty soon so check back and as always subscribe for more you can go to patreon.com/scishow gamers nexus dotnet for the articles or stored i Kara's Nexus dotnet to pick up like this one or a sticker thank you for watching I'll see you all next time
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