Gadgetory

welcome back to the Hadron box news corner the good news is it's currently not 40 degrees Celsius here so I can make this news corner I guess without as much trouble as last week and the extra good news is there is a range of interesting topics to cover this week so let's kick things off with a couple of Intel stories first up is the official launch of the Xeon w31 75 X intel's monster 28 called workstation CPU this chip was first announced sort of at Computex last year and it's finally here packing a 3.1 gigahertz base called a maximum 4.5 gigahertz turbo clock has 44 lens of pcie 3.0 and at 255 watt TDP it requires an LGA 36:47 motherboard like the isuzu Dominus extreme along with a huge power supply and 6 channel memory reviews for this CPU went live a couple of days ago unfortunately we didn't get sampled one and it's unlikely we will but the good news is a number of other outlets did and you should go read their reviews if you are interested there's really not a whole lot that's unexpected here it's the usual story for a hike or count CPU if you have a workload that can make use of the extra cores performances up to 50 percent better than the Quran 999 ATX II though of course in a lot of workloads you won't see performance at that level the troopers also unlocked and can be overclocked though it uses a lot of power when you do so still need a good power supply for that sort of thing post the most surprising aspect was the final price Intel settled on which was two thousand nine hundred and ninety nine dollars this is their most expensive workstation CPU but early rumors were suggesting a price closer to $4,500 that said three thousand dollars is about as high as Intel could have realistically priced this CPU considering the 18 core 99 80 XE is about $2,000 in the CPU is up to 50% faster it doesn't look like amazing value up against the red rip up but then again Intel's a TDT lineup hasn't been that for some time anyway however you won't be able to purchase one of these CPUs off the shop at least for until are exclusively selling it to system integrators and OAM so if you want a 31 75 X you'll have to buy an entire system this isn't a bad idea considering you'd need to buy a special motherboard and cooler anyway and it's really designed for professional workstations rather than enthusiastic it probably will still disappoint a few people next Intel story relates to their new f-series processors which denote a CPU with a disabled IGP until announced these chips CES a couple of weeks back but did so without any firm pricing well earlier this week the chips have begun to appear in retail channels including US retailer B&H photo and video oddly the f-series chips are priced higher than the models with the eye GPU enabled the crow $9.99 hundred K F for example was listed at $582 50 competitors 530 dollars for the I $9.99 hundred K similarly the core i7 9700 KF was four hundred and fifty-two dollars 50 compared to 400 $10 to the 9700 K and the 9600 K F at three hundred and eight dollars seventy five versus two hundred and sixty dollars for the non F model this is likely because the F models are new and could be limited in stock Intel suggested retail price for the boxed versions of these processes is identical whether it's the F model or not the 9900 K for example is listed at $499 as is the 9900 KF although of course neither CPU is available that price right now that said not sure how many F models that will actually sell if both are the same price there isn't much of a reason to buy a 9900 KF over 9900 K both are the same price as I guess we're not really expecting any performance differences another Intel story this time relating to the kora 990 900 T this CPU was spotted as an engineering sample on Yahoo options of all places the the 1900 T is basically in 9900 K except with a much harsher power limit while the 9900 K has a listed 95 watt TDP the 9900 t comes in at 35 watts leading to a much lower clock speeds it's still an eight-core 16 thread CPU but instead of having a base clock of 3.6 gigahertz with a boost up to 5 gigahertz the 90 t-slot sitting with just a 1.7 gigahertz base and a boost of only 3.8 gigahertz intel typically releases 80 series of skews for low-power systems those that either need to run at low levels of power consumption or are a small form-factor and can't pack in enough cooling capacity for the fully fledged chips in these situations having an 8 core CPU at lower clocks may be the best option that said there's still no official word about these SKUs just yet final Intel story is a quicker one the company has named Robert Swan as CEO after a seven-month search Swan has been Intel CFO since 2016 and was also the interim CEO after Brian krzanich left in June 2018 I don't really pay much attention to corporate structures of companies so I don't have any other comments on this but it seems like investors weren't super happy as stock prices took a bit of a dip after the announcement speaking of stock prices taking a dip after announcements Nvidia this week drastically altered their q4 revenue guidance originally the company expected 2.7 billion in revenue from the fourth quarter but now they've cut that by five hundred million dollars to just 2.2 billion as a result Nvidia stock price tanked by more than 12 percent a combination of factors contributed to this drop in revenue the cryptocurrency market is the first reason Nvidia initially responded to a spike in demand by producing more Pascal GPUs only to have demand then drop off when those GPUs were already this left in video with an excess of inventory and were forced to delay a planned production ramp of several new products the second issue was the launch of cheering in general lackluster reception for NVIDIA snoo GPUs which Jensen partly blamed on a lack of r-tx support actual games nah but I think that was a real reason has led to lower than expected sales NVIDIA has also suggested that gamers are waiting for price drops before buying although again envy you really only have themselves to blame for that one as they were the ones that set the prices Nvidia also blamed a decelerating global market particularly in China along with unpredictability in their data center business with all of these factors combined Nvidia is set to miss their original guidance by a significant amount and that continues the company struggles in the last half a year or so I am has amended their agreement with Global Foundries this probably isn't the biggest news out there but it's at least a little bit interesting the basics are the new agreement sets out pricing and volumes for wafers AMD will purchase from Global Foundries through to 2021 of course we're not getting any public details about those prices or volumes but those have been locked in the good news for AMD is the new agreement allows AMD to purchase wafers at the seven nanometer node or smaller from other companies like TSMC or Samsung without one-time payments or royalties to Global Foundries not familiar with their previous agreement but you think that when Global Foundries were still planning on releasing a seven nanometer node that their agreement with AMD would have prevented ambi from easily switching over to TSM C without some sort of payment AMD will continue to use Global Foundries for products built on 12 nanometer nodes or larger so this would include their send plus CPUs and ap use that they'll continue to be selling the i/o die for news then to products and most of their current GPU lineup if aim D failed to meet their agreed upon annual wafer purchase amount they'll have to pay a portion of the difference between their actual purchases and the target previously ambi had to pay the full amount regardless of how many wafers they actually needed so this is an improvement as well in gaming news I'm sure you've all heard about the controversy regarding Metro Exodus leaving steam for the epic game store in case you haven't heard Metro Exodus will now be sold exclusively through the epic game store although anyone who already pre-ordered through Steam will be able to download the game updates and only further DLC as planned the likely reason behind this is epic offers a larger cut for developers and publishers than steam and this cut could be even better if they sign an exclusivity deal at least I'm assuming but the news angered a lot of gamers who understandably felt like the exclusivity was a bit of a shafting here and sudden switches well seems to have rubbed people the wrong way old metro games did get review bombed on Steam and there have been lots of complaints don't II have many thoughts on this I'd personally prefer every game to be released on Steam because there has in my opinion the best functionality out of the game stores and launchers and salsa with most of my libraries but I also don't mind a bit of competition I guess that said I think exclusivity deals probably the best way to go about generating competition a chemical issue at TS mcs fab 14 b has affected yields for some customers including nvidia Iowa and mediatek a photoresist chemical used in production deviated from specifications and that caused lower than normal yields for recently processed wafers TSMC says some shipments will have to be delayed into quarter two as a result but doesn't know how much of a financial impact you will have at this stage final topic of this week we now have confirmed specifications for invidious mobile GeForce RT x-series the company officially launched these GPUs earlier this week alongside all new laptops we should have a few reviews coming up soon but the specs themselves are worth looking at while the mobile RT X 2060 2070 and 2080 all packed the same kuduk or counts and memory configurations as their desktop counterparts clock speeds are lower across the board and have wide ranges in the case of some products the ITX 20 AE for example is clocked at a 1515 megahertz base with a rated boost of 1710 megahertz on the desktop but for laptops the highest configuration of this GPU will top out at just a 13 80 megahertz base with a 1590 megahertz boost however we could see some max-q variants clocked as low as a 735 megahertz base and a 1095 megahertz boost which is quite low that's a pretty huge range as well with a similarly large range in TD piece Nvidia says 80 to a hundred and fifty plus watts seems like there could be some noticeable differences between each r-tx laptop depending on the configuration here it's a similar story for the RT X 2070 desktop cards are clocked up to a 16 20 megahertz boost while laptops top out at 14 40 megahertz excluding GPU boost 3.0 of course which often pushes well above those rated speeds the ITX 2060 as well again desktop cards clock up to 16 80 megahertz pin in laptops we're facing just 12 hundred megahertz clocks it seems that Nvidia have aggressively down clock these GPUs to fit into certain TDP categories for example the RT X 2060 is up to an 90 watt part in laptops whereas the desktop card is rated for a hundred and 60 watts with such a huge difference there's bound to be a large performance drop here and it's the same for the other parts at 175 watts and 215 watts which have been reduced to a hundred and fifteen Watts 150 watts respectively in some ways this does make sense as laptops you know they don't have the same cooling capabilities as desktop CPUs and truing cards aren't noticeably more efficient than Pascal cards that came before them so realistically there shouldn't be a large jump in performance that's available for a laptop with the same cooling power but it's definitely disappointing that unlike with Pascal where laptop GPUs were roughly on par with desktop equivalents that chewing laptops will likely perform a bit slower than their desktop variants we'll evaluate this in the coming weeks as there RTX laptop samples arrive anyway that's it for this week's news corner as always you can 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