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AMD's 4700G APU is a mid-range PC on a single chip
It's been a year since AMD's Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 CPUs changed the desktop PC market, with best-in-class productivity and "good enough" gaming performance. One area has been left behind, though: desktop APUs, which combine a processor with integrated graphics. Today that changes, as AMD is announcing a family of "4000G" APUs for desktop PCs.
Lenovo's new budget AMD gaming laptops start at $660
Lenovo recently went a little wild by cramming a 64-core Ryzen Threadripper PRO into an unassuming workstation, but we assume one of those won't be landing on your desk any time soon. Perhaps the most notable of Lenovo's new US-bound releases is the Legion 5, which comes in 15.6 and 17.3-inch variants.
Dell's XPS Desktop fits NVIDIA and AMD graphics inside a smaller case
Dell is updating its XPS Desktop with a new 19L design that doesn't sacrifice on customization.
How to buy a laptop for school
Here's a guide to find the perfect laptop for you based on your needs and budget.
NVIDIA's RTX GPUs now support DirectX 12 Ultimate
As of today, NVIDIA's GPUs officially support Microsoft's DirectX 12 Ultimate framework.
Do Apple's new Mac chips mean ARM has won?
For the latest episode of our explainer show Upscaled, we dive into the history of the RISC architecture. With Apple dropping Intel for its own RISC-based CPUs, this will be the first time in decades we've seen a company try to produce high-end RISC processors.
Corsair releases streaming-ready PCs with built-in capture cards
Corsair's new Vengeance gaming PCs include an Elgato 4K60 Pro capture card.
AMD's XT chips are faster versions of its Ryzen 3000 CPUs
AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs have been available in various forms for about a year now. AMD says that these chips will have a four percent performance boost over those from the 3000 series. The Ryzen 9 3900XT, 7 3800XT and 5 3600XT processors have 12, eight and six cores, respectively.
How much does your CPU matter for gaming?
For the latest episode of our explainer show Upscaled, we compared Intel’s new flagship 10-core chip, the i9-10900K, with AMD’s budget-level Ryzen 3 3300X. We were trying to answer one question: How much does your CPU matter in gaming performance?
Lenovo's new ThinkPad E14 and E15 pack AMD's powerful Ryzen 4700 chips
What's interesting about these devices is that they'll include AMD's new Ryzen Pro 4000 series processors, which the chipmaker announced today. In all, the lineup features three new CPUs: the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U, Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U and Ryzen 3 Pro 4450U.
Can Intel's 10th-gen desktop CPUs compete?
Now, with its 10th-gen “Comet Lake” desktop chips, Intel is offering up to 10 cores on top-line chips. These Intel 10th-gen chips are also still based on Intel’s aging 14nm manufacturing process and Skylake architecture, so aside from more cores, don’t expect huge performance gains here.
AMD's latest 3rd-gen Ryzen 3 CPUs start at $99
AMD's Ryzen 3 3100 lowers the price of its current-gen desktop CPUs to $99, while the B550 chipset brings PCIe 4.0 to a wider audience.
Apple finally offers a reasonably priced graphics upgrade for the Mac Pro
The Radeon Pro W5700X is now available as a more affordable graphics upgrade option for Apple's Mac Pro.
MSI's new laptops include 10th-gen Intel CPUs and RTX Super graphics
MSI is refreshing its gaming laptop lineup, including its popular GS Stealth and GE Raider series computers, to add Intel's new 10th-generation Comet Lake mobile processors and the new Super variants of NVIDIA's RTX mobile GPUs. Similarly, you can configure several of MSI's new laptops with the RTX 2080 Super. In some situations, those enhancements should lead to performance improvements, but probably not the 50 percent gains MSI is touting.
Origin's EON15-X laptop is powered by AMD's 12-core desktop Ryzen 9 CPU
Origin has unveiled the revamped EON15-X laptop with an impressive trick: It packs the 12-core AMD Ryzen 3900 desktop processor.
Xbox Series X and PS5: The new consoles are all about crazy fast storage
The Xbox One and PS4 were the start of an unusual console generation. Both systems adopted very "PC-like" architecture and instead of a new generation we instead got a refresh where Microsoft and Sony both released faster versions of their existing consoles, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. We may still have a few months left to wait, but finally we've gotten details of what the next real generation will bring. Microsoft and Sony have both stuck with the PC-like design of their predecessors, and are again using AMD as their CPU and GPU supplier, but the Xbox Series X and PS5 will be very different from the current generation. The biggest changes come from the storage systems. Considering the Xbox One and PS4 both still use slow mechanical hard drives, we figured a move to smaller, faster, more efficient flash-based SSDs was inevitable, but Microsoft and Sony have gone all out. Both systems feature custom storage interfaces with PCI Express 4.0 SSDs and custom hardware to handle real-time decompression. That means these drives will move serious amounts of data very quickly. The Series X is claiming transfer speeds of around 3-4GB/s, while the PS5 may be capable of data rates as high as 9GB/s. With data rates that high (the current consoles manage maybe 150MB/s in ideal conditions), load times should be cut down to seconds, and in-game load screens may become a thing of the past. Faster data rates could also enable higher resolution textures for more photo-realistic graphics, and enable you to switch between games with the click of a button. Add in a significantly upgraded CPU and a long-awaited AMD ray tracing solution for hyper-realistic lighting, and these consoles represent a huge leap forward. Hopefully, their benefits will also trickle down into the PC space as well, and games on every platform will be able to leverage these new possibilities to be faster and better looking. We don't know exactly when they'll arrive yet, or how much they'll cost, but we'll have more details on the Series X and PS5 as soon as they're announced.
A hacker stole and leaked the Xbox Series X graphics source code
AMD has been having a particularly rough few months, apparently. The chip designer has revealed that a hacker stole test files for a "subset" of current and upcoming graphics hardware, some of which had been posted online before they were taken down. While AMD was shy on details, the claimed intruder told TorrentFreak that the material included source code for Navi 10 (think Radeon RX 5700 series), the future Navi 21 and the Arden GPU inside the Xbox Series X.
Microsoft's DirectX 12 Ultimate brings ray tracing effects to more games
More efforts are underway to bring ray traced visuals to more of your games. Microsoft has introduced a DirectX 12 Ultimate framework that makes ray tracing and other visual effects both more efficient and more flexible. A new inline ray tracing technique gives more control over the lighting effects that make more sense for certain games, GPU shaders can invoke ray tracing without talking to the CPU and streaming engines can more efficiently load ray tracing shaders as you roam around. Your games won't demand as much from your system as they did before.
AMD's efficient Ryzen 9 CPUs target Intel's gaming laptop crown
While AMD is winning over the workstation market, Intel still dominates laptop gaming. However, AMD aims to change that in a hurry with the Ryzen 9 4900HS and 4900H Zen 2 mobile processors, launching soon on laptops like the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14. They pack eight cores and 16 threads, along with up to 8 cores of integrated Vega graphics, and run at overclocked speeds up to 4.4 GHz. Best of all, the 7-nanometer 4900HS chip consumes just 35 watts of power, boosting battery life for gaming and entertainment apps.
AMD CPUs for the past 9 years are vulnerable to data leak attacks
It's not just Intel chips that are vulnerable to hard-to-fix security flaws. Researchers at the Graz University of Technology have detailed a pair of side channel attacks under the "Take A Way" name that can leak data from AMD processors dating back to 2011, whether it's an old Athlon 64 X2, a Ryzen 7 or a Threadripper. Both exploit the "way predictor" for the Level 1 cache (meant to boost the efficiency of cache access) to leak memory content. The Collide+Probe attack lets an intruder monitor memory access without having to know physical addresses or shared memory, while Load+Reload is a more secretive method that uses shared memory without invalidating the cache line.
