CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 1

AMD formally announced its next-generation Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs at Computex 2024 earlier this month, and the company is already optimizing and tweaking its 3D V-Cache driver.

This is getting us all excited about Ryzen 9000X3D processors, which will fight Intel directly with its upcoming Arrow Lake-S CPUs as the best gaming CPU on the market. In a post on X, leaker "harukaze5719" discovered AMD's new 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer driver.

AMD last updated the 3D V-Cache driver when it launched the Ryzen 7000X3D processors, and there's not much information on what the 3D V-Cache driver actually does. It was first released as a Windows 10 exclusive driver for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor, but it's also available with AMD's bigger Ryzen 7000X3D family of processors and works in Windows 11 with the 7000X3D series chips.

Reuters reports that Taiwanese chip design giant MediaTek is developing an Arm-based PC processor that will run Windows. " Three people familiar with the matter" say this.

We have been hearing whispers of MediaTek teaming with NVIDIA for a new Arm-based AI PC processor and comments from Dell CEO Michael Dell that we will see an NVIDIA-based processor released for a next-gen AI PC in 2025.

Microsoft also revealed its next-generation laptops with chips designed by Arm last month, its huge new Copilot+ PC push, and the huge relationship with Qualcomm and its Arm-based Snapdragon X series of processors that are inside Copilot+ PC systems running Windows. It seems Qualcomm has the exclusivity here, but that will run out in 2025 and we're going to see an absolute flood of Arm-based AI PC processors hitting the market.

AMD has one of the best gaming processors on the planet with its Ryzen 7 7800X3D and its second-gen 3D V-Cache technology. However, it looks like the 7800X3D will be a faster gaming CPU than the next-gen Zen 5-based Ryzen 9 9700X, and that's coming directly from AMD.

In an interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD's Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Don Woligroski, said: "Is it the fastest in gaming? It's faster than the competition in our tests. X3D is still the king of the hill, but by a much smaller margin than typically between X3D and non-X3D. So a 7800X3D would, yes, be faster than 9700X, but maybe not by as much as you would expect".

In an interview with PCGamer earlier this week, Donny said: "The X3D stuff, we have a lot to say about it. The best part about it is we're not just resting on laurels. We're improving what we can do with X3D, it's really exciting and I'm super looking forward to talking to people about that. It's not like, hey, we've also added X3D to a chip. We are working actively on really cool differentiators to make it even better. We're working on X3D, we're improving it".

Computex 2024 featured many announcements from AMD regarding its incoming next-generation Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, and with many excited about the performance uplift in specific tasks, gamers shouldn't be, or at least if you have a specific previous-gen CPU.

Toms Hardware interviewed AMD's Senior Technical Marketing Manager for Consumer Processors, Donny Woligroski. In the interview, he told the publication that the difference between AMD's new Ryzen 9000 series CPUs and the Ryzen 7000X3D chips in gaming is very little.

Woligroski stated that while its coming Ryzen 9000 series chips won't be the Ryzen 7000X3D chips in gaming, they will still be top-of-the-line CPUs for gaming, but the difference between chips will be extremely small. However, the Ryzen 9000 series CPUs will still beat the 7000X3D chips in non-gaming tasks, meaning the Ryzen 9000 series will be the overall better CPU in terms of overall performance.

Computex 2024 has finally wrapped up, and the madness of the AI-based announcements from various companies has returned to a steady yet exponentially growing stream. Amongst the talk of new AI innovations was CPU hardware - new chips from both Intel and AMD.

A new rumor has surfaced from Club386, who said they spoke to an unnamed source at Computex that informed them AMD was planning on releasing its new 3D V-cache-equipped version of new Ryzen 9000 processors sometime in September. If this rumor is true, AMD would have achieved a new record in terms of how soon they release the X3D version of new CPU generations. For example, AMD released the X3D version for its Zen 3 CPUs 18 months later, while Zen 4 was six months later.

So, what models of new Ryzen 9000 series CPUs will be getting the extra 64MB slices of extra L3 cache? Judging from what has already been announced by AMD, it won't be surprising if the company's top contending CPUs are selected, which appear to be the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D, 12-core 9900X3D and an 8-core 9800X3D. That doesn't rule out the possibility of some mid-range CPUs getting some X3D variants, as AMD did say they were currently testing "cool differentiators" with the cache technology.

AMD has one of the best mid-range processors on the market with its Zen 4-based Ryzen 5 7600X, but the next-gen Zen 5-based Ryzen 5 9600X looks to be a champion.

In some new leaks, we're seeing that a Ryzen 5 9600X engineering sample (ES) processor being overclocked to a very nice 5.7GHz across all cores, up 300MHz from its max CPU boost clock of 5.4GHz. AMD isn't just cranking the CPU clock speed by 100MHz from the Ryzen 5 7600X, but the internal Zen 5 CPU architecture will provide IPC improvements, and a much lower 65W TDP is welcomed (105W on the 7600X).

The leaker posted some CPU-Z benchmark results, where we can see single-threaded performance with 871 points, and multi-threaded performance at 7096 points at all-core 5.7GHz. This is compared to 776 points and 6201 points for single-threaded and multi-threaded performance, respectively, on the Zen 5-based Ryzen 5 9600X ES chip at its stock 5.4GHz.

AMD has one of the best CPUs for gaming with its current-gen Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, but we're now expecting next-gen Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series, which will have SKUs that will be powered with 3D V-Cache technology.

But now AMD has spoken with PCGamer about some new CPUs, with AMD's senior technical marketing manager Donny Woligroski saying: "The X3D stuff, we have a lot to say about it. The best part about it is we're not just resting on laurels. We're improving what we can do with X3D, it's really exciting and I'm super looking forward to talking to people about that. It's not like, hey, we've also added X3D to a chip. We are working actively on really cool differentiators to make it even better. We're working on X3D, we're improving it".

If you were expecting to see AMD do what it did last time: slapping second-gen 3D V-Cache to its CPUs this time around, you'd be wrong. AMD has been making improvements to 3D V-Cache, and it seems that we're going to see just what those improvements are -- sorry, 'really cool differentiators' -- when the next-gen Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series X3D processors launch.

Intel has finally detailed its next-generation Lunar Lake architecture, with "breakthrough" x86 power efficiency, a "massive leap" in graphics performance for "great" mobile gaming, and unmatched future-ready AI compute.

The next-generation Lunar Lake architecture features 32GB of on-package memory, support for LPDDR5X DRAM, all-new Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficient-cores (E-cores) that deliver a "significant performance and energy efficiency improvements".

The fourth-generation Intel NPU has up to 48 TOPS of AI performance, with Intel reiterating that the powerful NPU inside of Lunar Lake delivers 4x the AI compte performance over the previous generation (Meteor Lake). There's an all-new GPU design with Battlemage, combining two new innovations: Xe2 GPU cores for graphics, and Xe Matrix Extension (XMX) arrays for AI.

Intel's Arrow Lake desktop processors are going to be out in October, or at least that's the word from Computex 2024.

This comes from Wccftech which has been tapping motherboard makers at Computex, firms that are showing off their Z890 boards - and have inside info on the Arrow Lake release timeframe.

Note that the mentioned October date is for Arrow Lake CPUs to be on shelves, not just some kind of initial reveal. In fact, the announcement of the next-gen desktop processors is planned to happen at Intel Innovation in September (which has been previously mentioned via the rumor mill).

Qualcomm held its Computex 2024 keynote earlier today, hyping both the Copilot+ PC ecosystem and its new Snapdragon X Series processors.

In the Qualcomm Computex 2024 keynote YouTube video above, at the 11:34 mark Neowin reports that Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon said that these initial laptops being released are just the first wave of Windows PCs that will feature Snapdragon X Elite chips.

Qualcomm teased renders of PCs with Snapdragon X Elite chips inside, with Amon saying that the new Snapdragon X Series chips will be inside all sorts of form factor PC systems. The company had some slides up that showed off tablet designs, Mini-PCs, and even all-in-one PC systems.