PlayStation 6 SoC is 'design complete' says leaker: AMD Zen 5 with X3D cache, next-gen UDNA GPU

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jan 18, 2025 3:17 PM CST

Sony's next-generation PlayStation 6 console is "design complete" according to the latest leaks, meaning the next-gen console is more into the development stage than most think.

PlayStation 6 SoC is 'design complete' says leaker: AMD Zen 5 with X3D cache, next-gen UDNA GPU

In a post on the NeoGAF forums, leaker Kepler_L2 made some fresh comments on the next-gen PS6 console saying that the SoC is "design complete" and in the pre-silicon validation stage with the A0 tapeout scheduled for later this year. The leaker teased: "PS6 is design complete and in pre-si validation already, with A0 tapeout scheduled for late this year".

The leaker also provided some details of the GPU inside of the PlayStation 6 as a fork of "gfx13" which was formerly known as RDNA 5, but it's now known as UDNA. We've been hearing more and more about the UDNA GPU architecture, while more recently we've heard leaks that the PS6 would be featuring X3D cache with its new Zen 5 CPU.

Continue reading: PlayStation 6 SoC is 'design complete' says leaker: AMD Zen 5 with X3D cache, next-gen UDNA GPU (full post)

Nintendo Switch 2 performance leaked revealing CPU and GPU clock speeds

Jak Connor | Gaming | Jan 18, 2025 1:33 AM CST

Nintendo finally officially unveiled the successor to the Nintendo Switch, and while the trailer did showcase the physical design of the console, we didn't get any performance details.

Nintendo Switch 2 performance leaked revealing CPU and GPU clock speeds

However, a data miner has now revealed what appears to be the hardware clock speeds for the Nintendo Switch 2, which gives us an insight into how the console will perform with games. Notably, these speeds are "leaked" and should be taken with a grain of salt. We won't actually know what the Nintendo Switch 2 is capable of until it is officially released. With that being said, let's take a look at what has been discovered.

According to the tech experts at Digital Foundry, which cite the purported leaked speeds, the Nintendo Switch 2 is powered by an 8nm chip, with a GPU clock speed of 561 MHz in handheld mode and 10007.25 MHz docked. As for the CPU, the leak states in handheld mode, the Nintendo Switch 2 will run at 1100.8 MHz, and in docked, it will drop down to 998.4 MHz.

Continue reading: Nintendo Switch 2 performance leaked revealing CPU and GPU clock speeds (full post)

NVIDIA stuffs $500 million worth of Blackwell GPUs into 10,000 square-meter facility

Jak Connor | Video Cards & GPUs | Jan 18, 2025 1:02 AM CST

NVIDIA is planning to spend half a billion dollars on a new supercomputer facility for research and development purposes. The new facility will be powered by the company's latest Blackwell AI GPUs.

NVIDIA stuffs $500 million worth of Blackwell GPUs into 10,000 square-meter facility

According to reports, the new facility measures approximately 10,000 square meters and is located in Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park near the city of Yokne'am. The new facility will be filled with thousands of liquid-cooled Blackwell GPUs, along with BlueField-3 SuperNIC, Spectrum-X800, and Quantum-X800 switches. As for the purpose of the facility, reports indicate NVIDIA employees will use it to conduct research and development on datacenter technologies that will likely increase efficiency and performance.

NVIDIA didn't reveal the total number of GPUs, but what we do know is the facility will be home to enough Blackwell GPUs that it will rival Israel's "Israel-1" supercomputer, which consists of 2,048 H100 AI GPUs. For those that don't know, NVIDIA touts Blackwell's performance as 2.5x the floating-point performance of Hopper, the previous generation of AI GPUs. Moreover, Blackwell will provide 5x performance when dropping down to 4-bit precision. Construction for this new facility has already begun, with reports indicating it will be complete sometime in the first half of 2025 and operations to start during the same period.

Continue reading: NVIDIA stuffs $500 million worth of Blackwell GPUs into 10,000 square-meter facility (full post)

Apple makes rare admission of failure with 'Apple Intelligece' feature has failed

Jak Connor | Software & Apps | Jan 18, 2025 12:01 AM CST

A new report has revealed Apple is preparing to fall on it sword after releasing an Apple Intelligence feature that has been caught producing incorrect information.

Apple makes rare admission of failure with 'Apple Intelligece' feature has failed

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A new report from the Washington Post claims Apple is preparing to disable its AI summaries generated for news and entertainment apps after the feature produced factually incorrect information several times. For those wondering what this feature does, Apple Intelligence users receive a notification summarizing the most popular news stories. The idea behind the feature is to provide users with a quick summary of the top headlines, which they can then engage with for further reading.

Continue reading: Apple makes rare admission of failure with 'Apple Intelligece' feature has failed (full post)

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT perf leaks: similar to 7900 XTX in raster, but RDNA 4 smokes RDNA 3 in RT

Anthony Garreffa | Video Cards & GPUs | Jan 17, 2025 11:35 PM CST

AMD's next-gen Radeon RX 9070 XT shouldn't be much further from being detailed, with new gaming performance leaks arriving to tease what to expect from RDNA 4.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT perf leaks: similar to 7900 XTX in raster, but RDNA 4 smokes RDNA 3 in RT

In a new video from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, we're getting a look at the flagship RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card being benched against the RX 9070 XT, and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture, as well the RX 7900 XT.

The benchmarks include Black Myth: Wukong (RT on High, 1080p upscale to 4K), Hitman 3 (High settings), F1 23 (High settings), Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Ultra settings), and finally, Cyberpunk 2077 (RT + Ultra settings). You can see that the new RX 9070 XT either falls just short of the RX 7900 XTX, equals it, or just beats it (we're talking about 1FPS more).

Continue reading: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT perf leaks: similar to 7900 XTX in raster, but RDNA 4 smokes RDNA 3 in RT (full post)

NVIDIA ordering more CoWoS-L advanced packaging from TSMC: ready for more Blackwell AI GPUs

Anthony Garreffa | Artificial Intelligence | Jan 17, 2025 4:04 PM CST

In order for NVIDIA's continued AI GPU dominance it needs advanced packaging -- TSMC is the king of the semiconductor industry, and has the world's bleeding-edge advanced packaging technology -- but NVIDIA needs more, much more.

NVIDIA ordering more CoWoS-L advanced packaging from TSMC: ready for more Blackwell AI GPUs

NVIDIA's new Blackwell AI GPUs have multiple chips glued together using a complex chip on wafer on substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology that TSMC makes, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang making some new remarks on needing more CoWoS advanced packaging capacity.

Huang said on the sidelines of an event by chip supplier Siliconware Precision Industries in Taiwan's central Taichung city: "As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we're still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L. So it's not about reducing capacity. It's actually increasing capacity into CoWoS-L".

Continue reading: NVIDIA ordering more CoWoS-L advanced packaging from TSMC: ready for more Blackwell AI GPUs (full post)

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series 'Shimada Peak' leaks: 96C/192T, 64C/128T, 32C/64T, 16C/32T

Anthony Garreffa | CPU, APU & Chipsets | Jan 17, 2025 3:03 PM CST

AMD's next-generation Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series "Shimada Peak" CPUs have turned up in new shipping manifests, teasing 96-core, 64-core, 32-core, and 16-core variants.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series 'Shimada Peak' leaks: 96C/192T, 64C/128T, 32C/64T, 16C/32T

In new shipping manifests, we're learning that AMD will have a plethora of core configurations of its new Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series "Shimada Peak" CPUs. We're talking about a flagship 96-core, 192-thread SKU, followed by 64C/128T, 32C/64T, and finally, a 16C/32T variant.

Previous leaks teased that we'd see the new Zen 5-based Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series CPUs would debut with the monster 96-core, 192-thread variant alongside the 16-core, 32-thread variant. But now, it seems we'll be graced by the 64-core, 128-thread, and 32-core, 64-thread variant at the same time. It'll be a thread party!

Continue reading: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series 'Shimada Peak' leaks: 96C/192T, 64C/128T, 32C/64T, 16C/32T (full post)

NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin AI GPU rumored for 2H 2025: more AI domination thanks to next-gen HBM4

Anthony Garreffa | Artificial Intelligence | Jan 17, 2025 2:02 PM CST

NVIDIA's next-generation Rubin GPU architecture will enter "trial production" in 2H 2025 according to the latest rumors, with SK hynix working on getting its next-gen HBM4 memory ready earlier than expected.

NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin AI GPU rumored for 2H 2025: more AI domination thanks to next-gen HBM4

The company promised a 1-year cadence on new AI GPU architecture releases, but it seems NVIDIA is even more keen on getting new AI GPU architectures into the wild even quicker. In a new report from ZDNet Korea, we're learning that SK hynix is shipping out HBM4 AI memory samples in June at the latest, with mass production of its new HBM4 expected to begin in Q3 2025, around 3 months earlier than SK hynix had planned.

NVIDIA requested SK hynix bring its HBM4 AI memory to market ahead of schedule, and this is ahead of the expedited release of HBM4 by NVIDIA. ZDNet Korea reports that the tape-out of HBM4 to NVIDIA had taken place in Q4 2024, which means SK hynix has already completed verification stages with big partners.

Continue reading: NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin AI GPU rumored for 2H 2025: more AI domination thanks to next-gen HBM4 (full post)

Intel acquisition back into the headlines: mystery company wants to buy the chipmaker

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Jan 17, 2025 1:48 PM CST

In a new turn of events for Intel, after CES 2025 is done and dusted, a new rumor of a company eyeing Intel off is back in the headlines.

Intel acquisition back into the headlines: mystery company wants to buy the chipmaker

Charlie Demerjian from SemiAccurate is reporting that they've read an internal email about a company "that was looking to buy Intel outright, not parts". However, the interested party is NOT one of the companies that we've been hearing about, with Charlie adding that "we have not seen any rumor of this company's interest in public statements"

Charlie explained in his post: "This email went to a very tight circle at the company according to our source which leads us to believe that it was quite real. When a company wants to use the press, public opinion, or investors as a denial of service weapon, they go public and go public loudly. When a company wants to actually buy something, they do whatever they can to avoid leaks to keep the price down. The way this email was circulated, or not circulated, made us lean toward it being real. That said it was far from confirmation".

Continue reading: Intel acquisition back into the headlines: mystery company wants to buy the chipmaker (full post)

Purported NVIDIA RTX 5090 benchmarks seem a rather disappointing result for the flagship GPU

Darren Allan | Video Cards & GPUs | Jan 17, 2025 12:05 PM CST

NVIDIA's RTX 5090 has been spotted in some benchmarks that give us an idea of its performance outside of DLSS 4 (and Multi Frame Generation) boosts.

Purported NVIDIA RTX 5090 benchmarks seem a rather disappointing result for the flagship GPU

The catch is that these aren't gaming benchmarks with DLSS 4 turned off, but rather, Geekbench Vulkan and OpenCL runs.

So no, these are far from ideal as a way of gauging the Blackwell flagship's performance, but, assuming the scores are accurate, they do give us a flavor of the raw generational uplift we're looking at here compared to the RTX 4090.

Continue reading: Purported NVIDIA RTX 5090 benchmarks seem a rather disappointing result for the flagship GPU (full post)

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