AMD has announced the new AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series processors for business laptops and mobile workstations and the new AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series desktop processors for professionals. Designed for the age of the AI PC, it's the first set of PRO chips from AMD with built-in NPUs for AI workloads.

Like other 8000-series 'Hawk Point' and 'Phoenix' products, these are built on the tried-and-true Zen 4 architecture that has been powering Ryzen for a few years (we have to wait a bit longer until we see Zen 5). They have the bonus of AI acceleration and onboard RDNA graphics. These are similar to previous client-facing chips that launched earlier this year, with additional tweaks and services to suit the professional market.

In fact, the addition of AI hardware, the AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series for laptops and the AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series of desktop processors for workstations, have made AMD the first company to offer professional CPUs with AI NPUs for both environments. Intel has yet to launch a desktop CPU with a built-in NPU.

No Rest for the Wicked is a new action RPG from the creators of the award-winning Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps platformers, with the team at Moon Studios channeling the likes of Diablo and Dark Souls to deliver a mature, story-driven, co-op loot-filled adventure in a dark and beautiful world.

Visually, No Rest for the Wicked is stunning, with a painterly art style that brings its gothic world to life. The animation is impressive; it makes the combat look intense. The game is launching into Early Access this week, on April 18 (on Steam), and the launch trailer showcases glimpses of the world, story, characters, and gameplay.

In the game, you become a "mystical holy warrior" and use your arsenal of supernatural powers to "defeat the Pestilence at any cost." At its core, No Rest for the Wicked is a Diablo-style action RPG where loot and skills will define your playstyle, with a zoomed-out isometric perspective framing exploration and action.

Taipower made an important call to TSMC on Monday to help generate electricity to avoid blackouts, while Taoyuen had a two-hour power outage on Tuesday.

After the earthquake in Taiwan a couple of weeks ago and with recent temperature rises as the country heads into summer, annual maintenance and the failure of air conditioners across Taiwan saw Taipower's power supply pressure immediately increase. On Monday night, Taipower called TSMC to help them generate enough electricity, which saw them close to power outages.

Taipower spokesperson Cai Zhimeng said on Tuesday that the power supply was very tight on Monday night, and that TSMC helped out greatly by turning on its own diesel generators and providing 200,000 kilowatts of electricity. Taipower quickly pointed out that TSMC was helping increase its power supply and not cause a reduction in electricity consumption or have any negative effects on TSMC's operations.

NVIDIA's new wave of Blackwell AI GPUs will boost demand for TSMC's advanced CoWoS packaging capacity by over 150% in 2024.

In a new report from TrendForce, the next-gen Blackwell AI GPU platform that includes the B200 and B100 AI GPUs -- as well as the GB200, which also features NVIDIA's in-house Arm-based Grace CPU -- all use CoWoS packaging from TSMC, and projections suggest millions of shipments of high-end B200 AI GPUs are expected in 2025 making up close to 50% of NVIDIA's high-end GPU market.

NVIDIA will launch its new GB200 and B200 in the second half of 2024, with upstream wafer packaging needing to adopt a much more complex, and high-precision CoWoS-L technology, which will make validation and testing take more time. On top of that, more time is needed to optimize the B-series for AI server systems in things like network communication and cooling performance.

Shortly after Take-Two Interactive bought Borderlands developer Gearbox for $460 million, the publisher has announced a big cost-cutting plan that will eliminate hundreds of jobs.

Take-Two's new 8-K SEC filing confirms the company will lay off 5% of its workforce in a bid to save money. As of March 2023, Take-Two employed 11,580 full-time employees--assuming this is still accurate, a 5% elimination would affect 579 Take-Two employees. Layoffs had already been expected post-Gearbox acquisition.

Multiple undisclosed games have been cancelled because of the cost-reduction strategy. "As part of these efforts, the Company is rationalizing its pipeline and eliminating several projects in development and streamlining its organizational structure, which will eliminate headcount and reduce future hiring needs," reads the SEC filing.

Intel is now talking about its new augmented intelligence tool developed in-house by Intel engineers, system-on-chip (SoC) designers now aren't waiting 6 weeks to see if they hit the sensor sweet spot, thanks to AI they're getting these answers in just a few minutes.

The new AI-powered tool developed by the Augmented Intelligence team led by Dr. Olena Zhu, senior principal engineer and AI solution artitect inside of Intel's Client Computing Group (CCG), helped Intel's system architecture factor thousands of variables into future silicon designs, with it being just one of many where Intel teams are using AI to optimize various workloads.

Engineers are required to analyze complex, concurrent workloads that activate the CPU core, input/output (I/O), and other system functions precisely to determine the location of thermal hotspots on a processor. The engineers also have to decide where to place very tiny sensors-each is barely larger than the tip of your average pin, says Intel-which makes things more complicated again.

Sony's upgraded PlayStation 5 Pro is coming later this year, and developers are already familiarizing themselves with the upgraded hardware so they can have games ready when the beefed-up console launches.

Inside, the new PlayStation 5 Pro console has an upgraded "Trinity" SoC made by AMD and fabbed by TSMC. It features a heavily upgraded GPU -- up to 45% faster than the standard PS5 -- and slightly faster CPU. We've heard that a new "PS5 Pro Enhanced" label for games will see 4K resolution, 60FPS, and improved ray tracing abilities.

PlayStation 5 Pro is said to have 2-3x the ray tracing performance of the standard PS5, so we're in for a true delight with PS5 Pro Enhanced games on a PlayStation 5 Pro console. I can definitely see, and I've been saying it for a while in my PS5 Pro and GTA 6 news, that GTA 6 will be a gigantic system seller for the PS5 Pro, so we can almost guarantee Grand Theft Auto 6 will be a PS5 Pro Enhanced title when the game launches in 2025.

Intel is under continued pressure from US restrictions -- and could reportedly, like NVIDIA -- that would see Team Blue gimping their AI processors for the Chinese market.

This isn't a new move, with NVIDIA modifying its AI GPUs to meet US restrictions into China, and now it seems Intel could do it soon with "special edition" versions of its new Gaudi 3 AI accelerators. These two new gimped AI accelerators from Intel are rumored to be launched at the end of June, and the end of September, reports TrendForce.

Intel announced its new Gaudi 3 AI accelerator recently, and in the Gaudi 3 white paper it was discovered that Intel said it would be launching two special edition versions of Gaudi 3 that will be specifically for the Chinese market. There will be two hardware variants launched later this year: the HL-328 OAM-compatible Mezzanine card, and the HL-388 PCIe Accelerator Card. TrendForce reports that the HL-328 will launch on June 24, and the HL-388 on September 24.

NVIDIA has been making cut-down AI GPUs to circumvent US export restrictions in China for months now, but it appears modified Ampere A100 AI GPUs are also making the rounds there.

A new NVIDIA A100 7936SP -- not the real name; this name is based on its CUDA core count -- has the same GA100 GPU as the regular A100 -- but with 15% more CUDA cores. The regular A100 has 124 SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors), while the new A100 7936SP has 128 SMs in total.

There's also more HBM2e memory on the new A100 7936SP, with 96GB of HBM2e memory, compared to just 80GB of HBM2e on the standard A100 AI GPU. With the additional 4 SMs, the new A100 7936P has a 15% increase in SM, CUDA, and Tensor Core counts, which should relate to at least 15% more AI performance across the board.

AMD partnered with Vindral to show off some incredible 8K 10-bit HDR live streaming technologies on its Alveo hardware, with ultra-low latencies and all viewers in sync at the NAB Show 2024 in Las Vegas.

The companies noted that the AV1-powered 8K 10-bit HDR quality live streaming tier, with ultra-low latency and all viewers in sync. The demo at the NAB Show 2024 was running as a full on-premise setup of the Vindral CDN, located locally at NAB in Las Vegas, powered by an Alveo MA35D from AMD.

The two companies have been "working closely" to make a viable implementation, quality-secured, and scalable. Daniel Alinder, CEO at Vindral, said: "After our AV1 initiative, the next obvious step was to look to the next frontier. And that's 8K. Not many devices can display it yet, nor can they decode the video, but as a brand aimed to be ahead of the curve it is an important step for us".