CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 108

AMD will be having a huge year this year, at least in their CPU department, with the release of their refreshed Ryzen CPUs and new 400-series chipsets in a couple of months. But now news is breaking of their upcoming Starship/Mattise CPUs that will be released late this year and early 2019.

HWINFO is now recognizing a bunch of new CPUs, AMD's upcoming 400-series chipset, and even Intel's upcoming Ice Lake-SP platform. AMD's next-gen Starship CPU is going to be a monster, offering a huge 48C/96T of CPU power rocking the refreshed Zen+ or Zen 2 architecture.

Here's what HWINFO32 and HWINFO64 v5.72 supports:

AMD is in the middle of a class action lawsuit from investors over its not-so-good comments about Meltdown and Spectre, but there was worse news last week when AMD machines were being bricked by Windows 10 security updates meant to help, not harm.

The latest updates come in the form of Windows 10 Creators Update (version 1703) and Windows 10 Anniversary Update (version 1607). These cumulative updates push the Creators Update systems to build 15063.877 (support KB4057144) and Anniversary Update PCs to build 14393.2034 (support KB4057142).

The big star here is KB4073290 that will fix the bricked AMD devices on the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, so grab that if you've been sitting there twiddling your thumbs with your fresh new Ryzen/Threadripper-powered gaming beast.

We all know that the Meltdown and Spectre security holes have caused headaches for Intel and AMD, but now AMD has been hit with a class action lawsuit that seeks to "recover damages for Advanced Micro investors under the federal securities laws".

Rosen Law Firm is a global investor rights firm, where a class action lawsuit has been kicked off on "behalf of purchasers of the securities of Advanced Micro Devices". The lawsuit details:

"Defendants during the Class Period made materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) a fundamental security flaw in Advanced Micro's processor chips renders them susceptible to hacking; and (2) as a result, Advanced Micro's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages".

In what started out with Intel being at the middle of the biggest security hole found in consumer CPUs ever, Meltdown and Spectre are now causing a world of hurt for AMD, which had previously said there was a "near zero risk to AMD processors at this time". Yeah, well... about that. We also have a list of Intel CPUs affected by Meltdown and Spectre.

Microsoft's own support forums have seen a flood of PC owners with AMD processors complaining that their PCs won't boot after Spectre/Meltdown security patches were downloaded and installed.

"Microsoft has reports of customers with some AMD devices getting into an unbootable state after installing recent Windows operating system security updates", a Microsoft spokesperson explained. They continued: "After investigating, Microsoft has determined that some AMD chipsets do not conform to the documentation previously provided to Microsoft to develop the Windows operating system mitigations to protect against the chipset vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown".

Intel has been in a world of hurt ever since the major security bugs inside of virtually every Intel CPU and many other CPUs on the market, but the news of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich selling $24 million worth of Intel shares - even though he knew about Meltdown and Spectre, has people not-so-happy.

Krzanich sold $24 million worth of stock back in November 2017, with the sale taking place after Intel found out about the huge Meltdown and Spectre bugs, as they found out months before that . Krzanich had the required 10b5-1 plan that allows company executives to sell their stock, but the plan was made at the end of October, a massive 5 months after Intel found out about Meltdown and Spectre.

But the thing is, Kzranich sold the maximum about of his Intel shares as he could, but there are thoughts that the Intel CEO sold as many company shares as he could, as he knew about Spectre and Meltdown and the possible effect it would have on Intel share prices. This is insider trading, and brings some very heavy things into the argument.

CES 2018 - AMD has just hosted its big event to unveil its new Raven Ridge APU range of processors, with two new CPUs in the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G.

Starting with the new Ryzen 3 2200G, which AMD says offers "best-in-class" eSports game performance, including Battlefield One (it's Battlefield 1, AMD... what the hell is going on here), Overwatch (on low), Rocket League, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (is an eSports game?) and Dota 2 (running on Vulkan). This is compared against Intel's Core i3-8100 processor.

Next up we have the faster Ryzen 5 2400G, which is a little faster but still doesn't hit 60FPS average in some of the bigger games on the market. Battlefield 1 at 52FPS average, and Overwatch at 49FPS on Medium isn't bad, but it can't even handle Rocket League at 49FPS.

CES 2018 - Intel is about to reveal their next-gen Core CPUs powered by Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics, featuring 4GB of HBM2 and HBCC.

Inside, there are two graphics subsystems on the single package courtesy of Intel using the Radeon RX Vega M on the left with 4GB of HBM2/HBCC on a 1024-bit bus, with 24 Compute Units and support for up to 6 displays. The GPU supports up to 4K, and has support for DisplayPort 1.4 w/HDR, HDMI 2.0b and HDR10.

On the right, the Intel side of things has an Intel Gfx Display Engine with support for 3 displays at up to 4K, and support for Intel Quick Sync Video which provides VP9, HEVC, and H264 hardware encoding/decoding.

Intel has just launched its new 8th-gen Core processor,with a few different SKUs. We have the 8th-gen Core Mobile processor in U, G, and H variants (mainstream, thin/light with discrete GPU, and highest performance).

These new CPUs will be more detailed in the coming days, but for now, this is the skinny:

U: Mainstream Mobility

Intel has finally released a full list of all of their processors that are open to the Spectre and Meltdown security flaws, with virtually all Intel CPUs at risk.

The chipmaker has worked closely with AMD, ARM Holdings, and multiple operating system makers in order to push an industry-wide approach to fixing this problem. Intel will soon have an update for 90% of their processors, something that should drop in the next few days.

AMD is expected to launch its next-gen Ryzen 2 processors and new 400-series chipset in March, according to retailers in Japan, who are citing upstream suppliers, according to the latest rumors.

Until now, previous rumors stated that AMD would be launching their new Ryzen 2 processors and 400-series chipsets in February. But the new Pinnacle Ridge architecutre will be expected to launch as optical shrinks of the current-gen Summit Ridge tech, down to the spiffy new 12nm process.

AMD's new Ryzen 2 processors will be built on the same socket AM4 package, and should work with existing 300-series motherboards with BIOS updates from manufacturers. The new 400-series motherboards should support current-gen Ryzen processors out-of-the-box as well as the upcoming Raven Ridge APUs, which 300-series motherboard owners will need an update for.