CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 3

Although not officially announced, there are several leaks surrounding the upcoming AMD Ryzen 8000 Strix Point APUs that will use Zen 5 architecture, with the big boy Strix Halo APU set to feature up to 16 Zen 5 Cores alongside 40 Compute Units of RDNA 3.5 graphics. That's Radeon RX 6750 XT or even PlayStation 5-like performance!

Although it's not a like-for-like comparison, this is more GPU power than the recently released AMD Radeon RX 7600, which features 32 Compute Units. It's on par with the AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT, a card made for high-end 1440p gaming.

As a potential flagship model, even with a 4nm process having 40 RDNA 3.5 CUs will certainly increase the die size by a decent amount. Still, as an all-in-one solution, there's no need for discrete graphics when you've got a configuration similar to what you find in the desktop space. Radeon RX 6750 XT performance on something like the ROG Ally sounds fantastic.

Earlier this week, we got word that there was a brand-new Ryzen 9 7945HX3D mobile CPU from AMD out in the wild, and today the company has confirmed that it is indeed real and the very first mobile CPU to feature its impressive 3D V-Cache technology. AMD's 3D V-Cache powered Ryzen CPUs deliver some of the best gaming performance in the desktop space, so this is great news for laptop and notebook gamers.

It's set to debut in a single product, though, the ROG Strix SCAR 17 X3D laptop from ASUS - the first device to use "exclusive AMD 3D V-Cache technology." The addition of 3D V-Cache stacked L3 cache technology brings the on-chip memory capacity up to an impressive 144 MB, and this is paired with a max boost clock speed of 5.4GHz in a 55W TDP package - making it one of the fastest mobile processors currently available.

With 3D V-Cache in the desktop space delivering a sizable boost to gaming performance in resolutions like 1080p and 1440p, it's the sort of product that makes perfect sense for gaming laptops. Not to mention the lower power draw of X3D CPUs being ideal for the efficiency-is-king mobile market.

Intel was said to be considering price hikes for its Core processors, an idea floated by the rumor mill, and one which is wholly untrue, the chip giant has told us in no uncertain terms.

Rumors about incoming Intel processor price rises have been greatly made-up, we're told by the chip giant (Image Credit: Intel)

This started on the grapevine with a report from German tech site PC Games Hardware, citing word from wholesalers in that country (who allegedly received a letter from Intel). And after that got picked up elsewhere, Intel let Tom's Hardware know that it was completely false.

Intel stated: "Generally, Intel does not comment on speculation regarding price changes to its portfolio. However, we can confirm that Intel has not sent the letter described to customers or partners and has not initiated a price change to its CPU portfolio at this time. We have no further comment to share on the matter."

Yet another rumor has emerged about how Intel's next-gen CPUs will turn out, and this time we've been treated to the full details - including clock speeds - of the non-K (locked) versions of Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh chips.

As ever, add your own seasoning, and don't be stingy with the stuff either, but you can see the purported line-up as outlined in the above tweet from leaker Chi11eddog (who has provided previous spillage on Intel's 14th-gen processors).

The details underline that only one processor will be changed in terms of its core loadout, despite other rumors floating around that were hopeful of beefier core counts for two or maybe even three of the Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs.

For PC gamers, AMD's 3D V-Cache powered Ryzen CPUs deliver some of the best overall performance when it comes to straight-up gaming - with the latest Ryzen 7 7800X3D being one of the very best options if you're putting together a new build to play the latest games. And it looks like 3D V-Cache is set to hit the mobile CPU space, starting with the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D that is set to be included as an option for ASUS's new ROG SCAR 17 laptops.

Per this post on Twitter (or X) by @9550pro, the new Ryzen 9 7945HX3D will feature 16 Zen 4 cores and 128MB of L3 cache with a TDP of 55-75W. According to specs, the cache is compromised of 32MB on two chiplets, with an additional 64MB of stacked cache. As a Ryzen 9 CPU, it's a flagship product, so expect it to be limited to high-end gaming laptops and notebooks with GPUs like the GeForce RTX 4090.

Spec-wise, the new ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 17 features a 17-inch 1440p display with a 240 Hz refresh rate, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 16GB GPU, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and 1TB of PCIe 3 SSD storage.

We've seen yet more evidence that Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh processors are set to hit the shelves within the next three months.

This is one of Mechenike's current gaming PCs which can be equipped with up to an Intel Core i9-13900 CPU (Image Credit: Mechenike)

This comes from a report by Chinese tech site IT Home, which was present at the Bilibili World exhibition (in Shanghai), and spoke to a PC maker there (as flagged up by VideoCardz).

That PC manufacturer, Mechenike, was showing off some of its incoming products for later this year, including gaming desktops and mini PCs (quite flashy looking efforts that incorporate water cooling and RGB goodness aplenty).

A bunch of new info has been spilled about Intel's future processor ranges by a well-known YouTuber, and we've caught sight of Beast Lake again - potentially highly performant chips that could be specially designed for gaming.

Before we dive into Beast Lake - which is purportedly still a good way down the line - let's look at what's due before this, focusing on the desktop processors, as laid out by Moore's Law is Dead (MLID).

So, as we know, Intel has Raptor Lake Refresh processors to follow current-gen Raptor Lake, landing later this year. Following that, there's Arrow Lake that'll debut late in 2024 (except for the flagship, maybe). After that, things get a bit cloudier, so MLID steps in with his latest theorized release schedule for Intel.

The rumors around Intel's Arrow Lake processors are starting to pile up, and the latest one is a bit of a shocker in all honesty - that the chips which will follow next-gen Raptor Lake Refresh will do away with hyper-threading.

Yes, you read that right - hyper-threading will apparently fall by the wayside with 15th-gen silicon, according to the latest video packed full of Intel leaks from Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) on YouTube.

The good news is that MLID has aired rumors in the past promising huge gains for Arrow Lake - we're talking the CPUs being up to 40% faster than Meteor Lake (the Core i5 desktop offering that was supposedly canceled) in multi-core - and that kind of huge gain still holds true. In other words, the sample processors used to produce that major (rumored) uplift already had hyper-threading disabled.

Another leak has sprung around Intel's inbound Raptor Lake Refresh processors, and it again underlines that the Core i5-14600 won't up its core count.

You may recall that a previous rumor suggested the Core i5-14600 (and 14600K) would have 8 performance cores plus 8 efficiency cores (8+8), upping the performance core count by 2 from the 13600 - which would be a bold step.

However, that isn't the case according to another (more recent) leak from Benchlife, which claimed the 14600 will stick with a 6+8 configuration - and that's now backed up by this new leak from chi11eddog, a regular hardware rumor-monger on Twitter.

AMD's Zen 5 processors have been grabbing some limelight in the rumor mill of late, and a fresh sighting of the CPUs has been made.

Ryzen 8000 CPUs are expected to be a big leap over Ryzen 7000 (Image Credit: AMD)

As Tom's Hardware spotted, the developer of the AIDA64 benchmarking suite has just added preliminary support for Zen 5 chips.

Specifically, the AIDA64 Engineer 6.90 software release notes make it clear that Zen 5 (Ryzen 8000) processors can now be recognized.