This week on the TT Show, Lord of the Rings superfan (and also superfan) Jak and Kosta discuss Peter Jackson returning to The Lord of the Rings franchise with the new movie 'The Hunt for Gollum.' They discuss the potential story, timeline, and their hopes for a return to the magic of the original trilogy. And not, you know, The Hobbit.

Another big story this week is Apple's apologizing for its seemingly tone-deaf iPad Pro advertisement that quickly caused a massive wave of negative backlash. Is it as bad as some of the comments? As a fan of retro hardware who doesn't like seeing it get destroyed, Kosta thinks so, while Jak is more on the fence and 'meh.'

And it wouldn't be an episode of The TT Show without GPU news, with all of the latest GeForce RTX 50 Series, Radeon, and Intel graphics talk bundled into a new section of the podcast called 'GPU Corner.' Speaking of new sections, Jak and Kosta play a round of Guess the Headline for some fun.

As part of its AYANEO REMAKE product lineup, the company has announced a pair of new portable gaming handhelds inspired by classic Game Boy hardware - albeit far more powerful. The AYANEO Pocket DMG is a new vertical handheld modeled after the iconic Game Boy Pocket or Game Boy Advance SP and powered by the Snapdragon G3x Gen 3 Gaming Platform.

The sleek and minimal design is optimized for vertical gaming, and the 3.92-inch OLED display sports an impressive resolution of 1240x1080 and a pixel density of 419 PPI. As a handheld geared toward sprite-based retro gaming and emulation, having an OLED display is a definite selling point - it will make many games look better than ever, thanks to the brilliant contrast and color accuracy.

AYANEO's second retro-inspired handheld that got revealed is the new AYANEO Pocket MICRO - which is reminiscent of the pocket or keyring-sized Game Boy Micro that played Game Boy Advance cartridges on a tiny 240×160 pixel 2-inch screen.

Microsoft will soon offer AMD's new Instinct MI300X AI accelerator for its cloud computing customers, as well as introducing a preview of its new Cobalt 100 customer processors during its upcoming Build conference this week.

The new clusters of AMD's flagship Instinct MI300X AI accelerator will be available for purchase by cloud computing customers through Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service, where they'll be an alternative to NVIDIA's family of H100 AI GPUs, which absolutely dominate the AI GPU market, but they're getting harder to purchase in big numbers.

Microsoft will also be offering AMD's new 4th Gen EPYC processors adapted for general purpose, memory-intensive, and compute-optimized virtual machines. Microsoft's new Cobalt 100 processors that the company will show off next week at the Build conference will feature 40% more performance compared to other processors based on the Arm architecture.

AMD is reportedly setting up a new research and development (R&D) center in Taiwan, with an investment of 5 billion yuan (around $155 million USD).

The US chip manufacturer will also seek subsidies from Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs' new "Big A+ Project" and that AMD CEO Lisa Su will be in Taiwan in the coming weeks for Computex 2024, where she'll also meet with the Taiwan government and discuss the new R&D center.

AMD's main GPU competitor, NVIDIA, recently applied with the Ministry of Economic Affairs for teh "Leading Enterprise R&D Deepening Plan" (referred to as the Big A+ Plan) which sees Asia's first R&D center in Taiwan, and Taiwan's largest AI supercomputer, the Taipei-1.

Taiwanese lawmakers are reconsidering the current regulations of nuclear power in the country that would heavily help TSMC.

TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) consumes most of the power generated in Taiwan, with the Taiwanese national legislature, the Executive Yuan, showed willingness to change laws after the new economic minister succeeding Weng Mei-hua, J.W. Kuo, said in the Executive Yuan that he thought nuclear energy was a clean power source.

The outgoing government has been stalling the increase of the share of nuclear power on Taiwan's national power grid, with data from national regulator TaiPower showing nuclear power makes up less than 7% of Taiwan's total energy. The recent comments regarding nuclear power regulation changes were made by outgoing NDC minister, Kung Ming-hsin, just as his government was handing power over to its successors.

Samsung and SK hynix are looking into 1c DRAM as the key to next-generation HBM4 competitiveness, with Samsung considering changing the DRAM to 1c DRAM for its HBM4, with South Korean rival SK hynix (who is working with TSMC for HBM4) also looking at 1c DRAM for its new HBM4 memory.

HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is memory that features multiple DRAMs stacked vertically, connected with TSV (Through Silicon Via), so the performance of the DRAM product on the HBM memory, greatly affects the performance of HBM. Samsung was initially planning to use 1b DRAM, a 10-nano class 5th-generation DRAM, to HBM4.

1b DRAM has a linewidth of 12nm, with Samsung starting mass production of 1b DRAM in May 2023, with Samsung's HBM3E memory using 1a DRAM. ZDNet Korea reports that Samsung has established a new plan internally to change the DRAM inside of its future-gen HBM4 to 1c DRAM, with competitors like SK hynix and Micron using 1b DRAM in their respective HBM3E, HBM4 is interpreted as a steategy to take the lead of its competitors in the front-end process area.

AMD's next-gen Zen 5 processors will be launched at Computex 2024 next month, while next-next-gen Zen 6 processors are being teased with 32 cores per CCD.

In some new posts on X from leakers "Kepler_L2" and "InstLatX64" we're discovering the Zen 5 and Zen 6 core configurations, with Zen 5 hitting in just a few weeks time. Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores are expected to both be smaller than existing Zen 4 cores, which means there'll be more room to fire more CCDs on the CPU package.

Western Digital has announced a new portable HDD expansion across its WD, WD_BLACK, and SanDisk Professional product lineups with the world's highest storage capacity in a 2.5-inch portable HDD at a huge 6TB.

The new WD My Passport portable HDD, WD_BLACK P10 Game Drive, and SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorARD will all now be available in 6TB capacities. The new WD My Passport 6TB drive comes with the latest USB-C connectivity, and a modern metal design. The out-of-the-box experience is easy, with a convenient and slim form factor that fits almost anywhere... with 6TB in your pocket.

The 6TB WD My Passport Ultra and 6TB WD My Passport Ultra for Mac both retail for $199.99 MSRP. The 6TB WD My Passport and WD My Passport for Mac both retail for $179.99 MSRP. The 6TB WD My Passport, Works with USB-C retails for $184.99 MSRP. All products are available now at select Western Digital retailers, e-tailers and on the Western Digital Store

ORIGIN PC has just launched its latest gaming laptops with the introduction of the new EON16-SX, NSX-16, NSL-14, and NSL-16.

The new ORIGIN PC EON16-SX laptop features Intel's latest Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs, designed for the generation of AI with their built-in NPU and Intel AI Boost technology for AI workloads. ORIGIN PC's four new gaming laptops have all passed MIL-STD-810H-SPEC standards, passing extensive stress tests including extreme temperatures, humidity, shock, and more.

The new EON16-SX and NSX-16 gaming laptops fuse high-performance and portability, weighing just 4.29lbs and just 0.77 inches thin. Inside, they pack the new Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor (16 cores, 22 threads) with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 that's been tuned for a TGP of 105W, a 16-inch 2560 x 1600 resolution display at 240Hz, up to 16TB of SSD storage, and up to 64GB of DDR5 memory.

A few of Apple's high-level executives have 'secretly' visited TSMC, with Apple wanting to secure TSMC's first batch of 2nm production capacity.

Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams met with TSMC president Wei Zhejia, with Apple wanting the first batches of 2nm production capacity, but TSMC benefits big time with NT$600 billion (around $18.6 billion USD or so), which is a new high for the Taiwanese contract chip manufacturer.

Apple has been working closely with TSMC for many years now, with the A-series processors used in iPhones, the long-term plan for the M-series processors inside of the latest iPads and MacBook laptops, with the "key driver" behind this being Apple COO Jeff Williams. The new wave of package production capacity and cooperation with TSMC for Apple's self-developed AI chips, is a very important step.

I've gotta say, I would never do this myself... but I really do love seeing modded graphics cards like this. NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card has been modded, with 24Gbps and 26Gbps GDDR6X memory.

A competition was recently held in Brazil between the Paulo Gomes and TecLab teams, with the competition involving swapping out the VRAM on the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card with faster memory, and overclocking it to its absolute limits.

NVIDIA ships the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card with 21Gbps GDDR6X memory modules, with NVIDIA using Micron 21Gbps GDDR6X dies (161-0479-900) were swapped, and modded, with 24Gbps GDDR6X dies (161-0480-900).