AMD and Nvidia to suffer from increased competition

Susquehanna Financial has warned that AMD and Nvidia are about to lose a big chunk of the cash that they have been making from crypto-miners.

Susquehanna’s Christopher Rolland said that the mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain had developed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip to mine the cryptocurrency Ether — and an ASIC from Bitmain could pose new competition for AMD’s and Nvidia’s graphics-processing units (GPUs).

Ether mining-related sales accounted for about 20 percent of AMD’s sales and 10 percent of Nvidia’s revenue.

Apparently, Monero is not that happy, and an emergency software upgrade set for April is explicitly meant to change the rules of the system to block the effort entirely, rendering the Antminer X3 ineffective. To keep hardware manufacturers from catching up, these algorithm edits are planned to continue with bi-annual network upgrades.

NVIDIA Titan V Reportedly Producing Errors in Scientific Simulations

NVIDIA’s prosumer oriented $3000 GTX Titan V reportedly suffers from a memory bug that’s causing it to produce erroneous results in scientific simulation workloads.

It’s thought that this issue is due to a memory design flaw. According to an unnamed industry veteran that has spoken with The Register, NVIDIA may be pushing the Titan V hardware to its limits, or perhaps even beyond the edge.

ASRock Officially Enters The Graphics Market With AMD Radeon RX Powered Phantom Gaming Lineup

ASRock’s Phantom Gaming lineup will cover the entire AMD Radeon RX 500 series which includes the Radeon RX 580, Radeon RX 570, Radeon RX 560 and the Radeon RX 550. All graphics cards are fitted with the new signature Phantom cooler and a custom board design which bring exceptional performance to gamers.

Apple’s ‘Project Kalamata’ For Custom Mac Processors Will Not Impact Intel Significantly As Macs Only Make For 5% Of Latter’s Revenues According To Barclays

..Apple will switch away from Intel’s chips on Macs by the year 2020..

..Mac sales make up for only 5% of Intel’s overall revenue – not a very significant chunk..

If Apple were to design and build processors from the ground up, its entire ecosystem for the Mac will either have to be re-written for the new silicon; or it’ll have to use Intel emulation..

AMD 7nm Vega 20 AI GPU Leaked in Linux Patch

AMD’s next generation Vega 20 GPU, designed for AI and machine learning, has just popped up in a Linux patch a couple of days ago. The Sunnyvale California based chip maker announced earlier this year at CES that it’s building a new Vega chip on cutting edge 7nm process technology to be deployed in deep neural networks for AI and machine learning applications by the end of the year. AMD announced that it will begin sampling 7nm Vega in Q4 2018.

First PlayStation 5 Rumors Point To 8-Core Zen CPU and Navi GPU; Lots of Devkits Already Out

..PlayStation 5 should feature an APU composed of an 8-Core Zen CPU and a Navi-based GPU – both customized, as usual with consoles. We don’t know much about Navi yet, but AMD has previously linked its name to “Scalability” and “Nextgen Memory”.

..a large amount of development kits has been already sent to game developers...

Full AMD Ryzen 2000 Series Prices Listed on Amazon, Cheaper Than Previously Reported

The 2700X is rated at a thermal design power envelope of 105W and comes with the company’s brand new Wraith Prism cooler. The Wraith Prism cooler features a transparent fan featuring RGB lighting as well as lower operating noise levels than the company’s previous Wraith design.

All-in-all, looks like AMD Ryezn 2000 series potential buyers might be in for quite a treat!

NVIDIA & AMD GPU Prices Begin to Normalize, Down ~25% in March

After a long and arduous period of extreme shortage in the graphics card market affecting both AMD and NVIDIA, it appears that supply is finally beginning to normalize.

Over the month of March alone, we saw prices come down by as much as a third on high-end graphics cards, such as NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 Ti and AMD’s RX Vega 64.

Supply levels have also seemingly gotten healthier.

[The Reason] The improvement in supplies seems to partially stem from news of the imminent release of the first ever ASIC miner for Ethereum, which would render mining Ethereum on GPUs almost entirely obsolete. Ethereum is the most popular cryptocurrency among GPU miners.

AMD Stock Upgraded While Intel and NVIDIA Receive Downgrades

Citron: NVIDIA at risk of losing emerging AI and Hyperscale business to custom solutions

Stifel: AMD a “Buy” and is positioned to steal server market share from Intel

Stifel also cited the impending threat EPYC represents to Intel’s server business. They expect to see major revenue ramp in the second half of this year as AMD starts to claw back market share from Intel in the highly lucrative data center and enterprise markets.

NVIDIA GPP: Meet ASUS AREZ Radeon series

For now, this is just a rumor, but our information comes directly from ASUS. Apparently, ASUS will launch a new AREZ brand for Radeon series. These cards will not carry any ROG branding. In fact, they might even lose ASUS branding altogether.

The ROG series simply do not exist under AREZ brand. That said there are no AREZ ROG STRIX series, but AREZ STRIX.

Other companies such as Gigabyte and MSI have already started removing “Gaming” Radeon products from their websites... Meanwhile, MSI ‘hid’ all Radeon Gaming series from their website.

The codenames [in the chart] are real.

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Overclocked Up To 4.3 GHz (1.4V) Across All Cores in First Preview Testings – Detailed CPU Benchmarks

This chip does 4.3 GHz across all cores at 1.4V..

the chip runs at 4.35 GHz on a single core but lacks behind the Skylake CPUs in single core performance results. However, the eight cores and 16 threads help this chip deliver better MT (Multi-Threading) results..

AMD already working on “Zen 5”

We are just 10 days before Zen+ officially reaches the market, but AMD is clearly not stopping here. So far, we only knew about Zen 2 and Zen 3, both 7nm architectures. The Zen 5, which is an internal codename (subject to change) would be a fifth installment in the x86 Zen microarchitecture..

As a side note, manufacturers often skip 4 due to its meaning in Chinese culture. It’s an unlucky number because it’s homophonous to the word ‘death’. .

.. Zen 3 for 2020, Zen 5 should not be expected sooner than 2021.

7/11/2017 Update – The growing number of miners, lowering Ethereum price and increasing difficulty has lowered the amount of Ethereum that one can mine. We highly suggest looking at other currencies to remain profitable and to get your investment back! If you plan on buying a mining system today you are already way to late it appears and you might be better off using that money to buy the alt coin of your liking..

AMD launches Radeon RX 500X series

The new Radeon RX 500X series are meant for pre-built PCs and notebooks, they will not be available elsewhere.

That said, we are looking at identical frequencies and memory configurations as Radeon 500 non-X series.

Chris Hook leaves AMD, starting new role by the end of April

AMD’s Senior Director of Global Product Marketing recently announced on Facebook that he will be resigning from his post...Chris has been one of the key people behind Radeon marketing and it is clear that his loss to the company will be a big one.

AMD hands product marketing reins to Sasa Marinkovic

"Sasa Marinkovic Director, Radeon Software Marketing will be taking leadership of AMD Product and Content Marketing. Over his twenty years career at AMD, Sasa has successfully launched several generations of disruptive AMD products and will be responsible for the introduction of the next generation of AMD’s Ryzen and Radeon products..."