AMD B550 Chipset coming soon

Reports are coming in that AMD and its partners are readying motherboards based on a new mainstream B550 chipset. Following the X570, B550 will be the second socket AM4 chipset designed specifically to go with the new Ryzen 3000 CPUs while still being backward compatible with 2^nd gen chips. No word on pricing yet but it’s pretty safe to assume that it will be significantly cheaper than its enthusiast grade sibling.

B550 will succeed and replace the aging B450 which probably is the most popular midrange chipset right now thanks in no small parts to its exceptional value. With B550, AMD would be looking to carry the tradition on, added some incremental features. For starters, the new chipset will feature more SATA III ports and general purpose PCIe (Gen 2/Gen 3) lanes to handle the I/O duties. B550 will retain its predecessor’s overclocking ability – meaning it’ll just be as easy to OC a lower priced (and clocked) Ryzen processor as before. On a side note, it’ll be interesting to see if the passive chipset cooling (with a fan) trend of the X570 based boards will continue on the B550 as well.   

B550, however, will miss on some key highlights compared to the flagship X570. The implementation of the PCIe Gen 4 will be one of those. This means it’ll be a PCIe Gen 3 x4 interlink between the motherboard chipset and the CPU, unlike the PCIe Gen 4 x4 connection found in the X570 chipset. Fortunately, this will not affect real-world performance in any tangible way as we’ve already seen Ryzen processors performing identically on both X570 and B450 (also PCIe Gen 3) based motherboards. Plus, the downstream PCIe Gen 4 lanes from the processor itself should be there for the motherboard manufacturers to put those in good use. Reports also suggest that the population of the USB 3.2 Gen-2 (10 GB/s) ports may not see a rise – at two, it'll be identical to previous generation chipsets but much lower than the eight found in X570.

All in all, AMD’s new B550 chipset could be a perfect solution for budget builders among us, especially those looking for a reasonably future-proof Ryzen 3000 PC but still holding out due to the high price of X570 motherboards.

Update Round-up: AMD fixes Ryzen, Microsoft breaks Windows 10

Updates and patches have become big parts of our daily digital life these days and last few days both AMD and Microsoft have dropped some big ones; although, with very different results.

First up is AMD and its promised fix which we reported about in our in-depth coverage of Ryzen 3000 processors' boost-clock controversy. If you haven't yet read it then please do so for some much needed context and insight on the matter. Here is a TLDR version:.

With the recent debates over boost-frequency of  Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, AMD promised an impending update that would fixate any oddities in boost behavior that bars the processor cores to hit the max-boost ceiling. The chip-maker claimed in a blog post that it has identified a bug which is responsible for sub-optimal performance of its boosting algorithm under certain workloads.

So, does the fix works? For the most part, yes it does. Some review-sites have already got their hands on the updated firmwire containing the fix and put their Ryzen CPUs through tests. Techpowerup's Ryzen 9 3900X clocked higher on the new BIOS with AGESA 1.0.0.3ABBA and even boosted beyond its 4.6GHz rateing which wasn't possible with the old BIOS.

India adds two more supercomputers to strengthen researches: Aims to deploy over 60 in next three years

India's HPC (high Performance Computing) initiative has finally gathered some much needed momentum as the country adds two more supercomputers to its growing computational repertoire. According to press reports, these new supercomputers are being deployed at IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Kharagpur and IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) Pune. 

This initiative comes as a part of  National Supercomputing Mission undertaken by India's Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The mission is currently in its first phase in which a series of six supercomputers are to be installed in education and research facilities across the nation. The first one, named "Param-Shivay", is already functional at IIT Varanasi and can churn up-to 837 Teraflops of data. By December this year, another three will be made available to IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, and Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies (JNIAS) which will conclude the first phase.

AMD roadmaps reveal Zen 3, RDNA 2 on-track for 2020 lunch: Zen 4 by 2022?

It's roadmap time again! Guru3D.com have published couple of new ones from AMD that talk about things to come in both CPU and GPU fronts. The slides, which seems to have been reserved for corporate briefing, make reference to Zen 3, RDNA 2 and even Gen 4. While nothing concrete or out of line of what we already know, this confirms that AMD is on track with future iterations of its current-gen designs.

Here, the CPU roadmap shows that AMD already has the design phase of  Zen 3 completed and currently is working on the design of its successor, Zen 4. Future CPUs (Ryzen 4000?) based on Zen 3 core-architecture will be built on a 7nm+, i.e. a more refined and mature 7nm, fabrication process at TSMC. Moreover, Zen 3 will utilize an EUV (Extreme UltraViolet) lithography compared to Zen 2's DUV ( Deep UltraViolet). With Zen 3, AMD's stated goal is enhanced power efficiency but the higher transistor density granted by the process refinements can be used towards raising the clock-speed as well.

The underlying timeline in the above roadmap spans five years and lack finer graduations which means no specific launch dateline. But it looks like AMD has a 2020 launch in mind for Zen 3.

It's not all quiet on the graphics front either! This year we saw AMD introducing its Navi GPUs based on company's latest graphics architecture dubbed RDNA. The next update to that will come in form of RDNA2 which is in design, also destined for 7nm+ process. At this point in time, we don't know much about RDNA2 and it could be at least a full year off from now considering AMD is yet to release its full RDNA product stack.

All in all, AMD sure seems poised to take its newfound momentum into the future and executed well enough, can usher a new era for the company!

AMD Ryzen 3000 Boost-Clock controversy and what you need to know

If you’re an enthusiast like me, you must be aware of the ongoing controversy over the boost-clock speeds of AMD’s recently launched Ryzen 3000 series processors. What started with some early adopters finding it hard to hit the rated boost frequencies on their respective Ryzen CPUs has now found its way into more serious contention, supported by claims from both reliable and unreliable sources. Things have specially heated-up after well-known overclocker “der8auer” conducted a survey which puts a big question mark on the ability (or the lack there-off) of most 3^rd gen Ryzen CPUs to operate at their advertised max boost-clock! While this controversy doesn’t necessarily jeopardize Ryzen’s status as the current champ of desktop processors on the whole, it sure creates a cloud of confusion or two in the mind of average consumer and enthusiast alike. Here we’ll try to dispel any such confusion by going deep into the matter and seek the truth.

AMD Radeon VII Review: The highend contender

From the center stage of CES last month, AMD gave us the outlines of two major products. One was about Ryzen gen 2 and we expected as much; the other, however, caught many of us off-guard. Not to be out-done by peers from CPU division, RTG (Radeon Technologies Group) announced Radeon VII, world's first 7nm consumer graphics card with 16GB HBM2 video memory. Fast forward a month and the Radeon VII is here with a price tag of $700 (~₹60K). 

AMD Radeon VII and its packaging, click to enlarge

Considering AMD's focus on the mainstream of late, not many anticipated it would be gunning for high-end with its next GPU. But that's exactly what Radeon VII is supposed to do - to take the fight to the likes of Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080. And that's easier said than done as Nvidia has asserted its dominance over the high-end ever since the launch of its RTX 2000 series of graphics cards. Powered by Turing architecture, these GPUs not only routinely outperform AMD's Vega and Polaris based products but also features Real-time Ray Tracing. In our review of GeForce RTX 2060, we saw Nvidia's mid-range card to nibble at the heels of RX Vega64 indicating how desperately AMD needs to update its aging line-up.

3rd generation Ryzen Processors: Things that we learned at CES

AMD unveils world's first 7nm chip - beats Intel i9

There was no shortage of cutting-edge techs and glittering new devices in this year's CES, From VR bikes and robot butlers to paper-thin notebooks and foldable smartphones, gracing the show floor as they were to entice your inner nerd. Yet it was AMD that stole the show with a not-yet-finalized piece of silicon with two chiplets in it. And by the time you realized it was an early engineering sample of the company's upcoming Ryzen 3rd generation desktop processor - world's first 7nm desktop CPU, you probably couldn't care less about the rest of CES! We can't blame you either, it's Ryzen we're talking about after all - the processor that single-handedly changed the landscape of desktop computing in last two years. And from what we saw in CES, things are about to be shaken-up once more.
 
Expectation were pretty high when Dr. Lisa Su, Ceo and president of AMD, took to the stage to deliver her keynote address. Rumors and speculations were making rounds prior to the event within tech sites and forums, speaking of Ryzen 3000 series SKUs with some of them being too good to be true. Having been well aware of the anticipation, Dr. Su made good use of limelight that CES offers. AMD teased us with a working silicon, the aforementioned sample, of a 3rd generation Ryzen 8-core/16-thread CPU and showed glimpses of performance that we can expect from their upcoming high-end platform which will also be the first to support PCIe gen 4.0. 

The de-lidded CPU die that AMD showed features a new chiplet design. The bigger chip is built on a 14nm GlobalFoundries process and it handles the I/O duties along with various controllers and connectivity. It's the somewhat inconspicuous smaller chip where in lie the next-gen cores(presumably housed within next-gen Core-complex or CCX), built on a bleeding-edge TSMC 7nm fabrication process. It's a clever design choice as the performance of CPU mostly depends on its cores. Also, splitting the manufacturing load between two fabs might help AMD overcome some early yield issues.

If you look carefully, as some keen-eyed reviewers did, you can see that there is just about enough space to nudge another 8-core/16-thread chiplet or perhaps even a graphics one in future. The 16C/32T config might be reserved for HEDT and socket TR4.

These new chips will also implement Zen 2 core design. Back in 2017 when AMD introduced it's completely new and forward looking Zen micro-architecture with the 1st gen Ryzen processors, the company also stated its commitment to improve and enhance the design in a regular and long-term basis. Staying true to that course, AMD launched 2nd gen Ryzen line up last year based on Zen+ micro-architecture which brought minor refinements along with a matured 12nm process. Zen 2 however is going to be the next big step in the architecture's logical evolution and we expect some major improvements in the core-design; The primary of those being an uplift in IPC (instructions per clock-cycle), one that would enable AMD to close-in on Intel's still superior single-threaded performance.

In a performance demo, AMD pitted its yet unnamed octal-core Ryzen 3rd gen against a Coffee Lake Refresh Core i9 9900K - Intel's flagship behemoth costing around 55,000 Rupees. The selected benchmark was Cinebech - one of the darlings of enthusiasts and reviewers around the world. AMD didn't disclosed the clock-speed of the sample but mentioned it's not final which means there is still room for improvement; the Intel chip ran on its default 3.6GHz/5GHz speed. Results are very impressive - The Ryzen actually completed the rendering faster(2057score, 135w) and consumed much less power than its Intel counterpart(2040score, 180w). There was also a gaming demo of Forza Horizon 4 and while it was running smooth @4K, we can't get much out of that.
 
From that Cinebench score alone, we can see that the 3rd gen Ryzen (R7 3700X/3800X??) is at least 15% faster than current flagship R7 2700x and matches Coffee Lake Refresh parts core-for-core. Even after taking Cinebench's multithread affinity into account, that seems like a remarkable generational leap for AMD. Not long ago we were used to accepting ~5% performance gain over previous gen CPUs, thanks to Intel and its stingy updates.
 
From the looks of it 3rd gen Ryzen processors should clock higher, how much we don't know. We can guess it's going to be in the range of ~4.5GHz to 4.8GHz. We also don't know at this point how much pure IPC gain AMD has achieved with these new breed of chips, just as we don't know how they are going to be priced. What we know is this - Ryzen 3rd gen is shaping up to be another powerhouse of a processor from AMD. With backward compatibility guaranteed, this is great news for existing AM4 users as they can just drop in these new CPUs for a clean and hassle-free upgrade.

AMD’s rumored super-HEDT platform: 16-core/32-thread Ryzen CPU on its way?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult these days to keep AMD’s Ryzen out of the limelight. The latest rumor to hit the inter-web speaks of an upcoming and yet unnamed 16-core desktop processor from AMD with an accompanying new socket. According to these unconfirmed speculations (originally from Chinese tech-site Chiphell), the new processor would be pitted squarely against Intel’s HEDT champion i7-6950X – a 10-core/20-thread behemoth. If the rumors are to be believed, AMD’s answer to that is going to be an even larger chip, accommodating 16 physical cores with equal number of logical ones by virtue of SMT.

Corsair releases Vengeance RGB DDR4 Memory

Burning red or nobler blue, corsair makes it sure that Vengeance comes in many shades! Corsair, The renowned maker of PC components and memory products, has just launched Vengeance RGB DDR4 Memory  modules. Rated for high bandwidth performance and compatibility, these new memory modules also feature effortless and exciting RGB lighting for ultimate customization of your gaming rig. Vengeance RGB comes in 16GB, 32Gb and 64GB packages with each module having a capacity of 8GB. It's available in both dual-channel and quad-channel kits.

Intel HEDT beware: Ryzen Benchmark leaks suggest strong multithreaded performance and remarkable IPC gain

As we eagerly approach the launch of Ryzen processors, benchmark leaks continue to pour in like cats and dogs. Every tech forum member and their mod is out posting (or reading) leaked benchmarks; Chinese, Greek, Nordic – any website would do as long as the Google translator can spot the word “Ryzen”! Here, at the Technoprozium, we don’t usually take fondly to rumors and leaks as those often turn out to be false, exaggerated or even artificial. The fervor surrounding Ryzen however is quite real and compelled us to gather a few latest and interesting leaked benchmarks to share with you.

Happy New Year: Looking forward to 2014

(click to enlarge)

We at Technoprozium, wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year! Time flies by at the speed of light with happy computing and as we say goodbye to 2013, we're very much confident that 2014 will bring the best yet! Here, we would like to take a moment to share our thoughts on a few things that we can expect this year.

Merry Christmas to you all :)

Christmastime is finally here! Being from a part of the world where summer and monsoon run a very convenient duopoly throughout the year, I've always cherished the winter time. I often consider myself gifted in the art of  finding good excuses to not to work and winter vacation has yet to fail me in this regard! For me Christmas is the biggest congregation of favorable conditions. This the time of the year when I commit myself  into all shorts of atrocities that otherwise won't go unpunished! I can eat staggering amount of cakes and cookies, buy utterly useless things or even go wild with my hardware and still get away with it - such is the spirit of Christmas! Take the incident from last year for example, when I ran some crazy amount of voltage through my now venerable i7 920 (Bloomfield, D0 stepping) for a suicidal 4.2GHz on air! Now that I look back at the whole event, I can't help feeling that it was the combined effect of Christmas and an idle brain that had put me up it. And the fact that my Nehalem survived that peril is a miracle in itself! These are situations where people find religion; for me, I was lucky enough to find my Noctua NH-D14!

Do SSDs improve your FPS? The answer is still NO!

Modern PC games are getting hungrier for resources each year. A gamer is known to the fact and as such often willing to walk the extra mile in order to get the extra performance out of his/her PC. While upgrading to a faster graphics card based on a newer GPU architecture provides the most surefire way of getting more in form of FPS, moving to a faster CPU or even a specialized network solution often boosts gaming performance. But whether or not an SSD (Solid state Drive) can be perceived as a potential upgrade for a gamer has remained a debatable topic over the years! If you ask the question to a manufacturer/vendor, they would possibly tell you that SSDs are the best thing that could happen to a gamer; but in reality things aren’t that simple! From time to time we have seen benchmarks clearly proving that games for the most part don’t benefit from SSDs. The latest dataset in this regard comes from HardOCP and goes inline with our prior observations!

ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition: The Dark Dreadnought!

Right now if you are looking for the ultimate performance in a desktop system, your options are quite limited. With AMD not pursuing the performance crown anymore, Intel is left battling itself for quite sometimes in the high-end enthusiast segment. So when it comes down to choosing a platform for your next HEDT (High-End Desktop) build, it’s either Intel’s mainstream socket LGA1150 or the higher-end socket LGA2011. With the later, you will not only get the chance to opt for Intel’s 6core/12thread Ivy Bridge-E CPUs but you’ll also encounter some of the finest (and largest!) samples of motherboard engineering. Take a look on the new Rampage IV Black Edition and you'll know what I'm talking about!

AMD launches A10-6790K: A new APU for socket FM2

While we are all waiting for Kaveri - the core-architecture that will drive AMD’s next-gen APUs, it seems that the firm isn’t quite done with its current line-up. So here comes A10-6790K – the newest member in AMD’s Richland family of APUs. Designated for socket FM2, this new model comes with a base clock frequency of 4.0GHz that can reach up to 4.3GHz in turbo mode.

Enter the Dragon: A look at MSI gaming series motherboards

Here is a tough one for you – what is common between a hardware manufacturer, RPG developer and a Chinese calendar maker? The answer is, along with many other things that come with their respective trades, they all make good use of Dragons! The Dragon, as a mighty myth of mass-marketing, always has good commercial value and as such, seldom fails to inspire the extra bucks out of the pocked of an overwhelmed enthusiast, gamer or tourist! But as with every other creature of legend, they are not easy to work with and it surely takes a little more to tame a Dragon than, say, your average house-cat! MSI, however seems to have mastered this arcane art as this leading motherboard manufacturer now has a formidable line-up in form of it's latest gaming series!

Netbook market crumbles: Big OEMs are getting out

Last year, we asked the question! Earlier this year we were disappointed at what was going on! The clues were there and we anticipated bad things looking into the future. We told you 2012 wasn't going to be a good year for the Netbook segment, now it turns out to be the worst ever! In some very recent developments, it seems that ASUS, Acer and MSI are all set to pull out of the Netbook arena once and for all. According to news reports from DailyTech and Techreport, which seems to have originally generated from Digitimes, these manufacturers are about to resolve their existing inventory with no further plans to continue on future products!

Intel's IGP evolution: Ticking and tocking its way to the mainstream

I can still remember the day when I came across the term "bottleneck" for the first time! It was not that long ago- I was stuck with my Pentium IV powered PC which won't run most of my favourite games of that time. Back then I was just a clueless student and thought my CPU was the culprit. But that was not the case as one of my better 'informed' friends rightfully indicated toward my iGPU (Integrated Graphics Processing Unit) which happened to be the lackluster (even by the standards of that time) Intel Extreme graphics. Even though my CPU wasn't the best in class, it still could run those games but my inbuilt graphics was the limiting factor or "bottleneck" as the term implies. Of-course I could've bypassed the whole scenario by simply switching to a separate video card or dGPU (Discrete Graphics Processing Unit) but that would require more space, more power, more hustle and surely more spending which I couldn't afford. This pretty much was the story with most systems back then and while the integrated graphics parts were sufficient to drive the 2D desktop components and images, 3D workloads were beyond both their purpose and capacity. Since then a lot of things have changed in the world of personal computing, but it is only recently that the IGP performance of mainstream PC's has reached a level which is more or less acceptable not only in terms of general computing but also gaming. Today, we'll have a quick look at how Intel's graphics solutions have evolved over time.

New Cedar Trail Netbooks: Not quite the upgrade you wanted

ASUS Eee PC

After Intel announced the Cedar Trail line-up as a much needed update to its low power Atom CPU back in 2011, it was just a matter of time before the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) started to ship new Netbooks and Nettops based on these new chips. And that's exactly the case as there are reports of new Netbooks/Eee PCs from around the web. ASUS has always been among the forerunners when it comes to this segment with its fast product launch and consistent updates, so no wonder there to see them offering some of these Netbooks. We also expect the other usual suspects like Acer, MSI and Samsung to follow soon. These look like fine little PCs and I'm sure the OEMs will do their part to make these even more attractive. But what intrigues me is the new Cedar Trail Atom CPU that seats right in the heart of these Netbooks. Let's take a closer look.

Microsoft offers coloful redesigns: (and) It's not Win8 we're talking about!

Keeping up with the spirit of Holi, I was looking for something that has, well, lots of vibrant color and a bit of grandeur to it. Luckily enough the tech-world is ripe with such devices and it only took a little bit of searching to discover that it's not just the Windows 8 developer team from Microsoft that has been working hard recently! Yes, Microsoft has a hardware team too and those guys are equally competent when it comes to delivering quality products, namely Mice, Keyboards and Webcams. These peripherals from MS tend to have good build quality and ergonomics and also represent good value for money. Actually its Arc and Touch