NVIDIA announces GTX 1080 Ti: A smaller Titan-X for $699

We were expecting it and now it’s official. Yesterday, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) NVIDIA made the announcement regarding its upcoming high-end consumer graphics card – the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Based on the company’s highly successful “Pascal” architecture and build on a cutting edge 16nm process, this new flagship should deliver almost 35% higher performance gain over the existing GTX 1080, according to the presentation slides. The card is expected to hit the stores worldwide during the first week of March, 2017 with a price tag of ~$700 and sits in-between the GTX 1080 and the prosumer GTX Titan-X.

Intel core i3-7350K performance analysis: unlocked, overclockable and overpriced?

One of the more interesting highlights of the Kaby Lake launch was the introduction of a multiplier unlocked core i3-7350K. Traditionally, the “K”-stamping which denotes the unlocked status of an Intel CPU is reserved for much costlier chips, namely the highest range i5s and i7s; dual-core i3 processors on the other hand represent excellent value thanks to their lower prices. So, when the news broke of an overclockable i3 - many enthusiasts, especially those on a budget, thought they’d found the dream chip. After all, not everybody can afford a 21K i5-7600K to entice their overclocking urge! We however wasn’t particularly captivated by its price tag and decided to hold our opinion for a later day. Meanwhile some of the leading hardware review-sites have recently published benchmark results of i3-7850K and that gives us ample reasons to go back and tackle the question of whether or not this is the right processor for you.

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.

Ryzen countdown: list of new CPUs, specs, price and release date

AMD Ryzen processors are ready for shipment, image credit Videocardz, click to enlarge

The wait for AMD’s long waited Ryzen microprocessors is almost over. According to many sources worldwide, at least some of these next-gen high-end chips are going to be released within February 28^th – March 2^nd timeframe. With the NDA being lifted at the end of the current month, we can expect to see the reviews and benchmarks on the launch date too. The reports suggest that it’ll be the flagship 8-core/16-thread models coming out first, followed closely by the others members of what is supposed to be a family of no less than 17 brand new CPUs. Various tech publications seem to have already gotten their hands on review samples; which means Ryzen is being put through its paces as I write this!

Sapphire readies unlocked RX 460: Nitro 1024 SP edition

RX 460 may not be the fastest offering based on AMD’s Polaris GPU but this graphics card is quickly becoming the darling of gaming crowd. With a price tag of around 10K Indian Rupees for the 2GB version and 12K for the 4GB ones, RX 460 can handle anything HD and scores some respectable FPS even in FHD/1080p. In a land of budget constrained gamers with mostly 20” 1600x900 monitors, those are clear signs of a winner. But as it turns out, there is more to little Baffin (code name of RX 460) than eyes could see in the first glance. According to news from WCCFTECH, Sapphire, one of the largest vendors of Radeon graphics cards, is offering a special edition of the gpu with all 1024 SPs (Stream Processor) unlocked! The standard variant of Rx 460, the one you’d normally find in the market, features 896 SPs – so that’s an increment of 128 SPs. The card in question is “Nitro - OC” branded – one of Sapphire’s elite performers and comes with factory overclocked frequency of 1250 MHz out-of-the-box. All the other specifications remain identical with no word on pricing.

Kaby Lake comes to desktop: here is what you need to know

Intel has finally taken the veils off of its 7^th generation core Kaby Lake processors. The announcement came at the grand floors of CES and with it, the immediate availability of Intel’s latest family of desktop processors. From what Technoprozium has learnt, retail availability can be expected around halfway through January 2017 with e-tailer already offering the parts online. We have already covered the Kaby Lake architecture andperformance expectation in detail, it’s time to get things official. Here, we’ll try to sum-up the most important aspects of this launch and pass the verdict. Let’s go.

Happy new year 2017

Dear friends and readers of Technoprozium, the new year is here and we're looking forward to it with a great deal of anticipation and excitement. 2016 was a very good year and we bid a fond farewell to it. Now is time to move on to a brand new 2017 which has all the makings of big year. As we start our journey anew, lots of exciting events are in store for us. As always, We'll kick-start things in the new year with CES where we'll hopefully see Intel's Kaby Lake processors in action. Then there is AMD's potential come-back with Ryzen and AM4. At some point, we also expect Vega to make an appearance and battle things out in the high-end of desktop graphics. But the best part is TPZ will be there to cover all the happenings in the world of computer hardware and bring the best to you! Have a very happy and prosperous new year!

Kaby Lake preview: architecture and performance expectation of Intel's 7th-gen core

Right now AMD Ryzen may be the epicenter of all hype and enthusiastic excitement, but that doesn’t mean that Intel is sitting idly! Far from that, the company is prepping its new line of Kaby Lake processors for an early 2017 launch. Kaby Lake is the codename of the 7^th generation of Intel’s core-architecture, succeeding the 6^th –gen core known as Skylake. Consistent with Intel’s monolithic and scalable design approach, this new core will cover a broad range of arrangements and power a vast array of devices ranging from 4.5Watt 2-in-1s to 91Watt mainstream desktops. Thankfully, Kaby Lake is much more of a known entity compared to Ryzen. Mobile Kaby Lake parts are already out in the market with a few reviews online and we have a pretty good idea about the desktop side too. Here, we’ll try to highlight the important bits.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays

A very merry Christmas to all the readers of Technoprozium! Festivities are a great excuse to spend some great times with your families and friends. Listen to your favorite musics, watch movies, eat lots of good food and have fun. Enjoy the chill in the air and put it to good use - game hardcore without the fear of throttling! With your hardware permitting, even a mild overclock isn't out of question - but only if you know what you're doing. Happy holidays :)

Zen evolves: AMD has Ryzen!

AMD’s upcoming Zen core-architecture has grabbed a lot of attention recently and with good reasons too. Zen is not only the brand new x86 micro-architecture from AMD in a long time; it also has the difficult yet important task of bringing the competition back into the enthusiast space. The competition that was still there back in the K10/K12 days, resulting in some fine line of CPUs like Phenom and Thuban. Since then however things have been downhill for AMD. FX processors based on Bulldozer, the company’s last generation micro-architecture didn’t fare well and while Piledriver, its eventual update, improved performance a bit it was nowhere near challenging Intel’s supremacy. Whether Zen is going to change all that is a million rupee question and to get the answer we have to wait till the 1^st quarter of 2017 when the Summit Ridge platform (Zen + AM4 motherboards) will be made available for mass market. For now we know this – it’ll be called Ryzen and it can go toe-to-toe with an Intel i7-6900K!

Last week AMD hosted an event dubbed New Horizon in Austin, Texas to shed new lights on some of the specs, features and performance of the upcoming release. So without wasting anytime, let’s delve into the details. First of all – "Zen" has evolved into "Ryzen"! No, it’s not some kind of a new Pokemon if that’s what you’ve been wondering about; rather, it’s the name under which the first products based on Zen architecture will see the light of day. This may sound a bit confusing to the uninitiated but that’s how things are in the semiconductor industry – lots of codes and lots of names! For now just remember that the underlying architecture is still the same old Zen but the new series of processors based on it are going to be branded as Ryzen. Does that mean that AMD is going to ditch the “FX” moniker which the current batches of Vishera CPUs bear? Seems very likely as the company may decide to give the famed “FX” branding a rest after the not so glorious 2^nd innings and start things anew with “Ryzen”. There could be more than one high-end processor under the “Ryzen” branding umbrella along with the one that AMD demonstrated in the event. The part in question is an 8-core 16-thread model, clocked at 3.4GHz base frequency and features a whopping 16MB L3 cache (20MB total). The TDP (Thermal Design Power) is a very respectable 95W for such specifications. There is no word on the boost clock although AMD has indicated that the clock frequency could go even higher. Remember that the silicon isn’t yer ready for the primetime and it wasn’t that long ago when early engineering samples were reported to be operating at around 2.8GHz with AMD itself showing a 3GHz part during IDF. Needless to say the final clock speed will be one of the most interesting aspects of Ryzen launch. 

Handbrake video transcoding results as captured by Tom's Hardware

Next-up is performance and once again AMD is doing a good job of not disclosing hard numbers! That’s understandable though being this close to launch. Instead AMD arranged some demos where Ryzen was pitted against a fully-fledged i7-6900K. Now that’s some serious competition as this is an octal-core Broadwell-E part which belongs to Intel’s coveted HEDT (High End Desk-top) line-up and boasts a 3.2Ghz base clock which can reach 3.70 GHz with boost. Not to mention the astronomical price tag of INR.90K that it bears! Blender and Handbrake were among AMD’s benchmark of choice and we know both software can utilize multiple-core CPUs efficiently. In the Blender demo Ryzen seems to finish the rendering as fast as the i7-6900K, while in Handbrake it’s faster by a few seconds! There’s gaming too, Battlefield 1 to be specific, where both CPUs appeared to deliver very similar gaming experience and frame-rates. Unfortunately it was being played at 4K resolution where it’s mostly GPU bound – so, that doesn’t tell much about Ryzen’s gaming capability. As many reviewers have already noted, the mainstream i7-6700K (or the 7700K, depending on the time) would be a more practical challenger to Ryzen when it comes to gaming. A curious little observation could be made though from one of the demos – gaming and streaming, when done simultaneously felt smoother on Ryzen @3.4GHz than i7-6700K @4.5GHz! We leave the conclusion to you as we’re not sure if this is gaming or multitasking :)

 

These are some striking results even after considering the favorable conditions which are generally associated with such organized demos. Finally, it looks like AMD has done a commendable job of designing a modern efficient processor. You may already know that from an architectural viewpoint Zen/Ryzen is quite a departure from AMD’s recent design philosophy. With the Bulldozer core-architecture AMD went for a “speed-demon” design with deep pipeline resulting in a processor core optimized for high frequencies. But that speed came at the cost of high latency and branch miss-prediction penalties which severely affected the IPC (Instruction per Clock-cycle) throughput. Also, the modular CMT (Clustered Multi Threading) approach of Bulldozer where computing resources are shared within a module, proved inefficient in most single threaded workloads. Piledriver brought some much needed refinement but that didn’t prevent AMD from essentially ceding the high-end of personal computing market to its arch nemesis. The mainstream FX CPUs never received the proposed Steamroller and Excavator upgrades as AMD didn’t thought it to be prudent to invest resources and time into a battle already lost. Instead the engineering team, lead by famous architect Jim Keller, focused its attention on Zen. Zen is much more of a conventional design with a strong emphasis on IPC. In fact AMD claims to deliver a radical 40% throughput gain, clock for clock, when compared to previous generation. To what extent that promise would realize into practical benchmarks remains to be seen but these early findings indicates that AMD might finally have something big in form of Ryzen in its hand.

Sony Goes Out of PC Market: VAIO's future looks uncertain!

Sony is selling off its PC department - the VAIO (acronym for "Visual Audio Intelligent Organizer") brand to be more precise along with related assets and workforce. The buyer is a Japanese investment group called Japan Industrial Partners (JIP). With this deal in effect, Sony will no longer manufacture or sell PCs under the VAIO brand name. According the reports the transition will be finalized within the 1^st quarter of 2014. After that you may still be able to buy VAIO laptops but those won’t be from Sony!

MSI Unveils New FM2+ Gaming Motherboards

During my overview of MSI's gaming series I came out highly impressed for what the firm has done with its newest range of motherboards. I liked the clean and clutter free layouts, striking color scheme along with all the game-centric features that MSI has packed in these boards. I also couldn't deny the value that was in offer. My only complain was the lack of availability on AMD side of things and that too seems to have remedied with Micro Star International unveiling two brand new mainboards for AMD's APU platform! Based on FM2+ socket, these boards are - A88X-G45 GAMING and A88XM GAMING!