HW News - AMD AM5 Big Changes, Windows "11," Steam's Switch Competitor, & PCIe Gen6

[Music] hey everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week this is a pretty major hardware news recap so one of our stories is about amd moving to lga this is something we've talked about in the past but there's a little bit more to go along with it this time we'll also be talking about unreal engine 5 and how it has now marked ray tracing as a deprecated option as it's moving towards its lumen system instead sort of a replacement for the rt technologies that we've been talking about for a while we'll also be going over steam's steam pal the linux based valve handheld gaming pc we have news on alder lake intel going seven nanometers and a couple of other things like a dram successor before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and the silent base 802 case the silent base 802 got high accolades in our review for its high build quality and its versatility in both sides focused and airflow focused built the 802 comes with swappable mesh panels or noise damped panels so you have options for either approach the silent base 802 case is able to fit larger builds as well without being overbearing and it stands out for its mechanics quality and assembly quality learn more about be quiet's new case at the link in the description below so the first one is the rumor about amd moving to lga with am5 this is something that came up about a year ago we had at the time received an anonymous leak that we we withheld large parts of that because we were unable to cross verify it with anyone else at the time we didn't have a specific reason to distrust it but without any other information out there to go off of we end up withholding the information now that information we got a year ago becomes more relevant than before because it aligns with a tweet by execufix on twitter or executable fix and a quick sort of note here is that executefix's tweet uses a rendered image not a real photo but it does show what is supposedly the bottom side of an amd cpu coming up in the raphael family and this render is in alignment with the rumors we received in march of 2020 which is showing that there's pads on the bottom of the cpu meaning a move to lga so executable fix said the following in the tweet quote raphael is the first zen for consumer chip and here's a first look the tweet claims ddr5 support which makes sense for the timeline and notes 28 pcie gen 4 lanes on a 120 watt tdp we went and pulled up our own information from over a year ago at this point and even on those internal amd slides at the time it said all this is subject to change and some of it has for example executable fix saying that there's 28 pcie gen 4 lanes is in opposition to what originally was listed in march 2020 showing in the range of 16 to 20 pcie lanes so that already is different that doesn't mean that exe fixes tweet is wrong rather we would think it's more likely to be correct than the year old information but it does show a disparity and additionally we saw at the time amd was targeting a 45 watt to 105 watt desktop tdp this is a little bit off from the 120 marker but not too far off for the high end and the code name for the ccds back then was durango with a zen4 solution and that is as we understand it's still what's being used now we also previously received this block diagram of am5 components but again this is over a year old at this point so things could have changed all told though it does align with execute fixes claims of the main thing which is lga on uh the new cpus and ddr5 only support no cross ddr5 and ddr4 like we've seen sometimes in the past with intel platforms for three and four for example is just ddr5 and that's what we heard a year ago as well so this is in alignment with the new leaks from xacufix and it does it is starting to look like amd will actually be moving towards lga here and away from pga and if you're not clear on what that means very simply pga is when you have pins on the bottom of the cpu and lga is when the pins are in the motherboard so it's land grid array versus pin grid array and there are some technical differences that are beneficial to one solution or the other the cpu or the motherboard but on the rma side as well it does move who handles most of the rmas so when the whichever device has the pins that's the device that gets the most rmas unsurprisingly next one is a bit of a a shot at nvidia here and amd actually for that matter unreal engine 5 and the epic games announcements from this past week were pretty major andrew actually on our team has already been using unreal engine 5 and doing really cool things with it we talked a week or two ago about our upcoming ram timing series he's been working away at some of the animations for that series to help make it a lot easier for everyone to understand the timings including me i'm probably not going to fully understand what uh patrick stone has written until i watch back the video with andrew's animations but we've already been using unreal engine 5 and there's some major updates for gaming as well unreal engine 5 at this point has important updates for the hardware market in addition to just the game development market and the reason is made obvious by looking at epic's new interface which lists ray tracing in a drop down as deprecated epic has determined at this point that real-time ray tracing is too costly in performance and so it has developed its own globally applicable solution called lumen epic said the following quote in unreal engine 4 features such as screen space global illumination were not reliable and ray tracing global illumination or rtgi was not performant for games with high enough quality and didn't integrate with other important systems the quote continues in their video saying lumen is our fully dynamic real-time global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light change making for more believable experiences the gi hooks in directly with our time of day settings allowing for true physically based settings for photorealistic environments lumen solves dynamic diffuse indirect lighting for example light bouncing diffusely off of a surface picks up the color of that surface and reflects the colored light onto the other nearby surfaces this effect is called color bleeding meshes in the scene also block indirect lighting which also produces indirect shadowing lumen is usable for indirect lighting global illumination emissive materials there's a lot of demos of this actually andrew is excited about this one and reflections and all light types that includes directional sky point spot and rex lights and nvidia and epic are still working together directly on variants of unreal engine with fully implemented rtx support but it does look like epic has decided to take things in a slightly different direction for at least the immediate future with lumen which produces high quality lighting without the high cost of real-time ray tracing so as we understand it lumen does not use rt cores and should run on basically all hardware agreeably additionally epic announced its temporal super resolution solution which is interesting it helps upscale image quality and in some ways offers again a global approach meaning a non a vendor agnostic approach towards something kind of like dlss or fidelity fx super resolution but not quite the same as either it does however have some of the upsides and epic said quote ue5's new anti-aliasing solution temporal super resolution keeps up with this geometric detail to create sharper more stable images than before with quality approaching true native 4k at the cost of 1080p now in the time since epic announced unreal engine 5's changes we learned a couple more things about lumen the main one is that lumen is still capable of leveraging rt hardware contrary to what we initially thought but it's not going to be the preferred or the default or main operating mode just for wider compatibility reasons so lumen's able to do rasterization and work without rt hardware in fact a lot of the really cool gi demos we've seen have been with 10 series cards but it can leverage rt hardware too and we'll just have to wait for more to come out to learn more about that up next steam pal in an exclusive report from rs technica valve is attempting to resurrect its hardware ambitions you might remember the steam boxes many years ago we covered several of them at gdc at a show and they never came out at least not as steam boxes that came out as other units but i like the z box from zotac but uh rs technica noted that valve is working on the steam pal handheld switch-like solution and said quote valve has been secretly building a switch-like portable pc designed to run a large number of games on the steam pc platform via linux and it could launch supply chain willing by year's end says rs technica citing sources familiar with the matter the alleged steem pal has reportedly been in development for some time now as rs reports there's even been code spotted in steam's code base that vaguely points towards the device this comes not long after valve's co-founder gabe newell teased the company's plans for consoles for the end of the year at a recent university event according to rs technica's reporting valve is going for a wider footprint than that of the nintendo switch they're saying that it will accommodate more control options and it'll likely use an soc from amd or intel although we'd be more inclined to think amd but anything's possible the steam pal is presumed to have at least a d-pad and will incorporate the standard fare of gamepad buttons triggers and joysticks as a refresher nvidia is actually the supplier of the soc for nintendo switch so uh that's that's the only major console in the market right now that's not done by amd xbox and playstation of course both running and the soc solutions we don't have any confirmation or news right now on the battery capacity the screen size or resolution memory storage anything that would reflect performance capabilities we do know that it's supposed to be linux based and this is not abnormal valve has been trying to do a lot more with linux over the years the entire steam machine or steam box was supposed to be a linux-based solution as well in a linux-based os and the steempal will rely on valve's proton compatibility layer to drive the games quote i can confirm the device's existence and development and i can point to newell's very loud hints that something console related will be announced later this year but valve is still in a position to change gears at a moment's notice says rs technica valve loves to create incubate and then cancel things of course we'll caution that it's only if valve ever gets past the second iteration of its steam pal that we all need to worry it will never see the light of day next one alder lake s potentially requiring new mounting mechanisms for the upcoming intel socket anytime intel introduces a new socket there's a chance that mounting mechanisms or coolers change to its credit intel has done a good job at keeping the lga 115x standard alive forever basically and actually the uh lj2011 standard and the v3 and other variants of that all working together so you can still carry coolers forward from one cpu to the next one motherboard to the next uh potentially with a slight update to the mounting hardware but overall it's been cross-compatible this time though through various leaks and rumors at this point some more credible than others uh like noctua's one recurring theme we've seen is that alder lake s is looking to skew more of the square shape and take on instead a rectangular form for the upcoming cpus that in and of itself would be enough to warrant new coolers as you change the shape of the ihs it of course changes the efficacy of the various cold plates that are on the market now the smaller more square ones that are very cost focused like hyper 212 or something similar would potentially be missing some of the coverage area of a more oblon ihs or integrated heat spreader shape on a new cpu according to igor from igor's lab intel has also designed its new lga 1700 socket 5 or socket v socket around a much shorter z height for alder lake s furthermore igor noted that intel has also redesigned the hole patterns for the new socket a shorter height of the cpu can actually be a good thing and depending on how height of the cpu is defined there typically what you'd think is the dis so there's a few different distances or z heights to consider an intel cpu especially one of those the substrate of course that's the the green bit and then you've got the height of the die where intel in the past not too distant past like the 10k series was sanding down the die to get a better contact patch with the ihs then you've got the height of the interface that connects the dye to the ihs so that would be solder you have a gold layer in there and then you eventually get to the height of the ihs itself or the thickness of the nickel plated copper that's used for the integrated heat spreader and all those things massively affect the ability for the cpu to get its heat out of the silicon and into the cooling device so when you see dye sanding for example it theoretically improves the cooling efficacy now as the z height as the height of the processor shrinks and as the heat can get more quickly into the cooler that's on top of the cold plate that's on top of it the cooling efficiency improves further but you potentially lose some of the structural rigidity of the cpu to resist breaks from extreme tension or things of that nature that's why they were one of the reasons why the entire package was as thick as it was to begin with that quote is definitely going to be pulled out of context in the comments i look forward to it so shrinking the overall package height and having the cpu sitting lower in the socket doesn't necessarily mean new coolers but it does basically guarantee that the cooler manufacturers will be designing new mounting kits for existing lga 115x coolers intel's rocket lake also debuted with a new lga 1200 socket but that socket was cooler compatible with older lga 115x mounting hardware overall this tracks with what noctua said back in april in that users should hang on to their existing lj115x coolers as noctua assured users that the coolers like the noctua nh12a would be compatible with alder lake cpus via an updated mounting kit of course not all coolers will do this especially those that are less popular or have ceased manufacturing as newer variants have replaced them so it'll depend on how old your cooler is and if the company still cares about keeping it a lot up next intel taped in at 7 nanometer meteor lake compute tile tape out is up next at intel's intel unleashed engineering the future event a couple of months ago intel ceo pat gelsinger took the stage and declared that intel's seven nanometer process was back on track gelsinger then stated that intel's first client seven nanometer product meteor lake was set to tape in sometime in q2 2021 and here we are in q2 both intel's pat gelsinger and gregory bryant confirmed this news quote we've got past some of the stumbles at 10 and now seven and the daily updates that we're getting on wafers coming out of the fab the full embrace of euv we're very confident that we have that back on track in fact right now we're taping out the compute tile the meteor lake compute tile is finishing tape in as we speak this was said by pat gelsinger during the jpmorgan global tmc event quote great way to start the week we are taping in our seven nanometer meteor lake compute tile right now brian said in a tweet as well now you'll also notice that galaxy seems to intermingle the terms tape in and tape out he later clarified via twitter and said taping in is somewhat newer slain and is used to describe one piece of ip block or modular element being ready for production tape out refers to the entire ic or photo mask being ready for production the term tape in is being used increasingly more in the wake of large socs that make use of several dyes and components in contrast to the more traditional monolithic dye approach up next unisanthis electronics a company helmed by the creator and inventor of nand flash as we know it dr fujio masuoka is proposing a new dram alternative recently unasantis outlined some brief specifications on its development of dynamic flash memory or dfm and how it relates to dram and other types of volatile memory dfm was invented by doctors koji sakui and nozomu harada from unisantis and was presented for the first time at the 13th ieee international memory workshop unisantis contends that dram's time in the sun is coming to an end and highlighted the deficits in dram memory at this point and how dfm is meant to address those downsides quote the memory industry has long since accepted dram technology is nearing the end of its life but its significant market means any replaceable technologies must provide the right balance of performance costs and future scalability after significant internal research and testing we're delighted to unveil dfm to the market as the leading long-term viable option to dram said dr koji sakui as for why this needs to exist it has to do with the efficiency of traditional dram dram and dfm differ in their use of capacitors specifically dram for example requires capacitors to store a charge whereas dfm won't the nature of being volatile memory for dram rather than non-volatile storage like an ssd is that the data is impermanent this impermanence allows dram to operate much faster than an ssd but it relegates it to generally lower capacities and to transients of data when dram reads data from a cell the capacitance drains and a refresh circuit and sense amplifiers have to be used as a temporary store so it's a destructive process this is an overall inefficient approach but it's the best one we've had to date for fast memory that can't fit on the diet itself like sram cash can't dfm is still a type of volatile memory so it's not non-volatile like nand flash on ssds for example or traditional hard drives but it doesn't rely on capacitors and while dfm still does leak a charge it supposedly has fewer leak paths than dram does and this is supposed to solve some of that issue its read process is also non-destructive and that's the main interesting bit for dfm dfm also incorporates a few key features from the flash memory solutions out there block refreshes and erases are one of them and with this unisantis claims that quote dfm reduces the frequency and the overhead of the refresh cycle and is capable of delivering significant improvements in speed and power compared to dram unisantis also claims that dfm has the potential to scale well past the 16 gigabit plateau that dram chips have hit saying that dfm could theoretically offer a four times density improvement over today's dram that'd be up to 64 gigabits compared to 16 gigabits unisantis doesn't produce or manufacture its products and instead is a licensing company to that end uncensus is looking to develop foundry and memory partnerships to test the possibilities of dfm as well as furthering its overall development up next microsoft teasing the next generation of windows on the list of things we're looking forward to more windows updates so at its build 2021 event microsoft ceo satya nadalla offered a tease of the upcoming next gen of windows and this brief showcase came during the keynote where nadella also mentioned that he'd been hosting or testing the new version of windows quote soon we'll share one of the most significant updates to windows of the past decade to unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators i've been self-hosting it over the past several months and i'm incredibly excited about the next generation of windows our promise to you is this we'll create more opportunity for every windows developer today and welcome every creator who is looking for the most innovative new open platform this is where i press x to doubt open platform to build and distribute and monetize applications we look forward to sharing more very soon among other things nadella seems to be referring to how microsoft is overhauling its windows store so that it'll be open to all apps and games not just ones packaged as msix there's also speculation that microsoft will allow for third-party commerce in the windows store allowing developers to bypass microsoft's revenue cut on games into apps now that point is particularly relevant if you've been following the epic v apple coverage that we've been talking about for the last few months where the app store monetization and revenue cuts became untenable for epic and so there's been a battle over who gets how much revenue in that market it seems like microsoft might be taking some notes from this battle additionally microsoft recently announced that it's windows 10 x os for tablets dual screen devices and hybrids is no longer shipping instead microsoft is porting over the best parts of windows 10 x into mainstream windows 10. we suspect that's a big part of what microsoft is getting at here and microsoft is currently working on a significant update to windows 10 code named sun valley that includes visual improvements the ui a start menu change file explorer new system icons and more up next is another brief update from pci sig the group that works on ratifying the standards for pci express among other devices and this one comes about pcie version 6.0 now before we get the comments about what i but 4.0 is barely out yet as a reminder pci sig the groups that work on the protocols and the standards have to ratify and define those protocols long in advance of them becoming consumer available because of course one there needs to be an agreed-upon spec ideally before it gets rolled out to the people who are going to eventually use it in products and they need time to test it too so it's always running one or two versions ahead of what's readily available on the market and that's not abnormal here so this brief update on pcie gen 6 is more focusing on one remaining on track to ratify the final version by year's end and two talking about its reasoning for holding on to the current 0.7 draft as opposed to immediately moving to 0.9 last november we reported that pci sig had released version 0.7 of pcie gen 6 which was an important milestone for the standard this draft fleshed out the bandwidth the electrical specifications the signaling among other things and usually at this point the draft would head to version .9 which is the final version before a full 1.0 release of the standard however pci sig has elected to hold the draft for a bit longer the version is instead moving to 0.71 this will allow the group to collect feedback on the draft and capture new protocol and electrical updates which will be detailed in version .9 due for release after the 30-day review period of 0.71 after the group issues the 0.9 draft there will be a two-month period where the partners who are involved here will have time to review before a full version 1.0 comes out and version 0.9 is supposed to nail down final specifications and requirements for pcie gen 6 and the pcie gen 6 bus and pci sig reaffirmed that pcie gen 6 standards will be released and ratified by the end of the year in the meantime we are just starting to see pcie gen 5 sort of trickle out into the hardware space amd's raphael as we know it right now is not going to be running pcie gen 5 but there are signaling changes there as we understand the trace lengths change again and so maybe that makes sense because there's just not enough time to do all the development and testing beforehand but it does look like in the enterprise market intel's supposed to be supporting pcie gen 5 alder lake might also support pcie gen 5. and marvel the controller company just announced the first pcie gen 5 ready ssd controller for data centers and finally a kind of fun if a bit weird story on police moving to bust a suspected drug operation but instead accidentally unveiling a mining operation fill the basics really wonder what that discovery was like if they're like no this this camp this what is this this can't be it is it uh so at this point the similarities between large-scale mining operations and other illicit activity power requirements appears to be about the same and this is because case in point police in the uk moved to bust what they suspected was an illegal drug operation but instead using a drone for uh taking a heat signature found high power consumption power that was actually getting stolen or siphoned for mining so in this strange new cyberpunk-like world we live in according to the bbc police were tipped off about a site that had been seen lots of traffic throughout the day and high power usage the police drones pointed the police to the building and according to the police they were expecting to find not a chia hard drive farm but a different farm rather the police discovered about 100 computer units they said to us they looked like asics from what we could tell additionally police discovered that the miners had stolen thousands of pound sterling worth of electricity police confirmed this with western power distribution who stated that their power network had been bypassed as of this writing the computers and hardware have been seized but no arrests have been made yet it is actually insane to think that this is where we are at this point where there's theft of power off of the grid or from a neighbor or whatever to power machines to harvest digital currency it's insane this is like should be a side quest in cyberpunk 2077 or something if it's shipped working but that's it for this one thanks for watching as always you can subscribe for more go to store.camerasexes.net if you'd like to pick up one of our two new mouse pads or of course back order our mouse mats and our mod mats or you can go to patreon.com gamersnexus.direct and get behind the scenes videos we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 236,936

Rating: 4.9600978 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, hw news, steam vs switch, steampal, valve steampal, amd am5, amd lga, amd raphael, nvidia rtx 3080 ti, alder lake

Id: aXzyTV-KvYo

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AbheekG]

What're people's expectations from Windows 11?

[u/BlockchainGreggy]

I’ve used Windows since ‘95, and while it’s not a “bad” operating system in the way Vista or 8 were, I personally find Windows 10 to be the most boring and stale OS I’ve ever used.

Hard to pinpoint exactly why, but I really dislike using it as my main OS. I enjoyed using all of the other versions of Windows, even Vista. Probably in the minority, but I have fond memories from that Vista era.

I’m ready for MS to move on from 10. This whole “the last version of Windows ever” was always a stupid gimmick.

[u/Ar0ndight]

Is it me or UE5 dropping raytracing is pretty damn huge?

Not only does that cut a potential big chunk of future games from using RT, but it might also push other devs to look for similar solutions.

RT is supposedly easy to use and actually makes devs' lives easier but the issue is, right now and for the foreseeable future it's so demanding (and unusable on mainstream hardware like a 1060) that no studio will go for raytracing only because that would drastically cut the consumer base of the game. As such while adding RT is supposedly easier, using it still means they have to do both regular raster based lighting and RT. So more work in the end.

Using Lumen (and potential similar future lighting tech) on the other hand would replace the current lighting setup workload instead of adding to it.

[u/PostsDifferentThings]

i mean lumen does look pretty fucking great.