HW News - Intel's Comeback, MSI GPU Price Hike, GameStop PC Hardware, & NVIDIA Mining GPUs

everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week and this one there's actually a ton of news intel 2.0 more or less is happening so intel had some major announcements this week that we'll be going over the company is looking to really fix itself put itself in a more competitive position and additionally there's stories on discord and microsoft apparently in talks about a potential 10 billion dollar acquisition of discord so that microsoft we assume it found some extra space in its graveyard and it would like to put someone next to skype to keep a company underground so discords and talks with microsoft we'll also be talking about some of the fabrication facility news industry news memory technologies and plenty of other stuff from the hardware industry before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly thermal grizzlies hydrant and cryonic thermal paste are high performing thermal interfaces for use on cpus and gpus you can bring an old card back to peak performance by re-pacing it and doing preventative maintenance and thermal grizzlies hydrant is ideal for water cooling and air quote for new and old cards alike cryonot paste is one of the top performing pace for extreme overclocking with cpus and gpus and has been used in several world records scoring machines learn more at the link in the description below first up just a really quick gn store update so a lot of you have been tweeting at us lately asking about when the mod mats are coming back in stock and this time we didn't do a back order for them we're just going to post them when they're available because we bought a lot of them so supplies should be pretty good and the arrival is expected to be mid april for those we are restocking both of the existing ones so medium and large for the mod mats and then if you're visiting store.gamersnexus.net anyway we have something like 15 extra assigned mouse maps we don't normally do a signed mouse mat sku unless you catch a live stream in which case we'll do them for special streams and stuff like that so we did one of those recently and patrick and i signed a bunch of mouse mats we signed some extra and threw them up there so there's only like 10 or 15 left at this point but if you want to grab one go to store.gamingtexas.net and if you miss it no big deal just catch a stream sometime and you can get one then okay first major news item intel the intel discussion in the past week has been pretty major it covered all points including server technology process technology new products at a cpu level they talked about the arizona fabs the new intel foundry service or ifs which is actually a really big component of intel's business going forward and we'll be talking about idm 2.0 as well so this is arguably the biggest news of the past week in our space and it was titled intel unleashed engineering the future it was presented by intel's new ceo pat gelsinger and during the digital event the new ceo cleared the air on several key issues at intel and outlined a path forward for intel after it has spent the last few years at this point on the rails and suffered several public and crippling setbacks not the least of which was a slew of security vulnerabilities in the cpus overall the reception to this news has been positive and it seems to be exactly what intel needed at this point intel made several key announcements some of which mark a shift in intel strategy and business we'll go over each of them in this piece first off idm 2.0 intel announced its intent to double down on manufacturing in the future with its vision of what it calls idm 2.0 this vision will see intel invest 20 billion dollars into construction of two brand new fabs at its arizona campus both of which utilize leading technology and process nodes including euv or extreme ultraviolet lithography now this really is some of this news really is what intel needs we're cautiously optimistic here intel as we said last week has had a lot of key staffing changes over the past year or so at this point the gpu side has hired a lot of the right people we'll see how they execute it and how the manufacturing comes together it takes more than just good engineers obviously it takes the fabs and the capacity to make the products in this current market anyway and management as well in ceo level decisions to some extent so we are cautiously optimistic about some of this news intel you know even though it's it's made itself into a bit of a meme in the diy pc space and that is truly intel's fault at this point it's not like everyone else is doing it to them intel has decided it's going to ship basically the same thing for a decade and so it's become a meme and that's that's what intel gets for making those decisions but it's moving in the right direction now silicon manufacturing is an extremely slow moving beast because you're looking at stuff that on the engineering side alone takes several years to lock in and get those architectures to where they're ready to be even made and then eventually sold and so with the lawn product development life cycles that you face in silicon and cpu spaces and gpus it might take a little bit for these changes to really start showing an intel's public launches and its product launches and announcements but it does look like it's moving the right direction and we we really do hope that the cautious optimism here is well placed because amd at this point severely needs some competition it's really interesting they've completely flipped where it used to be amd was the budget value brand and you bought it because you couldn't afford intel but now it's looking like kind of the opposite although we haven't tested the 11400 yet that kind of looks like where intel will slot in is at the lower end of the market at this point anyway that's kind of what we're looking forward to seeing materialize from intel there are other news items as well though intel secondly said that it will expand its use of external foundries including tsmc and it's doing this to ensure products get out the door to stay on the road map and hit the targets intel is also announcing its intel foundry services which will provide foundry service and custom silicon for customers globally ifs or intel foundry services will also open up intel's own x86 portfolio as well as arm and risk 5 processing intel will also offer its own advanced packaging technologies such as emib or emib and favaros thus far intel has already signed risk five maker sci-fi as a customer from what we've seen and we're sure it's signing more intel and tsmc and samsung for that matter have all published a lot of fab videos fabrication facility tours one of the few things that we haven't been able to tour yet because well there's a lot of secret ip in there at any given time but if you look at any of the footage of the fabrication facilities it's really no wonder why these fabs are bottomless money pits if they're not actually doing anything it is incredibly expensive in both opportunity and in literal cost to let a fab sit there waiting for something to happen so ifs the goal of intel foundry services is intel's attempt to extract maximum revenue from its fabs we're not 100 sure i haven't personally looked into it yet how exactly ifs and the fab ownership will be distributed between intel ifs and whatever other parties intel has sort of umbrellaed out underneath it but in any case the goal is that the the fabs will no longer be bottomless money pits and they'll be able to assign some of the workload to other customers so speaking long term this also presents and we've talked about this the past few weeks a little bit of western silicon independence which uh we have no comment on in what we do we don't talk about the political side of things with our own opinions but we'll provide you what the world is talking about so politically the last couple of months there's been a lot of discussion from the eu and from the u.s as in politicians from these two groups about silicon independence manufacturing their own silicon and having more control over the facilities that do it so there's potential that intel can kind of leverage itself and and maybe target a government angle get more government contracts or government grants as all of these companies have been asking for lately and this might be a part of that strategy as well intel hasn't made clear just how open its ip portfolio will be and we're not sure if intel will be offering its latest x86 ip and technology or if it's planning to offer something one or two generations behind but it's an interesting and potentially distinct advantage over other foundries like global foundries or tsmc even in that intel unlike those two can offer both the foundry and manufacturing services like the other foundries and potentially license its ip like cores and architecture similar to arm it's a very unique position intel's end obviously intel has to be careful not to undermine its own processors but if its own processors are slipping maybe licensing the ip is the better track to go intel also talked about how seven nanometers back on track so galaxy note confirmed that the issues plaguing the seven nanometer process node have been addressed last year intel ended up delaying its seven nanometer portfolio and revising its roadmap in the wake of defects and poor yields with its seven nanometer process galaxy was a bit light on the details surrounding the solution but did say that quote we've re-architected and simplified our seven nanometer process flow increasing our use of euv by more than a hundred percent with seven nanometer back on track gal center announced that intel will tape in its first seven nanometer tile chiplet for uh meteor lake in the second quarter of 2021 and meteor lake will specifically be intel's first client product at seven nanometers with granite rapids i guess granite can flow for the data center uh later a couple of other items in this news from intel intel reaffirmed its 2023 road map which included the aforementioned seven nanometer meteor lake and granite rapids both of which will use seven nanometer compute tiles built at intel intel says it's on track to deliver 10 nanometer isolate sp shortly and customers are already testing sapphire rapids which is set to ramp in 2022 intel will also be partnering with ibm to research advanced packaging and silicon development one more intel item here too before we get into the rest of the news it was a big week for them certainly we've had amd news shows in the past so this one ends up being the intel dominated news show intel has revealed that it will hold a special launch event to inaugurate its next product and that's going to be the third generation xeon scalable processors for server customers otherwise this has been known as the lawn delayed ice lake which we've talked about for a few years at this point the event is dubbed how wonderful gets done 2021 i don't know i i i have no idea but that's what it was called it'll be hosted by intel's navin shenroy and uh that's the executive vp of intel's dgp group joining shannoy will be a smattering of other high-ranking executives from intel's dgp and xeon and memory groups as well as some of intel's ecosystem partners isic sp is in theory an important milestone for intel because it would mark the company's first 10 nanometer server chip and its first server product to use sunny cove cores intel entered production with iceland sp back in january it's a few years behind it's it's many years behind on 10 nanometer at this point and it noted back then that it expected to ramp into volume production at some point during quarter 1 intel's a year's long struggle with migrating to its 10 nanometer node affected intel's road map in just about every single conceivable way and not good ones if 10 nanometer hadn't been ready for little chips it certainly wasn't ready for bigger chips so the ice like sp processors were at one time expected to land in 2020. just nope yeah it's 20 21. uh but they were inevitably pushed back to this year it looks like that might happen this time we're well into 2021 intel is saying it's on track with ice lake sp and it says that it's ready to start ramping in an official capacity and actually earlier this month anatech reported that at least 30 of intel's key customers had already received shipments and samples of ice like sp and that those shipments totaled more than a hundred thousand units thus far intel's ice like sp will be built on intel's second generation 10 nanometer process uh called 10 nanometer plus and we're starting it early this time and it'll use sunny cove cores and bring pcie gen 4 and 8 channel memory support just to name a few of the key improvements moving on from intel microsoft's reportedly eyeing a 10 billion discord acquisition as reported by bloomberg and venturebeat in the past week discord is reportedly in talks with microsoft over a deal that could see microsoft acquiring discord for more than 10 billion dollars as of this writing neither discord nor microsoft have publicly commented on the news and according to bloomberg sources discord is just as likely to go public the fact that discord hasn't said anything about this means that they probably are in some sort of discussion with companies about an acquisition or are considering going public so one of the two could happen at this point and by the way leave a comment below what your thought is on this specific story because we know a lot of our audience probably most of it has experienced using discord at this point we're very curious to see what you think what you think would happen if microsoft ends up buying it or if they end up going public i guess that's interesting to discuss too so bloomberg stated that epic games and amazon had previously held talks with discord regarding a sale in in the past but microsoft seems to be the premier candidate at the moment according to bloomberg discord is talking with microsoft's phil spencer who serves as microsoft vp of gaming and head of the xbox brand this wouldn't be the first time discord mold selling itself back in 2018 the company put itself up for sale but eventually decided to remain independent it's not altogether surprising for microsoft to be drooling on itself over a discord acquisition aside from the other reasons it drools on itself at this point given how popular the platform is and microsoft's well-documented spending spree to bolster its gaming business however microsoft's track record with these kinds of acquisitions it's it's not great and we don't need to look any further than skype or mixer to see what can happen if it goes poorly now that said microsoft also bought minecraft and the studio that makes it so mojon mojang mo yang so for said a lot of ways minecraft obviously it went over pretty well for microsoft in that instance though microsoft was buying an already established good strong product that had strong revenue streams discord is an established good strong product we're not sure how good the revenue streams are so depending on how microsoft tries to make back it's 10 billion dollars it could be potentially bad for the platform but we'll see and we're curious to hear your thoughts on this one up next news also broke this week that acer apparently suffered a ransomware attack that's asking for 50 million dollars in payout this was apparently done by revel which is the same group that did the dairy farm ransomware attack previously at 30 million dollars the acer 50 million attack is now the highest that we know of in terms of the demanded payout rival has reportedly already claimed responsibility for this attack and it's posted images of stolen files online as proof of the breach the ransom attack is potentially the result of the recently well-documented microsoft exchange server exploits multiple outlets reached out to azer for comment but acer has neither confirmed nor denied the attack acer said quote ace routinely monitors its i.t systems and most cyber attacks are well defensed companies like us are constantly under attack and we have reported recent abnormal situations observed to the relevant law enforcement and data protection authorities in multiple countries this is a statement acer sent to bleeping computer acer also told zdnet that it quote discovered abnormalities from march and immediately initiated security and precautionary measures the company said acer's internal security mechanisms proactively detected the abnormality rival has launched the streak of ransomware attacks over the past year targeting the asian retail chain dairy farm the foreign exchange company travel x and a new york based law firm that apparently represents celebrities if you remember the story we reported on a couple of weeks ago where nvidia was cleared of allegedly under reporting its mining revenue that's completely unrelated to this topic uh first of all coindesk is reporting that hut 8 purchased some somewhere around 30 million dollars of cmp gpus from nvidia cmp is the cryptocurrency mining line from nvidia currently several of them are previous generation but there's a rumor we'll be talking about where nvidia is looking at bringing its a100 into the cmp line as a 220 hx would be the name either way though 30 million of gpus towards a mining operation is a significant amount of gpus not sure how that stacks up versus the normal gaming gpu sales that are being used for mining anyway because that's not really data you can separate easily if it all just goes to retailers but it is nonetheless uh a lot of silicon so nvidia's rumored to be working on a new high-end mining card if the current rumors are to be believed anyway hardware leakers copied 7 k-i-m-i-a-n-d we're going to go with on twitter and i-leak vient have both offered what they believe is preliminary information pertaining to the cart the card would allegedly be the cmp 220 hx and it would slot in at the very top of the nvidia cm phx series the cmp220hx is supposedly going to be a cut down version of nvidia's a100 accelerator that would probably be a very cut down version because the a100 costs more than 10 thousand dollars depending on which sku you get and it comes in both 40 and 80 gigabyte vram variants according to ileakvn the cmp220hx has a theoretical hash rate of 210 megahash per second and could land for around three thousand dollars as usual take all this with a prescription of salt one more rumor for you this week as well as we get back into the not rumor news so the nintendo switch found its way back into the news cycle this week recently we talked about screen size increases and now bloomberg is reporting on uh soc changes and potential support for dlss now bloomberg's track record with technology leaks is fuzzy at best uh but some of this stuff is is extremely predictable and seems quite obvious when you think about it so per bloomberg anyway the new switch would offer a seven inch oled screen we reported on that previously and uh it's also targeting 4k resolution support possibly via dlss that's the most interesting aspect of the story that's also the least predictable and that would be when docked and plugged into a tv whether that extends to the handheld mode we're not sure all this is expected to land late this year to be fair predicting a new switch this year was the obvious choice and certainly a new soc makes sense as the current one is old so none of that is particularly surprising the dlss support would again be the most interesting angle the original switch console is based on nvidia's tegra x1 soc and the later refreshed tegra x1 plus soc over the years nvidia hasn't found much of a home for its soc designs outside of automotive or powering its own products like the nvidia shield or the jetson however the nintendo switch was a huge success and nvidia would undoubtedly jump at the chance to design a new soc for a switch processor if only to keep amd away from console dominance and if nintendo wants dls support that does right now require using dlss uh nvidia capable hardware over the last several months there's been a number of rumors or leaks trying to pin down an updated nvidia soc for the new switch console some have pointed to nvidia's xavier soc and some of the other rumors have claimed it would be a form of nvidia's or an soc and videos or an soc is aimed at automotive and is part of nvidia's drive program oren isn't supposed to be available to automakers until 2022 so to us the idea of nintendo getting its hands on an early version of it in 2021 is maybe a little bit hard to believe a custom tuned offshoot of xavier or an all-new design like maybe a tegra x3 is perhaps more likely asml which is one letter off from getting this video flagged entirely differently for youtube's advertising is finalizing its euv pellicles and preparing them for market this is in a report from semi-engineering for the uninitiated euv pellicles are a special type of helical we used as euv lithography becomes increasingly required for the manufacturing of smaller chips pellicles are thin membranes that mount to reticle and protect the photo mask from contamination as noted by semi-engineering when certain processes began using euv euv ready pellicles were not ready for prime time and you can read their report for more information on that aspect semi engineering also reports that asml is almost ready with its own euv pellicles and will hand over all assembly and distribution to meet sui chemicals mitsui also produces its own line of pellicles for optical lithography among other products for semiconductor processes the company will produce euv pellicles based on asms technology and already has tooling in place to ramp production this year asml will also continue its own r d efforts for future particles additionally imac has also made progress with its own euv pellicle development which are based on carbon nanotubes as opposed to asmls of polysilicon based euv pellicles also in soc and silicon design news google has hired a former intel vice president uh yuri frank who's now been brought in to work on server socs to enhance compute capabilities at google yuri frank will head up a new team tasked with developing custom silicon for google's cloud and server compute needs google's blog post didn't mention any details regarding the chips themselves other than the goal of compute performance quote compute at google is that an important inflection point to date the motherboard has been our integration point where we compose cpus networking storage devices custom accelerators memory all from different vendors into an optimized system but that's no longer sufficient to gain higher performance and to use less power our workloads demand even deeper integration into the underlying hardware says google's fellow and vice president of systems infrastructure in another report industry favorite msi has announced that uh the prices might be rising of its video cards it's following something that asus said or did in the last couple of weeks so the price hike comes as a symptom of tight supply insatiable demand and the fact that they can do it and still sell everything and this is in the face of the global silicon shortage that has impacted multiple industries not only that but even if you look outside of technology well outside of standard technology and into things like bikes those have been out for a long time too and e-bikes in particular have been in short supply because they rely on both bike components and silicon products or battery products especially so msi is the next on the list to begin increasing its prices across the board this is not as a result of tariffs it's as a result of there's not enough supply to meet demand and so as the market would often dictate you can bring the price up of the existing supply and still sell the parts whether or not that's a sound strategy is a different discussion in terms of long-term impact but msi's co-founder and chairman joseph sue stated that msi believes the demand for gpus motherboards and notebooks will remain high for the remainder of 2021 msi also expects supplies to remain tight but notes that shipping and transport expenses should begin to fall after march as global logistics continue to rebound assuming we get the boat out of the canal anyway the last story is about game stock game stop gamestop is looking to get into pc hardware and pc gaming which is interesting because we certainly remember being snubbed as pc gamers by gamestop when the early days of xbox and playstation consoles were sufficient enough in sales to push pc gaming out of the store to make more room for consoles but alas it's back the pc has come home to roost uh in its latest earnings call gamestop said that it will expand into pc hardware and components in fact as spotted by other publications like pc mag gamestop is already running a new weekly ad that shows pc peripherals and components and just personally i was in a gamestop not too long ago and saw that there were computer hardware peripherals some of the higher end keyboards and mice and headsets for example furthermore heading over to gamestonk's website shows what appears to be placeholders for a variety of pc components such as the next to non-existent rtx 30 series cards gamestop has also updated its website in order to sell pc hardware with a dedicated landing page for pc gaming in the earnings call gamestop ceo george sherman said that addressing the pc gaming market was among several key steps the company was taking to revitalize its business quote we are continuing the work to expand our addressable market by growing gamestop's product catalog this includes growing our products offerings across pc gaming and they list computers monitors game tables game tables mobile gaming and gaming tvs to name a few yes i'd like one one pc gaming table please shouldn't joke those exist on amazon much like gaming chairs so these categories gamestop says represent natural extensions and it makes sense because in a world where digital game sales are first and foremost for getting a game that relegates to the physical stores to physical commodities and so selling physical pc gaming components does make sense depends on the location whether it'll survive of course but uh that's where game stops going right now so that's it for this one thank you for watching as always you can go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to grab one of our mouse mats toolkits shirts or other products or patreon.com slash gamers and access to get access to our freshly published q a behind the scenes videos and we'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 213,181

Rating: 4.9560609 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, hw news, intel 2021, intel 10nm, intel 7nm, nvidia mining gpus, google custom soc, msi price increase, msi starlit, msi gpu prices, gamestop

Id: Lfr-MLLyzhU

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021