Thread: Anandtech News

Building on their recent announcement of PCIe 5.0 retimers, Microchip has announced their first PCIe 5.0 switches, as part of their Switchtec PFX product line. On paper these look like a very straightforward update to their existing Switchtec PFX switches for PCIe 4.0, carrying over all the important features but doubling the speed.
The final version of the PCI Express 5.0 specification was released in May 2019, but significant adoption is not expected to begin until Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors ship, planned for later this year. Microchip is positioning themselves to be one of the most important vendors helping enable the transition, and they expect to be the only company offering both switches and retimers for PCIe 5.0. Components like switches and retimers are becoming increasingly important with each iteration of PCIe as higher speeds are achieved at the cost of range; servers using PCIe 5.0 will only be able to put a handful of devices close enough to the CPU to operate at PCIe 5.0 speeds without some kind of repeater. Retimers like Microchip's XpressConnect parts are simple pass-through repeaters, while switches like the new Switchtec PFX parts can fan out PCIe connectivity from one or more uplink ports to numerous downstream ports.
As with the PCIe 4.0 members of the Switchtec PFX product line, the new PCIe 5.0 switches will be available with lane counts from 28 to 100. These switches support port bifurcation down to x2 links, with bifurcation down to x1 supported by some of the lanes on the switch. The switches also support up to 48 Non-Transparent Bridges (NTBs), allowing for large multi-host PCIe fabrics to be assembled using several switches. However, initial demand for PCIe is expected to center around GPUs, machine learning accelerators and high-speed NICs, so many of those advanced features will be underutilized early on, and the chips will be primarily used to feed those extremely bandwidth-hungry peripherals with an x16 link each. SSDs using just two or four lanes each are expected to be slower about moving to PCIe 5.0.
The new PCIe 5.0 Switchtec PFX switches are currently sampling to select customers, including a development/evaluation board based around the 100-lane switch. Microchip wouldn't disclose any pricing information for the new switches, but they are bound to be more expensive than the PCIe gen4 switches with the same lane counts. Power consumption is also going up, but Microchip wouldn't quantify the change.
Microchip's lineup of PCIe switches for earlier generations also includes the Switchtec PSX and PAX families with more advanced functionality than the PFX switches. PCIe 5.0 versions of the PSX and PAX families have not been announced, but it's normal for those versions to come later. Microchip's only competition for leading-edge PCIe switches comes from Broadcom/PLX PEX switches. Broadcom has not yet publicly announced their PCIe 5.0 switches, but they are doubtless also planning to take advantage of the launch of Intel's Sapphire Rapids platform.
Source: Microchip

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Wondershare's PDFelement 8 is here, and brings with it a wealth of improvements over the previous version. Improvements which, as a small business owner, you should find very, very exciting.

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Today we are having a close look at the Devarajas K556 RGB gaming keyboard from Redragon, a Chinese manufacturer of gaming peripherals. The company boasts excellent quality, performance, RGB backlighting, and advanced features, all while keeping the retail price very low.

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The electronics industry supply chain is facing a number of issues due to the ongoing pandemic. Companies are unable to meet product demand, and are being forced to fine-tune their product distribution strategies. Intel's Panther Canyon NUC was announced at CES 2021, with no official pricing or availability information. Yesterday, Intel provided some updates with the rather disappointing news that the Panther Canyon NUC family will only be distributed in the Asia-Pacific region.
The other markets will still get a wide range of Tiger Lake-based NUC products such as the NUC11 Pro (Tiger Canyon), Compute Element (Elk Bay), and the dGPU-equipped NUC11 Enthusiast (Phantom Canyon). Intel is citing tight supply of a few third-party components as the cause for the APAC-only focus of Panther Canyon. We expected the NUC11 Performance units to provide an affordable entry point for Tiger Lake mini-PCs. The other Tiger Lake NUC products are bound to be priced higher, given their target markets.
The APAC-only focus of the Panther Canyon products provides an opportunity for vendors such as ASRock Industrial to gain market share elsewhere. The company already has the NUC1100 series of Tiger Lake UCFF PCs available for purchase in the North American market with prices ranging from $600 for the top-end Core i7 version to $350 for the Core i3 one.

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Ahead of our full device review of the Galaxy S21 Ultra (and the smaller Galaxy S21), today we’re focusing on the first test results of the new generation of SoCs, the Snapdragon 888 as well as the Exynos 2100, putting them through their paces, and pitting them against each other in the new 2021 competitive landscape.

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Today Xiaomi is launching their new Mi 11 flagship for the global market, following their domestic launch of the phone in China almost 6 weeks ago.
The Mi 11 is an interesting device as it really balances out its features as a affordable flagship device. The European prices for the new phone start at 749€, featuring the new Snapdragon 888 SoC, and what seems to be a top-of-the line 1440p 120Hz OLED display, all while featuring a high-end 108MP camera module, though the phone compromises on its other cameras.

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Knowing your market is a key fundamental of product planning, marketing, and distribution. There’s no point creating a product with no market, or finding you have something amazing but offer it to the wrong sort of customers. When AMD started offering high-core count Threadripper processors, the one market that took as many as they could get was the graphics design business – visual effects companies and those focused on rendering loved the core count, the memory support, all the PCIe lanes, and the price. But if there’s one thing more performance brings, it’s the desire for even more performance. Enter Threadripper Pro.

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Qualcomm yesterday has announced a slew of new 5G communication platforms, representing their next-generation modems, and RF front-end solutions that will be powering the next flagship devices later in 2021 as well as 2022. This includes two new 5G modems in the form of the new Snapdragon X65 and X62, a new RFFE portfolio with new envelope trackers, new antenna tuners, and new power amplifiers, alongside a 4^th generation mmWave antenna module that supports more frequency bands and a larger frequency bandwidth.

Starting off with the new X65 modem, it’s a rather large generational upgrade compared to the current X60 modem that increases the amount of frequency bands as well as bandwidth that a vendor can deploy in an end user device.
In terms of sub-6GHz frequencies, the new X65 modem increases the bandwidth from 200MHz to 300MHz, essentially a 50% increase in aggregate spectrum that can be used. Such a wide breadth of spectrum is currently extremely rate in terms of 5G network deployments, but as the US is freeing up new mid-band frequencies for 5G usage over the next years, as well as other global markets deprecate 3G frequencies and reallocate them into 5G usage, we’ll be seeing more possible carrier aggregation combinations across larger variety of frequency bands.
On the mmWave side, things have also seen improvements as the available bandwidth goes from 800MHz to 1000MHz, and now adopts support for the TDD 41GHz n259 band, important for mmWave deployments in countries such as China and Japan.
The new modem, when aggregating across sub-6GHz and mmWave networks with the new increased bandwidth capabilities thus advertises maximum download speeds of up to 10Gbps. Of course, such peak figures aren’t too realistic in the real world, but they do showcase the vast increase in spectrum bandwidth available, which will translate to better transmission speeds in crowded situations.
Alongside the super-high-end X65 modem, we’re also seeing the release of the X62, which is essentially its little brother. In terms of frequency bands and standards capabilities, it’s of the same calibre as the X65, however it differs in terms of its spectrum bandwidth capabilities; sub-6GHz is reduced to 120MHz, and mmWave is reduced to 300MHz across 4 carriers, rather than 10. Undoubtedly this modem solution will be targeting devices at lower price points than the X65 flagship.
Interestingly, both new X65 and X62 modems are manufactured on a 4nm node – this should be Samsung’s 4LPE node which is a further iterative improvement of their current 5LPE technology.
The new 5G modem solutions and their RFFE companion chips are set to hit the market in late 2021.
Related Reading:

• Qualcomm’s New 3rd Generation Snapdragon X60 5G Modem, Built on 5nm
• Qualcomm Announces X55 Modem: 5G Multi-mode & New Advanced ICs
• Qualcomm Details The Snapdragon 888: 3rd Gen 5G & Cortex-X1 on 5nm
• Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 750G: Cortex-A77 & mmWave in the Premium Range

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Samsung Foundry has filed documents with authorities in Arizona, New York, and Texas seeking to build a leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing facility in the USA. The potential fab near Austin, Texas, is expected to cost over $17 billion and to create 1,800 jobs. If everything goes as planned, it will go online by the fourth quarter of 2023. There is an intrigue about the new fab though: Samsung hasn't stated which process node it will be designed for.

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NVIDIA this morning has sent over a quick note revealing the release date for their next GeForce desktop video card, the RTX 3060. The mainstream(ish) video card, previously revealed at CES 2021 with a late February release date, has now been locked in for a launch on February 25^th, with prices starting at $329.
As a quick recap, the RTX 3060 is the next card down in NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture consumer video card stack. Using the new GA106 GPU – which is already shipping in RTX 3060 laptops – the RTX 3060 follows the traditional price/performance cadence for video card launches, with NVIDIA releasing a cheaper and lower performing video card for the mainstream-enthusiast video card market. NVIDIA’s 60-tier cards have long been the company’s workhorse parts for 1080p gaming – as well as some of their highest-volume parts in North America – and the RTX 3060 is expected to fill the same role within the Ampere/30-series family.

NVIDIA GeForce Specification Comparison
	RTX 3060	RTX 3060 Ti	RTX 2060	GTX 1060
CUDA Cores	3584	4864	1920	1280
ROPs	64?	80	48	48
Boost Clock	1.78GHz	1.665GHz	1.68GHz	1.709GHz
Memory Clock	14Gbps? GDDR6	14Gbps GDDR6	14Gbps GDDR6	8Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	192-bit	256-bit	192-bit	192-bit
VRAM	12GB	8GB	6GB	6GB
Single Precision Perf.	12.8 TFLOPS	16.2 TFLOPS	6.5 TFLOPS	4.4 TFLOPS
Tensor Perf. (FP16)	51.2 TFLOPS	64.8 TFLOPS	51.6 TFLOPS	N/A
Tensor Perf. (FP16-Sparse)	102.4 TFLOPS	129.6 TFLOPS	51.6 TFLOPS	N/A
TDP	170W	200W	160W	120W
GPU	GA106	GA104	TU106	GP106
Transistor Count	?B	17.4B	10.8B	4.4B
Architecture	Ampere	Ampere	Turing	Pascal
Manufacturing Process	Samsung 8nm?	Samsung 8nm	TSMC 12nm "FFN"	TSMC 16nm
Launch Date	02/25/2021	12/02/2020	01/15/2019	07/19/2016
Launch Price	MSRP: $329	MSRP: $399	MSRP: $349	MSRP: $249 Founders $299

NVIDIA has already published most of the specifications for the card back in January. Including the fact that it offers 28 SMs (3584 CUDA cores), and 12GB of GDDR6 running on a 192-bit memory bus. As with previous 60-tier cards, the non-power-of-two memory bus means that NVIDIA is shipping with a somewhat odd amount of memory, in this case 12GB, which is actually more than what comes on even the RTX 3080. However with the only other option being an anemic-for-2021 6GB, NVIDIA is opting to make sure that the card isn’t for want of VRAM capacity.
Meanwhile, for better or worse the RTX 3060 is all-but-guaranteed to fly off of shelves quickly. With every video card more powerful than a GTX 1050 Ti seemingly getting shanghaied into mining Ethereum, desperate gamers will be fighting with hungry miners for supplies. Even with the 192-bit memory bus, I would be shocked if the RTX 3060 wasn’t profitable, especially with Ethereum reaching record highs. So for anyone thinking of grabbing the card, best be prepared to camp out at your favorite retailer or e-tailer on that Thursday morning.
On a final note, unlike the other RTX 30 series cards launched to date, NVIDIA will not be producing any Founders Edition cards for the RTX 3060 series. So all of the cards released will be AIB cards with their own respective designs. And, if tradition holds, don't be surprised if we see the AIBs outfit their cards with premium features and raise their prices accordingly.

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