Thread: Anandtech News

In some unexpected news today, HP and HyperX (formerly a division of Kingston) have jointly released a statement that HP is to acquire HyperX gaming peripherals portfolio, and the brand, for $425 million USD. Kingston retains the DRAM, Flash, and SSD products (those that are branded HyperX will probably be renamed). Perhaps it is indicative that Kingston wants to remain focused on the memory and storage markets, and divest away from a variable commodity market, while at the same time HP is looking to boost its presence in the space alongside its HP OMEN branding.
Pending regulatory review, the deal is expected to go close in Q2 2021, with the acquisition accretive on a non-GAAP to HP in the first full year. The HyperX peripheral line-up, which includes gaming headsets, microphones, keyboards, mouse pads, mice, power supplies, console accessories and apparel, is expected to be used by HP’s broader gaming ecosystem to expand potential add-ons for its OMEN series gaming desktops and laptops, as well as build that ecosystem for hardware, software, and services.

HyperX as a brand has always been a distinct element somewhat separate from Kingston – over the last few years, every trade show we’ve attended we have made separate meetings for each company, whereas a decade ago we would cover both in the same room. This disaggregation of the business has obviously allowed Kingston to package it up should it ever need to offload, as it has now done with HP. Kingston still retains the gaming focused RGB-laden DRAM and SSD businesses, although these are likely to be sold either under Kingston or a separate new brand that we will learn about in due course. It is unclear whether HyperX sponsorships of eSports teams is also part of the deal, if those will transfer to HP, or they will remain with Kingston.

In the press release, HP quotes that the PC hardware industry is set to have a $70 billion addressable market by 2023, with the global peripherals market (gaming and non-gaming) to grow to $12.4 billion by 2024. HP states that gaming peripherals will be a disproportionally large element of that year-on-year growth, and that HyperX’s brand recognition will help HP ‘advance its leadership in personal systems by modernizing compute experiences and expanding into valuable adjacencies’. In non-corporate speak, that just means that HP sees collective value in enabling its own systems with top-brand accessories to improve the overall experience. For a price, naturally, although there will no doubt be some synergies as HP can mothball some of its own HP OMEN peripherals that may not have had large distribution.
With the deal expected to close in Q2, it will be interesting to see if HP does any brand reorganization with HyperX, such as ‘HyperX by HP’, or leave it as it is. If we get more information we will add to this news post.
Source: https://press.hp.com/us/en/press-rel...re-hyperx.html

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It looks like AMD is getting ready to launch the next part in their RDNA2/RX 6000 family of video cards. This afternoon the company sent out a save the date invitation to the press and public, announcing that the company will be holding a Radeon-related announcement next Wednesday, March the 3^rd. And with a picture of a previously unseen Radeon video card included with the announcement, AMD is leaving little ambiguity about their plans.
The event, officially dubbed “Where Gaming Begins Episode 3”, will be another Radeon-focused event, where AMD will “introduce the newest addition to the Radeon RX family of high-performance graphic cards.” AMD’s previous two WGB events have been pre-recorded presentations, so we’re expecting the same here.
The cornerstone of the announcement will be the introduction of a new Radeon video card. Essentially giving us half of the product announcement up-front, AMD has also posted a short, looping video of the card, highlighting the fairly sizable card and its open air cooler with dual axial fans. Given this, we’re almost certainly looking at what will be a Radeon RX 6700 card. AMD started the RDNA2 family with the top cards and GPU (Navi 21) first, so this is the next step in the expected filtering down of RDNA2 into cheaper video cards.

On March 3rd, the journey continues for #RDNA2. Join us at 11AM US Eastern as we reveal the latest addition to the @AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics family. https://t.co/5CFvT9D2SR pic.twitter.com/tUpUwRfpgk
— Radeon RX (@Radeon) February 24, 2021

We’ll find out more about the card next week of course, but I would expect to see it positioned to compete against NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 series, with today’s announcement by AMD clearly intended to be a bit of a spoiler ahead of NVIDIA’s launch tomorrow. Currently AMD’s product stack stops at the $579 RX 6800, so it will be interesting to see just where this upcoming video card lands – if it’ll be positioned closer to the $400 RTX 3060 Ti, or the (nominally) $329 RTX 3060. AMD and NVIDIA’s GPUs have been slightly out of alignment this generation, as evidenced by Navi 21’s performance, so I won’t be too surprised if this next Navi GPU (Navi 22) similarly floats between NVIDIA’s GA106 and GA104.
Finally, I suspect we’ll hear some software-related news from AMD as well. The company has demonstrated an aptness for bundling software news into these hardware announcements, looking to make the most of these large, highly visible product launches. So I don’t expect AMD to solely talk about the new video card for 15+ minutes.
At any rate, we’ll find out more on March 3^rd at 11am ET. So please join us then for the full details on AMD’s next Radeon video card.

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NVIDIA this afternoon closed the book on another record fiscal year, announcing their FY 2021 and Q4 2021 earnings results for the company. For the last quarter of their fiscal year, NVIDIA booked just over $5B in revenue with a profit of $1457M, marking NVIDIA’s first five billion dollar quarter, and setting earning records across the board. Meanwhile for the full fiscal year, NVIDIA has recorded just under $16.7B in revenue, with a net income for the year of $4.3B.

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NVIDIA this morning is launching their previously announced GeForce RTX 3060. First unveiled back at CES 2021, the latest member of the GeForce RTX 30 series is continuing NVIDIA’s ongoing top-to-bottom launch of Ampere-based video cards, with today’s card in some respects being the most popular one. Aimed at the mainstream market, the RTX 3060 is designed to be a more balanced option for the larger market of gamers who probably aren’t trying to drive high-end 4K displays, but still want the latest graphical features on a 1080p or 1440p display. RTX 3060 cards will go on sale a bit later this morning – at 9am Pacific – with prices starting at $329.

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Semiconductor foundry offerings are thriving due to unprecedented demand for semiconductors and processors in recent quarters. Analysts from TrendForce believe that in Q1 2021 foundries will increase their revenue by 20% year-over-year as their capacities are fully loaded. Since the demand for chips is projected to continue to exceed the constrained supply for several quarters, market observers predict that manufacturers will be busy for a long time, and beyond this, will take a long time to catch up. This is good news for foundry revenue, and may encourage others to widen their foundry offerings. Warnings however about fab equipment are coming into play - being fully loaded means equipment now wears out faster, which increases risks of disruptions should that equipment also be short on supply.

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Intel's third generation QLC SSD delivers much-needed performance improvements due to its new 144-layer 3D QLC NAND and a new low-cost SSD controller from Silicon Motion.

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After a 9-year run, Intel today has begun to wrap up its Performance Tuning Protection Plan service, the company’s optional extended warranty for CPU overclocking. As of today, Intel is no longer selling new PTP plans, and the program will be shifting to servicing existing warranties while those are still active. Intel’s warranty service was quite unique throughout the industry; given the potentially destructive nature of overclocking, it’s almost unheard of to be covered, even by optional warranties.
Intel originally launched the Performance Tuning Protection Plan back in January of 2012, right in the middle of the heyday of Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPU overclocking (ed: has it really been that long?). At the time, for anywhere between $20 and $35, Intel would offer a one-time warranty that specifically covered damages incurred by overclocking – something that Intel’s standard warranty explicitly does not cover. Should a retail boxed processor fail due to overclocking, intel would replace a PPTP warrantied chip once and only once, free of charge.
When Intel kicked off the program, it was initially started as a six-month trial, where saw enough success to become a long-term offering for Intel, covering all overclockable Intel consumer chips including their massive HEDT parts. Even though the program made it very affordable to overcook an Intel CPU for little more than the price of a pizza, the one-time replacement restriction seemingly did its job, as stories of people trying to abuse the program have been few and far between.
None the less, the PTPP’s days have finally come to an end. In a message posted to the plan’s website, Intel announced that the program was being discontinued, citing that “As customers increasingly overclock with confidence, we are seeing lower demand for the Performance Tuning Protection Plans”.
And while Intel doesn’t provide any specific numbers to back that up, broadly speaking it’s not at all surprising to hear that demand is down. Since the Sandy Bridge era overclocking has become a lot less fruitful; with Turbo Boost Max 3.0, Thermal Velocity Boost, and other turbo technologies, Intel has begun wringing out the bulk of clockspeed headroom from their CPUs right out of the box. At the same time peak clockspeeds have stalled at a bit over 5GHz, and the much larger core counts of today’s CPUs means that Intel differentiates its parts based on core count more than it does based on clockspeeds. So unlike the Sandy Bridge era, where you could easily expect to add another 1GHz (or more) to a $216 i5-2500K, a modern i5-10600K is lucky to achieve half of that thanks to already starting at a peak clockspeed of 4.8GHz. Ultimately, although CPU overclocking is far from dead, it’s no longer delivering big, easy performance boosts as it once did.
At any rate, with the retirement of the PPTP, Intel is transitioning to servicing existing warranties. Intel chip owners who have already purchased a plan are still covered for the length of their warranty, which rides on top of Intel’s standard 3-year warranty. So Intel will still be replacing a handful of chips for a couple more years yet.

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Today AMD is officially going to start offering its Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors at retail, effectively ending the exclusivity deal with Lenovo on the product line. To date, Lenovo is the only company to have offered Threadripper Pro in the Thinkstation P620 platform. In the past few months, beginning with the CES trade show, we have seen three motherboard manufacturers showcase models of compatible motherboards for the retail market, and today is supposed to be the day that systems with those motherboards can be purchased.
At the launch of the Threadripper Pro platform, AMD advertised four different models from 12 cores up to 64 cores, built upon its Zen 2 architecture and mirroring the Threadripper 3000 family of hardware. The Pro element is an upgrade, giving the processor eight memory channels rather than four, support for 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, support for up to 2 TB of ECC memory per CPU, and Pro-level admin tools. In essence, sometimes it is easier to think of Threadripper Pro more as ‘Workstation EPYC’, as these new processors are aimed at the traditional workstation crowd.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro
AnandTech	Cores	Base Freq	Turbo Freq	PCIe 4.0	L3 Cache	DDR Cap	Price SEP
3995WX	64 / 128	2700	4200	128	256 MB	2 TB	$5490
3975WX	32 / 64	3500	4200	128	128 MB	2 TB	$2750
3955WX	16 / 32	3900	4300	128	64 MB	2 TB	$1150
3945WX	12 / 24	4000	4300	128	64 MB	2 TB	*
*Special OEM model
TR 3990X	64 / 128	2900	4300	64	256 MB	256 GB	$3990
EPYC 7702P	64 / 128	2000	3350	128	256 MB	4 TB	$4425

Out of the four processors, only three are being made at retail – that final 12-core processor is going to remain for specific OEM projects only. Pricing for these units is also being announced today, with the 64-core model sitting at $5490, the 32-core model at $2750, and the 16-core model at $1150.

These prices are larger than the equivalent Threadripper processors by up to 40%, despite our benchmarks showing the difference between the 64-core parts actually around 3% on average. This is because of all the extra features that Threadripper Pro brings to the table.
Motherboards from three manufacturers will be made available: the Supermicro M12SWA-TF, the GIGABYTE WRX80-SU8-IPMI, and the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi. Prices for these motherboards are currently unknown, however we did have a short hands on with the ASUS motherboard which you can find in the link below.

• AMD Opens Up Threadripper Pro: Three New WRX80 Motherboards
• Hands-On with the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi

We have already reviewed both the Threadripper Pro 3995WX and the Lenovo ThinkStation P620, which you can find here:

• 64 Cores of Rendering Madness: The AMD Threadripper Pro 3995WX Review
• Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Review: A Vehicle for Threadripper Pro

Exactly where and when these CPUs will start at the usual retail places is unclear - we do know that system integrators have been developing configurations with the hardware for several weeks now, so we might see these parts first hit the pre-built area before going fully retail.
We are hoping to get review units for the other CPUs in later this month, along with a few of these motherboards.

Update 1: Scan in the UK is currently selling the 64-core (£5000) and 32-core (£2500), with the 16-core (£1050) on preorder. They also have the ASUS motherboard for sale for £890.

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Some analysts consider Intel to be a processor company with manufacturing facilities – others consider it to be a manufacturing company that just happens to make processors. In the grand scheme of things, Intel is a hybrid of product, manufacturing, expertise, investment, and perhaps most importantly, research. Intel has a lot of research and development on its books, most of it aimed at current product cycles in the 12-36 month time span, but beyond that, as with most big engineering companies, there’s a team of people dedicated to finding the next big thing over 10-20+ years. This is usually called the Moonshot Division in most companies, but here we find it called Intel Labs, and leading this team of path-finding gurus is Dr. Richard Uhlig.


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As part of AMD’s latest Where Gaming Begins product presentation, the prolific processor designer announced the next member in its Radeon family of video cards, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. Following the tried and true scale-down release strategy that has come to define the GPU industry, the company is preparing its second RDNA2 GPU to further flesh out its lineup of video cards. Set to be released on March 18^th, the Radeon RX 6700 XT will be AMD’s anchor card for 1440p gaming, succeeding the last-generation RX 5700 XT and giving AMD’s product lineup a more wallet-friendly option than their 4K-focused 6800/6900 series cards. The launch for the latest Radeon card will be an all-out affair, with both reference and partner custom cards launching the same day, with prices starting at $479.

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