Thread: Anandtech News

In today’s review we are having a look at Lian Li’s first PSU, the SP750. Against all odds, Lian Li’s first diversification attempt comes with a very powerful 750W SFX unit rated at 80 Plus Gold, mainly designed for compact high-performance gaming systems.


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In today’s review we are having a look at Keychron’s attempt to create a portable wireless mechanical keyboard, the K3. The K3 not only has a very small footprint and a rechargeable battery, but it also features RGB lighting and a Mac-specific mode.

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Legendary overclocker Vince "KINGPIN" Lucido, part of EVGA's in-house design team, posted to his Facebook page an image that has caused a bit of a stir. The post is captioned 'The red pill', with an image of the appears to be the rear of an EVGA Dark series motherboard using AMD's famous Zen logo. This points to a potential AMD Ryzen version of its board, and this would be the first AMD-based EVGA motherboard since back in days of AMD's Athlon 64 processors. Most recently, EVGA has made hardware parts for two primary vendors: motherboards for Intel and graphics cards for NVIDIA. So making something AMD again is quite a shock.
EVGA's Dark series of motherboards typically cater towards enthusiasts and overclockers, with premium controller sets and a wide variety of features designed for pushing silicon to the limit. Dissecting the teased image posted by Vince Lucido on Facebook, we can see the EVGA X570 or X570S Dark series motherboard will feature one 24-pin 12 V ATX motherboard power input two 12 V EPS ATX CPU power inputs, and two full-length PCIe 4.0 slots.
Looking at what memory support the board might have, the rear of the board looks to only feature two memory slots, which is common on Dark series models, with two or more PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots likely to be a feature. Glancing the rear of the power delivery, there does look to be at least 14 power stages, with given the pedigree and status of EVGA's Dark series models, it could easily be a 16-phase monster.
At the moment, EVGA hasn't officially said anything about the launch of the EVGA X570/X570S Dark, but we expect an announcement in due course, hopefully with pricing and expected availability.
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Since the launch of AMD’s Threadripper Pro platform, the desire to see what eight channels of memory brings to compute over the regular quad-channel Threadripper has been an intriguing prospect. Threadripper Pro is effectively a faster version of AMD’s EPYC, limited for single CPU workstation use, but also heralds a full 280 W TDP to match the frequencies of the standard Threadripper line. There is a 37% price premium from Threadripper to Threadripper Pro, which allows for ECC memory support, double the PCIe lanes, and double the memory bandwidth. In this review, we’re comparing every member of both platforms that is commercially available.

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Russian outlet Vedomosti.ru today is reporting that the conglomerate Rostec, a Russian state-backed corporation specializing in investment in technology, has penned a deal with server company Yadro and silicon design company Sintakor to develop RISC-V processors for computers, laptops, and servers. Initial reports are suggesting that Sintakor will develop a powerful enough RISC-V design to power government and education systems by 2025.
The cost of the project is reported to be around 30 billion rubles ($400m), with that the organizers of the project plan to sell 60,000 systems based around new processors containing RISC-V cores as the main processing cores. The reports state that the goal is to build an 8-core processor, running at 2 GHz, using a 12-nanometer process, which presumably means GlobalFoundries but at this point it is unclear. Out of the project funding, two-thirds will be provided by ‘anchor customers’ (such as Rostec and subsidiaries), while the final third will come from the federal budget. The systems these processors will go into will operate initially at Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science, as well as the Ministry of Health.

Sintakor (or Syntacor) already develops its own core with the RISC-V architecture, rather than licensing a design. There have been questions as to whether any current RISC-V design is powerful enough to be used in a day-to-day work machine suitable for administrative services, however with the recent news that Canonical is enabling Ubuntu/Linux on some of SiFive’s RISC-V designs, chances are that by 2025 there will be a sufficient number of software options to choose from should the Russian processor adhere to any specifications required. That being said, it is not uncommon for non-standard processors in places like Russia or China to use older customized forks of Linux to suit the needs of the businesses using the hardware. Sintakor’s documentation states that their highest performance 64-bit core already supports Linux.

Sintakor's latest design

This news is an interesting development given that Russia has multiple home-grown CPU prospects in the works already, such as the Elbrus 2000 family of processors that run a custom VLIW instruction set with binary translation for Intel x86 and x86-64; these processors already offer 8-core and multi-socket systems running on Linux. Development on Elbrus is still ongoing with Rostec in the mix, and the project seems focused on high-powered implementations in desktop to server use. In contrast, the new RISC-V development seems to be targeting low-powered implementations for desktop and laptop use. Russia also has Baikal processors using the MIPS32 ISA, built by a Russian supercomputer company.
It will be interesting to see how this story develops: $400m should be sufficient to build a processor and instruct system design at this level, which puts the question on how well the project will execute.
Sources: @torgeek, Vedomosti.ru
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A couple of weeks ago, UL (formerly Futuremark) released the latest test in its ongoing 3DMark gaming benchmark suite, CPU Profile. The premise behind this new CPU-specific test is a simulation to measure how processor performance scales with cores and threads. Normally 3DMark tests are designed to measure overall gaming performance – and thus are largely a GPU benchmark – however this one is a little different since it focuses more specifically on CPU performance. So we wanted to take a look at UL's latest test to get a better idea of what exactly it is testing, what exactly it is trying to accomplish, and just how useful it might be.

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Today at a private GlobalFoundies event, CEO Tom Caulfield accompanied by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, announced that the company is set on expansion. At the heart of this new initiative is a doubling of Fab 8, GF’s leading manufacturing facility, at the cost of around $1B. Accompanying this is the disclosure that GF is going to build another manufacturing facility close to Fab 8, in Malta NY, as part of a Private-Public partnership. Details of the new facility were not given.

CEO Tom Caulfield

GlobalFoundries is a contract manufacturer of microprocessors, focusing on adjacency technologies from 12nm and larger geometries. While most column inches are spent discussing the leading-edge manufacturing at GF’s competitors, in a discussion with the CEO we were told that GF addresses around 70% of the semiconductor market and in the current climate is currently running all of its facilities at maximum production.
GF has three main fabs in Malta NY, Dresden Germany, and Singapore – all three are running at maximum output, and GF recently announced a new plant in Singapore capable of 450K wafers per year. Tom Caulfield told us prior to that announcement that the Malta fab is around two-thirds full of equipment, Dresden is at about half, but Singapore is full, hence the new Singapore fab. In March GF announced a $1.4B expansion divided equally between the three sites, with Production capacity is expected to increase by 13% this year and by 20% next year as a result of the increased funding. Today’s announcement commits to adding additional machines at Malta to scale out to the space already there, for another 150k wafers per year, at a cost of $1B.

New website with the new branding. They should have put 'Moore'

The other element of the announcement is the new fab in Malta. The deployment of a new facility, especially at scale, costs billions. GlobalFoundries today acknowledges that it will take billions, citing the US government’s desire to increase national manufacturing in light of the global scale and building more on American soil. Exactly how GF will implement a new facility has not been disclosed – no timeline, no costs, no information about where the funding is coming from, or what process nodes will be manufactured on-site. It was announced that it would be a private-public partnership, developing chips for high-growth areas such as automotive, 5G, and IoT. The fab is set to create 1000 technical jobs and another few thousand in ancillary positions in the local area to support it. Discussions were also made in light of the semiconductor supply chain, and the need to invest and evolve that part of the business alongside manufacturing improvements. Senator Schumer spoke about the need to pass grow semiconductors, holding up a bag of chips alongside a wafer.

These announcements are part of a train of recent disclosures and talk about GlobalFoundries. Last week it was rumored that Intel was seeking to acquire GF for $30 billion, however today GF announced a complete logo change and rebranding of the business, which doesn’t tend to occur if a company is in the process of acquisition talks. Alongside this, GF is expected to bring forward its Initial Public Offering (IPO) from 2022 to late 2021. The company is currently owned wholly by the Emerati state holding company Mubadala, and the IPO is on the back of some growth of GF in light of the high semiconductor demand environment. GlobalFoundries expects 2021 revenue to be around $6.2 billion, a +9% growth over 2020.
Official Press Release from GlobalFoundries
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Today we’re finally taking a deeper look at Xiaomi’s Mi 11 Ultra – the bigger brother of the Mi 11. Featuring the same screen and general design, can the big camera setup warrant double the price over the Mi 11?

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Today, we are taking a look at SilverStone's latest family of AIO coolers, the IceGem series. Designed explicitly with Ryzen Threadripper compatibility in mind, the IceGem coolers are meant to fill the hole in SilverStone's AIO cooler lineup, offering a single family of coolers that can be used with any desktop socket, large or small.

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With the launch of Intel’s Ice Lake Xeon Scalable platform comes a new socket and a range of features that vendors like Supermicro have to design for. The server and enterprise market is so vast that every design can come in a range of configurations and settings, however one of the key elements is managing compute density with memory and accelerator support. The SYS-120U-TNR we are testing today is a dense system with lots of trimmings all within a 1U, to which Supermicro is aiming at virtualization workloads, HPC, Cloud, Software Defined Storage, and 5G. This system can be equipped with upwards of 80 cores, 12 TB of DRAM, and four PCIe 4.0 accelerators, defining a high-end solution from Supermicro.

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