Tech News for November 5, 2018

Tech News for November 5, 2018.

AMD’s refresh of basically, a refresh, is coming and it is coming on the 12nm node. AMD remains ‘mum’ about the new cards recently discovered in benchmarking results online but there has been some leaks on this new GPU slated to be coming out on or about November 15, 2018. The previous models, the RX 480 and the RX 580 were both on the 14nm node while the nVidia counterparts in the GTX 10-series cards were on the 16nm node and the new Turing-based cards, the RTX series, are on the 12nm node. This shift of AMD cards to the 12nm should allow for higher GPU clock speeds and at least improved power efficiency, which in my opinion, is something AMD desperately needs with their products, particularly their GPUs.

In other AMD news, the “Next Horizon” even scheduled for November 6^th could introduce the Zen 2 Architecture’s arrival. Back in early December 2016, AMD held a ‘New Horizon’ even and during that event, they revealed some of the very first details of its Zen processors which were built on the 14nm architecture dubbed, “Summit Ridge.” AMD introduced Ryzen at that time and boasted a 40% increase in the processors’ instructions per clock (IPC). These potential Zen 2 processors are most likely going to be part of the EPYC server family. Per AMD Corporate VP Laura Graves, AMD “will discuss innovation of AMD products and technologies, specifically designed for the data center on industry-leading 7-nanometer process technology.”

The next generation of EPYC processors will be built on the 7nm Rome architecture which is pretty big considering Intel is still stuck on its 14nm architecture. The first of Intel’s 10nm products for the consumer “market” will not arrive until late in 2019 while the Ice Lake Xeon-SP processor, which is built on the 10nm process (server processor) isn’t slated until 2020 which will be Intel’s closest offering to AMD’s EPYC line. If rumors are true about Zen 2, EPYC specifically, we will see a 13% average performance boost over the Zen+ processors in scientific applications. Also, rumors have circulated that EPYC processors will be available with up to 64 physical cores and potentially 128 threads.

Now, let’s see what is happening with Intel. Intel has announced Cascade Lake and Xeon E-2100 processor. Intel has decided to drop 2 new processors in the market in an attempt to steal AMD’s thunder ahead of their upcoming ‘Next Horizon’ event. These processors will be a part of Intel’s Xeon product portfolio: one for entry level servers and one for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. The Intel Xeon E-2100 processor is available today while the Cascade Lake variant will be available sometime in the first half of 2019. The Cascade Lake processor will have up to 48 cores and support up to 12x DDR4 memory channels per socket. The Intel Xeon E-2100 processors will come with up to 6 cores and 12 thread and are aimed at small and medium-sized businesses and cloud service providers.

It is a generally slow news day for Intel today other than a few things dealing with the iPhone and Intel providing the modem for the first 5G variant which I will not discuss because it is more directed at the mobile phone market.

Finally, we have nVidia news. The most common new story, or most popular should I say, is the news of nVidia RTX 2080 Ti cards dying. There have been multiple posts on a variety of forums form nVidia’s forums to Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter as well as others. Allegedly, some RTX 2080 Ti GPUs have been dying on consumers within a few weeks of purchasing them or, actually receiving them. The reports range from crashes to black screens to BSODs, artifacts, and others. However, some cards are just completely dying and it seems to be far more common in the RTX 2080 Ti than in the RTX 2080 cards. nVidia has been handling the RMAs for their customers and have been doing so by sending them a completely different, new card but those cards are also being reported as failure and some folks have actually had to RMA the RMA. Of course, the “Debbie Downers” and “GPU Doomsday Preppers” that are saying that there is an “architectural defect” but it is far too early, in my opinion, to go full “Jesse Ventura” here… And you know, you never go “FULL” Jesse Ventura. At any rate, this appears to mainly be an issue for the Founders Edition models but there are a few of the custom models that are failing or outright dying too. I will keep you all updated as I hear more.

So, there you have it. I will be doing this news wrap up at least once a week with an aim to do it 2-3 times per week. I hope you have enjoyed it. If you did or did not enjoy it, let me know. Also, if you would like different news stories or have any ideas for other news options, please let me know. I hope you stop by for the next one. Thanks for stopping by today and I hope to see you next time. Have a great day!