Another week, another HW News. While not as busy as last week, we’ve still got some interesting stories. For instance, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, as well as the main Linux kernel developer, has moved to AMD CPUs for his personal machine -- after 15 some years of Intel-based machines. There’s also a new development in the ongoing SMR saga: Class action lawsuits are being brought against WD in both the US and Canada.  

We also have news of changes to the numbering of AMD’s AGESA microcode updates, updated ARM IP, Intel finally overhauling its stock coolers, and a terrible Nintendo Switch clone that’s begging to be sued. 

On the GN side of things, we’ve been busy analysing Intel’s newest 10th-gen (Comet Lake-S) K-SKU CPUs and their respective Z490 platform. Most recently, we looked at the extreme auto voltage settings on Z490, including Vcore, power limit, and MCE. We also looked at the i5-10400 and i7-10700K. Spoiler alert: they’re both hard to justify. 

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Another busy week of hardware news is in the books, and there’s a lot to talk about. Perhaps most notably, AMD has performed its 180 in regards to Zen 3 support on B4xx chipsets, enabling a one-way upgrade path for those wanting to migrate to Ryzen 4000 later this year. We have an exhaustive (pt1) video (pt2) series (pt3) dedicated to the topic and the current state of BIOSes, so we won’t delve into it here.

As ever, there’s more broad industry news, such as Microsoft admitting it was on the wrong side of the open-source explosion at the turn of the century, and TSMC pulling all chip orders from Huawei thanks to ever tightening US export restrictions. We have yet to see how this will affect Huawei, but it is almost certainly going to be detrimental to its business.

Within GN specifically, we’ve completely sold out of our GN wireframe mouse mats -- thanks for the support! More mouse mats are currently on back-order for the next production run. We expect those back-orders will ship in August. Meanwhile, we’ve posted our i9-10900K review and i5-10600K review, both of which look at frequency performance, overclocking, die sanding tests, and more. It also seems AMD has dropped the price on its Ryzen 9 3900X in response to Comet Lake-S. Additionally, if you happen to live near a MicroCenter, there’s an in-store promotion that will get you the Ryzen 9 3900X for $380.

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It’s been another interesting week in the realm of hardware and technology. The week started off slowly, but ended with a deluge of interesting stories, mostly as it relates to US semiconductor manufacturing. In addition to Intel and Samsung in talks with the Department of Defense, it looks as if TSMC will be adding a second fab to its US roster.

We also have news on AMD’s open-source GPUOpen, and its apparently not so open-source  Radeon Rays solution. Sometimes. There’s also news on the recently unveiled Unreal Engine 5 and how Epic CEO Tim Sweeney feels about the SSD storage solutions in the PlayStation 5. 

Elsewhere at GN, we recently covered Nvidia’s GTC 2020 keynote where Ampere was formally announced -- check out both the article and video. We’ve also been extensively overclocking the Ryzen 3 3100, as well as the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 Infinity Fabric clock (FCLK). 

Linus might have competition from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who today published the GTC 2020 keynote from his kitchen, given the current world circumstances. The company’s GTC event has rarely featured gaming product launches over the last few years, but often features the architectures that lead into them. Volta is a good example of this, where we didn’t really get gaming cards, but we saw what led to Turing. At this year’s event, the company showed off its new Ampere architecture, with a split-focus on reminding us of gaming and ray tracing advancements while also highlighting all the usual AI, machine learning, and deep learning processing goals of the architecture. Ampere sounds like it’ll be coming down to gaming at some point, as opposed to the Volta/Turing relationship, where they were technically different architectures and launches.

We thought NVIDIA might livestream a pre-recorded video, but the company ended up uploading multiple edited videos into at least 8 parts at time of writing (ed: ended up being 9). Admittedly, some of them were a little hard to listen to with obvious cuts and shoved-in words, but we’re probably more sensitive to that than most since we make so many videos here and deal with that weekly.

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Before beginning this week's hardware news recap, we'd like to highlight for our readers -- or those who just prefer referencing our articles rather than scrubbing through videos at a later date -- that we've been making a bigger push to publish written content to the site lately. This site serves almost more as an archive for the scripts than anything else these days, just because the nature of maintaining it is very difficult given our current working hours, but we like it and we know that all of you like the written format. We've made an active effort in increasing how many of our videos (from YouTube) end up on the website in written form, so we published the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 review, Ryzen 3 3300X review, and our B550 vs. X570 (et al) chipset comparison. Check them out on the home page.

In the meantime, we've got a lot of hardware news for the week to recap: The FCC is being forced to reveal its server logs for concerns stemming from fake comments about net neutrality, NVIDIA and AMD are vying over 5nm supply from fab TSMC, RTX Ampere is getting an announcement this week, Intel Alder Lake and LGA1700 are in the rumor mill, and more.