Another busy week in hardware news as we settle into the month of May. We have substantial news items from Intel, as the company continues to explore fab options in Europe. Additionally, Intel is ratcheting up its fab investments, and possibly looking to sell off its Sport Technology Group, which is home to its True View tech. Rounding-out the headline stories is IBM announcing a breakthrough in “2nm” semiconductors using nanosheet FETs. 

In slightly lesser news, TSMC is deploying AMD’s Epyc CPUs in the data centers that not only power its R&D, but its manufacturing as well -- a bragging point for AMD, to be sure. There’s also news regarding Arm, Sony, Steam, and more. 

At GN, we recently reviewed Cooler Master’s MF700 case, in addition to reviewing the Phanteks P360A case. Spoiler alert: Only one of those cases impressed us. We also dove into a decade’s worth of GPU data from AMD and Nvidia to discuss price creep, release patterns, and greed.

Lots of news to cover this week, including an interesting -- and surprising -- use of Intel’s Atom CPUs. We also have some commentary to add regarding the AMD “Warhol” rumor that ran rampant this past week. There’s news on the DDR5 front, as the new memory is nearing mass production and market-ready status, and we have something of an update on the Chia cryptocurrency story from last week. There’s plenty more, with news from AMD, Google, and Microsoft. 

At GN, we recently released a pair of videos diving into the AMD-based AYA NEO: one where we looked at performance and benchmarks, and another where we tore the unit down for analysis. Outside of hardware and gaming, GN has been involved in some environmental initiatives as well, such as this rain garden we recently helped fund.

News article and video below, per the usual.

News is busy this week and features a story that we'd love to know more about: The Cedar Supercomputer accidentally running cryptomining software for 6 hours a day under the nose of researchers. We're also talking about DDR5 and AMD's future roadmap (all tentative), the Ryzen 3 1200 AF & 1300 AF CPUs coming to market, Unigine Community 2 SDK, TSMC earnings, and more.

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Hardware news this week is abuzz, largely thanks to updates from AMD and Microsoft. AMD confirmed this week that it had confidential files stolen, with the hacker demanding blackmail to stop them from leaking the files publicly. Microsoft, meanwhile, has temporarily paused non-essential updates while its teams work from home, but is also facing a zero-day exploit. In a positive story, Folding @ Home has passed the ExaFLOP threshold in its growing research efforts for COVID-19.

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DDR5 has existed in a few different forms in the past year or two, but this past week brought news of the first JEDEC-compliant memory chip for future DDR5 implementations. As usual with new memory standards, frequency is expected to increase (and timings will likely loosen) significantly with the new generation, something we talk about in today's list of news items for the week. Also in that list, we talk ongoing CPU shortages for CPUs, Apple's T2 security co-processor and its impact on right to repair, and official mouse/keyboard support on the Xbox.

Show notes follow the video embed, as always.