Hardware news this week discusses a new CPU vulnerability (Hertzbleed) that affects all CPUs, alongside other topics, like the Intel A380 GPU launch, AMD's Zen 4 leaked release date for September, and leaks about the Intel Core i9-13900K and 13900KF.

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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). 

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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We're still in Taiwan this week for factory tours, but that's given us a unique perspective to get first-party information on how COVID-19 is impacting the computer hardware industry. In particular, we've been able to glean information on how companies in the US and Taiwan are handling risk mitigation and limiting spread of the virus in their companies. This has wider impact for consumers, as production will be limited over the next month or two and product delays are inevitable. There are also implications for Computex -- namely, whether it happens or not. In addition to this specific news, we have reporting on new AMD vulnerabilities, the death of the blower fan, and more.

Cloudflare has disclosed a bug within their code that has resulted in a massive memory leak, dumping user data into the wild. For those unaware, Cloudflare is an internet proxy and web performance service aimed at protecting websites and associated user data from malicious activity—making a security disaster like this acutely ironic.

GamersNexus received a tip from one of its readers regarding anti-virus utility Avast! detecting “VBS:Malware-gen” threats on seemingly random websites. We’ve independently corroborated this report and have encountered VBS:Malware-gen threat warnings on numerous sites, including Twitch.tv, Amazon, Reddit, and (at something of a random cycle) seemingly every other website. Upon running a scan of the system, Avast! will locate hundreds, if not thousands, of files which are allegedly infected by this VBS:Malware-gen threat. Some of these files include critical system .dlls and program files that will break major components of installs if quarantined or deleted. Do not begin deleting or quarantining files en masse as a result of this threat detection.

We are nearly fully confident that this is a false positive, though we’re not sure what precisely the issue is. A few forum posts have popped-up in the past few days regarding this issue, for instance: