This week, we can finally look forward to official news on the long-brewing Windows 10 update, code named Sun Valley, as Microsoft has officially named an event where it will disclose major changes coming to Windows. We also have major news in the form of TSMC’s Technology Symposium 2021, and a new lawsuit against Dell, targeting alleged false advertising for its Alienware Area-51M R1 laptop. 

In other news, there’s Atari announcing that it will bring its VCS console to public retail markets, Dell’s eGPU hardware being discontinued, the Steam Hardware and Software Survey for May 2021, and more. 

At GN, we’ve focused on Computex 2021 coverage, which includes Intel’s new products, AMD’s 3D V-Cache and FidelityFX SuperResolution, and more. We’ve also started digging into RTX 3080 Ti coverage, which so far includes a proper review and our usual teardown.

As we board another plane, just five days since landing home from Taipei, we're recapping news leading into next week's E3 event, positioned exhaustingly close to Computex. This recap talks AMD and Samsung partnerships on GPUs, Apple's $1000 monitor stand and accompanying cheese grater, and the Radeon Vega II dual-GPUs located therein. We also talk tariff impact on pricing in PC hardware and, as an exclusive story for the video version, we talk about the fake "X499" motherboard at Computex 2019.

Show notes below the video embed.

Intel's 10nm CPUs may have had their last delay -- and it's through the 'holidays' of 2019. Intel's latest earnings call indicates a finalized release target of EOY/holiday of 2019, continuing the saga of 10nm delays since 2015-2016. Note, however, that although TSMC and GF 7nm comparisons are prevalent, it's not as simple as comparing the numbers "7" and "10" -- density matters, as does architecture, and this is something we discussed with David Kanter in an upcoming video interview from GamersNexus.

Other hardware news revolves around a mixture of rumors and actual news, the latter represented by AMD's best quarterly earnings report in 7 years, and the former represented by Intel 9000-series specs and Samsung GPU development.

As always, the show notes are below the video.

Despite Computex’s imminence, there are still plenty of pre-show announcements and news items to discuss. This week’s anchor item is the “conversation” that Micron has been having with memory suppliers; specifically, China’s Anti-Monopoly Bureau has discussed DRAM pricing with Samsung and Micron, Hynix likely to follow. Connecting the dots isn’t too hard here, but keep in mind that there’s still nothing confirmed with regard to price fixing possibilities.

Separately, AMD’s B450 chipsets were detailed, passive AM4 coolers debuted, and JPR thinks cryptomining is waning, giving way to more affordable video cards for gamers.

Show notes are below the video.

We wrote a couple of scripts to scrape the data shown in this content, showing memory price trends for the year so far. We recently set forth on an information gathering mission to learn about how much it costs to actually buy different types of memory, allowing us to look at just how much the memory suppliers are making. They’re raking in record profits with record stock highs – just look at the below Hynix or Micron stock chart: Despite claimed cleanroom limitations, the companies are making record revenue. Today, we’re talking about why and how the memory industry is in the shape it’s in.

This is Part 2 of our RAM Report series. The first part aired previously, and dug deep into five years of memory price data and earnings results for memory suppliers. Be sure to read or watch that content if you haven’t already.

The headlining story for the past week covers the memory supplier class action that was recently filed (vs. SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron), alleging conspiracy to fix prices. In contension for the headline story, Intel's 10nm process problems have grown more complicated, seemingly preempting the company's hiring of Jim Keller, former AMD Zen architect.

This hardware news update looks into our original CTS Labs story, adding to the research by attempting to communicate with CTS Labs via their PR firm, Bevel PR. We also talk about leaked specifications for the R5 2600X, accidentally posted early to Amazon, and some other leaks on ASUS ROG X470 motherboards.

Minor news items include the loss of power at a Samsung plant, killing 60,000 wafers in the process, and nVidia’s real-time ray-tracing (RTX) demo from GDC.

Show notes below the video.

Samsung recently officially confirmed that they are producing ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) intended for cryptocurrency mining, being sold to unnamed clients for ASIC mining machines. These machines are different from GPU miners, and do not meaningfully affect desktop GPU supply.

As the name implies, ASICs are chips designed for a single purpose. There’s nothing unusual about producing ASICs, but mining-specific ones have been the domain of TSMC until now, primarily with client Bitmain. Samsung won’t be doing the mining themselves, just supplying the hardware: TechPowerUp suggests the order was placed by “Chinese clients” which were mentioned in a recent earnings report. Our understanding is that the varieties of cryptocurrency which ASICs can effectively mine are ones that are now beyond the capabilities of home mining operations, like Bitcoin, so they’re used by massive currency farms. SHA-256 algorithms are best mined with ASIC miners.

This week's hardware news recap teases some of our upcoming content pieces, including a potential test on Dragonball FighterZ, along with pending-publication interviews of key Spectre & Meltdown researchers. In addition to that, as usual, we discuss major hardware news for the past few days. The headline item is the most notable, and pertains to Samsung's GDDR6 memory entering mass production, nearing readiness for deployment in future products. This will almost certainly include GPU products, alongside the expected mobile device deployments. We also talk AMD's new-hires and RTG restructure, its retiring of the implicit primitive discard accelerator for Vega, and SilverStone's new low-profile air cooler.

Show notes are below the embedded video.

While researching GPU prices and learning that GDDR5 memory price has increased by $20-$30 on the bill of materials lately, we started looking into the rising system memory prices. RAM pricing has proven somewhat cyclic over the past few years. We’ve reported on memory price increases dating back to 2012, and have done so seemingly every 2 years since that time. This research piece pulls five years of trend data, working in collaboration with PCPartPicker, to investigate why memory prices might be increasing, when we can expect a decrease, and more.

DRAM prices are crazy right now. We’ve driven that point into the ground over the past few years, but pinpointing a “when” and a “why” is a difficult proposition. With the help of PCPartPicker, we’ve identified some general trends that seem almost cyclic, and provide some relief in pointing toward an eventual downturn.