Handheld gaming PC maker Ayaneo is currently working on the successor to its original Ayaneo 2. The company recently streamed a product showcase on YouTube, where it confirmed the use of AMD’s new 7000 series chips.
Outside of the Ayaneo 2S, the company announced that the new AMD tech will make its way into the upcoming Ayaneo Geek 1S, Ayaneo Slide, and Ayaneo Air Plus models.
The company also pledges free hardware upgrades for existing customers, though nothing looks to be set in stone yet. Upgraded cooling and speaker units will also apparently be on offer for select older devices.
The Ayaneo 2S is expected to appear on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo by the end of the month.
With Nvidia’s 40 series graphic cards (GPUs) and AMD’s 7900 series GPUs now available, it’s up to the users to decide which GPU offers their setup a better performance.
Both companies launched their new GPU series in the fourth quarter of 2022, though it seems like AMD is already facing criticism about its 7900 XTX GPU.
I picked up a reference RX 7900 XTX and it seems to have overheating issues. Running the first graphics test of Time Spy Extreme on repeat in fullscreen, the junction temperature reaches 110'C by the end of the seventh loop and the card throttles even at stock settings.🧵 pic.twitter.com/mZuQt4E1wQ
Since the launch of the graphics card, severalusers have reported that the GPU runs at excessively high temperatures, which hampers its performance. In a statement given to Tom’s Hardware, AMD has acknowledged the thermal issue, and said, “We are working to determine the root cause of the unexpected throttling experienced by some while using the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards made by AMD.”
The company added, “Based on our observations to-date, we believe the issue relates to the thermal solution used in the AMD reference design and appears to be present in a limited number of the cards sold. We are committed to solving this issue for impacted cards. Customers experiencing this unexpected throttling should contact AMD Support.”
It’s worth noting that not all AMD RX 7900 XTX GPUs are affected by the overheating issue. AMD said in its statement that a “limited number of the cards sold” face the issue, though it is currently unknown if the “limited number” amount to hundreds or thousands. Further, the flaw is only present in the RX 7900 XTX, which means the RX 7900 XT works as intended.
If you have a faulty AMD RX 7900 XTX GPU, contact AMD here.
For the past two years, anyone on the hunt for a new GPU has had to have an equal amount of patience and luck. As with many other segments of the tech industry, the pandemic made it difficult for eager customers to get their hands on an Nvidia or AMD graphics card. However, we may have reached the tipping point.
Whether it’s an Nvidia RTX 3080 or an AMD 6900 XT, GPUs have been well sought after this year. Since the peak of the pandemic, suppliers have not been able to keep up with the global demand. Even when retailers were able to re-up their stock, scalpers, bots and shoddy infrastructure got in the way of many obtaining one.
With high demand came a high secondhand resell price tag. eBay and other markets saw GPUs sitting at more than double their retail price. However, it appears as though these prices are now normalizing. It’s been reported that since January 2022, the cost of many GPUs fell by more than 50 percent of their inflated price.
GPU flood is here.
Chinese miners and South Asian ecafes now dismantling their mining rigs and putting cards up for auction on livestreams.
At the start of the year, the street pricing saw the Nvidia RTX 3090 land at $2,609 USD (roughly $3,356 CAD). The price then fell to $1,837 USD ($2,363 CAD) by April. That same GPU is now available for around $1,033 ($1,329 CAD).
The secondhand market may be stabilizing. It appears to indicate that suppliers are finally catching up with demand. As supply increases, the ability to upcharge on graphics cards lessens more and more. The downward trajectory of secondhand market prices gives a clear look at where the market currently is.
With that said, it’s hard to say what this means for the next-generation wave of GPUs. The Nvidia RTX 40 series and AMD’s RDNA 3 are both to arrive this fall. One still has to wonder if suppliers will be able to keep up with what one can assume will be greater demand. However, if you’re happy with a current-gen GPU, this should all come as welcome news.
Google might be working to add Nvidia GPU support to its servers for Stadia and/or Immersive Stream for Games.
As reported by 9to5Google, a code change from last month shows that Google added a way to include necessary drivers for Nvidia GPUs:
“Add support to the kokoro job script to generate a disk that contains the UMD/KMD NVIDIA modules and corresponding support files required for instances that use a NVIDIA gpu.”
Google’s game streaming services — Stadia and the underlying Immersive Stream for Games tech Google opened up for companies to use — have so far relied on custom AMD GPUs to power games. Researchers have said that Stadia’s servers run on AMD’s Radeon Pro V340, or something similar in power.
The main reason for this is that Stadia uses a modified version of the Linux kernel and, until recently, Nvidia hasn’t offered open-source GPU drivers for Linux.
In other words, with Nvidia offering open-source GPU drivers, it looks like Google is prepping to support the company’s hardware for use in Immersive Stream for Games and Stadia. While Nvidia GPUs aren’t available for the services yet, the inclusion points to intriguing possibilities.
As 9to5 notes, Stadia games are optimized to run on the current AMD hardware. If Google swapped Stadia to Nvidia, it would likely introduce issues for the current lineup of games unless developers similarly optimized for the new hardware.
That said, it’s certainly a possibility. 9to5 says Google might have plans for a Stadia ‘hardware upgrade’ to make it more competitive with other game streaming options from Microsoft and Nvidia. Alternatively, it could just be a way to give developers building Immersive Stream experiences more options.
For now, it’s not clear how this will play out, or what it means for Stadia users. The change could herald a significant upgrade, or could mean little — only time will tell.
Intel’s security team found a flaw in AMD’s old ‘LFENCE/JMP’ patch to mitigate Spectre vulnerabilities across several generations of Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs.
In response, AMD issued a security bulletin recommending the use of alternate mitigation options. The update also had additional information for software developers.
Intel uncovered the issue with LFENCE/JMP while investigating the new vulnerability. AMD implemented LFENCE/JMP in 2018 to mitigate against Spectre, but Intel’s researchers found it doesn’t adequately protect against the threat.
As per AMD’s security bulletin, the weakness in LFENCE/JMP spans the following chips:
Gen 1, 2, and 3 AMD Epyc processors
AMD Ryzen 2000, 3000, and 5000 series desktop processors
AMD Ryzen 4000 and 5000 series desktop processors with Radeon graphics
2nd and 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper
AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro
AMD Athlon 3000 series mobile processors with Radeon graphics
AMD Ryzen 2000 and 3000 series mobile processors
2nd Gen AMD Ryzen mobile processor with Radeon graphics
AMD Ryzen 3000, 4000, and 5000 series with Radeon graphics
AMD Athlon, Athlon 3000, and Ryzen 3000 mobile processors with Radeon graphics for Chromebook
The researchers who found the flaw performed the exploit on Linux, but so far there haven’t been examples of the using the exploit on platforms like Windows.
Finally, The Vergepoints out that patches for Spectre-related vulnerabilities have been known to cause performance issues, especially on older hardware. However, benchmarking platform Phoronix tested the impact of initial patches for Intel and AMD chips in 2019 and found AMD CPUs were less affected than Intel.
Samsung announced its latest mobile processor, the Exynos 2200, sporting a new graphics processing unit (GPU) using AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture dubbed ‘Xclipse.’
Ray tracing, for those unfamiliar with the tech, attempts to simulate how light physically behaves. In video games, ray tracing can help produce more realistic-looking lighting effects, including light that can bounce off reflective surfaces. However, so far ray tracing has proven to be difficult for GPUs to handle and often brings a significant performance hit compared to other lighting solutions.
Still, it’s impressive to see the technology come to mobile chips. It’ll be interesting to see how well it works in practice. Moreover, Samsung shared this surprisingly weird video touting the capabilities of the Exynos 2200 GPU:
Aside from the benefits of AMD RDNA 2 and ray tracing in Xclipse, the Exynos 2200 chip sports other benefits. Samsung says the chip uses a 4nm extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process and is one of the first in the mark to integrate Arm’s latest ARMv9 CPU cores. The ARMv9 cores offer a significant improvement over ARMv8 in both performance and security.
Specifically, the octa-core Exynos 2200 sports a tri-cluster structure with a single ARM Cortex-X2 core, three performance and efficiency balanced Cortex-A710 ‘big cores’ and four power-efficient Cortex-A510 ‘little cores.’
Exynos 2200 also support powerful on-device artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to an upgraded neural processing unit (NPU) and both sub-6 and mmWave 5G through an improved modem.
Finally, Samsung touted the chip’s image signal processor (ISP), which has a redesigned architecture that supports resolutions of up to 200 megapixels. When recording video at 30fps, the ISP supports up to 108 megapixels in single camera mode and 64+36 megapixels in dual camera mode. The ISP can connect up to seven individual image sensors and drive four sensors simultaneously for multi-camera set-ups. The ISP also supports up to 4K HDR or 8K recording.
While the Exynos 2200 certainly sounds impressive, Canadians might not get to try it out. Samsung typically launches its flagship phones in Canada with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips instead of its own Exynos (usually, Exynos chips power Samsung devices outside of North America). Of course, we won’t know for certain until devices rocking the Exynos 2200 release — for now, though, it’s probably safe to assume we won’t get those devices in Canada.
Windows users with AMD Ryzen chips may want to hold off on updating to Windows 11 for the time being — Microsoft and AMD have uncovered at least two issues causing performance issues for Ryzen chips.
According to AMD support (via The Verge), Microsoft’s fancy new operating system can cause performance drops up to 15 percent in some cases.
The first of the two issues is that Windows 11 can cause L3 cache latency to triple. According to AMD, that could cause a three to five percent degradation in performance in most applications. Games (AMD specifically mentions “games commonly used for eSports”) can see a 10-15 percent performance hit.
The second issue is with AMD’s ‘preferred core’ tech, which shifts threads to the fastest core on a processor. AMD says that users may see performance issues with tasks that are heavily reliant on the CPU, especially if they have a processor with more than eight cores and above 65W TDP.
AMD and Microsoft are looking into the issues, with AMD noting on its support page that a Windows update is “in development” and should arrive later this month. For now, however, AMD users may want to hold off on the Windows 11 update.
