(PR) SiFive Unveils the HiFive Premier P550 Out-of-Order RISC-V Development Board

Today at Embedded World, SiFive, Inc., the pioneer and leader of RISC-V computing, unveiled its new state-of-the-art RISC-V development board, the HiFive Premier P550. The board will be available for large-scale deployment through Arrow Electronics so developers around the world can test and develop new RISC-V applications like machine vision, video analysis, AI PC and others, allowing them to use AI and other cutting-edge technologies across many different market segments.

With a quad-core SiFive Performance P550 processor, the HiFive Premier P550 is the highest performance RISC-V development board in the industry, and the latest in the popular HiFive family. Designed to meet the computing needs of modern workloads, the out-of-order P550 core delivers superior compute density and performance in an energy-efficient area footprint. Furthermore, the modular design of the HiFive Premier P550, which includes a replaceable system-on-module (SOM) board, gives developers the flexibility they need to tailor their designs. Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/321308/sifiv...ment-board

AMD Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" Zen 5 Processor Pictured

An alleged picture of an unreleased AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" desktop processor, just hit the wires. "Granite Ridge" is codename for the desktop implementation of the "Zen 5" microarchitecture, it succeeds the current Ryzen 7000 "Raphael" that's powered by "Zen 4." From what we're hearing, the CPU core counts of "Granite Ridge" continue to top out at 16. These chips will be built in the existing AMD Socket AM5 package, and will be compatible with existing AMD 600-series chipset motherboards, although the company is working on a new motherboard chipset to go with the new chips.

The alleged AMD engineering sample pictured below has an OPN 100-000001290-11, which is unreleased. This OPN also showed up on an Einstein@Home online database, where the distributed computing platform read it as having 16 threads, making this possibly an 8-core/16-thread SKU. The "Zen 5" microarchitecture is expected to provide a generational IPC increase over "Zen 4," but more importantly, offer a significant performance increase for AVX-512 workloads due to an updated FPU. AMD is expected to unveil its Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" processors at the 2024 Computex.


https://www.techpowerup.com/321284/amd-r...r-pictured

This Week in Gaming (Week 15)

The month of April continues with more low-key releases and this week's major release is a somewhat new take on the MMO genre which focuses on players being nice to each other. As for the rest of this week we have a VR Western, a gigantic game, some roads in need of repair, a zone free of infection and turn-based tactics game involving mutant animals.

Sky: Children of the Light / This week's major release / Wednesday 10 April
Sky: Children of the Light is a peaceful, award-winning MMO from the creators of Journey. Explore a beautifully-animated kingdom across seven realms and create enriching memories with other players in this delightful puzzle-adventure game. Steam Link Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/321269/this-...ng-week-15

(PR) Intel Outlines New Financial Reporting Structure

Intel Corporation today outlined a new financial reporting structure that is aligned with the company's previously announced foundry operating model for 2024 and beyond. This new structure is designed to drive increased cost discipline and higher returns by providing greater transparency, accountability and incentives across the business. To support the new structure, Intel provided recast operating segment financial results for the years 2023, 2022 and 2021. The company also shared a targeted path toward long-term growth and profitability of Intel Foundry, as well as clear goals for driving financial performance improvement and shareholder value creation.

"Intel's differentiated position as both a world-class semiconductor manufacturer and a fabless technology leader creates significant opportunities to drive long-term sustainable growth across these two complementary businesses," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "Implementing this new model marks a key achievement in our IDM 2.0 transformation as we hone our execution engine, stand up the industry's first and only systems foundry with geographically diverse leading-edge manufacturing capacity, and advance our mission to bring AI Everywhere." Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/321146/intel...-structure

(PR) GameSir Unveils the Nova Lite Gaming Controller

GameSir, a leading brand in gaming peripherals, introduces the GameSir Nova Lite, a revolutionary multi-platform gaming controller that redefines the gaming experience. Featuring cutting-edge technology, including anti-drift Hall effect sticks and tri-mode connectivity, these controllers offer unparalleled precision, versatility, and affordability. Embracing the motto "Just In Game", GameSir is dedicated to providing gamers with a superior gaming experience through its exceptionally cost-effective controllers. The Nova Lite is available for £29.99/$24.99 from Amazon UK, Amazon and the GameSir website.

The GameSir Nova Lite offers an affordable yet exceptional gaming experience. Equipped with Hall effect sticks, analogue triggers, 20 Hz Turbo function and 2 motors in the grips, it caters to gamers' requirements without compromising on performance or quality. The Nova Lite is also featured packed with anti-drift GameSir Hall effect sticks for long lifespan and tri-mode connectivity for hassle-free gaming. The Lite also includes a 20 Hz turbo function with customizable buttons, providing a convenient way to enhance gameplay with faster response times. In addition, the Nova Lite includes a multi-function M button, offering control over vibration intensity, ABXY layout, and sticks' dead zone to seamlessly adjust various settings as and when required with ease. Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/320768/games...controller

AMD 24.3.1 Drivers Unlock RX 7900 GRE Memory OC Limits, Additional Performance Boost

Without making much noise, AMD lifted the memory overclocking limits of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card with its latest Adrenalin 24.3.1 WHQL drivers, TechPowerUp found. The changelog is a bit vague and states "The maximum memory tuning limit may be incorrectly reported on AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics products."—we tested it. The RX 7900 GRE has been around since mid-2023, but gained prominence as the company gave it a global launch in February 2024, to help AMD better compete with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super. Before this, the RX 7900 GRE had started out its lifecycle as a special edition product confined to China, and its designers had ensured that it came with just the right performance positioning that didn't end up disrupting other products in the AMD stack. One of these limitations had to do with the memory overclocking potential, which was probably put in place to ensure that the RX 7900 GRE has a near-identical total board power as the RX 7800 XT.

Shortly after the global launch of the RX 7900 GRE, and responding to drama online, AMD declared the limited memory overclocking range a bug and promised a fix. The overclocking limits are defined in the graphics card VBIOS, so increasing those limits would mean shipping BIOS updates for over a dozen SKUs from all the major vendors, and requiring users to upgrade it by themselves. Such a solution isn't very practical, so AMD implemented a clock limit override in their new drivers, which reprograms the power limits on the GPU during boot-up. Nicely done, good job AMD! Read full story


https://www.techpowerup.com/320715/amd-2...ost-tested

TechPowerUp and Arctic Giveaway: $1000+ in Prizes: Liquid Freezer III, Freezer 36, F

Arctic, in partnership with TechPowerUp brings you the season's biggest Giveaway, to celebrate Arctic's 23rd anniversary. Open worldwide (wherever legal), six lucky winners stand to win prizes worth over $1000 in various combos of CPU coolers, case fans, and thermal compounds from Arctic! Three winners get to pick their favorite model of Arctic's new Liquid Freezer III AIO CPU cooler (among the various radiator size variants), plus three matching case fans of their choice; plus a tube of MX-6 thermal compound. Three other winners get to pick their choices of Freezer 36 series air CPU coolers, plus three matching case fans, and a tube of MX-6. The Giveaway is open worldwide, from today, March 22, until March 29. To enter, simply give us basic information to help us get back to you if you've won. Increase your chances of winning by sharing the Giveaway in your social media. Good luck!

For more details, and to participate, visit this page.


https://www.techpowerup.com/320636/techp...ng-bundles

(PR) Steam Spring 2024 Sale is Up Now Thru March 24

Spring on over to Steam between now and March 21st at 10am PT to explore deals by the thousands! Games of all kinds are discounted, and we've added some free fun with our daily sticker drops. Since Steam's Spring Sale also coincides with the 2nd-ish birthday of Steam Deck, we're also using the occasion to surface the 100 most-played games on Deck from the past year, regardless of verified status. With many of the titles in the list also participating in the sale, it's another fun way to explore potential additions to your library by seeing what other players seem to be enjoying most on Steam Deck. The Steam Spring Sale is on now through March 21st. See you there.


https://www.techpowerup.com/320388/steam...u-march-24

Qubic Cryptocurrency Mining Craze Causes AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Stocks to Evaporate

It looks like cryptocurrency mining is back in craze, as miners are firing up their old mining hardware from 2022 to cash in. Bitcoin is now north of $72,000, and is dragging up the value of several other cryptocurrencies, one such being Qubic (QBIC). Profitability calculators put 24 hours of Qubic mining on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-core processor at around $3, after subtracting energy costs involved in running the chip at its default 170 W TDP. "Zen 4" processors such as the 7950X tend to retain much of their performance with slight underclocking, and reducing their power limits; which is bound to hold or increase profitability, while also prolonging the life of the hardware.

And thus, the inevitable has happened—stocks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X have disappeared overnight across online retail. With the market presence of the 7950X3D and the Intel Core i9-14900K, the 7950X was typically found between $550-600, which would have added great value considering its low input costs. CPU-based cryptocurrency miners, including the QBIC miner, appear to be taking advantage of the AVX-512 instruction set. AMD "Zen 4" microarchitecture supports AVX-512 through its dual-pumped 256-bit FPU, and the upcoming "Zen 5" microarchitecture is rumored to double AVX-512 performance over "Zen 4." Meanwhile, Intel has deprecated what few client-relevant AVX-512 instructions its Core processors had since 12th Gen "Alder Lake," as it reportedly affected sales of Xeon processors. What about the 7950X3D? It's pricier, but mining doesn't benefit from the 3D V-cache, and the chip doesn't sustain the kind of CPU clocks the 7950X manages to do across all its 16 cores. It's only a matter of time before the 7950X3D disappears, too; followed by 12-core models such as the 65 W 7900, the 170 W 7900X, and the 7900X3D.


https://www.techpowerup.com/320281/qubic...-evaporate

NVIDIA RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series "Turing" GPUs Get Resizable BAR Support Throu

February saw community mods bring resizable BAR support to several older platforms; and now we come across a mod that brings it to some older GPUs. The NVStrapsReBAR mod by terminatorul, which is forked out of the ReBarUEFI mod by xCurio, brings resizable BAR support to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series GPUs based on the "Turing" graphics architecture. This mod is intended for power users, and can potentially brick your motherboard. NVIDIA officially implemented resizable BAR support since its RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPUs in response to AMD's Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 GPUs implementing the tech under the marketing name Smart Access Memory. While AMD would go on to retroactively enable the tech for even the older RX 5000 series RDNA GPUs, NVIDIA didn't do so for "Turing."

NVStrapsReBAR is a motherboard UEFI firmware mod. It modifies the way your system firmware negotiates BAR size with the GPU on boot. There are only two ways to go about modding a platform to enable resizable BAR on an unsupported platform—by modding the motherboard firmware, or the video BIOS. Signature checks by security processors in NVIDIA GPUs make the video BIOS modding route impossible for most users; thankfully motherboard firmware modding isn't as difficult. There is an extensive documentation by the author to go about using this mod. The author has tested the mod to work with "Turing" GPUs, however, it doesn't work with older NVIDIA GPUs, including "Pascal." Resizable BAR enables the CPU (software) to see video memory as a single contiguously addressable block, rather than through 256 MB apertures.


https://www.techpowerup.com/320175/nvidi...srebar-mod