Small on external changes but with mostly new internals.

For nearly two years, netting a PS5, Xbox Series X, or AMD Radeon and Nvidia RTX graphics cards without paying a fortune has been a matter of luck (or a lot of skill). At its peak, scalpers were successfully charging double or even triple MSRP for a modern GPU. But it’s looking like the great GPU shortage is nearly over.

When Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company first confirmed the development of its N2 (2 nm-class) fabrication process in 2020, it did not disclose many details about the node or say when it intends it was set to enter production. This week, the company confirmed that the technology relies on a new transistor structure, but chips that use it won't become available until 2026.

Physicists in the United States have just announced a major breakthrough after they literally put a new spin on one of the greatest inventions in history: the transistor. The scientists made an entirely novel switching device called a magneto-electric transistor that uses 5% less energy than conventional semiconductor transistors, while potentially reducing the number of transistors needed to store data by as much as 75%.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip maker, said on Thursday that demand for its capacity will remain strong throughout the year despite signs of weakening demand for computers and smartphones.

IN JANUARY 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and a sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make “the world’s best video game.” In January 1982, a home computer incorporating those chips was introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev.

Could honey offer a solution to the global shortage of semiconductors - and help cut down on electronic waste in the process? A new study from the United States suggests that honey could be used to make an environmentally friendly computer chip that can process and store data by mimicking the human brain.

Believe it or not, not everything is based on C. There are current, shipping, commercial OSes written before C was invented, and now others in both newer and older languages that don't involve C at any level or layer. Computer hardware is technology yet very few people can design their own processor, or build a graphics card. But software is a form of culture. Open source is created by volunteers, even if they end up getting paid jobs doing it. Even rejecting open source is a choice: paying for Windows or macOS instead reflects a preference.

Three weeks on from the last 3dcenter report, it has now released another GPU pricing update. It shows that over the month GPU prices have fallen an average of 10-15%. This now means that both Nvidia and AMD GPUs are only 25% above their MSRP in Germany and Austria. Although still not ideal it does give hope for upcoming months and releases.

Dell has announced the 2022 models of its 15.6-inch XPS 15 and 17-inch XPS 17 laptops, and they’re available for purchase starting today. The two devices differ from their 2021 predecessors in one way only: They’re powered by Intel’s newest 12th Gen processors.

TSMC is a hot commodity, with Apple using their N5 nodes for their self-manufactured M1 chip lineup, which now fulfils an entire stack of Apple products, including the recently released M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio, but other tech companies are now lining up in droves to utilise TSMC’s N5 foundry, forcing them to boost the production capacity of the N5 and N4 nodes up by around 25% according to a report by Digitimes. The companies eagerly awaiting these chips include AMD, Nvidia, and more.

Apple’s impressive new Mac Studio was clearly not meant to be opened up, repaired, or upgraded, but a curious YouTuber found a way inside the mini PC. A look inside the Mac Studio revealed that there might be room for upgrades, but it seems that Apple took extra steps to prevent that. It also showed just how much bigger Apple’s proprietary silicon is in comparison to other similar chips.

Many of the popular graphics cards on the market have started to become more affordable in recent weeks, and while we've been anxiously expecting them to rise again at any moment, the downwards trend is continuing into March.

Nvidia, IBM, and researchers have a plan to make the lives of those working in machine learning a bit easier: connecting GPUs directly to SSDs. Detailed in a research paper, the idea is called Big accelerator Memory (BaM) and involves connecting GPUs directly to large amounts of SSD storage, helping unwind a bottleneck for ML training and other intensive tasks.

18 months ago, Microsoft revealed that one of the most important advancements in its new Xbox Series X console would be coming to PC — the ability to stream tremendous amounts of data from a blazing fast NVMe solid state drive to your GPU, instead of relying on your pesky CPU to decompress it first. The so-called “DirectStorage API” would let games load more detailed worlds, and load them more quickly than before.

Spectre-v2 isn't going anywhere soon. VUSec, a group of researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, recently discovered Branch History Injection (BHI), a byproduct of Spectre-v2 that affects Intel and Arm processors. According to Phoronix's latest report, while Intel has taken a performance hit up to 35%, AMD's processors got off easy.

Apple announced the new M1 Ultra chip during the Apple Spring Event 2022, building on top of the M1 Pro and M1 Max introduced in the MacBook Pro late last year. The chip essentially combines multiple M1 dies to create a more powerful processor, and Apple says it’s built for “extreme levels of performance.” Apple says that the M1 Max has a secret interconnect and that the M1 Ultra utilizes this interconnect to link two processors together.

Laptops and smartphones made by Apple, Microsoft, and Google are considerably less repair-friendly than those made by competitors Asus, Dell, and Motorola, according to a new report. These findings may be unsurprising to people who like to fix gadgets, but the data to back them up comes from an unusual source: the companies themselves.

It’s a given that Nvidia’s upcoming Lovelace graphics cards will be more powerful than their current Ampere counterparts, but more information is emerging on just how much more powerful they’ll be as we draw closer to the RTX 4000 release date. Now, new leaks suggest the GeForce RTX 4090 will offer a generational performance leap over the company’s current flagship GPU, the RTX 3090.

One of the top executives at TSMC gave an interview recently on the chip shortage, and surprise, surprise, there’s no silver bullet that will end it any time soon. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but others industry heavyweights have been ruminating recently that with COVID-19 transmission rates dwindling and lockdowns easing up, there might be a chance that the situation would start to improve in 2022.