Microsoft's Acquisition of Bethesda: A Shift in Strategy?

In recent news, Microsoft has acquired Bethesda Softworks, a renowned game development studio behind iconic franchises like Doom, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls. As the acquisition process comes to a close, it appears that Microsoft is shifting its strategy towards building an industry-leading first-party studios team.

Spencer Stahl, head of Xbox Gaming, acknowledged this shift in his statement about the acquisition, stating that "this is the next step in building an industry-leading first-party studios team." He noted that Microsoft has committed to supporting existing exclusive contracts like Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo for the PS5, ensuring a smooth transition for players. However, he also hinted at future plans, saying that "games for other systems will still be supported."

The Xbox community can expect a significant boost in terms of exclusive titles, as Bethesda's renowned franchises will now become part of Microsoft's portfolio. This move is reminiscent of Nintendo's successful approach to creating first-party exclusives, which has helped make its consoles highly sought after by gamers.

In related news, Microsoft has made several Bethesda games available on Xbox Game Pass, including titles from the Doom, Fallout, and Elder Scrolls franchises. This move highlights Microsoft's commitment to providing a robust game library for its subscribers, as well as showcasing its growing investment in first-party development.

Puget Systems' Sales Data Reveals AMD's Rise

In other news, Puget Systems, a custom PC builder specializing in high-end workstations and servers, has released some intriguing sales data. According to the company, AMD CPUs now account for more than 50% of machines built at their facility. This represents a significant increase, as Puget had previously dropped AMD from its build operations in 2015.

Puget notes that this shift towards AMD can be attributed to several factors, including the release of Ryzen 3000 processors. The company's data suggests that Intel utilization remained relatively stable until around October 2017, before AMD started gaining ground. By 2020, AMD had reached over 50% market share, marking a significant turnaround.

The increase in AMD usage can be attributed to the success of Ryzen Threadripper, which has been popular among professionals and content creators who require high-performance components. Puget Systems acknowledges that Fusion's market tends to focus on professional users, making it more likely for them to opt for AMD-based systems.

GAA FETT: The Future of Transistors

In recent years, the industry has been exploring new materials and technologies to improve transistor performance and reduce power consumption. GAA FETT (Gate-All-Around Fluxible Electron Transport) is one such technology that aims to replace traditional FinFET transistors.

Samsung recently showcased its work on MBC (Multi-Bridge Channel) PhET, a variant of the GAA FETT design. The company's research demonstrates the potential benefits of using nano-sheets as a flexible and adjustable width material for transistors. By doing so, Samsung was able to reduce voltage requirements in SRAM cells by 230 millivolts.

The MBC PhET technology has several advantages over traditional FinFET designs, including improved flexibility and scalability. Samsung plans to integrate this technology into its 3-nanometer production process, marking a significant step forward for the industry.

International Solid State Circuits Virtual Conference

In other news, Samsung's Vice President shared insights on the company's research at the International Solid State Circuits Virtual Conference. The VP noted that the new GAA PhET transistors will provide high-speed, low-power, and small-area designs, similar to those achieved with FinFETs.

The use of nano-sheets in MBC PhET allows for more flexibility in channel width, enabling Samsung to create customized designs for specific applications. This flexibility is particularly important for SRAM cells, where voltage requirements are critical.

As the industry continues to explore new materials and technologies, it will be interesting to see how GAA FETT and other innovations shape the future of computing hardware.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to the hardware news recap for the week and this one there's some pretty big news so amd's usb dropout issue finally being addressed not just talked about by amd but there's an agiza update that's supposed to come out and hopefully start resolving the intermittent usb dropout issue that many of you have posted about over the past couple of months now uh nvidia and its crypto mining lawsuit dismissed this one's been going on for a couple of years and these working on epic cpus new ones for march at this point and there's also a ryzen 5000 stock update alongside some other stories before that this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamers nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice squarespace makes e-commerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo galleries for photographers resume and portfolio sites and small business sites are all easily done through squarespace having built a lot of client websites the old way before running gm full-time we can easily recommend squarespace as a powerful fast solution go to squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace quick chance store update first so mouse mats and toolkits are still in stock this we're actually really proud to talk about because it took us months to sort of figure out demand and supply chain stuff and also build up money because we don't i mean you do have to pay for the product in order to order it so anyway it's taken us quite a while but we've finally gotten ahead of the demand a little bit and we've now been in stock for mouse mats and tool kits for probably a bit over a month at this point so really happy about that the sell-through rate's pretty high but we were able to actually get ahead if you've wanted one they're on store.gamersnexus.net it looks like we're probably going to run out before the next stock but we do at least we've had them in for a little while at this point so thanks for your patience on letting us figure all that out we can now say that we have better stock of our mouse mats and tool kits than billion dollar companies have of their products so let's let's hope we can keep it that way all right first real story amd fixing usb dropout issues that's sort of a big deal if you aren't up to speed on this basically for a couple months now particularly with the x5 with the 500 series amd chipset motherboards but also with some other ones and particularly with zen 3 but also with other versions of zen there have been issues where usb devices will drop out of connectivity with the system intermittently during use and this has been traced back to a few different things by the community but amd hasn't said anything including now with this update that firmly identifies the specific exact root cause it has said that it thinks it found the root cause as given some basics but nothing that would give you a hard understanding of where the root cause of the dropout is the reason this has been a problem other than annoying things like your mouse dropping out while using it is particularly for people who are using things like external drives that are connected via usb you can suffer data loss or corruption as a result of that or for people who are using external audio devices this has been a major dropout problem as well and there's been issues like audio crackling which amd has addressed in this new update it posted on subreddit so in mid-february so about a month ago andy posted on the andy subreddit and publicly acknowledged that it's heard the concern about usb dropout issues and it was working on trying to identify the problem it claimed that the problem affected a small number of users not really sure how true that is but it also was seeking assistance from the community in providing log files from failures specific system configurations things of that nature to identify the problem so fast forward to today and amd has now posted an update on the amd subreddit as well stating that it thinks it has found the root cause and that has an agisa binary push that should fix the issue and these posts states that the company quote believes it has isolated the root cause and developed a solution that addresses a range of reported symptoms it said that usb port dropout usb 2.0 audio crackling with dac and amp combos and usb or pcie gen 4 exclusion were among those to go back to the original story pcie gen 4 specifically was one of the one of the toggles people could flip to try and resolve the issue on their own system bringing it down to gen 3 for example apparently helped some people in the community but not everyone from what we've seen so it sounds like a really screwy issue to try and diagnose andy says that agisa version 1.2.0.2 will fix the dropout issue or at least the symptoms for some of these failures it was pretty careful with its wording but for anyone unaware a gsat is a collective name for the binary that amd issues to its motherboard partners so gsa is a package of code that's included in bios or firmware updates the motherboard vendors take that uh for example the entire amd overclocking section of bios that has all the subsections for things like vddg for example that is made by amd and provided to the partners that's why it's exactly the same from one motherboard to the next so the update is in a gsa this does mean that the motherboard partners have to roll the new agiza into their various motherboard bios and firmware updates and it's possible that some deprecated boards won't get the update but it seems like the boards that are affected should all still be on the actively supported list and none of the motherboard manufacturers making these boards have gone out of business in the last year so you should be supported at this point amd said quote customers can expect downloadable bios is containing agita 1.2.0.2 to begin with beta updates in early april the exact update schedule for your system will depend on the test and implementation schedule for your vendor and specific motherboard model if you continue to experience intermittent usb connectivity issues after updating your system to 1.2.0.2 we encourage you to download the standalone and the bug report tool and open a ticket with amd customer support the next story is on nvidia's a crypto mining lawsuit that it's been going through for the past couple of years so at the end of 2019 and early parts of 2020 nvidia's found itself in a cryptocurrency related lawsuit stemming back to something that investors claimed affected them in 2017 and 2018 and the allegations were that nvidia was misleading investors by obfuscating the proportion of revenue from gpus sold for mining as opposed to gpu sold for gaming because it's all g-force cards anyway so it's it's maybe easier to obfuscate uh with this particular product than with other ones the lawsuit claimed that nvidia was masking over one billion dollars in crypto mining revenue as gaming revenue from its geforce lineup the investor claims point to nvidia's then booming gaming segment as potentially unsustainable if the cryptocurrency bubble burst at the this was a different time to come back obviously uh that's not exactly how it panned out but both the amd and nvidia did and their partners in particular suffer from excess supply at one point you look at the rtx 20 series launch when the gtx 10 series was still somewhat readily available and everyone's recommending 10 series cards especially because there were no rtx titles for at least 50 to 55 days after launch of the cards named rtx so this was something that affected the supply namely oversupply of the previous pascal generation at the time for the partners and for nvidia and then of course polaris or amd or whatever was working on vega as of tuesday march 9 2021 though a u.s district court judge officially tossed the case out and this netted nvidia an important win the fulcrum of the case was the inability of plaintiffs to provide evidence that nvidia misled investors in 2017 and 2018 since that's what the entire lawsuit hinged on it was absolutely no secret that geforce cards were and still are an extremely popular fair amount miners and that shouldn't have been a secret to investors either that fact seems to have set the tone for the case and any future investor suits involving nvidia amd or crypto will have to try harder than this one so up next some amd news this is amd epic news it's server side but typically the threadripper hedt or high end desktop stuff comes out not too long after and the epic announcements so amd sent out news that it's planning to host a digital launch event for its upcoming epic cpu release and these have long gone by the name milan the code name internally is milan and uh according to andy's press release the event will feature the usual presentations from high ranking name the executives including ceo dr lisa sue and cto mark papermaster among others to talk about the milan processors milan is set to succeed amd's current line of epic roam processors and will be socket and pin compatible with not only rome but also the earlier naples platform not a whole lot is known about amd's milan cores yet other than they'll be based on zen 3 which should afford a notable ipc gain on its own milan will also use one of tsmc's n7 process nodes and will feature up to 64 cores and 128 pcie lanes as usual amd is targeting one and two socket systems with epic milan and we'll know more on monday march 15th at 11 a.m eastern or 8 a.m pacific for u.s time zones samsung also had an ssd announcement this week this one is for the 980 nvme ssd it's samsung's first entry-level nvme ssd of this performance class also the first test to see in quite a while to drop the three-letter suffix at the end of it it's just 980 keeping it simple not following the intel path of naming or well intel's not the only one at this point either way this brings a few notables for samsung this is samsung's first ssd to make use of a dram list controller for example samsung is billing the 980 ssd as something of a successor to its 970 evo but it's dropped the three-letter branding as of this writing there's already a number of reviews available so you check those out if you want to know more details but we'll briefly go through some of the specs the 980 ssd uses a pcie gen 3x4 nvme 1.4 interface and uses 128 layer tlc nand flash according to samsung's own announcements as previously stated the ssd uses that dram less controller we mentioned and instead it relies on the nvme host memory buffer or hmb feature to connect the ssd to a very small portion of system dram the samsung 980 ssd will come in three capacities 250 gigabytes 500 gigabytes and one terabyte the sequential read write speeds are up to 3 500 or 3000 megabytes per second depending on the model and capacity likewise random read and write speeds up to 500 000 iops or 480 000 iops depending on the model endurance comes in at 600 tbw for one terabyte 300 for 500 gigabytes and 150 tbw for 250 gigabytes each model is covered with a five year warranty with prices starting at 50 or 250 gig 70 for 500 and 130 for one terabyte time for another market share report there are as we discussed last week a couple of major analyst firms in the industry there's uh john petty research jpr mercury idc there's gartner probably a couple were forgetting here as well but gartner is the one that is relevant for this particular week and that's because gartner put out a report talking about pc growth and shipments and how they're currently riding an all-time high to the surprise of nobody watching uh this channel so for fourth quarter of 2020 total pc shipments numbered 74.9 million according to gartner's reports so for the fourth quarter of 2020 total pc shipments totaled 79.4 million according to gartner which is apparently a 10.7 increase quarter over quarter annually pc shipments totaled 275 million units for 2020 which gartner says is a 4.8 percent increase year over year and the most growth the pc market has seen in a decade now quote the worldwide pc market saw a strong finish to 2020 recording a third consecutive quarter of growth year over year although there continued to be supply shortages due to this high demand robust consumer pc demand again drove sales particularly in regions where governments maintain stay-at-home orders as the pandemic persists prior to 2020 consumers had been shifting to a phone-first focus yet the pandemic reversed this trend pcs have resurfaced as an essential device for consumers including younger children relying on them to work go to school socialize and be entertained from their homes as usual the major oems remained in the top three spots for vendors that includes lenovo hp and dell for pre-built system providers gartner noted that all vendors including asus apple acer and a couple others managed to grab more market share this year as well as as a result of the increased demand gartner didn't include the sales numbers of chromebooks in its research it did however note that it was a record year for chromebook sales and it specifically pointed towards educational use and acquisition as a reason for driving chromebook sales and this is something that jpr reported last week as well and we talked about that in our previous video gartner expects this growth and demand to remain for at least the first half of 2021 but beyond that the sustainability will depend on how many current trends remain in place like virtual learning and remote work for the last couple weeks we've talked about weather events around the world affecting the pc industry so one of them in taiwan there's been droughts this past season for them and that's led to companies like tsmc importing water to continue manufacturing in texas there's a problem of shutdowns to preserve the integrity of the electrical grid as a result of the rolling blackouts that were planned to to try and deal with the winter weather event that happened uh over the a couple weeks ago now so we're starting to finally get a better picture as to what the semiconductor plant shutdowns in texas actually mean for the industry at this point and that's for the market at large and for the companies digit times is reporting that the disruption in production at samsung's texas facilities will affect its pcie ssd controller supply and its output quote samsung electronics has notified clients that production of its pcie ssds is being disrupted by tight supplies of controller ships with the production unlikely to restore until may according to market sources says digitimes tom's hardware also reported on this talking about how samsung doesn't produce nand flash words ssds in taxes but saying it does produce the chips that power its controllers there and digitimes expanded on this saying that samsung has reported up to 75 of its pcie ssd controller production will be affected this month as of this writing the austin american statesman is reporting that samsung's texas fab is still offline countering the negative news about supply and availability there's some positive news pc world and front of the site gordon ma on reported on ryzen 5000 series availability over this past week and specifically pointed out that it seems like ryzen 5000 cpu availability has hit a turning point the outlet has been monitoring retailers stock on ryzen 5000 cpus and pc world reported that amazon has been able to keep stock of the ryzen 7 5800x and ryzen 55600x and at msrp prices as noted by pc world's gordon ma on the higher end ryzen 9 5900x and 5950x cpus continue to be elusive coming in and out of stock sporadically but gordon reached out to amd for an update on stock in inventory and received the following positive news quote from amd to pc world we have shipped a significant volume of ryzen 5000 cpus and are shipping out additional stock on a daily basis we're also refreshing the stock of amd ryzen 5000 series processors and radeon rx 6000 series graphics cards on amd.com on a weekly basis giving gamers and enthusiasts a direct option to purchase the latest ryzen cpus and radeon gpus at the suggested e-tail and retail price and for more of this report check out pc world's write-up you can also check out their youtube channel they do a i think it's weekly podcast at this point and always a lot of fun gordon and his team do great work so happy to recommend them if you're looking for another source of news up next intel working with darpa to build silicon for its new deprived program little little does the government know we've been deprived of silicon for quite some time now so other than perhaps an unfortunate acronym or initialism uh the deprived program is aimed at data protection in virtual environments hence the name and intel is partnering with the defense advanced research projects agency to work on this specifically they're looking at introducing the deprived program to aim at developing a custom hardware accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption or fhe compute fhe is the process of running calculations and computations on fully encrypted data or data sets meaning that the data never has to be decrypted in the process it's much less susceptible in theory to compromise or exposure fhe has huge implications for the future of machine learning for ai and for neural networks and while fhe isn't new altogether it also isn't viable with current hardware darpa's program manager tom rondeaux said quote a computation that would take a millisecond to complete on a standard laptop would take weeks to compute on a conventional server running fhe today for its part intel plans to develop a custom asic as well as developing the underlying ip blocks and software stack that'll eventually lead to an soc design to enable better fhe performance in the the cloud whatever that means in this context intel states that once fully realized the asic design could improve fhe workload execution performance by five orders of magnitude compared to existing cpu-based systems microsoft will also be part of the deprived program providing the cloud computing ecosystem and infrastructure the deprived program is set to span several years and phases and intel and microsoft will be working with global standards bodies in an effort to develop international standards for fhe speaking of microsoft microsoft has also announced that it's officially closed on its acquisition of xenimax media this will see microsoft bringing in all of xenimax's subsidiaries including historic studios like bethesda softworks and edge software other development studios include xenomax online studios arcane machine games tango gameworks alpha dog and roundhouse studios unsurprisingly microsoft's phil spencer confirmed that some new bethesda games in the future will be exclusive to xbox and pc players leaving out playstation of course spencer stopped just short of saying exactly which future games would be exclusive but microsoft has already clarified that existing exclusive contracts like death loop and ghostwire tokyo for the ps5 will be honored and that games for other systems will still be supported spencer also noted that quote this is the next step in building an industry-leading first-party studios team a commitment we have through our xbox community from day one leading into the new xbox launch it was fairly obvious that microsoft was trying to lean in this direction perhaps it sees what nintendo's been doing well for years which is to provide exclusives or first party titles that make the hardware almost irrelevant as a factor as people just want to play the specific games it looks like this is the direction microsoft is trying to head and in fact it's basically set as much and to celebrate uh this acquisition and the closing out of it microsoft just made a slew of bethesda games available on xbox game pass including several games from the doom fallout and elder scrolls franchises also in the news this week puget systems builders of custom and often high-end workstations and servers released some interesting sales data as it pertains to systems that the company has built and shipped according to the data amd cpus now account for more than 50 of the machines built at puget puget notes that it quietly dropped amd cpus from its build operations back in 2015 with the reason being that intel offered better performing chips and there was a declining interest in amd cpus from customers today puget systems data suggests that ryzen 3000 was the primary turning point as 2019 saw a significant uptick in amd based builds at puget the company's graph shows 100 intel utilization until about october of 2017 which is similar to the sales data we previously published from our own affiliate sales information where we saw something like a 97 or a 93 percent to the remainder for intel to amd the amd representation remained under 10 until about late 2019 to early 2020 and within one year since that mark puget saw amd climb to over 50 percent of its total sales puget noted that threadripper was also partly responsible for a big part of this uptick and that makes sense fusion's market tends to be more focused on professionals and that would include users more likely to need hedt components and finally some interesting manufacturing and industry news about gaa fetts we've been talking about these in a couple of news videos lately and mostly talking about how they're aiming to replace finfets in the next couple of years as shrinking process and interconnects get increasingly complicated tsmc intel and samsung are all working on some version of gaa phet transistors though samsung recently previewed what's possible with its own multi-bridge channel phet or mbc phet which makes use of nano sheets as a reminder nano sheets are flexible in that they can be built either wide or narrow to augment the channel width leading to either higher performing or lower power designs at international solid state circuits virtual conference 2021 samsung's vice president said that quote we have used finfet transistors for about a decade however at three nanometers we're using a gate all-around transistor samsung went on to say that the new gaa phat transistors will provide high speed low power and small area again the distinct advantage held by nanosheets is the flexibility of the wef or the width of the channel on a transistor samsung's research with nanosheets and potential next generation sram predominantly used for cash on cpus highlights this flexibility samsung used different width adjustments with sram in an effort to reduce the amount of voltage needed to switch the state of an sram cell quote sram's six transistors can be divided into three pairs the pass gates the pull-ups and the pull-downs in a finfet design the wef of all three types would be equal but with nanosheet devices the samsung team was free to make alterations in one they made the pass gates and the pull downs wider in another they made the pass gate wider and the pull down narrower this was on ieee spectrum the end result was that by using various channel widths supported by nanosheets samsung was able to produce sram with a right margin of 230 millivolts less voltage as we reported previously samsung plans to more widely incorporate its multi-bridge channel fetch or mbc fet at three nanometers so that's it for hardware news this week as always you can subscribe for more go to store.gamersnexus.net if you'd like to pick up one of our mouse mats or our toolkits or other products and go to patreon.com gamersnexus to get some behind the scenes videos and additional q a videos thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next time iwelcome back to the hardware news recap for the week and this one there's some pretty big news so amd's usb dropout issue finally being addressed not just talked about by amd but there's an agiza update that's supposed to come out and hopefully start resolving the intermittent usb dropout issue that many of you have posted about over the past couple of months now uh nvidia and its crypto mining lawsuit dismissed this one's been going on for a couple of years and these working on epic cpus new ones for march at this point and there's also a ryzen 5000 stock update alongside some other stories before that this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamers nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice squarespace makes e-commerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo galleries for photographers resume and portfolio sites and small business sites are all easily done through squarespace having built a lot of client websites the old way before running gm full-time we can easily recommend squarespace as a powerful fast solution go to squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace quick chance store update first so mouse mats and toolkits are still in stock this we're actually really proud to talk about because it took us months to sort of figure out demand and supply chain stuff and also build up money because we don't i mean you do have to pay for the product in order to order it so anyway it's taken us quite a while but we've finally gotten ahead of the demand a little bit and we've now been in stock for mouse mats and tool kits for probably a bit over a month at this point so really happy about that the sell-through rate's pretty high but we were able to actually get ahead if you've wanted one they're on store.gamersnexus.net it looks like we're probably going to run out before the next stock but we do at least we've had them in for a little while at this point so thanks for your patience on letting us figure all that out we can now say that we have better stock of our mouse mats and tool kits than billion dollar companies have of their products so let's let's hope we can keep it that way all right first real story amd fixing usb dropout issues that's sort of a big deal if you aren't up to speed on this basically for a couple months now particularly with the x5 with the 500 series amd chipset motherboards but also with some other ones and particularly with zen 3 but also with other versions of zen there have been issues where usb devices will drop out of connectivity with the system intermittently during use and this has been traced back to a few different things by the community but amd hasn't said anything including now with this update that firmly identifies the specific exact root cause it has said that it thinks it found the root cause as given some basics but nothing that would give you a hard understanding of where the root cause of the dropout is the reason this has been a problem other than annoying things like your mouse dropping out while using it is particularly for people who are using things like external drives that are connected via usb you can suffer data loss or corruption as a result of that or for people who are using external audio devices this has been a major dropout problem as well and there's been issues like audio crackling which amd has addressed in this new update it posted on subreddit so in mid-february so about a month ago andy posted on the andy subreddit and publicly acknowledged that it's heard the concern about usb dropout issues and it was working on trying to identify the problem it claimed that the problem affected a small number of users not really sure how true that is but it also was seeking assistance from the community in providing log files from failures specific system configurations things of that nature to identify the problem so fast forward to today and amd has now posted an update on the amd subreddit as well stating that it thinks it has found the root cause and that has an agisa binary push that should fix the issue and these posts states that the company quote believes it has isolated the root cause and developed a solution that addresses a range of reported symptoms it said that usb port dropout usb 2.0 audio crackling with dac and amp combos and usb or pcie gen 4 exclusion were among those to go back to the original story pcie gen 4 specifically was one of the one of the toggles people could flip to try and resolve the issue on their own system bringing it down to gen 3 for example apparently helped some people in the community but not everyone from what we've seen so it sounds like a really screwy issue to try and diagnose andy says that agisa version 1.2.0.2 will fix the dropout issue or at least the symptoms for some of these failures it was pretty careful with its wording but for anyone unaware a gsat is a collective name for the binary that amd issues to its motherboard partners so gsa is a package of code that's included in bios or firmware updates the motherboard vendors take that uh for example the entire amd overclocking section of bios that has all the subsections for things like vddg for example that is made by amd and provided to the partners that's why it's exactly the same from one motherboard to the next so the update is in a gsa this does mean that the motherboard partners have to roll the new agiza into their various motherboard bios and firmware updates and it's possible that some deprecated boards won't get the update but it seems like the boards that are affected should all still be on the actively supported list and none of the motherboard manufacturers making these boards have gone out of business in the last year so you should be supported at this point amd said quote customers can expect downloadable bios is containing agita 1.2.0.2 to begin with beta updates in early april the exact update schedule for your system will depend on the test and implementation schedule for your vendor and specific motherboard model if you continue to experience intermittent usb connectivity issues after updating your system to 1.2.0.2 we encourage you to download the standalone and the bug report tool and open a ticket with amd customer support the next story is on nvidia's a crypto mining lawsuit that it's been going through for the past couple of years so at the end of 2019 and early parts of 2020 nvidia's found itself in a cryptocurrency related lawsuit stemming back to something that investors claimed affected them in 2017 and 2018 and the allegations were that nvidia was misleading investors by obfuscating the proportion of revenue from gpus sold for mining as opposed to gpu sold for gaming because it's all g-force cards anyway so it's it's maybe easier to obfuscate uh with this particular product than with other ones the lawsuit claimed that nvidia was masking over one billion dollars in crypto mining revenue as gaming revenue from its geforce lineup the investor claims point to nvidia's then booming gaming segment as potentially unsustainable if the cryptocurrency bubble burst at the this was a different time to come back obviously uh that's not exactly how it panned out but both the amd and nvidia did and their partners in particular suffer from excess supply at one point you look at the rtx 20 series launch when the gtx 10 series was still somewhat readily available and everyone's recommending 10 series cards especially because there were no rtx titles for at least 50 to 55 days after launch of the cards named rtx so this was something that affected the supply namely oversupply of the previous pascal generation at the time for the partners and for nvidia and then of course polaris or amd or whatever was working on vega as of tuesday march 9 2021 though a u.s district court judge officially tossed the case out and this netted nvidia an important win the fulcrum of the case was the inability of plaintiffs to provide evidence that nvidia misled investors in 2017 and 2018 since that's what the entire lawsuit hinged on it was absolutely no secret that geforce cards were and still are an extremely popular fair amount miners and that shouldn't have been a secret to investors either that fact seems to have set the tone for the case and any future investor suits involving nvidia amd or crypto will have to try harder than this one so up next some amd news this is amd epic news it's server side but typically the threadripper hedt or high end desktop stuff comes out not too long after and the epic announcements so amd sent out news that it's planning to host a digital launch event for its upcoming epic cpu release and these have long gone by the name milan the code name internally is milan and uh according to andy's press release the event will feature the usual presentations from high ranking name the executives including ceo dr lisa sue and cto mark papermaster among others to talk about the milan processors milan is set to succeed amd's current line of epic roam processors and will be socket and pin compatible with not only rome but also the earlier naples platform not a whole lot is known about amd's milan cores yet other than they'll be based on zen 3 which should afford a notable ipc gain on its own milan will also use one of tsmc's n7 process nodes and will feature up to 64 cores and 128 pcie lanes as usual amd is targeting one and two socket systems with epic milan and we'll know more on monday march 15th at 11 a.m eastern or 8 a.m pacific for u.s time zones samsung also had an ssd announcement this week this one is for the 980 nvme ssd it's samsung's first entry-level nvme ssd of this performance class also the first test to see in quite a while to drop the three-letter suffix at the end of it it's just 980 keeping it simple not following the intel path of naming or well intel's not the only one at this point either way this brings a few notables for samsung this is samsung's first ssd to make use of a dram list controller for example samsung is billing the 980 ssd as something of a successor to its 970 evo but it's dropped the three-letter branding as of this writing there's already a number of reviews available so you check those out if you want to know more details but we'll briefly go through some of the specs the 980 ssd uses a pcie gen 3x4 nvme 1.4 interface and uses 128 layer tlc nand flash according to samsung's own announcements as previously stated the ssd uses that dram less controller we mentioned and instead it relies on the nvme host memory buffer or hmb feature to connect the ssd to a very small portion of system dram the samsung 980 ssd will come in three capacities 250 gigabytes 500 gigabytes and one terabyte the sequential read write speeds are up to 3 500 or 3000 megabytes per second depending on the model and capacity likewise random read and write speeds up to 500 000 iops or 480 000 iops depending on the model endurance comes in at 600 tbw for one terabyte 300 for 500 gigabytes and 150 tbw for 250 gigabytes each model is covered with a five year warranty with prices starting at 50 or 250 gig 70 for 500 and 130 for one terabyte time for another market share report there are as we discussed last week a couple of major analyst firms in the industry there's uh john petty research jpr mercury idc there's gartner probably a couple were forgetting here as well but gartner is the one that is relevant for this particular week and that's because gartner put out a report talking about pc growth and shipments and how they're currently riding an all-time high to the surprise of nobody watching uh this channel so for fourth quarter of 2020 total pc shipments numbered 74.9 million according to gartner's reports so for the fourth quarter of 2020 total pc shipments totaled 79.4 million according to gartner which is apparently a 10.7 increase quarter over quarter annually pc shipments totaled 275 million units for 2020 which gartner says is a 4.8 percent increase year over year and the most growth the pc market has seen in a decade now quote the worldwide pc market saw a strong finish to 2020 recording a third consecutive quarter of growth year over year although there continued to be supply shortages due to this high demand robust consumer pc demand again drove sales particularly in regions where governments maintain stay-at-home orders as the pandemic persists prior to 2020 consumers had been shifting to a phone-first focus yet the pandemic reversed this trend pcs have resurfaced as an essential device for consumers including younger children relying on them to work go to school socialize and be entertained from their homes as usual the major oems remained in the top three spots for vendors that includes lenovo hp and dell for pre-built system providers gartner noted that all vendors including asus apple acer and a couple others managed to grab more market share this year as well as as a result of the increased demand gartner didn't include the sales numbers of chromebooks in its research it did however note that it was a record year for chromebook sales and it specifically pointed towards educational use and acquisition as a reason for driving chromebook sales and this is something that jpr reported last week as well and we talked about that in our previous video gartner expects this growth and demand to remain for at least the first half of 2021 but beyond that the sustainability will depend on how many current trends remain in place like virtual learning and remote work for the last couple weeks we've talked about weather events around the world affecting the pc industry so one of them in taiwan there's been droughts this past season for them and that's led to companies like tsmc importing water to continue manufacturing in texas there's a problem of shutdowns to preserve the integrity of the electrical grid as a result of the rolling blackouts that were planned to to try and deal with the winter weather event that happened uh over the a couple weeks ago now so we're starting to finally get a better picture as to what the semiconductor plant shutdowns in texas actually mean for the industry at this point and that's for the market at large and for the companies digit times is reporting that the disruption in production at samsung's texas facilities will affect its pcie ssd controller supply and its output quote samsung electronics has notified clients that production of its pcie ssds is being disrupted by tight supplies of controller ships with the production unlikely to restore until may according to market sources says digitimes tom's hardware also reported on this talking about how samsung doesn't produce nand flash words ssds in taxes but saying it does produce the chips that power its controllers there and digitimes expanded on this saying that samsung has reported up to 75 of its pcie ssd controller production will be affected this month as of this writing the austin american statesman is reporting that samsung's texas fab is still offline countering the negative news about supply and availability there's some positive news pc world and front of the site gordon ma on reported on ryzen 5000 series availability over this past week and specifically pointed out that it seems like ryzen 5000 cpu availability has hit a turning point the outlet has been monitoring retailers stock on ryzen 5000 cpus and pc world reported that amazon has been able to keep stock of the ryzen 7 5800x and ryzen 55600x and at msrp prices as noted by pc world's gordon ma on the higher end ryzen 9 5900x and 5950x cpus continue to be elusive coming in and out of stock sporadically but gordon reached out to amd for an update on stock in inventory and received the following positive news quote from amd to pc world we have shipped a significant volume of ryzen 5000 cpus and are shipping out additional stock on a daily basis we're also refreshing the stock of amd ryzen 5000 series processors and radeon rx 6000 series graphics cards on amd.com on a weekly basis giving gamers and enthusiasts a direct option to purchase the latest ryzen cpus and radeon gpus at the suggested e-tail and retail price and for more of this report check out pc world's write-up you can also check out their youtube channel they do a i think it's weekly podcast at this point and always a lot of fun gordon and his team do great work so happy to recommend them if you're looking for another source of news up next intel working with darpa to build silicon for its new deprived program little little does the government know we've been deprived of silicon for quite some time now so other than perhaps an unfortunate acronym or initialism uh the deprived program is aimed at data protection in virtual environments hence the name and intel is partnering with the defense advanced research projects agency to work on this specifically they're looking at introducing the deprived program to aim at developing a custom hardware accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption or fhe compute fhe is the process of running calculations and computations on fully encrypted data or data sets meaning that the data never has to be decrypted in the process it's much less susceptible in theory to compromise or exposure fhe has huge implications for the future of machine learning for ai and for neural networks and while fhe isn't new altogether it also isn't viable with current hardware darpa's program manager tom rondeaux said quote a computation that would take a millisecond to complete on a standard laptop would take weeks to compute on a conventional server running fhe today for its part intel plans to develop a custom asic as well as developing the underlying ip blocks and software stack that'll eventually lead to an soc design to enable better fhe performance in the the cloud whatever that means in this context intel states that once fully realized the asic design could improve fhe workload execution performance by five orders of magnitude compared to existing cpu-based systems microsoft will also be part of the deprived program providing the cloud computing ecosystem and infrastructure the deprived program is set to span several years and phases and intel and microsoft will be working with global standards bodies in an effort to develop international standards for fhe speaking of microsoft microsoft has also announced that it's officially closed on its acquisition of xenimax media this will see microsoft bringing in all of xenimax's subsidiaries including historic studios like bethesda softworks and edge software other development studios include xenomax online studios arcane machine games tango gameworks alpha dog and roundhouse studios unsurprisingly microsoft's phil spencer confirmed that some new bethesda games in the future will be exclusive to xbox and pc players leaving out playstation of course spencer stopped just short of saying exactly which future games would be exclusive but microsoft has already clarified that existing exclusive contracts like death loop and ghostwire tokyo for the ps5 will be honored and that games for other systems will still be supported spencer also noted that quote this is the next step in building an industry-leading first-party studios team a commitment we have through our xbox community from day one leading into the new xbox launch it was fairly obvious that microsoft was trying to lean in this direction perhaps it sees what nintendo's been doing well for years which is to provide exclusives or first party titles that make the hardware almost irrelevant as a factor as people just want to play the specific games it looks like this is the direction microsoft is trying to head and in fact it's basically set as much and to celebrate uh this acquisition and the closing out of it microsoft just made a slew of bethesda games available on xbox game pass including several games from the doom fallout and elder scrolls franchises also in the news this week puget systems builders of custom and often high-end workstations and servers released some interesting sales data as it pertains to systems that the company has built and shipped according to the data amd cpus now account for more than 50 of the machines built at puget puget notes that it quietly dropped amd cpus from its build operations back in 2015 with the reason being that intel offered better performing chips and there was a declining interest in amd cpus from customers today puget systems data suggests that ryzen 3000 was the primary turning point as 2019 saw a significant uptick in amd based builds at puget the company's graph shows 100 intel utilization until about october of 2017 which is similar to the sales data we previously published from our own affiliate sales information where we saw something like a 97 or a 93 percent to the remainder for intel to amd the amd representation remained under 10 until about late 2019 to early 2020 and within one year since that mark puget saw amd climb to over 50 percent of its total sales puget noted that threadripper was also partly responsible for a big part of this uptick and that makes sense fusion's market tends to be more focused on professionals and that would include users more likely to need hedt components and finally some interesting manufacturing and industry news about gaa fetts we've been talking about these in a couple of news videos lately and mostly talking about how they're aiming to replace finfets in the next couple of years as shrinking process and interconnects get increasingly complicated tsmc intel and samsung are all working on some version of gaa phet transistors though samsung recently previewed what's possible with its own multi-bridge channel phet or mbc phet which makes use of nano sheets as a reminder nano sheets are flexible in that they can be built either wide or narrow to augment the channel width leading to either higher performing or lower power designs at international solid state circuits virtual conference 2021 samsung's vice president said that quote we have used finfet transistors for about a decade however at three nanometers we're using a gate all-around transistor samsung went on to say that the new gaa phat transistors will provide high speed low power and small area again the distinct advantage held by nanosheets is the flexibility of the wef or the width of the channel on a transistor samsung's research with nanosheets and potential next generation sram predominantly used for cash on cpus highlights this flexibility samsung used different width adjustments with sram in an effort to reduce the amount of voltage needed to switch the state of an sram cell quote sram's six transistors can be divided into three pairs the pass gates the pull-ups and the pull-downs in a finfet design the wef of all three types would be equal but with nanosheet devices the samsung team was free to make alterations in one they made the pass gates and the pull downs wider in another they made the pass gate wider and the pull down narrower this was on ieee spectrum the end result was that by using various channel widths supported by nanosheets samsung was able to produce sram with a right margin of 230 millivolts less voltage as we reported previously samsung plans to more widely incorporate its multi-bridge channel fetch or mbc fet at three nanometers so that's it for hardware news this week as always you can subscribe for more go to store.gamersnexus.net if you'd like to pick up one of our mouse mats or our toolkits or other products and go to patreon.com gamersnexus to get some behind the scenes videos and additional q a videos thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next time i\n"