HW News - Dell Class Action Lawsuit, NVIDIA DLSS on Linux, AMD x Samsung GPUs

TSMC to Quadruple Capacity by 2023

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has announced plans to quadruple its capacity by 2023. The company's expectations for this increase are significant, highlighting the growing demand for semiconductor products across various industries. TSMC also spoke about its new Arizona plant, which has broken ground and is making progress. Although the new fab is not expected to come online until 2024, it will add an additional 20,000 wafers per month of capacity, further solidifying TSMC's position as a leading semiconductor manufacturer.

N5 Node Performance Improvements

TSMC highlighted its N5 node, which has already produced better yields than any of its previous nodes. The company attributes this success to the production learning curve and defect density improvements made with N6 and N7. TSMC notes that these advancements are critical in meeting the growing demand for semiconductors. The company's use of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography on more layers is also a significant factor in its improved yields.

EUV Lithography Dominance

TSMC accounts for approximately 65% of cumulative EUV wafers shipped and represents a staggering 50% of the install base for EUV machines. This dominance highlights TSMC's leadership in the adoption of EUV lithography, a technology critical for the manufacturing of modern semiconductors.

N4 Node Introduction

TSMC introduced its N4 node, which is an optical shrink of its N5 node. The company notes that N4 is an enhanced N5 technology offering a six percent smaller die area, as well as iterative power and performance improvements. Production for N4 is scheduled for quarter three of 2021.

N3 Node Volume Production

TSMC also mentioned its plans for N3 volume production, which are set to take place in the back half of 2022. This marks an important milestone in TSMC's expansion plans.

New Process Nodes: N6RF and N5A

TSMC announced two new process nodes: N6RF and N5A. The N6RF node is optimized for 5G and Wi-Fi 6 or 6e silicon, while the N5A option is aimed at automotive silicon. These new nodes demonstrate TSMC's commitment to meeting the diverse needs of various industries.

AMD Keynote and Graphics Partnership with Samsung

AMD showcased its Andreno GPU in laptops from companies like Asus and Dell. The company also confirmed its partnership with Samsung, which has been developing custom Radeon IP for its next flagship SoCs. At Computex 2021, AMD's Lisa Sue delivered a brief update on the partnership, mentioning that the custom graphics IP is based on RDNA 2 and will include features such as variable rate shading and ray tracing capabilities.

Ray Tracing in Mobile Devices

AMD highlighted its efforts to bring ray tracing to mobile devices. The company notes that this technology will be integrated into Samsung's next flagship SoCs, marking a significant milestone for the adoption of real-time ray tracing in consumer electronics.

Background Information on AMD and Samsung Partnership

The partnership between AMD and Samsung has been in development since 2019. Although there have been few updates over the years, AMD confirmed that it is working with Samsung to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market. The custom graphics IP will be based on RDNA 2 and will include features such as variable rate shading and ray tracing capabilities.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone welcome back to their hardware news recap for the week it's been a crazy week this is going up early in the week actually but we already have multiple news videos out on all the computex announcements from the past week there's still other news windows 11 for example discussion advancing further we'll be talking about some false marketing class action complaints filed against dell recently going over nvidia dlss coming to linux as well and talking about some gn updates on the fan testing machine that's case fans not like viewers just to be clear on that before that this video is brought to you by keoxia said to be the original inventors of nand flash memory and formerly known as toshiba memory kyouksi's xg6 m.2 ssd is a high-end nvme ssd claiming up to 3180 megabytes per second read and 2960 megabytes per second write speeds sequentially and it's ideally used in high performance gaming pcs or power conscious laptops the xg6 is available up to one terabyte and the company also has its bg4 ssd in a much smaller m.2 2230 form factor for up to one terabyte of ultra compact storage learn more about keoxia at the links in the description below including about their enterprise storage products so first just some gn behind the scenes stuff if you're interested in it there's time bars over there if you're not but power supply testing fan testing and uh general topics that we're doing videos on right now just wanted to give a quick update for those of you who are curious about that stuff so on the let's start with power supply testing power supply testing stuff we just filmed a video of this this is the dell g5 power supply actually surprisingly good it is a very redeeming part of the machine other than not being a standard unfortunately that can that can be slotted in elsewhere but the real reason we did the review on this was sort of as practice so we've had power supply testing stuff for a while we've only ever produced one or two videos with it uh one was a review of the the walmart pre-built system power supply also surprisingly good and so we use this as a vessel to learn more about doing power supply testing figure out how we want to present it in video format what charts make sense and better educate ourselves on power supplies in general so patrick stone headed that up he's featured in the video as well and it's either up already or will be shortly but the point is in that video we talk about some of how power supplies work we do some data presentations show you what sort of numbers to look for and hopefully we'll be able to do this a little bit more going forward my vision for our approach to power supply testing at a very top level is more similar to how we do coolers than anything else meaning with similar frequency to coolers so maybe one every month or two depending on how busy that month is and we have some cool ideas lined up for it is not going to be a frequent thing but it's going to be something that we we do have ideas for we've got a good process now patrick stone's been learning a lot about power supplies he already knew a bit so uh so that's where we are with that we always like to take our time and educate ourselves so all that said if you know a lot about power supplies and you do see stuff that we could improve on in the videos or you see a mistake or something obviously in that video comment section let us know and we'll read it and work on it for the next one because that's part of the process of learning we are not going to start out at the same high level with power supply as we do with other reviews we've been doing for a decade now so that's that side of things case fans in the moving video update where we showed some of the new location pre-renovation we talked about the desire to purchase a case fan testing machine and talked about some of the pricing for that so we've submitted payment at this point for the case fantastic machine it's extremely expensive but the statement i made in that moving video was basically we're not going to make roi on this anytime soon like as in it'll take probably years because it's for reviewing case fans and we can apply it to coolers and to cases and even the gpus to some extent but ultimately it's for fans and it's only for fans we should start a page for that somewhere and call it something about how it's just only for fans i don't know but anyway the uh the machine is i think after the modifications we've made to it it has ballooned a little bit to 48 thousand dollars it is uh cleaning out the bank accounts in a sense but i'm really excited about it i want to work with it it's the most excited i've been about a testing machine apparatus piece of equipment whatever for a long time so we're excited about it it's going to take several months to build and uh they'll have to ship it obviously it's getting calibrated it fits all testing standards for fan for fan manufacturing actually that are relevant so manufacturers use this same type of machine some of them have the same exact machine although we've done modifications to fit up to 200 millimeter fans so that's neat but uh anyway you won't really see anything about that probably until let's call it november just to be safe because of shipping timelines and uh validation but that's the plan it's been paid for at this point so it'll happen that puts us up probably in december january for when we're actually feeling pretty good about showing it because we need to again learn about it learn a lot about fans before we progress with it so the only reason it's possible we can buy equipment like this now again is because of patreon patreon.com gamersnexus where you can get some behind the scenes videos and because of the store on store.comtaxes.net where we sell stuff like these mouse pads we sell mod mats mouse mats we've got tool kits on the way back in stock they're not here yet though but thank you to everyone who's made this type of stuff even possible the the i never would have been able to dream of being able to buy a machine that expensive to do cool stuff like testing fans that were not aware of many of any other media outlets that have that equipment so thank you for supporting us in that and there's one other thing oh yeah the content right now so lots of this stuff the last few days has been news we're aware of that it's because computex happened normally we shoot this kind of stuff on the ground in taiwan for computex and it's a lot of fun it's my favorite place in the world and it's my favorite show to do love taipei i love the the show computex specifically we get to meet with a lot of engineers there and really learn a lot so unfortunately we didn't get to do that obviously in person this year but we still wanted to report on the announcements that came out of it and that's why you got a bunch of news videos it's just not as clear this time that it's from an organized trade show that's why it's all dumped at once uh since obviously we're not shooting on location so it's not as clear from context of the video why are these guys talking about news so much right now that's why i just wanted to update everyone on uh why the content was so news heavy the last week or so okay all that stated let's get into the news for this one and then it'll be a lot of content after this as we get into the review window for other products coming out so windows 11 potentially inbound we talked about this a little bit in the last one but we have some more information now microsoft is brewing it looks like a substantial update to windows 10 and it might be more of a full change over to windows 11. so it looks like microsoft is finally ready to take the wraps off of what the update coming up entails that update is codenamed sun valley by the way microsoft has announced an event for june 24th where it will detail quote the next generation of windows we know that to some extent sun valley is a substantial overhaul of the desktop and user interface i'm on a new start menu and task bar we've also seen refreshed icons for windows file explorer there's reportedly also going to be other ui changes a new set of fluid animations among other things beyond the ui microsoft is also looking to completely overhaul the microsoft store to allow third-party apps and commerce inside of the store this would bring along with it a change to the revenue model for microsoft store so microsoft store not too popular right now but with third-party commerce it comes the absence of a cut from microsoft so if for example let's just pick an easy one fortnite is on the microsoft store fortnite sells something in the game through its own platform microsoft would never see that transaction and therefore wouldn't even know about being able to take a cut to begin with so if this happens the way it sounds like it will right now that would be more in line with apps to the analogy the epic v apple fight that's going on right now where epic is pushing apple to reduce its cut taken of sales and potentially change how it handles sort of intra app commerce so these changes might be enough here to prompt microsoft to trot out a new number for for microsoft windows and that number would probably be 11 not necessarily we've we've seen people skip numbers in the past but probably it's 11. microsoft is continuing to allude to the number 11 though as you can see in a tweet from microsoft where if you look at the light shining through the logo it looks like an 11 or they're just trolling all of us some have also pointed out the start time of the event here 11 a.m eastern time moreover microsoft's yusef mehdi tweeted that he hasn't quote been this excited for a new version of windows since windows 95. obviously the keyword here is version and it's the first time we believe anyone at microsoft has mentioned a new version as opposed to the word update previously at this point we won't have to wait long to see what microsoft has been working on and we'll be sure to put in another hardware news video even though it's softer news it's important for everything we do here uh because windows is still the main platform that we look at anyway up next atari is launching the atari vcs to the public yes it is happening atari is preparing a public retail launch for its atari vcs console and this was long delayed but it did finally ship to early backers already and it wasn't clear at the time when we reviewed it if the atari vcs would ever come to everybody to the public who aren't backers and we have one of our viewers by the way to thank for loaning us his atari vcs so we could test it so uh the pricing unfortunately is a little bit of a an ask as they say in the corporate world it's expensive the atari vcs onyx base is set at three hundred dollars the all-in bundle is four hundred dollars getting close to the price of a console there and that includes a wireless joystick and a wireless controller so the extra 100 bucks gets you those things now despite our criticism of atari we did say in our coverage of the atari vcs that it's actually not a bad device sort of the recap of it was we thought there were some really good engineers who really wanted to make a good product match with executives who wanted to make a scam that's kind of what it seemed like it was because it was actually shocking how well-designed the thing was overall uh on a hardware level especially but a lot of the other stuff just didn't make any sense so anyway our conclusion in that back then was that if you bought it as an early backer especially closer to 200 might actually be worth it but much higher than that it's really hard to justify so the console itself is driven by an embedded ryzen r1600 6g apu that is built on global foundry's 14 nanometer process it's amd ip obviously and that's a dual core zen based part that uses radeon vega 3 graphics and other specs include 8 gigabytes of ddr4 2400 there's 32 gigabytes of onboard emcc storage and an m.2 slot to go with it and you can do some interesting stuff like install your own windows os which we tried and talked about in our review at that price you have a retro inspired console competing with the xbox series s and the ps5 digital edition and we likely don't need to remind you what hardware those consoles have compared to in our 1606g apu further you can play most of the atari games not only for free but free and legally on archive.org it's they're just stored there so if you want to play those games you can do it i mean obviously there's a lot of other ways too dating back to flashlights from two decades ago but the point is the games themselves aren't really a value add here if you want to buy it should probably be for some specific reason relating to the hardware maybe there is one but anyway uh the catalog is is not particularly compelling as a selling point for 400 anyway atari is marketing this as a pc console hybrid and they're doing that because you can install windows on it if you want to uh color us skeptical though about how many users would actually use the machine this way certainly a few of them are out there maybe some of you are watching but it's not going to be a common use for it at any rate according to atari anyone who wasn't an early backer in the crowdfunding campaign is now in a position where you have the opportunity to buy it and they're saying on june 15th if they don't delay it for two years this time the console will be available from atari directly and some retailers best buy microcenter gamestop at all if you've been keeping up with our youtube channel and twitter you've seen that we've detailed our own frustrations with dell in recent months as customers these frustrations range from scummy business tactics that dell has employed to exceedingly low quality pre-built gaming pcs the power supply on the table not withstanding actually dell's pre-built g55000 isn't worth considering for example even if all you wanted was the gpu all that said though we now bring you news of other consumer frustrations with dell in case you got tired of hearing ours we received an email on behalf of class action attorneys and whistleblower brian mahani david kenny and steve hokfelson detailing a new class action lawsuit against dell or at least a class action complaint regarding false marketing the email title makes a strong point to immediately accuse dell of quote cheating gamers not the aimbot variety so robert felter who lives in california and this is where the the lawsuit is most immediately relevant although a few states have been added filed a class action lawsuit against dell because he purchased the dell alienware area 51mr1 gaming laptop and the lawsuit alleges that dell quote intentionally misled and deceived what no uh buyers over the supposed upgradeable components like the cpu and the gpu the agency representing the lawyers has an open request to speak to consumers who purchased the area 51m r1 quote after being exposed to dallas deceptive marketing campaign when we were speaking with the agency they said that there's no current course of action you don't have anything you can sign up for right now there's no payment uh but they said that they want to speak with owners of the area 51m r1 to learn about the spec of the laptop the location of purchase and some other info they have a contact of inquiries at elitelawyermanagement.com but the crux of the issue is dell's marketing around the upgradable laptop so when the alienware area 51mr1 was announced and launched in 2019 its marketing was heavily tinged with upgradability as the central feature according to the lawsuit dell never clearly defined the limitations of that upgradability at least not before anyone bought the r1 model it seems that dell didn't clarify how upgradeable these machines were until it launched the second one the alienware area 51m r2 this is where the lawsuit starts to gain some potential traction with the release model of the r2 dell stated that the r1's upgrade path for cpus and gpus would be limited to models within that same generation that is intel's 9th gen cpus and nvidia's rtx 20 series the newer r2 was much the same although its cpus would be locked to intel's 10th gen the problem is that all the systems that shipped with flagship series 9000 series cpus clearly have no upgrade path at all it's unable to socket 10 series and it is devoid of superior 9 series cpus it is therefore not upgradable it is however downgradable not really a selling point but maybe maybe dell could argue something about stepping down to a 9600 as a power saving upgrade or something like that just some ideas so the gpus were perhaps the most limited here users could only upgrade the gpu through a gpu upgrade kit that uses dell's proprietary dell graphics form factor dgf modules unfortunately modules like this sort of make the component look a lot more future-proof than it is ultimately though if it's proprietary it's non-standard you have one supplier for it and they just cut it off whenever then it is e-waste not any different than anything else except it was made to look a lot less e-waste-y than it out of being so the lawsuit points out that dell's initial marketing and documentation never mentioned these plans it claims that it misled users into believing the cpu and the gpu were upgradable beyond the current generation akin to desktops in fact dell's marketing called this a quote mobile desktop which the complaint says quote further cements its alleged material capability that the area 51m is upgradable in the same way a desktop is upgradable this apparently became a problem again when owners of the original r1 wanted to upgrade intel 9th cpus to a 10th gen and anyone buying the highest end model would not be able to upgrade so the easiest way out of all of this radel would have been to only ship it with say a sockable cpu so a 9700k that way it's always upgradable even if it's not to the 10th gen still slimy but maybe not illegal furthermore according to the filing quote after his purchase plaintiff later inquired about upgrading his area 51m's core components but learned that contrary to dell's repeated promises that the area 51m is upgradable none of the area 51m's core components were in fact upgradable in any way the area 51m cpu was not upgradable to the new intel 10th generation cpu nor was its gpu upgradable to the new nvidia rtx 2000 super series in fact the only way plaintiff could own a laptop with these newly released upgraded core components was to spend several thousand dollars more than what an upgrade would cost to purchase the then newly released alienware area 51mr2 the lawsuit is seeking the usual it's looking for financial relief and lawyers fees for not only the plaintiff but for the consumers who purchased the area 51m r1 in the states of alaska arizona california hawaii idaho montana nevada oregon and washington also in dell news just briefly as confirmed by the verge dell has scrapped its alienware graphics amplifier external gpu enclosure also proprietary the word makes a resurgence in this news item so this news comes on the heels of dell trotting out the new alienware x-series gaming notebooks with the x-15 and 17 models not featuring proprietary alienware graphics amplifier ports a little digging also shows that the port is missing from alienware's m15 r5 and r6 in confirming the discontinuance of the port and the enclosure uh to the verge dell didn't offer any details on why it was doing so reading between the lines of it the most obvious reason is the rise of the thunderbolt interface and indeed alienware's new models come with thunderbolt 4. in recent years most egpus have relied on the thunderbolt interface anyway so this makes sense there are still problems though so the alienware graphics amplifier port it is proprietary and it used a mixture of pcie and usb signals to do the communication but in getting with the times moving to thunderbolt makes more sense the problem is moving away from another device that was proprietary and owners of it losing support the verges report notes that the support page for the product was last updated in april though support for the latest amd and nvidia graphics cards was not added up next steam's hardware survey for may of 2021 steam's hardware and software survey is out with the monthly update and it continues to highlight two key trends that we've been pointing out one is the continued rise of amd's ryzen cpu adoption offset by its recent decline as the second point in gpu adoption among steam users the biggest win for amd is finally crossing the 30 share mark on steam's cpu chart as amd moved from 29.48 in april 2021 to 30.13 in may of 2021. this is a trend that has been building for several months now and as we show the numbers on the screen they might change a little bit because it does sort of update on a bit of a latency but it's only been compounded by the popularity of amd's ryzen 5000 cpus however that win comes with a standing trade-off amd is actually losing share in the gpu chart having tumbled down a bit to 16.18 share in may also may 2021 marked another month where not a single rx 6000 series card at the time of filming emerged on the steam charts we pointed out that the rtx 3060 recently and finally made its debut toward the bottom of the charts uh this month that card has notched another 0.10 percent gain in share points moving up several spots elsewhere the data in the survey is much the same month over month for instance the gtx 1060 at 8.95 despite continually shrinking and share is still the most popular gpu on steam users the margin is still surprisingly wide as well the closest card is the 1050 ti with 6.71 quad-core cpus on that side of things are still the leaders at 40.38 percent but eight core cpus continue to be the fastest growing amongst team users at 13.25 marking a 0.38 point increase up next some dls news except for linux so this is kind of interesting on top of the 3080ti and 3070 ti announcements nvidia also announced expanded dlss support also expanded for games that's something we talked about in one of the computex roundups the second one that we published i think but linux is covered here so nvidia's dlss will be delivered through steam's proton and this is a compatibility layer that's based on wine wine being the application that's often and for a long time been used on linux for games compatibility although we are aware that there are other ways to do it too of course but previously nvidia's dlss had two exclusive requirements one of those was an rtx gpu and the other was a windows os it appears as if nvidia is starting to take linux gaming a bit more seriously which also aligns with valve's previous declaration to better support linux nvidia claims that dlss support for vulkan is coming later this month and that support for directx games will come this fall the next story is going to be a bit dense but it's interesting it's packed with information from tsmc it's from tsmc's symposium that they hold i think it's annually so tsmc recently held an online only technology symposium 2021 where uh it over a two-day period covered highlights of new technology process advancements changes to manufacturing and supply availability and what it's planning to do going forward aside from of course just seven nanometers starting with seven nanometers tsmc's seven nanometer family is seeing a stall in overall adoption as tsmc's customers migrate to five nanometers to that end tsmc is only forecasting a 14 capacity increase for seven nanometers throughout 2021 and that capacity progression will likely wane in the years ahead as tsmc's other nodes become more mature we saw a similar trend when 16 nanometers peaked and customers moved onto seven nanometers tsmc's n6 process is a derivative of its n7 process and will continue to be important for the company to highlight this tsmc notes that while in quarter 4 of 2020 n6 only accounted for 15 of total n7 or 7 nanometer output but that n6 will account for as much as 50 in quarter 4 of 21. tsmc also stated that its defect density metric or what it calls an n6d0 is already achieving the same yields as n7 and uh for tsmc's five nanometer and five it expects the capacity to quadruple by 2023. tsmc also spoke about its new arizona plant which has broken ground we actually had a viewer send us some uh drive-by shots of the not that kind of the arizona plant uh showing that the ground had been prepared for site work had been done i think is what they call it and so that's making progress tsmc's new arizona fab isn't expected to come online until 2024 and it will add an additional 20 000 wafers per month of capacity tsmc notes that n5 has already produced better yields than any tsmc 7 nanometer node and tsmc highlights the production learning curve and the defect density improvements it made with n6 and n7 as a reason for this of course tsmt also points the increased use of euv on more layers with n5 and tsmc also shared that it accounts for some 65 percent of cumulative euv wafers shipped it said that it also represents a shocking 50 percent of the install base for euv machines that's extreme ultraviolet lithography for that so moving on tsmc had some stuff to say about the n4 changes as well n4 is an optical shrink of its n5 node and tsmc notes that it's an enhanced n5 technology that it will offer a six percent smaller die area as well as the usual iterative power and performance improvements going forward n4 is already producing the same yields as n5 and tsmc says that production is scheduled or rather risk production is scheduled for quarter three of 2021. there are also some brief updates on n3 where the uh volume production is set for the back half of 2022. tsmc also introduced two new process nodes and those are called n6rf and n5a n6rf is an augmented n6 process with optimizations for 5g and for wi-fi 6 or 6e silicon while the n5a option is aimed at automotive silicon last story is just some amd keynote stuff so we covered the andy apus the laptop gpus would be the rx 6800m and the like and we also talked about the really cool 3dv cache if you haven't seen that video check it out just a short news video we did on that we covered those one thing we didn't talk about actually two things was amd confirming our dna infused samsung socs inbound this has been a story developing for a long time now a couple years actually and confirming perhaps again that you can find our dna i think it was two gpus in tesla cars to which we said try and scalp that one you're gonna see you can see on ebay like selling brand new tesla never driven ninety thousand dollars just needs gpu so for the samsung exynos stuff we've been reporting on amd and samsung's graphics partnership for since about 2019 when it was first announced and in the years since there's been little in the way of updates other than samsung confirming that an soc with radeon silicon was on the way that src is largely believed to be the successor to the in-market exynos 2100 soc all that said at computex 21 dr lisa sue delivered a brief update on the topic quote the next place you'll find rdna 2 will be the high performance mobile phone market md has partnered with industry leader samsung to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market and we're happy to announce that we'll be bringing custom graphics ip to samsung's next flagship soc sue also noted that this would include ray tracing and variable rate shading capabilities and so that they're looking forward to the samsung provision of more details later in the year the highlights here that as lisa sue mentioned the custom graphics ip is based on rdna 2 and amd's variable rate shading and ray tracing will come to the silicon there are technically other mobile gpu solutions that use vrs but this would be the first mobile gpu implementation of ray tracing at least hardware that can do it in real time for the record imagination technologies has been sitting on ray tracing cable ip for years such as its gr 6500 gpu and c-series architecture however as far as we're aware none of that ip has come to market at least not in a consumer device it's likely we'll know more about this one in the back half of the year when the galaxy s22 devices start rolling out so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always and if you watch the update on the gm stuff thanks for doing that we're happy to share some of the behind the scenes what we're working on with you but as always you can subscribe for more go to store.gamingtexas.net or patreon.com gamersnexus helps out directly and we'll see you all next timehey everyone welcome back to their hardware news recap for the week it's been a crazy week this is going up early in the week actually but we already have multiple news videos out on all the computex announcements from the past week there's still other news windows 11 for example discussion advancing further we'll be talking about some false marketing class action complaints filed against dell recently going over nvidia dlss coming to linux as well and talking about some gn updates on the fan testing machine that's case fans not like viewers just to be clear on that before that this video is brought to you by keoxia said to be the original inventors of nand flash memory and formerly known as toshiba memory kyouksi's xg6 m.2 ssd is a high-end nvme ssd claiming up to 3180 megabytes per second read and 2960 megabytes per second write speeds sequentially and it's ideally used in high performance gaming pcs or power conscious laptops the xg6 is available up to one terabyte and the company also has its bg4 ssd in a much smaller m.2 2230 form factor for up to one terabyte of ultra compact storage learn more about keoxia at the links in the description below including about their enterprise storage products so first just some gn behind the scenes stuff if you're interested in it there's time bars over there if you're not but power supply testing fan testing and uh general topics that we're doing videos on right now just wanted to give a quick update for those of you who are curious about that stuff so on the let's start with power supply testing power supply testing stuff we just filmed a video of this this is the dell g5 power supply actually surprisingly good it is a very redeeming part of the machine other than not being a standard unfortunately that can that can be slotted in elsewhere but the real reason we did the review on this was sort of as practice so we've had power supply testing stuff for a while we've only ever produced one or two videos with it uh one was a review of the the walmart pre-built system power supply also surprisingly good and so we use this as a vessel to learn more about doing power supply testing figure out how we want to present it in video format what charts make sense and better educate ourselves on power supplies in general so patrick stone headed that up he's featured in the video as well and it's either up already or will be shortly but the point is in that video we talk about some of how power supplies work we do some data presentations show you what sort of numbers to look for and hopefully we'll be able to do this a little bit more going forward my vision for our approach to power supply testing at a very top level is more similar to how we do coolers than anything else meaning with similar frequency to coolers so maybe one every month or two depending on how busy that month is and we have some cool ideas lined up for it is not going to be a frequent thing but it's going to be something that we we do have ideas for we've got a good process now patrick stone's been learning a lot about power supplies he already knew a bit so uh so that's where we are with that we always like to take our time and educate ourselves so all that said if you know a lot about power supplies and you do see stuff that we could improve on in the videos or you see a mistake or something obviously in that video comment section let us know and we'll read it and work on it for the next one because that's part of the process of learning we are not going to start out at the same high level with power supply as we do with other reviews we've been doing for a decade now so that's that side of things case fans in the moving video update where we showed some of the new location pre-renovation we talked about the desire to purchase a case fan testing machine and talked about some of the pricing for that so we've submitted payment at this point for the case fantastic machine it's extremely expensive but the statement i made in that moving video was basically we're not going to make roi on this anytime soon like as in it'll take probably years because it's for reviewing case fans and we can apply it to coolers and to cases and even the gpus to some extent but ultimately it's for fans and it's only for fans we should start a page for that somewhere and call it something about how it's just only for fans i don't know but anyway the uh the machine is i think after the modifications we've made to it it has ballooned a little bit to 48 thousand dollars it is uh cleaning out the bank accounts in a sense but i'm really excited about it i want to work with it it's the most excited i've been about a testing machine apparatus piece of equipment whatever for a long time so we're excited about it it's going to take several months to build and uh they'll have to ship it obviously it's getting calibrated it fits all testing standards for fan for fan manufacturing actually that are relevant so manufacturers use this same type of machine some of them have the same exact machine although we've done modifications to fit up to 200 millimeter fans so that's neat but uh anyway you won't really see anything about that probably until let's call it november just to be safe because of shipping timelines and uh validation but that's the plan it's been paid for at this point so it'll happen that puts us up probably in december january for when we're actually feeling pretty good about showing it because we need to again learn about it learn a lot about fans before we progress with it so the only reason it's possible we can buy equipment like this now again is because of patreon patreon.com gamersnexus where you can get some behind the scenes videos and because of the store on store.comtaxes.net where we sell stuff like these mouse pads we sell mod mats mouse mats we've got tool kits on the way back in stock they're not here yet though but thank you to everyone who's made this type of stuff even possible the the i never would have been able to dream of being able to buy a machine that expensive to do cool stuff like testing fans that were not aware of many of any other media outlets that have that equipment so thank you for supporting us in that and there's one other thing oh yeah the content right now so lots of this stuff the last few days has been news we're aware of that it's because computex happened normally we shoot this kind of stuff on the ground in taiwan for computex and it's a lot of fun it's my favorite place in the world and it's my favorite show to do love taipei i love the the show computex specifically we get to meet with a lot of engineers there and really learn a lot so unfortunately we didn't get to do that obviously in person this year but we still wanted to report on the announcements that came out of it and that's why you got a bunch of news videos it's just not as clear this time that it's from an organized trade show that's why it's all dumped at once uh since obviously we're not shooting on location so it's not as clear from context of the video why are these guys talking about news so much right now that's why i just wanted to update everyone on uh why the content was so news heavy the last week or so okay all that stated let's get into the news for this one and then it'll be a lot of content after this as we get into the review window for other products coming out so windows 11 potentially inbound we talked about this a little bit in the last one but we have some more information now microsoft is brewing it looks like a substantial update to windows 10 and it might be more of a full change over to windows 11. so it looks like microsoft is finally ready to take the wraps off of what the update coming up entails that update is codenamed sun valley by the way microsoft has announced an event for june 24th where it will detail quote the next generation of windows we know that to some extent sun valley is a substantial overhaul of the desktop and user interface i'm on a new start menu and task bar we've also seen refreshed icons for windows file explorer there's reportedly also going to be other ui changes a new set of fluid animations among other things beyond the ui microsoft is also looking to completely overhaul the microsoft store to allow third-party apps and commerce inside of the store this would bring along with it a change to the revenue model for microsoft store so microsoft store not too popular right now but with third-party commerce it comes the absence of a cut from microsoft so if for example let's just pick an easy one fortnite is on the microsoft store fortnite sells something in the game through its own platform microsoft would never see that transaction and therefore wouldn't even know about being able to take a cut to begin with so if this happens the way it sounds like it will right now that would be more in line with apps to the analogy the epic v apple fight that's going on right now where epic is pushing apple to reduce its cut taken of sales and potentially change how it handles sort of intra app commerce so these changes might be enough here to prompt microsoft to trot out a new number for for microsoft windows and that number would probably be 11 not necessarily we've we've seen people skip numbers in the past but probably it's 11. microsoft is continuing to allude to the number 11 though as you can see in a tweet from microsoft where if you look at the light shining through the logo it looks like an 11 or they're just trolling all of us some have also pointed out the start time of the event here 11 a.m eastern time moreover microsoft's yusef mehdi tweeted that he hasn't quote been this excited for a new version of windows since windows 95. obviously the keyword here is version and it's the first time we believe anyone at microsoft has mentioned a new version as opposed to the word update previously at this point we won't have to wait long to see what microsoft has been working on and we'll be sure to put in another hardware news video even though it's softer news it's important for everything we do here uh because windows is still the main platform that we look at anyway up next atari is launching the atari vcs to the public yes it is happening atari is preparing a public retail launch for its atari vcs console and this was long delayed but it did finally ship to early backers already and it wasn't clear at the time when we reviewed it if the atari vcs would ever come to everybody to the public who aren't backers and we have one of our viewers by the way to thank for loaning us his atari vcs so we could test it so uh the pricing unfortunately is a little bit of a an ask as they say in the corporate world it's expensive the atari vcs onyx base is set at three hundred dollars the all-in bundle is four hundred dollars getting close to the price of a console there and that includes a wireless joystick and a wireless controller so the extra 100 bucks gets you those things now despite our criticism of atari we did say in our coverage of the atari vcs that it's actually not a bad device sort of the recap of it was we thought there were some really good engineers who really wanted to make a good product match with executives who wanted to make a scam that's kind of what it seemed like it was because it was actually shocking how well-designed the thing was overall uh on a hardware level especially but a lot of the other stuff just didn't make any sense so anyway our conclusion in that back then was that if you bought it as an early backer especially closer to 200 might actually be worth it but much higher than that it's really hard to justify so the console itself is driven by an embedded ryzen r1600 6g apu that is built on global foundry's 14 nanometer process it's amd ip obviously and that's a dual core zen based part that uses radeon vega 3 graphics and other specs include 8 gigabytes of ddr4 2400 there's 32 gigabytes of onboard emcc storage and an m.2 slot to go with it and you can do some interesting stuff like install your own windows os which we tried and talked about in our review at that price you have a retro inspired console competing with the xbox series s and the ps5 digital edition and we likely don't need to remind you what hardware those consoles have compared to in our 1606g apu further you can play most of the atari games not only for free but free and legally on archive.org it's they're just stored there so if you want to play those games you can do it i mean obviously there's a lot of other ways too dating back to flashlights from two decades ago but the point is the games themselves aren't really a value add here if you want to buy it should probably be for some specific reason relating to the hardware maybe there is one but anyway uh the catalog is is not particularly compelling as a selling point for 400 anyway atari is marketing this as a pc console hybrid and they're doing that because you can install windows on it if you want to uh color us skeptical though about how many users would actually use the machine this way certainly a few of them are out there maybe some of you are watching but it's not going to be a common use for it at any rate according to atari anyone who wasn't an early backer in the crowdfunding campaign is now in a position where you have the opportunity to buy it and they're saying on june 15th if they don't delay it for two years this time the console will be available from atari directly and some retailers best buy microcenter gamestop at all if you've been keeping up with our youtube channel and twitter you've seen that we've detailed our own frustrations with dell in recent months as customers these frustrations range from scummy business tactics that dell has employed to exceedingly low quality pre-built gaming pcs the power supply on the table not withstanding actually dell's pre-built g55000 isn't worth considering for example even if all you wanted was the gpu all that said though we now bring you news of other consumer frustrations with dell in case you got tired of hearing ours we received an email on behalf of class action attorneys and whistleblower brian mahani david kenny and steve hokfelson detailing a new class action lawsuit against dell or at least a class action complaint regarding false marketing the email title makes a strong point to immediately accuse dell of quote cheating gamers not the aimbot variety so robert felter who lives in california and this is where the the lawsuit is most immediately relevant although a few states have been added filed a class action lawsuit against dell because he purchased the dell alienware area 51mr1 gaming laptop and the lawsuit alleges that dell quote intentionally misled and deceived what no uh buyers over the supposed upgradeable components like the cpu and the gpu the agency representing the lawyers has an open request to speak to consumers who purchased the area 51m r1 quote after being exposed to dallas deceptive marketing campaign when we were speaking with the agency they said that there's no current course of action you don't have anything you can sign up for right now there's no payment uh but they said that they want to speak with owners of the area 51m r1 to learn about the spec of the laptop the location of purchase and some other info they have a contact of inquiries at elitelawyermanagement.com but the crux of the issue is dell's marketing around the upgradable laptop so when the alienware area 51mr1 was announced and launched in 2019 its marketing was heavily tinged with upgradability as the central feature according to the lawsuit dell never clearly defined the limitations of that upgradability at least not before anyone bought the r1 model it seems that dell didn't clarify how upgradeable these machines were until it launched the second one the alienware area 51m r2 this is where the lawsuit starts to gain some potential traction with the release model of the r2 dell stated that the r1's upgrade path for cpus and gpus would be limited to models within that same generation that is intel's 9th gen cpus and nvidia's rtx 20 series the newer r2 was much the same although its cpus would be locked to intel's 10th gen the problem is that all the systems that shipped with flagship series 9000 series cpus clearly have no upgrade path at all it's unable to socket 10 series and it is devoid of superior 9 series cpus it is therefore not upgradable it is however downgradable not really a selling point but maybe maybe dell could argue something about stepping down to a 9600 as a power saving upgrade or something like that just some ideas so the gpus were perhaps the most limited here users could only upgrade the gpu through a gpu upgrade kit that uses dell's proprietary dell graphics form factor dgf modules unfortunately modules like this sort of make the component look a lot more future-proof than it is ultimately though if it's proprietary it's non-standard you have one supplier for it and they just cut it off whenever then it is e-waste not any different than anything else except it was made to look a lot less e-waste-y than it out of being so the lawsuit points out that dell's initial marketing and documentation never mentioned these plans it claims that it misled users into believing the cpu and the gpu were upgradable beyond the current generation akin to desktops in fact dell's marketing called this a quote mobile desktop which the complaint says quote further cements its alleged material capability that the area 51m is upgradable in the same way a desktop is upgradable this apparently became a problem again when owners of the original r1 wanted to upgrade intel 9th cpus to a 10th gen and anyone buying the highest end model would not be able to upgrade so the easiest way out of all of this radel would have been to only ship it with say a sockable cpu so a 9700k that way it's always upgradable even if it's not to the 10th gen still slimy but maybe not illegal furthermore according to the filing quote after his purchase plaintiff later inquired about upgrading his area 51m's core components but learned that contrary to dell's repeated promises that the area 51m is upgradable none of the area 51m's core components were in fact upgradable in any way the area 51m cpu was not upgradable to the new intel 10th generation cpu nor was its gpu upgradable to the new nvidia rtx 2000 super series in fact the only way plaintiff could own a laptop with these newly released upgraded core components was to spend several thousand dollars more than what an upgrade would cost to purchase the then newly released alienware area 51mr2 the lawsuit is seeking the usual it's looking for financial relief and lawyers fees for not only the plaintiff but for the consumers who purchased the area 51m r1 in the states of alaska arizona california hawaii idaho montana nevada oregon and washington also in dell news just briefly as confirmed by the verge dell has scrapped its alienware graphics amplifier external gpu enclosure also proprietary the word makes a resurgence in this news item so this news comes on the heels of dell trotting out the new alienware x-series gaming notebooks with the x-15 and 17 models not featuring proprietary alienware graphics amplifier ports a little digging also shows that the port is missing from alienware's m15 r5 and r6 in confirming the discontinuance of the port and the enclosure uh to the verge dell didn't offer any details on why it was doing so reading between the lines of it the most obvious reason is the rise of the thunderbolt interface and indeed alienware's new models come with thunderbolt 4. in recent years most egpus have relied on the thunderbolt interface anyway so this makes sense there are still problems though so the alienware graphics amplifier port it is proprietary and it used a mixture of pcie and usb signals to do the communication but in getting with the times moving to thunderbolt makes more sense the problem is moving away from another device that was proprietary and owners of it losing support the verges report notes that the support page for the product was last updated in april though support for the latest amd and nvidia graphics cards was not added up next steam's hardware survey for may of 2021 steam's hardware and software survey is out with the monthly update and it continues to highlight two key trends that we've been pointing out one is the continued rise of amd's ryzen cpu adoption offset by its recent decline as the second point in gpu adoption among steam users the biggest win for amd is finally crossing the 30 share mark on steam's cpu chart as amd moved from 29.48 in april 2021 to 30.13 in may of 2021. this is a trend that has been building for several months now and as we show the numbers on the screen they might change a little bit because it does sort of update on a bit of a latency but it's only been compounded by the popularity of amd's ryzen 5000 cpus however that win comes with a standing trade-off amd is actually losing share in the gpu chart having tumbled down a bit to 16.18 share in may also may 2021 marked another month where not a single rx 6000 series card at the time of filming emerged on the steam charts we pointed out that the rtx 3060 recently and finally made its debut toward the bottom of the charts uh this month that card has notched another 0.10 percent gain in share points moving up several spots elsewhere the data in the survey is much the same month over month for instance the gtx 1060 at 8.95 despite continually shrinking and share is still the most popular gpu on steam users the margin is still surprisingly wide as well the closest card is the 1050 ti with 6.71 quad-core cpus on that side of things are still the leaders at 40.38 percent but eight core cpus continue to be the fastest growing amongst team users at 13.25 marking a 0.38 point increase up next some dls news except for linux so this is kind of interesting on top of the 3080ti and 3070 ti announcements nvidia also announced expanded dlss support also expanded for games that's something we talked about in one of the computex roundups the second one that we published i think but linux is covered here so nvidia's dlss will be delivered through steam's proton and this is a compatibility layer that's based on wine wine being the application that's often and for a long time been used on linux for games compatibility although we are aware that there are other ways to do it too of course but previously nvidia's dlss had two exclusive requirements one of those was an rtx gpu and the other was a windows os it appears as if nvidia is starting to take linux gaming a bit more seriously which also aligns with valve's previous declaration to better support linux nvidia claims that dlss support for vulkan is coming later this month and that support for directx games will come this fall the next story is going to be a bit dense but it's interesting it's packed with information from tsmc it's from tsmc's symposium that they hold i think it's annually so tsmc recently held an online only technology symposium 2021 where uh it over a two-day period covered highlights of new technology process advancements changes to manufacturing and supply availability and what it's planning to do going forward aside from of course just seven nanometers starting with seven nanometers tsmc's seven nanometer family is seeing a stall in overall adoption as tsmc's customers migrate to five nanometers to that end tsmc is only forecasting a 14 capacity increase for seven nanometers throughout 2021 and that capacity progression will likely wane in the years ahead as tsmc's other nodes become more mature we saw a similar trend when 16 nanometers peaked and customers moved onto seven nanometers tsmc's n6 process is a derivative of its n7 process and will continue to be important for the company to highlight this tsmc notes that while in quarter 4 of 2020 n6 only accounted for 15 of total n7 or 7 nanometer output but that n6 will account for as much as 50 in quarter 4 of 21. tsmc also stated that its defect density metric or what it calls an n6d0 is already achieving the same yields as n7 and uh for tsmc's five nanometer and five it expects the capacity to quadruple by 2023. tsmc also spoke about its new arizona plant which has broken ground we actually had a viewer send us some uh drive-by shots of the not that kind of the arizona plant uh showing that the ground had been prepared for site work had been done i think is what they call it and so that's making progress tsmc's new arizona fab isn't expected to come online until 2024 and it will add an additional 20 000 wafers per month of capacity tsmc notes that n5 has already produced better yields than any tsmc 7 nanometer node and tsmc highlights the production learning curve and the defect density improvements it made with n6 and n7 as a reason for this of course tsmt also points the increased use of euv on more layers with n5 and tsmc also shared that it accounts for some 65 percent of cumulative euv wafers shipped it said that it also represents a shocking 50 percent of the install base for euv machines that's extreme ultraviolet lithography for that so moving on tsmc had some stuff to say about the n4 changes as well n4 is an optical shrink of its n5 node and tsmc notes that it's an enhanced n5 technology that it will offer a six percent smaller die area as well as the usual iterative power and performance improvements going forward n4 is already producing the same yields as n5 and tsmc says that production is scheduled or rather risk production is scheduled for quarter three of 2021. there are also some brief updates on n3 where the uh volume production is set for the back half of 2022. tsmc also introduced two new process nodes and those are called n6rf and n5a n6rf is an augmented n6 process with optimizations for 5g and for wi-fi 6 or 6e silicon while the n5a option is aimed at automotive silicon last story is just some amd keynote stuff so we covered the andy apus the laptop gpus would be the rx 6800m and the like and we also talked about the really cool 3dv cache if you haven't seen that video check it out just a short news video we did on that we covered those one thing we didn't talk about actually two things was amd confirming our dna infused samsung socs inbound this has been a story developing for a long time now a couple years actually and confirming perhaps again that you can find our dna i think it was two gpus in tesla cars to which we said try and scalp that one you're gonna see you can see on ebay like selling brand new tesla never driven ninety thousand dollars just needs gpu so for the samsung exynos stuff we've been reporting on amd and samsung's graphics partnership for since about 2019 when it was first announced and in the years since there's been little in the way of updates other than samsung confirming that an soc with radeon silicon was on the way that src is largely believed to be the successor to the in-market exynos 2100 soc all that said at computex 21 dr lisa sue delivered a brief update on the topic quote the next place you'll find rdna 2 will be the high performance mobile phone market md has partnered with industry leader samsung to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market and we're happy to announce that we'll be bringing custom graphics ip to samsung's next flagship soc sue also noted that this would include ray tracing and variable rate shading capabilities and so that they're looking forward to the samsung provision of more details later in the year the highlights here that as lisa sue mentioned the custom graphics ip is based on rdna 2 and amd's variable rate shading and ray tracing will come to the silicon there are technically other mobile gpu solutions that use vrs but this would be the first mobile gpu implementation of ray tracing at least hardware that can do it in real time for the record imagination technologies has been sitting on ray tracing cable ip for years such as its gr 6500 gpu and c-series architecture however as far as we're aware none of that ip has come to market at least not in a consumer device it's likely we'll know more about this one in the back half of the year when the galaxy s22 devices start rolling out so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always and if you watch the update on the gm stuff thanks for doing that we're happy to share some of the behind the scenes what we're working on with you but as always you can subscribe for more go to store.gamingtexas.net or patreon.com gamersnexus helps out directly and we'll see you all next time\n"