SK hynix, one of the largest DRAM chip makers in the world, has confirmed that some of the DRAM products it made were indeed defective. In a statement to The Register, the firm has said:

We can confirm that a defect was found in a few DRAM products. We're currently talking to a limited number of customers affected by this to address the issue. While it’s too early to estimate the potential losses, we don't think they would be that significant as the defect is within the range of typical quality issue check.

However, it was quick to add that the number of defective products that were circulating around in rumors was hugely overblown. "The scale of the potential losses mentioned in the rumor is absolutely not true and exaggerated", it added.

According to such rumors, the company was having to deal with around 240,000 defective memory wafers, which is an enormous number and a huge cause for worry especially in a time of serious massive global chip shortage.

Consequently, the shares of the chip giant fell 0.78 percent to 127,500 won. Clearly upset about this entire situation, the company has requested a police investigation for looking into whosoever may be spreading such rumors.

Source: Yonhap via The Register

About a week or so ago, speaking at the Computex 2021 virtual event, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger cast doom and gloom for the chip industry when he said that the current global silicon shortage is expected to last years. While the shortage of chips is certainly very prevalent, not everyone it seems is on board with Gelsinger's forecast. Andrew Tilton, Chief Asia economist at Goldman Sachs, believes we are already "in the worst period of that right now" and that means things will only get better for the industry as we move into the second half of the year.

Gelsinger pointed out how supply chains are struggling to meet the excessively high demand for smartphones, laptops, notebooks, and such, due to the massive shift to working and studying from homes in the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Tilton did acknowledge the supply chain crisis but he was quick to add that there's a “noticeable tightening” of supply chains and shipment delays in Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea and we know a lot of the chipmakers, like TSMC, are based in this belt.

However, Andrew Tilton is still cautious on the matter as problems outside the pandemic have also started popping their heads recently. For example, Taiwan is currently facing a major drought, one of the worst in many many years, which is affecting chip designing as semiconductor fabs tend to rely on plentiful water supply.

Source: CNBC

Catch up on the news from Apple’s big developer conference

GaN is helping the semiconductor industry shake its reliance on silicon

The global semiconductor shortage is delaying the production of everything from refrigerators and microwaves to gaming consoles and smartphones. Experts are saying it could take months for the industry to recover, but in reality the shortage is changing consumer electronics forever.

The industry has been reliant on silicon for decades, but the chip shortage is helping to make electronic devices more environmentally friendly, more efficient and smaller. More companies are turning to gallium nitride (GaN), because it is easier and faster to produce than silicon chips, among other benefits.

TechRadar Pro spoke to Stephen Oliver, VP Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Navitas Semiconductor, to find out how the shortage is impacting consumer electronics and shifting the industry away from silicon. Navitas supplies GaN chips to companies including Anker, Aukey, Belkin, Dell, Hyper, Lenovo, OPPO, RAVPower, Verizon and dozens of others.

An event to give folks a look at ‘the next-generation of Windows’ scheduled for June 24, a confirmation of FidelityFX Super Resolution on console, and even some new Edge features, were all revealed in the last seven days. You can find info about that, as well as much more below, in your Microsoft digest for the week of May 30 – June 5.

June Windows event

Aligning with previous rumors, Microsoft has announced a June 24 event to showcase “what’s next for Windows”.

Although we knew of the UI refresh codenamed Sun Valley before thanks to rumors, and hints of it have been peppered throughout Insider builds - from new icons to more rounded corners on certain UI elements -, we’ve yet to see the entire picture. It’s possible that Microsoft is at last ready to take the wraps off of what’s been working on for quite a while.

In case the teaser video posted on Twitter is anything to go by, the firm could be preparing to either increment the version number – as Microsoft of old would -, thus giving us Windows 11, or simply drop the number entirely.

Our very own Abhay Venkatesh makes the argument that splitting off Windows 10 releases into consumer and enterprise-targeted variants could be an interesting route to take. This would, according to Abhay, ease the concerns of the traditionally change-averse business clients, leaving the new and experimental (Windows 8-level) changes on the consumer side.

FidelityFX SR on console

To open this particular section, it’d be prudent to highlight that AMD’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) equivalent, FidelityFX Super Resolution (or FSR) will in fact be coming to the Xbox consoles, as confirmed by Microsoft. This will presumably make its way to the Sony console as well, since both devices use essentially the same AMD architecture for their SoCs.

In other tech-related news, Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision will in fact not be console-exclusive to the Xbox consoles, despite previous reports. As per the Redmond giant, “a local Xbox team” published a post which “included inaccurate information regarding exclusivity of Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision on Xbox Series X|S. There is no exclusivity agreement of either tech on Xbox.”

Moving on to games, Darkest Dungeon, For Honor, Backbone and more are headed to Game Pass in June, with The King’s Bird and NeoGeo Battle Coliseum being in the first batch of free-to-claim Games with Gold for the same month.

Also in June, specifically on the 8, Mojang is set to release Minecraft Caves & Cliffs: Part I, having split the update in two earlier in the year to allow for more polish.

Last but not least, as per a Microsoft Store leak, Sega is close to unveiling Two Point Campus, a management sim from the creators of 2018’s Two Point Hospital, which in itself is a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital. As E3 is just around the corner, we won’t have long to wait until a release date is revealed.

New Edge features

Ever since switching to Chromium to power its Edge browser, Microsoft has been rather busy tweaking things and adding features to its homegrown browser.

Build 92.0.902.2, which landed this week in the Dev channel, continues the trend, adding a number of management policies to control Active Directory site SSO, as well as features like the ability for the browser to enter Immersive Reader automatically on eligible pages.

It's not all rosy though, as some folks may have noticed that Edge now has some popups recommending that you switch to recommended settings, which include setting Bing as your default search provider. This can thankfully be turned off in the flags page by disabling “Show feature and workflow recommendations”.

In somewhat related news, our very own Nick Hall went hands-on with the News and Interests taskbar feature, pointing out that a little bit more refinement is necessary before it becomes in any way useful. If you are however using this feature and are annoyed by weather not opening in the widget, EdgeDeflector 1.2.1.0 has you covered.

Dev channel

• Microsoft is encouraging cloud adoption in light of the Nobelium cyberattacks.
• ReFirm Labs has been acquired by Microsoft.
• Power BI Report Builder is now a 64-bit app.
• The Surface Duo is being sold at up to $708 off.
• Microsoft has expanded the Airband Initiative.
• Teams will soon get end-to-end encryption and support for native Windows 10 notifications.

Logging off

To wrap things up, we’ll highlight a rather interesting screenshot posted in the Office Insider release notes.

Though the local Outlook app is a pretty mature piece of software, Microsoft seems to be planning on taking some cues from its Outlook.com webmail service for the upcoming release.

It’s expected that the app will be underpinned by a web-based platform dubbed Outlook on the web Powered Experiences (or OPX for short), reportedly codenamed Project Monarch. In the release notes of the Beta Channel build for Office Insiders, Microsoft posted a screenshot of the app’s UI, which is mostly obscured by another feature called Organization Explorer.

The new Outlook app is set to enter preview later this year, with a public release targeted for some time in 2022.

In the meantime however, Microsoft has also been working on improvements to the sharing experience across Microsoft 365 apps. The dropdown option, replacing the current implementation, will be available later this year for OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and more.

Missed any of the previous columns? Be sure to have a look right here.

Here’s what we want to see at E3 2021

E3 2021 is just around the corner and, here at TechRadar, we’re seriously starting to feel the buzz. While E3 will look a bit different this year, taking the form of a digital event rather than an in-person expo, that hasn’t dampened our spirits (too much).

After E3 2020 was canceled, we’re more than ready for a season of big gaming announcements, reveals and teases. It’s like Christmas Day for gamers. And one of the best parts of preparing for E3 is predicting what we’re going to see.

So we’ve rounded up the TechRadar team’s E3 2021 predictions. While some of these predictions are likely, and others possible, there are plenty that are just downright wishful thinking. But it’s all a bit of harmless fun and it’s E3 after all: anything could happen.

A closer look at Fable

Vic Hood, Gaming Editor 

I’m a huge Fable fan and when Fable 4 (officially just called ‘Fable’) was revealed back in 2020, it’s fair to say I was a tad excited. We may have only got a few-second teaser trailer but that was enough to get me hyped. 

I’m hoping that this E3, we get a closer look at what we can expect from the new Fable: where it’s set, what creatures we can expect to see, whether it’ll still focus on heroes and whether the rumors about time-traveling are actually true. Even if it’s just a cinematic trailer – please, Microsoft. Give me something.

Skate 4 reveal

Axel Metz, News Writer

Some sort of Skate-related project is in the works over at EA, that much is clear. It’s been 11 years (11!) since the release of Skate 3, and back in June last year the game’s developers sent fans of the franchise into delirium after announcing that they were “back” – whatever that means. 

Could we see Skate 4 officially (and finally) announced at E3 2021, then? It’s not a game we expect to be able to play any time soon – what’s another few years after a decade-long wait, right? It would, however, be awesome to see EA swap shooters for skateboards for at least a few minutes.

TimeSplitters 2 HD

Daryl Baxter, Software & Downloads Writer

It’s finally happening. Free Radical is coming back with original founders David Doak and Steve Ellis, with the sole aim of creating a new TimeSplitters game.

It’s not looking likely that we’ll see this anytime soon, which is why I'd love to see an HD remaster of the original trilogy, or just the second entry, announced at E3 2021.

Especially with the Switch Pro about to be announced, playing TimeSplitters 2 on this handheld, in online multiplayer, is something that could very well while we wait for the new game to arrive.

More Command & Conquer remasters

Samuel Roberts, Senior Entertainment Editor

My best gaming experience during 2020's pandemic was replaying RTS games from the 1990s. EA resuscitated Command and Conquer and Red Alert for a well-priced, beautiful update in last year's Remastered Collection – and now it's time for two more games in the series to get similar treatment. 

I'd love to see EA announce it's going to do the same with Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun, two more classics that would benefit from having new sprite art, animations and UI tweaks. Sure, I could predict something like 'Elden Ring appears at the Xbox conference' instead as a more exciting E3 prediction – but isn't everyone else on the internet basically saying that already?

The year of Final Fantasy?

Rhys Wood, Staff Writer

Square Enix has a few big Final Fantasy titles in the works, as we know: Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker, Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade and Final Fantasy 16. It’s been a while since we heard from the next major installment in the Final Fantasy series, so I think E3 would be the perfect opportunity to debut a new trailer for the much-hyped FF16. It would also be great to see rumors of a Dark Souls-inspired Final Fantasy come to fruition, and would certainly make for a bumper year for Square Enix’s flagship series.

Spyro 4 announcement

Hamish Hector, Staff Writer

Activision might have built itself a reputation as the Call of Duty factory, and it hasn’t done itself any favors given the recent Toys for Bob layoff news, but I’m hoping it’ll use E3 to remind us it has many other IPs under its belt. My favorite of those is Spyro, and I’m convinced we’ll finally see a follow-up to 2018’s Spyro Reignited Trilogy announced this year. 

While the publisher hasn’t given any concrete plans for E3 yet, its name has been listed on the official list of companies attending the event so it's sure to have some kind of presence, preferably one involving everyone's favorite purple dragon. 

GTA 6 official teaser

John McCann, Global Managing Editor

Okay, this one is a stretch – I know. And it’s certainly a case of my heart over my head. 

It’s been eight long years since the launch of GTA 5, marking the longest stint we’ve ever had between major installations of the hugely popular, open-world game. GTA 6 rumors are worming their way onto the web, and while some are being debunked, it feels like things are slowly building to a head.

Rockstar doesn’t have an E3 press conference and tends to steer clear of the event altogether, but imagine if it dropped a teaser image or even a short trailer for GTA 6 during the gaming expo? It would be the biggest story of the week. Yes, please.

More Legend of Zelda remakes (but no BOTW 2)

Henry St Leger, Home Cinema Editor

2021 is the 35th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda franchise. While the game we’re all keenest to hear about is Breath of the Wild 2, I expect that Nintendo is going to save that game to close off the year’s celebrations, and that we’ll have a few more remake and remaster announcements to get through before we get a good look at it.

We’re close enough to Skyward Sword HD, releasing on the Switch in July, that Nintendo should start pointing towards what’s next on the horizon. Remasters of the GameCube/Wii classic Twilight Princess, or the cel-shaded Wind Waker – possibly as a two-game collection – seem likely, while a renewed trademark for Phantom Hourglass suggests the beloved DS game could get a makeover in the vein of 2019’s Link’s Awakening. With a back catalog like Zelda’s, there’s a lot Nintendo could be planning.

We may well get a BOTW 2 release date to close off Nintendo’s E3 presentation, but likely not too many details or in-depth gameplay – and I do think Nintendo will try to stoke nostalgia with a few more remakes before we really know what we’re getting in the next mainline Zelda game.

Elder Scrolls 6 teaser and confirmation of setting

John Loeffler, Computing Writer

It’s been nearly 10 years since Skyrim was released and, with Fallout 76 getting some legs under it, there’s every reason to expect Bethesda to pivot to Elder Scrolls 6. And now with Microsoft’s merger with Bethesda, E3 could give us our first real details about the highly-anticipated RPG.

We got a very lame teaser a couple of years ago with a brief video showing what looked like highlands, leading many to guess at the province of High Rock as the game’s setting. 

On New Year’s Eve last year, The Elder Scrolls official account tweeted out a photo of a map of Skyrim with some candles and other items on a table, with one of the candles placed right underneath the word Hammerfell to Skyrim’s southwest. Pretty much the entire internet takes this as confirmation that Hammerfell will be the setting for Elder Scrolls 6, and since High Rock is to the north of Hammerfell (and the border region between these two provinces was the setting for Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall), there’s no reason why both Provinces couldn’t be wrapped up into Elder Scrolls 6.

Personally, I don’t see how you do a proper Elder Scrolls game set after Skyrim in the series' timeline. If you support Jarl Ulfric and cast off the Imperials in ES5, then Nords would theoretically be out of the Empire for ES6, which wouldn’t feel right. It’d also be sad for Bethesda to decide which side wins the Stormcloak Rebellion for canonical purposes. The easy way to get around this is to set it further back in the Empire’s past, and Hammerfell has a lot of lore opportunities that they could explore.

Show me Mario Kart 9

Adam Vjestica, Senior Gaming Writer

It’s easy to forget that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was basically a spruced-up re-release of Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U, a game that was released in 2014. That means it’s been seven long years since we got a brand new entry in the series, and I can’t wait any longer. 

It’s time, then, for Nintendo to wow us at E3 2021 with a Mario Kart 9 announcement. 

Even though I’m sure Nintendo will figure out a way to make the next Mario Kart feel suitably fresh, I’d like to see even more faces from the company’s classic franchises this time around. Let me race around as Samus Aran, inhale rivals as Kirby, or skid around the track as Captain Olimar. There are so many characters that deserve to cross the finish line, so Nintendo should stuff Mario Kart 9’s roster full of fan favorites, just like it did for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. 

Sadly, as much as I want Mario Kart 9 to be announced, I still don’t think it will happen. If Nintendo released some more DLC for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, though, that would at least keep me, and many others, content for a little while longer.

AMD's Raphael is rumored to be the codename of AMD's Ryzen 7000 series of processors based on the Zen 4 micro-architecture. The next-gen processor is said to be introducing the company's next major socket revision dubbed "AM5" in the mainstream desktop lineup. The new socket AM5 is going to be significant for more than one reason.

We already know from earlier leaks that DDR5 memory support will reportedly be coming to AMD with this socket. And now we learn that the Socket AM5, like Intel's, will be moving to Land Grid Array (or LGA) from the current Pin Grid Array (or PGA) packaging. This essentially means that pins, which have so far been on AMD's processors, will now be moved to the motherboard in AM5.

Here's a rendering of how a Raphael CPU might look like from below:

YouTuber GamersNexus (GN) has said today that it had received images of internal AMD slides related to Raphael last year but decided against releasing them to the public since the authenticity of those images couldn't be verified. However, after Twitter leakster 'ExecutableFix' also seemed to share similar information about two weeks ago, GN says he feels much more confident now to share these publicly. Bear in mind though that these slides are more than a year old at this point and some of this information on them like DDR4 memory support on AM5, has likely been updated since.

With that aside, here are the rumored details of the two leaks we have so far:

• Socket AM5,
• LGA package,
• Zen 4 Core Core Chiplet Die (CCD) codename Durango,
• Zen 4 CCD based on 5nm while the I/O die will be 7nm,
• Ryzen 7000 desktop TDP up to 120W (may go higher up to 170W),
• Ryzen 7000 mobile 35-65W,
• DDR5 memory,
• 28 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

AMD is expected to release Raphael in late 2022 or the year after since the company has its 7nm Zen 3+ based chips planned for launch later this year. Zen 3+ is likely to feature its new 3D-stacked V-cache which AMD unveiled at Computex. The new 3D V-cache is said to offer around a 15% average improvement in gaming performance.

While the Ryzen 7000 series Raphael chips may be the first to use LGA on the mainstream platform, the company has always been using LGA packaging on its Threadripper-based HEDT lineup.

Source: ExecutableFix (Twitter) via GamersNexus (YouTube)

Quote

A notable benefit to dual actuator technology standardization is that it drastically cuts down test time, and therefore, hard drive production time is greatly reduced. This is a benefit we're looking forward to recognizing on the cost side of the business.

The NVM Express (NVMe) consortium has launched today the latest NVMe specification version 2.0. The new 2.0 spec is backwards compatible with previous specifications. By 2024, the NVMe body expects PCIe SSDs to grow at a 43% compound annual growth rate and a move to a new standard to tackle that demand and to enable next-gen features is important says the organization.

As one would expect from a new standard, the NVMe 2.0 spec brings with it plenty of new technologies and perhaps the most interesting one among these is the support for rotational storage media on NVMe. This essentially means that now hard disk drives (HDDs) can also run on the NVMe interface.

Other key new features are:

• Zoned Namespaces (ZNS): A new technology that will help to place the data in certain zones within the storage device depending on how frequently they are used so rewriting and rearranging of the data stored can be reduced. This should lead to overall drive performance and life improvement. Below is an image showing the data placement difference between a conventional SSD and a ZNS SSD.
•  

• Endurance Group Management: A new management mechanism of the storage that can allow flexible and dynamic SSD configurations which will enable dynamic capacity management and mixed-mode NAND operation. This according to the NVMe consortium should improve the "granularity of access to the SSD" and the overall control we have on the storage.
• Key Value (KV): The KV command set will allow applications to communicate with the drive controller using KV pairs instead of doing so via a block address. This is said to lower CPU computational load. This kind of SSD is known as a KV-SSD.

Back in 2019, Samsung launched the industry's first KV-SSD prototype while it was Western Digital, last year, which began sampling the first-ever consumer ZNS SSD in the form of the Ultrastar DC ZN540. With the new spec now out, we should see more such products to follow suit soon. In fact, just yesterday, Samsung released its own SSD running on ZNS technology.

You can read more about the new NVMe 2.0 specification here.

More Windows on Arm laptops are hitting the market

Samsung has announced the launch of the 2.5-inch PM1731a - its first solid-state drive that features Zoned Namespace (ZNS) technology.

By making use of ZNS technology, the SSD will provide its users improved lifespan in cloud environments, data center, and storage server, and maximum available user capacity. ZNS will enable data to be grouped contingent on its access frequency and usage, and deposited in independent spaces within the SSD.

This storage device is notably capable of mitigating the number of write operations, which, in turn, reduces the writer amplification factor (WAF) of the drive. Samsung claims that this feature will increase the endurance up to fourfold as compared to conventional NVMe SSDs.

Sangyeun Cho, senior vice president of the Memory Software Development Team at Samsung had the following to say:

Samsung’s ZNS SSD reflects our commitment to introducing differentiated storage solutions that can substantially enhance the reliability and lifetime of server SSDs. We plan to leverage quad-level cell (QLC) NAND technology in our next-generation ZNS drives to enable higher thresholds for storage performance and capacity in the enterprise systems of tomorrow.

The PM1731a is built on Samsung's sixth-generation V-NAND and will come in 4TB and 2TB models, with dual ports. Although prices and exact launch dates have not been announced yet, Samsung says that it plans to mass-produce ZNS SSDs in the second half of 2021.

Hello Games has been updating its space exploration and adventure game No Man's Sky with fresh content for almost half a decade now, and it is not done yet. The latest update, dubbed Prisms, is aimed towards dramatically increasing the game's visual fidelity while also adding the ability to adopt and ride flying creatures.

The visual improvements come from the addition of screen space reflections for higher quality reflective surfaces, alongside enhanced volumetric lighting, light refractions, as well as rain and weather density improvements, among other effects. There is now even an advanced photo mode to take the new graphics for a spin.

There are also new audio and visual effects for warp travel, more alien looking subterranean biomes, a huge increase to the number of stars that can be seen across the sky, and – as Nvidia announced earlier this week – DLSS support. Fur rendering is also in for the first time, giving appropriate creatures the all-important fuzzy look.

Not all enhancements are available across every platform though. Screen space reflections are only enabled on PC, the new generation consoles, and the Xbox One X, with support for PCVR coming soon. Old-generation consoles are also missing out on the planetary detail improvements this update carries. Meanwhile, Xbox One S and PSVR platforms aren't getting the new fur rendering

The No Man's Sky 3.5 Prisms update has now shipped out across all systems. The official patch notes of the release can be found here.

At Computex today, as the company had promised, Nvidia has announced its newest GeForce RTX offerings, the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3070 Ti GPUs. The former will be available to purchase worldwide in a couple of days on June 3 and it is priced at $1,199, which is 20% higher than what rumors had earlier suggested.

For this asking price, the new RTX 3080 Ti, Nvidia says, delivers twice the performance of the GTX 1080 Ti even in traditional rasterization situations. The gap naturally extends further when newer technologies like DLSS or real-time ray tracing are added into the mix.

Moving on, the 3080 Ti's smaller sibling the RTX 3070 Ti is a much more affordable product coming in for half the price of the former at $599. It will be available for purchase next week. Similar to the performance claims of the 3080 Ti, Nvidia says that the new RTX 3070 Ti offers double the performance of the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. It is also said to offer around 50% more performance than the RTX 2070 SUPER.

In terms of cooling, both the RTX 3080 Ti and the 3070 Ti seem to be equipped with the same cooler design that came with the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3080. Both the coolers are 2-slot wide. The hardware specifications of the two new GPUs are given below:

Check out some gameplay footage of DOOM Eternal at 4K on the new RTX 3080 Ti provided by Nvidia. (YouTube sign-in required). You can read more about the RTX 3080 Ti and the 3070 Ti here.

Movin' on up

AMD made some news last night during its Computex 2021 keynote address when AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su showed off the company's new 3D chiplet technology, developed in partnership with TSMC.

The long and short of it is that rather than spread itself out over a wider die, CPU components like the logic unit and cache memory are stacked on top of each other, utilizing vertical space rather than growing the total surface area of the chip in a flat wafer.

While the technology is primarily being pioneered by TSMC, AMD looks to be the first chipmaker to take advantage of the new process by introducing new "vertical L3 cache" to its Ryzen series processors. 

Without getting bogged down too much in computer system architecture, cache memory is the part of the processor that stores the most relevant data and program instructions for the processor at any given time. The larger the cache, the more data can be stored there so the processor doesn't have to fetch new data from RAM, which takes longer and slows down performance.

According to Su, by stacking a 64MB SRAM node onto the CCD (the part of the processor that contains a collection of processing cores), AMD is able to triple the available L3 cache on a 16-core processor from a maximum of 64MB to 192MB. 

This change alone gave AMD's prototype, a Ryzen 9 5900X processor using the new 3D v-cache tech, a roughly 12% performance boost during a demo of Gear of War 5. This kind of performance increase is typically what you see between processor generations, so boosting the performance of an existing processor by 12% using just a 3D chiplet design is pretty impressive.

And while this technology hasn't made its way into a consumer processor yet, AMD says that it "is on-track to begin production on future high-end computing products with 3D chiplets by the end of this year."

Are AMD's 3D chiplets the future of processors?

Without getting too deep in the weeds of Moore's Law, the writing has been on the wall for the assumption that our computers would get progressively faster for more than a decade now. We can no longer rely on the brute-force engineering of smaller and smaller transistors to make our computers more and more powerful. We are approaching the literal physical limit of how small these transistors can be before individual silicon atoms start becoming unreliable mediums for electrical current.

So while we've pretty come to the end of the easy way to fabricate increasingly powerful computers, this doesn't mean the end of progress as we know it. We'll continue to shrink transistors for years to come, but the next phase is moving beyond the transistor and innovating new processor technology that we haven't even considered yet – and 3D fabrication is the obvious next step.

We've long realized that when you run out of physical space and you need to squeeze in more of something, whether that means transistors, inventory, or even people, start moving upward rather than outward. All you need to do is look at a city skyline or an IKEA warehouse to see this in practice.

AMD's new 3D V-Cache is just the first implementation of many to move in this direction – literally. Expanding the cache available for existing processor architecture is already giving a serious boost to performance, but there's no reason why we can't just start stacking cores as well. 

This would require all kinds of new engineering solutions to heat management, physical integrity, power consumption, and the like, but those have always been obstacles in processor innovation – and unlike shrinking transistors to the point where you can literally count the number of atoms you're working with, these latter challenges are much more manageable and hold a lot more promise than trying to somehow fab less-than-1nm dies.

It's been a long wait for an Nvidia DLSS competitor - will it be worth it?

After around a year of teasing that it's coming, AMD has finally confirmed that its FidelityFX Super Resolution tech is coming on June 22. 

AMD made the announcement as part of its Computex 2021 keynote, and it looks to deliver a similar performance boost to Nvidia's DLSS (deep learning super sampling) technology. However, unlike Nvidia's upscaling tech, FidelityFX Super Resolution will work on any recent graphics card, as AMD has demonstrated the tech working on an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 in GodFall. 

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, based on Team Red's own claims, should provide a up to a whopping 2x performance jump on AMD graphics cards using the Quality mode of Super Resolution, and up to a 2x performance boost in its Performance mode. These numbers come from GodFall at 4K with ray tracing on an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, so it's not clear if these numbers will change at all on other graphics cards. 

AMD does share some brief information about the technology working with its competitor's graphics cards, but not the same breakdown we see for the 6800 XT. Also in Godfall, but at 1440p, AMD claims that the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 can go from 27 fps to 38 fps at 1440p, using the Epic Preset and FidelityFX Super Resolution with its Quality mode. That's not the same 2x performance jump that AMD's own card boasts, but that's still a 41% performance jump. 

We'll have to see for ourselves how this technology fares once we can get our hands on it for some more in-depth testing on June 22. But for right now, just based on AMD's own claims, this technology is looking extremely promising. 

Will AMD’s processor dominance extend to its GPUs?