VideoCardz reports: NVIDIA has just told its board partners that it will not launch GeForce RTX 3080 20GB and RTX 3070 16GB cards as planned. NVIDIA allegedly cancels its December launch of GeForce RTX 3080 20GB and RTX 3070 16GB. This still very fresh information comes from two independent sources. Technically GeForce RTX 3080 20GB and RTX 3070 16GB could launch at a later time, but the information that we have clearly stated that those SKUs have been canceled, not postponed. NVIDIA has already canceled its RTX 3070 Ti model (PG141 SKU 0), so the RTX 3070 16GB (PG141 SKU5) and RTX 3080 20GB (PG132 SKU20) will be joining the list. The GeForce RTX 3080 20GB was expected to be a response to AMD Radeon RX 6900/6800 series featuring Navi 21 GPU. All three AMD SKUs will feature 16GB of memory, leaving NVIDIA with a smaller frame buffer to compete with. We do not know the official reason for the cancellation. The RTX 3080 20GB might have been scrapped due to low GDDR6X yield issues, one source claims. The reason behind RTX 3070 16GB cancellation is unknown (this SKU uses GDDR6 memory). The plans for GeForce RTX 3060 Ti remain unchanged. The PG190 SKU 10 remains on track for mid-November launch.

The Motley Fool writes: AMD held just under 18% of the CPU market at the end of 2016 before Ryzen arrived. The latest third-party estimates suggest that the chipmaker now controls close to 37% of the market. Other reliable estimates from the likes of video gaming platform Steam also suggest that AMD has been consistently chipping away at Intel's CPU dominance. And AMD isn't done hammering Intel in CPUs just yet — especially since the arrival of its latest Ryzen 5000 CPUs...

According to AMD's own claims, a high-end Ryzen 5000 processor can deliver a 26% jump in gaming performance over the previous-generation chip. AMD also claims that the chip is 7% faster in gaming performance than the competing Intel chip...

Rumors suggest that Intel may not launch its 12th-generation 10nm Alder Lake processors until the second half of 2021 to compete with AMD's 7nm process. So AMD is likely to continue enjoying a technology lead over Intel, especially considering that it could make the move to a 5nm manufacturing process with the Zen 4 microarchitecture by the end of 2021, according to rumors. As such, don't be surprised to see AMD continuing to eat Intel's market share, and remaining a top growth stock in the future thanks to a combination of improved CPU sales and stronger pricing power.

FSGSBASE support in Linux "has the possibility of helping Intel/AMD CPU performance especially in areas like context switching that had been hurt badly by Spectre/Meltdown and other CPU vulnerability mitigations largely on the Intel side," Phoronix wrote back in August. As it started its journey into the kernel, they provided a preview on August 10: The FSGSBASE support that was finally mainlined a few days ago for Linux 5.9 is off to providing a nice performance boost for both Intel and AMD systems... FSGSBASE support for the Linux kernel has been around a half-decade in the making and finally carried over the finish line by one of Microsoft's Linux kernel engineers...

FSGSBASE particularly helps out context switching heavy workloads like I/O and allowing user-space software to write to the x86_64 GSBASE without kernel interaction. That in turn has been of interest to Java and others...On Linux 5.9 where FSGSBASE is finally mainlined, it's enabled by default on supported CPUs. FSGSBASE can be disabled at kernel boot time via the "nofsgsbase" kernel option.
Today on the Linux kernel mailing list, Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.9: Ok, so I'll be honest - I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here. It's just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for.
And Phoronix reported: Linux 5.9 has a number of exciting improvements including initial support for upcoming Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA 2" graphics cards, initial Intel Rocket Lake graphics, NVMe zoned namespaces (ZNS) support, various storage improvements, IBM's initial work on POWER10 CPU bring-up, the FSGSBASE instruction is now used, 32-bit x86 Clang build support, and more. See our Linux 5.9 feature overview for the whole scoop on the many changes to see with this kernel.

According to The Wall Street Journal, AMD is in advanced talks to buy rival chip maker Xilinx Inc. for more than $30 billion. Slashdot reader Jerrry writes: "Looks like further consolidation in the chip industry is in order if this merger goes through..." CNBC reports: A deal, which could mark the latest big tie-up in the rapidly consolidating semiconductor industry, can come together as soon as next week, [The Wall Street Journal reported]. AMD has seen a higher usage of its products recently, driven in part by an overall surge in chip demand due to a global shift to work from home, and market-share gains from larger rival Intel.

San Jose, California-based Xilinx makes programmable chips used in data centers to speed up tasks such as artificial intelligence work and in 5G telecommunications base stations. The company's business suffered a setback last year when key customer Huawei Technologies Ltd was blacklisted by U.S. officials, preventing it from buying chips from U.S. companies. Government officials have since added other China-based companies, including some Xilinx customers, to the list.

Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has today announced the company's next generation mainstream Ryzen processor. From a report: The new family, known as the Ryzen 5000 series, includes four parts and supports up to sixteen cores. The key element of the new product is the core design, with AMD's latest Zen 3 microarchitecture, promising a 19% raw increase in performance-per-clock, well above recent generational improvements. The new processors are socket-compatible with existing 500-series motherboards, and will be available at retail from November 5th. AMD is putting a clear marker in the sand, calling one of its halo products as 'The World's Best Gaming CPU.' With the new Ryzen 5000 series, AMD is keeping a similar structure to the previous generation. The first four processors to market will include products in the key Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 segments, as well as a pair of high-performance parts with Ryzen 9. These will stretch from six cores to sixteen cores, with increased frequencies and increased performance-per-clock, but with no additional increase in power. The processors are still chiplet-based, with one chiplet having either six or eight cores. Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 will have one chiplet, while Ryzen 9 will have two chiplets -- the easy way to identify this is through the amount of L3 cache each processor has. Full details here.

Intel's 10th Gen Comet Lake S desktop CPUs debuted earlier this year, with the Core i9-10900K in particular offering sizeable gains in gaming performance from the previous generation. The mid-range Core i7-10700K and Core i5-10600K also come with exciting gains in a lot of areas, but one downside is that the 10th Gen designs don't support PCIe 4.0, unlike their AMD counterparts. Intel is aiming to fix that with the 11th Gen Rocket Lake series. The chip manufacturer has confirmed that the 11th Gen Rocket Lake series will make its debut in Q1 2021, and that it will include PCIe 4.0 support. From a report: Intel didn't go into architectural details on Rocket Lake, but recent leaks give us a high-level overview of the platform. The Rocket Lake S desktop designs will be based on a 14nm node -- much like Intel's last four generations -- but Intel is introducing a new Willow Cove architecture that should deliver decent gains over the current 10th Gen platform. In particular, Rocket Lake will deliver significant IPC gains thanks to the switch to Willow Cove, with Intel once again able to leverage 5.0GHz boost frequencies because of the mature 14nm platform.

Gateway, the major PC brand of the 1990s with the iconic cow-spotted logo, is back -- well, kind of. Acer now owns the company and has decided to start selling Gateway-branded laptops again, exclusively at Walmart. From a report: As is often the case with Walmart-exclusive laptops, the main attraction is the price. On the most affordable end is the Gateway Ultra Thin series, which starts with a $179 11.6-inch laptop with an AMD A4, and spans up to a $499 15.6-inch model with a Core i5. There's also a $199 11.6-inch touchscreen 2-in-1 available, powered by an Intel Celeron processor. The names aren't very interesting, but they do come in a variety of fun colors, including purple, blue, green, and rose gold, as well as black. On the higher end is the Gateway Creators series, two 15.6-inch laptops meant for media editing and gaming. No funky colors on these -- they only come in black -- but they do seem to have some decent specs. You can choose the $799 rig with a Ryzen 5 4600H and an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU or a $999 model with a Core i5 and an RTX 2060. That puts them a step above the Ultra Thin series in price, but they're still fairly inexpensive as creator-focused machines go. I would guess that's at least partially because they don't seem to have a lot of storage -- only 256GB each.

Samsung has unveiled its next high-performance NVMe 2280-sized M.2 drive, the 980 Pro. So far, it comes in three capacities shipping this month: 250GB for $89.99, 500GB for $149.99, and 1TB for $229.99. A 2TB model will arrive later this year, but Samsung didn't share a price. From a report: The standout feature of this drive is its compatibility with M.2 slots over the PCIe 4.0 interface. If you have a compatible motherboard, Samsung says the 980 Pro can go on a tear with sequential read / write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively. It claims that this is two times faster performance than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and nearly 13 times faster than the more affordable but slower SATA SSDs. Of course, to get the best speeds out of this Samsung M.2 drive, you'll need a compatible motherboard with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot. Adoption of the tech is starting to ramp up, including mainstream computing products like AMD's third-generation Ryzen CPUs, its Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT GPUs, and more recently, Nvidia's RTX 3080 graphics card. Sony and Microsoft are also using the technology for their custom SSD technologies in the PS5 and Xbox Series S / X consoles.

MojoKid writes: Intel formally announced its 11th Gen Core mobile processor family, known by the code name Tiger Lake, a few weeks back and made some bold performance claims for it as well. The company even compared its quad-core variant to AMD's 8-core Ryzen 7 4800U in gaming and content creation. Today Intel lifted the embargo veil on benchmarks with its Core i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake CPU with on-board Iris Xe graphics and there's no question Tiger Lake is impressive. Intel indeed achieved single-threaded performance gains north of 20% with even larger deltas for multithreaded throughput in some cases as well. In addition, Tiger Lake's integrated Iris Xe graphics put up over 2X the gaming performance over the company's 10th Gen Ice Lake processors, and it looks to be the fastest integrated graphics solution for laptops on the market currently, besting AMD's Ryzen 4000 series as well. Battery life measurements are still out, however, as retail ready products have yet to hit the channel. Intel notes Tiger Lake-powered laptops from OEM partners should be available in the next month or so.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang officially unveiled the GeForce RTX 30 series based on the company's new Ampere architecture a couple of weeks back. According to Huang, the GeForce RTX 30 series represents the greatest generational leap in the company's history and he claimed the GeForce RTX 3080 would offer double the performance of its predecessor. The embargo for GeForce RTX 3080 reviews just lifted and it seems NVIDIA was intent on making good on its claims. The GeForce RTX 3080 is the fastest GPU released to date, across the board, regardless of the game, application, or benchmarks used. Throughout testing, the GeForce RTX 3080 often put up scores more than doubling the performance of AMD's current flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT. The RTX 3080 even skunked the NVIDIA Titan RTX and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti by relatively large margins, even though it will retail for almost half the price of a 2080 Ti (at least currently). The bottom line is, NVIDIA's got an absolutely stellar-performing GPU on its hands, and the GeForce RTX 3080 isn't even the best Ampere has to offer, with the RTX 3090 waiting in the wings. GeForce RTX 3080 cards will be available from NVIDIA and third-party board partners on 9/17 for an entry-level MSRP of $699.

"Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed 'BlindSide' as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors," reports Phoronix: BlindSide is self-described as being able to "mount BROP-style attacks in the speculative execution domain to repeatedly probe and derandomize the kernel address space, craft arbitrary memory read gadgets, and enable reliable exploitation. This works even in face of strong randomization schemes, e.g., the recent FGKASLR or fine-grained schemes based on execute-only memory, and state-of-the-art mitigations against Spectre and other transient execution attacks."

From a single buffer overflow in the kernel, researchers claim three BlindSide exploits in being able to break KASLR (Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization), break arbitrary randomization schemes, and even break fine-grained randomization.
There's more information on the researcher's web site, and they've also created an informational video.

And here's a crucial excerpt from their paper shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm: In addition to the Intel Whiskey Lake CPU in our evaluation, we confirmed similar results on Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5, XeonE3-1270 v6 and Core i9-9900K CPUs, based on the Skylake, KabyLake and Coffee Lake microarchitectures, respectively, as well as on AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 3700X CPUs, which are based on the Zen+ and Zen2 microarchitectures.

Overall, our results confirm speculative probing is effective on a modern Linux system on different microarchitectures, hardened with the latest mitigations.

On Wednesday, Acer and Walmart announced they were reviving the Gateway brand to sell affordable Windows 10 notebooks and laptop convertibles from $179 and up. PCMag reports: Gateway was once a major PC vendor in the US, especially during the 1990s when it famously sold computers packaged in cow spotted boxes. However, the company's fortunes began to falter in the 2000s, resulting in Taiwanese PC vendor Acer later buying it up. Acer has now decided to bring back Gateway, calling it a "beloved" brand in the US. And to market the products, the company has resurrected the cow spotted box logo.

According to Acer, the products are designed for everyday consumers, students and "creators," who pump out content or graphic designs. The hardware will also feature processors from either Intel or AMD, and come fitted with 1080p screens. In total, the Gateway PCs span nine different notebook models. At the low-end is the "11.6-inch Ultra Slim" laptop, which retails for $179, and contains 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. At the high-end, you can buy the "Gateway Creator Series 15.6-inch Performance Notebook," which has an Intel 10th Gen Core i5-10300H processor, an NVIDIA 2060 RTX graphics card, 256GB of SSD storage and 8GB of RAM.

An anonymous reader writes: The fact that Apple is moving away from Intel to ARM has been making a lot of headlines recently — but that's not the only new place where ARM CPUs have been making a splash.

ARM has also been turning heads in High Performance Computing (HPC), and an ARM-based system is now the world's most powerful supercomputer (Fugaku). AWS recently made their 2nd generation ARM Graviton chips available which allows everyone to test HPC workloads on ARM silicon. A company called The Numerical Algorithms Group recently published a small benchmark study that compared weather simulations on Intel, AMD and ARM instances on AWS and reported that although the ARM silicon is slowest, it is also the cheapest for this benchmark.
The benchmark test concludes the ARM processor provides "a very cost-efficient solution...and performance is competitive to other, more traditional HPC processors."

Last month Intel's stock lost $50 billion in valuation — while the valuation for Taiwan-based TSMC jumped by over 50%.

The former chief of staff to Intel CEO Andrew Grove (and later general manager of Intel China) explains why this moment was 15 years in the making: Learning curve theory says that the cost of manufacturing a product declines as the volume increases. Manufacturing chips for the whole computer industry gave Intel huge advantages of scale over any other semiconductor manufacturer and resulted in the company becoming the world's largest chip manufacturer with enviable profit margins.

Chaos theory says that a small change in one state of a system can cause a large change in a later stage. In Intel's case, this was not getting selected by Apple for its iPhones. Each successive era of computing was 10x the size of the previous era, so while Intel produced hundreds of millions of microprocessors per year, the mobile phone industry sells billions of units per year. Apple's decision in 2005 to use the ARM architecture instead of Intel's gave Taiwan-based TSMC, the foundry chosen to manufacture the processor chips for the iPhone, the learning curve advantage which over time enabled it to pull ahead of Intel in manufacturing process technology.

Intel's integrated model, its competitive advantage for decades, became its vulnerability. TSMC and ARM created a tectonic shift in the semiconductor industry by enabling a large number of "fabless" chip companies such as Apple, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm, to name a few. These fabless companies began to out-design Intel in the mobile phone industry and accelerated TSMC's lead over Intel in high volume manufacturing of the most advanced chips. Samsung, which also operates a foundry business, has been another beneficiary of this trend.

This week saw the release Linux 5.8, which Linus Torvalds called "one of our biggest releases of all time," reports TechRepublic: The new version of the Linux kernel brings a number of updates to Linux 5.7 spanning security, core components, drivers, memory management, networking and improvements to the kernel's design, amongst others. This includes updates for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform, Intel Tiger Lake Thunderbolt support, improvements to Microsoft's exFAT file system, and support for newer Intel and ARM chips.

Torvalds said the kernel had received over 15,000 merge requests and that around 20% of all the files in the kernel source repository had been modified. "That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it is scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development," Torvalds said.

Translated into numbers, Linux 5.8 includes over 800,000 new lines and over 14,000 changed files. It also received one of the biggest number of merge requests during its merge window — over 14,000 non-merge commits and more than 15,000 including merges, according to Torvalds. "5.8 looks big. Really big," he added.

New submitter spth writes: Demand for notebooks with AMD Ryzen processors is far higher than supply. Following a reddit post by a Schenker (German computer manufacturer) employee about Ryzen 4800H shortages, Heinz Heise (Heinz Heise is the publisher of some leading German computer magazines, such as c't and iX) journalists investigated and found that the shortage apparently affects all Ryzen 4000 mobile APUs, and according to AMD is an industry-wide phenomena. Apparently, a large part of TSMC production capacity is needed for production of the APUs of future PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, and cannot be used to compensate for increased Ryzen 4000 demand.

Bleeping Computer reported this week that a new public repository of leaked code includes big names like Microsoft, Adobe, Lenovo, AMD, Qualcomm, Motorola, Roblox, and Disney: The leaks have been collected by Tillie Kottmann, a developer and reverse engineer, from various sources and from their own hunting for misconfigured devops tools that offer access to source code... According to Bank Security, a researcher focused on banking threats and fraud, code from more than 50 companies is published in the repository...

Kottmann told BleepingComputer that they find hardcoded credentials in the easily-accessible code repositories, which they try to remove as best as they can... Kottmann also says that they comply with takedown requests and gladly provide information that would strengthen the security of a company's infrastructure. One leak from Daimler AG corporation behind the Mercedes-Benz brand is no longer present in the repository. Another empty folder has Lenovo in its name. However, judging by the number of DMCA notices received (estimated at up to seven) and direct contact from legal or other representatives, many companies may not be aware of the leaks...

Reviewing some of the code leaked on Kottmann's GitLab server revealed that some of the projects have been made public by their original developer or had been last updated a long time ago. Nevertheless, the developer told us that there are more companies with misconfigured devops tools exposing source code. Furthermore, they are exploring servers running SonarQube, an open-source platform for automated code auditing and static analysis to uncover bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Kottmann believes there are thousands of companies that expose proprietary code by failing to properly secure SonarQube installations.
Tom's Guide considers it a serious breach: Jake Moore, a security specialist at ESET, told Tom's Guide: "Losing control of the source code on the internet is like handing the blueprints of a bank to robbers.

"This list will be viewed by cyber criminals far and wide looking for vulnerabilities as well as confidential information in a scarily short space of time."

If you've been following along with Intel's troubles moving away from its 14nm process to 10nm over the years, you probably won't be surprised to learn that the company is now having trouble getting its 7nm process off the ground. From a report: On its Q2 earnings call this week, Intel revealed that it's pushing back its previously planed 7nm rollout by six months -- and that yields for the process are now a year behind schedule. This means that Intel can't produce 7nm chips in an economically viable way at the moment. Intel originally expected to catch up with AMD's 7nm chips in 2021, but didn't say when in 2021. With these new delays, that puts Intel's 7nm chip debut in 2022, at the earliest. By then, AMD may already be on its Ryzen 6000 5nm chips on Zen 4 architecture, according to its roadmap -- though that's assuming AMD doesn't run into any delays itself.

However, there is some good news on the 10nm front. From Intel's Q2 2020 press release, the company says it's "accelerating its transition to 10nm products this year" and growing its portfolio of 10nm-based Intel Core processors. That includes its Tiger Lake chips and its first 10nm-based server CPU Ice Lake. Additionally, Intel said it "expects to deliver a new line of client CPUs (code-named Alder Lake), which will include its first 10nm-based desktop CPU, and a new 10nm-based server CPU (code-named Sapphire Rapids)." Intel originally announced its 10nm chips in 2015, but confirmed it was having yield issues and other problems that July.

MojoKid writes: Today AMD took the wraps off a new line of desktop processors based on its Zen 2 architecture but also with integrated Radeon graphics to better compete against Intel with OEM system builders. These new AMD Ryzen 4000 socket AM4 desktop processors are essentially juiced-up versions of AMD's already announced Ryzen 4000 laptop CPUs, but with faster base and boost clocks, as well as faster GPU clocks for desktop PCs. There are two distinct families AMD Ryzen 4000 families, a trio of 65-watt processors that include the Ryzen 3 4300G (4-core/8-thread), Ryzen 5 4600G (6-core/12-thread), and the flagship Ryzen 7 4700G, offering 8 cores/16 threads, base/boost clocks of 3.6GHz/4.4GHz, 12MB cache, and 8 Radeon Vega cores clocked at 2100MHz. AMD is also offering three 35-watt processors -- Ryzen 3 4300GE, Ryzen 5 4600GE, and the Ryzen 7 4700GE -- which share the same base hardware configurations as the "G" models but slightly lower CPU/GPU clocks to reduce power consumption. In addition AMD also announced its Ryzen Pro 4000 series for business desktops, which also include a dedicated security processor and support for AMD Memory Guard full system memory encryption. As you might expect, specs (core/cache counts, CPU/GPU clocks) for the Ryzen Pro 4000G (65W) and Ryzen Pro 4000GE (35W) largely line up with their consumer desktop counterparts.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Google gives its online video service YouTube the advantage when choosing the best video clips to promote from around the web. From the report: Take a clip of basketball star Zion Williamson that the National Basketball Association posted online in January, when he made his highly anticipated pro debut. The clip was popular on Facebook Inc., drawing more than one million views and nearly 900 comments as of March. A nearly identical YouTube version of the clip with the same title was seen about 182,000 times and garnered fewer than 400 comments. But when The Wall Street Journal's automated bots searched Google for the clip's title, the YouTube version featured much more prominently than the Facebook version.

The Journal conducted Google searches for a selection of other videos and channels that are available on YouTube as well as on competitors' platforms. The YouTube versions were significantly more prominent in the results in the vast majority of cases. This isn't by accident. Engineers at Google have made changes that effectively preference YouTube over other video sources, according to people familiar with the matter. Google executives in recent years made decisions to prioritize YouTube on the first page of search results, in part to drive traffic to YouTube rather than to competitors, and also to give YouTube more leverage in business deals with content providers seeking traffic for their videos, one of those people said. A Google spokeswoman, Lara Levin, said there is no preference given to YouTube or any other video provider in Google search. "Our systems use a number of signals from the web to understand what results people find most relevant and helpful for a given query," Ms. Levin said. She declined to comment on the specific examples cited in the article.