Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

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By the way, here's a couple of news that may, or not, interest you. I wouldn't put too much faith in the first one given the sources (RedGamingTech and Moore's Law is Dead) and some dubious conclusions that even the article refutes, while the second one looks cool but I think it will have a hard time going forward:

AMD prioritising multi-thread over single-thread performance for next-gen Zen 5 CPUs according to new rumours
https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-prioritising-multi-thread-over-single-thread-performance-for-next-gen-zen-5-cpus-according-to-new-rumours/
AMD is on the record scheduling its next-gen Zen CPUs, to be known as the Ryzen 8000 series, for next year. We could even see Zen 5 launch in some form in the first half of 2024. So, it's no surprise that the rumours regarding the new chips are now coming thick and fast.

The latest comes from YouTube channel RedGamingTech and among numerous details perhaps the big stand out is a claim that AMD is prioritising multi-threaded performance over single-threaded.

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Now, given the far greater financial rewards of server chip sales for AMD, RedGamingTech's claim is that Zen 5's architecture has been tilted slightly in favour of server performance over client PC performance. And server performance is generally all about multi-threaded performance.

The consequence? The gap between the maximum single-core clock speed and maximum multi or all-core clockspeed has been narrowed for Zen 5 compared to previous Zen chips.

The immediate implication is that single-thread frequencies may have suffered. If that's the case, it does not appear to be by much. RedGamingTech claims that "late engineering samples" of what the channel claims to be the Ryzen 9 8950X are hitting 5.6GHz. That's just 100MHz down on the existing Ryzen 9 7950X.

And, of course, we're talking engineering samples, not final silicon. So, that frequency could yet improve.

At the same time, RedGamingTech has some claimed information regarding Zen 5's IPC or instructions per clock performance, which is the measure of the performance of a single software thread per clock cycle. In other words, independent of clock speed.

Earlier info from competing rumour monger Moore's Law is Dead revealed a purported AMD internal slide showing Zen 5's IPC improving by 10 to 15%, which was a little disappointing.

RedGamingTech is now claiming the slide in question used the narrow measure of SpecInt to come up with those IPC numbers, and that broader IPC gains across multiple integer and floating point workloads will likely be 20% or more.

Assuming that Zen 5 does hit similar peak clockspeeds to Zen 4, we're then looking at about 20% more single-thread performance. But the multi-thread performance gains should be bigger given that claim of narrowing the frequency gap between single and multi-threaded loads.

So you could argue that it's more a case of multi-thread performance getting a particularly big boost than single-thread performance suffering. But if this is what AMD is doing, you could also argue that single-thread performance would likely be better still had that been the priority.

Canon challenges ASML dominance with new chipmaking tech that could lead to cheaper chips
https://www.pcgamer.com/canon-challenges-asml-dominance-with-new-chipmaking-tech-that-could-lead-to-cheaper-chips/
The chips we know and love are made with some of the most advanced manufacturing methods on the planet. The smallest nodes require billions of dollars in capital expenditures, a big part of which goes to Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography machines manufactured by ASML, the current market leader. But there's a new challenger and some exciting tech on the horizon that aims to change the status quo, potentially leading to a fall in the cost of chips.

Japan-based electronics giant Canon (via Bloomberg) has developed what it calls Nanoimprint Lithography technology that it claims could scale down to 2nm. That's small enough to rival EUV lithography, but the more important part of this news is the claim that Canon's technology will have a price of "one digit less than ASML's EUV tools". In other words, Canon's tech should cost just a tenth of an equivalent ASML machine.

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Nanoimprint lithography is pretty much as it sounds. Using NIL, circuits are essentially printed directly onto a wafer. It involves applying a resin directly to the wafer, followed by the pressing of a mold to create surface patterns before ultraviolet light is used to solidify the patterns. However, production yields and the potential for defects remain unanswered questions for now.