Hopefully, the next GPU is assembled in the US (or Israel... or Germany... or Russia... or Mainland China... or freaking Costa Rica, they all have Intel fabs) and we can forget this happened. 

Like, if I was Intel, I'd think of finding a way to get my Israeli staff to put in as much work as they can given Israel is already mostly immunized. OTOH, the WB isn't and... yeah, it could still be a hassle. 

Unfortunately, Intel will be using TSMC for its GPUs, which means that the supply will be even worse.

Yea there are some fabs opening in the US for TSMC and maybe Samsung but it's gonna be a while before they go live T_T

Exclusive: Intel 12th Gen Core “Alder Lake-S” platform detailed

https://videocardz.com/newz/exclusive-intel-12th-gen-core-alder-lake-s-platform-detailed

"Intel claims up to 20% single-thread performance uplift"
"Alder Lake processors will be twice as fast in multi-threaded workloads"
"The slide also confirms that Alder Lake will support PCI Express Gen5 and Gen4. There is also a confirmation on DDR5 and DDR4 support, the platform will actually support both memory technologies at the same time. For mobile Alder Lake, Intel also confirms LPDDR4 and LPDDR4 support. We have recently revealed that Raptor Lake, a successor to Alder Lake will extend the memory support to LPDDR5X."

Interesting, That means if you were to buy Alder Lake, you may not need to buy new RAM modules so at least there's some cost savings!


AMD overtakes Apple as TSMC's main 7nm customer

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-overtakes-Apple-as-TSMC-s-main-7nm-customer.528532.0.html

"AMD has apparently increased its 7nm orders by 80% for this year compared to last year"

It's mainly due to Apple moving to 5nm but this should be some good news.


DDR4 Memory Prices to increase 18% in Q2021 due to increase in demand

https://dramexchange.com/WeeklyResearch/Post/2/10891.html

Along with Nand prices to increase shortly as well, PC gaming continues to get more expensive!

Good time to get NVMe's and sata SSD while they're lowest they've been. Might get a cheap TB boot drive.

And Alderlake looking damn good. Have my doubts it will release this year though..

Yeah for a what looks like a fairly poor "remaster" it's going onto the wait for Winter sale 2022 and buy it for under a tenner list.

On the other side Scarlet Nexus is the first game I've seen with regional pricing in years at £39.99 compared to the usual £55-60 publishers have been trying to milk us for these past couple of years. Popular key retailers have it at £33.99 and I might just make this my first pre-order buy in years purely because Bandai aren't been greedy twats.

Interesting indeed. Does locking to a screen's refresh rate have the same effect for games without frame limiters?

Most likely but the best way to do it would be to go into the Driver and lock the framerate in there as sometimes, in-game framerate limiters can cause frame time issues but doing it through the driver (least according to Digital Foundry) or using RTSS will always work as intended.

Now remember that the problem is with GPU bound scenarios. So if your screen refresh rate is 120hz but the GPU is running at say 80FPS or above, you would need to cap your framerate to less than 80FPS.

Should be good to see the supply constraints of AMD chips (Consoles, GPU's and CPU's) relaxed later this year thanks to the 80% increase in chip orders from TSMC... Thank you Apple. You finally did something good. :P

Interesting about Alder Lake - it just doesn't say what the base is. If it's 20% uplift from Comet Lake, it won't be enough to beat Zen 3, and twice as much in multithread compared to Rocket Lake would still be behind the 5950X. And while Alder Lake will be able to use both DDR4 and DDR5, I doubt that the boards will have slots for both standards, so you'll need to choose wisely here.

As for AMD increasing the orders by 80%, the big question is how it's split up between CPU and GPU dies. I fear the bulk will be CPU dies for EPYC, but even if just 10-20% of that increase goes to GPU, it would mean a sizeable increase in volume. With GPU mining slowly starting to reduce (like with the GPU mining craze before, specialized chips are starting to get produced that are cheaper and/or more powerful), we could actually get some GPUs by summer if all goes well.

The fact that DDR4 and Nand prices will go up was to be expected considering how low they dropped. It sucks, but unlike the price hike in the GPU department this one at least is understandable.