AMD on April 15 updated its COVID-19 response strategy to include a sizable donation of enterprise hardware from its inventory towards COVID-19 vaccine research. The company is giving away $15 million worth HPCs cloud computing nodes powered by EPYC enterprise processors and Radeon Instinct scalar compute accelerators to key research institutions at the forefront of vaccine research for COVID-19. AMD says that these systems will be of a turnkey nature, so they could be quickly deployed and put to use. The company invites any institution conducting COVID-19 related research to contact them for access to the node.

Making the announcement, CEO Dr. Lisa Su writes: "AMD is announcing today a COVID-19 HPC fund to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. The fund will include an initial donation of $15 million of high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions. To ease the implementation and speed the useful impact from these donations, we are working with our HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes. Research institutions should contact AMD at COVID-19HPC[at]amd[dot]com to submit proposals for access to these nodes."

Every year, Oculus Connect brings together developers, content creators, marketers, and more to celebrate the VR industry's momentum and growth. In light of the evolving public health risks related to COVID-19, we've decided to shift Oculus Connect 7 to a digital format later this year.

This was a tough decision to make, but we need to prioritize the health and safety of our developer partners, employees, and everyone involved in OC7. Oculus Connect gives us an unprecedented opportunity to connect with our global developer community. OC7 will be no exception, and we look forward to sharing more details about the digital event in the coming months.

The German Government today announced a nationwide ban on all major events until the end of August, effectively cancelling Gamescom 2020. Thankfully, this didn't come as too much of a surprise to the organizers and they had been preparing alternative options for some time. While the public in-person event won't be taking place a online digital alternative will be. Unlike E3 and GDC, Gamescom has time to prepare for proper a digital event and will announce more details shortly.

"Even though not all details are known at present, the nationwide ban on major events until the end of August will also affect the planning for #gamescom2020. Furthermore: gamescom 2020 will definitely take place digitally! We will provide further information shortly. "

The unprecedented demand for ventilators in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, has pushed many firms from various industries to re-tool their production-lines to make them. A big chunk of these makeshift ventilator manufacturers are from the automobile and aerospace industries. A ventilator isn't as simple a device as it sounds. It's not a mechanized ambu bag. It is an intelligent device that assists in respiration by precisely combining oxygen and ambient air specific to the patient's needs, and assists them in expiration. This requires a microprocessor-based control. Established biomedical equipment manufacturers use their own ASIC-based electronics for their ventilators; but the likes of General Motors don't have time to develop custom electronics. Enter the immensely versatile Raspberry Pi.

By leveraging Arm-based SBCs (single-board computers) such as Raspberry Pi, with its plethora of modern- and legacy I/O options, makeshift ventilator manufacturers are able to quickly design functional devices. All they have to do is write code for it. Even the cheapest $5 Pi Zero board with its GPIO interface suffices to run embedded Linux and code that runs the ventilator's hardware. Eben Upton, CEO and Founder of Raspberry Pi, says that demand for the Pi Zero is at an all-time high. The company manufactured over 192,000 units of the SBC in Q1-2020, and plans to scale up production to 250,000 per quarter, going forward. The Pi Zero features a Broadcom BCM2835 single-core Arm SoC and 512 MB of RAM, with a microSD slot for storage. That's plenty of brains to run a ventilator and save lives.

I had to take that sentence from Game of Thrones' Little Finger (if you recognized it, kudos to you), since I believe it to be mostly true, given we have the right mindset about that which surrounds us. While the pandemic will always be a mainly bleak point in humanity's history, and everyday there are reports of people being their worst selves through these difficult times, there is also always opportunity for growth affixed to any great crisis. It falls upon us, our institutions, and on companies, to see really what we can learn from situations such as these.

For one, we've seen, beyond any possible ideological beliefs we may have, that the Internet is a utility, not a commodity. Its capability to bridge the gaps in geography - and in social connection - is just too important in our globalized society to be considered anything other than a fundamental right. Discussions on this point have been ongoing for a while, and debates surrounding things like the net neutrality have already given birth to rivers of both actual and digital ink. However, it is this writer's opinion that the discussion is moot, and nothing more than a speedbump until we achieve the final, inescapable truth that the Internet is a crucial part of the world's infrastructure, and not only that - of what it means to be human in our modern world.

Due to the impact of the coronavirus on semiconductor supply and demand, worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to decline 0.9% in 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. This is down from the previous quarter's forecast of 12.5% growth.

"The wide spread of COVID-19 across the world and the resulting strong actions by governments to contain the spread will have a far more severe impact on demand than initially predicted," said Richard Gordon, research practice vice president at Gartner. "This year's forecast could have been worse, but growth in memory could prevent a steep decline."

Microsoft has decided to shift its focus away from Windows 10X dual-screen laptop solutions in the near term, according to the report from ZDNet. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has happened recently, Microsoft's Chief Product Officer Panos Panay internally informed his team that Microsoft will not be focusing its efforts on delivering the Windows 10X based dual-screen laptops this year. However, Microsoft is committed to that idea and will not shift away from it completely, it is just taking a rest for now. This is bad news for everyone that was hoping to get Surface Neo dual-screen laptop that was meant for the Holiday season of 2020. In addition to Surface Neo not shipping this year, Microsoft isn't enabling any new Windows 10X dual-screen device to ship this year either.

What Microsoft is focusing on, however, is to get Windows 10X firstly on single-screen devices. That means that regular laptops should be getting the Windows 10X treatment sometime this year so vendors can launch products to compete with Chromebook devices, based on Google's ChromeOS.

A leaked Intel internal slide surfaced on Chinese social networks, revealing five new products the company will build on its 10 nm silicon fabrication process. These include the "Alder Lake" heterogenous desktop processor, "Tiger Lake" mobile processor, "Ice Lake" based Xeon Scalable enterprise processors, DG1 discrete GPU, and "Snow Ridge" 5G base-station SoC. Some, if not all of these products, will implement Intel's new 10 nm+ silicon fabrication node that is expected to go live within 2020.

"Alder Lake" is a desktop processor that implements Intel's new heterogenous x86 core design that's making its debut with "Lakefield." The chip features up to 8 larger "Willow Cove" or "Golden Cove" CPU cores, and up to 8 smaller "Tremont" or "Gracemont" cores. This 8-big/8-small combo lets the chip achieve TDP targets around 80 Watts. Next up is "Tiger Lake," Intel's next-generation mobile processor family succeeding "Ice Lake." This microarchitecture implements "Willow Cove" CPU cores in a homogeneous setup, alongside Xe architecture based integrated graphics. "Ice Lake-SP" is Intel's next enterprise architecture that places mature "Sunny Cove" CPU cores in extreme core-count dies. Lastly, there's "Snow Ridge," an SoC purpose built for 5G base-stations. Image quality notwithstanding, these slides don't appear particularly new, and it's likely that COVID-19 has destabilized the roadmap. For instance, "Alder Lake," and "Ice Lake-SP" are expected to be 10 nm++ chips, a node that doesn't go live before 2021.

In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have adopted work from home policies. Synology's wireless routers feature powerful VPN server capabilities that enable businesses to quickly facilitate a remote workforce. Starting from April 6, Synology VPN Plus licenses will become free to purchase until September 30, 2020.

"We have seen many businesses rushing to adopt VPN solutions in order to set up an infrastructure to enable a remote workforce. Over the past two months, we have seen a five-fold increase in VPN Plus license purchases," said Hewitt Lee, Director of Synology Product Management Group. "As the situation continues to develop in unprecedented ways, we understand that many are uncertain of how to maintain business continuity. Synology is offering VPN Plus licenses for free in an effort to help businesses resume operations remotely."

Today Google announced that it would be opening up registration for Stadia's free tier, and that all new and existing customers will receive two months of Stadia Pro for free in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Google Stadia is available in 14 countries and the pro tier will give users access to 9 free games including GRID and Destiny 2.

We're facing some of the most challenging times in recent memory. Keeping social distance is vital, but staying home for long periods can be difficult and feel isolating. Video games can be a valuable way to socialize with friends and family when you're stuck at home, so we're giving gamers in 14 countries free access to Stadia Pro for two months. This is starting today and rolling out over the next 48 hours.

MAINGEAR—an award-winning PC system integrator of custom gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations—today announced that they will be utilizing their manufacturing facilities to produce affordable and high-quality emergency ventilators to aid hospitals in the fight against COVID-19. The MAINGEAR LIV can be produced at scale for approximately a quarter of the price of traditional ventilators.

New Jersey-based manufacturer MAINGEAR—known for building the industry's most complex liquid cooling systems and high performance PCs—is located twenty-minutes outside of New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Due to the growing number of infected individuals needing treatment, there are significant shortages of ventilators in New York City hospitals. MAINGEAR is quickly re-tooling much of its production space for mass assembly of the MAINGEAR LIV—an emergency pulmonary ventilator for use in intensive care units on intubated patients.

Microsoft has announced that all their upcoming events will transition to online only and that this will last till at least July 2021. This is obviously due to the threat of COVID-19 and the lock down much of the world is currently in. This announcement means several high profile Microsoft events such as Ignite 2020, Ignite The Tour, the MVP Summit 2021 and Build 2021.

"In light of the challenges presented by COVID-19, Microsoft has been closely monitoring the developing global situation and re-assessing the overall company-wide in-person event strategy. As a company, Microsoft has made the decision to transition all external and internal events to a digital first experience through July 2021. This will include the future MVP & RD Summit which is currently scheduled for March 28 - April 2, 2021. We will continue to evaluate the situation and look forward to connecting in person when the situation allows."

When E3's organizer ESA originally cancelled E3 2020 in early March they stated they were "exploring options with our members to coordinate an online experience to showcase industry announcements and news in June 2020". However since then nothing more has been said about the online experience.

Now after announcing the dates of a reimagined E3 2021, set to be the 15th - 7th June 2021, the ESA confirmed to PC Gamer that the organization no longer has any plans to present an online experience in lieu of the E3 2020 event originally scheduled event originally scheduled for this June. This comes after several major players have announced they would instead host individual online events for their communities.

Today, Intel is pledging an additional $50 million in a pandemic response technology initiative to combat the coronavirus through accelerating access to technology at the point of patient care, speeding scientific research and ensuring access to online learning for students. Included in Intel's effort is an additional innovation fund for requests where access to Intel expertise and resources can have immediate impact. This is in addition to prior announcements of $10 million in donations that are supporting local communities during this critical time.

The world faces an enormous challenge in fighting COVID-19. Intel is committed to accelerating access to technology that can combat the current pandemic and enable new technology and scientific discovery that better prepares society for future crises. We hope that by sharing our expertise, resources and technology, we can help to accelerate work that saves lives and expands access to critical services around the world during this challenging time," said Bob Swan, Intel chief executive officer.

AMD and NVIDIA are the latest computing giants to join the HPC COVID-19 Consortium, they join the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft along with the US Federal Government and Academic Institutions in support of COVID-19 research. This announcement brings the combined power of the cluster to 402 petaflops which trails behind the community driven Folding@Home project which holds the record at 1,500 petaflops but is still more powerful than any one supercomputer.

Researchers can apply to the HPC COVID-19 Consortium for compute resources in the fight against COVID-19.

TechPowerUp has learned that Intel is planning to bring 16 cores onto the mainstream desktop platform by Spring 2021 by implementing a similar chip-design philosophy as AMD: MCMs. The new "Ozark Lake" processor will pack up to 16 cores and 32 threads by decoupling the "core" and "uncore" components of a typical Intel mainstream processor.

Intel will leverage the additional fiberglass substrate floor-space yielded from the new LGA1700 package to create a multi-chip module that has two [kinds of] dies, the "core complex" and the "uncore complex." The core complex is a 14 nm die purely composed of CPU cores and an EMIB interconnect. There will be as many as 16 "Skylake" cores in a conventional ringbus layout, and conventional cache hierarchy (256 KB L2$ and up to 2 MB/core L3$). The lack of uncore components and exclusive clock and voltage domains will allow the CPU cores to attain Thermal Velocity Boost Pro speeds of up to 6.00 GHz, if not more.

Steam, an online platform for gaming, has seen some incredible numbers in terms of usage last night. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that many people are in quarantine/self-isolation mode, the number of concurrent users of the platform has skyrocketed. Beating all the previous records of 18 million and 20 million concurrent users, Steam saw as much as 23 million concurrent users last night. Precisely 23,572,311 of users online, setting a new record-high number. The most played games were Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. For more statistics, please see here.

Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service, has seen a huge uplift in traffic/usage in the past few days amid the COVID-19 outbreak. In the places where the outbreak happened and people are enforcing social distancing, Microsoft reports that there has been a 775% traffic uplift compared to the previous situation. As everyone capable of working from home needs a communication tool, Microsoft Teams is a popular choice, and it has seen some amazing usage as well. The users of Teams service have generated over 900 million meetings and calling minutes on Teams daily in a single week, resulting in high server usage. The demand for Windows Virtual Desktops has tripled as well.

The U.S. government announced advanced measures that make it harder for foreign companies, such as Taiwan's TSMC, to supply chips to Chinese telecom hardware giant Huawei. Foreign companies that use American chipmaking equipment, are required to obtain a license from the U.S. before supplying certain chips to Huawei. Sources comment that the new rule was tailor-made to curb TSMC fabricating smartphone SoCs for Huawei's HiSilicon subsidiary.

Mainland Chinese semiconductor companies are still behind Samsung and TSMC in 7 nm-class fab technologies, forcing HiSilicon to source from the latter. 7 nm fabrication is a key requirement for SoCs and modem chips capable of 5G. The high data transceiving rates of 5G requires a certain amount of compute power that can fit into smartphone-level power-envelopes only with the help of 7 nm, at least for premium smartphone form-factors. Same applies to 5G infrastructure equipment. This is hence perceived as a means for the U.S. to clamp brakes on Huawei's plans of playing a big role in 5G tech rollouts around the world, buying western 5G tech suppliers such as Nokia time to catch up. Huawei has been a flashpoint for a bitter political spat between the U.S. and China, with the Chinese press even threatening that the matter could hamper medical supplies to the U.S. to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the global crisis of COVID-19, we understand that these are critical times for everyone. This has impacted all aspects of our lives, and we understand that during these times, priorities are placed on more health-concerned matters. Many in the process of RMAs may find difficulty in shipping out cards for repair or service at this time, so we will be adding a 3-month extension to customers with warranties expiring between March through June 2020. PowerColor remains committed to delivery great products and services to our customers, and want to assure that we will continue to do so during these trying times.

Microsoft yesterday announced that they would be freezing any release for optional Windows 10 updates whilst the world still reels from the COVID-19 pandemic. This decision by the company comes after they decided to keep delivering security updates for the Fall Creator's update (version 1709 of the OS).

Both these decisions by Microsoft stem from the company trying to reduce the impact of Windows 10 updates on businesses - reducing update requirements to security updates means there is fewer chances of an optional update shipping that could negatively impact productivity - of which very little bit is required right now for some businesses to even keep afloat. When the crisis has passed, all updates will be resumed.

Popular video streaming sites YouTube and Netflix have reportedly started rationing their bandwidth by limiting video quality, as online traffic to their services surge to record levels. With COVID-19 lockdowns forcing people to take to online entertainment, the sites are reporting an unprecedented strain on their finite Internet bandwidth. In Europe, the two sites have capped their video quality to 480p, or slightly worse than DVD quality.

Despite the mighty backing of AWS, the world's largest CDN, Amazon's Prime Video is also finding itself having to cap quality based on regional bandwidth constraints. Google is already engaging with governments and ISPs to minimize strain on available Internet bandwidth. Streaming video remains the number one bandwidth consumer. Governments would want to prioritize bandwidth for companies operating remote- or virtual desktops for their employees working from home. Perhaps there's no better time to upgrade online video codecs to newer bandwidth-efficient ones like AV1.

For the second time in history, Computex, one of the flagship electronics shows in the industry, and our favorite event, has been postponed. Many years ago, it was delayed in 2003 due to the SARS outbreak, however, it happened again today. Following the outbreak of COVID-19. Instead of cancelling, the Computex organizer TAITRA has decided to postpone their 2020 event. Originally scheduled for June, Computex has been moved to September 28th, when the event will officially start. It will last only three days instead of the usual five, ending on the 30th.

This is especially relevant given that the event now shares the same three days with Innovex, the partnering startup-focused show that happens on the last 2-3 days of Computex each year, so the two shows have to share the spotlight on the same time. Making things tighter is confirmation from TAITRA that Computex, and Innovex, will both be sharing Hall 2 of the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, as opposed to having both Hall 1 and 2 available for Computex. This shortened timeframe and smaller booth space is a heavy indication that the agency expects a smaller turnaround at this time, and indeed several companies are already expressing concerns about whether Computex 2020 should have just been cancelled altogether. Some companies have told us they still plan to have an online event in June given they have planned product lifecycles around it already, and the new event in September is just a hiccup they are not confident about handling. We hope to bring you the latest Computex news live from the trade show, once it happens, so stay tuned.

This one here is another shot in the arm when it comes to faith in humanity. Folding@Home, the distributed computing project where users can donate their spare CPU and GPU cycles for a given cause, has hit an absolute bonkers milestone. According to Greg Bowman, Director of Folding@home, the network has reached a peak compute power amounting to some 470 petaFLOPS - more than double that of the world's current supercomputing record holder, the Summit supercomputer, which dishes out 200 peak petaFLOPS. Folding@Home's 470 Petaflops means users donating their spare cycles are delivering more computing power than that which is available in the world's top 7 supercomputers combined.

After some slight service outages where users weren't getting any work units due to the increased number of donors over the last few days, the computing service now seems to be running at full steam ahead. Remember that you can select the causes for which you are donating your computing power: whether cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington, or Parkinson's disease, as well as some other non-selectable projects.

A WikiChip analysis of TSMC's next-generation 5 nanometer N5P silicon fabrication node estimates a massive 84-87% increase in transistor densities on offer compared to the company's first commercial 7 nm-class node, the N7 (7 nm DUV). The report estimates an 87% transistor-density increase, even though TSMC's own figure is slightly modest, at 84%. TSMC N5P node is expected to commence production later this year. Its precursor, TSMC N5, began risk production earlier this year, with production on the node commencing in April or May, unless derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The N5P node provides transistor densities of an estimated 171.3 million transistors per mm² die area, compared to 91.2 mTr/mm² of N7. Apple is expected to be the node's biggest customer in 2020, with the company building its A14-series SoC on it.