Enlarge / The RX 6700XT GPU reaches retailers soon. When will it reach average customers, however? Honestly, who's to say at this point?

AMD's RDNA 2 push continues on March 18 with a newly announced RX 6700XT graphics card, starting at $479 and featuring just about the exact downscaled options you might expect from a card costing $100 less than last year's RX 6800 .

Before we talk specs, of course...

AMD chose YouTube for the announcement —and, perhaps foolishly, left the chat function on. This allowed fans to spam the live-stream chat with "sold out" and "out of stock" cries for a full 15 minutes. Weirdly, the video's host acknowledged that "demand for GPUs is at an all-time high," only to offer about as worthless a pledge as you'll get about availability: that the GPU will be sold both at AMD.com and at "e-tailers and retailers across the globe on day one."

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Slimbook, the Linux friendly hardware company that offers Linux as a choice on their hardware has revealed the powerful Titan laptop that's ready for pre-orders. Coming as a result of the recent announcements of new CPUs from AMD and new GPUs from NVIDIA , this Titan combines them together into one unit.

With a good screen to make use of all that power too, they've not skimped on the details for the Titan. You get 15.6 inches, with a 2560x1440 resolution and 165Hz. Plenty of screen pixels for the powerful CPU/GPU combination to move around.

If, like me, you love a good bit a bling too it also comes with a per-key RGB backlit keyboard too. Not only is it colourful, it's an optical mechanical keyboard too for long-life and good response times. There's also a front RGB light bar, plus it's a full keyboard with a num pad too so you've got tons of space for easy typing.

Main Specifications:

Powerful, good looking and could be your next Linux laptop? You can order it with no operating system to load it all up yourself, or Ubuntu (Windows is a choice too).

As expected from the specifications it's got a big price to it too, with it starting at €1,750 which seems to be a special pre-order price so we expect it to be higher at main release.

You can check out the Titan here .

Plenty of AMD news announced today during the digital CES event, with new CPUs and GPUs on the way for this year including the Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile CPUs and RDNA 2 GPUs.

Much like Intel with their newly announced 11th Gen Intel Core H-series mobile processors, a big focus for AMD is on notebooks as well as the desktop. AMD wants to take the performance crown here, with the Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile CPUs - this is Zen 3 going properly mobile. AMD are claiming an "up to" 16% increase in single-threaded performance and "up to" 14% for multi-threaded over the previous generation.

“As the PC becomes an even more essential part of how we work, play and connect, users demand more performance, security and connectivity,” said Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, Client business unit, AMD. “The new AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop and Mobile Processors bring the best innovation AMD has to offer to consumers and professionals as we continue our commitment to delivering best-in-class experiences with instant responsiveness, incredible battery life and fantastic designs. With our PC partners, we are delivering top-quality performance and no-compromise solutions alongside our record-breaking growth in the notebook and desktop space in the previous year.”

Here's what was newly revealed today for mobile chips:

Coming along with that, AMD also announced some new desktop chips coming too, however these new reduced TDP models will only be available to system builders it seems:

Also very exciting is the upcoming RDNA 2, AMD's next-generation GPU architecture. AMD confirmed today that RDNA 2 will be coming to gaming notebooks next, with desktop GPUs based on RDNA 2 to follow along. Both of which are being targeted for a release in the first half of 2021. No real extra info was given out on RDNA 2 today though other than the vague window of when to expect them.

AMD also announced more monstrous server chips with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC.

You can watch the full event below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

On Linux with AMD GPUs you can decide between the RADV and AMDVLK drivers for Vulkan API support, and it appears AMD want to make things a little easier for you.

It can get a little confusing so here's the real basics: AMDVLK is the "official" external Vulkan driver developed by AMD, whereas RADV is part of Mesa and comes with most distributions by default. Sometimes certain games work better on one, sometimes on the other. Additionally, AMD only directly support Ubuntu and Red Hat, whereas Mesa with RADV focuses on everything they can.

With the latest AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 release, AMD has made switching between the two a little easier. With this driver installed, you only need to set an environment variable to tell whatever game or application you're using what driver to use with "AMD_VULKAN_ICD" set to either "AMDVLK" or "RADV". The default is AMDVLK of course, if none is set.

Here's the highlights of this new driver release:

New feature and improvement

• Add AMD switchable graphics layer to switch AMD Vulkan driver between amdvlk and RADV
• Update Khronos Vulkan Headers to 1.2.164
• Navi21 performance tuning for game X-Plane, Madmax, Talos Principle, Rise of Tomb Raider, F12017

Issue fix

• RPCS3 Corruption observed on Game window on Navi10

See more on GitHub .

Great news for AMD fans as Quake II RTX has been updated again, and it now features support for the newly released official cross-vendor Ray Tracing support with the Vulkan API.

With Vulkan, originally only NVIDIA supported Ray Tracing with their own extensions. That's no longer needed, as The Khronos Group formally announced the final and finished Ray Tracing specification for the Vulkan API back in late November.

Quake II RTX was one of the earliest titles to have Ray Tracing, and acted as something of a quick playground just to test out the features available. It was built on top of existing work from Q2VKPT from Christoph Schied with NVIDIA adding in new path-traced visual effects, improved textures and so on.

Thanks to an update to Quake II RTX released today, it adds support for the new official Vulkan Ray Tracing API and enables dynamic selection between NVIDIA's stuff and the new stuff. Any GPU and driver that supports VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline will now work with the Ray Tracing here. Additionally, they also added in "temporal upscaling, or TAAU".

Quake II RTX 1.4.0 comes with various other improvements too including SDL2 upgrades, lots of bug fixes, further enhancements to the visuals like more stable reflections and refractions, reduced blurring in the temporal filter and more.

Find Quake II RTX on Steam with the first three levels free, the rest available if you buy Quake 2 directly.

You asked, quite a lot actually and now System76 are going to be delivering with the all-AMD powered Pangolin. Considering the power of the newer generation AMD chipsets, it's not surprising that they've seen plenty of requests for a laptop powered by team red.

While no formal press release has been made about it (that we've seen anyway?), they have announced it briefly on Twitter with a coming soon page. Interestingly, the Pangolin looks to be their most affordable laptop and one they're calling an "everyday laptop" with the price starting at $849.

Specifications:

You can see the coming soon page here .

Once they give out more info, we will let you know.

In other System76 news, it seems their custom keyboard is still in progress. Founder and CEO, Carl Richell, showed off a shot on Twitter of the prototype keyboard milling. Will be very interesting to see what they actually come up with in the end, as we know it's going to be quite customizable from what they teased back in August .

Mesa 20.3.0 is the latest and greatest when it comes to Linux open source graphics, bringing with it new hardware support, performance improvements and more. Mesa drivers are what power the likes of Intel and AMD on Linux with the latest Vulkan and OpenGL support whereas NVIDIA have their own proprietary driver.

As always, with it being a brand new release if you're concerned about stability you might want to wait for the first point release with Mesa 20.3.1.

Lots new with this version like the 'V3DV' Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi now being available, new extension support, big improvements to the Zink driver (OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan), new hardware support across both AMD and Intel for the latest chips and some upcoming stuff, the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs was extended quite a lot too and much more. You can see the release notes here , although they're quite technical and not great reading unless you really know what to look for.

Need to learn more about Mesa drivers? See the official site .

Today, AMD are bringing out the big guns with the formal release of their next generation desktop GPUs with the AMD Radeon RX 6800 and the RX 6800 XT. Announced back in late October , these cards are AMD's first to come with hardware accelerated Ray Tracing support. Although for Linux, we're still waiting on The Khronos Group to formalise the cross-vendor Ray Tracing Vulkan extensions for that.

Here's a reminder of the specifications:

For running them on Linux, the driver situation isn't the best. AMD will be putting out an update to their official packaged "Radeon Software for Linux" which will support the driver, but it only works directly with a few distributions. For Mesa drivers, you're going to need Linux Kernel 5.9, Mesa 20.2 (or newer) and also LLVM 11.0 which means most normal distributions will be missing out with manual upgrades. So, unless you really know what you're doing with everything, you will likely want to hold off.

If you do manage to find one because, as expected, most places are sold out and you get everything it needs setup - expect to see some incredible performance. We don't get sent any hardware from AMD, so we're going by what others have been cooking up. It seems Level1Linux on YouTube are very happy with it, and the Phoronix benchmarks show them doing well too. From a price point of view, the performance does seem pretty amazing considering how close it appears to be with the NVIDIA 3080 and if you prefer the open source side of things it doesn't get better than this.

Enlarge / Spoiler: When it comes to performance over the years, Intel is the slow and steady tortoise to AMD's speedy-but-intermittent hare. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images )

The comment wars between Intel and AMD fans have been hot for the last few release cycles, with a lot of digital ink spilled about which company has—or has not—improved significantly over the years. There's been no shortage of opinions about the current raw performance of each company's fastest processors, either. We thought it would be interesting to dive into archived performance benchmarks of the fastest desktop/enthusiast CPUs for each company to get a good overview of how each has really done over the years—and perhaps to even see if there are patterns to be gleaned or to make some bets about the future.

Before we dive into charts, let's start out with some tables—that way, you can see which CPUs we're using as milestones for each year. While we're at it, there are a couple of irregularities in the data; we'll discuss those also and talk about the things that a simple chart won't show you.

Twenty years of enthusiast computing

Year	Intel Model	AMD Model	Notes
2001	Pentium 4 2.0GHz (1c/1t)	Athlon XP 1900+ (1c/1t)
2002	Pentium 4 2.8GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon XP 2800+ (1c/1t)	Intel introduces hyperthreading
2003	Pentium 4 Extreme 3.2GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon XP 3200+ (1c/1t)
2004	Pentium 4 3.4GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon 64 FX-55 (1c/1t)
2005	Pentium 4 3.8GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2c/2t)
2006	Pentium Extreme 965 (2c/4t)	Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2c/2t)	Intel takes the undisputed performance lead here—and keeps it for a decade straight.
2007	Core 2 Extreme QX6800 (4c/4t)	Phenom X4 9600 (4c/4t)	Intel and AMD both launch the first true quad-core desktop CPUs
2008	Core 2 Extreme X9650 (4c/4t)	Phenom X4 9950 (4c/4t)
2009	Core i7-960 (4c/8t)	Phenom II X4 965 (4c/4t)
2010	Core i7-980X (6c/12t)	Phenom II X6 1100T (6c/6t)	Intel and AMD both introduce hex-core desktop CPUs
2011	Core i7-990X (6c/12t)	FX-8150 (8c/8t)
2012	Core i7-3770K (4c/8t)	FX-8350 (8c/8t)	Intel abandons hex-core desktop CPUs—but few miss them, due to large single-threaded gains
2013	Core i7-4770K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)	AMD's underwhelming FX-9590 launches—and it's Team Red's last enthusiast CPU for four long years
2014	Core i7-4790K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)	Intel's 5th generation Core dies stillborn. AMD releases low-power APUs, but no successor to FX-9590
2015	Core i7-6700K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)
2016	Core i7-7700K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)	Strictly speaking, 2016 was an Intel whiff—Kaby Lake didn't actually launch until January 2017
2017	Core i7-8700K (6c/12t)	Ryzen 7 1800X (8c/16t)	Launch of AMD's Zen architecture, return of the Intel hex-core desktop CPU
2018	Core i9-9900K (8c/16t)	Ryzen 7 2700X (8c/16t)
2019	Core i9-9900KS (8c/16t)	Ryzen 9 3950X (16c/32t)	AMD's Zen 2 architecture launches, Intel whiffs hard in the performance segment
2020	Core i9-10900K (10c/20t)	Ryzen 9 5950X (16c/32t)	AMD's Zen 3 finally crushes Intel's long-held single-threaded performance record

Although both Intel and AMD obviously launch a wide array of processors for different price points and target markets each year, we're limiting ourselves to the fastest desktop or "enthusiast" processor from each year. That means no server processors and no High-End Desktop (HEDT) processors either—so we won't be looking at either Threadrippers or the late model XE series Intel parts.

Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments