Sapphire released the GPRO X070 compute graphics card. This is very much a graphics card, in that it has display outputs, and is based on the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, but there's a twist—it's completely fanless. The card has a large triple-slot heatsink cooling the GPU, which is designed to rely on external airflow in rackmount cases, and probably won't work on its own in a tower case. Sapphire says its applications include render farms, or V-GPUs. The card features an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT that runs at reference clock speeds—1905 MHz max boost, 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory. There's also an "Efficiency Mode" enabled through a secondary BIOS, which runs the GPU at 1750 MHz boost, possibly making the card best suited for crypto-currency mining operations.

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Pat Gelsinger: "Intel Has to be Better at Making CPUs Than That Lifestyle Company"
Intel's future CEO Pat Gelsinger, who supersedes current CEO Bob Swan come February 15th, has reportedly compared Intel with Apple's efforts, in wake of that company's decision to leave the Intel ecosystem in favor of in-house designed ARM CPUs. As Apple M1-powered devices hit reviewers' tables, the opinions mostly went one-sided in favor of Apple's decision, clamoring for that particular CPU design to be only lightly short of a computing miracle, considering the amount of computing power provided at that chip's TDP, and running circles around Apple's previous Intel implementations.



According to The Oregonian, a local newspaper from (you guessed it) Oregon where Intel has a strong branch presence, Intel held an all-hands meeting of its Oregon workforce, attended by future Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who is quoted as having remarked that "We [Intel] have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino makes. We have to be that good, in the future." Considering how Apple's M1 has raised the world's attention to the ARM architecture as a competitor with strong enough arguments to face the x86 ecosystem (as if ARM powering the world's current fastest supercomputer wasn't a strong enough argument), that seems like a strong yet adequate statement. We'll see how Intel fares with its Alder lake CPUs, which essentially bring ARM's design philosophy of an heterogeneous CPU with both high-performance and high-efficiency cores to the x86 table.

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Shipped Pre-built PC Systems See 13% Rise in Sales in 2020 Compared to 2019
The International Data Corporation (IDC) has revealed PC shipping growth numbers for 2020 - counting desktops, notebooks (including Chromebooks) and workstations (but excluding laptops and servers), and the results are clear. In a currently-pandemic world, and with the urge and necessity for teleworking efforts so as to reduce personal exposure to risk environments, we've seen an unprecedented demand for technological components. Whether in shortages for the latest "comfort" technologies such as dedicated graphics cards, latest-gen consoles, or even webcams, it's been clear that citizens of the world have been increasingly investing their money in technological devices. This need - either for work, for bridging social distances through the Internet, or for entertainment - has led the pre-built PC ecosystem shipments to increase as much as 13% in 2020 - and a global shipment number set at 302.6 million units.



This year-over-year (YoY) increase is bolstered, mainly, by rises in sales throughout Q4 of 2020, where global PC shipments achieved an outstanding 26% increase from Q4 2019 - in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone, 91.6 million units were shipped. In that particular quarter, Lenovo led the top three vendors with a 25.2% share of the sales, followed by HP (20.9%) and Dell (17.2%). Apple appears in fourth place with a mere 8% market share, but shows the strongest growth among the top 5 sellers, at 49.2% YoY - and that's with Apple's comparatively small product portfolio when put against any of the other top three vendors.
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NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti, Eventual SUPER Revisions Allegedly Postponed Indefinitely Amidst Supply Woes
Everyone and their mother expected NVIDIA to announce - if not a SUPER refresh to their existing graphics cards with increased memory sizes - at least the RTX 3080 Ti. That card surfaced as a planned NVIDIA counter to AMD's preemptive pricing of $999 on its RX 6900 XT graphics card (which to be fair, is in itself as abundant a card as unicorns this side of the galaxy). GamersNexus reported NVIDIA partners' comments on the indefinite postponement of the RTX 3080 Ti and possible SUPER derivatives of the RTX 30-series lineup. It's being said that NVIDIA decided (smartly, I would say) to ensure consistent supply of their existing lineup to sate demand, instead of dispersing its limited chip production across even more product lines.



This would result, I have no doubt, on NVIDIA only having even more SKUs out of stock than they currently do. Considering the market's current state of mind in regards to NVIDIA's lineup, this seems like the most sensible decision possible. TechPowerUp has in the meantime confirmed this information with NVIDIA partners themselves.

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Following Huawei, Xiaomi Added to US Blacklist For Alleged Chinese Military Ties
Access to affordable electronics isn't looking much of a reality for US citizens, as the US government (presently in the outgoing days of Trump's administration) has now announced the addition of Chinese tech company Xiaomi to its military-connections blacklist. The move, enforced via a presidential executive order, now also demands U.S. investors to divest, or sell out, of affected holdings of any companies on the blacklist, by Nov. 11 this year. This addition to the US blacklist is done in accordance with the US National Defense Authorization Act of 1999, and doesn't place XIAOMI in the Entity list, of which Huawei is a part of, which would impede the Chinese tech giant from acquiring US technology and components for fabrication of its products.



The US Department of Defense (DOD) said in a statement that "The Department is determined to highlight and counter the People's Republic of China's (PRC) Military-Civil Fusion development strategy, which supports the modernization goals of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) by ensuring its access to advanced technologies and expertise acquired and developed by even those PRC companies, universities, and research programs that appear to be civilian entities". Xiaomi has been classified as one of nine "Communist Chinese military companies".
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ASUS Reveals Its GeForce RTX 3060 ROG STRIX Graphics Card
ASUS today revealed their latest flagship iteration on the NVIDIA RTX 3060, the ASUS RTX 3060 ROG STRIX. the graphics card follows ASUS' tried and true ROG STRIX design with a triple-fan cooling solution (that features 0 dB technology when in light use) and an RGB strip detailing alongside the shroud. The RTX 3060 ROG STRIX features a single 8-pin power connector, palatable for this card's expected performance profile, and the company has managed to decrease the footprint of their cooling solution to a 2.7-slot design, which should be more than enough for the card's 170 W TDP.



ASUS has fitted the card with an abundance of connectors that are sure to stand the test of time: 2x HDMI 2.1, and 3x DisplayPort 1.4. ASUS expects the card to be available near the end of February, in both OC and non-OC versions. No word on pricing was available at time of writing - though it will surely be higher than NVIDIA's $329 MSRP.

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Bitspower Announces the Premium Mobius VGA Water Block for GeForce RTX 3080 FE
Bitspower has announced a new addition to their VGA waterblock lineup in the form of the Mobius, a specialty-designed waterblock that's meant to fit only NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 Founder's Edition. The Mobius has been engineered to mimic the original NVIDIA design, but trades the traditional dual-fan configuration for a higher-performance cooling solution that stays true to NVIDIA's original design vision for the Founder's Edition.



The waterblock features a nickel and chromium-plated copper base plate, engineered with direct contact technology to cool both the GPU chip and VRM circuitry. The Mobius features an acrylic cover which supports Bitspower's Digital RGB LED technology - which has sync capabilities with popular 3rd party RGB software (ASUS AURA Sync, GIGABYTE RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light Sync, ASRock Polychrome, BIOSTAR VIVID LED DJ, and Razer Chroma). The waterblock features a cutout for NVIDIA's reference 12-pin power connector, and an additional RGB sync cable that extrudes from the PCIe connector side of the waterblock. the Bitspower Mobius waterblock for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 FE is being listed at $325.

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