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Showing posts from May, 2020

When will we see an 8-core Ryzen 5?

What could the next few months hold for CPUs?  I think this is something that's been on a lot of people's minds lately especially with Intel's 10th gen coming out recently. I even went as far  in a recent blog post as saying right now is the best contest in CPU history... at least until Zen3 comes out that is. No matter which way you cut it, after such a long period of time with only incremental updates from Intel who held a nearly uncontested lead for a decade (with only a brief discussion between Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer in 2012), the events unfolding right now are making history, and the results of which will determine the landscape for a long time to come.  Note: This is almost entirely an opinion piece. I don't have any industry sources or fresh leaks. I'm simply looking at available information and offering my personal analysis.  AMD holds the performance advantage with Zen2 Right now, it's no secret that between AMD and Intel, it's team

PS5 vs XSX vs PC featuring storage architectrures

How do Xbox Velocity Architecture and PS5 storage compare?  Preface -- Let's support better knowledge  Anyone that's been following my blog posts and even my guest appearance on Moore's Law is Dead's podcast  Broken Silicon , you'll know that one of my recent interests is trying to inform the community about not only what the storage is in the next gen consoles and how they work, but what benefits they can bring to gaming. The need for this knowledge is apparent in the widespread misconceptions about the SSD in the consoles and the hardware that accelerate its pipeline.  Evidence of the lack of understanding among techtubers can be seen  here , with Linus at the WAN show with comments like "and if you imagine for a second that Sony's CPU in the playstation is not just an AMD chip running PCI express then you're a fool". While I don't mean to discredit Linus, as I've learned an incredible amount from watching his channel, and indeed

How faster storage is actually improving visuals in next-gen games

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The Largest Improvement to Visual Fidelity in Games Since 3D I've spent the past few weeks trying to convince people that faster storage doesn't just mean spending less time looking at a loading screen, telling them to think bigger about the possibilities brought by both abandoning the Hard Drive and by the incredible hardware accelerated I/O pipeline in both new consoles.  Before we get started, there are two resources that any reader should be generally familiar with.  The first is a blog post I made where I discuss a lot of the details on the limitations of HDDs and why game developers were so keen to abandon the HDD, Why SSDs don't offer the gaming boost we expect given their radically increased performance on paper, and what next-gen consoles are doing to address the pipeline issue. If you aren't incredibly clear on any of those issues, have a look  here . The second resource is the May 13th Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo reveal, linked below.  What b