Last month, we covered ASML's plans to leave the Netherlands after a crisis with the Dutch government that prevented skilled immigrants from entering and working inside ASML's facilities. However, it appears that ASML has managed to strike a potential deal with the Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his office about the company's plans to stay in the country. In an effort dubbed "Operation Beethoven," the Dutch government aimed to keep the tech giant in the country, with a deal now seemingly in place. AMSL's roadblocks and reasons for potentially leaving the Netherlands were difficulty in obtaining building permits, constraints on the electrical grid, transportation bottlenecks, and a need for supporting infrastructure like hospitals, schools, and housing. The most prominent of them was importing foreign labor in the form of highly skilled engineers and scientists needed to develop next-generation lithography machines.

According to the NLTimes, ASML now plans to potentially expand in the Brainport Industries Campus (BIC) in Eindhoven, with a creation of 20,000 new jobs in a 2.5 billion Euro investment from the Dutch government. "BIC is an interesting option for us, which we are now exploring together with the municipality of Eindhoven," noted ASML CFO Roger Dassen. Given that ASML needs to double its operations in the following decade to meet soaring demand, the company has many uncertainties. Questions of finding skilled immigrants and building infrastructure to support their needs remain the company's priority. In the Summer, the plan to support ASML's expansion will be voted in the Eindhoven City Council, which will decide the fate of ASML's stay in the Netherlands. An interesting comment from January from AMSL CEO Peter Wennik is, "Ultimately, we can only grow this company if there are enough qualified people. We prefer to do that here, but if we cannot get those people here, we will get those people in Eastern Europe or in Asia or in the United States. Then we will have to go there." The final decision still awaits.

After two years of decline, the worldwide traditional PC market returned to growth during the first quarter of 2024 (1Q24) with 59.8 million shipments, growing 1.5% year over year, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. Growth was largely achieved due to easy year-over-year comparisons as the market declined 28.7% during the first quarter of 2023, which was the lowest point in PC history. In addition, global PC shipments finally returned to pre-pandemic levels as 1Q24 volumes rivaled those seen in 1Q19 when 60.5 million units were shipped.

With inflation numbers trending down, PC shipments have begun to recover in most regions, leading to growth in the Americas as well as Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). However, the deflationary pressures in China directly impacted the global PC market. As the largest consumer of desktop PCs, weak demand in China led to yet another quarter of declines for global desktop shipments, which already faced pressure from notebooks as the preferred form factor.

Graphics card enthusiasts with a thing for earthy green hues, will likely appreciate Manli's latest products—its Gallardo graphics card range has expanded with two new models. The Asian and European market-focused manufacturer has already unleashed "refreshed" models that utilize NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40-series SUPER GPUs, but the newest entries sport a revised signature green flagship "Gallardo" design. VideoCardz has pored over the small details—it turns out that Manli has produced a slimmer profile: "perhaps something that is not obvious is that Manli has introduced the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER Gallardo already. The new version marks a second revision, featuring an entirely different aesthetic compared to its predecessor. The most important change is that it no longer occupies a 3.5-slot space." Manli has evidently put together a "much slimmer 2-slot version" under a "M3604+N693" moniker.

The non-Ti model is likely coming out soon, but Manli has not yet announced official pricing or launch date details for their newly redesigned Gallardo Ada Lovelace cards—official product pages were created last week. Despite flagship status, VideoCardz notes that Manli has not implemented any factory overclocking—the Gallardo range is often associated with: "system integrators like Sycom for further customization." The spec sheet advertises integrated LED lighting with seven available color cycles, four 6 mm copper heat pipes with segmented heatsinks, and a metal backplate for reinforcement and protective purposes.

EK, the renowned premium liquid cooling gear manufacturer, is proud to unveil its latest accessory that promises to streamline the assembly process for enthusiasts and professionals alike: the EK-Loop Stainless Steel Gauge Card. Crafted from durable stainless steel and designed for simplicity, this handy tool is an essential accessory for anyone involved in water cooling. Its primary function serves to drastically simplify the search for the correct assembly parts, ensuring that users can effortlessly find compatible components. Multifunctional by design yet primarily aimed at enhancing the water cooling experience, the EK-Loop Gauge Card is the accessory you didn't know you needed—until now.

Preventing Assembly Errors Before They Happen
With the Gauge Card, measuring and matching bolt and nut sizes becomes effortless. It accurately determines the bolt size and length for any component, including nut size measurements for M2.5, M3, and M4 nuts. This guarantees compatibility and ease of assembly across a wide range of components. The card also allows for the identification of different screw diameters (M4, M3.5, M3, M2.5, M2) and screw dimensions effortlessly, making it more straightforward to select the right parts for your build. Screw length identification up to 30 mm further ensures precise fitting and optimal security of components, while the tool aids in avoiding the insertion of the wrong bolts in the wrong places - thus preventing potential damage to sensitive PCBs. Moreover, the EK-Loop Gauge Card aids in the determination of Allen key sizes (2, 2.5, 6, 8, 9), simplifying the search for the right tool for the job.

Soon, you'll be able to play your favorite games from GOG, like the Witcher series or Cyberpunk 2077, on multiple devices of your choice. We're teaming up with Amazon Luna cloud gaming service to give you even more ways of enjoying your titles, while still keeping our mission of DRM-free gaming. Let's dive into it and take a look at how it works!

What exactly is Amazon Luna?
It is a cloud gaming service developed and operated by Amazon. The service first launched in March 2022 in the United States, and then spread its reach to other countries last year, with availability in the USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Luna works by streaming games from cloud servers and runs on Amazon's powerful cloud computing service Amazon Web Services (AWS). And what it means is that it allows its customers to enjoy gaming on the go, on the couch, or anywhere else you have an internet connection. No lengthy downloads or updates, no need for an expensive gaming PC, complicated setup, or heavy computer processing - just pure joy of running your games on a device of your choice in high-quality.

Silicon Box, a cutting-edge, advanced panel-level packaging foundry announced its intention to collaborate with the Italian government to invest up to $3.6 billion (€3.2 billion) in Northern Italy, as the site of a new, state-of-the-art semiconductor assembly and test facility. This facility will help meet critical demand for advanced packaging capacity to enable next generation technologies that Silicon Box anticipates by 2028. The multi-year investment will replicate Silicon Box's flagship foundry in Singapore which has proven capability and capacity for the world's most advanced semiconductor packaging solutions, then expand further into 3D integration and testing. When completed, the new facility will support approximately 1,600 Silicon Box employees in Italy. The construction of the facility is also expected to create several thousand more jobs, including eventual hiring by suppliers. Design and planning for the facility will begin immediately, with construction to commence pending European Commission approval of planned financial support by the Italian State.

As well as bringing the most advanced chiplet integration, packaging, and testing to Italy, Silicon Box's manufacturing process is based on panel-level-production; a world leading, first-of-its-kind combination that is already shipping product to customers from its Singapore foundry. Through the investment, Silicon Box has plans for greater innovation and expansion in Europe, and globally. The new integrated production facility is expected to serve as a catalyst for broader ecosystem investments and innovation in Italy, as well as the rest of the European Union.

Two years ago, Intel Corporation and the Italian Government initiated negotiations over the "enabling" of a new state-of-the-art back-end manufacturing facility—a potential investment of up to 4.5 billion euros was mentioned at the time. Italy's chipmaking fund was put together in order to attract several big semiconductor firms, but Team Blue appeared to be the primary target. This week, Minister Adolfo Urso confirmed to media outlets that Intel had: "given up or postponed its investments in France and Italy, compared with others that it plans in Germany." Intel has not commented on this announcement according to a Reuters report—a spokesperson declined to make a statement.

Italy's Business Minister stated that he will welcome a continuation of negotiations, if Intel leadership chooses to diversify its construction portfolio outside of Germany: "if it decides to complete those projects, we are still here." His nation is set to receive further investments, following a recent announcement from Silicon Box—the Singapore-headquartered advanced semiconductor packaging company has signed an up to €3.2 billion deal. Their new Italian facility will: "enable next generation applications in artificial intelligence (AI), high performance computing (HPC)," and other segments. Urso reckons that "there will be others in coming months." He also added that a ministry task force had conducted talks with unnamed Taiwanese groups.

The HPC research projects DEEP-SEA, IO-SEA and RED-SEA are wrapping up this month after a three-year project term. The three projects worked together to develop key technologies for European Exascale supercomputers, based on the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA), a blueprint architecture for highly efficient and scalable heterogeneous Exascale HPC systems. To achieve this, the three projects collaborated on system software and programming environments, data management and storage, as well as interconnects adapted to this architecture. The results of their joint work will be presented at a co-design workshop and poster session at the EuroHPC Summit (Antwerp, 18-21 March, www.eurohpcsummit.eu).

Valiant Hearts: Coming Home and Valiant Hearts: The Collection, which includes Valiant Hearts: The Great War and Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, is now available on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and PC through Ubisoft Connect. Valiant Hearts: The Great War, the first installment of the duology, interweaves the stories of five characters as they experience the horrors of World War I. Karl, who was expelled from France and drafted to the German army; his father-in-law Emile, who has been drafted into the French army; Freddie, an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion; Anna, a French combat nurse; and Walt, a medic's casualty dog - who also helps players sneak into areas inaccessible to humans.

Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, previously an exclusive Netflix mobile game developed by Ubisoft Montpellier in partnership with Old Skull Games, continues a dramatic narrative during World War I, once again focusing on four interconnected stories. James is a member of the historic Harlem Hellfighters looking for his older brother Freddie; the nurse Anna's returns to her work tending the wounded; Ernst is a German diver; and George is a British aviator. And, of course, the good dog Walt returns to help players with puzzles and exploration. Music plays an important role in the game as well, as the Harlem Hellfighters played a key role in introducing jazz music to Europe, and players can listen to the game's jazz soundtrack by Jason Moran on music streaming platforms.

Jim Ryan—President & CEO, Sony Interactive Entertainment—revealed a sobering restructuring plan earlier today: "The PlayStation community means everything to us, so I felt it was important to update you on a difficult day at our company. We have made the extremely hard decision to announce our plan to commence a reduction of our overall headcount globally by about 8% or about 900 people, subject to local law and consultation processes. Employees across the globe, including our studios, are impacted." Ryan's full email—addressed to the entire Sony Interactive Entertainment workforce—can be found here. It reveals that company leadership has decided to close its PlayStation London Studio—the South East UK team is/was reportedly working on an announced "PS5 online game." Microsoft revealed a larger scale layoff program late last month—affecting 1900 employees—albeit without shuttering any major development studios. A number of its California-based teams are in the process of ditching "traditional" office locations (including a former aircraft hangar), and are moving to a work from home (WFH) model.

The SIE chief believes that current circumstances are not sustainable: "These are incredibly talented people who have been part of our success, and we are very grateful for their contributions. However, the industry has changed immensely, and we need to future ready ourselves to set the business up for what lies ahead. We need to deliver on expectations from developers and gamers and continue to propel future technology in gaming, so we took a step back to ensure we are set up to continue bringing the best gaming experiences to the community." His email outlines an "impact for employees across all SIE regions—Americas, EMEA, Japan, and APAC," with reductions affecting native development teams and Firesprite, a Liverpool, UK-based studio (founded by former Psygnosis veterans). Hermen Hulst, Head of PlayStation Studios, also posted a blog entry on the subject of SIE global layoffs—he confirmed a number of reductions and project cancellations.

Tech giant Microsoft and Paris-based startup Mistral AI, an innovator in open-source AI model development, have announced a new multi-year partnership to accelerate AI innovation and expand access to Mistral's state-of-the-art models. The collaboration will leverage Azure's cutting-edge AI infrastructure to propel Mistral's research and bring its innovations to more customers globally. The partnership focuses on three core areas. First, Microsoft will provide Mistral with Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure to power advanced AI training and inference for Mistral's flagship models like Mistral-Large. Second, the companies will collaborate on AI research and development to push AI model's boundaries. And third, Azure's enterprise capabilities will give Mistral additional opportunities to promote, sell, and distribute their models to Microsoft customers worldwide.

However, an investment in a European startup can not go smoothly without the constant eyesight of the European Union authorities and regulators to oversee the deal. According to Bloomberg, an EU spokesperson on Tuesday claimed that the EU regulators will perform an analysis of Microsoft's investment into Mistral after receiving a copy of the agreement between the two parties. While there is no formal investigation yet, if EU regulators continue to probe Microsoft's deal and intentions, they could launch a complete formal investigation that could lead to the termination of Microsoft's plans. Of course, the formal investigation is still on hold, but investing in EU startups might become unfeasible for American tech giants if the EU regulators continue to push the scrutiny of every investment made in companies based on EU soil.

The U.S. Department of Commerce today announced $1.5 billion in planned direct funding for GlobalFoundries (Nasdaq: GFS) (GF) as part of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. This investment will enable GF to expand and create new manufacturing capacity and capabilities to securely produce more essential chips for automotive, IoT, aerospace, defense, and other vital markets.

New York-headquartered GF, celebrating its 15th year of operations, is the only U.S.-based pure play foundry with a global manufacturing footprint including facilities in the U.S., Europe, and Singapore. GF is the first semiconductor pure play foundry to receive a major award (over $1.5 billion) from the CHIPS and Science Act, designed to strengthen American semiconductor manufacturing, supply chains and national security. The proposed funding will support three GF projects:

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB reference model has reached UK shores, albeit very briefly and with a very low stock count—e-tailer AWD-IT Gaming PC (ADMI Ltd.) was the first shop in the region to offer XFX's Navi 31 XL partner card. Team Red's formerly Chinese market-exclusive Radeon RDNA 3 GPU has made its way West—as of late last year—but retail presence in Europe is less than inspiring. Circumstances could change—recent rumblings indicate that more custom options are incoming—GIGABYTE is readying a Gaming OC variant, possibly paving the way for a wider release through mainstream channels. PowerColor's Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 GRE OC model has also been spotted on European price comparison engines.

UK buyers were treated to an initial batch of a dozen (or fewer) XFX Radeon RX 7900 GRE Reference graphics card, at £659.99 (~$832) including VAT and free delivery. AWD-IT's listing is inactive at the time of writing, but the SKU remains as a searchable asset on their web store. It appears that curious UK hardware enthusiasts have snapped up the first round of Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) curiosities, although the price point was nowhere near as attractive when lined up against past offerings within EU mainlands. For example, Italy's PSK Mega Store had reference stock priced at €542.66 (~$585) a piece, with a digital copy of AVATAR: Frontiers of Pandora bundled in. The XFX Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB SPEEDSTER MERC 310 model is currently discounted—£699.99 via Ebuyer UK—representing a very tempting higher-specced custom design prospect (going for only £40 more than the RX 7900 GRE) .

Slimbook, a Spanish tech company, is a self-described pioneer in the GNU/Linux hardware ecosystem—specializing in laptops and notebooks. Their latest offering is a gaming-oriented model that packs a typical modern day specification sheet: Intel Core i7-13620H CPU, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 integrated graphics, and a 15.6 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel 165 Hz display. A previously released Hero model sports the same specs, although it is sold with "Windows, Linux, or both (Dual Boot)" options. Beyond the usual gaming hardware credentials, a unique selling point is signified by its name: Slimbook Hero Manjaro—this Linux distribution was previously sighted on Orange Pi Neo handheld demo units.

Linux's popularity in gaming circles has grown since the launch of Valve's Steam Deck handheld—its Proton software layer grants access to roughly 4400 compatible Windows titles (at the time of writing). Valve's Deck Verified operation will continue on its quest to add even more titles in the near future. By all indications, the Manjaro Linux team and its hardware partners have been taking notes—while most gaming handhelds manufacturers have sided with Microsoft's Windows 11 OS, the Orange Pi Neo team has opted to go open source. Slimbook's selection of a community-backed Manjaro OS is certainly quite distinctive in the world of GNU/Linux gaming laptops/notebooks—customers are treated to a wide selection of ecosystems: Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, ProtonUp-QT, OBS, and Lutris.

According to a Bloomberg report, Intel is seeking to raise at least $2 billion in equity funding from investors for expanding its fabrication facility in Leixlip, Ireland, known as Fab 34. The chipmaker has hired an advisor to find potential investors interested in providing capital for the project. Fab 34 is currently Intel's only chip plant in Europe that uses cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. It produces processors on the Intel 4 process node, including compute tiles for Meteor Lake client CPUs and expected future Xeon data center chips. While $2 billion alone cannot finance the construction of an entirely new fab today, it can support meaningful expansion or upgrades of existing capacity. Intel likely aims to grow Fab 34's output and/or transition it to more advanced 3 nm-class technologies like Intel 3, Intel 20A, or Intel 18A.

Expanding production aligns with Intel's needs for its own products and its Intel Foundry Services business, providing contract manufacturing. Intel previously secured a $15 billion investment from Brookfield Infrastructure for its Arizona fabs in exchange for a 49% stake, demonstrating the company's willingness to partner to raise capital for manufacturing projects. The Brookfield deal also set a precedent of using outside financing to supplement Intel's own spending budget. It provided $15 billion in effectively free cash flow Intel can redirect to other priorities like new fabs without increasing debt. Intel's latest fundraising efforts for the Ireland site follow a similar equity investment model that leverages outside capital to support its manufacturing expansion plans. Acquiring High-NA EUV machinery for manufacturing is costly, as these machines can reach up to $380 million alone.

GIGABYTE is ready with its first custom design graphics card based on the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition). Originally designed for the Chinese domestic market, the RX 7900 GRE is finding its way across other Asian markets, and is also available in Europe. This GIGABYTE graphics card could be among the RX 7900 GRE cards to make it to the old continent. The card's design resembles that of the company's RX 7800 XT Gaming OC, which is slightly smaller than that of the RX 7900 XT Gaming OC. It features a triple-slot WindForce 3X cooling solution with a dual aluminium fin-stack heatsink that uses a copper base-plate, four heatpipes, and a trio of 80 mm fans. The card is about 30 cm long, 13 cm tall, and 5.6 cm thick. It uses a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

The Radeon RX 7900 GRE is based on the "Navi 31" XL silicon, which is essentially the "Navi 31" chiplet GPU on a compact package that's about the size of a "Navi 32." AMD designed this smaller package for its mobile RX 7900 series SKUs. The RX 7900 GRE is configured with 80 RDNA3 compute units, which make up 5,120 stream processors, 160 AI accelerators, 80 Ray accelerators, and 320 TMUs. It gets the full 192 ROP count of the silicon. The SKU only has four out of six MCDs (memory cache dies) enabled, which gives it 64 MB of Infinity Cache, and a 256-bit wide memory bus, driving 16 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 for 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The total board power (TBP) of the RX 7900 GRE is configured at 260 W, which is about the same as that of the RX 7800 XT. The GIGABYTE Gaming OC card is expected to come with a slight factory overclock for the GPU.

GIGABYTE Technology, a pioneer in computer hardware, has taken a significant stride in shaping its European business model. Today, GIGABYTE has broadened its e-commerce platform, shop.gigabyte.eu, by integrating enterprise server and server motherboard solutions into its product portfolio. Being at the forefront of computer hardware manufacturing, GIGABYTE recognizes that it is imperative to expand its presence in the EMEA region to maintain its leadership across all markets. With the introduction of our enterprise-level server and motherboard solutions, we are dedicated to delivering a diverse range of high-performance products directly to our B2B clients.

GIGABYTE offers a complete product portfolio that addresses all workloads from the data center to edge including traditional and emerging workloads in HPC and AI to data analytics, 5G/edge, cloud computing, and more. Our enduring partnerships with key technology leaders ensure that our new products are at the forefront of innovation and launch with new partner platforms. Our systems embody performance, security, scalability, and sustainability. Within the e-commerce product portfolio, we offer a selection of models from our Edge, Rack, GPU, and Storage series. Additionally, the platform provides server motherboards for custom integration. The current selection comprises a mix of solutions tailored to online sales. For more complex solutions, customers can get in touch via the integrated contact form.

It seems that AMD and its board partners are continuing to rollout new custom graphics cards based on the formerly China market exclusive Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB GPU—PowerColor unleashed its fiendish flagship Red Devil model as one of last September's launch options. Their Chinese website has been updated with another Navi 31 XL entry—Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 GRE OC. This design sits below the Red Devil in the company's graphics card product and pricing hierarchy; providing excellent cooling performance with fewer frills. The latest custom RX 7900 GRE card borrows PowerColor's existing demonic dog design from the mid-tier Hellhound RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT models. The Hellhound enclosure deployed on Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT GPUs is a much chunkier affair.

The PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 GRE OC has also popped up on a couple of UK and mainland Europe price comparison engines (published 2024-01-30), so it possible that a very limited release could occur across a small smattering of countries and retail channels—Proshop Denmark seems to be the first place with cards in stock, pricing is €629.90 (~$682) at the time of writing. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) GPU sits in an awkward spot between the fancier Navi 31 options, and Navi 32 siblings—AMD and its AIB partners have reduced MSRPs in Europe, possibly in reaction to the recent launch of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 SUPER series. We are not sure if this initiative has boosted the RX 7900 GRE's popularity in this region, since very few outlets actually offer the (XFX-produced) reference model or Sapphire's Pulse custom design.

Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) has today announced that the General Purpose Partition of the MareNostrum 5, a new pre-exascale supercomputer running on Lenovo's HPC infrastructure, has been classified as the top x86 general-purpose cluster on the recently published TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers globally.

Officially inaugurated at Barcelona Supercomputing Center on December 21st, MareNostrum 5 has been built for the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). The pre-exascale supercomputer will bolster the EU's mission to provide Europe with the most advanced supercomputing technology and accelerate the capacity for artificial intelligence (AI) research, enabling new scientific advances that will help solve global challenges. It aims to empower a wide range of complex HPC-specific applications, from climate research and engineering to material science and earth sciences, adeptly handling tasks that extend beyond the capabilities of cloud computing.

European buyers are facing a baseline MSRP of €1109 for the upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics card family, thanks to extra sales taxes affecting purchases in the region's various countries. North American customers are set to "enjoy" a more reasonable entry point of $999 come January 31, including various custom options from NVIDIA's board partners—ZOTAC lead the charge with their non-overclocked offerings matching Team Green's Founders Edition MSRP. A small selection of brave retailers have already delivered GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics cards to customers, while others have simply gone live with their asking prices.

Germany's Notebooksbilliger (translation: cheaper laptops) online store has produced product pages for all sorts of custom GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER cards—prices start off at NVIDIA's €1109 baseline, and ramp up to a maximum of €1379 for the fanciest option (ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 4080 SUPER OC). A VideoCardz report focuses mostly on the cheapest products listed by Notebooksbilliger.de. Five non-overclocked custom designs sits at the bottom of the webshop's RTX 4080 SUPER pricing pile: ASUS TUF GAMING, GIGABYTE SUPER WINDFORCE, SUPER WINDFORCE V2, Inno3D X3 and ZOTAC's Trinity Black Edition. At the time of writing, Notebooksbilliger's customers cannot pre-order any of the listed GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER cards—the full checkout process could be unlocked early next week, a few days ahead of the official January 31 launch day.

AMD unveiled its Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) Radeon RX 7900 GPU last summer—this Navi 31 XL-based card was first launched in China, with only a handful of customized options and a reference model (produced by XFX) available at the starting line. It later emerged that Team Red's special SKU (celebrating the Year of the Rabbit) would be heading West; by Autumn-time, system integrators in Europe started to sell full PC systems outfitted with Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics cards. By late 2023, a small smattering of board partner versions hit the European market in proper retail form—you no longer had to shell out €1500+ for a pre-built system in order to gain access to an exclusive model. Team Red's almost parallel launch of its Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU has overshadowed the slightly more powerful RDNA 3 model's limited release.

VideoCardz has received tips about price cuts affecting certain Radeon RX 7900 GRE models, and a new retail entry for an ASRock custom design. AMD has started to adjust its pricing at the higher mid-tier and flagship GPU level, in reaction to NVIDIA rolling out GeForce RTX 40 SUPER cards this month. This initiative has affected the Radeon RX 7900 GRE as well, despite its very restricted availability in Western markets. The article points to an example of the reference design with its price falling by ~€60 (over a two month period)—Italy's PSK Mega Store's offer currently sits at €542.66. The lowest price in Spanish and German markets appears to be €579—CoolMod Espagna has Sapphire's Pulse Radeon RX 7900 GRE Gaming OC 16 GB card listed at €579.95; it also qualifies for the AVATAR: Frontiers of Pandora promotion. Mindfactory DE lists a mysterious ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Challenger 16 GB OC Edition model (SKU 90-GA52ZZ-00UANF), ready to purchase and ship out immediately at €579. Photos of this twin-fan custom model can be viewed at Skinflint UK.

Today, Ubisoft announced that BattleCore Arena, a free-to-play competitive platform shooter, is under development at Ubisoft Bordeaux and coming to PC via Ubisoft Connect and Steam. Playing as a spherical core, players will enter multi-tiered maps and contend with gravitational forces as they roll, dash, jump, and double-jump to outmaneuver their opponents with physics-based movement. Players will also be able to eject (or be ejected by) their opponents as they wield a multi-faceted arsenal, featuring ranged weapons for close-range impact or mid-distance power, as well as perks to help them evade danger, knock out enemies, or aid their allies.

BattleCore Arena is a PvP game with competitive modes including Backup, a 3v3 team deathmatch; Golden Core, in which possession of the eponymous Core is the path to victory; and Free-for-all, a fast-paced way to test your solo skills or warm up before climbing the ladder in ranked matches. Players can customize their core with cosmetic options for armor, lights, banners, elimination explosions, and more so they can show off their style while zipping around the arenas. If you live in Europe, you can register to participate in the BattleCore Arena tech test running from February 1 through February 5. Stay tuned to Ubisoft News for more on BattleCore Arena.

Global semiconductor capacity is expected to increase 6.4% in 2024 to top the 30 million *wafers per month (wpm) mark for the first time after rising 5.5% to 29.6 wpm in 2023, SEMI announced today in its latest quarterly World Fab Forecast report.

The 2024 growth will be driven by capacity increases in leading-edge logic and foundry, applications including generative AI and high-performance computing (HPC), and the recovery in end-demand for chips. The capacity expansion slowed in 2023 due to softening semiconductor market demand and the resulting inventory correction.

The recent attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea are affecting not only oil shipments, but also cargo ships from Asia to Europe. All major carriers such as CMA CGM, Cosco, Evergreen, Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk, MSC and so forth are affected and all have delayed their shipments through the area. A coordinated security action called Operations Prosperity Guardian which includes over half a dozen nations so far, is getting ready to guide shipments through the affected area by Yemen, but it'll lead to slower shipments through the area.

TechPowerUp has already received reports from sources in Taiwan that their products are on some of these ships that are now stuck waiting for naval escorts through the area. However, it appears that there might be shortages of some computer components for the foreseeable future, alongside many other products that are being shipped this route and onwards via the Suez Canal. According to the BBC, it takes 25.5 days on average to ship goods from Taiwan to the Netherlands via the Red Sea and Suez Canal whereas the only alternative route via the Cape of Good Hope takes 34 days and adds extra fuel costs. Regardless of the extra shipping times and costs, it appears some shipping companies are willing to take the longer route to avoid being attacked. This is likely to have a knock on effect on prices for a lot of consumer goods in Europe, so if you haven't bought that hardware you've been holding off getting, now might be as good a time as any.

The 62nd edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system retains its top spot and is still the only exascale machine on the list. However, five new or upgraded systems have shaken up the Top 10.

Housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, Frontier leads the pack with an HPL score of 1.194 EFlop/s - unchanged from the June 2023 list. Frontier utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, Frontier has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/watt and relies on HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.