Electronic Arts Inc., a worldwide leader in interactive entertainment and sports gaming, announced the acquisition of Metalhead Software, a talented Canada-based video game studio and developer of the fan-favorite Super Mega Baseball franchise. EA SPORTS and Metalhead are teaming up to grow the Super Mega Baseball franchise as well as develop new gaming and sports experiences for players worldwide.

Metalhead co-founders Scott Drader and Christian Zuger started the company in 2009, and have since developed Super Mega Baseball into a highly rated and beloved gaming franchise, with an enthusiastic and loyal community. The Metalhead team will continue to work out of their Victoria, BC studio while partnering with the global EA SPORTS team to expand the Super Mega Baseball franchise as well as deliver new and engaging entertainment and sports experiences.

In response to reports of the PCIe riser cable of its H1 case posing a fire hazard, NZXT in February 2021 instituted a recall of the case in the U.S. and Canada. The flaw in the component's design came to light in early-2020, but it was only by November that it responded to the issue. In its original design, the PCIe riser component was improperly grounded, and a short-circuit could result in a fire. NZXT's first response to this was sending out non-conductive Nylon screws for the users to replace the metal ones the part originally shipped with. This solution wasn't found to be effective, and resulted in a product recall this February. Regulators in the U.S. and Canada directed NZXT to send out free repair kits to existing owners of the H1, along with disposal instructions for the entire case, if the user wishes to discontinue use. We got our Repair Kit, and decided to go hands-on.

The NZXT Repair Kit, and replacement riser card appears to be one of the most solidly built PCIe risers in the market. Thanks to the crypto-mining boom, the market is flooded with PCIe risers of all shapes and sizes, and the NZXT riser looks to be among the better designed ones. What sets this apart from the original design is that now, the downstream (female end) of the riser comes with grounding rings around the mounting holes, similar to motherboards. These are bits of exposed copper that facilitate contact between the ground layer of the PCB, with the sheet-metal of the case. The original design lacked grounding pads on either side of the PCB, and when installed with metal screws, certain PCB traces could get shorted, causing them to heat up and start a fire. NZXT's first solution to this problem was non-conductive Nylon screws. End users with an H1 case, can request this riser cable from here.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced that Tenstorrent, an AI semiconductor and software start-up developing next-generation computers, will license the new SiFive Intelligence X280 processor in its AI training and inference processor. SiFive will deliver more details of its SiFive Intelligence initiative including the SiFive Intelligence X280 processor at the Linley Spring Processor Conference on April 23rd.

Tenstorrent's novel approach to inference and training effectively and efficiently accommodates the exponential growth in the size of machine learning models while offering best-in-class performance.

AMD is readying its upcoming EPYC processors based on the refined Zen 3 core. Codenamed "Milan", the processor generation is supposed to bring the same number of PCIe lanes and quite possibly similar memory support. The pricing, along with the specifications, has been leaked and now we have information on every model ranging from eight cores to the whopping 64 cores. Thanks to @momomo_us on Twitter, we got ahold of Canadian pricing leaked on the Dell Canada website. Starting from the cheapest design listed here (many are missing here), you would be looking at the EPYC 7543 processor with 32 cores running at 2.8 GHz speed, 256 MB of L3 cache, and a TDP of 225 Watts. Such a processor will set you back as much as 2579.69 CAD, which is cheaper compared to the previous generation EPYC 7542 that costs 3214.70 CAD.

Whatever this represents more aggressive pricing to position itself better against the competition, we do not know. The same strategy is applied with the 64 core AMD EPYC 7763 processor (2.45 GHz speed, 256 MB cache, 280 W TDP) as the new Zen 3 based design is priced at 8069.69 CAD, which is cheaper than the 8180.10 CAD price tag of AMD EPYC 7762 CPU.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide server market grew 2.2% year over year to $22.6 billion during the third quarter of 2020 (3Q20). Worldwide server shipments declined 0.2% year over year to nearly 3.1 million units in 3Q20. Volume server revenue was up 5.8% to $19.0 billion, while midrange server revenue declined 13.9% to $2.6 billion, and high-end servers declined by 12.6% to $937 million.

"Global demand for enterprise servers was a bit muted during the third quarter of 2020 although we did see areas of strong demand," said Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC. "From a regional perspective, server revenue within China grew 14.2% year over year. And worldwide revenues for servers running AMD CPUs were up 112.4% year over year while ARM-based servers grew revenues 430.5% year over year, albeit on a very small base of revenue."

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today is announcing a partnership with Northern Data AG to create a HPC mega-project with computing power of around 3.1 exaflops. GIGABYTE will supply GPU-based server systems equipped with proven AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Instinct accelerators from technology partner AMD, a leading provider of high performance computing and graphics technologies, to Northern Data.

Northern Data develops a distributed computing cluster based on the hardware at locations in Norway, Sweden and Canada, which in its final stage of deployment will provide FP32 computing power of around 3.1 exaflops (3.1 million teraflops and 274.54 petaflops FP64). The world's fastest supercomputer, the Japanese "Fukagu" (Fujitsu), has a calculation power of 1.07 exaflops FP32 and 415.3 petaflops FP64, whereas the second fastest, the US supercomputer "Summit" (IBM) has a calculation power of 0.414 exaflops FP32 and 148.0 petaflops FP64.

The Epic Games store has seen continuous updates since its launch in 2018 adding various additional features, now surpassing many other game launchers such as Origin, Uplay, and battle.net in terms of features and hot on the heels of Steam. In the latest update to the platform Epic has added support for five new local currencies, users in Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway can now pay for games on the launcher in their native currencies. This addition is one of many Epic have been releasing from their public roadmap which lists trending pages, mod support, and offline sign-in all as features coming soon.

TechPowerUp is partnering with Cooler Master and ASUS to bring our readers from the United States and Canada, a chance to receive a full set of components put together in a gaming desktop. The TUF Gaming brand was originally created by ASUS and represents aspiration and value for gamers putting together a stable and reliable rig on a budget. Our build set also includes components from AMD, Team Group, and Apacer.

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It seems that AMD either had a) unrevealed plans to launch their online store on more countries and markets alongside the introduction of the Navi-powered RX 5700 XT, or b) a change of mind when it comes to permitted availability of their collectors', limited-edition graphics card for the rest of the world. Originally reported to only be launched in the United States and China, an AMD representative (under the handle dprairie_AMD over at Reddit) has seemingly confirmed that the company will be bringing its limited-edition graphics cards to more markets than previously expected - though it still isn't a global release. The statement from Reddit follows.

Reddit user @dprairie_AMD

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Hi all,
Friendly reminder that just because someone writes it doesn't mean it is true.... We will be expanding AMD.com sales to more countries, so we expect the 50th anniversary edition will also be available in: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Sorry we are not offering global availability at this point. We hear you on the desire. The team is focused on expanding into more regions/countries while making sure we can fully support customers.

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