AMD

AMD's Ryzen 7000 launch is bigger than just the processors. The processor architecture is changing, but it's also being accompanied by changes to everything from the chipset to the physical socket that the chips plug into. The last time this many things changed at once was back in 2017, when the first-generation Ryzen chips originally launched.

AMD will begin selling its latest budget GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, on January 19th. Its retail price is $199. But the ongoing GPU shortage, caused in part by cryptocurrency miners and scalpers who are snapping up every card they can get, has made it mostly impossible to get any graphics card at its list price over the past year.

Since 2018, an almost endless series of attacks broadly known as Spectre has kept Intel and AMD scrambling to develop defenses to mitigate vulnerabilities that allow malware to pluck passwords and other sensitive information directly out of silicon. Now, researchers say they’ve devised a new attack that breaks most—if not all—of those on-chip defenses.

In an embargoed presentation Friday morning, Intel Chief Performance Strategist Ryan Shrout walked a group of tech journalists through a presentation aimed at taking AMD's Zen 2 (Ryzen 4000 series) laptop CPUs down a peg.

On Tuesday, AMD announced three new additions to its desktop Ryzen CPU line: Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 5 3600XT. The new processor designs are expected to become generally available on July 7, the anniversary of the original launch date of 7nm Zen 2.

AMD's next flagship video card will be the Radeon VII. The VII slots in above the RX Vega 64 and averages about 29 percent faster, putting it within spitting distance of Nvidia's RTX 2080.

AMD today charted out its plans for the next few years of product development, with an array of new CPUs and GPUs in the development pipeline.

On the GPU front are two new datacenter-oriented GPUs: the Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50. Based on the Vega architecture and built on TSMC's 7nm process, the cards are aimed not primarily at graphics (despite what one might think given that they're called GPUs) but rather at machine learning, high-performance computing, and rendering applications.

German researchers reckon they have devised a method to thwart the security mechanisms AMD's Epyc server chips use to automatically encrypt virtual machines in memory.

So much so, they said they can exfiltrate plaintext data from an encrypted guest via a hijacked hypervisor and simple HTTP requests to a web server running in a second guest on the same machine.

When the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were revealed in millions of processors earlier this year, those deep-seated vulnerabilities rattled practically the entire computer industry. Now a group of Israeli researchers is outlining a new set of chip-focused vulnerabilities that, if confirmed, would represent another collection of flaws at the core of computer hardware, this time in a processor architecture designed by AMD.

It's not just Intel facing a legal firestorm over its handling of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU design flaws – AMD is also staring at a growing stack of class-action complaints related to the chip vulnerabilities.

At least four separate lawsuits have now been filed against the California-based processor slinger, alleging violations ranging from securities fraud to breach of warranty, unfair competition, and negligence. The cases, all submitted to a US district court in San Jose, include: