AMD and EK Cooling Hardware News from the Week of June 1, 2020

[Guest_Jim_*]

The game stories I have missed this week have gone up already, but there are also some hardware stories I missed as I have focused on another project. These stories concern AMD and EK, with AMD revealing some information on RDNA 2 GPUs, and submitting a Linux driver patch, while EK is holding the EK Cooling Expo virtual event this week.

Going in alphabetical order, AMD CFO Devinder Kumar stated at the Bank of America 2020 Securities Global Technology Conference that the first RDNA 2 based product will be a Navi 2x GPU. This means the new architecture will not first enter the market in the upcoming consoles, which both have a Holiday 2020 launch target. The RDNA 2 architecture is to feature a 50% efficiency improvement over the current RDNA 1 products, which already improved efficiency by 50% over the older GCN devices. It will also being support for fixed-function accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and variable rate shading, which are all features many are looking forward to, in part because NVIDIA's Turing architecture in the RTX 20-series already supports them.

The CFO also stated the RDNA architecture will go through the entire stack, covering mainstream GPUs and that the so-called "Big Navi" GPU will be a halo product, as in a very powerful but typically also a very expensive product, such as NVIDIA's Titan series of graphics cards. Though few people purchase these products, their existence at the top of the stack does have an impact on consumers.

Launching a lot of speculation this week was the appearance of a new GPU in AMD's Linux drivers named Sienna Cichlid. This code name was generated by a script, according to a Phoronix forum post by AMD Linux team member bridgman, and with this first patch, it is hard to know much about what this GPU might be. However, the patch indicates it is a Navi-based GPU with VCN 3.0 capabilities for video encoding and DCN3 for working with displays. The timing of the patch indicates this GPU will not be mainlined into the Linux Kernel until Linux 5.9, with its merge window opening in August and a stable release expected around October, so it could be one of the highly anticipated RDNA 2 GPUs.

Source: Overclock 3D and Phoronix

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This week EK has been holding its first EK Cooling Expo, a virtual event the company is putting on in light of various conventions and expositions being postponed or cancelled due to the current health crisis. It began with its keynote on June 2, which you can find and watch on EK's YouTube Channel along with many other videos that may be worth a look. Some are more instructional, like the "How to Plan Your Loop" video released today, while others give an idea of what we can expect from the company, as some information has been shared during the Q&A sessions.

Tomorrow looks to be the best day to learn what is upcoming as it already has scheduled videos with titles of "Fluid Gaming PCs," "EK's Latest Pride & Joy," as well as "What's Cooking," so be sure to check it out if you are interested in custom liquid cooling. The company has also released the EK AIO that will be coming to the US and Amazon in the next month or two, for those of you that want better cooling but are not ready to jump into custom loops yet. If you are just unsure about building a loop yourself, the "Fluid Gaming PCs" video might be what you want to look at, as systems with custom cooling installed will be available under that brand.

If you have already entered into custom liquid cooling using an EK Fluid Gaming kit, there is some important news for you, if you have not already seen it. It appears the kits will be going away, with Fluid Gaming being just for the pre-build computers. However, we can still expect a new GPU block in the future and something for those who want to upgrade in the future. As the Fluid Gaming kits use aluminum parts, they should not be mixed with copper components, as the copper will actually eat away the aluminum.

Source: EK Water Blocks

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