Although AMD delayed launch of its Ryzen 9000-series processors based on the Zen 5 microarchitecture from July 31, to early and mid-August, the company's partner (and major US retailer) Best Buy briefly began listing the new CPUs today, revealing a very plausible set of launch prices. As per the retailer's product catalog, the most affordable unlocked Zen 5-based processor will cost $279, whereas the highest-performing Zen 5-powered CPU will cost $599 at launch.

AMD will start its Ryzen 9000 series rollout from relatively inexpensive six-core Ryzen 5 9600X and eight-core Ryzen 7 9700X on August 8. Per the Best Buy listing, the Ryzen 5 9600X will cost $279, whereas the Ryzen 7 9700X will carry a recommended price tag of $359.  Meanwhile, The more advanced 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X and 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X will hit the market on August 15 at MSRPs of $449 and $599, respectively, based on the Best Buy listing.

It is noteworthy that when compared to the launch prices of the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 processors, the new Zen 5-powered Ryzen 9000 CPUs come in cheaper. The range topping Ryzen 9 5950X started at $799 in 2020, while the Ryzen 9 7950X had a recommended $699 price tag in 2022. By contrast, the top-end Ryzen 9 9950X is listed at $599. Both Ryzen 7 5600X and Ryzen 7 7600X cost $299 at launch, while the upcoming Ryzen 5 9600X will apparently be priced at $279 at launch.

As always with accidental retailer listings, it should be emphasized that AMD has not yet announced official pricing for their Ryzen 9000 CPUs. Given Best Buy's status as one of the largest US electronics retailers, these prices carry a very high probability of being accurate; but none the less, they should be taken with a grain of salt – if only because last-minute price changes are not unheard of with new CPU launches.

Source: Best Buy (via @momomo_us)

Micron on Tuesday announced that the company has begun shipping its 9th Generation (G9) 276 layer TLC NAND. The next generation of NAND from the prolific memory maker, Micron's latest NAND is designed to further push the envelope on TLC NAND performance, offering significant density and performance improvements over its existing NAND technology.

Micron's G9 TLC NAND memory features 276 active layers, which is up from 232-layers in case of Micron's previous generation TLC NAND. At this point the company is being light on technical details in their official material. However in a brief interview with Blocks & Files, the company confirmed that their 276L NAND still uses a six plane architecture, which was first introduced with the 232L generation. At this point we're assuming Micron is also string-stacking two decks of NAND together, as they have been for the past couple of generations, which means we're looking at 138 layer decks.

On the density front, Micron told Blocks & Files that they have improved their NAND density by 44% over their 232L generation. Which, given what we know about that generation, would put the density at around 21 Gbit/mm². Or for a 1Tbit die of TLC NAND, that works out to a die size of roughly 48.9mm², comparable to the die size of a 512Gbit TLC die from Micron's older 176L NAND.

Besides improving density, the other big push with Micron's newest generation of NAND was further improving its throughput. While the company's 232L NAND was built against the ONFi 5.0 specification, which topped out at transfer rates of 2400 MT/sec, their new 276L NAND can hit 3600 MT/sec, which is consistent with the ONFi 5.1 spec.

Meanwhile, the eagle-eyed will likely also pick up on Micron's ninth-generation/G9 branding, which is new to the company. Micron's has not previously used this kind of generational branding for their NAND, which up until now has simply been identified by its layer count (and before the 3D era, its feature size). Internally, this is believed to be Micron's 7th generation 3D NAND architecture. However, taking a page from the logic fab industry, Micron seems to be branding it as ninth-generation in order to keep generational parity with its competitors, who are preparing their own 8th/9th generation NAND (and thus cliam that they are the first NAND maker to ship 9th gen NAND).

And while this NAND will eventually end up in all sorts of devices – including, no doubt, high-end PCIe Gen5 drives thanks to its high transfer rates – Micron's launch vehicle for the NAND is their own Micron 2650 client SSD. The 2650 is a relatively straightforward PCIe Gen4 x4 SSD, using an unnamed, DRAMless controller alongside Micron's new NAND. The company is offering it in 3 form factors – M.2 2280, 2242, and 2230 – with a modest set of capacities ranging from 256GB to 1TB.

Micron's 2650 NVMe SSDs offer sequential read performance of up to 7000 MB/s as well as sequential write performance of up to 6000 MB/s. As for random performance, we are talking about up to a million read and write IOPS, depending on the configuration.

The performance of the drives scales pretty significantly with capacity, underscoring how much parallelism is needed to keep up with the PCIe Gen4 controller. The rated capacity of the drives scales similarly, with the smallest drive rated for 200TBW (800 drive writes), while the largest drive is rated for 600 TBW (600 drive writes).

“The shipment of Micron G9 NAND is a testament to Micron’s prowess in process technology and design innovations,” said Scott DeBoer, executive vice president of Technology and Products at Micron. “Micron G9 NAND is up to 73% denser than competitive technologies in the market today, allowing for more compact and efficient storage solutions that benefit both consumers and businesses.”

Micron's G9 276-layer TLC NAND memory is also in qualification with customers in component form, so expect the company's partners to adopt it for their high-end SSDs in the coming quarters. In addition, Micron plans Crucial-branded SSDs based on its G9 NAND memory..

Continuing our ongoing look at the latest-generation ATX 3.1 power supplies, today we are examining Cooler Master's V Platinum 1600 V2, a recent addition to the company's expansive PSU lineup.

The V Platinum 1600 V2 is designed to cater to top-end gaming and workstation PCs while offering maximum compatibility with modern ATX directives. And while it boasts a massive 1600 Watt output and a long list of features, the V is a workhorse of a power supply rather than a flagship; Cooler Master is aiming the PSU at budget-conscious users who can't justify spending top dollar, but whom none the less need a powerful and relatively efficient (80PLUS Platinum) power supply.

So often we see PSU vendors go for broke on their high-wattage units, since there's a lot of overlap there with the premium market, so it will be interesting to see what Cooler Master can do with a slightly more modest bill of materials.

Intel’s next-generation Core Ultra laptop chips finally have a launch date: September 3^rd.

Codenamed Lunar Lake, Intel has been touting the chips for nearly a year now. Most recently, Intel offered the press a deep dive briefing on the chips and their underlying architectures at Computex back in June, along with a public preview during the company’s Computex keynote. At the time Intel was preparing for Q3’2024 launch, and that window has finally been narrowed down to a single date – September 3^rd – when Intel will be hosting their Lunar Lake launch event ahead of IFA.

Intel’s second stab at a high volume chiplet-based processor for laptop users, Lunar Lake is aimed particularly at ultrabooks and other low-power mobile devices, with Intel looking to wrestle back the title of the most efficient PC laptop SoC. Lunar Lake is significant in this respect as Intel has never previously developed a whole chip architecture specifically for low power mobile devices before – it’s always been a scaled-down version of a wider-range architecture, such as the current Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 100 series). Consequently, Intel has been touting that they’ve made some serious efficiency advancements with their highly targeted chip, which they believe will vault them over the competition.

All told, Lunar Lake is slated to bring a significant series of updates to Intel’s chip architectures and chip design strategies. Of particular interest is the switch to on-package LPDDR5X memory, which is a first for a high-volume Core chip. As well, Lunar Lake incorporates updated versions of virtually every one of Intel’s architecture, from the CPU P and E cores – Lion Cove and Skymont respectively – to the Xe2 GPU and 4^th generation NPU (aptly named NPU 4). And, in a scandalous twist, both of the chiplets/tiles on the CPU are being made by TSMC. Intel isn’t providing any of the active silicon for the chip – though they are providing the Foveros packaging needed to put it together.

Suffice it to say, no matter what happens, Lunar Lake and the Core Ultra 200 series should prove to be an interesting launch.

It’s worth noting, however, that while Intel’s announcement of their livestreamed event is being labeled a “launch event” by the company, the brief reveal doesn’t make any claims about on-the-shelves availability. September 3^rd is a Tuesday (and the day after a US holiday), which isn’t a typical launch date for new laptops (for reference, the lightly stocked Meteor Lake launch was a Thursday). So Intel’s launch event may prove to be more of a soft launch for Lunar Lake; we’ll have to see how things pan out in the coming weeks.