The big picture: As you know, AMD launched their new Zen 4, Ryzen 7000 processors about two weeks ago now and hopefully you've all seen our reviewsof the fourmodels. There are a number of strengths to these new parts, including performance – however, AMD is facing a bit of a hurdle since their introduction, and that is convincing people to actually buy them.
Does this mean I can declare myself Employee of the Month?
WTF?! Far Cry 6 Game of the Year (GOTY) Edition launches on Friday as an inexplicably strange bundle and costs $120. Several things make this version of the game weird, which I will touch on, but the main takeaway should be: Don't buy it. We don't want to encourage this type of marketing.
The big picture: Intel has ambitions to create a foundry business by manufacturing chips for other companies. This is an important strategic initiative that the company will need to recoup the massive investment it is now making in fabs around the world.
In context: Databases are in something of a Golden Age right now. There is an immense amount of development taking place in and around the way we store and access data. The world is obsessed with "data," and while we would not call it the "new oil," our ability to manipulate and analyze data continues to advance in important ways. But at their heart, databases are fairly straightforward things - repositories of data.
The big picture: Nvidia finally took the wraps off their next-generation GeForce 40 series graphics cards, which feels like it's been a long time coming considering all the leaks and rumors over the last year or so. We've spent some time analyzing Nvidia's presentation to give our thoughts on the new RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 series GPUs and to break down some of Nvidia's confusing performance reveals that obfuscate the most important information.
Why it matters: Earlier this month, the US government blocked the sale of specific chips to anyone in China. We see this as an important change by the government in the tactics they are deploying. The United States has gone from blocking specific companies in China, to blocking all companies and focusing on specific products.
This is a big change, and opens up the question – what exactly are they hoping to achieve? This matters obviously in that it can help us predict the outcome, but we increasingly hold the view that the government may not have entirely thought through how this will ultimately play out.