Articles by Matthew Connatser

Matthew first got into PC gaming after the Wii U launched out of pure disappointment, building his first desktop in 2015. Ever since, he's been burning money buying PC parts he really doesn't need, like a custom liquid cooling setup that may or may not have caused an electrical fire in his last PC build. All this experience in PC building led to a career in writing about them, and Matthew has written for Tom's Hardware, Digital Trends, HotHardware, and a few other publications. He mainly reports on PC news but would spend all of his time benchmarking if he could. Matthew originally went to college to get a computer engineering degree to complement his journalistic career but instead got a degree in history and linguistics, which he enjoyed studying much more than physics and math.

Articles by: Matthew Connatser

Jobs eviscerated at Chinese Arm chip design firm in wake of restrictions from TSMC — lack of access to 7nm node could cause 150 employees to be laid off

By Matthew Connatser published 5 December 24

Half of Hongjun Microelectronics Technology’s 300 workers might be fired after the server CPU firm lost access to TSMC’s 7nm node.

Intel's new Arc GPU naked in unsanctioned teardown pics — B580 has Nvidia Founders Edition-inspired cooler, BGM-G21 die surrounded by 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory

By Matthew Connatser published 4 December 24

Intel didn’t shake things up too much with the B580, but one significant difference from the A750 and A770 indicates Chipzilla is following Nvidia’s lead.

Chinese chip firms say a new round of US sanctions won’t stop China’s chip industry — Chinese government responds with its own export restrictions anyways

By Matthew Connatser published 3 December 24

The US and China trade blows yet again on semiconductor products and minerals, but Chinese companies say they’ll survive.

Linux AMD patch fixes glacial boot times for some Zen 1 and 2 computers — time saved ranges from seconds to multiple minutes

By Matthew Connatser published 1 December 24

Botched microcode updates were causing boot times to balloon on some computers that used Zen 1 and Zen 2 CPUs.

Intel Battlemage desktop GPUs to launch before end of year, report claims

By Matthew Connatser published 26 November 24

Intel’s next generation Battlemage desktop cards are slated to land before 2024 ends according to ZDNet Korea, but gaming might not be the GPU’s primary focus.

Ubitium announces development of 'universal' processor that combines CPU, GPU, DSP, and FPGA functionalities – RISC-V powered chip slated to arrive in two years

By Matthew Connatser published 24 November 24

RISC-V startup Ubitium says it’s working on a processor that can tackle any workload whether it’s made for CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, or FPGAs.

Threadripper 9000 CPUs spotted with 16 to 96 Zen 5 cores — Shimada Peak expected to max out at 350W

By Matthew Connatser published 23 November 24

Shipping manifest data indicates the Threadripper 9000 series will get a 16-core member, and confirms the 96-core flagship model will have a 350-watt TDP like the 7980X.

AMD crafts custom EPYC CPU with HBM3 memory for Microsoft Azure – CPU with 96 Zen 4 cores and 450GB of HBM3 may be repurposed MI300C, four chips hit 7 TB/s [Updated]

By Matthew Connatser last updated 22 November 24

Microsoft’s new Azure HBv5 virtual machines use a custom AMD CPU that looks an awful lot like the rumored MI300C that never officially launched.

Cerebras video shows AI writing code 75x faster than world's fastest AI GPU cloud — world's largest chip beats AWS's fastest in head-to-head comparison

By Matthew Connatser published 20 November 24

Llama 3.1 405B runs at nearly a thousand tokens a second on Cerebras Inference, and took a quarter of a second to get the first token.

Google may be forced to sell its Chrome browser due to monopoly complaints — potential $20 billion sale if approved by a judge

By Matthew Connatser published 19 November 24

Google accuses the Department of Justice of having a ‘radical agenda’ in response to a report that claims a forced sell-off of Chrome is on the table.

The Framework Laptop 13 with DeepComputing's RISC-V motherboard.

RISC-V motherboard for Framework 13 laptops and mini-PCs starts at $199 – quad-core RISC-V CPU and 8GB of RAM included

By Matthew Connatser published 14 November 24

RISC-V company DeepComputing launches a $199 motherboard that’s ready out-of-the-box for the Framework 13 laptop and mini PCs.

A die shot of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D's V-Cache chip.

Ryzen 7 9800X3D gutted to get a look inside AMD’s gaming champion — die shot reveals CPU cores and 3D V-Cache

By Matthew Connatser published 8 November 24

A Bilibili user sacrificed his 9800X3D in order to get a look at the chip’s CCD and 3D V-Cache.

Unannounced Ryzen 9 9950X3D dominates Ryzen 7 9800X3D in Factorio benchmark — Ryzen 9000X3D flagship up to 18% faster than current fastest gaming CPU

By Matthew Connatser published 7 November 24

The 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D is much faster than the 8-core 9800X3D according to one benchmark site that has a result for the as-of-yet unannounced chip.

Asus launches triple-fan RX 6750 GRE Megalodon GPU – midrange RDNA 2 GPU still plentiful even in late 2024

By Matthew Connatser published 4 November 24

Asus has released a new triple-fan model of the RX 6750 GRE, the RX 6750 GRE Atlas Shark, showing that there’s still plenty of leftover midrange RDNA 2 GPUs to sell.

AMD’s China-exclusive lineup of prebuilt PCs gets Ryzen 7 9800X3D upgrade – some models come with GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs

By Matthew Connatser published 4 November 24

In China, AMD is releasing its prebuilt desktops featuring the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

It’s been 30 years since Intel’s infamous Pentium FDIV bug reared its ugly head – a math bug caused Intel’s first CPU recall

By Matthew Connatser published 31 October 24

2024 marks the 30th anniversary since Intel announced a math glitch on some of its Pentium CPUs.

RISC-V CPU demoed with RX 7900 XTX GPU in Debian Linux — AMD flagship GPU paired with Milk-V Megrez board and SiFive P550 cores

By Matthew Connatser published 29 October 24

RISC-V firm Milk-V demonstrated that it can get AMD’s RX 7900 XTX graphics card to work on one of its RISC-V boards.

Core Ultra 7 265 specifications exposed in a new benchmark — the unreleased Arrow Lake chip has a 200 MHz lower boost clock than the Core Ultra 7 265K

By Matthew Connatser published 26 October 24

Benchleaks has uncovered an unannounced Core Ultra 7 265 in a Geekbench 6 GPU result.

Western Digital launches 32TB hard drive in SATA and SAS flavors — Ultrastar DC HC690 delivers sequential performance up to 257 MiB/s

By Matthew Connatser published 15 October 24

Western Digital’s newly launched ePMR-powered UltraSMR HDDs can store up to 32TB, a new record for shingled magnetic recording-based drives.

RX 7650 GRE reportedly leverages Navi 33 GPU — Radeon GPU rumored to skip CES 2025 but launch shortly afterward in China

By Matthew Connatser published 14 October 24

AMD is rumored to be prepping the RX 7650 GRE for launch early next year, but according to Benchlife.info, it won’t debut at CES.

AMD Ryzen AI 300 CPU beats Intel Core Ultra 200V CPU in Linux showdown — Strix Point was up to 1.6X faster than Lunar Lake

By Matthew Connatser published 5 October 24

According to one review, Lunar Lake's performance in Linux disappoints, which found Ryzen AI 300 APUs to be much better.

Intel Lunar Lake CPU gets die annotation — four Skymont E-cores slightly bigger than one Lion Cove P-core

By Matthew Connatser published 4 October 24

Die shots of Intel's Lunar Lake CPU for mobile have been annotated in detail.

Official render of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit for Windows

Snapdragon X Elite pushed past 100W shows us what the CPU can offer on the desktop — almost 4X more power for 10% to 30% more performance

By Matthew Connatser published 1 October 24

Benchmarks performed on the Snapdragon X Elite dev kit show that having a lot more power doesn't always mean having a lot more speed.

Huawei guns for Nvidia market share in China — Ascend 910C GPU customer sampling begins

By Matthew Connatser published 29 September 24

Huawei's latest GPU for AI, the Ascend 910C, has finally hit the sampling stage.

Intel Arrow Lake QS CPU pictured — 'Q33K' CPU is seemingly a Core Ultra 7 265K

By Matthew Connatser published 28 September 24

A qualification sample Arrow Lake CPU that leaked on a Chinese forum is apparently the Core Ultra 7 265K.

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