NVIDIA 3000-Series Launch Date Announced

Via The Verge

NVIDIA’s Twitter account has tweeted a countdown to September 1, presumably for the release of the next generation of graphics hardware. These refreshed cards will remain in the market for quite some time at nearly the same price, making this announcement a great time to consider a purchase. NVIDIA-competitor AMD will also announce graphics cards this fall, so the best bet will be to hold off on a purchase until benchmarks from both vendors can be reported.

AMD On Track To Release New CPU and GPU Generations in 2021

Notebookcheck (https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-essentially-confirms-5-nm-Zen-4-CPUs-and-advanced-node-RDNA-3-GPUs-will-launch-by-2021-in-latest-corporate-presentation.483288.0.html) has reported that an internal presentation shows AMDs upcoming Zen 4 (5000 series?) CPUs and RDNA 3 (7000 series?) GPUs are on track for delivery in 2021. AMD has attempted to move to a yearly cadence of hardware updates. Their last few generations of hardware have shown significant improvement year by year. The upcoming Zen 3 and RDNA 2 already look to put AMD ahead of Intel and at least on par with NVIDIA, so if you’re planning a purchase be sure to check out AMD options this fall.

AMD Re-Confirms Zen 3 in 2020

During their earnings call, AMD has confirmed again that Ryzen 4000 series Zen 3 CPUs are on track for release in 2020. The expectation is that they will be available in volume by January 2021, but possibly announced as early as September.

See YouTuber Gamer’s Nexus for more. WCCFTech has more as well.

Leaked roadmap slide. Still on track.

Thinkpad P15 Announced

This unit will replace the venerable Thinkpad P53. They promise to increase the cooling capacity of the design and improve the amount of power that can be delivered to the GPU and CPU. These improvements remove the main bottleneck holding back the P53 design. Prices will likely be around the same as the current MSRP, so you may need to wait for a sale to snag one at the more “reasonable” mid-$3,000 price tag that the current recommendation occupies.

See more at NotebookCheck.

See more at Lenovo.

New Thinkpad P15 and P17 designs. Source: Lenovo.com

Upcoming Graphics Processors Rumored

Exciting times ahead. NVIDIA and AMD are both set to release new GPUs this summer or fall, promising performance gains. The rumors are strong and if you can hold off on a purchase until then, do so. It appears that AMD will release a GPU stronger than anything in NVIDIA’s current lineup, and NVIDIA will respond with a new generation of graphics chips that may hold the edge, especially with ray tracing technology. VRay now uses the ray tracing features in NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate rendering, so an uplift in ray tracing could yield real gains in render times.

See YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead for more.

See Tweaktown and Digital Trends for a rundown.

Rumored NVIDIA 3080Ti, improving performance by somewhere between 20 and 50%.