While the all-in-one CPU cooler industry is dominated, at least in mindshare, by flagship coolers from the industry’s biggest brands, the market segment overall has grown over the years to cover a much larger gamut of users. From flagship coolers to sub-$100 specials, effective AIO coolers have become available and affordable for most mid-range and higher builds. Thanks in part to some intensive competition in this space, we’ve seen several vendors bring down even 360mm coolers to the sub-$100 market in an effort to get in an edge over their competitors, and a sale in the process.
Looking at an opportunity to grow their own customer base, even the normally premium-focused AlphaCool has opted to get into this action with their Core Ocean lineup of coolers. And today, we're taking a closer look at the Core Ocean T38 360mm, AlphaCool's latest entry-level AIO cooler.
At a high level, the Core Ocean T38 has been designed to balance performance with manufacturing costs, allowing the company to put together an effective cooler that can still be priced low enough to reach budget-conscious consumers. Sticking with an aluminum radiator and keeping the frills such as RGB lighting to a minimum, the T38 is primarily aimed at system builders who require straightforward, effective cooling solutions – and without the complexity of AlphaCool's renowned open-loop custom liquid cooling kits. As we'll see, nothing comes for free, but AlphaCool has been able to put together a rather effective CPU cooler for $100 that's hard to ignore.
Cases/Cooling/PSUsWhen Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions.
The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting an ONFi 5.0 2400 MT/s interface, and features a combination of enterprise-grade capabilities (OCP Cloud Spec 2.0, SR-IOV, up to 512 name spaces for ZNS support, flexible data placement, NVMe-MI 1.2, advanced security, telemetry, power loss protection) not available on other off-the-shelf controllers – or on any previous Western Digital controllers.
The Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD offers sequential read speeds up to 13.7 GB/s as well as sequential write speeds up to 7.5 GB/s. As for random performance, it boasts with an up to 3.3 million random 4K read IOPS and up to 0.8 million random 4K write IOPS. The drives are available in capacities between 1.6 TB and 7.68 TB with one or three drive writes per day (DWPD) over five years rating as well as in U.2 and E1.S form-factors.
While the two form factors of the SN861 share a similar technical design, Western Digital has tailored each version for distinct workloads: the E1.S supports FDP and performance enhancements specifically for cloud environments. By contrast, the U.2 model is geared towards high-performance enterprise tasks and emerging applications like AI.
Without any doubts, Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 is a feature-rich high-performance enterprise-grade SSD. It has another distinctive feature: a 5W idle power consumption, which is rather low by the standards of enterprise-grade drives (e.g., it is 1W lower compared to the SN840). While the difference with predecessors may be just 1W, hyperscalers deploy thousands of drives and for their TCO every watt counts.
Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs are now available for purchase to select customers (such as Meta) and to interested parties. Prices are unknown, but they will depend on such factors as volumes.
Sources: Fadu, Storage Review
Storage
As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance.
As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite performance tier. As of today, this will be a single configuration. But if the Snapdragon X lineup is successful and demand warrants it, I would not be surprised to see Qualcomm expand it further – as they have certainly left themselves the room for it in their product stack. In the meantime, with Qualcomm’s expected launch competition now shipping (Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake and AMD Ryzen Mobile 8040 Hawk Point), the company is also very confident that even these reduced performance Snapdragon X Plus chips will be able to beat Intel and AMD in multithreaded performance – never mind the top-tier Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Qualcomm will be launching this expanded four chip stack at once; so both Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus tier devices should be available at the same time. The company’s goal is still to have devices on the shelf “mid-year”, although the company isn’t providing any more precise guidance than that. With Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, set to deliver a Computex keynote in June, I expect we’ll get more specific details on timings then, along with the company and its partners using the event to announce and showcase some retail laptop designs. So this is very much looking like a summer launch at the moment.
In the meantime, Qualcomm is already showing off what their Snapdragon X Plus chips can do with a fresh set of live benchmarks, akin to their Snapdragon X Elite performance previews from October 2023. We’ll dive into those in a bit, but suffice it to say, Qualcomm knows the score, and they want to make sure the entire world knows when they’re winning.
CPUsWhen Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions.
The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting an ONFi 5.0 2400 MT/s interface, and features a combination of enterprise-grade capabilities (OCP Cloud Spec 2.0, SR-IOV, up to 512 name spaces for ZNS support, flexible data placement, NVMe-MI 1.2, advanced security, telemetry, power loss protection) not available on other off-the-shelf controllers – or on any previous Western Digital controllers.
The Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD offers sequential read speeds up to 13.7 GB/s as well as sequential write speeds up to 7.5 GB/s. As for random performance, it boasts with an up to 3.3 million random 4K read IOPS and up to 0.8 million random 4K write IOPS. The drives are available in capacities between 1.6 TB and 7.68 TB with one or three drive writes per day (DWPD) over five years rating as well as in U.2 and E1.S form-factors.
While the two form factors of the SN861 share a similar technical design, Western Digital has tailored each version for distinct workloads: the E1.S supports FDP and performance enhancements specifically for cloud environments. By contrast, the U.2 model is geared towards high-performance enterprise tasks and emerging applications like AI.
Without any doubts, Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 is a feature-rich high-performance enterprise-grade SSD. It has another distinctive feature: a 5W idle power consumption, which is rather low by the standards of enterprise-grade drives (e.g., it is 1W lower compared to the SN840). While the difference with predecessors may be just 1W, hyperscalers deploy thousands of drives and for their TCO every watt counts.
Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs are now available for purchase to select customers (such as Meta) and to interested parties. Prices are unknown, but they will depend on such factors as volumes.
Sources: Fadu, Storage Review
Storage
As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance.
As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite performance tier. As of today, this will be a single configuration. But if the Snapdragon X lineup is successful and demand warrants it, I would not be surprised to see Qualcomm expand it further – as they have certainly left themselves the room for it in their product stack. In the meantime, with Qualcomm’s expected launch competition now shipping (Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake and AMD Ryzen Mobile 8040 Hawk Point), the company is also very confident that even these reduced performance Snapdragon X Plus chips will be able to beat Intel and AMD in multithreaded performance – never mind the top-tier Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Qualcomm will be launching this expanded four chip stack at once; so both Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus tier devices should be available at the same time. The company’s goal is still to have devices on the shelf “mid-year”, although the company isn’t providing any more precise guidance than that. With Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, set to deliver a Computex keynote in June, I expect we’ll get more specific details on timings then, along with the company and its partners using the event to announce and showcase some retail laptop designs. So this is very much looking like a summer launch at the moment.
In the meantime, Qualcomm is already showing off what their Snapdragon X Plus chips can do with a fresh set of live benchmarks, akin to their Snapdragon X Elite performance previews from October 2023. We’ll dive into those in a bit, but suffice it to say, Qualcomm knows the score, and they want to make sure the entire world knows when they’re winning.
CPUsSamsung this week has unveiled its latest process technologies roadmap at the company's Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) U.S. The new plan covers the evolution of Samsung's 2nm-class production nodes through 2027, including a process technology with a backside power delivery, re-emphasizing plans to bring out a 1.4nm-class node in 2027, and the introduction of a 'high value' 4nm-class manufacturing tech.
Samsung Foundry's key announcements for today are clearly focused on the its 2nm-class process technologies, which are set to enter production in 2025 and will span to 2027, when the company's 1.4-nm class production node is set to enter the scene. Samsung is also adding (or rather, renaming) another 2nm-class node to their roadmap with SF2, which was previously disclosed by Samsung as SF3P and aimed at high-performance devices.
"We have refined and improved the SF3P, resulting in what we now refer to as SF2," a Samsung spokesperson told AnandTech. "This enhanced node incorporates various process design improvements, delivering notable power, performance, and area (PPA) benefits."
| Samsung Foundry for Leading-Edge Nodes Announced on June 12, 2024 Compiled by AnandTech |
||||||||
| HVM Start | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | 2027 | 2027 | ||
| Process | SF3E | SF3 | SF2 (aka SF3P) |
SF2P/SF2X | SF2Z | SF1.4 | ||
| FET | GAAFET | |||||||
| Power Delivery | Frontside | Backside (BSPDN) | ? | |||||
| EUV | 0.33 NA EUV | ? | ? | ? | ? | |||
This is another example of a rebranding of leading-edge fabrication nodes in the recent years by a major chipmaker. Samsung Foundry is not disclosing any specific PPA improvements SF3P has over SF2, and for now is only stating in high-level terms that it will be a better-performing node than the planned SF3P.
Meanwhile, this week's announcement also includes new information on Samsung's next batch of process nodes, which are planned for 2026 and 2027. In 2026 Samsung will have SF2P, a further refinement of SF2 which incorporates 'faster' yet less dense transistors. That will be followed up in 2027 with SF2Z, which adds backside power delivery to the mix for better and higher quality power delivery. In particular, Samsung is targetting voltate drop (aka IR drop) here, which is an ongoing concern in chip design.
Finally, SF1.4, a 1.4nm-class node, is on track for 2027 as well. Interestingly, however, it looks like it does not feature a backside power delivery. Which, per current roadmaps, would have Samsung as the only foundry not using BSPDN for their first 1.4nm/14Å-class node.
"We have optimized BSPDN and incorporated it for the first time in the SF2Z node we announced today," the spokesperso... Semiconductors
As GPU families enter the later part of their lifecycles, we often see chip manufacturers start to offload stockpiles of salvaged chips that, for one reason or another, didn't make the grade for the tier of cards they normally are used in. These recovered chips are fairly unremarkable overall, but they are unsold silicon that still works and has economic value, leading to them being used in lower-tier cards so that they can be sold. And, judging by the appearance of a new video card design from MSI, it looks like NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace generation of chips has reached that stage, as the Taiwanese video card maker has put out a new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super card based on a salvaged AD102 GPU.
Typically based on NVIDIA's AD103 GPU, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super series sits a step below the company's flagship RTX 4080/4090 cards, both of which are based on the bigger and badder AD102 chip. But with some number of AD102 chips inevitably failing to live up to RTX 4080 specifications, rather than being thrown out, these chips can instead be used to make RTX 4070 cards. Which is exactly what MSI has done with their new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Black OC graphics card.
The card itself is relatively unremarkable – using a binned AD102 chip doesn't come with any advantages, and it should perform just like regular AD103 cards – and for that reason, video card vendors rarely publicly note when they're doing a run of cards with a binned-down version of a bigger chip. However, these larger chips have a tell-tale PCB footprint that usually makes it obvious what's going on. Which, as first noticed by @wxnod, is exactly what's going on with MSI's card.

Ada Lovelace Lineup: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 TiS (AD103), RTX 4070 TiS (AD102), & RTX 4090 (AD102)
The tell, in this case, is the rear board shot provided by MSI. The larger AD102 GPU uses an equally larger mounting bracket, and is paired with a slightly more complex array of filtering capacitors on the back side of the board PCB. Ultimately, since these are visible in MSI's photos of their GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Black OC, it's easy to compare it to other video cards and see that it has exactly the same capacitor layout as MSI's GeForce RTX 4090, thus confirming the use of an AD102 GPU.
Chip curiosities aside, all of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics cards – no matter whether they are based on the AD102 or AD103 GPU – come with a GPU with 8,448 active CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR6X memory, so it doesn't (typically) matter which chip they carry. Otherwise, compared to a fully-enabled AD102 chip, the RTX 4070 Ti Super specifications are relatively modest, with fewer than half as many CUDA cores, underscoring how the AD102 chip being used in MSI's card is a pretty heavy salvage bin.
As for the rest of the card, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Black OC is a relatively hefty card overall, with a cooling system to match. Being overclocked, the Ventus also has a slightly higher TDP than normal GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super cards, weighing in at 295 Watts, or 10 Watts above baseline cards.
Meanwhile, MSI is apparently not the only video card manufacturer using salvaged AD102 chips for GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, either. @wxnod has also posted a screenshot obtained on an Inno3D GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super based on an AD102 GPU.
GPUsWhen Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a controller from Fadu, a South Korean company founded in 2015 that specializes on enterprise-grade turnkey SSD solutions.
The Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD is aimed at performance-hungry hyperscale datacenters and enterprise customers which are adopting PCIe Gen5 storage devices these days. And, as uncovered in photos from a recent Storage Review article, the drive is based on Fadu's FC5161 NVMe 2.0-compliant controller. The FC5161 utilizes 16 NAND channels supporting an ONFi 5.0 2400 MT/s interface, and features a combination of enterprise-grade capabilities (OCP Cloud Spec 2.0, SR-IOV, up to 512 name spaces for ZNS support, flexible data placement, NVMe-MI 1.2, advanced security, telemetry, power loss protection) not available on other off-the-shelf controllers – or on any previous Western Digital controllers.
The Ultrastar DC SN861 SSD offers sequential read speeds up to 13.7 GB/s as well as sequential write speeds up to 7.5 GB/s. As for random performance, it boasts with an up to 3.3 million random 4K read IOPS and up to 0.8 million random 4K write IOPS. The drives are available in capacities between 1.6 TB and 7.68 TB with one or three drive writes per day (DWPD) over five years rating as well as in U.2 and E1.S form-factors.
While the two form factors of the SN861 share a similar technical design, Western Digital has tailored each version for distinct workloads: the E1.S supports FDP and performance enhancements specifically for cloud environments. By contrast, the U.2 model is geared towards high-performance enterprise tasks and emerging applications like AI.
Without any doubts, Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 is a feature-rich high-performance enterprise-grade SSD. It has another distinctive feature: a 5W idle power consumption, which is rather low by the standards of enterprise-grade drives (e.g., it is 1W lower compared to the SN840). While the difference with predecessors may be just 1W, hyperscalers deploy thousands of drives and for their TCO every watt counts.
Western Digital's Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs are now available for purchase to select customers (such as Meta) and to interested parties. Prices are unknown, but they will depend on such factors as volumes.
Sources: Fadu, Storage Review
Storage
As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance.
As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite performance tier. As of today, this will be a single configuration. But if the Snapdragon X lineup is successful and demand warrants it, I would not be surprised to see Qualcomm expand it further – as they have certainly left themselves the room for it in their product stack. In the meantime, with Qualcomm’s expected launch competition now shipping (Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake and AMD Ryzen Mobile 8040 Hawk Point), the company is also very confident that even these reduced performance Snapdragon X Plus chips will be able to beat Intel and AMD in multithreaded performance – never mind the top-tier Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Qualcomm will be launching this expanded four chip stack at once; so both Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus tier devices should be available at the same time. The company’s goal is still to have devices on the shelf “mid-year”, although the company isn’t providing any more precise guidance than that. With Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, set to deliver a Computex keynote in June, I expect we’ll get more specific details on timings then, along with the company and its partners using the event to announce and showcase some retail laptop designs. So this is very much looking like a summer launch at the moment.
In the meantime, Qualcomm is already showing off what their Snapdragon X Plus chips can do with a fresh set of live benchmarks, akin to their Snapdragon X Elite performance previews from October 2023. We’ll dive into those in a bit, but suffice it to say, Qualcomm knows the score, and they want to make sure the entire world knows when they’re winning.
CPUs
0 Comments