The iBUYPOWER AW4 360 AIO Cooler Review: A Good First Effort
iBUYPOWER is a U.S.-based company known for its custom-built gaming PCs and peripherals. Established in 1999, the company offers a wide range of self-branded products, including pre-built desktop computers, laptops, and gaming accessories. These products are designed to cater to various performance needs, from casual gaming to high-end competitive gaming. iBUYPOWER is particularly recognized for its customizable gaming PCs, allowing users to choose specific components according to their preferences. The company's self-branded peripherals, like keyboards, mice, and headsets, are designed to complement their gaming systems, providing a cohesive experience for gamers.
iBUYPOWER also offers a selection of cooling-related products, including air and liquid cooling solutions, tailored to ensure optimal thermal performance and custom aesthetics for their gaming systems. Most of these products are from other manufacturers, but the company is also branching out into selling their own cooling related products. Most notable of these is the new AW4 360 mm AIO liquid cooler. This review will focus on the AW4 AIO, evaluating its design, cooling efficiency, and overall performance within high-demand gaming and computing environments.
Cases/Cooling/PSUs
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G.Skill Intros Low Latency DDR5 Memory Modules: CL30 at 6400 MT/s G.Skill on Tuesday introduced its ultra-low-latency DDR5-6400 memory modules that feature a CAS latency of 30 clocks, which appears to be the industry's most aggressive timings yet for DDR5-6400 sticks. The modules will be available for both AMD and Intel CPU-based systems. With every new generation of DDR memory comes an increase in data transfer rates and an extension of relative latencies. While for the vast majority of applications, the increased bandwidth offsets the performance impact of higher timings, there are applications that favor low latencies. However, shrinking latencies is sometimes harder than increasing data transfer rates, which is why low-latency modules are rare. Nonetheless, G.Skill has apparently managed to cherry-pick enough DDR5 memory chips and build appropriate printed circuit boards to produce DDR5-6400 modules with CL30 timings, which are substantially lower than the CL46 timings recommended by JEDEC for this speed bin. This means that while JEDEC-standard modules have an absolute latency of 14.375 ns, G.Skill's modules can boast a latency of just 9.375 ns – an approximately 35% decrease. G.Skill's DDR5-6400 CL30 39-39-102 modules have a capacity of 16 GB and will be available in 32 GB dual-channel kits, though the company does not disclose voltages, which are likely considerably higher than those standardized by JEDEC. The company plans to make its DDR5-6400 modules available both for AMD systems with EXPO profiles (Trident Z5 Neo RGB and Trident Z5 Royal Neo) and for Intel-powered PCs with XMP 3.0 profiles (Trident Z5 RGB and Trident Z5 Royal). For AMD AM5 systems that have a practical limitation of 6000 MT/s – 6400 MT/s for DDR5 memory (as this is roughly as fast as AMD's Infinity Fabric can operate at with a 1:1 ratio), the new modules will be particularly beneficial for AMD's Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000-series processors. G.Skill notes that since its modules are non-standard, they will not work with all systems but will operate on high-end motherboards with properly cooled CPUs. The new ultra-low-latency memory kits will be available worldwide from G.Skill's partners starting in late August 2024. The company did not disclose the pricing of these modules, but since we are talking about premium products that boast unique specifications, they are likely to be priced accordingly. Memory
The Noctua NH-D15 G2 LBC Cooler Review: Notoriously Big, Incredibly Good When you buy a retail computer CPU, it usually comes with a standard cooler. However, most enthusiasts find that the stock cooler just does not cut it in terms of performance. So, they often end up getting a more advanced cooler that better suits their needs. Choosing the right cooler isn't a one-size-fits-all deal – it is a bit of a journey. You have to consider what you need, what you want, your budget, and how much space you have in your setup. All these factors come into play when picking out the perfect cooler. When it comes to high-performance coolers, Noctua is a name that frequently comes up among enthusiasts. Known for their exceptional build quality and superb cooling performance, Noctua coolers have been a favorite in the PC building community for years. A typical Noctua cooler will be punctuated by incredibly quiet fans and top-notch cooling efficiency overall, which has made them ideal for overclockers and builders who want to keep their systems running cool and quiet. In this review, we'll be taking a closer look at the NH-D15 G2 cooler, the successor to the legendary NH-D15. This cooler comes with a hefty price tag of $150 but promises to deliver the best performance that an air cooler can currently achieve. The NH-D15 G2 is available in three versions: one standard version as well as two specialized variants – LBC (Low Base Convexity) and HBC (High Base Convexity). These variants are designed to make better contact with specific CPUs; the LBC is recommended for AMD AM5 processors, while the HBC is tailored for Intel LGA1700 processors, mirroring the slightly different geometry of their respective heatspeaders. Conversely, the standard version is an “one size fits all” approach for users who care more about long-term compatibility over squeezing out every ounce of potential the cooler has. Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Silicon Motion Demonstrates Flexible Data Placement on MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform At FMS 2024, the technological requirements from the storage and memory subsystem took center stage. Both SSD and controller vendors had various demonstrations touting their suitability for different stages of the AI data pipeline - ingestion, preparation, training, checkpointing, and inference. Vendors like Solidigm have different types of SSDs optimized for different stages of the pipeline. At the same time, controller vendors have taken advantage of one of the features introduced recently in the NVM Express standard - Flexible Data Placement (FDP). FDP involves the host providing information / hints about the areas where the controller could place the incoming write data in order to reduce the write amplification. These hints are generated based on specific block sizes advertised by the device. The feature is completely backwards-compatible, with non-FDP hosts working just as before with FDP-enabled SSDs, and vice-versa. Silicon Motion's MonTitan Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Platform was announced back in 2022. Since then, Silicon Motion has been touting the flexibility of the platform, allowing its customers to incorporate their own features as part of the customization process. This approach is common in the enterprise space, as we have seen with Marvell's Bravera SC5 SSD controller in the DapuStor SSDs and Microchip's Flashtec controllers in the Longsys FORESEE enterprise SSDs. At FMS 2024, the company was demonstrating the advantages of flexible data placement by allowing a single QLC SSD based on their MonTitan platform to take part in different stages of the AI data pipeline while maintaining the required quality of service (minimum bandwidth) for each process. The company even has a trademarked name (PerformaShape) for the firmware feature in the controller that allows the isolation of different concurrent SSD accesses (from different stages in the AI data pipeline) to guarantee this QoS. Silicon Motion claims that this scheme will enable its customers to get the maximum write performance possible from QLC SSDs without negatively impacting the performance of other types of accesses. Silicon Motion and Phison have market leadership in the client SSD controller market with similar approaches. However, their enterprise SSD controller marketing couldn't be more different. While Phison has gone in for a turnkey solution with their Gen 5 SSD platform (to the extent of not adopting the white label route for this generation, and instead opting to get the SSDs qualified with different cloud service providers themselves), Silicon Motion is opting for a different approach. The flexibility and customization possibilities can make platforms like the MonTitan appeal to flash array vendors. Storage
Intel Sells Its Arm Shares, Reduces Stakes in Other Companies
Intel has divested its entire stake in Arm Holdings during the second quarter, raising approximately $147 million. Alongside this, Intel sold its stake in cybersecurity firm ZeroFox and reduced its holdings in Astera Labs, all as part of a broader effort to manage costs and recover cash amid significant financial challenges.
The sale of Intel's 1.18 million shares in Arm Holdings, as reported in a recent SEC filing, comes at a time when the company is struggling with substantial financial losses. Despite the $147 million generated from the sale, Intel reported a $120 million net loss on its equity investments for the quarter, which is a part of a larger $1.6 billion loss that Intel faced during this period.
In addition to selling its stake in Arm, Intel also exited its investment in ZeroFox and reduced its involvement with Astera Labs, a company known for developing connectivity platforms for enterprise hardware. These moves are in line with Intel's strategy to reduce costs and stabilize its financial position as it faces ongoing market challenges.
Despite the divestment, Intel's past investment in Arm was likely driven by strategic considerations. Arm Holdings is a significant force in the semiconductor industry, with its designs powering most mobile devices, and, for obvious reasons, Intel would like to address these. Intel and Arm are also collaborating on datacenter platforms tailored for Intel's 18A process technology. Additionally, Arm might view Intel as a potential licensee for its technologies and a valuable partner for other companies that license Arm's designs.
Intel's investment in Astera Labs was also a strategic one as the company probably wanted to secure steady supply of smart retimers, smart cable modems, and CXL memory controller, which are used in volumes in datacenters and Intel is certainly interested in selling as many datacenter CPUs as possible.
Intel's financial struggles were highlighted earlier this month when the company released a disappointing earnings report, which led to a 33% drop in its stock value, erasing billions of dollars of capitalization. To counter these difficulties, Intel announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and implement other expense reductions. The company has also suspended its dividend, signaling the depth of its efforts to conserve cash and focus on recovery. When it comes to divestment of Arm stock, the need for immediate financial stabilization has presumably taken precedence, leading to the decision.
CPUs
Kioxia Demonstrates Optical Interface SSDs for Data Centers
A few years back, the Japanese government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO ) allocated funding for the development of green datacenter technologies. With the aim to obtain up to 40% savings in overall power consumption, several Japanese companies have been developing an optical interface for their enterprise SSDs. And at this year's FMS, Kioxia had their optical interface on display.
For this demonstration, Kioxia took its existing CM7 enterprise SSD and created an optical interface for it. A PCIe card with on-board optics developed by Kyocera is installed in the server slot. An optical interface allows data transfer over long distances (it was 40m in the demo, but Kioxia promises lengths of up to 100m for the cable in the future). This allows the storage to be kept in a separate room with minimal cooling requirements compared to the rack with the CPUs and GPUs. Disaggregation of different server components will become an option as very high throughput interfaces such as PCIe 7.0 (with 128 GT/s rates) become available.
The demonstration of the optical SSD showed a slight loss in IOPS performance, but a significant advantage in the latency metric over the shipping enterprise SSD behind a copper network link. Obviously, there are advantages in wiring requirements and signal integrity maintenance with optical links.
Being a proof-of-concept demonstration, we do see the requirement for an industry-standard approach if this were to gain adoption among different datacenter vendors. The PCI-SIG optical workgroup will need to get its act together soon to create a standards-based approach to this problem.
Storage
The Endorfy Fortis 5 Dual Fan CPU Cooler Review: Towering Value Standard CPU coolers, while adequate for managing basic thermal loads, often fall short in terms of noise reduction and superior cooling efficiency. This limitation drives advanced users and system builders to seek aftermarket solutions tailored to their specific needs. The high-end aftermarket cooler market is highly competitive, with manufacturers striving to offer products with exceptional performance.
Endorfy, previously known as SilentiumPC, is a Polish manufacturer that has undergone a significant transformation to expand its presence in global markets. The brand is known for delivering high-performance cooling solutions with a strong focus on balancing efficiency and affordability. By rebranding as Endorfy, the company aims to enter premium market segments while continuing to offer reliable, high-quality cooling products.
SilentiumPC became very popular in the value/mainstream segments of the PC market with their products, the spearhead of which probably was the Fera 5 cooler that we reviewed a little over two years ago and had a remarkable value for money. Today’s review places Endorfy’s largest CPU cooler, the Fortis 5 Dual Fan, on our laboratory test bench. The Fortis 5 is the largest CPU air cooler the company currently offers and is significantly more expensive than the Fera 5, yet it still is a single-tower cooler that strives to strike a balance between value, compatibility, and performance.
Cases/Cooling/PSUs
U.S. Signs $1.5B in CHIPS Act Agreements With Amkor and SKhynix for Chip Packaging Plants
Under the CHIPS & Science Act, the U.S. government provided tens of billions of dollars in grants and loans to the world's leading maker of chips, such as Intel, Samsung, and TSMC, which will significantly expand the country's semiconductor production industry in the coming years. However, most chips are typically tested, assembled, and packaged in Asia, which has left the American supply chain incomplete. Addressing this last gap in the government's domestic chip production plans, these past couple of weeks the U.S. government signed memorandums of understanding worth about $1.5 billion with Amkor and SK hynix to support their efforts to build chip packaging facilities in the U.S.
Amkor to Build Advanced Packaging Facility with Apple in Mind
Amkor plans to build a $2 billion advanced packaging facility near Peoria, Arizona, to test and assemble chips produced by TSMC at its Fab 21 near Phoenix, Arizona. The company signed a MOU that offers $400 million in direct funding and access to $200 million in loans under the CHIPS & Science Act. In addition, the company plans to take advantage of a 25% investment tax credit on eligible capital expenditures.
Set to be strategically positioned near TSMC's upcoming Fab 21 complex in Arizona, Amkor's Peoria facility will occupy 55 acres and, when fully completed, will feature over 500,000 square feet (46,451 square meters) of cleanroom space, more than twice the size of Amkor's advanced packaging site in Vietnam. Although the company has not disclosed the exact capacity or the specific technologies the facility will support, it is expected to cater to a wide range of industries, including automotive, high-performance computing, and mobile technologies. This suggests the new plant will offer diverse packaging solutions, including traditional, 2.5D, and 3D technologies.
Amkor has collaborated extensively with Apple on the vision and initial setup of the Peoria facility, as Apple is slated to be the facility's first and largest customer, marking a significant commitment from the tech giant. This partnership highlights the importance of the new facility in reinforcing the U.S. semiconductor supply chain and positioning Amkor as a key partner for companies relying on TSMC's manufacturing capabilities. The project is expected to generate around 2,000 jobs and is scheduled to begin operations in 2027.
SK hynix to Build HBM4 in the U.S.
This week SK hynix also signed a preliminary agreement with the U.S. government to receive up to $450 million in direct funding and $500 million in loans to build an advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana.
The proposed facility is scheduled to begin operations in 2028, which means that it will assemble HBM4 or HBM4E memory. Meanwhile, DRAM devices for high bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks will still be produced in South Korea. Nonetheless, packing finished HBM4/HBM4E in the U.S. and possibly integrating these memory modules with high-end processors is a big deal.
In addition to building its packaging plant, SK hynix plans to collaborate with Purdue University and other local research institutions to advance semiconductor technology and packaging innovations. This partnership is intended to bolster research and development in the region, positioning the facility as a hub for AI technology and skilled employment.
Semiconductors
Intel Sells Its Arm Shares, Reduces Stakes in Other Companies
Intel has divested its entire stake in Arm Holdings during the second quarter, raising approximately $147 million. Alongside this, Intel sold its stake in cybersecurity firm ZeroFox and reduced its holdings in Astera Labs, all as part of a broader effort to manage costs and recover cash amid significant financial challenges.
The sale of Intel's 1.18 million shares in Arm Holdings, as reported in a recent SEC filing, comes at a time when the company is struggling with substantial financial losses. Despite the $147 million generated from the sale, Intel reported a $120 million net loss on its equity investments for the quarter, which is a part of a larger $1.6 billion loss that Intel faced during this period.
In addition to selling its stake in Arm, Intel also exited its investment in ZeroFox and reduced its involvement with Astera Labs, a company known for developing connectivity platforms for enterprise hardware. These moves are in line with Intel's strategy to reduce costs and stabilize its financial position as it faces ongoing market challenges.
Despite the divestment, Intel's past investment in Arm was likely driven by strategic considerations. Arm Holdings is a significant force in the semiconductor industry, with its designs powering most mobile devices, and, for obvious reasons, Intel would like to address these. Intel and Arm are also collaborating on datacenter platforms tailored for Intel's 18A process technology. Additionally, Arm might view Intel as a potential licensee for its technologies and a valuable partner for other companies that license Arm's designs.
Intel's investment in Astera Labs was also a strategic one as the company probably wanted to secure steady supply of smart retimers, smart cable modems, and CXL memory controller, which are used in volumes in datacenters and Intel is certainly interested in selling as many datacenter CPUs as possible.
Intel's financial struggles were highlighted earlier this month when the company released a disappointing earnings report, which led to a 33% drop in its stock value, erasing billions of dollars of capitalization. To counter these difficulties, Intel announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and implement other expense reductions. The company has also suspended its dividend, signaling the depth of its efforts to conserve cash and focus on recovery. When it comes to divestment of Arm stock, the need for immediate financial stabilization has presumably taken precedence, leading to the decision.
CPUs
Kioxia Demonstrates Optical Interface SSDs for Data Centers
A few years back, the Japanese government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO ) allocated funding for the development of green datacenter technologies. With the aim to obtain up to 40% savings in overall power consumption, several Japanese companies have been developing an optical interface for their enterprise SSDs. And at this year's FMS, Kioxia had their optical interface on display.
For this demonstration, Kioxia took its existing CM7 enterprise SSD and created an optical interface for it. A PCIe card with on-board optics developed by Kyocera is installed in the server slot. An optical interface allows data transfer over long distances (it was 40m in the demo, but Kioxia promises lengths of up to 100m for the cable in the future). This allows the storage to be kept in a separate room with minimal cooling requirements compared to the rack with the CPUs and GPUs. Disaggregation of different server components will become an option as very high throughput interfaces such as PCIe 7.0 (with 128 GT/s rates) become available.
The demonstration of the optical SSD showed a slight loss in IOPS performance, but a significant advantage in the latency metric over the shipping enterprise SSD behind a copper network link. Obviously, there are advantages in wiring requirements and signal integrity maintenance with optical links.
Being a proof-of-concept demonstration, we do see the requirement for an industry-standard approach if this were to gain adoption among different datacenter vendors. The PCI-SIG optical workgroup will need to get its act together soon to create a standards-based approach to this problem.
Storage
The Endorfy Fortis 5 Dual Fan CPU Cooler Review: Towering Value Standard CPU coolers, while adequate for managing basic thermal loads, often fall short in terms of noise reduction and superior cooling efficiency. This limitation drives advanced users and system builders to seek aftermarket solutions tailored to their specific needs. The high-end aftermarket cooler market is highly competitive, with manufacturers striving to offer products with exceptional performance.
Endorfy, previously known as SilentiumPC, is a Polish manufacturer that has undergone a significant transformation to expand its presence in global markets. The brand is known for delivering high-performance cooling solutions with a strong focus on balancing efficiency and affordability. By rebranding as Endorfy, the company aims to enter premium market segments while continuing to offer reliable, high-quality cooling products.
SilentiumPC became very popular in the value/mainstream segments of the PC market with their products, the spearhead of which probably was the Fera 5 cooler that we reviewed a little over two years ago and had a remarkable value for money. Today’s review places Endorfy’s largest CPU cooler, the Fortis 5 Dual Fan, on our laboratory test bench. The Fortis 5 is the largest CPU air cooler the company currently offers and is significantly more expensive than the Fera 5, yet it still is a single-tower cooler that strives to strike a balance between value, compatibility, and performance.
Cases/Cooling/PSUs
U.S. Signs $1.5B in CHIPS Act Agreements With Amkor and SKhynix for Chip Packaging Plants
Under the CHIPS & Science Act, the U.S. government provided tens of billions of dollars in grants and loans to the world's leading maker of chips, such as Intel, Samsung, and TSMC, which will significantly expand the country's semiconductor production industry in the coming years. However, most chips are typically tested, assembled, and packaged in Asia, which has left the American supply chain incomplete. Addressing this last gap in the government's domestic chip production plans, these past couple of weeks the U.S. government signed memorandums of understanding worth about $1.5 billion with Amkor and SK hynix to support their efforts to build chip packaging facilities in the U.S.
Amkor to Build Advanced Packaging Facility with Apple in Mind
Amkor plans to build a $2 billion advanced packaging facility near Peoria, Arizona, to test and assemble chips produced by TSMC at its Fab 21 near Phoenix, Arizona. The company signed a MOU that offers $400 million in direct funding and access to $200 million in loans under the CHIPS & Science Act. In addition, the company plans to take advantage of a 25% investment tax credit on eligible capital expenditures.
Set to be strategically positioned near TSMC's upcoming Fab 21 complex in Arizona, Amkor's Peoria facility will occupy 55 acres and, when fully completed, will feature over 500,000 square feet (46,451 square meters) of cleanroom space, more than twice the size of Amkor's advanced packaging site in Vietnam. Although the company has not disclosed the exact capacity or the specific technologies the facility will support, it is expected to cater to a wide range of industries, including automotive, high-performance computing, and mobile technologies. This suggests the new plant will offer diverse packaging solutions, including traditional, 2.5D, and 3D technologies.
Amkor has collaborated extensively with Apple on the vision and initial setup of the Peoria facility, as Apple is slated to be the facility's first and largest customer, marking a significant commitment from the tech giant. This partnership highlights the importance of the new facility in reinforcing the U.S. semiconductor supply chain and positioning Amkor as a key partner for companies relying on TSMC's manufacturing capabilities. The project is expected to generate around 2,000 jobs and is scheduled to begin operations in 2027.
SK hynix to Build HBM4 in the U.S.
This week SK hynix also signed a preliminary agreement with the U.S. government to receive up to $450 million in direct funding and $500 million in loans to build an advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana.
The proposed facility is scheduled to begin operations in 2028, which means that it will assemble HBM4 or HBM4E memory. Meanwhile, DRAM devices for high bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks will still be produced in South Korea. Nonetheless, packing finished HBM4/HBM4E in the U.S. and possibly integrating these memory modules with high-end processors is a big deal.
In addition to building its packaging plant, SK hynix plans to collaborate with Purdue University and other local research institutions to advance semiconductor technology and packaging innovations. This partnership is intended to bolster research and development in the region, positioning the facility as a hub for AI technology and skilled employment.
Semiconductors
Kioxia Demonstrates RAID Offload Scheme for NVMe Drives
At FMS 2024, Kioxia had a proof-of-concept demonstration of their proposed a new RAID offload methodology for enterprise SSDs. The impetus for this is quite clear: as SSDs get faster in each generation, RAID arrays have a major problem of maintaining (and scaling up) performance. Even in cases where the RAID operations are handled by a dedicated RAID card, a simple write request in, say, a RAID 5 array would involve two reads and two writes to different drives. In cases where there is no hardware acceleration, the data from the reads needs to travel all the way back to the CPU and main memory for further processing before the writes can be done.
Kioxia has proposed the use of the PCIe direct memory access feature along with the SSD controller's controller memory buffer (CMB) to avoid the movement of data up to the CPU and back. The required parity computation is done by an accelerator block resident within the SSD controller.
In Kioxia's PoC implementation, the DMA engine can access the entire host address space (including the peer SSD's BAR-mapped CMB), allowing it to receive and transfer data as required from neighboring SSDs on the bus. Kioxia noted that their offload PoC saw close to 50% reduction in CPU utilization and upwards of 90% reduction in system DRAM utilization compared to software RAID done on the CPU. The proposed offload scheme can also handle scrubbing operations without taking up the host CPU cycles for the parity computation task.
Kioxia has already taken steps to contribute these features to the NVM Express working group. If accepted, the proposed offload scheme will be part of a standard that could become widely available across multiple SSD vendors.
Storage
Intel Sells Its Arm Shares, Reduces Stakes in Other Companies
Intel has divested its entire stake in Arm Holdings during the second quarter, raising approximately $147 million. Alongside this, Intel sold its stake in cybersecurity firm ZeroFox and reduced its holdings in Astera Labs, all as part of a broader effort to manage costs and recover cash amid significant financial challenges.
The sale of Intel's 1.18 million shares in Arm Holdings, as reported in a recent SEC filing, comes at a time when the company is struggling with substantial financial losses. Despite the $147 million generated from the sale, Intel reported a $120 million net loss on its equity investments for the quarter, which is a part of a larger $1.6 billion loss that Intel faced during this period.
In addition to selling its stake in Arm, Intel also exited its investment in ZeroFox and reduced its involvement with Astera Labs, a company known for developing connectivity platforms for enterprise hardware. These moves are in line with Intel's strategy to reduce costs and stabilize its financial position as it faces ongoing market challenges.
Despite the divestment, Intel's past investment in Arm was likely driven by strategic considerations. Arm Holdings is a significant force in the semiconductor industry, with its designs powering most mobile devices, and, for obvious reasons, Intel would like to address these. Intel and Arm are also collaborating on datacenter platforms tailored for Intel's 18A process technology. Additionally, Arm might view Intel as a potential licensee for its technologies and a valuable partner for other companies that license Arm's designs.
Intel's investment in Astera Labs was also a strategic one as the company probably wanted to secure steady supply of smart retimers, smart cable modems, and CXL memory controller, which are used in volumes in datacenters and Intel is certainly interested in selling as many datacenter CPUs as possible.
Intel's financial struggles were highlighted earlier this month when the company released a disappointing earnings report, which led to a 33% drop in its stock value, erasing billions of dollars of capitalization. To counter these difficulties, Intel announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and implement other expense reductions. The company has also suspended its dividend, signaling the depth of its efforts to conserve cash and focus on recovery. When it comes to divestment of Arm stock, the need for immediate financial stabilization has presumably taken precedence, leading to the decision.
CPUs
The Endorfy Fortis 5 Dual Fan CPU Cooler Review: Towering Value Standard CPU coolers, while adequate for managing basic thermal loads, often fall short in terms of noise reduction and superior cooling efficiency. This limitation drives advanced users and system builders to seek aftermarket solutions tailored to their specific needs. The high-end aftermarket cooler market is highly competitive, with manufacturers striving to offer products with exceptional performance.
Endorfy, previously known as SilentiumPC, is a Polish manufacturer that has undergone a significant transformation to expand its presence in global markets. The brand is known for delivering high-performance cooling solutions with a strong focus on balancing efficiency and affordability. By rebranding as Endorfy, the company aims to enter premium market segments while continuing to offer reliable, high-quality cooling products.
SilentiumPC became very popular in the value/mainstream segments of the PC market with their products, the spearhead of which probably was the Fera 5 cooler that we reviewed a little over two years ago and had a remarkable value for money. Today’s review places Endorfy’s largest CPU cooler, the Fortis 5 Dual Fan, on our laboratory test bench. The Fortis 5 is the largest CPU air cooler the company currently offers and is significantly more expensive than the Fera 5, yet it still is a single-tower cooler that strives to strike a balance between value, compatibility, and performance.
Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Fadu's FC5161 SSD Controller Breaks Cover in Western Digital's PCIe Gen5 Enterprise Drives
When 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
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Intel Sells Its Arm Shares, Reduces Stakes in Other Companies
Intel has divested its entire stake in Arm Holdings during the second quarter, raising approximately $147 million. Alongside this, Intel sold its stake in cybersecurity firm ZeroFox and reduced its holdings in Astera Labs, all as part of a broader effort to manage costs and recover cash amid significant financial challenges.
The sale of Intel's 1.18 million shares in Arm Holdings, as reported in a recent SEC filing, comes at a time when the company is struggling with substantial financial losses. Despite the $147 million generated from the sale, Intel reported a $120 million net loss on its equity investments for the quarter, which is a part of a larger $1.6 billion loss that Intel faced during this period.
In addition to selling its stake in Arm, Intel also exited its investment in ZeroFox and reduced its involvement with Astera Labs, a company known for developing connectivity platforms for enterprise hardware. These moves are in line with Intel's strategy to reduce costs and stabilize its financial position as it faces ongoing market challenges.
Despite the divestment, Intel's past investment in Arm was likely driven by strategic considerations. Arm Holdings is a significant force in the semiconductor industry, with its designs powering most mobile devices, and, for obvious reasons, Intel would like to address these. Intel and Arm are also collaborating on datacenter platforms tailored for Intel's 18A process technology. Additionally, Arm might view Intel as a potential licensee for its technologies and a valuable partner for other companies that license Arm's designs.
Intel's investment in Astera Labs was also a strategic one as the company probably wanted to secure steady supply of smart retimers, smart cable modems, and CXL memory controller, which are used in volumes in datacenters and Intel is certainly interested in selling as many datacenter CPUs as possible.
Intel's financial struggles were highlighted earlier this month when the company released a disappointing earnings report, which led to a 33% drop in its stock value, erasing billions of dollars of capitalization. To counter these difficulties, Intel announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and implement other expense reductions. The company has also suspended its dividend, signaling the depth of its efforts to conserve cash and focus on recovery. When it comes to divestment of Arm stock, the need for immediate financial stabilization has presumably taken precedence, leading to the decision.
CPUs
Kioxia Demonstrates Optical Interface SSDs for Data Centers
A few years back, the Japanese government's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO ) allocated funding for the development of green datacenter technologies. With the aim to obtain up to 40% savings in overall power consumption, several Japanese companies have been developing an optical interface for their enterprise SSDs. And at this year's FMS, Kioxia had their optical interface on display.
For this demonstration, Kioxia took its existing CM7 enterprise SSD and created an optical interface for it. A PCIe card with on-board optics developed by Kyocera is installed in the server slot. An optical interface allows data transfer over long distances (it was 40m in the demo, but Kioxia promises lengths of up to 100m for the cable in the future). This allows the storage to be kept in a separate room with minimal cooling requirements compared to the rack with the CPUs and GPUs. Disaggregation of different server components will become an option as very high throughput interfaces such as PCIe 7.0 (with 128 GT/s rates) become available.
The demonstration of the optical SSD showed a slight loss in IOPS performance, but a significant advantage in the latency metric over the shipping enterprise SSD behind a copper network link. Obviously, there are advantages in wiring requirements and signal integrity maintenance with optical links.
Being a proof-of-concept demonstration, we do see the requirement for an industry-standard approach if this were to gain adoption among different datacenter vendors. The PCI-SIG optical workgroup will need to get its act together soon to create a standards-based approach to this problem.
Storage
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