Welcome back PCWorld fans, this is your weekly major PC news roundup. What started off as
a slow week quickly ramped into some of the biggest news of the year so far. We’ve got
a legitimate handheld gaming PC from Valve, FidelityFX Super Resolution has gone live
for Open Source, some rumbling of Zen 4 core counts and other details, along with Intel
(supposedly) being in talks to buy GlobalFoundries. Buckle up folks, 'cause it’s getting wild
in the PCWorld!
I want to kick things off this week with what is likely the biggest news in some time, and
that is none other than the Steam Deck. This one took me by surprise, and both Adam and
I got so excited we couldn’t resist reserving ourselves a unit. While none of us at PCWorld
advocate for how you choose to spend your money, especially when it comes to preorders,
they are up for reserve if you’re one of those kinds of folks.
The interesting thing about the Stream Deck isn’t just that it’s a portable gaming
computer running Linux. From my standpoint, it’s the SOC, or system on chip, inside
which I find most fascinating. The Steam Deck is powered by a custom AMD SOC sporting 4
Zen 2 cores with 8 threads and an integrated NAVI RDNA2 based GPU with 8 Cores. 16GB of
LPDDR5 rated for 5500 mega transfers per second and up to a 512GB M.2 SSD round out the rest
of the specs. That internals paired with a 1280x800 resolution screen should make for
some competent gaming experiences. If you want to know more about the Steam Deck, how
much each variant runs, how they’re configured, and more, hit the link below for Brad’s
full breakdown.
Carrying on with more news related to AMD, this week saw the full open-source release
of FidelityFX Super Resolution, FSR for short, to the wild. FSR has been well received by
both gamers and developers alike. We took some time recently to check out the FSR implementation
in Godfall and show how it was able to take the RX 6700 XT to new heights while still
looking stunning. Check the AMD sponsored video in the card in the upper right-hand
corner of the screen for more on that one. But with this recent unveil, we also got a
few more games added to the quickly expanding list of supported titles. One of the biggest
is Resident Evil 8, which should be updated in a few days from this video, and I’ll
certainly be looking into the performance and image quality impact there, so stay tuned
for that one.
Enough with graphics - on to CPUs! AMD once again has the rumor mill swirling with news
about Zen 4. But come on guys, we haven’t even gotten to the release of AMD’s upcoming
Zen 3 with 3D-Cache yet, which is looking quite promising. Either way, this rumor was
started by Patrick Schur and picked up by Techpowerup, and it appears that Zen 4 may
continue the same core count and CCD structure that Zen 3 is using. This means that the highest-end
mainstream desktop parts should top out at 16 cores and 32 threads. We should get a lot
more than just cores of course, with Zen 4 rumored to move to an LGA socket along with
DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5 support. So it sounds like there will be more to this update than
just cores, and I’m personally not fussed about the lack of higher counts until we start
to see more programs really take advantage of it.
But AMD aren’t the only ones out there making cores - don’t forget about Intel as they’ve
been moving full steam ahead with tons of stuff on the horizon. From Alder Lake to their
upcoming DG2 based Xe-HPG gaming graphics cards, they have to make them all somewhere,
right? While Intel does have their own foundries, it may not be enough to satisfy Chipzilla
as, according to The Wall Street Journal, they are in talks to buy GlobalFoundries for
around $30 BILLION dollars. While there aren’t any details on when, where, and how this would
all go down, it is a rather interesting proposition as GlobalFoundries became its own company
after being branched off from AMD when they transitioned to a fabless chip maker. It just
shows how cyclical in nature the technology world can be at times
Well, there you have it folks, a new console like PC from Steam, which I hope stands the
test of time better than my Steam Link and Steam Controller. FidelityFX Super Resolution
is in the wild now so it’ll be exciting to see what lengths it goes to. Zen 4 rumors
are getting interesting. And Intel is contemplating buying up a pretty big silicon chip maker.
As I said earlier, what started out slow turned into a HUGE news week here at PCWorld. If
you enjoyed this roundup hit that thumbs up button and make sure you’re subscribed here
at PCWorld for even more PC hardware and software goodness in the future.
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