Leo Says 35 - The CHEERY Edition! - RTX 2060s galore, CES 2019, Zen 2, 9th Gen Intel Mobile

Today Leo rounds up his thoughts of 2018, and goes over some various topics - and also he thanks a lot of people too. Worth waiting til the end for that one !

00:15 Introduction
01:01 March 2018 - CTS Labs attacked AMD
01:44 October 2018 - Bloomberg attacked Supermicro
03:15 CES is Coming - Nvidia news
04:56 Gigabyte list more than 30 RTX2060 models!
06:06 Intel will not be announcing 9th Gen Mobile CPUs at CES
07:29 CPU's - what a weird and wonderful world in 2018
08:40 Intel on an employment rampage
09:40 Well done to all these people!

Leo Says 35 - The Cheery Edition - LEOS NOTES

In March 2018 CTS Labs attacked AMD
http://cts-labs.com/
This seemed to be a riposte on behalf of Intel after the disaster of Spectre and Meltdown that broke at the start of CES 2018. We hadn’t heard of CTS Labs before their report landed. Happily, once people started asking who had funded their report we never heard from them again.

In October Bloomberg attacked Supermicro with a report their motherboards were peppered with Chinese spy chips. Amazon and Apple defended Supermicro, however Bloomberg stood by their story.
Bloomberg never produced any evidence their allegations were correct and Supermicro’s share price dropped by more than 30 percent during 2018 but happily Supermicro has retained the confidence of their customers.

CES is coming and we are confident that Nvidia will announce RTX 20-series graphics for laptops along with RTX 2060 and 2050 for the desktop, although there are solid predictions from Videocardz.com that we will also see GTX 1160 and GTX 1150 models that are, presumably, cheaper than RTX.

Gigabyte has listed more than 30 models of RTX 2060 graphics cards with permutations 6GB, 4GB or 3GB of GDDR6 or GDDR5 with various clock speeds and a variety of coolers. This is good. It makes life interesting and means that AMD’s Navi will have to be focussed on specific market segments instead of aiming at the general area of $99-$299.

This strongly suggests Intel will not be announcing 9th Gen Mobile CPUs at CES as it would muck their laptop partners around if they brought out ranges of laptops with 8th Gen CPUs with 20-series graphics in January and then replace them with 9th Gen and 20-series in February. The good news is that we can pencil in Q2 for the next mobile CPUs as we head to Computex.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have crashed. This is good.

During 2018 we saw mainstream desktop CPUs move from four cores to eight cores with clock speeds that typically run at 4GHz and often boost to 5GHz on one or two cores. Once you drill down and include value for money is not clear which platform is best for gamers, mainstream users and power users as AM4, Z370/Z390 and X299 each have their advantages and Threadripper is also spectacular in its own way.

Intel is employing AMD graphics and CPU design people along with a bunch of journalists and reviewers. As far as I can tell the entire core staff of PC Perspective left and now works for Intel. This makes you wonder what products AMD will be delivering in 2022 when they are scheduled to move from 7nm++ to 5nm as they will need people to build those products. The good news is that 2022 is a long way off and in the meanwhile we can look forward to Zen 2 in 2019.

Last week we praised Gamers Nexus. The good news is that we stand by that plaudit however it has been pointed out that we might have seemed to be hijacking their traffic by using their name. That sounds bad so to make amends, I would like to say well done to Linus Tech, Marques Brownlees, Casey Neistat, Dr. Jordan Peterson, PewDiePie, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Holiness The Pope