NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card may implement a design closely resembling the cinder block product design the company readied for its RTX 4090 Ti graphics card that never materialized into a marketable product. This sees a 4-slot thick board design, with a slender main logic PCB arranged along the plane of the motherboard, on top of which the cooling solution is mounted perpendicular to the plane, as shown in the images below. This main logic board contains the GPU, memory, and VRM. There two additional PCBs—one has the display I/O, and the other has the PCIe interface. There is a fourth disaggregated component, the 12V-2x6 receptacle, located somewhere along the top of the cooling solution.

Confirmation of NVIDIA using the RTX 4090 Ti "cinder block" board design for the RTX 5090 comes from kopite7kimi, a reliable source with NVIDIA leaks. Kopite7kimi mentions a card that has a "Main Board, IO Rigid Board and a separate PCIE slot component (perhaps it should not be considered as the third PCB)," which perfectly describes with the RTX 4090 Ti. NVIDIA had completed the design phase of this card, which made it to its cooling solution OEM (which is likely where the images leaked out from). The company probably decided against launching this product because the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX fell significantly short of the performance proposition of the RTX 4090.

Every week, GFN Thursday brings new games to the cloud, featuring some of the latest and greatest titles for members to play. Leading the seven games joining GeForce NOW this week is the newest game in Ninja Theory's Hellblade franchise, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. This day-and-date release expands the cloud gaming platform's extensive library of over 1,900 games. Members can also look forward to a new reward - a free in-game mount - for The Elder Scrolls Online starting Thursday, May 30. Get ready by opting into GeForce NOW's Rewards program.

Senua Returns
In Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, the sequel to the award-winning Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Senua returns in a brutal journey of survival through the myth and torment of Viking Iceland. Intent on saving those who've fallen victim to the horrors of tyranny, Senua battles the forces of darkness within and without. Sink deep into the next chapter of Senua's story, a crafted experience told through cinematic immersion, beautifully realized visuals and encapsulating sound. Priority and Ultimate members can fully immerse themselves in Senua's story with epic cinematic gameplay at higher resolutions and frame rates over free members. Ultimate members can stream at up to 4K 120 frames per second with exclusive access to GeForce RTX 4080 SuperPODs in the cloud, even on underpowered devices.

The XMG PRO 16 Studio is receiving a significant upgrade as part of a model update. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX Studio-certified laptop, which includes graphics cards up to the GeForce RTX 4070, previously came with a conventional H-series laptop CPU. It now features an Intel Core i9-14900HX based on the design of desktop processors. Additionally, the laptop, which continues to be cooled by a massive vapor chamber in a 19.9 mm thin, predominantly aluminium chassis, is now lighter at only 2.3 kg. The 240 Hz IPS display with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels is colour-calibrated and X-Rite certified. Furthermore, the otherwise identical chassis retains the extensive connectivity of the predecessor model.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported revenue for the first quarter ended April 28, 2024, of $26.0 billion, up 18% from the previous quarter and up 262% from a year ago. For the quarter, GAAP earnings per diluted share was $5.98, up 21% from the previous quarter and up 629% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share was $6.12, up 19% from the previous quarter and up 461% from a year ago. "The next industrial revolution has begun—companies and countries are partnering with NVIDIA to shift the trillion-dollar traditional data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center—AI factories—to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "AI will bring significant productivity gains to nearly every industry and help companies be more cost- and energy-efficient, while expanding revenue opportunities.

"Our data center growth was fueled by strong and accelerating demand for generative AI training and inference on the Hopper platform. Beyond cloud service providers, generative AI has expanded to consumer internet companies, and enterprise, sovereign AI, automotive and healthcare customers, creating multiple multibillion-dollar vertical markets. "We are poised for our next wave of growth. The Blackwell platform is in full production and forms the foundation for trillion-parameter-scale generative AI. Spectrum-X opens a brand-new market for us to bring large-scale AI to Ethernet-only data centers. And NVIDIA NIM is our new software offering that delivers enterprise-grade, optimized generative AI to run on CUDA everywhere—from the cloud to on-prem data centers and RTX AI PCs—through our expansive network of ecosystem partners."

NVIDIA is eying a comeback to the client processor business, reveals a Bloomberg interview with the CEOs of NVIDIA and Dell. For NVIDIA, all it takes is a simple driver update that exposes every GeForce GPU with tensor cores as an NPU to Windows 11, with translation layers to get popular client AI apps to work with TensorRT. But that would need you to have a discrete NVIDIA GPU. What about the vast market of Windows AI PCs powered by the likes of Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD, who each sell 15 W-class processors with integrated NPUs capable of 50 AI TOPS, which is all that Copilot+ needs? NVIDIA held an Arm license for decades now, and makes Arm-based CPUs to this day, with the NVIDIA Grace, however, that is a large server processor meant for its AI GPU servers.

NVIDIA already made client processors under the Tegra brand targeting smartphones, which it winded down last decade. It's since been making Drive PX processors for its automotive self-driving hardware division; and of course there's Grace. NVIDIA hinted that it might have a client CPU for the AI PC market in 2025. In the interview Bloomberg asked NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang a pointed question on whether NVIDIA has a place in the AI PC market. Dell CEO Michael Dell, who was also in the interview, interjected "come back next year," to which Jensen affirmed "exactly." Dell would be in a front-and-center position to know if NVIDIA is working on a new PC processor for launch in 2025, and Jensen's nod almost confirms this

GALAX introduced the Classic line of graphics cards based on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and the RTX 4070 SUPER. These cards are designed with lateral-blower coolers, and a strictly 2-slot thickness, making them fit for workstations or graphics rendering servers with multiple cards in them. Both cards share a common board design, consisting of an aluminium channel-type heatsink that relies on a lateral blower for ventilation, which always stays on. This card pulls air from either sides of the PCB, and the card's backplate doesn't extend over the region of the PCB with the fan, to maximize clearance for the neighboring card.

The aluminium channel heatsink of this card extends through the entire thickness of the card, and pops out of the cooler shroud, GTX 480-style. The rear I/O bracket has large vents for the cooler to exhaust from. Display connectors include three DisplayPort 1.4, and an HDMI 2.1. Power is drawn from a 16-pin 12VHPWR connector located at the tail end of the card. The RTX 4070 SUPER comes with 7,168 CUDA cores across 56 SM; while the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER has 8,448 CUDA cores across 66 SM. Both cards stick to NVIDIA reference clock speeds for their respective GPUs. The company didn't reveal pricing.

More than 500 games and applications feature RTX technologies, and each week new games integrating NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex and advanced ray-traced effects are released or announced, delivering the definitive PC experience for GeForce RTX players. Last week, the critically acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut launched on PC, featuring DLSS 3, DLAA and Reflex on day-one. Today, the stunningly-rendered Senua's Saga: Hellblade II launches with day-one support for DLSS 3 and Reflex, followed by the DLSS 3, DLAA and Reflex-enhanced launch of Serum later this week. And capping off another fantastic week for GeForce RTX gamers, Ships At Sea and Wuthering Waves arrive with day-one support for DLSS 2.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade II Available Today With DLSS 3 & Reflex
In the sequel to the award winning Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Senua returns for a brutal journey of survival through the myth and torment of Viking Iceland. Intent on saving those who have fallen victim to the horrors of tyranny, Senua faces a battle of overcoming the darkness within and without. Sink deep into the next chapter of Senua's story, a crafted experience told through cinematic immersion, beautifully realized visuals and encapsulating sound.

NVIDIA today announced at Microsoft Build new AI performance optimizations and integrations for Windows that help deliver maximum performance on NVIDIA GeForce RTX AI PCs and NVIDIA RTX workstations. Large language models (LLMs) power some of the most exciting new use cases in generative AI and now run up to 3x faster with ONNX Runtime (ORT) and DirectML using the new NVIDIA R555 Game Ready Driver. ORT and DirectML are high-performance tools used to run AI models locally on Windows PCs.

WebNN, an application programming interface for web developers to deploy AI models, is now accelerated with RTX via DirectML, enabling web apps to incorporate fast, AI-powered capabilities. And PyTorch will support DirectML execution backends, enabling Windows developers to train and infer complex AI models on Windows natively. NVIDIA and Microsoft are collaborating to scale performance on RTX GPUs. These advancements build on NVIDIA's world-leading AI platform, which accelerates more than 500 applications and games on over 100 million RTX AI PCs and workstations worldwide.

According to the Taiwan Central News Agency AMD is considering opening up an R&D center in Taiwan. AMD is said to have applied with the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) as part of Taiwan's "A+ global R&D and innovation partnership program" to set up a new R&D facility. The government partnership program covers three types of fields, namely AI, new-generation semiconductors including high-power and high-frequency ICs, and new 5G network structures and it's aiming for both local and international businesses to set up new R&D centers. AMD has yet to announce any plans about the potential R&D center and the MOEA has declined to share any details with local media in Taiwan.

However, an unnamed source with inside knowledge in the matter has revealed that AMD is looking at investing around NT$5 billion (~US$155 million), based on the application. The same source also mentioned that the MOEA has stipulated conditions that AMD has to meet, which among other things involves working with local IC design companies to help further develop Taiwan's IC design industry, working with local companies to produce servers with AI chips and working with local universities to cultivate talent. Furthermore, the MOEA is said to have asked AMD to recruit at least 20 percent of its R&D centre workforce from outside of Taiwan, to avoid competing with local companies for staff. AMD could be making an announcement about the R&D center at Computex, but it's worth keeping in mind that these things take time. Back in 2021, NVIDIA announced that it would set up an R&D center in Taiwan, but with a much bigger budget of NT$24.3 billion plus a government subsidy of a further NT$6.7 billion. NVIDIA has as yet to announce the opening of its Taiwan R&D center.

NVIDIA released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers. Version 555.85 WHQL comes with optimization for Hellblade II: Senua's Saga; F1 24, XDefiant, and Serum. The optimization for F1 24 includes support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, DLAA (in DLSS 2 mode); Reflex, and ray tracing effects. The support for Hellblade II: Senua's Saga gives you DLSS 3 Frame Generation and Reflex support. Meanwhile, Serum gets DLSS 3 Frame Generation, DLAA, and Reflex support. Lastly, XDefiant, the arena/MOBA from Ubisoft, gets support for Reflex.

The GeForce 555.85 WHQL drivers also add GeForce Experience or NVIDIA App optimal settings for Bellwright, Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, Homeworld 3, and
Infection Free Zone. The list of newly validated G-SYNC compatible displays grows with 11 new display models spanning ASUS, Dell, Philips, IO-Data, and LG. Among the issues fixed with this release include a random crash during gameplay with Tekken 8 on GTX 10-series "Pascal" graphics cards; a lower-than-expected GPU utilization with Horizon Forbidden West when Reflex is used in conjunction with Boost; and a bug with Blender Cycles that causes motion blur to incorrectly render on some GPU generations. Grab the drivers from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 555.85 WHQL

TrendForce reports that the three largest DRAM suppliers are increasing wafer input for advanced processes. Following a rise in memory contract prices, companies have boosted their capital investments, with capacity expansion focusing on the second half of this year. It is expected that wafer input for 1alpha nm and above processes will account for approximately 40% of total DRAM wafer input by the end of the year.

HBM production will be prioritized due to its profitability and increasing demand. However, limited yields of around 50-60% and a wafer area 60% larger than DRAM products mean a higher proportion of wafer input is required. Based on the TSV capacity of each company, HBM is expected to account for 35% of advanced process wafer input by the end of this year, with the remaining wafer capacity used for LPDDR5(X) and DDR5 products.

The graphics card modders from Brazil, TecLab and Paulo Gomes are back with yet another audacious, competitive VGA mod. The duo has already built a reputation for video memory replacement mods that have significantly altered the performance profile of graphics cards, and their latest feat sees an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card get a bit of a memory upgrade. Out of the box, the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER comes with 16 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across the 256-bit wide memory interface of the "AD103" GPU. The two tech-tubers each performed memory chip replacement mods, which in combination with GPU overclocking, resulted in memory speeds ranging between 24 Gbps and 26 Gbps. The big story here is that with faster memory, the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER beats the RTX 4080, despite 13% fewer shaders and other key components.

A stock GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card scores 8525 points in the Unigine Superposition 8K benchmark, and a stock-speed Manli RTX 4070 Ti SUPER does 7212 points, on account of fewer shaders (66 SM vs. 76 SM) and slower memory (21 Gbps vs. 22.4 Gbps). With a 24 Gbps memory speed mod, and GPU overclocking, Paulo Gomes achieved 8870 points in the test for the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, beating the RTX 4080, and overcoming the shader deficit. Meanwhile, over at TecLab, their Galax-branded RTX 4070 Ti SUPER yields 7028 points at stock speeds; and the team pulled off an epic 26 Gbps memory speed (chip replacement + overclocking), which when combined with some GPU overclocking, yielded a staggering 9133 points, which would inch close to what an RTX 4080 SUPER could produce with its 23 Gbps memory and maxed out "AD103" ASIC with all 80 SM on deck.

EK, the leading computer cooling solutions provider, is introducing the EK-Pro GPU WB RTX 4090 WindForce V2 - Nickel + Inox, an enterprise-grade full-cover water block designed specifically for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 WindForce V2 24G graphics card. The water block features a CNC-machined nickel-plated copper base paired with a precision laser-cut stainless-steel top, ensuring both durability and superior liquid cooling efficiency. It fully covers and cools the GPU, VRAM, and VRM components by directing the cooling liquid over these essential areas to efficiently dissipate heat.

Utilizing the Open Split-Flow cooling engine design, this water block delivers exceptional cooling performance. It boasts minimal hydraulic flow restriction, making it compatible with lower-powered water pumps or those running at reduced speeds without compromising efficiency. The jet plate and fin structure geometry are meticulously optimized to ensure uniform flow distribution with minimal loss, achieving optimal cooling efficiency. Remarkably, this water block maintains outstanding cooling performance even when the water flow is reversed, consistently surpassing expectations. It also features a single-slot I/O bracket.

The latest update of Ghost of Tsushima lets you use DLSS 2 super-resolution and FSR 3 Frame Generation simultaneously, so you have the unique benefit of having the NVIDIA DLSS 2 handle super resolution and image quality, while letting the AMD FSR 3 nearly double frame-rates of the DLSS 2 output. All this, without the need for any mods, it's part of the game's original code. It's crazy when you think about it—you now have two performance enhancements running in tandem, with gamers reporting over 170 FPS at 4K with reasonably good image quality. This could particularly benefit those on older GeForce RTX 30-series "Ampere" and RTX 20-series "Turing" graphics cards, as those lack support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

Whether looking for new adventures, epic storylines or games to play with a friend, GeForce NOW members are covered. Start off with the much-anticipated sequel to the Men of War franchise or cozy up with some adorable pals in Palworld, both part of five games GeForce NOW is bringing to the cloud this week.

No Guts, No Glory
Get transported to the battlefields of World War II with historical accuracy and attention to detail in Men of War II, the newest entry in the real-time strategy series from Fulqrum Publishing. The game features an extensive roster of units, including tanks, airplanes and infantry. With advanced enemy AI and diverse gameplay modes, Men of War II promises an immersive experience for both history enthusiasts and casual gamers. Gear up, strategize and prepare to rewrite history. Get an extra fighting chance with a GeForce NOW Ultimate membership, which streams at up to 4K resolution and provides longer gaming sessions and faster access to games over a free membership.

ORIGIN PC, a leader in custom high-performance systems, today launched their latest laptops - the EON16-SX, NSX-16, NSL-14, and NSL-16. For gamers, the EON16-SX offers powerful 40-Series performance and the latest in processing efficiency with an Intel Core Ultra processor. Professionals have a much broader selection of workstation laptops moving forward with the introduction of the brand new NSX-16, NSL-14, and NSL-16 laptops. Designed for the Generation of AI, the new Intel Core Ultra processors also feature a built-in NPU and Intel AI Boost. Experience improved productivity, efficiency, and performance with AI-acceleration that can be used for video editing, multi-tasking, and more. All four of the new laptops meet MIL-STD-810H-SPEC standards, meaning they have passed extensive stress tests including extreme temperatures, humidity, shock, and more. Durable and powerful, yet completely portable, ORIGIN PC is proud to announce the newest editions to their world-class lineup of custom PCs.

The brand new EON16-SX and NSX-16 laptops are a fusion of high-performance and fully portable design. While only 4.29 lbs light and 0.77 inches thin, they offer high-performance via quality hardware like an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070, DDR5 memory, and a spacious amount of high-speed SSD storage. Both laptops are also designed with a 16" 240 Hz 2560x1600 display, providing an expansive view of games, videos, and software. The two new laptops also take advantage of NVIDIA Optimus which automatically switches between the high performance dedicated GPU and power-efficient integrated GPU to maximize power efficiency. Packed with the latest technology, they boast a generous battery lifespan of 4 hours and 40 minutes. Customize the EON16-SX or NSX-16 with up to 64 GB of DDR5 memory and 16 TB of SSD storage, while also accessing a wide array of connectivity options.

According to analysts at HSBC, NVIDIA's upcoming Blackwell GPUs for AI workloads are expected to carry premium pricing significantly higher than the company's current Hopper-based processors. The analysts estimate that NVIDIA's "entry-level" Blackwell GPU, the B100, will have an average selling price between $30,000 and $35,000 per chip. That's already on par with the flagship H100 GPU from the previous Hopper generation. But the real premium lies with the top-end GB200 "superchip" that combines a Grace CPU with two enhanced B200 GPUs. HSBC analysts peg pricing for this monster chip at a staggering $60,000 to $70,000 per unit. NVIDIA may opt to primarily sell complete servers powered by Blackwell rather than individual chips. The estimates suggest a fully-loaded GB200 NVL72 server with 72 GB200 Superchips could fetch around $3 million.

The sky-high pricing continues NVIDIA's aggressive strategy of charging a premium for its leading AI and accelerator hardware. With rivals like AMD and Intel still lagging in this space, NVIDIA can essentially name its price for now. The premium pricing reflects the massive performance uplift promised by Blackwell. A single GB200 Superchip is rated for five PetaFLOPs at TF32 of AI compute power with sparsity, a 5x increase over the H100's one PetaFLOP. Of course, actual street pricing will depend on volume and negotiating power. Hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft may secure significant discounts, while smaller players could pay even more than these eye-watering analyst projections. NVIDIA is betting that the industry's insatiable demand for more AI compute power will make these premium price tags palatable, at least for a while. But it's also raising the stakes for competitors to catch up quickly before losing too much ground.

According to ServeTheHome, Intel has decided to discontinue its high-performance computing (HPC) product line, Ponte Vecchio, and shift its focus towards developing its next-generation data center GPU, codenamed Falcon Shores. This decision comes as Intel aims to streamline its operations and concentrate its resources on the most promising and competitive offerings. The Ponte Vecchio GPU, released in January of 2023, was intended to be Intel's flagship product for the HPC market, competing against the likes of NVIDIA's H100 and AMD's Instinct MI series. However, despite its impressive specifications and features, Ponte Vecchio faced significant delays and challenges in its development and production cycle. Intel's decision to abandon Ponte Vecchio is pragmatic, recognizing the intense competition and rapidly evolving landscape of the data center GPU market.

By pivoting its attention to Falcon Shores, Intel aims to deliver a more competitive and cutting-edge solution that can effectively challenge the dominance of its rivals. Falcon Shores, slated for release in 2025, is expected to leverage Intel's latest process node and architectural innovations. Currently, Intel has Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 accelerators for AI. However, the HPC segment is left without a clear leader in the company's product offerings. Intel's Ponte Vecchio is powering Aurora exascale supercomputer, which is the latest submission to the TOP500 supercomputer lists. This is also coming after the Rialto Bridge cancellation, which was supposed to be an HPC-focused card. In the future, the company will focus only on the Falcon Shores accelerator, which will unify HPC and AI needs for high-precision FP64 and lower-precision FP16/INT8.

ASUS today announced that it is bundling a Steam code for the role-playing video game Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth with select NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards purchased from May 13 to July 8, 2024. For gamers who have been waiting for their chance to explore Japan and Hawaii's criminal undersides with Kasuga Ichiban and the gang in the latest installment of the beloved Like a Dragon series, now is the chance to leverage new hardware in an adventure so vast that it spans the Pacific.

During this global promotion, any purchase of an ASUS NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 or above or any ASUS AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT or above will include a bundled Steam code for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Gamers everywhere can take advantage of this opportunity to upgrade their system and redeem the game code by August 8. For complete promotion details and instructions on how to redeem this code, click here.

The 63rd edition of the TOP500 reveals that Frontier has once again claimed the top spot, despite no longer being the only exascale machine on the list. Additionally, a new system has found its way into the Top 10.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA remains the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores, an HPE Cray EX architecture that combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, and it relies on Cray's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer. On top of that, this machine has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.93 GFlops/Watt - putting Frontier at the No. 13 spot on the GREEN500.

Quantum computing. Drug discovery. Fusion energy. Scientific computing and physics-based simulations are poised to make giant steps across domains that benefit humanity as advances in accelerated computing and AI drive the world's next big breakthroughs. NVIDIA unveiled at GTC in March the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, which promises generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models (LLMs) at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than the NVIDIA Hopper architecture.

Blackwell has powerful implications for AI workloads, and its technology capabilities can also help to deliver discoveries across all types of scientific computing applications, including traditional numerical simulation. By reducing energy costs, accelerated computing and AI drive sustainable computing. Many scientific computing applications already benefit. Weather can be simulated at 200x lower cost and with 300x less energy, while digital twin simulations have 65x lower cost and 58x less energy consumption versus traditional CPU-based systems and others.

Driving a fundamental shift in the high-performance computing industry toward AI-powered systems, NVIDIA today announced nine new supercomputers worldwide are using NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips to speed scientific research and discovery. Combined, the systems deliver 200 exaflops, or 200 quintillion calculations per second, of energy-efficient AI processing power.

New Grace Hopper-based supercomputers coming online include EXA1-HE, in France, from CEA and Eviden; Helios at Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet, in Poland, from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE); Alps at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, from HPE; JUPITER at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, in Germany; DeltaAI at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Miyabi at Japan's Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing - established between the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba and the Information Technology Center at the University of Tokyo.

NVIDIA today announced that it will accelerate quantum computing efforts at national supercomputing centers around the world with the open-source NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform. Supercomputing sites in Germany, Japan and Poland will use the platform to power the quantum processing units (QPUs) inside their NVIDIA-accelerated high-performance computing systems.

QPUs are the brains of quantum computers that use the behavior of particles like electrons or photons to calculate differently than traditional processors, with the potential to make certain types of calculations faster. Germany's Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich is installing a QPU built by IQM Quantum Computers as a complement to its JUPITER supercomputer, supercharged by the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip. The ABCI-Q supercomputer, located at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan, is designed to advance the nation's quantum computing initiative. Powered by the NVIDIA Hopper architecture, the system will add a QPU from QuEra. Poland's Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) has recently installed two photonic QPUs, built by ORCA Computing, connected to a new supercomputer partition accelerated by NVIDIA Hopper.

Gear up, Trailblazers - Honkai: Star Rail lands on GeForce NOW this week, along with an in-game reward for members to celebrate the title's launch in the cloud. Stream it today, along with five new games joining the GeForce NOW library of more than 1,900 titles this week.

Five Stars
Take a galactic journey in the cloud with Honkai: Star Rail, a new Cosmic Adventure Strategy role-playing game from HoYoverse, the company behind Genshin Impact. The title seamlessly blends intricate storytelling with immersive gameplay mechanics for an epic journey through the cosmos. Meet a cast of unique characters and explore diverse planets, each with its own mysteries to uncover. Assemble formidable teams, strategically deploying skills and resources to overcome mighty adversaries and unravel the mysteries of the Honkai phenomenon. Encounter new civilizations and face off against threats that endanger the Astral Express, overcome the struggles caused by Stellaron together, powerful artifacts that hold the keys to the universe's fate. Begin the trailblazing journey without needing to wait for downloads or game updates with GeForce NOW. Members who've opted into GeForce NOW's Rewards program will receive an email with a code for a Honkai: Star Rail starter kit, containing 30,000 credits, three Refined Aethers and three Traveler's Guides. All aboard the Astral Express for adventures and thrills!

According to Benchlife.info insiders, NVIDIA is supposedly in the phase of testing designs with various Total Graphics Power (TGP), running from 250 Watts to 600 Watts, for its upcoming GeForce RTX 50 series Blackwell graphics cards. The company is testing designs ranging from 250 W aimed at mainstream users and a more powerful 600 W configuration tailored for enthusiast-level performance. The 250 W cooling system is expected to prioritize compactness and power efficiency, making it an appealing choice for gamers seeking a balance between capability and energy conservation. This design could prove particularly attractive for those building small form-factor rigs or AIBs looking to offer smaller cooler sizes. On the other end of the spectrum, the 600 W cooling solution is the highest TGP of the stack, which is possibly only made for testing purposes. Other SKUs with different power configurations come in between.

We witnessed NVIDIA testing a 900-watt version of the Ada Lovelace AD102 GPU SKU, which never saw the light of day, so we should take this testing phase with a grain of salt. Often, the engineering silicon is the first batch made for the enablement of software and firmware, while the final silicon is much more efficient and more optimized to use less power and align with regular TGP structures. The current highest-end SKU, the GeForce RTX 4090, uses 450-watt TGP. So, take this phase with some reservations as we wait for more information to come out.