During Computex 2022 in Taipei, Taiwan, MSI unveiled four AM5 motherboards designed for AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors, which will be landing later this year. Currently announced are the premium MEG X670E Ace, the mid-ranged MPG X670E Carbon WIFI, and the more business-focused Pro X670-P WIFI motherboards.

Hot on the heels of AMD’s announcement that its highly anticipated Ryzen 7000 processors for desktops will be dropping sometime in the fall, motherboard vendors have been slowly unveiling what boards we can expect to see at launch. MSI has dropped some limited information on four new AM5 boards, including two from its flagship MEG series, one from its gaming-focused MPG family, and one from its more affordable Pro series.

Here is what we know so far:

Although MSI has announced there will be an X670E Godlike, we currently don’t have any images for this model. As we know from previous motherboard launches, the MSI X670E Godlike will be the company’s flagship AM5 board for Ryzen 7000 processors, with a large E-ATX sized PCB and a wave of high-end enthusiast-level features. One interesting feature of the MEG series boards is a front panel USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C header with support for 60 W power delivery.

MSI hasn’t specified much or distinguished much of its announced features between either model. Still, MSI does say the MEG series for AM5 includes a monstrous 26-phase power delivery (24+2) with 105 A smart power stages and a stacked fin array heatsink to help cool it. MSI also states that the MEG series will include a large metal backplate with up to four M.2 slots onboard and an M.2 Xpander-Z Gen5 dual add-on card supporting two PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs. Whether these features are specific to the entire MEG series for AM5 remains to be seen. 

The MSI MPG X670E Carbon WIFI uses a carbon black finish across the board, with two full-length PCIe 5.0 slots. MSI states the X670E Carbon WIFI will include four PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots and that the board will be powered by a 20-phase (18+2) power delivery with 90 A power stages.

MSI’s fourth and final model is the Pro X670-P WIFI motherboard, which is primarily aimed at SMEs and users looking to build a more professional type system. MSI says the X670-P WIFI will include a 16-phase (14+2) power delivery, with a single PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot and 2.5 GbE/Wi-Fi 6E networking.

At the time of writing, MSI hasn’t provided any information regarding controller sets at this time, or how much each of the four models might cost. MSI will likely give more details closer to the launch of the AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs, which are expected to hit retail shelves in Q4 2022.

Source: MSI

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Among NVIDIA’s slate of announcements tonight at Computex 2022, the company has revealed that it is preparing to launch liquid cooled versions of their high-end PCIe accelerator cards. Being offered as an alterative to the traditional dual-slot air cooled cards, the liquid cooled cards come in a more compact single-slot form factor for both improved cooling and improved density. The liquid cooled A100 will be available in Q3, and a liquid cooled H100 will be available early next year.

While liquid cooling is far from new in the datacenter, it’s typically been reserved for more bespoke hardware with extreme cooling and/or density requirements, such as the upcoming generation of high-end NVIDIA H100 (SMX) servers. PCIe servers, by contrast, are all about standardization and compatibility. Which for server video cards/accelerators means dual slot cards designed for use with forced air cooling within a server chassis. This serves the market segment well, but the 300 to 350 Watt TDPs of these cards means that they can’t get any thinner and still be effectively cooled by air – which in turn creates a 4 card limit for standard rackmount systems.

But times are changing, and liquid cooling is being implemented in datacenters in greater capacities both to keep up with cooling ever-hotter hardware, and to improve overall datacenter energy efficiency. To that end, NVIDIA will be releasing liquid cooled versions of their A100 and H100 PCIe cards in order to give datacenter customers an easy and officially supported path to installing liquid cooled PCIe accelerators within their facilities.

The cards (pictured above) are essentially a reference A100/H100 with the traditional dual-slot heatsink replaced with a single-slot full coverage water block. Designed to be integrated by server vendors, they use an open loop design that is meant to be used as part of a larger liquid cooling setup.

But other than changing the cooling system, the specifications of the cards remain unchanged. NVIDIA isn’t increasing the TDPs or clockspeeds on these cards, so their performance should be identical to traditional air cooled cards (so long as they’re not thermally throttling, of course). Put another way, these new cards are using liquid cooling to improve energy efficiency and density, rather than performance.

The first card out of the gate will be the liquid cooled version of the 80GB A100 PCIe accelerator. That will be available to customers in Q3 of this year. Meanwhile a liquid cooled version of the H100 PCIe is also under development, and NVIDIA expects that to be available in early 2023.

In the interim, NVIDIA has been working with Equinix in order to qualify the liquid cooled A100 within their datacenters, as well as to get an idea of the real-world power savings of the new hardware. Interestingly, NVIDIA is reporting a significant reduction in overall datacenter power usage from switching to liquid cooling – a 2000 server (4000 A100 card) setup saw its total power needs drop by 28%. According to NVIDIA, this is from a combination of overall power savings across the datacenter from the switch, including everything from improved video card energy efficiency from lower temperatures, to reduced energy needs from cooling water versus running large air chillers. All of which underscores why NVIDIA is promoting liquid cooled hardware as a power efficiency gain for datacenter operators who are looking to trim power usage.

And while this first generation of liquid cooled hardware is focused on efficiency, according to NVIDIA that won’t always be the case. For future generations of cards the company will also be looking at liquid cooling to improve performance at current energy levels – presumably by investing the datacenter-scale gains back into higher TDPs for the cards.

Finally, while the bulk of NVIDIA’s announcement today (as well as the case study) is focused on PCIe cards, NVIDIA is also revealing that they’ve been working on official, liquid cooled designs for their HGX systems as well, which are used to house the company’s more powerful SMX cards. A liquid cooled HGX A100 is already shipping, and a liquid cooled HGX H100 is slated to be released in Q4.

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Alongside their big desktop update for later in the year, AMD is also using this year’s Computex to announce an update to the low-end segment of their mobile lineup. In the fourth quarter of this year the company will be rolling out a new chip codenamed “Mendocino”, which is aimed at mainstream, high-volume Windows and ChromeOS notebooks. With 4 Zen 2 cores and RDNA 2 graphics, the relatively petite chip is intended to go into notebooks in the $399 to $699 range.

Based on its intended market segment, AMD Mendocino (no relation to Intel’s) is positioned to end up as the successor to a mix of lower-end AMD SoC products, including the bottom of the Ryzen mobile stack (e.g. Ryzen 5300U) as well as AMD’s Ryzen C-class chips. Mainstream laptops are a huge part of the market in volume, and for both good reasons and bad, it’s always been an area where AMD has done well for itself. And while the current chip shortage hasn’t been fully resolved, AMD is finally in a position to update the lower-end of its APU lineup with some newer hardware built on a more recent manufacturing process, replacing their current hodgepodge of mostly Picasso (4C 12nm Zen+) based SKUs.

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Alongside the new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, as part of Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon Night” event in China this evening, the company is also rolling out a brand-new SoC for the premium phone market, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. Aimed downmarket of Qualcomm’s traditional flagship SoCs, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 is the first non-flagship SoC to be introduced by Qualcomm since they implemented their new platform naming and differentiation scheme. But, like the Snapdragon 7xx series before it, the latest Snapdragon 7 SoC follows the same design mantra of offering flagship-level features with more modest performance and costs.

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