Jim Keller, AMD’s chief CPU architect, leaves the company

Earlier this week, we reported on rumors that AMD’s Zen might have slipped into Q4 2016. Since then, we’ve heardthe chip could actually launch in the Q1 2017 timeframe — and now, there’s further reason to think that something happened to AMD’s next-generation CPU timetable. Now, it’s been reported that Jim Keller, who returned to AMD to helm its new CPU after a stint with Apple, has left the company to “pursue other opportunities.”

Nvidia kills Icera soft modem, refocuses Tegra on automotive design

Nvidia posted its first quarter results yesterday, with strong growth in PC gaming and automotive sales. The GPU manufacturer also announced that it would cease all business operations related to its Icera softmodem technology, with the intent of wrapping up that segment by the second half of the year.

Killing Icera brings an end to one of the more ambitious chapters in Nvidia’s quest for mobile market domination. When Nvidia bought the company in 2011, 4G and LTE support were just beginning to roll out across the United States. After several quiet years with relatively few design wins, Nvidia came out swinging in 2013, with the simultaneous announcement of Tegra 4, 4i, and the Icera i500 stand-alone modem.

Server woes: Final Itanium processor will be 32nm, AMD’s ARM servers delayed a full year

Intel and AMD are both facing delays and product changes on the server front. While we alluded to some of these changes in our AMD earnings coverage from last year, it’s worth exploring them in a bit more detail. Intel has finally let slip some details on Kittson, the follow-up processor to Poulson and the last Itanium processor on any roadmap. Meanwhile, AMD’s roadmap for its Cortex-A57 based “Seattle” SoC has slipped a full year, with volume ramping in 2015.

Nvidia announces ultra-high-end GTX Titan X, leaves out almost all details

Companies often play coy with announcements at major press events, but Nvidia’s latest tactic with its new GTX Titan X may take some kind of reward. The company’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, made a surprise appearance at an Unreal Engine conference and handed Unreal chief developer Tim Sweeney an autographed GPU. This new Titan X will carry an estimated eight billion transistors and a massive 12GB of RAM. But Nvidia isn’t saying more until its own GTC event.

According to Sweeney, Titan X was developed partly in response to the VR headsets and technology that are widely on display. In more plausible reality, it’s a chip in the same vein as the original GTX Titan and GTX 780 — an HPC and scientific computing GPU that Nvidia is bringing over to the consumer business.

Report claims DirectX 12 will enable AMD and Nvidia GPUs to work side-by-side

With the Games Developer Conference right around the corner we’ve started to see more gaming and technology announcements cropping up, but a new report on DirectX 12 is certain to raise the eyebrows of any PC gamer. It’s been reported that DirectX 12 — Microsoft’s upcoming, low-latency, close(r)-to-metal API that replaces DirectX 11 — will be capable of running across AMD and Nvidia GPUs at the same time.

A “source with knowledge of the matter” told Tom’s Hardware that DirectX 12 will support asynchronous workloads across multiple GPUs, and that one extension of this support is that a task could theoretically be split between two different video cards from different manufacturers.

Nvidia slapped with class-action lawsuit over GTX 970 memory issues

Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, hasn’t directly responded to the class-action lawsuit allegations, but he has written a blog post responding to the larger situation. Said post isn’t likely to win many converts to Nvidia’s way of thinking, since Huang refers to the memory issue as a “feature,” noting that “Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.”

He then claims that this was done because games “are using more memory than ever.”

Nvidia kills mobile GPU overclocking in latest driver update, irate customers up in arms

Nvidia’s mobile Maxwell parts have won significant enthusiast acclaim since launch thanks to excellent performance and relatively low power consumption. Boutique builders and enthusiasts alike also tend to enjoy pushing the envelope, and Maxwell’s manufacturing characteristics apparently make it eminently suited to overclocking. Now, apparently, Nvidia is cracking down on these options with a driver update that removes the overclocking features that apparently some vendors sold to customers.