Ryzen 7000 processors continue to get cheaper. Now several major foreign chains are offering the eight-core Ryzen 7 7700X for $299.

Recall that AMD initially priced this CPU at $400, then the company lowered prices for all new items, and this model began to cost $350. Now we have another decline, although it may be temporary.

Discounts also apply to the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X, but in their case, the prices simply fell back to those that AMD set back in November, while the Ryzen 7 7700X fell even more.

Whether this offer will be available globally and how long it will be active is unclear. But let’s recall that yesterday AMD itself admitted that for the past six months it has deliberately limited the supply of its products to the market, which is why prices were inflated.

In addition, we recall that the unique Ryzen 7000X3D will soon enter the market.

Intel has released a fresh graphics driver for Arc video cards, which, as the company itself promises, will increase performance by some incredible values.

Of course, not everywhere, but Intel says that in Full HD performance will increase by up to 77%, in 1440p by 87%, and the average increase for older games with DirectX 9, which Arc cards initially had problems with, should increase by 43%. All these figures are valid for the Arc A750, which Intel has just reduced the price to $250.

The growth that Intel promises is really impressive. Under these conditions, the $250 Arc A750 should be the best-value graphics card in the class, as it competes on price with the GeForce RTX 3050 and Radeon RX 6600, which it could previously beat. However, it is better to wait for various tests and evaluate whether such an impressive performance increase really takes place.

We have already seen photos of the LGA7529 socket for the new Intel Xeon server processors, and now it’s time to understand how huge the CPUs themselves will be.

In the comparison photo, you can see the LGA4677 socket for the recently released Sapphire Rapids processors and the much larger LGA7529 for the upcoming Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest CPUs.

According to preliminary calculations, the dimensions of the new CPUs will be about 105 x 70.5 mm, that is, they will be about 70% larger than the current generation, which is rather big in itself. For comparison, the dimensions of the monstrous Epyc Genoa are approximately 72 x 75.4 mm. It is quite possible that the new Intel processors will be the largest on the market at the time of release.

The LGA7529 (Birch Stream-AP) platform is expected next year. As part of the platform, Intel is going to release two lines of completely different processors. The first will be Granite Rapids, which will reportedly contain up to 128 large Redwood Cove + cores, and the second will be Sierra Forest, which will have all small cores, but there will be either 344 or even 528 of them.