Prospects are looking increasingly positive for AMD-- following a 2017 return to profitability, the company is set to set to gain 30% global desktop processor share in Q4 2018, DigiTimes reports.

Key to such gains is fully foundry support from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), as well as Intel 10nm processor launch delays. According to "industry sources," AMD has recently loosened ties with Globalfaoundries in favour of contracting TSMC to manufacture GPUs, server and PC processors using a 7nm process. The change brought about better chip yield rates and performance, not to mention regular shipments to customers.

Samsung is concerned about memory prices, Bloomberg reports-- so much so the S. Korean giant plans to keep memory chip supplies tight come next year, amid forecasts of demand slowing down.

Such a move would maintain (if not drive up) memory chip prices, at least according to unidentified people "discussing the plan." Currently Samsung expects growth of less than 20% for DRAM, while NAND flash should grow by 30%, down from previous forecasts of 20% growth for DRAM and 40% for NAND in 2018.

Mitel announces key executive appointments in Europe, with Thomas Veit as revional VP of the Rest of Europe region and the promotion of Christophe Chamy to managing director of Mitel France.

A former VP EMA and APAC for channel strategy with NCR, Veit oversees the Nordics, Benelux, Spain, Italy, Middle East, Russia, CIS and Austria/CEE. He also held senior EMEA leadership positions at Unify, Avaya, Cisco, SonicWall and Ingram Micro. Meanwhile Chamy is former sales director of Mitel France, and has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry.

High-performance data management solution provider DataDirect Networks (DDN) completes the acquisition of VM-aware storage vendor Tintri, thanks to a deal worth $60 million.

“We look forward to bringing the exceptional suite of virtualization and analytics products that Tintri has developed over the last decade to enterprise and hybrid cloud organizations around the world,” DDN says. “Our first order of business is to deliver immediate world-class support to the more than one thousand Tintri customers worldwide. Beyond that, we are thrilled to help businesses achieve significant value and transformational simplicity for their server virtualization, DevOps and VDI needs.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang takes the SIGGRAPH 2018 main stage to unveil the company's 8th generation GPU architecture-- Turing, described as "the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006."

The biggest claim for Turing is hybrid rendering, a combination of ray tracing with traditional rasterisation. Nvidia says Turing architecture features an RT core, a set of dedicated processors able to render ray tracing in real time. For the curious, the RT core does by accelerating ray-triangle intersection checks and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) manipulation, a popular data structure for object storage in ray tracing.

Samsung reveals what it claims is the first 10nm-class 8Gb LPDDR5 DRAM chip-- an addition to the S. Korean company's DRAM lineup aimed for upcoming 5G and AI-powered mobile applications.

“This development of 8Gb LPDDR5 represents a major step forward for low-power mobile memory solutions,” Samsung says. “We will continue to expand our next-generation 10nm-class DRAM lineup as we accelerate the move toward greater use of premium memory across the global landscape.”

LPDDR5 is currently the most cutting edge memory standard-- so much so the JEDEC standards group is still to finalise the specification. However Samsung appears to have the details, and is showing off a memory chip with data rates of up to 6400Mb/s, 1.5x faster than LPDDR4X DRAM chips found in flagship mobile devices. As a result, the LPDDR5 chip can send 51.2GB of data in a second.