PC power supplies haven’t seen a whole lot of change in the last decade or two. We’ve gotten modular cables for easier routing, smaller standards for itty-bitty builds, and that’s about it. But today Intel has finalized the ATX 3.0 standard, coming soon to a full-sized PC case near you. The biggest addition announced today is a new standardized connection for graphics cards and other PCIe devices, delivering up to 600 watts on a single connector.

Currently graphics cards are in a bit of a power pinch. The maximum throughput for an 8-pin ATX rail is 150 watts, so the biggest and most power-hungry GPUs need to double or even triple up, adding extra space requirements and more complex cable routing inside the case. The new 12-pin 12VHPWR connection should be able to deliver more energy than even the most powerful graphics cards need for the next generation or two. Each pin housing is also physically smaller, with a 3.0mm pitch versus 4.2mm on current power supply rails.

Technically it’s 16 total pins (12+4), with four additional data pins squeezed in beneath the primary power pins. This is to manage DC output voltage regulation and a series of new tools designed to regulate high power output efficiently and safely, all handled intelligently by the power supply. According to Intel, the new 12VHPWR connection will be the standard for “most, if not all” PCIe cards using the 5.0 spec.

There’s been a lot of focus on how both Intel and AMD are planning for the future in packaging their dies to increase overall performance and mitigate higher manufacturing costs. For AMD, that next step has been V-cache, an additional L3 cache (SRAM) chiplet that’s designed to be 3D die stacked on top of an existing Zen 3 chiplet, tripling the total about of L3 cache available. Today, AMD’s V-cache technology is finally available to the wider market, as AMD is announcing that their EPYC 7003X “Milan-X” server CPUs have now reached general availability.

As first announced late last year, AMD is bringing its 3D V-Cache technology to the enterprise market through Milan-X, an advanced variant of its current-generation 3rd Gen Milan-based EPYC 7,003 processors. AMD is launching four new processors ranging from 16-cores to 64-cores, all of them with Zen 3 cores and 768 MB L3 cache via 3D stacked V-Cache.

AMD’s Milan-X processors are an upgraded version of its current 3rd generation Milan-based processors, EPYC 7003. Adding to its preexisting Milan-based EPYC 7,003 line-up, which we reviewed back in June last year, the most significant advancement from Milan-X is through its large 768 MB of L3 cache using AMD’s 3D V-Cache stacking technology. The AMD 3D V-Cache uses TSMC’s N7 process node – the same node Milan’s Zen 3 chiplets are built upon – and it measures at 36 mm², with a 64 MiB chip on top of the existing 32 MiB found on the Zen 3 chiplets.