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When it comes to graphics cards there are generally two manufacturers who stand apart from the competition as industry-standard choices for professionals – AMD and NVIDIA.

It has been a nervous few weeks in budget conscious studios and agency lofts across the country as we await the launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and RTX 4050 GPUs.

It has been one of the computer industry’s longest running and most closely guarded product journeys. But finally, global microchip giant Intel has released its 4th Gen Xeon Scalable microprocessor which, until now, has been known only by its codename, Sapphire Rapids.

AMD finally unveiled its 4th Gen EPYC processors at an event in San Francisco earlier this month. With up to 96 cores in a single processor, the new line-up – which also includes the Compute Density-Optimized Zen 4C for EPYC Bergamo, and the Cache-Optimized Zen 4 V-Cache within the EPYC Genoa-X series – has been created for critical workloads across cloud, enterprise, and high-performance computing (HPC). 

While Intel doesn’t quite dominate the CPU landscape as it did in the past, it can still set hares running like no other tech player. Its February announcement of the proposed release of the first 13th-gen CPUs in the second half of this year has had designers and developers on tenterhooks ever since. 

The launch of the NVIDIA RTX™ A4500 professional graphics card last November was met with some bemusement, if not outright scepticism, by some reviewers. Why, with the RTX™ A4000 (16 GB) and RTX™ A5000 (24 GB) already on the market, was there a need to plug a gap for which there didn’t appear to be a ready market? But they hadn’t reckoned with a global semiconductor shortage which made accessibility of both cards sporadic, thereby pushing up the price of both.

GPU prices are steadily decreasing now that businesses are back to more normal operating schedules, resale prices are also much lower.

Nvidia has teased the possibility that future cards of theirs may be manufactured by Intel. This could take Nvidia to the top of the competition after years of rivalry with AMD.

Innodisk has recently launched a M.2 10GbE network card, the first of its kind leveraging M.2s PCIe interface to offer a 10GbE connectivity in a compact package.