It's no secret that GPUs are inherently better than CPUs for complex parallel workloads. IBM's latest collaborative effort with Stone Ridge Technology and Nvidia shined a light on the efficiency and performance gains for reservoir simulations used in oil and gas exploration. The oil and gas exploration industry operates on the cutting edge of computing due to the massive data sets and complex nature of simulations, so it is fairly common for companies to conduct technology demonstrations using the taxing workloads.

TOKYO -- Western Digital, opposing the sale of Toshiba's memory unit, has offered funds to bail out the struggling Japanese technology company.

Hooooooly graphics cards, you guys. This week, we brought you reviews on the AMD Radeon RX 580 and RX 570 graphics cards, and what followed was the resultant deluge of AIB cards. AMD announced pricing info, and off we went. Some RX 550s snuck in there as well. Sprinkled in there was a raft of Nvidia cards and related updates from third party makers, too, just for good measure, but in any case, if you’ve been waiting for some more GPU options, this week was a veritable Christmas.

ASRock released BIOS updates for its Taichi, Fatal1ty Gaming, and Pro series motherboards to support AMD's new Ryzen 5 processors. The company also announced that it has entered a strategic technology partnership with Sapphire Technology, a Hong Kong component manufacturer and supplier, to "launch cutting edge motherboard, CPU, and VGA card configurations" to offer gamers a better price-to-performance value.

AMD's Ryzen launch has brought us a new lineup of eight-core processors with disruptively low price points, but the relationship between performance and price is inextricably intertwined. Ryzen excels at workstation applications, but its curious gaming performance trends have dominated the conversation. We've recorded lower than expected performance in several titles, and after a bit of experimentation, we found that part of the problem stems from the Windows power profile. AMD has also stated that many games have difficulty navigating its unique cache and core topology, which requires specific optimizations delivered via patches. AMD announced in a blog post that it created a new Windows profile to address the power issue, and also announced that a third game received a performance-boosting patch.

Stardock and Oxide Games gave us access to a beta build of Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation ahead of its official launch. The update is our first example of a game optimized for AMD's Ryzen CPUs, which should improve their performance.

Microsoft suspended updates for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users with Intel's 7th generation (Kaby Lake) processors, AMD's 7th generation (Bristol Ridge) processors, and Qualcomm's 8996 processor or newer. The company said before that it wouldn't release new drivers for older Windows versions to support new hardware, but now it's stopped Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users with these new CPUs from scanning or downloading from Windows Update.

AMD's relatively low performance in some games has led to a flurry of theories, with the most popular being that the Windows scheduler bears the blame. There have been widespread reports, based on a now-deleted tweet as far as we can gather, that Microsoft will issue an update to rectify a scheduling conflict. AMD released a community update that contradicts the theories.