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Cisco Systems is reportedly considering shedding its global workforce by nearly 20 percent with the lose of up to 14,000 jobs.

According to multiple rumours, it's been claimed that the network kit giant is preparing to announce cuts to between 9,000 and 14,000 employees within the next few weeks, while early retirement packages are apparently already being offered to many staff.

It comes as Cisco is expected to report its fourth quarter financial results on Wednesday.

COLOGNE, Germany—While common wisdom suggests that your average gamer would prefer a smaller PC over a larger one—see Nvidia shrinking down its desktop graphics cards to fit inside laptops—HP is bucking the trend with its imposing Omen X PC.

While it only houses a micro-ATX motherboard, the Omen X's tilted cube design with separate compartments for motherboard, power supply, and storage, makes it far larger than your average micro-ATX PC. Inside the motherboard compartment there's space for up to two full-length graphics cards, and three 120mm fans that can be used together to fit in a 360mm radiator or all-in-one watercooler. There's room in the PSU compartment for monster 1500W units, while the storage compartment houses four neat hot swap hard drive bays that'll take 3.5- or 2.5-inch drives.

Unusually for a PC from an OEM, the Omen X is designed to be taken apart by users. On the back of the case is an eject button that pops off the side cover with little effort, revealing the internals. On the front, behind one of the four squares outlined by customisable RGB LED lighting (because everything has to have RGB lighting these days) is a tool kit containing a screwdriver and extra screws. That's particularly handy given that the Omen X will be sold both as a complete PC, with prices starting at €2299 (~£2000), and as a standalone chassis for an extremely pricey €599 (~£500).

Nvidia has called out Intel for juicing its chip performance in specific benchmarks—accusing Intel of publishing some incorrect "facts" about the performance of its long-overdue Knights Landing Xeon Phi cards.

Nvidia's primary beef is with the following Intel slide, which was presented at a high performance computing conference (ISC 2016). Nvidia disputes Intel's claims that Xeon Phi provides "2.3x faster training" for neural networks and that it has "38 percent better scaling" across nodes.

At this juncture I should point out that juicing benchmarks is, rather sadly, par for the course. Whenever a chip maker provides its own performance figures, they are almost always tailored to the strength of a specific chip—or alternatively, structured in such a way as to exacerbate the weakness of a competitor's product.