(Photo: Vaclav/Unsplash)For the last couple of years, Apple, Google, and Amazon have begun shifting their manufacturing from China to Vietnam in an effort to avoid trade tensions. But a recent spike in COVID-19 cases has thrown a wrench in their plans, as each country’s governments devise travel restrictions to temper the virus. Apple’s iPads and MacBooks, Google’s Pixel 6 line, and a handful of Amazon’s IoT devices are among the products affected. Apple first began shifting AirPod production to Vietnam two years ago, when the trade relationship between the US and China became particularly sticky. Just after imposing new punitive tariffs on China-made products, US government officials began (namely Huawei) in “an effort to draw those companies over to [their] side in the escalating Washington-Beijing tech war.
One of the interesting facets in the “evolution” of Windows over the decade or so is the way Microsoft suddenly pretends not to be aware of common institutional knowledge. Microsoft, for example, had to learn that designing apps that act like malware is wrong. It had to learn that people value patch notes. It had to learn that people want more control over when and how their PC updates. The latest concept Microsoft has “forgotten” people care about is browser choice. When you start a new browser for the first time in Windows 11, Microsoft asks which application you’d like to use to open web content, as by The Verge.
This week, Intel shared significant details on its Alder Lake CPU family with far more information than we’ve previously had regarding the CPUs core design, performance, and expected power efficiency. This is a critical launch for Intel. The manufacturer’s desktop CPUs have been stuck on 14nm for over six years now, and the cracks in that process node have been showing for at least two. Rocket Lake is currently competitive with AMD at the midrange and lower-end of the market as long as you don’t care about power efficiency, but AMD has an advantage at the high end. Alder Lake is intended to change that.
Intel’s tech day wasn’t just a CPU-centric affair; the company had quite a bit to say about its Xe graphics products and its new upscaling solution, XeSS. Let’s tackle the core first. The first Xe HPG (High Performance Gaming) product to come to market is code-named Alchemist, and it’ll debut under the Intel Arc brand. A Xe GPU is built from Xe Cores. A Xe Core is approximately equivalent to an Nvidia SM or an AMD CU. In each case, these slices represent the functional building block of the GPU. In Intel’s case, each Xe slice contains 16 vector engines and 16 matrix engines.
When Intel launches Alder Lake later this year, it won’t just be a step forward for x86 hybrid processing or an improved processor. The company will also be unveiling a new version of the ATX power standard, dubbed ATX12VO (the VO stands for Voltage Only, meaning the power supply only provides 12V power). The goal is to simplify power delivery and remove legacy standards that are barely required in the modern era. It’s been some years since the ATX standard was significantly updated. ATX 12V 2.0 was introduced in 2003 and added support for additional 12V power. For those of you who remember 20-pin power supplies, the 2.0 standard is the one that introduced 24-pin connectors.
The video game industry is booming like few others, even the sports and movie industries. It’s not hard to see why, with the sophistication of gaming increasing and a rapidly accelerating pace, the immersion and entertainment provided by video games (especially when the world is in such a ). Gaming allows for people to take their minds off things, be diverted, have fun, and immerse themselves in stories of other worlds, all from their living rooms – a fact that’s only multiplied by the potential of virtual reality (VR) gaming. It’s not hard to see why the industry is booming, or why more and more people want to be involved in the industry as professional game designers.
Today you can save over $500 on a new Dell Alienware M15 R3 that ships with a 4K OLED display and has all the hardware you need to run games with blistering speed and with high quality graphics settings. Intel Core i7-10750H 15.6-Inch 4K OLED Gaming Laptop w/ Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, 16GB DDR4 RAM and 2x256GB M.2 PCI-E SSDs in RAID-0 for $1,699.99 from Dell (List price $2,279.99) M.2 NVMe SSD for $54.99 from Amazon (List price $73.61) WiFi Robot Vacuum for $229.99 from Amazon (List price $274.00) Intel Core i5-10400 Desktop w/ Intel UHD Graphics 630, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 1TB HDD for $519.00 from Dell (List price $955.71) Wireless Earbuds for $179.99 from Amazon (List Price $249.00) 32GB 8″ WiFi Tablet with Special Offers for $59.99 from Amazon (list price $89.99)
Boston Dynamics spent most of its 29-year history with no consumer products at all. Now, it has one in . There’s still no way to buy the company’s humanoid Atlas robot, but it’s learning some new tricks nonetheless. In the latest Boston Dynamics video, you can marvel at the speed and agility of two Atlas robots as they navigate a parkour course. They even pull off some sick flips. Atlas was unveiled back in 2013, and at the time it couldn’t do much more than walk in circles. The robot, which is five feet (1.5 meters) tall and weighs 190 pounds (86 kilograms), was initially intended for search-and-rescue applications.
Gigabyte has announced it will replace defective power supplies it shipped to customers, but the company wants you to know it’s not happy about it. The company has released a statement in which it misrepresents what independent investigation uncovered about its products in the name of saving face. The company writes: GIGABYTE is aware of certain media outfits casting doubt over the quality of Power Supply models GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM… We were made aware by third parties of concerns regarding potential issues of the GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM tripping at high wattages when tested via DC Electronic Load equipment for extended lengths of time repeatedly close to the 120% to 150% OPP trigger point.
