AMD’s Q2 2020 results were excellent this week, showcasing how the company continues to perform well even in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Revenue was up 8 percent quarter-on-quarter and 26 percent year-on-year, with gross margins of 44 percent. That’s slightly less than Q1 (46 percent) but above Q2 2019 (41 percent). The company recorded $173M in operating income and an operating margin of 9 percent. While discussion of Intel’s quarterly results has focused heavily to the 7nm ramp and what it means for the company’s 10nm more than its short-term excellent financials, AMD’s coverage is likely to go the opposite direction.
Five years ago today, Microsoft launched Windows 10 for PCs. The first devices to ship Windows 10 Mobile would drop a few months later, in November 2015. At the time, Microsoft positioned Windows 10 as a radical response to changing market conditions and pledged that this would be both Microsoft’s last version of Windows and an eternally updated, ever-improving version of Windows. Features like DirectX 12 would leave old APIs in the past. Windows Mobile would enable an effectively unified experience across devices and operating systems. Your OS would be kept seamlessly updated, with less need for reboots and better overall stability.
OnePlus made its name with cheap phones, but its most recent OnePlus 8 series has reached the stratospheric heights of other flagship devices. However, the company isn’t done with budget phones. The OnePlus Nord was unveiled recently, offering almost-flagship specs for a low price. Initially, OnePlus only confirmed availability in Europe and India, but now we know a version of the Nord . Don’t expect it to be the same Nord, though. The OnePlus Nord gives you a lot for £379 including a 5G-enabled Snapdragon 765G, 8GB of RAM, a 6.4-inch 90Hz OLED, 30W fast charging, and more. You might want to buy one in the US, but the cellular bands will make that a poor experience.
So far, there haven’t been any upsets in the MLPerf AI benchmarks. Nvidia not only wins everything, but they are still the only company that even competes in every category. Today’s MLPerf Training 0.7 announcement of results isn’t much different. Nvidia started shipping its A100 GPUs in time to submit results in the Released category for commercially available products, where it put in a top-of-the-charts performance across the board. However, there were some interesting results from Google in the Research category. MLPerf Training 0.7 Adds Three Important New Benchmarks To help reflect the growing variety of uses for machine learning in production settings, MLPerf had added two new and one upgraded training benchmarks.
Porting Doom to various devices has become an art over the years. From calculators to printers, the first level of “Knee Deep in the Dead” tends to show up in a lot of places. This is the first time, at least that I’m aware of, that a modder has figured out how to actually play Doom inside of Minecraft itself. The mod works via VirtualBox (as-in, the software) and an . Essentially, the mod allows you to order a computer from a satellite that passes overhead 5x per day. Once you’ve ordered it, you can configure the box for the type of machine you want to virtually emulate, then install an emulated operating system.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to lift off this week to begin its journey toward the red planet. The robot carries a plethora of instruments, a helicopter, and sample containers that might one day conduct pieces of Mars back to Earth. However, Perseverance will also back to its homeworld. The rover’s calibration target will include a piece of a meteorite that left Mars behind thousands of years ago. Perseverance, previously known only as Mars 2020, is the successor of Curiosity. NASA has been overwhelmingly pleased with Curiosity’s performance since its 2012 landing on Mars. Perseverance makes a few structural changes, like more durable wheels that won’t get roughed up by the pointy Martian rocks.
NASA has that the Perseverance rover will launch on Thursday (July 30th) this week after years of development and testing. The robotic explorer, which is already bundled up in the nose section of an Atlas V rocket, will study the history of Mars with a specific focus on the search for signs of life on the dusty rock. First, it has to get there. Currently, NASA plans to launch the mission at 7:50 AM (eastern time) on Thursday from Cape Canaveral. This is always a dangerous phase of any mission, but the Atlas V has an excellent success rate for heavy-lift rockets.
Intel quietly launched the Core i9-10850K, a new CPU that’s almost a Core i9-10900K in every single particular save one — it’s 100MHz slower, and a little bit cheaper. What’s interesting about the Core i9-10850K is that it exists in the first place. Intel doesn’t typically insert a SKU directly between its highest and next-highest CPUs like this. The Core i9-10900K is a 10C/20T CPU with 3.7GHz base frequency and up to a 5.3GHz clock if thermal circumstances permit. The CPU has a nominal TDP of 125W, though this only refers to its thermal dissipation over time — at peak, the CPU draws well over 200W before throttling itself backward.
If you’re ready to do away with hard drives and switch to an all-SSD solution for your storage needs, you may want to pick up one of Samsung’s 970 Evo 1TB SSDs. Not only does this drive offer a large storage capacity, but it also features a fast data transfer rate and a $70 discount. Reading data at 3,500MB/s, this SSD hits the limits of what the M.2 interface is capable of when connected using PCI-E 3.0 lanes. With a total of 1TB of storage capacity, this drive removes any need to have a second drive to store files as it can hold more data than the average user typically needs.
