Dell’s getting a head start on Presidents’ Day by launching excellent deals on several of its most popular products. Today you can save big on a display or pickup a new computer with a substantial discount. Dell’s high-end UltraSharp U3415W display features an ultra-wide IPS curved display panel with a resolution of 3,440×1,440. The display also has excellent color support that extends to cover 91 percent of the CIE1976 color gamut, and it’s currently marked down from $949.99 to just $699.99 from Dell. Add to this a $200 Dell gift card, and this monitor is an incredible deal.
For more than a year, Intel has kept the exact details of its next-generation Xe GPUs tightly under its vest. We’ve gotten a few updates, like those about Ponte Vecchio, but the company has mostly let its advancing integrated graphics speak for itself (Ice Lake, which is based on Xe’s immediate predecessor, offered substantially improved graphics performance compared to Skylake). A new leak from , however, claims to have a good deal more information about Intel’s graphics plan. According to their data, Intel is planning to bring cards to market based on several designs. The cards will feature either 1, 2, or 4 tiles, with each tile apparently constructed from 128 EUs.
On Sunday, newly minted Oscar winner Taika Waititi took the opportunity to slam Apple for its terrible butterfly keyboards. When asked what writers in Hollywood should ask for in the next round of talks with Apple, Waititi joked: “Apple needs to fix those keyboards. They are impossible to write on. They’ve gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs.” Out of the mouth of babes — or, in this case, the director of one of my favorite movies of all time. DaringFireball took note of the , writing: “I’ve been saying for years now that Apple has done severe reputational harm to the MacBook brand, which effectively is the Mac brand for most people, especially writers.
For decades, Swiss firm Crypto AG supplied governments around the world with encrypted communication systems. Most of its 62 customers never suspected anything was amiss, but a new report from The Washington Post and German broadcaster ZDF reveals that . For decades, the agencies effortlessly eavesdropped on the secure communications of allies and enemies alike. Crypto AG didn’t start as a CIA operation — it was the brainchild of Russian-born inventor Boris Hagelin. Hagelin fled to Sweden when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and then fled again to the US when the Nazis swept into Sweden. While in the US, he helped develop the M-209 encryption machine for US forces.
Samsung is making big changes to the Galaxy S lineup this year. The consumer electronics giant just unveiled the Galaxy S20 series at its Unpacked event, and the era of 5G is now fully upon us. The Galaxy S20 comes in three flavors, all of which support 5G networks. They also come with impressively high price tags. has done away with the “e” variant of its flagship phone, which was the one to get last year. Instead, we now have the Galaxy S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra. The phones all have a 1440p “Infinity-O” display like the Note 10 with a single front-facing camera in the top middle of the screen.
AMD has spent the last three years rewriting the rules of desktop performance. On Friday, the microprocessor manufacturer launched its AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the world’s first single-socket 64-core CPU. I’ve already written a teaser and gone over some of my early thoughts on the CPU, but here’s where we dig into the data on the chip and see what the reports can tell us. Under the right circumstances, the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X offers incredible performance. In unoptimized workloads, it’s flat or even declines against the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. I’ve spent a great deal of time putting the CPU through its paces, looking for scenarios where it succeeds and analyzing where it falls flat.
Somewhere in the universe, a highly energetic Fast Radio Burst (FRB) is blasting outward from an unknown object, bathing the sky in radio waves. Scientists may be one step closer to understanding these mysterious signals. A new study of FRBs has . That could finally give astronomers the tools they need to characterize these perplexing cosmic occurrences. FRBs have been the subject of intense speculation ever since scientists spotted the first one in 2007. These signals last only a millisecond, and the power is minuscule here on Earth — it’s similar to placing a cell phone call from the moon.
Millions of Americans have been dealing with the fallout from the Equifax hack since 2017, and the US government just announced the first criminal charges in the case. are listed in the indictment, which the US Justice Department filed today in federal court. While the case sheds new light on the nature of the hack, it’s unlikely any of the officials will ever end up in a US court. The indictment alleges that Wang Qian, Xu Ke, Wu Zhiyong, and Liu Lei conducted the hack as members of the Chinese Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute. They are charged with nine counts including computer fraud, wire fraud, and economic espionage.
Back in 2018, AMD launched the MI50 and MI60, Vega-based accelerators built on TSMC’s 7nm process node. Now, there are rumors of a massive new chip coming in that family, in a relatively svelte power envelope. “Arcturus” is a codename that’s been floating around for a while, having first been mentioned by an AMD staffer in late 2018, but it’s never been clear if the GPU was based on Navi or Vega. Thus far, AMD has maintained a divide between its Vega products, which are built for AI and the HPC market, and Navi, which is built for gaming.
