A new batch of Chinese companies are waking up to the harsh reality of US technology bans today. The US Commerce Department has , most of which are known for producing AI and facial recognition systems. This means companies like Hikvision Digital Technology and Zhejiang Dahua Technology will be unable to get technology or services from US firms. According to the US government, it took the action because these companies aid “implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs and other members of Muslim minority groups.” Although, it’s worth mentioning that the US government has been largely silent on the intensifying crackdown in Xinjiang.
Today’s top deal is a well rounded Dell laptop with strong performance for everyday tasks and a low-end GPU for running last-gen games like the 2013 Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite. Dell’s Vostro 15 5000 offers well-rounded performance for everyday tasks such as web browsing and word processing. It also comes equipped with an Nvidia GeForce MX130 graphics processor that’s suitable for playing games with a couple of years on them. Right now this system can be picked up with a significant discount from Dell, which drops its price from $1,355.71 to $739.00 with promo code BIZLT739.
With the RX 5700 and 5700 XT in-market since June, it was inevitable that AMD would refresh the lower end of its product family. Big Navi may not drop until 2020, but there’s plenty of room at the lower end of the market for a major refresh cycle. Since 2016, AMD’s Polaris family of cards has anchored this market, but the company has maintained its competitive standing by slashing prices and competing on raw performance as opposed to power efficiency. This has made cards like the RX 570 absolutely killer deals compared with Nvidia’s GTX 1050 and even the GTX 1650.
Amazon’s Fire tablets advance at a crawl. Each generation makes such minor changes it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. However, the is unusually substantial. Not only does it come with a faster processor and better battery life, it finally makes the jump to USB Type-C for charging and data. Amazon uses Google’s Android operating system on its Fire tablets, but you won’t find any mention of that on the product page. These devices run a heavily skinned version of Android that Amazon calls Fire OS, but they do not have Google apps and services installed. Instead, buyers of Fire devices are plugged into all of Amazon’s content channels like Prime Video and the Amazon Appstore.
The Internet of Things revolution is finally here, and it’s now possible for anyone with a curious mind and a modest budget to build everything from home automation systems to fully-functional robots in the comfort of their own home. But, if you want to take advantage of everything that this DIY electronics revolution has to offer, you need the right instructions. The will teach you everything you need to know about one of the leading home electronics platforms on the market, and the best part is that you only have to pay what you want. With 15 eBooks focusing on everything from the absolute basics to the more advanced elements of this exciting electronics platform, this bundle is a must-have for any Arduino enthusiast.
Your ride might seem almost capable of driving itself at times, whether it’s slowing down in response to traffic or parallel parking. Just when you think we’re living in the magical future of autonomous cars, a Tesla gets in a crash trying to drive across a parking lot. AAA recently ran a series of tests with cars that use rudimentary autonomous driving to avoid hitting other cars and pedestrians, and it says . Just a few years ago, you had to spend big to get vehicles with radar modules and cameras that could identify potential obstacles in your path.
Ever since the disclosure of side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, the semiconductor industry in general and Intel in particular have been grappling with the security problems this class of attacks creates. While these ongoing attacks have mostly been discussed in terms of what they mean for Intel, the security implications of side-channel attacks go beyond any single company. Thus far, many of the countermeasures deployed against Spectre and its ill-spawned children have been specific to the attacks they were intended to counter. Security researchers vastly prefer to lock down systems against entire classes of attack rather than having to fix each individual problem as it occurs, and a team of researchers at Intel STORM (Strategic Offensive Research and Mitigation) have proposed a means of doing so using a new type of memory they call Speculative Access Protected Memory.
Last week, Microsoft and AMD announced that a new AMD APU would power the 15-inch Surface Laptop intended for the consumer market (there’s also an Ice Lake variant built for corporations). It’s a unique chip, with 11 Vega graphics units in a 15W TDP, when all of AMD’s other parts in this segment have either 10 GPU units in 15W or 11 units in 35W. The “Surface Edition” APU is a modest tweak to AMD’s existing product stack — but it’s also apparently just the beginning of what looks like a sustained hardware collaboration effort between the two companies.
Last week, we brought you a quick bit of information on Intel’s upcoming Cascade Lake refresh for the High-End DeskTop (HEDT) and Xeon W markets. These chips, as we previously discussed, are a major improvement on their predecessors in price. Performance gains are a bit more workload-dependent, but there are some significant gains there as well, at least in specific markets. Intel is also making price adjustments to its high-end desktop chips via changes to the “KF” product series. Let’s talk about the new CPUs first. Xeon W and Cascade Lake There are a number of improvements and features that are common to both the Xeon W and X-Series / Cascade Lake platforms:
