Intel didn’t just detail its new Ice Lake architecture at Computex this week, it also announced an upcoming CPU — the Core i9-9900KS. This chip is an eight-core spin on the 9900K, but with an even higher all-core base clock of 5GHz under load. That’s a 300MHz boost over the standard Core i9-9900K, with a 400MHz higher base-clock. We’ve charted how the CPU will drop into Intel’s overall stack, with comparative parts from AMD listed. We’ve also included the Ryzen 7 2700X, for reference. Prices marked with an ~ are taken from retail pricing as of 5/28. The asterisk near the 9900K’s TDP is a reference to the fact that this chip has been demonstrated to only be a 95W processor if confined to a 3.6GHz operating clock.
Memorial Day has come and gone, but just like the grilled leftovers in our refrigerators, the deals linger on. Today you can take advantage of a number of deals from Dell on gaming hardware and displays. Also, if you need some extra storage space to save all the photos you took with the family yesterday, Amazon has several deals on high-capacity storage solutions that can hold millions of photos safe for the years to come. Dell’s high-end S2716DG display features a native resolution of 2560×1440 and a fast 144Hz refresh rate.
Mini now has a plug-in hybrid version in its largest model, the Countryman. Like every Mini, the plug-in is a blast to drive, with iconic big round instrument clusters and toggle switches. But, oh, the compromises: The little battery adds only 12 miles of electric-only range. The gas-plus-electric range is about 270 miles. The suspension is stiff, the wheelbase is short, and the ride can be choppy. The car weighs pocket change less than two tons. Our test car cost more than $45,000 and the cheapest plug-in hybrid Countrymen is in the upper thirties. The base prices don’t include much in the way of driver safety assists and no amount of money will get you blind spot detection.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been studying the red planet since 2006, making amazing discoveries the whole time. As a testament to how much there still is to learn about Mars, the MRO just spotted signs of a huge volume of water ice on the planet. Scientists believe this may be . You may be thinking that has ice caps, and it does. That’s on the surface, but the newly discovered reservoir of water is deep beneath the northern ice cap (about 1.2 miles down), uncovered thanks to the radar scanning instruments aboard the NASA spacecraft. Researchers believe this is the third-largest cache of water ice on the red planet.
On Earth, we deal with simple matters like liquids, gasses, and solids. Our Sun, on the other hand, is a giant ball of unstable fluid known as plasma. With plasma in short supply on Earth, we struggle to study how it works, but new observations of the Sun’s atmosphere have revealed some of the secrets behind plasma’s instability. This could lead to the development of a more efficient and safer source of nuclear power. Dr. Eoin Carley, postdoctoral research at Trinity College Dublin and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS), explains this new discovery: We worked closely with scientists at the Paris Observatory and performed observations of the Sun with a large radio telescope located in Nançay in central France.
Fires aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are a very bad thing unless it’s part of an experiment that helps unravel the most fundamental mysteries in the natural world. Scientists haven’t been sure why some fires produce soot and others don’t. The unique nature of microgravity on the ISS allowed the crew to to shed light on the problem. It’s well understood that you can create soot-free flames by altering the composition of your fuel. Oxygen is, of course, necessary for combustion to take place. Air on Earth also contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is inert, but by removing nitrogen from the air and adding it to the fuel, you can create a soot-free flame.
AMD has finally unveiled its Ryzen 3000 family, with specific core counts and boost frequencies. The company’s 7nm products have been the subject of a great deal of speculation over the past six months, as enthusiasts have eagerly awaited the company’s next generation of products. AMD’s new product stack ranges from a 12-core option at the top for $499, to a six-core processor for $199. All CPUs now support PCIe 4.0 and TDPs have improved dramatically. AMD’s previous 12-core CPU, the Threadripper 2920X, is rated for 180W TDP. The new 12-core CPU is rated for 105W TDP.
While most mobile users are looking for the lightest laptop they can get away with, users with heavy compute requirements for applications including scientific work, modeling, media processing, and AI are keen to get as much performance as they can on the road. With this week’s announcement at Computex, Nvidia is giving them access to its Turing architecture GPUs and RTX ray tracing and AI cores. Nvidia’s New Quadro GPUs By the Numbers There are six new Quadro mobile GPUs. Three are based on Turing with RTX: the 5000, 4000, and 3000. Three are Turing but without the RTX cores — The T2000 and T1000.
We met Google Duplex at the I/O conference in 2018 when Google showed off a suspiciously realistic AI that could call and make appointments for you. The service has now rolled out to users of Google Assistant in most US states, but you may not be getting the full AI experience. According to a new report, many of those calls are being . The New York Times tested Duplex by asking it to place reservations and then staking out the restaurants to find out how it went. If you’re in a supported region, you can have Google book you a table by telling the Assistant on your phone where you want to go and when.
