Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic through 2017 and 2018 with multiple vendors throwing their hats into the proverbial ring, targeting everything from mobile devices to specialized accelerators for applications. Now, MediaTek is hopping on the bandwagon itself, with its new P60 SoC design. MediaTek typically uses an “X” for its highest-end flagship SoCs and a “P” for its midrange SoCs. (X stands for eXtreme, “P” for Premium). The new P60 supplants the previous P30 at the top of the Premium stack and the dramatic model number jump is, in this case, completely justified. First, on the CPU side, the new P60 combines four Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores.
Tesla says it will sell its 200,000th electric vehicle sometime this year. That means the US residents on the Model 3 waiting that stretches almost to a half-million have to wonder if they’ll get the full $7,500 tax credit, a partial credit, or none at all. Tesla could tinker with deliveries to make more buyers eligible for the credit. Buyers will be helped most if Tesla can crank up to its claimed production of 5,000 units per week. What Tesla Said In a filing Friday with the federal Securites Exchange Commission, Tesla gave notice that will sell it’s 200,000th car this year:
PDFs were never really meant to be edited. The format was originally based on the PostScript printer language and optimized for high-fidelity display across a variety of devices, hence the full name: Portable Document Format. It’s since been extended for filling in forms, electronic signatures, and other features, but it still isn’t ideal for editing. Most PDFs start life in some other native format (like Word or one of the Adobe Creative Cloud formats) and are converted to PDF for distribution. So typically your best option is to get the source file and work with it. Sometimes, though, that isn’t possible — either because it isn’t available to you, or because you don’t have the right application to edit the source file.
When the Xbox One first launched in 2013, Microsoft’s gaming division was in turmoil. But under the stewardship of Phil Spencer, the Xbox team has effectively corrected course. And with the Xbox One X, Microsoft is really pushing the console market forward. • Specs-wise, the Xbox One X is no joke. It features an 8-core 2.3GHz AMD CPU, 12GB of GDDR5 memory (326GBps), a GPU capable of 6 teraflops, a 1TB hard drive, a 4K Blu-ray drive, and support for 2160p and HDR output. Upcoming games like Far Cry 5 and Sea of Thieves will obviously offer visual improvements on the new hardware, but a huge library of as well.
Samsung has announced and demoed its upcoming Galaxy S9 for Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona. While it’s not a huge leap forward from the Galaxy S8, it’s an evolutionary improvement that should satisfy anyone in the Androidverse looking for an upgrade this year. that the Galaxy S9 is nearly indistinguishable from the Galaxy S8, save for a slightly-harder-to-see iris scanner and a slightly larger and heavier phone. By “slightly” however, we mean slightly. The new S9 and S9+ are a whopping 0.3 ounces and 0.6 ounces heavier than the S8 and S8+, respectively. That’s not a difference you’re likely to feel.
Intel’s Coffee Lake may have launched last fall, but the company hasn’t introduced many SKUs to-date. The high-end is reasonably well-covered between the , i7-8700, Core i5-8600K, and Core i5-8400 . Below the Core i5-8400, there’s a rather substantial performance gulf. The Core i3-8350K is an overpriced quad-core at $180, while the Core i5-8400 is a six-core chip for just $10 more. Higher clocks will give the Core i3-8350K an edge in lightly threaded code, but anything capable of scaling up to six cores is going to favor the Core i5. Below the Core i3-8350K there’s a $62 gap in Intel’s pricing and no Coffee Lake CPUs in the Celeron or Pentium product families.
For the past year, AMD has been busy rolling out multiple waves of Ryzen hardware. From high-end consumer desktops, to 16-core enthusiast and workstation designs, to its new APUs for the budget-conscious enthusiast, AMD has been firing on all cylinders for the first time in, well, a very long time. Now the company is pushing ahead with another set of parts, this time intended for the embedded market. AMD is announcing two new embedded families today: The Epyc 3000 series, an embedded solution that builds off its server family of chips and the Ryzen V1000, an embedded APU with a Vega 11 GPU inside it.
When Microsoft announced it was working on a new version of Windows on ARM, the news generated a fair amount of skepticism. Microsoft’s previous effort in this arena, Windows RT, was legendary for high rates of return, limited capabilities, and generally weak performance. Windows RT looked just like Windows, but had few of the features or capabilities users expected and the backlash was fierce. This time around, Microsoft declared it had learned from its own mistakes and written an emulation layer that would allow chips like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 to run software written for x86 processors. At first, this seemed like a win-win.
Jeff Bezos and a cabal of billionaires last month with the announcement that they’re conspiring to disrupt the healthcare industry. They are planning to offer a “not-for-profit” system that would initially be made available to employees of their respective companies, but with the potential to be rolled out to Americans en masse. It’s not the first time a group of über-wealthy, revolutionary-minded individuals have plotted to overthrow a tyrannical system. But references to America’s founding fathers aside, one outstanding question remains: How will these visionaries slay the merciless beast that the American healthcare system has become? One thing is almost assured: Given their respective companies and interests, a heavy dose of technology will likely figure into the mix.
