Spectre and Meltdown are two of the most serious security flaws we’ve seen in years. While it’s not clear how often we’ll see either exploited in the wild, they’re dangerous because they target the fundamental function of the affected chips themselves rather than relying on any software flaw. Meltdown can be addressed by a patch, while Spectre’s attack methods are still being analyzed. Building CPUs that aren’t vulnerable to these attacks under any circumstances may not be possible, and mitigating some threat vectors may require fundamentally new design approaches. Over at ZDNet, Jason Perlow these latest failures are proof the x86 standard itself needs to be destroyed, root and branch.
All the matter you’ve ever interacted with has mass, and as such it obeys the standard laws of motion as enunciated by Newton centuries ago. If you push something, it moves in the direction you push it. However, matter with negative mass would do the opposite. It sounds like wacky science fiction, but it’s close to becoming reality. Researchers at the University of Rochester have worked out a way to using, what else, lasers. Is there anything can’t do? Physicists have been chasing real-world examples of negative mass for years, but it’s all been theoretical until recently. The math predicted negative mass was possible, though.
At CES 2018, Nvidia announced a new line of gaming monitors designed to round up and deliver every single high-end feature you can buy in a monitor or television today. The company’s new BFGD monitors — the acronym stands for Big Format Game Display, obviously, and not the kind of profanity-fueled phrase that might lead one to label such a display a “BFGD Screen” — are serious business, as the saying goes. All of the partner displays from Acer, Asus, and HP are 65-inch panels that support up to 120Hz refresh rates and HDR with up to 1,000 nits of brightness.
Western Digital’s My Cloud network attached storage (NAS) devices claim to offer an easy, all-in-one solution for storing your data at home. However, they might also be providing an easy, all-in-one solution for hackers to . Western Digital was told about the vulnerabilities last year but has yet to patch many devices. A Western Digital My Cloud NAS starts at less than $200 for a few terabytes with a single disk. It goes up to about $700 in the largest 16TB dual-drive system. Then there are the My Cloud EX series devices, which are more like a traditional NAS with user-accessible drive bays.
The last few years have been good to as it grew to surpass Apple, becoming the world’s second largest smartphone vendor behind Samsung. It’s done it all without any substantial presence in the US market. The upcoming (and unannounced) to sell the new Mate 10 series was supposed to be the start of Huawei’s push into North America. But the deal has reportedly fallen apart at the last minute after AT&T got cold feet, and some sources point to a political cause. The Mate 10 Pro was announced late last year and went on sale in Asia and Europe.
Intel has refreshed its Alpine Ridge line of Thunderbolt 3 controllers with a new pair of products, codenamed Titan Ridge. The JHL7540, 7440, and 7340 are drop-in replacements for the JHL6x40 family and offer a single low-bandwidth Thunderbolt 3 port, a single high-bandwidth TB3 port, or a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports. There are that set the new controllers apart from Intel’s older variants. First, they nudge support for Thunderbolt 3’s DisplayPort standard from version 1.2 to version 1.4. No mention is made of whether the new controllers support Adaptive Sync, the optional feature that enables FreeSync and was added in DP1.2a.
One of the major questions associated with the Spectre and Meltdown CPU bugs we’ve been tracking is how much performance loss might be incurred from Microsoft’s fix. Early tests suggested the drop-off could be high — while artificial benchmarks specifically designed to hammer the issue could show drop-offs of up to 50 percent, Intel predicted a much more manageable 5-7 percent. This is a complex question that’s going to be tightly tied to memory access patterns, but consumer storage synthetic tests may have significantly overstated the scope of the problem. That’s the conclusion of , which ran its own storage benchmarks on an Intel Optane 9800P 480GB drive (nothing about Optane’s architecture, which is significantly different from NAND flash, would create a difference in tests designed to measure the relative impact of the Meltdown patch).
In search of an affordable desktop that has plenty of room for upgrades? Take a look at the XPS 8930 tower PC from Dell. With a sleek modern design, a six-core CPU, space for three 3.5-inch drives, and support for up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, this PC is up for almost anything. • (List price: $649.99 — Coupon code: TENOFF) So, what kind of specs are we looking at here? This tower ships with an eighth generation six-core 2.8GHz Intel Core i5-8400 processor, integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630, 8GB of DDR4 RAM (2666Mhz), a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive, Bluetooth 4.2, and 802.11b/g/n/ac WiFi support.
Trade shows are always an excuse for electronics manufacturers to show off wacky hypothetical products that may take many years to show up in consumer products. A favorite of display manufacturers has long been the flexible OLED panel. LG is one of the world’s leading makers of OLED TVs, and it’s got a TV on display at CES 2018 that’s more than just flexible — . LG’s concept rollable TV has all the bells and whistles with an 65-inch diagonal bezel-free form factor and 8K resolution. That’s a huge screen that might actually benefit from 8K resolution compared to 4K.
