When AMD announced its upcoming , most of the focus was on its upper-end SKUs amid speculation of how well they’d compete against the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti. Less discussed was how the more modest Vega 56 might compare with Nvidia’s GTX 1070. Now, early leaks from Tweaktown suggest this match-up might actually be the more potent of the two. A quick refresher: Vega 56 has an 1156MHz base clock, 1471MHz boost, 64 ROPS, 224 texture units, 3584 shader cores, and 8GB of HBM2 on a 2048-bit memory bus. The TDP is also fairly low, at 210W, at least in comparison to the other Vega 64 parts (the air-cooled Vega 64 has a TDP of 295W, while the water-cooled card has a 345W TDP).
The Galaxy S8 has a reputation for being a rather fragile phone, but the newly announced should offer a bit more durability. That’s the whole point of Samsung’s Active line of phones, which have been available for all of its recent Galaxy S devices. However, this year has to make more changes than usual to turn the Galaxy S8 into a rugged device worthy of the Active name. That means it looks a bit… clunky. Arguably the most notable design feature of the Galaxy S8 didn’t make it into the Active variant — there’s no Infinity Display. That’s Samsung’s name for the curved edge-to-edge AMOLED panel on its current flagship phone.
At Computex 2017, Intel announced that its new Core i9 family would add significantly more cores than the old Core i7 HEDT CPU families had ever offered, while pushing back the window on availability for these high core-count CPUs into the fall. Now we know when these updated chips will hit market, and Intel has pulled the dates in from even the October launches we expected earlier this summer. The 12-core Intel Core i9-7920X will be available starting on August 28, while the Core i9-7940X, 7960X, and 7980XE will all go on sale September 25. Pricing, frequencies, and core counts are shown below:
China’s FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) is the largest radio telescope in the world, dwarfing the 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. FAST was a heavy lift for China, with a final price tag of $180 million, and some technical issues that are still being worked out. Now, there are reports that China is having trouble finding someone to oversee the telescope and its operation, and may turn to foreigners to help fill the gap. The problem is that having a giant radio telescope and having someone available to run the giant radio telescope aren’t the same thing.
Apple, historically, has absolutely hated leaks. Much of this was driven by Steve Jobs, who famously fired four people he caught leaking a memo to the press not long after rejoining the company. With his passing, Apple information pops up a bit more often than it did before. This latest leak isn’t provided by a company scofflaw, however — it’s an inadvertent unveil by Apple itself. We covered rumors that a new Apple TV was in the works several weeks ago, but this new information sheds more light on what the platform will be able to do. This time, the freshly leaked code comes courtesy of Apple’s HomePod speaker.
It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the universe from our little corner of it, but scientists realized decades back that the universe is expanding. This naturally led to questions about the distribution and movement of matter out there. There are cosmological models to predict these things, but are they right? A five-year project known as the (DES) sought to find out, and now the results are in. So far, the scientific models hold up — the universe looks pretty much like we expected it to look. While we cannot directly observe dark matter and dark energy, we know these are the driving force behind the universe’s expansion.
For most of us, game resolutions increase fairly slowly, one periodic monitor purchase at a time. Ten years ago, 1080p was the new hotness; I was personally using a 22-inch Acer with a 1680×1050 resolution, and wondering what all the fuss was about with 1080p compared with 720p. Now, 4K displays are becoming more common, with additional support for features like HDR, upcoming support for FreeSync, and even a whisper of a promise OLED technology might finally go mainstream in such panels (though to date, no OLED panel we’re aware of has qualified for the Rec. 2020 standard). In short, it’s not just game resolutions that are improving.
One of the strangest things about Windows 10 S, Microsoft’s Chromebook competitor and locked-down educational OS play, is that Microsoft chose to debut it with a $1,000 Surface Laptop, as opposed to the $150-$300 space where Chromebooks typically compete. Granted, the Surface Laptop ships with a free offer to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro through the end of 2017, after which it’ll cost $50. But that device was still an odd way to showcase a restricted OS, given its price point. Today, that situation is finally being rectified, with the release of new Lenovo laptops like the N23 and N24.
For years, Wacom was virtually the only name in town if you were a digital artist who wanted a drawing surface to use with Photoshop or similar applications. Last year, Microsoft’s Surface Studio made an explicit play for the artist market, with its Surface Studio and that machine’s integrated 28-inch display. Now, Dell is jumping into the mix with the Dell Canvas, a 27-inch drawing surface that it previously showed off at CES this year. The (27 KV2718D) includes a pen, a magnetic pen holder, replacement nibs, and a peripheral clearly inspired by the Surface Dial, which Dell calls the totem (no uppercase).
