If you’re in the market for an affordable big-screen laptop, take a look at the 17.3-inch Inspiron 17 5000 series from Dell. With a Skylake CPU and a full HD display, this laptop is a steal when you use today’s coupon code. (List price: $945.85 — Coupon code: SAVE330MORE) On the inside, this model sports a sixth generation dual-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U processor, a discrete AMD Radeon R5 M335 graphics card (with 4GB of memory), 8GB of DDR3L RAM (1600MHz), a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive, Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi support. As for the 17.3-inch display, it benefits from LED backlighting, an anti-glare coating, and a full HD resolution of 1920×1080.
Earlier this week we discussed Sony’s for the PS4 Pro. The idea behind Boost Mode is that some of the PS4 Pro’s clock speed improvements can be harnessed to make older titles faster, even if those titles don’t receive updates to take full advantage of the improved hardware under the hood. Now, we have some idea what kind of benefits Boost Mode can deliver — and frankly, they’re pretty impressive. has tested a number of titles and seen encouraging results, though the figures are a bit split. Boost Mode allows the PS4 Pro to use its higher core clocks — 30% higher on the CPU, 14% higher on the GPU — but which titles benefit is interesting.
Western Digital and Toshiba have jointly announced that they have begun initial production on 64-layer 3D NAND in 512Gb capacities. This new pilot production at the company’s fab in Yokkaichi, Japan, is expected to ramp up to commercial volumes within the first half of 2017, with hardware arriving on store shelves not too long thereafter. “The launch of the industry’s first 512Gb 64-layer 3D NAND chip is another important stride forward in the advancement of our 3D NAND technology, doubling the density from when we introduced the world’s first 64-layer architecture in July 2016,” said Dr. Siva Sivaram, executive vice president, memory technology, Western Digital.
The 2018 Ford Expedition was unveiled today as the ultimate rolling infotainment center. The full-size SUV offers on-board telematics, Wi-Fi hotspots for 10, streaming video redirected from your home cable system, and dual middle-row screens each with their DVD player. Based on the architecture of the Ford F-150 pickup truck, the new Expedition uses a body-on-frame construction (heavy but rugged) and an aluminum body that saves up to 300 pounds, Ford says. There will be regular and extended-length (Expedition Max) versions measuring about 17 and 19 feet in length, so measure your garage before shopping.
For decades, one of the most troubling difficulties of treating patients with certain types of neurological disorders has been the complete inability of doctors to communicate with these patients, in any fashion. Modern technology has helped millions of physically or mentally disabled persons express themselves or better communicate with caretakers, but locked-in syndrome has been extremely difficult to treat. Now researchers from Europe have used a brain-computer interface to communicate with four completely locked-in ALS patients. Locked-in syndrome means that patients can’t communicate, even though they’re still “in there.” One patient in this report had been locked in since 2014.
AMD’s new Ryzen , and Intel is reportedly prepping changes to its own product lineup to counter any AMD threat. It’s a smart move from Intel if true — the rumors we’ve heard about Ryzen suggest the chip will be a potent competitor, and Intel won’t want to be caught flat-footed. Back in 2003, Chipzilla was forced to rush the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition to market to counter the surprise threat of the Athlon 64, which still wound up winning most games and a number of consumer benchmarks. Intel will want to avoid any repeat of that situation, or the drubbing it would take if AMD’s Ryzen debuts at price points that would challenge Intel’s existing product stack.
Yesterday, news broke that Steam was affected by a cross-site scripting vulnerability that could compromise Steam account safety or be used to steal user data. The problem has since been corrected, and it’s now safe to view profiles and activity feeds (kudos to Valve for patching this specific issue rapidly). A cross-site script vulnerability is a vulnerability that allows attacks to be injected into websites viewed by other users. There are a variety of methods and subtypes, but the basic idea is the same — an attacker uses a web application to inject malicious data into a request for “clean” information.
Last month, Intel launched its 7th generation refresh of the Core processor family, codenamed Kaby Lake. While the new desktop processor was a moderate improvement over its immediate predecessor, the major news of the launch was that Intel would, for the first time, make Hyper-Threading available on a . As we detailed at the time, this was an unprecedented move for the company — ever since it launched its Core i3/i5/i7 branding, Hyper-Threading has been reserved to those processor divisions, while Pentium and Celeron chips lacked it. has put one of these new budget Pentiums to the test.
For the past 12 months, Nvidia has slow-walked its GP100 GPU — that’s Pascal, but equipped with HBM2 and a full suite of technological features meant to appeal to the HPC and scientific communities — into its high-end markets. Initially, the card was only available with a passive cooler and was intended solely for use in high-end servers. The first Quadro card to use a Pascal GPU were the P5000 and P6000, but these were derived from GP102 and combined a Pascal-class graphics processor with GDDR5X, the memory technology Nvidia used to good effect with its GeForce 10xx GPU family.
