If you’re looking for a feature-rich display for your office, Dell’s UltraSharp U2720Q may be your perfect option. This monitor has a 4K resolution and excellent color accuracy that makes it well-suited for professional work projects. Best of all, it’s available now with hundreds knocked off the retail price.
Working on a 4K monitor has some major advantages, including fitting more on-screen at any given time. This display from Dell utilizes a 27-inch 4K panel that also supports 1.07 billion colors, making it well-suited for image editing. Right now you can get one from Dell marked down from $719.99 to $485.99 with promo code STAND4SMALL.
The Core i9-9900K is one of Intel’s most powerful processors with eight CPU cores that can hit speeds as high as 5GHz. The processor is also unlocked, giving you the ability to overclock it in an attempt to extract extra performance from the chip. Currently, you can get it from Newegg along with a free game marked down from $449.99 to just $369.99 with promo code GAMERDAYS49.
Amazon built the Echo Studio to be an exceedingly high-end smart speaker. It has a total of five speakers built-in to provide clear high notes as well as powerful bass. It also comes bundled with a Philips Hue bulb, which can be controlled with Alexa. Right now, this bundle is on sale from Amazon marked down from $229.98 to just $169.99, which makes it the same price as the Echo Studio by itself.
Dell upgraded this laptop with Intel’s new 10th generation Core i7-10510U processor that has four CPU cores clocked at 1.6GHz. The system also comes with a fast NVMe SSD storage device, a 1080p display, and an AMD Radeon 610 graphics processor for running low-end games. You can get it now from Dell marked down from $1,212.86 to just $659.00.
Samsung designed its Galaxy Tab S6 Lite tablets with an octa-core ARM processor and a high quality 2,000×1,200 resolution display. This model also ships with 64GB of storage and a Samsung S-Pen for hand taking notes on screen. Right now you can get it from Amazon marked down from $349.99 to $279.99.
As its name suggests, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K is capable of streaming 4K content to your smart TV from a wide range of sources. It also comes with a remote that features Alexa, which is able to hear and obey voice commands. Right now select customers can get it marked down from $49.99 to $24.99 with promo code 4KFIRETV.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
Samsung has announced the production of 16Gb LPDDR5 memory modules on its 10nm-class “1z” foundry node. These chips will be the first LPDDR5 modules built using extreme ultraviolet lithography, which both Samsung and TSMC are in the process of deploying. Samsung, however, made the decision to integrate EUV directly with its first-generation 7nm node, while TSMC decided to tackle that process in two steps. So far, TSMC seems to have made the better bet — though getting EUV LPDDR5 out the door should help Samsung fill foundry lines.
The RAM is built at the second production line in Pyeongtaek, Korea. According to Samsung, Pyeongtaek, Line 2 is the largest semiconductor production line ever built. If TSMC is a pure-play foundry with no hardware that it builds for its own uses, and Intel is a dedicated IDM that builds very little equipment that it doesn’t sell itself, Samsung is a hybrid. It manufactures its own chips and RAM with its fabs, but it also engages with customers and acts as a client foundry.
Samsung’s Line 2 foundry.
Line 2 itself is intended to build DRAM, V-NAND, and “foundry” solutions — no word on what those might be. Samsung has historically built its own Exynos CPU cores, but the company closed its Austin development center and has ended development on its own mobile core. The M-family never competed all that effectively against other solutions, and the gap between it and its competitors has been growing in recent years.
As for overall EUV manufacturing, at its technical summit last week, TSMC claimed to hold roughly half the world’s installed EUV machines and to have shipped 60 percent of its total wafers. That’s not a huge surprise; with Intel having pushed back its 7nm node and associated EUV injection point, only two companies — Samsung and TSMC — are going to be running much in the way of EUV volume. Intel likely has some testing and evaluation hardware, but it’s going to account for a minority of total tool shipments.
According to Samsung, the new DRAM is about 1.16x faster than the 12Gb LPDDR5 devices it built previously and supports 6.4GB/s memory transfers. The new DRAM devices are 30 percent thinner than previously, which will allow for thinner products in some cases, and the capacity bump allows for a smaller number of total chips, but there’s no word on power or efficiency improvements. Presumably whatever the company gained as a result of EUV (if anything) was absorbed by higher clocks.
There’s going to be a disconnect between the way companies talk about EUV and the actual impact the new lithography technology will have on shipping products. The improvements from EUV on power and performance are small to nil, at least in direct terms. There are some density savings in some applications and yields should improve due to the (theoretically) improved quality of the underlying lithography, but nothing that’s going to upend the industry from a consumer perspective. EUV is a technology that we’ve developed for decades and absolutely require to continue to move lithography forward, but it’s more important for the other advances it enables in other areas of manufacturing than for direct improvements to performance or power.
If there is a buzzier tech buzzword than blockchaining, we haven’t heard it. As the backbone process that creates and fuels Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it’s already proven to be a technology with wide sweeping implications.
But as a philosophy centered on the decentralization, transparency and almost democratization of information, it could ultimately change the world fundamentally. Even now, experts are applying blockchaining technology to the music industry (with eye-opening results), and exploring whether blockchaining might be the ultimate answer to safe and secure digital voting.
In blockchaining, the data you gather isn’t just saved on your computer — it’s saved across an entire network of computers. Everyone has access to the same information, has a record of the data and can’t change it, making it more secure since it’s open to everyone and can’t be hidden.
Across 13 lectures covering over 56 hours of content, the course package breaks down the entire blockchaining process, explaining how it all works and how it’s being applied today. It’s pretty technical stuff, yet for anyone from developers and architects to UI designers, testers, and administrators, this is in-depth hands-on experience that provides a solid foundation for evaluating what blockchaining can do and learning lower level details so learners can use the technology on their own.
The collection also takes a close look at blockchaining’s most well-known application so far, cryptocurrencies. Courses here explain how cryptocurrencies and smart contracts are built, the fundamentals you need to know for investing in cryptos or Bitcoin, and even how to use JavaScript to create your own cryptocurrency.
It may not be simple to wrap your head around all the practical implications of blockchaining…but what knowledge worth having ever came easy?
Right now, you can get access to this entire package of wall-to-wall blockchaining training at hundreds off the retail price. Regularly this package including almost $1,600 worth of instruction is available now for only $39.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
SpaceX had hoped to launch a pair of Falcon 9 rockets on Sunday, but weather early in the day threatened to scuttle the entire event. However, the skies cleared just in time for SpaceX to make history late in the day. The launch of the SAOCOM 1B satellite was SpaceX’s 100th and its first-ever polar orbit insertion from Florida. In fact, it was the first by anyone in decades.
Early on Sunday (August 30th), SpaceX had to scrap its planned launch of several dozen Starlink satellites. Things were looking grim until just minutes before the scheduled SAOCOM launch, but SpaceX was able to squeak by. So, SpaceX’s 100th launch carried the SAOCOM 1B satellite and a pair of smaller rideshare payload satellites into space. The company’s first launch was in March 2006, and it exploded shortly after liftoff.
SAOCOM 1B is an Earth observation satellite designed to collect radar imagery for first responders, environmental scientists, and more. SpaceX launched both SAOCOM 1A and 1B, delivering the satellites to polar orbits. A polar orbit is one in which a spacecraft orbits passing over the poles rather than nearer to the equator. This is ideal for Earth observatories like SAOCOM because a polar orbit allows the spacecraft to see the entire surface of the planet over time as it rotates.
Falcon 9 first stage lands at Landing Zone 1 to complete this booster’s fourth flight pic.twitter.com/tUtAcKmIFn
Getting into a polar orbit requires more energy than equatorial, and launch operators rarely attempt that from Florida. SAOCOM 1B was initially supposed to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but the mission was delayed and ended up at Cape Canaveral. And that’s the second reason this launch was historic. The last time a mission launched from Florida into a polar orbit was 1969 when the ESSA-9 weather satellite rode into space aboard a Delta E1 rocket.
Heading for the souther polar corridor from Florida includes the possibility of flying over land shortly after launch, which is something you want to avoid. In this launch, SpaceX performed a “dog-leg” maneuver to curve around the southern part of Florida. The first stage detached before it encountered any more land, but the second stage did fly over Cuba briefly. The 45th Space Wing noted there was no danger given the second stage’s altitude, and the mission reached the desired orbit without incident. The first stage even landed safely at LZ1 in Florida. All around, a successful 100th flight.
Android’s application ecosystem has proven to be versatile and developer-friendly after a bit of a slow start. You are free to develop an app for Android and publish it to the Play Store with Google’s restrictions, or you can distribute it yourself outside the Play Store. This has led to a plethora of really cool Android apps, some of which aren’t available on iOS or other platforms. Even in this age of giant phones, you might occasionally want to use those apps on a bigger screen, like the one connected to your Windows PC. Fortunately, with a little leg work, you can run Android apps on a PC. There are a few different ways to go about it, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Android Studio
One popular way to get Android apps running on a PC is to go through the Android emulator released by Google as part of the official Android Studio. The emulator can be used to create virtual devices running any version of Android you want with different resolutions and hardware configurations. The first downside of this process is the somewhat complicated setup process.
You’ll need to grab the installer from Google’s site and run through the setup process to download the platforms you want — probably whatever the most recent version of Android happens to be at the time (7.1 at the time of publishing). Google has some pre-configured emulation options available in the menu for Nexus/Pixel devices, but you can set the parameters manually, too. Once you’ve booted your virtual device, you’ll need to get apps installed, but the emulator is the bone stock open source version of Android — no Google apps included.
Since there’s no Play Store, you need to do some file management. Take the APK you want to install (be it Google’s app package or something else) and drop the file into the tools folder in your SDK directory. Then use the command prompt while your AVD is running to enter (in that directory) adb install filename.apk. The app should be added to the app list of your virtual device.
The big upside here is that the emulator is unmodified Android right from the source. The way apps render in the emulator will be the same as they render on devices, and almost everything should run. It’s great for testing app builds before loading them onto test devices. The biggest problem is that the emulator is sluggish enough that you won’t want to make a habit of running apps in it. Games are really out of the question as well.
BlueStacks
If you’re looking to get multiple apps and games up and running on your computer with the minimum of effort, BlueStacks is your friend. BlueStacks presents itself as just a way to get apps working, but it actually runs a full (heavily modified) version of Android behind the scenes. Not only that, but it has the Play Store built-in, so you have instant access to all of your purchased content. It actually adds an entry to your Google Play device list, masquerading as an Android device.
The BlueStacks client will load up in a desktop window with different app categories like games, social, and so on. Clicking on an app or searching does something unexpected — it brings up the full Play Store client as rendered on tablets. You can actually navigate around in this interface just as you would on a real Android device, which makes it clear there’s a lot more to BlueStacks than the “App Player” front end. The main screen in BlueStacks with the app categories is just a custom home screen, so replacing it makes BlueStacks feel almost like a regular Android device.
Having full Play Store access means you won’t be messing around with sideloading apps, and BlueStacks manages to run apps pretty well (and better if you have a CPU that supports hardware virtualization). Most games are playable, but keep in mind you’ll have trouble operating many of them with a mouse. If your PC has a touch screen, you can still use apps and games that rely on more than one touch input. BlueStacks can essentially make a Windows tablet PC into a part-time Android tablet.
The only real issue with BlueStacks is that it’s not running a standard Android build. All the alterations the company made to get apps working on a PC can cause issues — some apps fail to run or crash unexpectedly. This customized environment is also of little value as a development tool because there’s no guarantee things will render the same on BlueStacks as they might on a real Android device without all the back-end modifications. It’s also a freemium service with a $2 pro subscription, or you can install a few sponsored apps.
Samsung Link to Windows
Samsung’s latest high-end phones have enhanced support for Microsoft’s Your Phone Windows 10 client, offering access to your messages, notifications, photos, and yes, apps. The apps aren’t technically running on the PC — they’re mirrored from your phone. However, this system is very fleshed out and officially supported. Everything else we’ve talked about is a bit of a hack or not for regular users, but you can be up and running with Link to Windows in a few minutes.
You will need a Samsung phone that works with the latest Your Phone features. As of this writing, that’s just the Note20 family. The feature will expand to more Samsung phones in the coming months, though.
First, make sure you’ve got the Your Phone app on your Windows PC. Next, launch the Link to Windows client on your Samsung phone — it should be accessible under Advanced Features and from the quick settings. You’ll have to scan a QR code on your computer with the phone and sign into your Microsoft account. And that’s it.
Your app list appears in the Your Phone app, and you can launch any of them. Your phone doesn’t need to be plugged in, but Wi-Fi is recommended. Currently, you can only run a single app, but multi-app support is coming in late 2020.
So What’s the Best Way?
If you need to test something with the intention of putting it on other Android devices, the emulator is still the best way. This is best suited to developers as the configuration and management of apps is complicated. It’s slow, but you’ll be able to see how things will work on the real deal. If you’re interested in getting more than a handful of apps running on your PC so you can actually use and enjoy them, BlueStacks App Player is the best solution for most people. It’s easy, has Play Store access, and works on multitouch Windows devices.
If you happen to have a Samsung phone compatible with Microsoft’s latest Your Phone features, that’s by far the easiest way to get Android apps on your PC. These phones are expensive, so it’s not worth buying one just for this single use case. However, if you’re due for an upgrade and running Android apps on a PC is on your list of priorities, this might influence your decision.
Microsoft has published some details on its upcoming DirectX 12_2 feature level and which companies will be supporting these new capabilities in upcoming GPUs. If you’re wondering how DirectX 12_2 and DirectX 12 Ultimate relate to each other, they’re the same thing — if a GPU supports DX12U, it’ll also support 12_2 and the reverse appears to also be true.
A DirectX feature level is Microsoft’s way of defining what specific capabilities a GPU is capable of. A GPU that can only handle DX 12_0 or 12_1, for example, would support the low-latency command structures and performance-improving aspects of DX12 as an API, but would offer no support for Microsoft’s DXR (DirectX ray tracing) technology. Microsoft typically only puts a major brand push behind whole-integer updates (DirectX 10, 11, 12), but the company is making a bit of an exception with DirectX 12_2, which is where the “DirectX 12 Ultimate” concept comes from.
Whose Getting 12_2 Support?
Here’s the official phrasing, straight from Microsoft (and likely AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm):
Feature level 12_2 is supported on NVIDIA GeForce RTX and NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs.
AMD’s upcoming RDNA 2 architecture based GPUs will include full feature level 12_2 support.
Intel’s roadmap includes discrete GPUs that will empower developers to take full advantage of Feature Level 12_2.
Microsoft is collaborating with Qualcomm to bring the benefits of DirectX feature level 12_2 to Snapdragon platforms.
Intel’s statement is a bit different than any of the others. It’s the only company to imply that support is a bit conditional, with the qualifier that the company’s roadmap includes “discrete” GPUs that take advantage of 12_2. The fly in the ointment here is probably Tiger Lake. If a GPU doesn’t support ray tracing, it can’t claim to support DirectX 12_2, which is why Nvidia also makes it clear that support is limited to the company’s RTX family of cards.
It’s going to be a long time before we see ray tracing in an integrated GPU core sitting alongside a CPU inside the same socket. At the moment, the performance penalty for using the feature would nuke any benefit of enabling it. Obviously AMD and Intel will eventually add it, but ray tracing is going to remain a somewhat high-end capability for now. Even if AMD, Nvidia, and Intel deploy DXR against each other throughout the full range of their product stacks this generation, it won’t likely be useful on lower-end cards for at least a generation after this one, and possibly longer than that.
The feature I’m most curious about besides ray tracing in DX12_2 is variable rate shading, which I’m still hoping will see wider adoption in future GPUs and titles. The interesting thing about VRS is the way it could boost performance of lower-end GPUs, allowing smaller and lighter systems to pack a decent amount of graphics performance (at least, in supported titles). We’ve talked about variable rate shading here — if you need a quick refresher, it’s a method of rendering that allows a GPU to reserve limited horsepower for the most detailed areas of the scene intended to draw the eye rather than lavishing the same amount of detail (and power) on every section of a frame.
Should you expect these features to immediately revolutionize gaming? No. As much as I’d love to say otherwise, we’re looking at an ongoing slow burn for features like ray tracing, though the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft will obviously boost the feature. It’s taken time for Nvidia to push a moderate number of titles into market and it’ll take a few years more for that number to grow to the point that you could realistically call it a library. Last gen showed that ray tracing was possible, this generation will showcase it in ways that drive adoption directly, and next generation will probably see broader top-to-bottom availability, even on lower-end hardware.
As the launch date for Ampere approaches, the details on the next-generation platform are firming up and the rumors are theoretically becoming more accurate. The first is a given, with details on Ampere arriving this week from Nvidia, while the second is… look, details on Ampere arrive this week from Nvidia, and I’m tired of talking about salt. Stop eating so much salt. Take your rumors with something healthy, like a giant spoonful of high fructose corn syrup.
If these new, tasty, tasty rumors are accurate, the highest-end Ampere will cram up to 24GB of RAM onboard, while the RTX 3090 and RTX 3070 will feature 10GB and 8GB, respectively. This seems… kind of low, honestly — but it may be that looks are deceiving here.
On the one hand, this would be the third generation in a row in which Nvidia mostly held the line on 8GB cards. While the RTX 3080 would move up to 10GB, the RTX 3070 at 8GB means that effectively, 8GB is going to be the RAM target for high-end hardware. No one is going to build games that require 10-24GB of VRAM if only a few percent of the market can play them.
On the other hand, however, we’re finally seeing games tapping the power of SSDs this generation rather than continuing to rely on ever-large amounts of console RAM, and it’s already been stated that PCs are expected to share in that bounty. Thus, we should be able to expect the same kinds of graphics updates courtesy of leveraging NVMe and solid-state storage on the platform side of things, without the need for larger memory pools.
Here’s what VideoCardz expects as far as speeds and feeds:
Assume, for the sake of argument, that Ampere and Turing offer identical performance-per-clock (they probably don’t, but it makes the math easier). The RTX 3090 is 1.21x wider than the old RTX 2080 Ti, while the new RTX 3080 is the size of the RTX 2080 Ti. Clocks would be modestly higher than what we saw in the last generation, with the RTX 3090 picking up about 1.1x clock compared with the RTX 2080 Ti. The RTX 3080 would be almost 1.5x wider than the old RTX 2080 (non-Super), making it a significant upgrade in the same price bracket and an unknown value until we know more about how Nvidia will price these new cards.
Looking at these cards, the big question is price. If Nvidia holds the RTX 3080 steady at the RTX 2080 Super’s pricing, it would be a tremendous upgrade. If it raises prices — and if I’m being honest, the sharp increase in VRAM and core counts could both point in that direction — then Ampere might offer performance benefits in-line with its architectural improvements but not dramatically exceeding them, in terms of performance-per-dollar. It’s a little harder to predict Nvidia’s pricing here than in the past because the company raised prices last time it launched, then cut them under pressure from AMD once its own RDNA architecture debuted. Nvidia’s overall share of the graphics market has increased to 80 percent of the discrete space, which probably hasn’t signaled to the company that it ought to consider a price cut.
Then again, if Nvidia comes in at markedly higher prices than AMD plans to target, we’ll see costs come down when AMD launches its own RDNA2 GPUs, an event my crystal ball tells me…to expect. This year, if things are still on schedule, but we don’t know more than that.
It’s been a bit of an odd year in gaming. With a number of Xbox Series X and PlayStation launch titles pushed back, there’s been less to talk about, and for every game that’s formally announced a delay, there are more still floating in limbo. One reason it’s hard to predict how Nvidia will price ray tracing with Ampere is that there hasn’t been as much of a high-profile push around next-generation gaming titles.
Assuming VideoCardz specs are accurate, a lot of how the 3090 – 3070 compare against their predecessors is going to come down to price.
If you remember even basic elementary school geography, you know that Earth’s surface is mostly water. Scientists have disagreed about how all that water ended up on Earth. Was it all here when the planet formed, or was Earth a dry husk until asteroids and comets delivered water? A new analysis of meteorites published in the journalSciencepoints to a watery Earth from the start.
It’s not unthinkable that a planet could form with water or ice, but Earth formed in a much warmer part of the solar system than chilly planets like Jupiter or the uncountable icy Kuiper Belt objects. The current thinking is that no water ice would have remained frozen amidst the swirling cloud that became Earth, and that would mean Earth accumulated water later on to become the wet world it is today. To know for sure, we’d have to look at the material that formed Earth. That’s not possible 4.5 billion years after the fact, but we have something almost as good.
The latest clues to Earth’s beginnings came from a rare type of space rock known as an “enstatite chondrite meteorite,” also known as E-type chondrites. Only about two percent of meteorites are in this class, which have chemical compositions that date them to the earliest era of the solar system. Since these objects are essentially the same material that coalesced to form the planets, the amount of hydrogen locked up inside is of great interest to scientists.
Researchers from the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques in France took a close look at 13 of these uncommon meteorites. They measured the amount of hydrogen present in the rocks because hydrogen plus oxygen gets you water, and we know Earth had plenty of oxygen at the beginning.
The team found less hydrogen in the enstatite chondrites than in other types of space rock, but it was still more than enough. According to the study, the hydrogen present in enstatite chondrites could account for several times more water than is currently in Earth’s oceans. That supports the idea Earth formed with most or all of the water we have today. Backing up this claim, the team analyzed the ratios of hydrogen isotopes in the meteorites, finding they are very similar to the Earth’s interior.
This conclusion is appealing because it’s much simpler than the alternative — that Earth picked up oceans of water from other objects. We probably did accumulate some water from the occasional comet, but this study offers strong evidence Earth has always been a watery planet.
Step up your game with a Dell Alienware desktop. Today you get one of these systems with an RTX 2060 graphics card and a Core i5 processor on sale with over $200 knocked off the retail price.
Dell’s new Alienware Aurora gaming desktops utilize a new case design with RGB LED lighting and high-end hardware, which is capable of running the latest games with next-gen effects including ray tracing. You can get it now from Dell marked down from $1,149.99 to $912.99 with promo code IGD17.
Asus’s VivoBook features a fast Intel Core i7 processor that’s great for running multiple programs at the same time. It also has a low-end Nvidia MX250 graphics chip that can some games with low graphics setting. For a limited time you can get one of these systems from Newegg marked down from $799.99 to $719.99 with promo code W6SCHYR56.
In addition to its large 256GB capacity, this microSDXC card is also fairly fast and able to transfer data at up to 100MB/s. Currently, you can get it from Amazon marked down from $49.99 to $29.99.
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At first glance, it’s easy to overlook a simple pair of in-ear headphones like the EarFun True Wireless BT 5 Earbuds. They don’t look cheap, but they don’t have the otherworldly aura of some of the high-end earbud brands that come with triple-figure price tags either.
However, a pair of 2020 awards from CES Innovation and iF Design should be enough to get your attention. Then, there have been reviews like this one from What HiFi that explicitly calls out their outlying status.
“Until now, we’ve never awarded five stars to a set of true wireless headphones at this budget level,” the site states. “The EarFun Air buds could just be the ideal proposition.”
With credentials like those, the Air should quickly join your list of earbud options, especially at their budget price of just $54.99.
Any headphones are primarily judged by their sound — and the Air clears that first hurdle easily. Backed by PEEK + PU high fidelity custom-built composite cellulose drivers, the Air delivers deep, powerful gut-thumping bass with dynamic treble that faithfully reproduces the music you love.
The Air also score high marks for their innovative design elements as well. While most earbuds include a mic in each bud, each Air bud comes loaded with a pair. Thanks to that quad mic system, these buds employ noise cancellation hat effectively block about 80 percent of background noise. Meanwhile, the mic help elevate your voice above the usual distant tinny quality of many buds, making it three times clearer for your listener on the other end.
And when you look at its list of features, the Air doesn’t read like budget earbuds either. The buds are controlled through a highly responsive single-button touchpad, which lets users change tracks, adjust volume to take calls easily. They also employ in-ear detection to work seamlessly as a pair or with a single bud operating solo. When you take the Air out of your ear, the music automatically pauses, then resumes when you put it back in.
As for battery life, the Air is also putting up strong numbers, producing up to 35 hours of play time with the accompanying carrying case. The earbuds can charge up with a USB-C plugin or even via Qi wireless charging.
Regularly $59, the EarFun Air True Wireless BT 5 Earbuds are available now at a few bucks off the retail price, down to just $54.99 while this offer lasts.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
It’s been a minute since I’ve referenced his work, but CPU software architect and low-level feature researcher Agner Fog is still publishing periodic updates to his CPU manuals comparing the various AMD and Intel architectures. A recent update of his sheds light on a feature of AMD’s Zen 2 chip that’s gone previously unremarked.
Disclosure: I’ve worked with Agner Fog in the past on collecting data for his ongoing project, though not for several years.
Agner runs each platform through a laundry list of micro-targeted benchmarks, in order to suss out details of how they operate. The officially published instruction latency charts from AMD and Intel aren’t always accurate, and Agner has found undisclosed bugs in x86 CPUs before, including issues with how Piledriver executes AVX2 code and problems in the original Atom’s FPU pipeline.
For the most part, the low-level details will be familiar to anyone who has studied the evolution of the Zen and Zen 2 architectures. Maximum measured fetch throughput per thread is still 16-bytes, even though theoretically the CPU can support up to a 32-byte aligned fetch per clock cycle. The CPU is limited to a steady decode rate of 4 instructions per clock cycle, but it can burst up to six instructions in a single cycle if half of the instructions generate two micro-ops (uops) each. This doesn’t happen very often.
The theoretical size of the uop cache is 4096 uops, but the effective single-thread size, according to Agner, is about 2500 uops. With two threads, the effective size is nearly 2x larger. Loops that fit into the cache can execute at 5 instructions/clock cycle, with 6 again possible under certain circumstances. Low-level testing also confirmed some specific advances from Zen to Zen 2 — Zen can perform either two reads or a read and a write in the same cycle, while Zen 2 can perform two reads and a write, for example. The chart below shows how floating-point instructions are handled in different execution pipes depending on the task:
One previously undisclosed difference AMD introduced with Zen 2 is the ability to mirror memory operands. In some cases, this can significantly reduce the number of clock cycles to perform operations, from 15 down to 2. There are multiple preconditions for the mirroring to happen successfully: The instructions have to use general-purpose registers, the memory operands must have the same address, the operand size must be either 32 or 64 bits, and you may perform a 32-bit read after a 64-bit write to the same address, “but not vice versa.” A full list of required conditions is on Page 221, with discussion continuing on to page 222.
Since the feature is undocumented, it’s not clear if anyone has used it for anything practical in shipping code. Agner notes that it’s more useful in 32-bit mode, “where function parameters are normally transferred on the stack.” Agner notes that the CPU can also take a performance hit if the CPU makes certain incorrect assumptions. This may explain why the capability is undocumented — AMD might not have wanted to encourage developers to adopt a feature if it was likely to cause performance problems if used improperly. This last, to be clear, is supposition on my part.
Of Zen as a whole, Fog writes: “The conclusion for the Zen microarchitecture is that this is a quite efficient design with big caches, a big µop cache, and large execution units with a high throughput and low latencies.” I recommend both this manual and his other resources on x86 programming if you’re interested in the topic — you can learn a lot about the subtleties of how x86 CPUs perform this way, including the corner cases where what the instruction manual says should happen and what actually happens wind up being two different things.
Doom Eternal launched earlier this year, continuing the story of the Doom Slayer as he battles the forces of hell. Developer id talked up the improvements in the new Tech 7 engine prior to launch, noting Doom Eternal was even capable of 1,000 frames per second rendering. At the time, that was a theoretical ceiling. After all, no computer in the world could push 1,000 frames of Doom! Well, it’s not theoretical anymore thanks to some liquid nitrogen.
Bethesda, which published Doom Eternal with id, has posted a video on its Polish YouTube page showing a massively overclocked gaming rig breaking the 1,000 FPS threshold. The hardware is high-end, but it’s not an outlandish setup with multiple video cards and server-style components. Here are the specs of Bethesda’s test system.
CPU: Intel Core i7 9700K @ 6.6GHz
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus XI APEX
GPU: ASUS RTX2080Ti Strix @ 2.4GHz
RAM: HyperX Predator 4000MHz CL19 2x8GB
Drive: Samsung 512GB M.2 NVMe Evo Plus
Power: Be Quiet 1200W Straight Power
The most expensive component on the list is the video card, which runs around $1,200. The CPU is a comparative bargain at $300, and the motherboard is $100 more. As expensive as that all is, I’m sure there are a few people watching the video on a gaming rig with even more powerful components.
Even with all that hardware, Doom Eternal won’t hit 1,000fps without some help. That help comes in the form of a nifty custom heatsink filled with liquid nitrogen. At -321 degrees Fahrenheit (-196 degrees Celsius) liquid nitrogen is widely used as a coolant and preservative. And yes, it has occasionally been used for extreme overclocking as seen in the video. It’s not a viable long-term cooling solution as the nitrogen evaporates very rapidly, but it allowed Bethesda to push the CPU to 6.6GHz (from 4.9GHz) and the GPU to 2.4GHz (from 1.66GHz).
The Polish team of x-kom led by Piotr “Lipton” Szymanski and Marcin “Ryba” Rywak successfully hit 1,000fps after several applications of coolant and progressive clock speed increases. So, id wasn’t lying about the capabilities of the engine. That said, the scene that finally reached 1,000 frames wasn’t the most impressive — a dark room with some glowing panels on the floor. Still, hundreds of frames per second with intense action is excellent. If only there were monitors that could handle it. Maybe we’ll have those in time for id Tech 8.
Amazon has wormed its way into most areas of consumer electronics, such as smart speakers, security cameras, routers, and even wearables. The new Halo fitness band focuses on health, which is not a unique approach. However, it does stand apart from the crowd in one notable way: there’s no screen. The Halo relies on an app to access data on body fat, emotional state, and more. But it’s not free to use.
The Halo hardware will run you $99.99, but it’s only available by invitation right now with a limited time price of $64.99. The smart part of the Halo hides under the band, and Amazon plans to sell a lot of different styles. Because there’s no screen, it’ll just look like you’re wearing a slightly chunky bracelet. The device pairs with your phone over Bluetooth to log your stats, and that’s where you have to go to see them.
The device comes with six months of premium service, without which your fitness band only does the basics like heart rate, step tracking, and sleep logging. After the trial is over, Halo costs $3.99 per month, but it does have a lot of features. Whether they’re useful is another story.
Amazon is hanging its hat on Halo’s body composition and voice analysis to hook people. When you set up Halo, you use the app to take pictures of yourself in your underwear, which yes, sounds like a very bad idea. However, Amazon promises that your Halo data is kept separate from your Amazon account, and it deletes all photos within 12 hours. Halo uses the images to estimate your body fat with cloud AI. Amazon says body fat is a better measure of health than other metrics, and its AI scans are better at estimating it than other methods. Amazon says it has data to back that up, but we’ll have to take its word for now.
The voice analysis feature seems somewhat less scientific. The microphone on Halo doesn’t do voice commands, but instead senses the tone of your voice and connects that to your emotional state throughout the day. Amazon categorizes the recordings (which stay on your phone) into states like happy, bored, worried, and confused. However, it notes that its AI is modeled on US English, so those with other accents might find the data less reliable. Whether it’s reliable for anyone seems up in the air, though.
Halo might be a tough sell. The features seem too general for fitness enthusiasts, and casual users won’t be keen to spend $4 per month on a wearable that tells you when you’re feeling worried.
Ever since Microsoft and Sony announced their upcoming consoles, there have been questions about the design of both platforms. Historically, new console generations have always come with a large increase in available RAM. That’s not happening with the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, both of which will offer ~2x the RAM of their baseline predecessors, as opposed to the 16x increase from the Xbox 360/PS3 to the Xbox One/PS4. We’ve seen a few tech demos from companies like Unreal that hinted at the power of these platforms, but little to directly confirm it — until now.
A new, 6-minute+ gameplay trailer for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart showcases how the high-speed storage of the PlayStation 5 can be used for fast world loads beyond anything we’ve seen from a current-generation title. Rift Apart appears to rely on twin portal mechanics, much like Portal and Portal 2, but amped to the nth degree. First, here’s the video, with some screenshots to follow:
The geometry processing/level transitions when Ratchet portal travels are very interesting. I’m going to show some image sequences as examples.
When Ratchet ‘hooks’ a portal, at first, it’s just a gold polygonal effect. Nothing all that crazy here.
The new area of the level effectively loads in while you’re still solidly in the first. This happens in fractions of a second.
Barely a blink later, and you’re already moving through the portal. This isn’t necessarily much different from what Valve gave us, though the execution is next-level in terms of visual fidelity and the transitions are quick and smooth.
The other warping mechanic is purple, and it seems to be used to move you much greater distances. In this case, you start off by falling towards a rift:
Plunging through it, you spend a second or two in this weird, disjointed fractional space. It’s clearly a disguised level load, but when you fall out of this space — which takes virtually no time at all — you’re in an entirely different area of the level. I left the YouTube player in the screenshot so you could see the geometry around Ratchet before and after he falls through the purple void area. It’s distinctly different.
This is the PlayStation 5’s SSD horsepower in action, but as we’ve previously discussed, these performance levels are going to be achievable on the PC as well. Sony clearly wasn’t kidding when it talked about being able to offset RAM usage with fast-enough SSD storage. There’s also evidence of true ray tracing throughout the demo, with Clank appearing to reflect the environment realistically at several points.
The visual effects in the game and its overall presentation, at least in this demo, are top-notch. The frame rate noticeably sags in some places — the game isn’t even hitting locked-solid 30fps — but there’s time to work those kinks out before the launch.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is expected within the PlayStation 5 launch window, but an exact launch date hasn’t been disclosed. That’s led to concern in some corners about whether there are going to be enough next-gen games ready at launch to justify launching new platforms at all. Personally, I’m more in favor of launching than not, but Sony and Microsoft continue to play things close to the chest on a lot of data points we ought to know by now, including launch lineup and pricing. Even if both companies wanted to cancel the launch, neither likely wants to be the one to announce it first. If Microsoft were to skip its launch and Sony refuse to do the same, the Xbox manufacturer would be handing its competitor an uncontested holiday season. Nobody is going to be anxious to make that mistake.
The Soviet-era Lun-class ekranoplan, aka MD-160, looks a bit like a unit you might see in the Command & Conquer series. It’s also currently beached in the Caspian Sea and taking on water. It’s possible the ekranoplan may be hammered apart by Mother Nature, joining the original “Caspian Sea Monster” on the sea bottom, before it can be repaired and put on display as a museum showpiece as originally intended.
The MD-160 is designed to fly by taking advantage of the increased lift and decreased drag an aircraft’s wings experience when close to the earth during flight. Where an ordinary plane only experiences ground effect during takeoff and landing, an ekranoplan exploits ground effect during the entire time the vehicle is operating. This is also why the MD-160 and other types of ekranoplan also operate over water. Flying a few dozen feet over the ground is unlikely to work in any area more crowded than the Great Plains and would wreak havoc on telephone poles and electrical wiring even then. Ekranoplans are unique vehicles, distinct from aircraft, helicopters, hoverfoils, and hovercraft.
Invented in Russia, the Lun (from the Russian word for “harrier”) originally mounted eight NK-87 turbofans, with six missile tubes mounted on its back and a wingspan of 144 feet (44 meters). It served in the Russian Navy from the late 1980s through the late 1990s before being laid up Kaspiysk until 2020. On July 31, the vehicle was taken under tow for a move to Derbent, Dagestan, where it was to be displayed in a future park. Instead, the Lun arrived on site before it was discover there was nowhere to put the aircraft in the first place (at least, according to this translation provided via Twitter):
Экраноплан "Лунь", недавно отбуксированный в Дербент,в будущий филиал парка "Патриот".
Оказалось, никакого парка там пока не построено. "Лунь" лежит на брюхе возле дикого пляжа и превращается в ключевую местную достопримечательность. pic.twitter.com/MQkeKmkpdN
The craft has reportedly been sitting in the surf ever since, with locals making multiple unsuccessful attempts to haul it into shore by hand.
The original discovery of Russia’s secret ekranoplan tests in 1967 caused a stir in the United States. The predecessor to the Lun was labeled “KM” on the wings, for Korabl-maket, meaning “Prototype Ship.” When spy satellite photos showed a monstrous aircraft with tiny wings taxiing for testing, the CIA nicknamed the ekranoplan “Kaspian Monster” without being aware of what it actually was. One of the reasons the CIA was working on unmanned drone surveillance technology via Project Aquiline as early as the mid-1960s was the supposed threat posed by craft like the KM or the Lun that later followed it.
HI Sutton has assembled the image above and his website, Covert Shores, has additional details on how the craft fit into the Soviet military doctrine. The original goal of Soviet ekranoplan research was to create a vessel that could move almost as quickly as an airplane while remaining below the minimal altitude for radar detection. While smaller ekranoplans have been built for a variety of uses, there are no monsters the size of the original KM or MD-160 in service, and ekranoplans are not major components of any planned transportation networks worldwide that I’m aware of. The craft is a rather fascinating example of a ‘what if’ that might have proved popular if technology had developed along different lines than it did.
Today you can take advantage of an enormous discount to save $1,675 on your purchase of an immensely powerful gaming laptop from Dell. In addition to being a highly capable gaming machine, this system also has plenty of fast storage space with two SSDs in RAID 0 and a secondary 1TB SSHD.
Dell’s Area-51M R1 is an immensely powerful gaming laptop that comes loaded with an Intel Core i9 processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics chip. The system should be more than capable of running today’s newest gaming titles with high graphics settings. The system also has an abundance of storage with two 256GB RAID 0 SSDs in RAID 0 and a secondary 1TB SSHD. Currently you can get this system with an enormous discount from Dell by using promo code SAVE10 to drop the price from $3,249.99 to just $1,574.99.
Lenovo’s Flex 5 laptop is a highly versatile system equipped with a fast six-core CPU and a capable iGPU. The system may not be up to running the latest games in high graphics detail, but it should be able to run most games with medium to low graphics setting. Lenovo also equipped the system with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1080p touchscreen display. Currently you can get one from Amazon for just $599.99.
Working on a 2K monitor has some major advantages, including fitting more on-screen at any given time. This display from Dell utilizes a 25-inch panel that can accurately reproduce 95 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, making it well-suited for image editing. Right now you can get one from Dell marked down from $469.99 to $319.49 with promo code STAND4SMALL.
If you’ve used a robot vacuum before, you may have found the need to empty its small dust bin a frequent nuisance. With the Roomba i7+, this becomes a significantly less bothersome chore, as the robot is able to empty its dust bin into one 30 times larger located in its charging base. Currently, you can get it from Amazon marked down from $999.99 to $699.00.
This compact mini-PC was designed by Intel with a Core i3-8109U processor that has two CPU cores. Though this system is exceedingly compact, it should be able to run a few games with low graphics settings thanks to the use of Intel’s Iris Plus Graphics 655. You will need to install RAM and a storage device before you will be able to use this system, though. Right now you can get one from Newegg marked down from $289.99 to $277.99 with promo code 8AUGAGSL62.
AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X processor is one of the fastest CPUs on the market today with a dozen cores clocked at 4.6GHz and 70MB of cache. For a limited time you can get this blazing fast processor marked down from $499.00 to $429.99 from Amazon.
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Working on a 4K monitor has some major advantages, including fitting more on-screen at any given time. This display from Dell utilizes a 27-inch 4K panel that also supports 1.07 billion colors, making it well-suited for image editing. Right now you can get one from Dell marked down from $719.99 to $485.99 with promo code STAND4SMALL.
