Month: March 2020

The Intel Core i9-10880H, which should be the direct successor to last year’s i9-9880H, hasn’t been announced yet, but benchmarks results are already creeping up. Hardware leaker @_rogame reportedly found the upcoming mobile chip in a 3DMark submission yesterday.

The i9-10880H (codename Comet Lake-H) is expected to arrive sporting eight cores and 16 threads like its predecessor. Besides the improved clock speeds, there isn’t any significant architectural changes with Comet Lake over the i9-10880H’s Coffee Lake. Therefore, we expect the i9-10880H to retain the same 16MB of L3 cache as the i9-9880H. Being a H-series part, the 14nm processor will likely operate within the 45W envelope.

According to the 3DMark entry, the i9-10880H could come with a base clock fixed at 2.3 GHz, which is the same base clock on the prior i9-9980H. The only thing that the i9-10880H has going for it is the higher boost clock. If the 3DMark’s report is accurate, the i9-10880H will flex a 5 GHz boost clock, which is 200 MHz higher than the i9-9980H but only by 4.2%.

With the previous generation, Intel offered consumers the i9-9980H and faster i9-9980HK. The latter operates with a 100 MHz and 200 MHz higher base and boost clocks, respectively. It’s plausible that Intel would release a i9-10880HK with slightly faster clocks.

So far, the i9-10980HK has appeared with a 3.1 base clock and 5.27 GHz boost clock in unconfirmed benchmarks. Given the huge gap between the i9-10980HK and i9-10880H’s specifications, there’s certainly room for a i9-10880HK to slide in between. 

The i9-10880H and i9-10980HK should be very popular choices for upcoming high-performance mobile workstations and gaming laptops. However, they’ll have to compete with AMD’s Ryzen 4000-series (codename Renoir) chips, such as the Ryzen 9 4900H and Ryzen 7 4800H.

A new iPad Pro was revealed last Wednesday. I’ve been using the 12.9in model non-stop since hours after. Here’s everything you need to know.

Update March 24: New details have been added describing extra trackpad benefits.

It’s the best iPad yet. Obviously.

From the front, this iPad Pro looks identical to the previous model, released in November 2018. This isn’t a bad thing – that newly redesigned machine was a great-looking upgrade with Face ID, no notch in the screen and gently curved corners on the display that perfectly matched the tablet’s shape. The display is the same as before, too.

Flip the iPad Pro over, though, and there’s one big difference. The single camera and flash unit has been replaced by the familiar square camera unit found on the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. Here, there are two cameras – wide and ultra-wide. But the right hand side of the square has a circular detail, though it’s not a camera. Where the two lenses gently protrude from the raised square, the other item sits flush. It’s a scanner.

LiDAR? Well, la-di-da.

We’ve seen time-of-flight cameras on other smartphones, though not yet an iPhone. These are designed to grab depth information in great detail, at high speed. Time-of-flight means it works by projecting light onto objects which is reflected back and, based on the time it takes, gives a near-instant depth map of the surroundings.

On the iPad, the scanner uses LiDAR, which stands for Light Direction And Ranging. The difference between this and other time-of-flight systems is that works indoors and out, and can reach further, up to 5 metres away.

This will make for great portrait mode effects, potentially, though that’s not its main purpose here. After all, as I’ve said before, the iPad is not ergonomically the best shape to suit photography, apart from having a dreamily big monitor on which to frame your shots.

LiDAR is mostly for Augmented Reality (AR) apps, and some of the ones in the works look great. Shapr3D is great for creating 2D and then 3D floor plans. IKEA Place also helps you plan your home environment, with the IKEA app recognizing your couch or coffee table and making suggestions accordingly, plonking a realistic version of a new light or cushion or whatever into the room. Then there’s Complete Anatomy, which measures a patient’s movements in three dimensions and compares the real-life subject to a database of 3D muscle animations. The popular Apple Arcade game, Hot Lava, is also getting a LiDAR makeover, allowing the familiar characters to appear in an even more familiar situation: your living room.

Right now, the first manifestation of the AR capabilities LiDAR permits is an updated version of the Measure app. This was already a useful way of measuring stuff without a tape and now, thanks to LiDAR and Apple’s neural engine, it’s more detailed. It can automatically spot when the virtual line you’re drawing reaches the end of the table, say and as you walk closer to the object, the line suddenly adds increments to become a more effective tape measure substitute.

Trackpad capabilities – and not just for iPad Pro

The new iPad Pro works with a mouse or trackpad. In fact, so does the current iPad Pro, and any other iPad, as soon as it’s been updated to iPadOS 13.4, available today.

I’ve been using mine with an Apple Magic Trackpad and it’s sublimely easy to set up – just pair it using the Bluetooth menu in settings and you’re done. Then, you have an extra way to interact with the tablet. Touch the trackpad and a cursor appears on the iPad Pro screen just as it would if you were using the trackpad with a Mac laptop.

Actually, that’s not quite true because here the cursor is especially versatile and changes shape according to context. So, when you first tap the trackpad, a grey circle appears, mimicking the shape of your fingertip, of course. Place it in the text of a document, for instance, and it becomes a blue vertical cursor. Tap twice to highlight a word, or press more firmly to move the cursor within a word. It’s easy to highlight text, by highlighting a word and then placing the cursor, now circular again, on top one of the end bars and dragging.

As you change context, the cursor shape as other tricks up its sleeve, including when it touches the dock, it highlights and wiggles the app icons. When you’re in the Calendar app, it transforms again so that if you’re moving between Day and Week and Month indicators, it matches the shape of the item it’s on. The coloring here is subtle and is easier to see in Day mode than Night mode, I’d say.

Tapping the trackpad even wakes the iPad Pro screen. There are also shortcuts which are useful and convenient, meaning you can raise the dock or swipe between apps easily.

So, is it a real alternative to using a laptop? Well, it’ll take a lot for me to want to move on from my Mac, which remains the ultimate in intuitive and appealing interfaces, but it’s certainly getting very close.

The Magic Keyboard isn’t here yet, though the updated Smart Keyboard Folio works well, with a pleasing amount of travel to the keys and a comfortable typing experience.

Update: The more I use the trackpad, the more I’m convinced that the Apple execution of the mouse and cursor on the iPad Pro is not just as good as it gets, it’s something so well-crafted that it offers a new way of doing things and Apple and other manufacturers should consider the lessons learned here for regular laptop interfaces. Sure, there are some elements like text highlighting which take some getting used to. For instance, when you pick the cursor up by resting your thumb on the trackpad and dragging it to a new position with your finger, you might have thought that this would highlight text. No, that’s done by double-clicking to highlight a word and then clicking on the grabber bar at the end of the word and dragging it. So, there is definitely a learning curve to get on top of this new system. But on the whole, it’s sublime.

And there are the iPad specials, such as the three-finger swipe up to go home and the three-finger swipe to switch apps. Then there are the curiosities: as you swipe down on the trackpad you reach the bottom of the cursor movement on the iPad Pro display. But just keep going: as your finger moves further south something else happens and the dock springs into view. It really takes a bit of time to accustom yourself to this, but it works well.

Performance and battery life

Both are excellent. The new chip, called A12Z Bionic, is the most powerful chip Apple has ever made – yes, more powerful even than the A13 Bionic found in the Apple iPhone 11 series. Well, the gorgeous display means there’s a lot more pixels to move around here, for a start. Apple says the architecture of this chip is different from anything found on a PC. It’s designed so even advanced apps like Photoshop CC will work perfectly, assisted by the trackpad capabilities and, of course, the Apple Pencil. In practice, the iPad Pro works fast and smoothly. And at length, as usual. Like previous iPad Pros, this one has 10 hours battery life claimed, and it seems to live up to this.

iPad Pro: do you need one?

Some will be disappointed that there’s not another radical redesign as there was last time. Others will have wanted 5G connectivity, as had been rumored. In practice, the reason the new iPad Pro is so desirable is that the upgrades have been the ones that matter: improved performance, an extra camera and the cool new features that LiDAR promises to deliver. And then there’s that very cool upgrade which is coming to other iPad models – trackpad support. This is a significant change which will add powerful functionality to all compatible iPads and will make a lot of people make the move to iPadOS instead of another laptop.

This is a slick, effective and highly desirable tablet – easily the most attractive and accomplished one out there – that is suddenly even more powerful. And the keyboard, Pencil and trackpad capabilities now qualify it as a solid laptop alternative.

Adobe has issued a patch for a critical flaw that can be exploited to delete files from Windows computers running the Creative Cloud client.

Dubbed CVE-2020-3808, the vulnerability is a classic time-of-check-to-time-of-use flaw where, by exploiting a race condition, a miscreant could potentially trick the system into deleting work-in-progress files and other data-destroying shenanigans.

“Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary File Deletion in the context of the current user,” Adobe said in its bulletin today.

If there is one saving grace here, it’s that Adobe told The Register a scumbag would have to convince a mark to download and open a poisoned document to trigger exploitation.

In other words, so long as you don’t go around opening random Creative Cloud projects, this shouldn’t be a massive problem, but, let’s face it, everyone gets sloppy occasionally.

If you do slip up, a hacker can delete files you’ve spent a long and hard time working on. The fact Adobe is releasing this now, rather than on a Patch Tuesday, suggests the Silicon Valley biz gets the potential ramifications. Adobe, for its part, described the vulnerability as being a “critical” risk, though only assigned the update a ‘2’ priority rating (a ‘1’ being the highest priority and generally reserved for arbitrary code execution bugs that are under active or imminent attack).

Still, it’s never a good idea to put off patching. Users and admins should update Creative Cloud for Windows to version 5.1 or later to make sure their machines are guarded from the flaw.

No other operating systems are believed to be at risk.

While you’re at it, it would also be a good idea to make sure machines are mitigated against the under-exploit code execution bug described yesterday by Microsoft. The attack, which has not yet been patched, relies on a font-parsing bug to gain malicious code execution. Microsoft has not yet said when it plans to fix that flaw. The next scheduled round of security fixes is due April 14. 

Five years ago, it seemed unlikely AMD would leapfrog rival Intel to take a process lead, but that is precisely what happened—not with its original Zen architecture, but with the shift to 7 nanometers with the introduction of Zen 2 last year. How long AMD can hold onto the lead remains to be seen, but looking ahead, there is reason to be optimistic—excited, even—about AMD’s eventual shift to 5nm.

There’s a bit of a rabbit hole to traverse, but for anyone interested in the manufacturing side of the equation, WikiChips (via Hardware.Info) posted an interesting article on where TSMC is headed. TSMC, by the way, is AMD’s primary manufacturing partner. And soon (if not already), AMD is reportedly set to become TSMC’s largest customer of 7nm silicon.

As it’s relevant here, the extremely short version of how this all works is AMD designs its processors and TSMC (mainly) builds them. There was a time when AMD made its own silicon, as Intel does (mostly), but those days are firmly in the rear view mirror.

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With regards to 5nm manufacturing, TSMC is already at the beginning stages and will ramp up early production later this year. These are basically prototype designs. Which brings us to the bit that’s interesting.

“At IEDM, TSMC reported 1.84x density improvement over the company’s own N7 node. Our estimates land at 1.87x which is reasonably close. A ramp in April will mark exactly two years since TSMC ramped its 7-nanometer node,” WikiChips says.

An 84-87 percent increase in transistor density compared to current 7nm designs is significant. Transistor density has traditionally been an indicator of overall performance, and while it’s more complicated than that—this is where the rabbit hole runs deep, if you care to dig around the web—AMD could potentially see major gains in both compute performance and power efficiency with Zen 4.

I say Zen 4 because AMD already confirmed it will be the company’s first CPU architecture to make the leap to 5nm, whereas Zen 3 (due out later this year) will be built on a refined 7nm node.

What does this mean for Intel? Sustained competition, in short. During a recent webcast, Intel CFO George Davis acknowledged AMD’s lead in nodes, saying Intel had to “accelerate the overlap” between its 10nm and 7nm nodes, and then 7nm and 5nm, in order to “regain processor leadership.” Or put more plainly, Intel does not anticipate taking the lead again until its 7nm and/or 5nm parts arrive.

As for Intel’s 10nm manufacturing, we’ve seen some parts on the mobile side (Ice Lake), but are still waiting for 10nm desktop CPUs. However, Davis also said 10nm “isn’t going to be as strong a node as people would expect from 14nm or what they’ll see in 7nm,” in terms of yields.

Bottom line is this—AMD is great shape, both now and for at least the next couple of years, it seems.

The updates to Microsoft’s Surface hardware continue. Following on from the Surface Book 3 details revealed last week, the latest leak around the new Surface Go show it too will be picking up a refresh.

Update 24 March: The leaked specs for the upcoming Surface Go 2 have caught the attention of many, and the consensus is that the Surface Go is going into a head to head contest with the iPad Air.

Jesus Diaz for Tom’s Guide: “A new iPad vs Surface war is brewing… A new leaked spec list shows that the upcoming machine is ready to crush Apple’s slim tablet with some Windows 10-powered gut upgrades.”

Adrian Diaconescu for Phone Arena: “…as long as Microsoft gets the price right, this versatile new mid-ranger should prove to be a mighty adversary for Apple’s iPad Air (2019).”

Daniel Piper for Creative Bloq: “…A leaked spec list for the update to the Surface Go, Microsoft’s cheapest tablet, suggests we might have serious rival to the iPad Air on our hands.”

It’s going to be an interesting competition when the two meet. Which is the better approach, to upscale the iPhone to a tablet, or to downscale Windows 10 from a desktop? It’s going to be fun to find out.

The details on the presumptively named Surface Go 2 highlight two main configurations. The first comes with Intel’s m3-8100Y CPI, the second with a Pentium 4425Y. Both have been spotted on web-based benchmarking site 3DMark.

The Pentium chip represents a small step up from the current Pentium 4415Y in the Surface Go. The Intel Core m3 is a chip that has been available for nearly two years. Backed up with 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD in the former and a 256 GB SSD in the latter, the Surface Go 2 is not going to win any awards for high-end performance.

But it doesn’t have to meet that challenge, there are other Surface devices that can offer that (the Surface Pro being the obvious example in tablet form). The Surface Go (and presumably the Surface Go 2) address the needs of two groups.

The first is consumers looking for a lightweight and relatively inexpensive tablet running Windows. It might to have the power to run the last 3D action game, but for social media work, browsing, and creating documents and spreadsheets, the Surface Go was a solid choice. The Surface Go 2 is going to be an almost direct replacement, albeit with comparatively less power than the competition.

The second area is in enterprise. Here the Surface Go has proven to be useful in many areas, not least as a point of sale terminal, front-line hospitality needs, on the floor of warehouses for activities, and more. The Go does not need to be cutting edge, it just needs to have just enough power and be solid enough to be relied on.

This is where I think the Surface Go 2 will make a difference. Not in the specs (part of me wonders if the slight tweak in the CPU is down to the availability of parts over the next two years), but in increasing the uptime.

Although the Surface Go is one of the most robust Surface devices (the original design had increased protection against falls, a bonded screen, and waterproofing) any broken unit is going to go out of service and have an impact on workflow and costs.

If the Surface Go 2 can bring the modular repair design from the Surface Laptop 3 and Surface Pro X to this front-line enterprise device, allowing IT departments the ability to quickly switch out significant parts and reduce the downtime. 

There’s no indication yet that this will happen, but if it does then the Surface Go 2 becomes an attractive upgrade for enterprise.