Month: September 2020

A sharp-eyed redditor found a listing in the new ROCm (Radeon open compute) firmware update that reveals some of the specs for the highly-anticipated RDNA2 Sienna Cichlid (Big Navi) and Navy Flounder (Navi 22 or 23) graphics cards. Things could change over the next month as AMD fine-tunes its gear, so take these specs with a grain of salt – even though the numbers come from an official firmware update, these specs aren’t confirmed.

The firmware update indicates Sienna Cichlid (Navi 21, i.e., Big Navi) will feature 80 CUs and a 256-bit memory bus. The CU count for this GPU is interesting, indicating all that we know on Big Navi could be legit, with most signs pointing to 80 CUs (or around 80 CUs) to be the spec for Big Navi. If this is true, not to mention if the GPU runs on TSMC’s latest 7nm process, we could see RTX 3080-levels of performance, but with much better efficiency.

The firmware specifications also list AMD’s Navy Flounder with 40 CUs and a 192-bit memory bus. This GPU appears to a direct replacement to the RX 5700 XT and/or RX 5700 on the new RDNA2 architecture. If each CU has the same 64 stream processors as RDNA1, then Navy Flounder will have identical core counts to the 5700 XT.

Strangely, the memory bus is narrower than Navi 10 chips (RX 5700/XT) at 192-bits, AMD could be pulling an Ampere tactic by using higher-frequency GDDR6X memory to compensate for the lower bus width. Unfortunately, there is not enough information to indicate just where these GPUs will be placed in AMD’s lineup – they could compete with the rumored RTX 3060 Ti, possibly the RTX 3070, or even other SKUs in the future.

Hopefully, this time around, AMD can make a bigger dent in Nvidia’s market share over the upcoming months and years. AMD will announce these new GPUS under the RX 6000 series branding on October 28th.

Over the last few years, one of the more major enhancements to operating systems like iOS and Android is the addition of a dark mode. Chrome OS is going in the opposite direction by bringing a dedicated light theme, which we managed to get our hands on early.

With a dedicated system-wide theme switcher, apps for Android and iOS have recently been able to match that desired color theme. Considering Chromebooks are able to run Android apps, as well as the fact that web apps can also respect your light/dark mode settings, it was surely only a matter of time before Chrome OS got a proper toggle between light and dark theme, as Chrome Story recently reported is coming.

Looking at Chrome OS as we have it today, though, there’s no denying that some parts are already essentially in “dark mode,” such as the shelf, quick settings tray, and app drawer. Meanwhile, other parts like the Settings app could definitely use a coat of dark gray paint.

Regardless, more darkness isn’t really what Chrome OS needs in order to launch a light/dark mode toggle. Instead, as noted by Android Police, Google is working on building a brand new light theme to act as the baseline for Chrome OS’s dark mode to contrast against.

With a fair amount of effort, we were able to get Chrome OS’s new “dark mode” toggle to appear in the quick settings panel on the latest build of Chrome OS Canary. As you’d hope, Chrome OS uses “Dark Theme” as its default, with no visible changes from Chrome OS as we know it today. Give the new toggle a click, and a few seconds later Chrome OS is given an unabashedly bright new look.

Pretty quickly, you can probably see that Chrome OS’s light theme is still a work in progress. For example, the current time is fairly hard to see, as it still uses white text instead of a black or dark gray. Similarly, the launcher and app drawer do not yet respect the light theme setting.

So far, all that does respect light theme is the app shelf, the quick settings bubble, the quick account switcher, and the tablet mode app switcher. As is also the case in dark mode, many parts of the UI are slightly translucent to let your wallpaper shine through, rather than simply being stark white.

As this is still a work in progress, it’s hard to say when Chrome OS’s light theme could launch in earnest. Until it does, we’ll continue to keep a close eye on things as they develop.

What do you think of Chrome OS’s light mode so far? And conversely, what would you like to see become darker in the default dark mode? Let us know down in the comments.

Samsung’s 980 Pro is set to redefine the company’s product line up, and perhaps the entire high-performance market, with a combination of the speedy PCIe 4.0 interface paired with a new controller and flash, all of which delivers brutal performance in many types of applications. That isn’t too surprising given the drive’s rated speed of up to 7/5 GBps of sequential read/write throughput and 1 million IOPs.

For the first time, the company’s flagship Pro series SSD doesn’t come with 2-bit MLC flash. Instead, the 980 Pro uses Samsung’s latest 3-bit TLC flash to reduce costs, essentially making it the high-end evolution of the more economical 970 Evo Plus series. But, with a very robust PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe controller under the hood, the 980 Pro still ensures efficient and responsive performance along with AES 256-bit security for both gamers and prosumers alike.

Aside from its slower sustained write speed than the previous-gen 970 Pro, Samsung’s 980 Pro is the fastest flash-based SSD we’ve laid our hands on. The 980 Pro proves that even while Samsung no longer uses 2-bit MLC flash in the design, its newest 1xx-layer layer V6 V-NAND 3-bit TLC scales to new heights and brings impressive performance to the table. 

Samsung’s 980 Pro is the SSD to get if you’re building a high-end gaming or work machine with bleeding-edge performance in mind. The 980 Pro also doesn’t cost too much more than Phison E16-based SSDs, like Seagate’s FireCuda 520 or Sabrent’s Rocket NVMe 4.0, making it surprisingly competitive against other prosumer-class drives at checkout, too.

Samsung’s 980 Pro is available in capacities spanning from 250GB up to 1TB, but unlike the last-gen 970 Pro, the 980 Pro will bring back the 2TB capacity point. Unfortunately, Samsung will not release the 2TB model until late 2020. As expected of Samsung’s flagship SSD, each capacity commands a premium over competing drives. Prices range from $90 for the 250GB capacity up to $230 for the 1TB model, with the latter having the best price-per-GB.

The company rates the 980 Pro to hit peak sequential speeds of up to 7/5 GBps read/write and upwards of 1 million random read/write IOPS. These performance figures aren’t consistent across the capacity of the device like they were on the 970 Pro, however, so the larger drives are faster than their slower counterparts.

Samsung’s 980 Pro features Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 to enable fast burst performance, but as we see with all SLC caching mechanisms, Samsung’s direct-to-TLC write speed is much slower after the cache fills. Samsung’s Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 improves upon the 97O EVO Plus’s implementation so that the end-user can write faster for longer, though. 

Not only is the sustained after-TurboWrite performance higher across the board, but Samsung significantly increased the capacity of the TurboWrite cache. Samsung left the same static 4GB/6GB default cache values, but tweaked the dynamic cache by expanding its capacity to be up to five times larger. 

Even with the new TurboWrite 2.0 implementation, Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) ECC, and 9% over-provisioning, Samsung still pulled back on the 980 Pro’s endurance ratings due to the TLC flash, matching the 970 EVO Plus within the same five-year warranty period.

This is a bit of disappointment, not only for us, but also for the potential buyers who have already expressed some grief on forums. This change is a calculated move by Samsung, though. According to Samsung’s statistics on over 661,000 NVMe SSDs, the company says 99% of users write up to 156 TB of data within five years, and 99.7% write less than 600 TB.

Furthermore, unlike most SSDs on the market, Samsung’s 980 Pro supports AES 256-bit hardware-accelerated encryption that is TCG Opal V2.0 and IEEE1667-compliant for protection of data at rest. It supports secure erase via the Format NVM command and crypto erase capability, as well as S.M.A.R.T. data reporting and Trim. 

From drive monitoring to benchmarking and security configurations, Samsung Magician leads the market in both SSD Toolbox design and capability. The company also supports NVMe SSDs with a custom driver tuned by the company. And for those who need to migrate their existing data over to their new Samsung SSD, the company provides its Samsung Data Migration Software to clone it over easily. 

Overall, Samsung’s 980 Pro looks to be an overhauled and scaled up 970 EVO Plus. The 980 Pro comes in an M.2 2280 form factor and features a quality black PCB and components. The SKU numbers on the top sticker take away from the aesthetic appeal of the 980 Pro, though. The company could have easily placed these markings on the backside along with the compliance information. 

With the 980 Pro’s small footprint yet massive performance, the device is bound to generate some heat. To help keep it cool, the company continues to use a copper heat spreader on the backside of the device to help absorb the thermal load when heavy workloads hit. Additionally, the controller features a nickel coating that Samsung says imProves cooling by roughly 7%.

The drive also supports Active State Power Management (ASPM), Autonomous Power State Transition (APST), and the L1.2 ultra-low power mode to regulate overall power consumption, as well as further refinements to dynamic thermal guard (DTG) technology that allows you to write for longer without the device slowing down. 

The new SSD controller, dubbed Elpis, measures 16.5 x 16.5mm and features a DRAM-based multi-core Arm architecture built on Samsung’s 8nm manufacturing process node. While the previous-gen Phoenix leveraged five Arm Cortex R5 cores, Samsung hasn’t specified what type of cores, or how many, power this new controller. Samsung also doesn’t specify the channel count, although it’s probably an eight-channel design.

Samsung did mention some other interesting points on the controller’s IO processing capability, however. The company states that the new PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3c controller can natively process up to 128 concurrent I/O queues, which is up from 32 queues on the previous PCIe 3.0 controller, leading to a more responsive latency profile.

The 980 Pro leverages DRAM for caching its FTL metadata, and for this task, the company outfitted the SSD with LPDDR4. These DRAM ICs interface at up to 1866 MHz and need as little as 1.1V to operate. The 250GB and 500GB models come with 512MB of DRAM while the 1TB and 2TB receive 1GB and 2GB, respectively.

Over the years, Samsung has led the way in NAND design, and the company’s V-NAND was the first vertical-channel 3D charge trap flash brought into volume production. Samsung’s 1xx-layer V6 V-NAND TLC is the company’s most refined flash yet – it scales the layer count up to new heights and consumes 15% less power than the V5 flash. 

Although it hasn’t confirmed, Samsung’s V6 V-NAND reportedly features up to 136 layers, up 40% from the 970 EVO Plus’s 92-layer count. Unlike competing types of 3D flash, Samsung didn’t need to use a multi-stack design to achieve such a high layer count. Instead, the company uses its unique channel hole etching technology to enhance scalability within a single stack. By sticking with a single stack design, the company says it can maintain high-quality production and achieve good yields without the risk of stack channel hole misalignments.

There are just two NAND packages onboard the 980 Pro’s PCB, which applies to all capacities. The 250GB to 1TB 980 Pros come with 256Gb dies while the 2TB model, when available, will feature 512Gb dies. This means that both the 1TB and 2TB models feature 32 dies in total for optimal interleaving and peak performance characteristics. To boost performance, Samsung’s V-NAND features two planes per die (independent regions of die access) for further interleaving.

Competitors like SK hynix and Micron now feature four-plane designs, which doubles parallelism, but this adds to overall periphery circuity, which in turn takes up precious die space. To overcome that die space limitation, most companies use, or are transitioning to, Periphery Under Cell (PUC) or CMOS Under Array (CUA) technology.

By placing the additional periphery, page buffer, and other select circuitry under the cell array rather than its border, companies can increase bit density per wafer. Lacking this design component, Samsung’s V6 V-NAND suffers in regards to bit density. Samsung’s next-generation V7 V-NAND will most likely implement both multi-stack and Cell Over Periphery (COP) concepts for improvement.

The current design splits each of the two 16kB plane cell arrays into two 8kB sub-planes with even/odd sensing for even faster performance capability with the limited space budget. This, in conjunction with some other modifications like an enhanced bit line precharge scheme, couple-capacitance-minimizing technique, progressive Vth window scheme, and random pre-pulse sensing scheme, enables Samsung’s V6 V-NAND TLC to respond 10% faster to both read and program requests over the last generation of flash. The new flash operates down to 45/450 microseconds (820/82 MBps) read/write, respectively.

Although the company didn’t specify the exact speed that the flash interfaces with the controller at, Samsung specified the flash operates at Toggle DDR 4.0 speeds, which ranges from 800 MTps up to 1,400 MTps, at a 1.2V supply voltage. This most likely matches the speed of SK hynix’s 128-Layer TLC, which is 1,200 MTps

Microsoft has unveiled a series of changes to its Windows 10 antivirus service that will bring all the company’s extended detection and response (XDR) facilities under one roof.

Announced at the company’s Ignite 2020 event, the changes will see Microsoft 365 Defender (formerly Microsoft Threat Protection) and Azure Defender consolidated under the umbrella of the Microsoft Defender antivirus service.

The company claims the offering will provide the “broadest resource coverage of any XDR in the industry”, using AI to analyze attacks across different vectors and deliver automatic resolutions where possible.

Microsoft Defender has also been integrated with the firm’s security information and event management tool (SIEM), Azure Sentinel. The cloud-native SIEM draws in data from Microsoft Defender and other sources to deliver a comprehensive view of each attack and rank threats by priority.

The firm also announced that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) has entered general availability on Android and landed in preview on iOS, meaning the service is now available across all major operating systems.

On mobile platforms, the service will shield against phishing attacks, dangerous apps and malicious files, and can be used to wall off corporate data to minimize the risk of a breach.

Windows 10 antivirus

According to Microsoft, the move to consolidate its security offerings is designed to minimize complexity – and the issues that might arise as a result.

“Security teams have historically struggled to keep up with threats and signals across a patchwork of poorly integrated solutions that fail to cover the breadth of workloads, clouds and devices that businesses run on,” explained Vasu Jakkal, VP of Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity.

By consolidating its XDR facilities and integrating with Azure Sentinel, Microsoft is hoping to simplify threat detection, analysis and resolution – especially in the context of changes brought about by the pandemic and remote working boom.

“Digital security is about people – it’s about empowering defenders to defend and protect employees, data, work and personal safety. It’s about making people and organizations resilient in an environment of unexpected change, like widespread remote work,” added Jakkal.

“Today we’re delivering a new set of security, compliance and identity innovations to help all customers simplify and modernize their environments by embracing the reality that the past seven months have likely reshaped the next 10 years of security and digital transformation.”

HP has unveiled the new Pavilion 14, which has received a complete overhaul. The Pavilion 14 now features 11th Gen Intel Core processors and an optional NVIDIA GeForce MX450 GPU in a more compact design. HP boasts that the Pavilion 14 has an 84% screen-to-body ratio, 16% quieter fans and 27% increased airflow. Theoretically then, the Pavilion 14 should look more modern than its predecessor without sacrificing performance or cooling.

The new model will be available in six colours, although HP notes that final colour options will vary by country. The Pavilion 14 will combine two colours in all but the Natural Silver model. As the photos below demonstrate, the display lid will be finished in one colour and the chassis in another. HP will release the Pavilion 14 in the following colour combinations:

Natural Silver

Warm Gold/Luminous Gold

Ceramic White/Natural Silver

Serene Pink/Tranquil Pink

Tranquil Pink/Natural Silver

Ceramic White/Rose Gold

The Pavilion 14 will also have a 3-sided micro-edge bezel display, which will be available in HD, FHD or UHD resolutions. The metal chassis incorporates multiple ports too, including a microSD card reader, two USB Type-A ports, an HDMI 2.0 port and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. HP has equipped the Pavilion 14 with a proprietary power connector, but the machine’s USB Type-C port supports USB Power Delivery, along with data and DisplayPort.

HP has included a Wi-Fi 6 modem too with Bluetooth 5.0, B&O-branded speakers and an optional fingerprint reader. The latter sits between the keyboard and a much larger trackpad, which is closer to the size of the one that HP includes on the Envy 15. The keyboard has half-sized up/down arrow keys, though.

The Pavilion 14 will be available with 11th Gen Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors, although HP is yet to specify which ones it plans to use. Additionally, the laptop will come with Intel Optane Memory H10 and up to 1 TB of PCIe storage. HP claims that the Pavilion 14 should last up to 8:45 hours on a single charge too and will recharge to 50% in 30 minutes.

The HP Pavilion will go on sale in the US in October from US$579.99. The company is yet to announce full pricing and international availability, though.

Want to understand the success of the Apple Watch? Sure, you could look at how it has, for some time, outsold the entire Swiss watch industry. Or you could look at the number of copycats.

For starters there’s the Amazfit Bip S, the Huawei Watch Fit and the Xiaomi Mi Watch. Oppo likes the Apple Watch so much that it doesn’t just look similar, it’s also got the same name: Oppo Watch. Say it quickly and it even sounds the same.

So what do you do as the clear frontrunner? You make your product better without stuffing up your lead. Such a mentality is not the friend of radical redesign, of course. This explains the Series 6: a new key health feature, a new S6 chip and iterative upgrades aplenty.

Who’s it for?

The Apple Watch 6 is primarily for newcomers looking to buy the top-of-the-range model. It starts at £379, but you can go up to £1,449 with the lux Hermès versions. However, as many of the updates are included in watchOS 7, anyone with a Series 5 or 3 will be able to access most of the new features such as Family Setup, cycle directions (when they appear in the UK) and sleep tracking, so unless you want the new stuff exclusive to the Series 6 there is little point in existing Watch owners upgrading.

That is unless you are a Series 3 owner and want an ECG app, which was previously only in the 5. For 5 owners, you will have to be excited by the admittedly impressive additions of the blood oxygen sensor and U1 chip to be convinced to upgrade. Lastly, if you felt that your old Watch was a tad slow, then the S6 chip may well sway those annoyed by sub-second delays in certain watchOS navigations. For this you pay £110 more than you would for the new second-tier model, the Watch SE.

Design

It looks like an Apple Watch. That’s it.

What else? Well, the Series 6 comes in 11 colours and three materials: aluminium, polished stainless steel and brushed titanium. Graphite stainless steel replaces ‘Space Black’ now, though. And there’s a new gold stainless steel finish which is “jewellery inspired… to achieve the colour and brightness without using actual gold mineral”. Also known as fake gold. Looks bling, though. Our favourites? The new blue and red aluminium models have a winning aesthetic, the latter being Apple’s first Product Red
watch.

Living with it

First off, that new S6 chip makes a noticeable difference. Apple claims it’s up to 20 per cent faster than the S5, and has a more energy efficient design, too. You can certainly see an uptick in speed navigating around the different apps with the Series 6, and it is most welcome.

As for more efficient, running the 6 all night for sleep tracking robbed it of just 14 per cent charge – which was topped up, thanks to the new faster charging, in the time it takes for any morning ablutions. How much faster? It’s 60 minutes from flat to 80 per cent, or 90 minutes up to full charge – about a third less than on the Series 5.

But it’s the addition of the U1 chip, previously seen in the iPhone 11, that really excites. You won’t be able to use it now, really – it’s more a promise of things to come. It is this ultra wideband (UWB) tech that Apple has described as “GPS on room scale” and promises to become more important in the coming years. This, for example, is the wizardry that will let you use your Apple Watch to open and start your car just by walking up to the vehicle – no gesturing or tapping necessary.

Killer feature(s)

Day-to-day it’s going to be two things: that improved battery performance and the fact that now the always-on Retina display is 2.5 times brighter than Series 5 (500 nits instead of 200). These two features make the Apple Watch Series 6 easier to live with. We’ve never had an issue with battery life on the Watch, so Apple could have been forgiven for leaving performance here as it was, but extra power and a clearer, brighter display is always going to improve matters.

The big new feature, especially in these pandemic times, is that blood oxygen sensor. During a measurement the LEDs on the back shine infrared light through your skin onto the blood vessels in your wrist. Photodiodes capture the light that is reflected back to detect the colour of your blood. It is this colour that indicates how oxygenated your blood is (bright red blood is more saturated, dark red is less).

The whole thing takes 15 seconds and you get a nice animation to watch while it’s all going on. The system also periodically measures your blood oxygen level throughout the day in the background – but only when you’re not moving.

Yes, blood oxygen is less dramatic than the ECG feature, but it adds yet another health capability to the Watch, confirming that this more a wellbeing device, as far as Apple is concerned, than a mini iPhone on your wrist, as the initial intention may have been.

Why oh why…

This is the interesting bit. There is one part of the Watch that Apple has neglected to fix for years – and it still hasn’t done so on the Series 6.

What is this glaring failing? Organising your music and podcasts that are downloaded to the Watch remains an absolute nightmare. It’s practically impossible. The Watch, if you toggle the right options, is meant to download the latest episodes of your subscribed podcasts, for example. But it doesn’t do so reliably. Sometimes it does, others it doesn’t. What’s more, you normally find this out only once you are outside on a run, have chosen to leave your phone behind because you can play the media you want directly off the Watch. As for music? You can still only add whole albums or whole playlists. Want a particular song? Forget it.

Deleting things is equally hard. I’ve tried a number of times to bin old podcasts only to have them reappear like cockroaches. This negates a key selling point for the Apple Watch. If you live or train in a place where phone reception is poor, or you have Apple’s wearable without the eSIM, then downloading audio to the Watch is your only option if you want to go running without your phone.

Would it really be so very hard to develop the Watch app sufficiently so that it could organise and manage songs and podcasts so that you know exactly what was on there and in the order you wanted? Rumour has it Spotify has the jump on Apple here and is trialling downloadable content for Apple Watch.

So, should I buy it?

The answer to this question is much tricker when it comes to the Watch SE. Have you got a Series 5? Are you happy with it? If the answer is yes to both these questions we’d have to advise sticking where you are for now.

But if you are new to Apple Watch, or have an older model and are thinking about upgrading, then this is most definitely a good buy – especially for £379, which, incidentally, is the price of our pick, the Product Red watch. The new, faster chip alongside the brighter screen, better battery life and faster charging are worth it. How much you get out of continually tracking your blood oxygen is a matter for individuals to assess over time.

Apple has done what it needed to do with the Series 6: improvements not embellishments. There may be increasingly more Apple Watch clones coming to market, but you still can’t beat the real thing.

Dell was the first company to unveil a large-format gaming display — the Alienware 55 — based on an OLED panel back at CES 2019. It just so happens that Dell appears to be the first maker to slash pricing of such a product, too. 

The Alienware 55 uses a 55-inch OLED panel featuring a 4K resolution, 400 nits peak brightness, a 130,000:1 contrast ratio, a 0.5 ms gray-to-gray response time, as well as a 120 Hz maximum refresh rate. This high refresh rate along with support for VESA’s Adaptive-Sync technology in its AMD FreeSync Premium as well as Nvidia G-Sync-compatible implementation makes the monitor a particularly good fit for dynamic PC gaming. 

After we did our Alienware AW5520QF OLED review, we just had to put it on our Best 4K Gaming Monitors list.

Originally, the monitor’s MSRP was $3,999 when it was launched last year. But since then Dell has quietly slashed pricing of the device to $3,039.

The Alienware 55 monitor can display 98.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which is nearly as accurate as performance of professional IPS LCD displays. For gamers, it means more vivid colors, which, when combined with OLED’s deep blacks, gives more realism, and therefore immersion. Meanwhile, the display also features an anti-reflective coating with 2H hardness for extra clarity when used in bright environments. 

While the OLED technology promises a lot, the Alienware 55 monitor is not without caveats. The display does not support HDR transport, a technology that is used by a number of games today. Furthermore, both HDR10 and Dolby Vision are used by countless 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray as well as Netflix movies. 

Mobvoi launched a new TicWatch GTX last week that may have left some drooling over the price but dissatisfied over its features. For those still wishing for a formidable Wear OS smartwatch won’t have to wait long. The company has already confirmed that the TicWatch 3 Pro is landing this week and, if the leaks are correct, it could yet again be one of the more notable if not the most notable smartwatches running on Google’s Android-based wearable platform.

Mobvoi hit smartwatch news radars after it was reported that Google made an investment in the Chinese company’s efforts to bring some semblance of Android Wear to that market. It would eventually launch its own global Android Wear smartwatches with a unique dual-screen feature that can be credited for its long battery life.

The TicWatch 3 Pro will seemingly carry on that tradition but will quickly set itself apart from the rest of the Wear OS brood with a single feature. It will be one of the first to run on Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Wear 4100 chipset, bringing with it all the performance improvements it promises.

Although it isn’t confirming that, Mobvoi has just announced the date that the “TicWatch Pro 3 GPS” will debut, on September 24 to be precise. It even reveals the smartwatch’s design, which is pretty similar to the other TicWatch Pros before it.

While some leaked specs, like 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, sound pretty common by now, word is that the smartwatch will also come with a still uncommon Sp02 sensor. The battery is also expected to be larger though there might be some weight reduction as well. Of course, with more power comes a higher price and that will be what we’ll be waiting for in a few days.