Month: November 2020

I haven’t even owned my Wi-Fi 6 router for a full year yet and already there is a (slightly) newer wireless standard that is inching into the marketplace. That would be Wi-Fi 6E and, well, that’s the way it goes—technology never sits still. In this case, Intel is standing ready with its AX210, the first Wi-Fi 6E adapter.

This is not a proper launch (no press release, no big announcement), and there might not be one until early next year. In the meantime, a marketplace seller on Newegg is selling and shipping the adapter from China (via Tom’s Hardware) for $33. Intel has also apparently registered its Wi-Fi 6E adapter with the Eurasian Economic Commission, a popular landing spot for products that are getting ready to launch.

So, what is Wi-Fi 6E? It is sort of an extension of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), as it supports the same features and technologies, including OFDMA, which is what makes it so great for crowded networks. But in addition to serving up connectivity over the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, Wi-Fi 6E adds a 6GHz band.

“6GHz addresses Wi-Fi spectrum shortage by providing contiguous spectrum blocks to accommodate 14 additional 80MHz channels and 7 additional 160MHz channels which are needed for high-bandwidth applications that require faster data throughput such as high-definition video streaming and virtual reality. Wi-Fi 6E devices will leverage wider channels and additional capacity to deliver greater network performance and support more Wi-Fi users at once, even in very dense and congested environments,” the Wi-Fi Alliance stated in January.

Incidentally, both Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E have a theoretical maximum throughput of 9.6Gbps across multiple channels, so the latter is not inherently faster. But the advantage of Wi-Fi 6E is the added spectrum. By jettisoning some connections to the 6GHz band, the result is a less crowded network, which in turn could lead to faster speeds for your devices. It’s sort of like adding another lane on the highway, to help with rush hour traffic.

The very big caveat to this is the consumer hardware. As of this moment, there is not a single laptop, smartphone, or other device that supports Wi-Fi 6E. That is where Intel’s new adapter comes into play, as it can be installed in a laptop to support the latest wireless standard.

However, you also need a Wi-Fi 6E router in order to use the 6GHz band. I’m only aware of one existing model at the moment—the Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE 11000, introduced in September, and which has not been released to retail yet.

Even then, it’s of little benefit right now, because Wi-Fi 6E devices simply do not exist. Your Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) will still connect to it just fine, but the advantage of the 6GHz band will go unused for the time being.

This is the same caveat that applies to Wi-Fi 6—to take full advantage of the standard, you need a Wi-Fi 6 router and several Wi-Fi 6 devices, which are starting to become more common. So if you just purchased a Wi-Fi 6 router, don’t feel like you made a huge mistake. It will take some time for Wi-Fi 6E to make a dent in the marketplace, by which time you might be ready for a new router anyway.

The Xiaomi Mi 11 and Mi 11 Pro are already hotly anticipated, but the photo above is not of them. Seemingly first published on Weibo by the likes of DigitalChatStation, outlets like Gizchina asserted that the photo is of Xiaomi’s next flagships, which are reputedly due early next year. To the credit of DigitalChatStation, they did not explicitly state that we were looking at the Mi 11 series.

Instead, they merely hinted that the devices pictured would be announced by the end of the year. As a second photo demonstrates, the devices pictured are running OriginOS, the custom version of Android produced by Vivo. OriginOS is believed to be replacing FuntouchOS and may be coming to older devices like the Neo3 and iQOO Pro 3, among others.

According to another Weibo leaker cited by Sparrows News, the photos are of the Vivo X60 series, which will be Vivo’s next flagship smartphones. It would seem that the X60 and X60 Pro have been pictured, with the latter being the larger of the two devices shown. The X60 Pro is believed to feature Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 875, although with a 6.65-inch OLED screen that has a 120 Hz display. By contrast, the regular edition will supposedly have an Exynos 1080 instead, for some reason. It is unknown when Vivo will announce the X60 series, but it will be before the end of the year, according to DigitalChatStation.

The first virtual edition of FMS 2020 (Flash Memory Summit, not Football Manager) is well underway and the first announcements are already trickling through, with Samsung’s intriguing new enterprise SSD snatching the spotlight.

Meet the SmartSSD, which Samsung Semiconductor refers to as a Computational Storage Drive (CSD).

It is designed to “accelerate a variety of applications including database management, video processing, artificial intelligence layers, and virtualization”. In other words, like the coprocessors of yesteryear and the GPU of today, the CPU can offload specific tasks to this very useful sidekick.

Samsung used Xilinx FPGA to achieve what it calls the first adaptable computational storage platform. Xilinx was acquired a few weeks ago by AMD, one of the largest CPU vendors in the world. Ironically, therefore, a surge in demand for CSD’s could potentially have an impact on the sales of AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors.

Among the use cases put forward by Samsung are “search-in-storage”, with some processes seeing a 100x improvement in speed, while transparent compression technology enabled one provider to cram up to 10x more bytes into the storage.

Other scenarios include time-to-insight in big data analytics, video file transcoding and data encryption solutions.

The drive itself is a standard 2.5-inch SSD with a 25-watt power envelope and a 4TB native capacity – or up to 12TB using accelerated transparent compression. That’s a 3:1 compression ratio, which is slightly more than the industry standard of 2.5:1 adopted by the Linear Tape Open (LTO) organization.

Yes, you read that headline correctly: according to a new listing in the Geekbench 5 database, the M1 MacBook Air absolutely destroys the Core i9 16-inch MacBook Pro in both single- and multi-core tests. 

The scores apparently come from the MacBook Air 10,1. According to the Geekbench post, this MacBook Air runs macOS 11.0.1 and uses an “Apple Silicon” processor. The laptop posted an impressive 1687 and 7433 in the single- and multi-core tests, respectively.

Comparatively, the top-of-the-line 16-inch MacBook Pro with a Core i9-9880H performs about 35% worse in Geekbench 5’s single-core test and about 15% worse in the multi-core test. Average scores for the Core i9 16-inch MacBook Pro hover around 1100 for single-core and 6000-6500 for multi-core. 

This is quite the performance gap, especially considering this MacBook Air looks like the baseline model with 8 GB of RAM. Also, keep in mind that the M1 MacBook Air is fanless, suggesting that the new M1 13-inch MacBook Pro will perform significantly better than the best MacBook Pros currently on the market. The M1 MacBook Pro has active cooling, which should allow for longer sustained load operation.

The Geekbench post also shed some light on an M1 specification many have asked about: clock speed. According to the listing, the M1 has a base clock of 3.2 GHz. The Core i9-9880H, for comparison, has a base clock of 2.3 GHz. 

If this listing is legitimate, Apple has worked wonders with the M1 chip. That kind of performance in a passively cooled system with a TDP of 10 Watts is incredible, especially compared to an 8 core/16 thread 45 Watt monster like the Core i9-9880H. 

Apple’s statement that the M1 is the fastest CPU in the world may have been more than marketing fluff after all.

Insiders in the Dev Channel can look forward to test driving exciting new features in Windows 10 before anyone else. However, not every new build that gets rolled out can be a show stopper.

Sometimes, instead of exciting additions, what you get from a new flight is a bunch of fixes, which is the case in new Build 20257.

Changes and Improvements in this release include:

Based on feedback, Microsoft is updating its Start menu tile theming logic such that the tile background for Win32 apps will no longer adjust based on detected contrast ratio, except in the case of pinned Microsoft Edge PWAs.

Fixes include:

Fixed an issue starting with Build 20236 where installing games from the Store to a secondary non-OS drive would result in the secondary drive becoming inaccessible.

Fixed an issue causing some devices to experience a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION bugcheck in recent builds.

Fixed an issue resulting in some apps crashing on launch in the previous flight, including Microsoft Jigsaw and Microsoft Minesweeper.

Fixed an issue resulting in File Explorer having a transparent line across the top when maximized on systems with multiple monitors.

Fixed an issue resulting in win32 app titles being unexpectedly highlighted in the title bar after enabling and disabling high contrast.

Fixed an issue where the windows.old folder is not completely deleted when performing disk cleanup.

Fixed an issue where if you reset your PC then and re-connected your MSA, then your MSA picture might never sync down.

Fixed an issue impacting Windows Hello Face recognition if the device was trained in a different orientation than the orientation used at unlock time.

Fixed an issue where setting up a kiosk (assigned access) account wouldn’t work the first time you tried, only subsequent tries.

Fixed a deadlock that could result in unexpected CPU usage. If you continue experiencing other performance issues, please take a moment to file feedback including details about the issue you’re seeing, and a performance trace. More info about collecting a repro trace is available here if needed.

Fixed an issue resulting in recently some apps being slower to accept keystrokes into text fields.

Fixed an issue that could result in links from apps failing to launch the browser.

Fixed an issue from the last couple flights that could result in audio playback unexpectedly stopping.

Fixed an issue that could result in not hearing audio after streaming certain content then turning your Bluetooth headset off and back on.

Fixed an issue that could result in Movies & TV failing to play some recorded HDR videos with error 0x80004001.

Known issues are:

Microsoft is looking into reports of the update process hanging for extended periods of time when attempting to install a new build.

Live previews for pinned sites aren’t enabled for all Insiders yet, so you may see a grey window when hovering over the thumbnail in the taskbar. Microsoft is continuing to work on polishing this experience.

Microsoft is working on enabling the new taskbar experience for existing pinned sites. In the meantime, you can unpin the site from the taskbar, remove it from the edge://apps page, and then re-pin the site.

Microsoft is investigating reports that some users are seeing error 0x80070426 when using their Microsoft account to sign into various apps. If you encounter it, rebooting your PC may resolve this.

Microsoft is investigating an issue where, after taking this build, no drives appear under Settings > System > Storage > Manage Disks and Volumes. As a workaround, you can manage your disks in the classic Disk Management tool.

Microsoft is investigating reports that some screens incorrectly have black text on dark backgrounds when dark theme is enabled.