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iOS 14 brings a range of valuable new features, and some of them are designed as Accessibility options but happen to be useful for just about everyone. Read along for a hands-on look at how to use iPhone Sound Recognition to get alerts for things like doorbells, running water, smoke alarms, crying babies, animals, and more.

Another one of the Accessibility features in iOS 14 that’s appealing for lots of use cases is the new “Back Tap” feature. That lets users create custom controls with a double or triple tap on the back of their iPhones.

Sound Recognition is also an Accessibility feature that can give users with hearing challenges a visual cue for a variety of sounds happening in their environment. The list includes alarms, animals, household sounds, and people. Check out all the options below. Notably, there are some valuable use cases for any user, even without being hard of hearing like getting a notification for someone at your door if you regularly wear headphones while working from home.

I’ve been testing out Sound Recognition, and it has worked reliably in my use so far. One interesting thing: I found that whistling is picked up by Sound Recognition in iOS 14 as a “siren.”

Note: iOS 14 is currently only available as a developer beta with the first public beta coming in July. Read more here on how to install it.

How to use iPhone Sound Recognition in iOS 14:

Open the Settings app and head to Accessibility

Swipe to the bottom and tap Sound Recognition

Tap the toggle to enable it, then tap Sounds

Choose the type(s) of sounds you’d like to recognize

Tap Back in the top left corner

Hands-on with iPhone Sound Recognition:

Once you turn on Sound Recognition on your iPhone, tap Sounds, and you’re able to simply toggle on all the types of sounds you’d like alerts for:

When your iPhone registers a sound, you’ll get a notification on your lock screen, home screen, or when using apps.

You can long-press to see what type of sound was recognized if you have your iPhone set up to alert you to multiple types. You’ll also get the option to snooze recognizing the sound.

So far I’ve found Sound Recognition to be very responsive. For instance, something like running water was picked up about 40 feet from my kitchen faucet while in my office (and a TV was on too).

Polar smartwatches aren’t exactly chic. Like many fitness-first wearable companies, Polar’s strength has always been its in-depth metrics and platform. When it comes to style, Polar usually relies on that plain, sporty aesthetic, as it did with the M400, M600, A300, and the A360 fitness tracker. But today it’s launching a new smartwatch, the Polar Unite, and it doesn’t make my eyes bleed! It’s also £135, which, as far as Polar smartwatches go, is pretty dang affordable.

The Unite has many of the same features Polar introduced with its Ignite smartwatch, which was released last year and targeted toward more casual fitness enthusiasts. It includes all the basics, like smartphone notifications, continuous heart rate-tracking, sleep-tracking, breathing reminders, and multi-day battery life. They’re both also waterproof up to 30 metres. The Unite also includes Polar’s FitSpark on-wrist workouts and the Nightly Recharge metric, which purports to measure how well your body’s autonomic nervous system has recovered after a night’s sleep. As for the display, it looks like the Unite is sticking to the same colour touchscreen and thick bottom bezel as the Ignite.

So…what exactly is the difference between the Unite and Ignite? For starters, it appears the Unite opts for connected GPS, meaning it relies on your phone’s GPS to track workouts as opposed to using a built-in GPS sensor. That probably explains why the Unite is £40 cheaper than the £175 Ignite. It’s also slightly lighter, weighing 32 grams to the Ignite’s 35g – a negligible difference, but still lightweight compared to some other smartwatches out there. Battery life is also a smidge shorter. The Unite has an estimated four days of battery life and 50 hours of connected GPS training, where the Ignite had five days. (Though in testing, the Ignite never lasted more than three days for me, so we’ll have to see how the Unite does under real world conditions.)

I’d say, at least from the photos, the Unite is probably the most stylish watch Polar’s ever offered. That’s an extremely low bar, but progress is progress! Where the Ignite was pretty boring, the Unite kind of looks – dare I say – cute. It’s not that Polar has drastically overhauled the Ignite’s look. It’s more that there’s a much better palette of silicone wristbands to choose from. Sure, that doesn’t sound like much, but historically Polar hasn’t really provided options beyond white, black, and a violent shade of orange or red. This time around, you can opt between black, white, pink, and blue as the default strap colours. Polar is also offering mint and blush straps for an additional £32, along with cloth, woven fabric, and leather options.

While I liked the Ignite quite a bit, it had a lot of design quirks for something priced at £175. The touchscreen was laggy, and frankly, syncing Polar watches is a pain. We’ll have to test the Unite to see if Polar’s improved on any of those issues in the past year, or whether this is just blatantly repackaging the Ignite as a cheaper version of itself. It’s probably the latter, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, unacceptable quirks for £175 might be more tolerable at £135. Also, £135 is pretty cheap for a smartwatch – that’s actually getting into fitness band territory. Plus, many of Polar’s watches cost upwards of £200, so this price isn’t too shabby for what you get.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been this impressed with a laptop’s design. As I unpacked the Asus Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 and booted it up for the first time, I thought I knew what to expect, having tested both the ZenBook Pro Duo and the smaller ZenBook Duo. But the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 takes things to another level —literally —and delivers some serious cooling innovation in the process. It’s one of the best gaming laptops you can buy, particularly if you value the utility of a second screen more than comfortable input devices.

The second touch display that sits above the keyboard (Asus calls it the ROG ScreenPad Plus) actually rises up at the back as you lift the lid of the laptop, which serves two key purposes. First, it lets Asus significantly increase the cooling abilities of the system — important because our review unit packs a Core i9-10980HK and Nvidia RTX 2080 Super Max-Q inside its slim 0.8-inch frame. Second, it angles that second screen more toward your eyes (rather than looking straight down at a flat screen), while giving the laptop’s pair of displays more of a sense that they’re tied together — at least in a visual sense when your eyes flow from one to the other.

And beyond the utility and wow-factor of that second screen, the large air intakes behind the second display result in a cool, quiet, and consistently running high-end gaming rig. At $2,999 to start and $3,699 in the top-end configuration Asus sent for review, this is an expensive machine if you’re purely using it for gaming. But the 4K primary display in our unit is fairly bright and vivid, making it suitable for work and content creation as well. For those primarily interested in gaming, a 300 Hz 1080p panel is also an option.

The main downsides here are the absence of a webcam (this is a bad time for that, Asus) and the usual input device drawbacks that always seem to come when you shove a second screen above the keyboard, though that arguably matters less in a gaming machine than a system designed for a focus on productivity.

As you turn on the laptop for the first time, the keys flash red in a pattern that twice runs across the keys, before switching to their default RGB rainbow. And the ROG ScreenPad brings up a schematic of what looks like a floating futuristic city, with animations of fans on either side that spin briefly as the laptop finishes booting to Windows 10 Pro. It’s silly, but also undeniably cool. If this laptop doesn’t make it into regular rotation on one of the WB’s superhero shows, it’s a missed opportunity on Asus’ part. 

At 14.1 x 10.6 x 0.8 inches and 5.3 pounds, the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is far from a lightweight, but for a 15.6-inch laptop with powerful components (two 1TB NVMe SSDs are included, along with 32GB of RAM in this configuration), it’s not bulky either. The MSI GS66 Stealth is a bit smaller and lighter, at 14.2 x 9.7 x 0.7 inches and 4.6 pounds, but it lacks a second screen and ran hot during our testing. As we’ll see in detail later, that’s not an issue for this laptop.

One of the ways that Asus manages to keep the weight down is by opting for a magnesium aluminide chassis, rather than aluminum or plastic. It both looks and feels good in the blue-on-grey tone that is the laptop’s single color option. But note that scratches are still possible; in the process of photographing the laptop and removing the bottom to investigate expandability (see the upgradability section below) I managed to scratch a portion of the lid.

The ports wrap around three sides of the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15. The left side houses the barrel connector for the power brick, as well as separate headphone and mic jacks — handy if you want to attach one of the best gaming headsets and one of the best gaming microphones. 

Around back lives the Ethernet jack, an HDMI 2.0b port and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type A port. And on the right sits the line Thunderbolt/USB-C port (which can also be used for charging if you have your own USB-C charger), alongside a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A ports. Port selection here isn’t bad, but it would be helpful if at least one of the USB-A ports found its way to the left side of the laptop.

Gaming Performance on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

Asus equipped our review unit with top-end mobile components, including an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, Intel Core i9-10980HK CPU, and 32GB of DDR4 clocked at 3,200 MHz. As such, it’s capable of playing most modern games at the highest settings, although if you prefer smoothness over the best possible details, you’ll probably want to run the most demanding games at 1080p, rather than this configuration’s 4K resolution. Also note that both monitor options support G-Sync, though to enable the feature on our review unit, we had to jump into Asus Armoury Crate software (more on that later) and switch to the Discrete GPU mode and reboot. 

When I played Borderlands 3 at 4K and medium settings, the game ran between 35 and 44 fps (frames per second). At higher settings, the game wasn’t playable at the display’s native resolution.

For comparison systems, we matched the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 against other recent dual-screen laptops: HP’s Omen X 2S (this laptop’s primary competitor), as well as Asus’ own ZenBook Pro Duo and the more ultrabook-like ZenBook Duo (neither of which are particularly gaming focused, though the Pro model does sport an Nvidia RTX 2060). Also included here for some perspective is the MSI GS66 Raider, a more traditional single-screen gamer with the same Nvidia RTX 2080 Super graphics, a 10th Gen Core i7 CPU, and a price tag in our review configuration of $2,699 — a grand less than the config of the Zephyrus Duo 15 we’re looking at here.

Things don’t start out looking stellar for the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 on the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (FHD, highest), where its score of 69 fps, while smooth, is just behind the HP Omen X 2S’s 71 fps. Still, Asus’ Zephyrus Duo gaming system managed to land a few frames ahead of the similarly equipped MSI system.

On the Grand Theft Auto V benchmark (FHD, very high), the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15’s 84 fps again edged out the MSI machine (82 fps) by a couple of frames, and was well ahead of everything else here. Note, though, that 4K performance is below 30fps, again indicating you’ll want to either turn down some settings or lower your resolution.

Moving on to the Hitman benchmark (1080p, ultra), things get a bit weird, with the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15’s score of 97 fps falling behind both the MSI (113) and HP (111). This would be troubling if it were a trend, but as we’ll see next, it’s more of an anomaly.

Last up in On Far Cry New Dawn (FHD, Ultra), the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15’s score of 89 fps beats everything else, again edging out the MSI (86 fps) while stomping the HP’s score of 67 fps.

To stress test the Duo 15’s gaming performance, we ran Metro Exodus 15 times on a loop using RTX presets. The game was remarkably consistent between runs, wavering only slightly between 46.9 and 47.1 fps, for an average of 47 fps. The CPU ran at an average speed of 4.0 GHz and at an average temperature of 75.2 degrees Celsius (167.3 degrees Fahrenheit). The GPU ran at an average speed of 1335 MHz and an average temperature of 68 degrees Celsius (154.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Note that while the GPU here was a couple of degrees warmer than the similarly specced MSI system (68 vs 66 degrees Celsius), the Asus system’s CPU average temperature was a stunning 15 degrees Celsius cooler (75.2 versus 90.9) than the MSI, despite the fact that Asus’ laptop was running an i9 while the MSI we tested was an i7. Part of this is due to Asus’ use of liquid metal rather than traditional thermal paste/pads on the CPU (which HP uses with its Omen X 2S as well). But clearly, Asus’ cooling solution with its massive intakes below the second screen make a big difference too, that helps both temperatures and noise output from the fans.

Productivity Performance on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

With its eight-core Intel Core i9-10980HK CPU, 32GB of DDR4 memory (clocked at 3,200 MHz) and pair of 1TB Samsung NVMe SSDs running in RAID0, the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is as capable a productivity machine as it is a gaming rig. 

In Geekbench 4.3, the Zephyrus Duo 15’s score of 32,056 easily bested anything else here, with the ZenBook Pro Duo coming the closest, at 26,524. The MSI GS66 Stealth was close behind that, with 25,304, helped by its Core i7-10750H CPU and the same Nvidia 2080 Super Max-Q graphics, but a single SSD. 

The Zephyrus Duo 15 took 3 seconds to copy 4.97GB of files, a rate of 1,696.4 MBps. That’s faster than the ZenBook Pro Duo and the HP Omen X 2S, but just matches the MSI GS66 Stealth. 

Given the former has a single NVMe SSD and the Zephyrus Do 15 has two speedy Samsung drives installed in RAID0, perhaps we’re reaching the limits of our transfer test. We’re in the process of rolling out a larger transfer test, but don’t yet have comparison numbers for all recent systems. That said, the Zephyrus Duo 15 delivered a speed of 1,413.03 MBps on our 25GB test. Regardless, you won’t likely see significantly speedier boot drive speed than what the Duo delivers until we start to see PCIe 4.0 support in laptops–if that ever happens. PCIe 4.0 drives and the bus required to run them requires much more power than 3.0 drives.

It took the Zephyrus Duo 15 just 7 minutes and 22 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p on our Handbrake test. That’s again better than anything else here and nearly twice as fast as the HP Omen X 2S, which took 13:25 to transcode the same file. 

ROG ScreenPad Plus on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

Asus gives ROG ScreenPad Plus touch-based software a different, more gamer-aggressive skin than the secondary display software on its other Duo laptops, but in most respects, the software is the same.

The launcher can be slid out by tapping a persistent translucent button on the left edge, and programs can be dragged here so that they automatically launch on the ScreenPad rather than the primary display. You can tap to swap applications between the upper and lower display, and save up to four groups of programs in a particular layout, so that once you settle on a setup that works well for you, you can get back to it with a couple of taps.

Additionally, there’s a floating menu that pops up when you’re moving a program or window around that lets you instantly add it to the ScreenPad display, maximize it across both screens (which can be useful for things like video editing or just surfing the web), or pin it to the ScreenPad launcher. As someone who uses a dual-screen setup on his home desktop setup, I’m pretty used to using the Windows arrow key combos to move my programs around my screens. That works perfectly well here, too. 

And in case you’re wondering, the metal mechanism that lifts and supports the ZenPad on both sides of the Zephyrus Duo 15 feels extremely solid. It’s impossible to say how it will hold up over years of opening and closing, but it feels like Asus took durability into serious consideration in the design of the second screen and the hinges that lift it up at the back.

Primary Display on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

The 15.6-inch primary display on the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is a winner in many respects. It’s a 4K 60Hz panel, which isn’t the best option for all types of gamers, but you can opt for a high-refresh 1080p panel if that better suits your needs. But there’s a lot to like about the panel option Asus sent with this review unit. 

Producing 160% of the Adobe sRGB (75.9% of DCI-P3) and averaging 402 nits of brightness, it’s better than anything in this comparison group, save for Asus’ own creator-focused ZenBook Pro Duo. That laptop manages to produce 203% of the color gamut, but its screen isn’t as bright. In short, with the 4K display option, the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 will serve you just as well for productivity and some image or video editing as it does for games. As noted earlier, it also supports G-Sync for smooth gaming.

Note that the ScreenPad’s brightness and color gamut isn’t quite a match for the primary display above it, but the difference between the two is far less noticeable than what we saw with the ZenBook Pro Duo. 

Keyboard and Touchpad on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

As with pretty much every dual-screen laptop we’ve seen in the last couple years, the addition of the second display above the screen means the touchpad gets shoved to the side of the keyboard and the keys get moved down so that there’s no area below them to rest your wrists. 

Asus attempts to lessen the issue here by including a solid rubber wrist rest in the box. That’s better than nothing, but given its fairly substantial heft (and the fact that its rough rubber surface attracts dust like a Dyson), you’re probably not going to take it with you on the go. 

And while the keys look good with their RGB backlighting that flashes red when the system boots up, don’t feel great. The 1.4mm of travel is about what we’d expect in a gaming laptop this thin, but strokes feel more rubbery than I’d like at anything approaching this price, and the arrow and Function keys in particular are tiny.

Directly to the right of those arrow keys sits the 2.3 x 2.9 inch touchpad. Just like with the previous Duo laptops, it’s generally accurate and gets the job done, but it’s narrow and not where it belongs. That said, given this is a gaming laptop, you’re almost certainly going to be using a dedicated mouse most of the time anyway, so I found the touchpad here a bit less awkward than on some other dual-screen laptops.

In short, as with all other dual-screen laptops we’ve tested so far, you trade anything approaching ‘good’ peripherals for the sake of the second screen here. On most other gaming laptops in this price range (or even $1,000 or so less) you could get mechanical switches and a roomier touchpad that sits below the keys where it belongs. If good peripherals are important to you, you should weigh that against how handy you think a second screen will be. 

Audio on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX55 

The ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 may only sport a pair of 4W downward-firing speakers that sit up front, underneath the keyboard. But they don’t sound bad for what they are. With the laptop on my coffee table, they produced clear, reasonably loud sound that was easily able to fill my medium-sized home office/living room. I didn’t notice any distortion at 100% volume, but if you want serious low-end thump for basslines or booming in-game explosions, you’ll either want to use a headset (Asus includes a high-end ESS Sabre DAC for that purpose) or external speakers. 

Upgradability on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

Getting inside the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is surprisingly simple, provided you have the right driver bits. You’ll need to remove 14 tiny Torx screws, and loosen a Phillips-Head screw in the front corner. With those out, the metal bottom lifts off, revealing the motherboard, downward-firing speakers and the substantial 90 Whr battery.

Two M.2 slots are visible, both of which support NVMe, while one also supports SATA drives. Regardless, both were populated by NVMe OEM Samsung drives in our review unit. There’s also an accessible SODIMM slot here, which was populated by a 16GB stick. A second 16GB of RAM lives on the other side of the motherboard, but it’s both inaccessible and soldered onto the board. The 32GB here is the maximum for this system. The wireless module is also built onto the board. So at least in this configuration, you won’t be adding anything, unless you want to replace the pair of 1TB SSDs with 2TB or larger drives. 

Battery Life on Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

The 90 WHr battery that Asus includes in the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 doesn’t quite match the 99.9 WHr juice box in the single-screen MSI GS66 Stealth. But for a dual-screen laptop, the Zephyrus holds up quite well when unplugged, lasting just over 5 hours in our test, which continuously browses the web, streams video and runs browser-based OpenGL tests, all while connected to Wi-Fi and with a screen brightness of 150 nits.

But that’s with both screens on. If you turn off the ScreenPad below the main display, that gets you an hour and change of more unplugged runtime. Both results are better than other dual-display laptops we’ve tested recently. But MSI’s GS66 Stealth, with its single screen and lesser CPU, lasts 6 hours and 36 minutes on the same test.

Heat on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 

We took surface temperature measurements while running the Metro Exodus stress test. The center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, reached 34.4 degrees Celsius (94 degrees Fahrenheit), though the touchpad stayed cooler at 34.2 degrees Celsius (93.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The underside gets warmer, though not exactly hot for a gaming laptop. The highest temperature, in the middle of the FCC compliance sticker, reached 47.9 degrees Celsius (118.2 degrees Fahrenheit). 

Clearly there’s something to Asus’s layout and cooling setup, because all of these numbers are substantially lower than what we saw with the MSI system, which topped out at 54.6 degrees Celsius (130.3 degrees Fahrenheit) on the bottom of the laptop.

Keep in mind that the MSI machine only comes with one screen, though it is a tenth of an inch slimmer. But its fans were also noisy during gaming, while on the ROG Zephyrus, they were noticeable, but made a low whoosh as cool air gets pulled in from the massive intakes behind the secondary display. Asus claims this setup increases airflow by 30%, while keeping noise levels below 43dB on performance mode. Those numbers seem plausible, because given its components and slim chassis, this is a surprisingly cool and quiet gaming portable. 

Webcam on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX55 

As is increasingly the case with recent Asus gaming laptops, there is no webcam on the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15. There are certainly gamers who won’t care, and streamers who will want to use a dedicated camera anway. But for so many of us who are now working from home (and many who likely will be for the foreseeable future), this is a particularly bad time to be shipping laptops of any kind without a camera. Considering everything else Asus managed to shove into this laptop, the webcam is a noticeable omission.

Software and Warranty on Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX55 

The ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 isn’t exactly overloaded with pre-installed software, but there’s a bit more here than we’d like for a high-end gaming rig. Most noticeable (because it pops up all the time until you uninstall it) are the trials for McAfee LiveSafe and WebAdvisor. And despite the fact that Asus shipped the machine with Windows 10 Pro, there’s the usual Windows bloat, like a “Play” section in the start menu with tiles for Farm Heroes Saga, Candy Crush Friends, Spotify, Hulu, and Disney Magic Kingdoms, alongside Netflix.

Also included is a bunch of Asus software, including the company’s Armoury Crate software for managing system settings. This is a nicely laid out (if not exactly pretty) piece of software that I would like more if it weren’t riddled with ads for other Asus products and content.

Asus sells the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 with a 1-year warranty.

Configurations of Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX55 

Asus sent us the top-of-the line ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 for review. But you don’t have to spend $3,699 to get most of what the laptop offers. If you halve the SSD storage and RAM (1TB/16GB) and go with the 300 Hz 1080p screen, that configuration will sell for $3,499. Or, stick with the 300 Hz display and 2TB/32GB storage/memory setup, but drop the CPU down to a Core i7-10875H and the GPU to an RTX 2070 Super and the price goes down to $2,999. 

If we were spending our own money, that entry config would be what we’d go with. It’s still plenty capable for high-refresh 1080p gaming. As we saw in our tests, the mobile 2080 Super Max-Q isn’t exactly up to no-compromise 4K gaming anway.

Bottom Line

Starting at $2,999 and selling for $3,699 as configured, the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is certainly expensive–but that comes with the territory when you’re loading up high-end components like a Core i9 processor, 2TB of NVMe storage and an RTX 2080 Super Max-Q. If you’re happy with the traditional single-screen gamer, there are more affordable options out there with better keyboards, touchpads, and built-in webcams.

But if you like the idea of a portable with a second screen for Discord chats, and YouTube hints as you make your way through the latest AAA title, the Zephyrus Duo 15 is easily the best option we’ve seen yet. And rather than just slapping on a screen, Asus used the space available below its ScreenPad to improve cooling considerably, for more reliable frame rates and quieter operation. Every dual-screen laptop we’ve looked at from Asus so far seems to be an improvement on the last. Hopefully the next iteration of the ROG Zephyrus Duo will feature mechanical keys and room for a webcam.

Today, Ampere announced plans to expand its Altra family of server processors with the Altra Max chip, which arriving by the end of the year with a whopping 128 CPU cores.

Similar to the Amazon Graviton2, the Ampere Altra is based on Arm’s Neoverse N1 (codename Ares) microarchitecture. TSMC carves the Altra for Ampere with its 7nm FinFET manufacturing process. The Altra family currently features 11 different models, however, the list and specifications are subject to change. 

Each core inside the Ampere Altra corresponds to a single thread and comes with its own cache. We’re looking at 65KB of L1I cache, 64KB of L1D cache and 1MB of L2 cache per core. 

As for the Altra line’s other attributes, the 7nm processors each support up to eight channels of DDR4-3200 ECC memory and a maximum capacity up to 4TB . For expansion, the Altra provides 128 lanes of high-speed PCIe 4.0 lanes per socket, but also support up to 192 PCIe 4.0 lanes in a 2P setup.

Ampere has one of the simplest CPU nomenclatures known to mankind. The Q, which stands for Quicksilver, is followed by the chip’s number of cores and then the clock speed. 

The Q80-33 is the current flagship of the Altra family. The processor delivers 80 cores up to 3.3 GHz within a 250W package. 

The Q80-33 will eventually pass the torch to the Altra Max, which will flaunt up to 128 cores. Ampere has confirmed that the Altra Max (codename Mystique) will be socket-compatible with current Altra offerings. We suspect that the the Altra Max will have an M prefix in its model names.

Ampere will sample the Altra Max in the fourth quarter of this year, and the processor should be available next year. 

The company is also firm on its commitment to roll out the 2nd Generation Altra processors (codename Siryn) in 2022. If the nomenclature remains the same, the Siryn should sport the S prefix. The next-generation processors will leverage TSMC’s 5nm process node.

Ampere expects to sample Siryn in the latter part of 2021 with a scheduled launch in 2022.

It seems 2020 is the year of incremental upgrades for Mobvoi smarwatches – the new TicWatch Pro (2020) didn’t change up much but upgraded the specs, and the newly-announced TicWatch C2+ tells much the same story.

The TicWatch C2+ is mostly the same as the TicWatch C2 smartwatch from 2018, but with two significant adjustments, and they might make this a more interesting smartwatch than the largely unchanged specs list would suggest.

Firstly, the TicWatch C2+ has 1GB of RAM, which is twice as much as the C2, and this should make scrolling the menus and accessing apps a lot smoother. This will be great for people who, like us, want to track workouts on multiple apps at once, for example, as it will greatly reduce the risk of one giving up the ghost and forgetting to track the exercise.

Secondly, the TicWatch C2+ ships with not one but two bands – a silicone one, likely better for workouts, and a leather one, that you’ll probably prefer for everyday use.

The ability to have one ‘exercise’ band and one ‘non-exercise’ strap that you can swap between is a surprisingly useful tool that lets you choose whichever is more useful for your current task and outfit, and it’s also a good way of keeping your lifestyle strap hygienic by not sweating over it during a workout.

We’ve always been fans of smartwatches that ship with multiple straps for this exact reason.

Other Mobvoi TicWatch C2+ specs

Mobvoi’s TicWatch C2+, like many of the company’s other wearables, will run on Google’s Wear OS platform, so users of Wear OS smartwatches will find it familiar to use. 

The design, like that of the TicWatch C, is a large stainless steel watch with two crowns and a 1.3-inch AMOLED screen. It comes in ‘Onyx’, ‘Platinum’ or ‘Rose Gold’ colors, the first and last of which are pictured.

Beyond what we’ve already said, the TicWatch C2+ smartwatch comes with a 400mAh battery that the company states should last you for a day to a day and a half.

Paired with the 1GB of RAM is the Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset, which isn’t the newest smartwatch processor from Qualcomm anymore (while it was when the TicWatch C2 was released) which is a shame, as it’s a bit dated now and lacks some of the battery saving tech of its successor.

The watch has all the fitness features you’d expect, like a heart rate sensor and plenty of fitness modes too.

Samsung is working on a follow up to last year’s Galaxy Fold that’s expected to launch this August , and while the Korean manufacturer was almost certainly going to shake things up with the design, given the issues it had with its first attempt at the Fold, the latest leak suggests quite the turnaround. 

A new collection of renders have surfaced, reportedly based on a patent filed by Samsung this week that seems to incorporate elements from the Galaxy Z Flip – which was blissfully unencumbered by any of the problems we saw with the Fold – and the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It’s certainly a very different aesthetic, but with two foldable smartphones under its belt already, the company may have decided that an inner screen is the winning design.

The renders were mocked up by @xleaks7 and Pigtou, and show off a long, thin display embedded in the outer shell, much like the Flip, that could have similar functionality – displaying notifications and allowing users to accept or reject incoming calls.

The patent suggest it’s not just the design that will be aping the Flip, with the Fold 2’s improved hinge mechanism allowing it to fold flush. That wasn’t the case with the original Fold and was one of the causes of its many problems. 

The inner screen appears to be sporting a notch, which is contrary to another rumour going around that alluded to a hole-punch camera and smaller bezels.

Pigtou has spotted what looks to be an alert slider – similar to the one found on OnePlus smartphones – which would make a welcome addition to the handset, allowing users to switch between preset profiles including Ring, Vibrate, and Silent without having to access any menus on their phones. If that’s what it is, we assume it’ll have similar functionality.

A slightly less exciting feature is the lack of cameras, which seems a bit jarring given Samsung’s recent offerings, but the foldable range is courting a different consumer, who’s less concerned about snapping pics, and more concerned with having a snazzy phone that folds in half.

As TechRadar points out, it’s possible that this particular patent is for the Galaxy Fold Lite (aka the Galaxy Fold Special Edition), which is rumoured for a July launch and will be sporting a smaller price tag than its 2019 counterpart. 

Either way, the design looks far less prone to niggles than the original Fold, and we love the Flip vibes. If it’s the cheaper Fold, there’s not long to wait for more news, as we head towards the end of June. 

So you’ve got one of the best gaming chairs, have you? Does it play soothing music and massage you while you game? Thought not. Though it probably also doesn’t cost $999 either… Still, Acer’s got you covered if you deem relieving your aching shoulders priceless, as from July you’ll be able to pick up the new Predator Gaming Chair x OSIM. At the moment, however, it’s looking like it’s a North America-only product, so some of us are going to have to stick with finding someone else to rub us down after a hard gaming session. 

Maybe it’s down to the OSIM co-branding, but the latest Predator chair doesn’t have much of the racing seat aesthetic Acer’s previous chairs have sported, which is certainly no bad thing. It is rocking the angular design of its Thronos forebear, however. That was the Batcave-looking beast that allowed you to mount three screens on an overhead boom. It was definitely a chair for the lonely millionaire anyways.

OSIM has been in the massage game since the 80s, and takes its name from founder, Mr. Ron Sim. “With the ‘O’ symbolising the globe.” No joke. The collaboration means that it’s not just a comfy place to rest your butt of an evening, it’s taking OSIM’s massage chair heritage and applying four discrete, and discreet, rollers to your aching spine. With a total of six different ways to adjust them, you can find the perfect position to hit your shoulders too.

And with a little mild contortion maybe your face as well. Though that’s probably not advised.

It’s all at the press of a button, with three preset programs and a pair of customisable massages too, so you could really dial into a problem area. Whether that’s mid-game or after, you can hit the recline lever, kick back, and drift off to the soothing motion of your very own gaming chair rub down.

There’s also a pair of Bluetooth speakers built into the headrest so you can really crank up the soothing whalesong for your chill time. But when you want to get back in the game Acer has also introduced Predator Shot, an energy drink that’s “full of vitamins and minerals… and lutein which is actually quite good for the eyes.”

At the company’s recent global press conference the two hosts ‘enjoyed’ the beverage live on air while introducing it for the first time. Neither one took a second hit.

A new build of the Dell XPS 13 has gone on sale with one major difference – it has dropped Windows 10 in favour of Ubuntu.

The new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition ditches Microsoft’s software in favour of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS preinstalled to work straight out of the box, giving developers a new ultra-portable and powerful laptop option.

The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is now available in North America and selected EMEA countries including UK and Ireland from today costing $1,049/around £899.

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

The launch is is the first system available on the market with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which was released in April 2020, with Canonical pledging to provide security updates to the system for up to 10 years.

This means it comes with all the latest Ubuntu and Linux features, including new and updated applications such as LibreOffice 6.4 and Thunderbird 68.7.0. There’s also GNOME 3.36 adding improved user workflow and performance enhancements, over 6,000 snaps from the Snap Store including Visual Studio Code, Slack, Spotify, Plex and the JetBrains portfolio, a new desktop Yaru default theme with light and dark modes.

Users will also be able to benefit from increased customisation options thanks to improved settings for Wi-Fi, wallpaper and application groups in the ‘Activities’ overview.

As for the hardware, not much has changed from the initial Dell XPS 13 build, but there’s only a few configurations of offer for now. That means you’ve got the choice of 10th generation Intel Core 10nm mobile processors and up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, making the Ubuntu edition less powerful in some respects compared to its Windows 10 sibling – although there is Wi-Fi 6 configuration available.

But you still get a light and slim design made from either CNC machined aluminium, aerospace-inspired carbon fibre or woven glass fibre, sporting a larger 16:10 display, fingerprint reader, edge-to-edge keyboard, with larger keycaps and a larger touchpad.

We’re big fans of the Dell XPS 13 here at TechRadar, with our review calling it, “an extremely luxurious device (with) a design that’s something to die for.” You can check out where it comes on our full list of the best laptops around today.

Back in March, AMD had said that while posting about graphics issues related to its Radeon hardware on Reddit is helpful, submitting an actual bug report directly to the company is the better course of action. Pretty soon, that will be easier to do right from within AMD’s Radeon Software utility.

As spotted by a user on Reddit (Ceremony64), there is a new bug reporting tool in the latest Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver package (version 20.20.01.05) for people who are participating in the Windows Insider program, who also are testing out the latest Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature.

“Yep, this is a new feature which we’ll share a little more about soon. Feel free to give the preview driver a try!,” a member of AMD’s Radeon Community Team responded.

Submitting bug reports to AMD is not new, nor is initiating the action from within the Radeon Software utility. However, instead of sending users to AMD’s website where certain system specifications need to be inputted manually by the user, the new built-in tool automatically collects the vitals it needs. The user still has to provide a description of the issue, but the streamlined process is far more convenient, and potentially more accurate.

This is a welcome move on AMD’s part. Black screen issues have been a particularly annoying occurrence for Radeon RX 5000 series owners over the last several months, which has kept AMD’s driver team busy—various black screen fixes have their way into a whole bunch of driver updates.

Hopefully this is something AMD will roll out soon, rather than waiting for the next big update to Windows 10 (which will arrive in the fall).

This beautiful-looking beast is the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, the very latest ultra-modern gaming laptop from the Republic of Gamers brand and the true successor to the original, ground-breaking Zephyrus machine. The GX550LXS has got the latest Nvidia graphics card, the latest Intel CPU, and a second, large touchscreen monitor built into the surprisingly svelte chassis. But I’m afraid I don’t really get it.

I mean, I do like it. The build quality is excellent—more effective than the first, mildly flimsy Zephyrus notebook—and the performance is pretty outstanding when you push it as far as it can go. But I really question why there’s a need for a gaming laptop to come with an integrated second screen.

To me it feels like it’s there purely because it can be. Asus’ ZenBook Duo and Pro Duo machines introduced the concept of the ScreenPad Plus in a laptop more designed for productivity than the gaming raison d’etre you’d expect for an ROG device. Drop Premiere windows or Photoshop toolbars onto the second screen and you have your main working display clutter-free and easily accessible. Sweet.

But when you’re gaming what’s that automatically raised second screen up to? Displaying CPU and GPU temps and frequencies, and maybe monitoring your OBS stream. Still, I’m not convinced a non-interactive display while gaming is enough of a win to make it necessary or even relevant. Though part of my problem with all this is how Windows deals with a second display, and that’s not Asus’ fault.

There is a whole lot of laptop here, but for around the $4,000 mark you’d sure hope so. The specs for this GX550LXS build give it an impressive base; there’s the 10th Gen Intel Comet Lake Core i9 10980HK processor for one. That’s an eight-core, 16-thread CPU with a peak clock speed of up to 5.3GHz. On one of those cores, anyway. Compared with the desktop Core i9 10900K though it does at least display more of a proclivity for actually running the chip at that frequency.

Multi-core it will happily run at 4.5GHz for most of the time, though under serious load, for extended periods of time, it will drop back to 3.8GHz to cope. The extra cooling afforded by the flip-up screen does allow the chip to hit peak performance for a relatively lengthy period of time, though that also doesn’t stop it getting super toasty.

On the graphics side you do get something super too, an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, to be precise. That’s the top mobile GPU de jour (forget Brexit, I’m all about the Franglais right now) and will deliver the ultimate in on-the-go gaming performance. With 3,072 CUDA cores it’s a beast of a GPU, and that shows in the Zephyrus Duo’s top benchmarks. Even though it’s a Max-Q Design version of the card, with the requisite lower base and boost clocks, the cooling options allow it to boost way beyond even the non Max-Q GPU’s rated specs when running in ‘Turbo’ mode.

On the system memory side, the Zephyrus Duo comes with 16GB of DDR4 onboard, with an additional SODIMM slot to drop in up to another 32GB of RAM. This version just comes with another 16GB stick, giving it 32GB RAM running in dual-channel mode at 3,200MHz.

For storage there are a pair of 1TB NVMe SSDs, arranged in RAID 0 to try and max out the solid state speeds. In a world where we’ve got fast PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 SSDs I’m not that convinced about the pace of this RAID 0 pairing, and should one drive fail at any point any operating system or information stored across them is toast…

And then there are the screens. 

Our sample is one of the 4K versions, sporting a 15.6-inch UHD IPS panel with G-Sync support, though it’s only capable of a 60Hz refresh rate. There is the option to have a Zephyrus Duo 15 with a 1080p main IPS display running at 300Hz if you want to dial into the gaming prowess of this Asus ROG machine. And honestly, that would be my preference. 

On the productivity focused Zenbook Pro Duo, yeah, go 4K and edit all that ultra HD content you’re working on full screen. When you’re gaming, however, you need to be able to take advantage of a high 1080p refresh rate—running at 4K the RTX 2080 Super can’t even deliver a consistent 60fps at a graphics preset that won’t make you sad you spent $4,000 on it. Sure, you can always run games at 1080p on the 4K screen, but that introduces a whole new heap of issues…

The ScreenPad Plus is a 14.09-inch IPS panel, but with a seriously letterbox aspect ratio delivering a native resolution of 3840 x 1100. It’s touchscreen too, which neither of the potential main displays are. It’s designed to be able to offer quick access to apps and screen setups too. 

The quick launcher button means you can boot specific software at the touch of a button, adjust settings, and capture screen configurations. Arrange your windows how you want them, click the capture button and it will store your layout so you can recreate it quickly without having to go through the whole dragging and resizing rigmarole. 

The upshot of adding in the ScreenPad Plus is that, like the original Zephyrus, the keyboard has been shifted to the front of the laptop and the trackpad to the right-hand side. Which does mean I keep slapping the spacebar trying to use the pad where my brain thinks it should be, and also means Asus ships it with a rubber wrist rest which sits on your desk to make it more comfortable to type on the chiclet keyboard. Sadly that’s not a practicable solution when you’re out and about.

As you’d expect, with all that’s at the disposal of the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, it’s a hell of a performer. The caveat to that is the peak performance is only accessible if you’re willing to forego any semblance of acceptable acoustics. The speakers may be good, but if you put this thing into ‘Turbo’ mode and enable its reliance purely on the dedicated graphics (disabling Optimus, enabling G-Sync, and ditching the potential power-saving integrated CPU graphics), then the cooling fans are going to drown out anything the speakers are capable of outputting.

In standard ‘Performance’ mode the Max-Q Design kicks in and you get gaming performance that slides in behind the Acer Predator Triton 500 and MSI GS66 notebooks. The necessary cooling and acoustic demands rein in the GPU from the peak clock speeds it can hit when unleashed in ‘Turbo’ mode, but if you’re happy to accept the audible assault from the required cooling you’ll see between 20% and 30% higher gaming frame rates than listed here in the benchmarks above. And that makes it head and shoulders above the other two machines.

These figures are all running at 1080p, however, when ideally you’d want to be gaming at your panel’s native resolution. But the demands of high-end 4K gaming are still beyond even the RTX 2080 Super inside the Asus Zephyrus Duo—in my testing, even with ‘Turbo’ mode enabled, it could still barely get near the 60fps we’d normally want for comfortable gaming. More often than not the performance was sitting around the 30fps mark.

You can obviously drop down your quality settings, but that kinda negates the point of spending around $4,000 on a gaming laptop…

As I alluded to before, dropping the resolution down also brings its own problems, mostly because Windows really doesn’t like you going outside the non-native specifications of your panel, especially when you have a pair of them connected to your PC. Ditching the Optimus settings and relying purely on discrete graphics can negate some of the issues, but the vagaries of scaling and dual monitor wielding can still crop up when you least expect it.

The OS doesn’t like it when you’re scaling your 4K panel (which you kind of have to as at 15-inches running at 3840 x 2160 makes things tiny) so if you try and run a game full screen at 1920 x 1080 instead it will sometimes just stick it in a window anyways.

If you preempt this and set scaling to just 100% then you can game at 1080p full screen, but actually using your touchscreen second panel will drag you out of the game and back to the Windows desktop. Because that’s just how dual monitors work. You can run games as borderless windows, so you could smoothly use the second screen at the same time without issue, but if your desktop is 4K then a borderless full screen window has to be the same res or it comes out super small, which is unplayable.

Aaaaaaaaand if you’re running the second panel at its native 3840 x 1100 resolution, and choose to run a full screen game at 1080p, so you can get decent frame rates, then anything you have set up on the panel will sometimes get messed around as Windows rejigs the offset resolutions. Got some monitoring software running on the second screen? Forget it, the vital information you’re looking to track will be shoved off half the screen and become inaccessible.

You can also preempt this by setting the second screen’s resolution down to 1920 x 550, but that’s such a paltry resolution you wouldn’t get enough screen real estate to make out anything useful anyway.

If you followed any of that screed… well done. If not, you just need to understand using the second screen is complicated, awkward, and of questionable benefit for gaming. Picking up the Zephyrus Duo with a 1080p 300Hz panel, however, might be of more use, especially if a few more devs follow suit with Techland and make the use of a second screen a plus point within their games.

There may otherwise be a niche sector of mobile gamers that would get a lot out of this multi-screen setup. Set up correctly, monitoring your gaming stream while playing might come in handy for a select few folk, should you not wish to use a more effective desktop rig instead. But for the vast majority of us PC gamers it’s a luxury of dubious utility.

Which all leaves me questioning why the Zephyrus Duo really exists under the Republic of Gamers brand. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an impressive beast of a gaming laptop. The cooling enables you to get unprecedented levels of gaming performance out of it—admittedly at the expense of your eardrums—and the build quality is typically excellent. But it’s super-expensive, and its layout and design is more immediately arresting than it is comfortably usable for a decent length of time.