Sommaire pour July 2022 de Maximum PC

TRADITIONALLY WITH AMD processors, there’s been a gap between the desktop and mobile markets. That gap is starting to close and AMD is bringing the latest 5000-series Zen 3 processors to Chromebooks with four new 15W chips. This will be quite a jump in performance from the last Chromebook chips, the Zen+ 3000-series from 2020. The top chip is the Ryzen 7 5825C, with an eight-core heart, a world-first for the Chromebook. It has a base clock of 2GHz and a maximum boost to 4.5GHz. Below this are the Ryzen 5 5625C and two Ryzen 3s, the 5425C and 5125C, with six, four, and two cores respectively. You also get improved Vega graphics and double the L3 cache of the previous generation. AMD estimates they will be between 67 and…

01 Case Open Well, would you look at that: it’s another case stripdown! As with the NZXT case, you can kick off this build by removing the two side panels (again, secured at the rear with thumbscrews) and also taking out the excess drive mounts and HDD cage. Inside that cage, you’ll find a handy box of case accessories that contains the screws and standoffs you’ll need for installing the motherboard, so put that to one side. You don’t need to remove any fans from the case for this build either; the front panel of the Corsair 4000D is also removable with simple push-pins, but we’d actually advise leaving it in place to protect the case fans. 02 Socket Rocket Intel CPUs are a little more fiddly to install than…

On 8th October 2014, when Lisa Su assumed leadership of AMD as CEO, the company’s stock price was running at $3.25. Just over six years later, on 29th November 2021, AMD’s stock hit $164. That’s an increase of 4,946 percent. So, who is the woman behind AMD’s revival? Born in 1969, Su came to the US from Taiwan aged just three. As a young girl, her statistician father and accountant mother schooled her in the way of numbers. By 10 years old, her engineering instincts had her rebuilding remote control cars and it seemed her destiny to enroll, as she did, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 1986 to study electrical engineering. From the very start, those student days set the tone for her future…

NOWHERE DOES tribalism exist to quite the same extent as in the gaming world. Whether it was Atari vs Commodore in the 1980s, Nintendo vs Sega in the 1990s, or Xbox vs PlayStation in the 2000s, generations of gamers have spent decades pledging their allegiance and going to war over their platforms of choice, whether that’s in the playground or on forums like Reddit. In the last few years, though, that rivalry has settled into more of a “can’t we just all get along?” kind of vibe. That’s thanks to the evolving strategies of platform holders such as Xbox and PlayStation, who rather than preciously guarding their crown jewels like Halo and God of War as they once did, are now happy to release them on PC, sometimes day-and-date with their lead…

Arguably the biggest technological leap forward in this generation of consoles—possibly even more so than the graphics—was the forward-looking adoption of PCIe 4.0 storage. Still relatively rare on PCs, PCIe 4.0 drives offer incredibly fast read and write speeds that essentially double those found on the last-generation 3.0 drives. The result is that games can load into memory extremely quickly, meaning that loading screens and those areas meant to hide loading times (think the elevators in Mass Effect) become a thing of the past. The game that exemplifies the benefits of PCIe 4.0 storage is Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, where the protagonists are able to snap between different worlds at the press of a button in a way that is really quite impressive, given the detail present in those worlds.…

If you prefer graphics over gameplay, there’s a vulgar term for you that we won’t use here. But plenty of people do care about pixel counts, frame rates, and fancy effects—enough people to drive an entire industry of GPU manufacturers who are happy to sell you cards for over $1,000 that will support 4K, 240 frames per second, and graphics so real you almost feel like you’re there. Games consoles can offer a whole host of effects to look like they’re hitting 4K, but the truth is most of them aren’t even hitting 1440p native resolution. If you do want the prettiest graphics, there really is no other way to go but PC. Ray tracing is now on its fourth generation on the PC, and while it’s still a performance…

If the goal is to create a machine that can show human levels of intelligence, simulating a human brain in real-time would be a good target. How much computational power does the human brain have, and how powerful would a supercomputer need to be to equal a human? It’s a conundrum that has been researched and debated for decades. Neural networks aren’t new, and they have shown up in various forms over the years, like Terminator’s Skynet. Back in the early 1980s, some thought it would only take a hundred gigaflops, or perhaps a few teraflops, to achieve artificial intelligence. For example, see Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy, specifically the first novel Software, written in 1982, where an early ‘shackled’ AI ran at 100 gigaflops. Today, such estimates seem quaint, though incidentally,…

While scientific research using FP64 remains important, Nvidia is betting big on the increasing importance of AI workloads. Its current Selene supercomputer already ranks among the top ten fastest for traditional workloads, but in AI performance Nvidia says it can do 2.8 exaflops. If Selene sounds potent, just wait for the upcoming Eos supercomputer, built on Nvidia’s latest Hopper H100 processor. Eos will consist of 18 DGX H100 SuperPODs, each with 32 DGX H100 servers. The servers will be powered by dual AMD EPYC processors, but Nvidia doesn’t even make a point of mentioning what CPUs are used as they are child’s play compared to the GPU hardware. There are eight H100 GPUs per DGX H100 or 4,608 GPUs in total. Eos looks pretty tame in terms of its traditional supercomputer…

TIP OF THE MONTH AUTO GPU OVERCLOCKING If you’re running an Nvidia RTX card and have the GeForce Experience app, then there is a somewhat hidden feature that you may have missed. In the settings, make sure that the in-game overlay is turned on and hit ‘ALT + Z’ to open it up. Then click performance and enable automatic tuning. If you haven’t already overclocked your GPU, this should help. MAKE – USE – CREATE 64 Tips for mastering Windows 11 Command Line 68 Machine of the Month: Apple Macintosh II 70 Add a splash of neon light to your photos in GIMP ENTERING THE LIQUIDCOOLING LOOP My former colleague and Maximum PC editor, Zak Storey, was back on his old stomping ground last month to help show me the…

YOU’LL NEED THIS GIMP 2.1 www.gimp.org OS: Windows 7 or newer THERE ARE AN ALMOST INFINITE range of uses for image editing applications. For many, the ability to make minor edits such as adding filters, color adaptations, and the odd manipulation is sufficient reason to invest in some software. On the other hand, a more powerful application, such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, gives the user more scope to edit imagery and create pieces of artwork. Photoshop is now on a subscription-based payment plan, which may be a financial barrier to the beginner or more casual user, however, GIMP is not only free, but it’s a great starting point to get into more advanced areas of image manipulation. Test the waters and see whether this is a hobby you enjoy—and…

LAST MONTH, we got Nvidia’s new halo GPU, the RTX 3090 Ti. This month, AMD tries to respond with an upgraded RX 6950 XT—though we’re using the term ‘upgraded’ loosely here. Fundamentally, the RX 6950 XT uses the same Navi 21 GPU we’ve had for around 18 months and, since the RX 6900 XT was fully enabled with 80 CUs, the only improvements come via increased clockspeeds. As with the RTX 3090 Ti, higher clocks also mean increased power limits and the MSI Gaming X Trio we received for review takes things even further. We reviewed ASRock’s heavilyoverclocked RX 6900 XT Formula in our January issue and one of our complaints was that, for all the beefed-up cooling, factory overclock, and increased power consumption, the card was stuck with the…

CHOOSING A MONITOR is a huge part of any PC setup. You could spend a fortune, but still end up with something not fit for purpose. So a monitor that ticks a multitude of boxes at a decent price tag seems like a no-brainer. BenQ is a big name in the screen game, but it’s less known for its gaming monitors. Its Mobiuz lineup aims to change that and, certainly on paper, the EX2710R looks promising. Curved monitors are something of an acquired taste, especially after the short-lived history of curved TVs. On smaller displays, a curve makes more sense as it will typically be used by just one person sitting directly in front of the screen, rather than the whole family jostling to position themselves on the sofa. The…

THE LEGO SERIES has been hard to avoid since the first Star Wars game in 2005. Also including Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Potter, Marvel, DC, Pirates… Lego has cherry-picked the jewels in the crown of modern entertainment, converted them into plastic blocks, and now returns to where it all began. This isn't a franchise you’d expect to give up any new details or meanings after over 40 years but in Lego guise, it gains the charm Lucas always stretched for with his droids, porgs, and jizz music, but never quite grasped. The little moments are everywhere, from the beginning where a space traffic stop leads to the hiding of some suspicious Evil Plans, while the Death Star levels show what stormtroopers do on their days off—and we weren’t expecting tai…

WE NOW HAVE a new best ever Radeon graphics card, the RX 6950 XT. This three-fan monster has, AMD says, “been engineered to deliver the ultimate 4K gaming experience”. Basically a refreshed 6900 XT, it is built around the same 7nm Navi21 GPU with 5,120 Stream Processors and 80 Compute Units. It is clocked faster though, with the game clock jumping from 2,015MHz to 2,100MHz, a four percent bump. The maximum boost speed gains 60Hz to 2,310MHz and although memory is the same, 16GB of GDDR6, it’s now 18Gbps rather than 16Gbps, while memory bandwidth rises from 512GB/s to 576GB/s. AMD quotes the ‘effective’ memory bandwidth using the Infinity cache, now 1,793.5GB/s, up from 1,664.2GB/s. That’s some useful extra bandwidth. All of these changes have pushed the power consumption to…

TRIUMPHS PLASTIC-EATING ENZYMES Researchers at Texas University found proteins that break down plastic. ‘Depolymerisation’ can turn landfill into useful material. EARLY APPLE TO AUCTION A rare ‘first batch’ Apple-1 is to be auctioned. Last time a similar rig was sold, it fetched $500K. IT’S ALIVE Researchers studying ancient rock salt think some microbes inside the 830million-year-old crystals might be alive. TRAGEDIES CRASHED FOR LIKES The FAA ruled that YouTuber Trevor Jacob crashed his light aircraft for content and took away his pilot certificate. 8K FLOPS Content is king, which is why 8K TVs made up just 0.15 percent of worldwide sales last year. STABLECOIN ISN’T Cryptocurrency Terra Luna is almost worthless after a $45bn crash. The stablecoin to which it was coupled lost its dollar peg.…

THE MODERN GPU IS A WONDER, which unfortunately has made it an ideal chip for mining cryptocurrencies. So with many of our best cards being snatched away and put to work in sheds to mine cryptocurrency, Nvidia implemented a Lite Hash Rate system for most of its 30-series cards last year. This throttled the GPU by 50 percent if it detected it was being used in Ethereum mining. However, it wasn’t long before work started to break this, and now the mining outfit NiceHash (a broker of hash power and a crypto exchange) has announced that it has managed to circumvent the limitation, although it hasn’t unlocked every card yet. So, you can now use your racks of Nvidia cards to mine Ethereum at full speed again. It’s no surprise…

> Upgrading NAS > HDMI without wires > Dual-boot and EFI NAS upgrade query I’m looking at buying or building a NAS. In the past, I set up and used WD Reds in a five-disk Synology (DS1518+), configured in a Synology RAID setup. I was happy, but that was six years ago, and the technology has changed a lot. It would be great if you could do a custom NAS build or a comparison shootout between prebuilt units—actually, both would be ideal. I need a solution that provides scalability, reliability, and easy usability, especially for unskilled users. This would be for personal data storage and backup and not for an enterprise application, however, I would still desire good throughput speeds. Would spinning disks still be the way to go? SATA…

01 Stripped Back As always, we start our build by stripping down the case to prep for assembly. We’ll give you a super exciting sneak peek here: all three of our builds are going to start with this step. The NZXT H510 is a nice easy case for building in, so we don’t anticipate any trouble here. Remove the two side panels by loosening the thumbscrews at the rear and lifting them off (the glass panel latches to the top of the PSU shroud on the bottom edge), but leave the fans in place; we don’t need to remove them for this build. You can, however, remove the SSD drive mounts and the HDD cage, as we won’t be using them and it will be beneficial to free up the…

It’s well known that AMD struggled in the mid-2010s. But just how bad did the cash crisis get? As the 2000s came to a close, AMD’s business was turning sour. Profits of $360 million in 2010 and $491 million in 2011 flipped into a monumental loss of $1.18 billion in 2012. In 2013, the bleeding subsided somewhat with a loss of $83 million, only for the losses to balloon once again to $403 million in 2014, $660 million in 2015, and $497 million in 2016. That’s a total of $2.8 billion leaving the building over the course of six years. As for how close AMD came to folding, its cash balance of $1.9 billion at the end of 2011 had shrunk to just $716 million by mid-2016. Clearly, that could…

With hardware, the whole PC vs console debate at first appears to be unfair, given that you can buy a GPU such as the RTX 3090 Ti ($1,999) or RX 6950 XT ($1,099) that blows any games console out of the water when it comes to raw performance. Indeed, the RX 6800 XT ($649) and RTX 3080 ($699) both offer PS5 and Xbox Series X-beating performance on paper, although good luck finding either card for those prices at retail right now. That’s just the situation today—later this year, AMD is set to introduce its first RDNA 3-based graphics cards, which should offer a generational leap forward in performance. When that happens, you can expect performance and feature sets that leave the RDNA 2-based games consoles firmly in the dust. The…

If PC owners get four to five years out of a machine, we tend to consider that pretty good going. However, that pales in comparison to how long the last couple of console generations have lasted—there were over seven years between this current generation of Xbox/PlayStation and the previous one. What’s more, games are still being released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One—FIFA and Madden games will probably be released for many years to come. What’s more, the games that came out in the dying years of a console tend to be some of the most technically accomplished, because developers have been programming for them for years and have learned to wring every last drop of performance out of them. Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us: Part…

Not everyone wants to be a video star with their own YouTube or Twitch channel, but the latest generation of consoles and PCs have made it easier than ever to go live. Both the Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles make it easy to post gameplay online, and while you won’t challenge a dedicated streamer in terms of a professional-looking stream, you can capture yourself and your game using Sony’s HD Camera on PlayStation, while Xbox supports many different USB webcams, which can be a cheaper option. On PC, the world is your oyster, and you can use a host of software including XSplit and OBS Studio, which we compared in the June 2022 issue, as well as a dedicated PC if you want to run things smoothly. However, Nvidia and…

HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED at your fancy-pants 4K PC monitor and thought ‘gee, this is great, I wish my television was like this’? Well, Acer has you covered. The Predator CG7 is billed as a ‘large format gaming monitor’, but let’s be honest: this is a gaming TV, and we love it. It even comes with a remote—bet your monitor doesn’t have that. A 42.5-inch 4K panel packed with gaming-led features and wrapped up in a slick Predator-branded chassis, the CG7 is somewhat unique as a huge gaming monitor. Most PC monitors greater than 40-inches are ultrawide, curved affairs rather than having a conventional widescreen aspect ratio. Naturally, framerates and responsiveness are key for gaming, so this 4K screen offers a clean 144Hz refresh rate in its high-end model (or…

AMD’s EPYC processors packing up to 64 cores have proven to be extremely potent and popular within the server community of late. With its Milan CPUs and Aldebaran (MI250X) GPUs, AMD’s lineup was impressive enough to garner two exascale contracts for Frontier and El Capitan. Frontier is already in the process of coming online and features Zen 3-based CPUs with MI250X GPUs, while El Capitan is slated to use Zen 4-derived CPUs and potentially a future AMD Instinct GPU—we say ‘potentially’ because it’s not clear if AMD will have anything better than MI250X available any time soon. Exact details of the two supercomputers aren’t available, though Frontier is supposed to have over 100 cabinets or ‘pods’ if you’re comparing to Nvidia. Frontier will use Shasta blades with a single 64-core ‘Trento’…

The advent of modern GPUs has radically altered the supercomputer landscape. Video cards used to focus primarily on spitting out pixels to your display, but when programmability entered the picture, it was only a matter of time before that computational power would come to be put to other uses. CPUs remain important for general-purpose workloads, running the operating system, browsing the web, and even powering much of the logic behind the graphics in our games. Trying to make a computer where everything ran on the GPU would knock performance in certain tasks back to the proverbial stone age. But if you want to do lots of similar calculations in parallel, that’s precisely what a GPU does for graphics. The 3D game worlds of our day can include millions of polygons. Turning…

YOU’LL NEED THIS ANY WINDOWS PC WILL DO Windows 10 release 20H1 (or later) to use the Windows Terminal; otherwise, tips should all work in the old Command Prompt console. ONCE UPON A TIME, Microsoft’s operating system, MS-DOS, was solely based on the Command Prompt. It remained a fundamental part of early versions of Windows but, these days, you have to dig deep to find it. Not only has it been supplanted by the more user-friendly Windows desktop, it’s not even the only command-line shell available. In addition to adding support for Linux, Microsoft has also unveiled PowerShell. Despite this, however, the Command Prompt remains a valuable tool in anyone’s armory. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to focus on using the Command Prompt in Windows itself to…

IF YOU’VE NEVER been to at elevision manufacturer briefing, consider yourself lucky. They spend hours trying to sell features you don’t need, running flattering demonstrations against rival panels, and bigging up those picture processing modes we all turn off as soon as we unbox the TV. I recently went to an event hosted by Samsung, which began with some flogging of the 8K dead horse—8K displays account for just 0.15 percent of TV sales worldwide (see News, page 9). Thankfully, it soon moved on to something people do care about—gaming, and specifically PC gaming. There was a demo of futuristic racer Redout using Samsung’s own HDR10+ standard, thanks to beta drivers provided by Nvidia. Like Dolby Vision, HDR10+ allows content makers to add dynamic metadata to the picture and, as…

WE HAVE TO ADMIT that, here at Maximum PC, we welcome products with the word ‘mini’ in their name. Whether that’s down to the quirky nature and sheer novelty value of diminutive devices, or whether it’s the prospect of small pieces of tech that take up little desktop real estate, we always have a soft spot for compact products. Just large enough to fit in the palm of your hand, Geekom’s Mini IT8 PC clearly fits into this bracket. There are some decent specs on offer—the version we have on test is the top-of-the-line model, which provides larger storage capacity and increased RAM over the other models in the lineup. With plenty of creative potential for some unique setups, including as an unusual laptop replacement, the Mini IT8 should make…

TRADITION DICTATES that PC manufacturers sell different products for different purposes. Creative type? Get a Macbook Pro. Gamer? Try the Razer Blade 15. However, as we’ve all become multi-hyphenates—gamers who livestream, influencers who photo edit, office workers who side-hustle—we’ve needed machines that can adapt and keep up. MSI recognizes this trend, as its MPG Artymis 273CQRX-QD is a gaming monitor that pulls double-duty as a creative display. That means it boasts gamer-friendly features such as a high refresh rate and adaptive sync, but also has 95 percent DCI-P3 color space coverage and USB-C display support. Often when companies try to please everyone, they end up appealing to no one, but that thankfully isn’t the case here. Yes, there are compromises, but these are mostly on the creative side. The VA…

WHILE THE WORLD’S leading technology companies are finally vowing to put an end to passwords by using a smartphone-based PIN, fingerprint, or face unlock (see News, page 10), passwords remain essential for now. Google Chrome and Windows Credential Manager will perform the basics of remembering your passwords and suggesting secure logins, but that quickly becomes a problem if you frequently switch platforms or software. If you use more than one device, as most people do, then a password manager is the answer, as it works across platforms and syncs between devices. The result is that you never have to remember a password again, other than the one you use to access the password manager, of course. Having had the password manager conversation with friends at dinner parties (yes, we are…

THIS SUMMER, we’ll see Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 40-series, armed with the first Ada Lovelace GPUs. The earlier than expected date means it won’t launch at the same time as AMD’s RDNA 3 cards, which no doubt suits both companies. The new GPUs range from the 18,432 core AD102 to the more modest 3,072 core AD107. Details are sketchy, but the first three cards will be top-tier ones, including the RTX 4090 with the AD102 and 24GB of GDD6X: the same memory configuration as the current RTX 3090 Ti (above). Power consumption could be 450W, not as insane as earlier rumors. We’re promised an epic performance, with up to twice the horsepower of the RTX 3090. The RTX 4080 and 4070 will use their own GPU dies, rather than cut-down ones,…

INTEL HOLDS LOTS of events, one of which is Intel Vision, where it shows off its latest wares. This year’s event brought HX versions of the Alder Lake ‘extreme performance’ mobile chips, which join the U, P, and H versions. These are the most powerful mobile processors Intel has made and the first to offer 16 cores in a laptop. HX chips use Ball Grid Array packaging and look like thin desktop chips. If you want to do away with your desktop and have a high-end laptop instead, these are the chips—Intel is using words like ‘desktop-caliber’ and ‘mobile workstations’. Initially, there are seven new chips, the top one is the Core i9-12950HK, which has 16-cores, including eight dual-thread performance cores and eight efficiency cores. It has a base clock…

ESPORTS PLAYERS USUALLY demand wired mice for reduced latency and improved responsiveness, but for everyone else, there are wireless mice. If you spend hours at your computer working or gaming, there’s nothing quite like the luxury of being able to navigate unencumbered by a mouse cable. Our selection this month covers the best mice for comfort, features, and style, all across a range of budgets. Whether you’re looking for your first wireless mouse or an upgrade, these are the ones to check out. 5 HYPERX PULSEFIRE DART HyperX has a track record of making great products at a competitive price, a tradition we’re pleased to see has been continued with the Pulsefire Dart. It features one of the simpler designs of the mice on test here but it feels great to…

WE’RE FINALLY DOING IT, folks. For years now, we’ve been running the same set of benchmarking tests in our build tutorials and system reviews, and enough is enough. It’s time for new numbers; specifically, the numbers that comprise our system zero-points for testing. No more will we be comparing shiny new gaming PCs to old hardware and testing years-old games. No, it’s time to update our benchmarking process and make it relevant for 2022. We’ve actually wanted to do this for a while, but such a mammoth project takes time, and we’ve always had other pressing concerns. But no longer! Sharp-eyed readers will no doubt already be aware that we have three sets of system benchmark zero-points, each targeted at a different resolution for gaming and general performance. That means we need…

MAKE A NOTE of the date, 22nd February 2022. That was the day AMD’s market capitalization—essentially, its overall value as a company—surpassed Intel’s for the first time. It was nothing less than a spectacular reversal in fortunes for a company that had been on the very brink just a few years earlier. Forget wondering whether AMD can even survive, it is now an entirely legitimate question to ask whether AMD can overturn Intel’s dominance of the PC. Truly, AMD has become the pretender to Intel’s throne. Of course, stock prices don’t tell you everything about a company’s real-world proportions. Intel still has a 75 percent market share for PC processors and generates massively more revenue and profit than AMD. But the notion of AMD as the usurper of Intel’s position as…

You have to give Microsoft credit, the company went all-in on online gaming with its Xbox Live service and, while it was the first premium online offering of its kind, it revolutionized multiplayer gaming across both console and PC. (Yes, we know Sega got there first on the Dreamcast, but Xbox Live was the real deal). It was also a canny business move—PlayStation responded with PS Plus and monthly games and Xbox replied with Game Pass, which has now delivered on the long-promised ‘Netflix of games’. Today, Xbox and PlayStation’s online offerings are great from a functionality perspective, but expensive if all you want to do is play with your friends. PS Plus Essential and Xbox Live Gold are both $10 per month or $60 per year, effectively priced highly…

One of the benefits of closed console systems is that developers know what they’re aiming for, and optimize accordingly. But often the technology can’t quite keep up, so both Sony and Microsoft released upgraded “Pro” versions of the last-generation PS4 and Xbox One consoles, to take advantage of people who wanted more power. On PC, that’s not a problem, as you can just swap out an aging GPU or CPU, or add more RAM and storage as needed. You may have to change your motherboard if you’re making a generational change, but it’s all perfectly doable. On consoles, the one big thing you can change is the storage, which is kind of a necessity given the small amount of storage offered by Sony and Microsoft. We have to commend Sony…

SUPERCOMPUTERS are at the heart of modern life, powering many things that we take for granted. Imagine trying to find your way around an unfamiliar city without the help of Google Maps or Waze? And where would we get immediate answers to trivia questions without the likes of Alexa, Google, and Siri? Weather forecasts are no longer as accurate as staring into a crystal ball; disease and pharmaceutical research have sped up by orders of magnitude; we can get real-time translation of conversations in a different language, and we’re rapidly approaching the day when most vehicles on the roads will drive themselves. What sort of hardware will power our future supercomputer overlords, and who are the biggest competitors in the race to exascale computing? Join us as we don our…

The Aurora supercomputer has a lengthy history. Originally announced in 2015 and slated to launch in 2018 with a target performance of 180 petaflops, it was later delayed to 2021 and was to be the first exascale computer. Designed and built by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory, Intel’s difficulties with the transition to 10nm lithography ultimately contributed to even more delays. The current schedule calls for Aurora to go online sometime this year, though the AMD-powered Frontier is now expected to be the first exascale supercomputer. Given Frontier isn’t expected to be fully available to researchers until early 2023, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Aurora finally debut next year. In the meantime, Intel has upgraded the target performance for Aurora, and it’s now supposed to exceed a…

Google is another company that has put a huge effort into AI research. Its search engine continues to be the best in the world, and its DeepMind technologies have created several impressive tools, including AlphaGo, the first AI to beat one of the best humans at Go—a feat some thought would be impossible for the foreseeable future. In 2016, AlphaGo took down one of the top players, who retired in 2019 declaring AI to be “an entity that cannot be defeated.” Google created its first custom Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) back in 2015, with a performance of 23 teraops — Google appears to have focused on INT8 rather than floating-point formats, so it’s teraops instead of teraflops. It used the TPU internally in its data centers to power AlphaGo, AlphaZero, parsing…

1. STARTUP Select this to set what happens when opening Windows Terminal. Choose the Command Prompt under Default profile to launch that by default. 2. INTERACTION Flick the ‘Automatically copy selection to clipboard’ switch to On to speed up copy and paste using the Windows Terminal. If copying rectangular selections, flick ‘Remove trailing white-space…’ to On too. 3. ACTIONS Use this dialog to view and change existing keyboard shortcuts, plus set new ones from dozens of available commands and options. 4. GENERAL TAB The options here include allowing you to rename the Command Prompt tab. You can also set a different starting directory instead of your personal user folder. 5. APPEARANCE TAB Change the color scheme, font (family, weight, and size), cursor type, and even set a background, among other…

YOU’LL NEED THIS A COPY OF MINI VMAC Plus working system ROM and OS image. https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/download.html ALTHOUGH THE MACINTOSH II is rarely mentioned in retro computing circles, it introduced monumental changes, bringing color graphics, a shift towards a 32-bit architecture, and multi-monitor support. For the retro enthusiast, the Macintosh II line has a sizeable library of excellent applications and multimedia, industry-leading desktop publishing software, as well as cult favorites in gaming and “edutainment”. 1 DEVELOPMENT When the original Macintosh launched in 1984, despite its elegant styling and interface, the computing world was disappointed to find few opportunities for hardware expansion, and graphics only in black and white. >> In 1985, engineers Michael Dhuey and Brian Berkeley began work on a sequel, without the permission or knowledge of Steve Jobs, who…

LENOVO’S LAPTOP RANGE just keeps getting better. Expanding on the existing selection of Legion 5 and 7 models comes the S7, shorthand for ‘Slim 7’. And it is pretty slim, measuring in at barely more than half an inch thick with the lid closed and weighing just over 4lbs, a far cry from the average 15.5-inch gaming laptop. Priced at $1,770 (although that’s just the model we were sent for review; both cheaper and more expensive SKUs are available, with a customization page on Lenovo’s website allowing you to build your perfect S7), it sits just above the budget gaming laptop sphere, and it’s not hard to see why. Immediately upon unboxing and booting up the S7, it’s clear that this is a product designed with serious quality in mind.…

‘CHROMEBOOK’ HAS become an increasingly nebulous term as of late. Where it once simply referred to a cheap, basic laptop running ChromeOS, the definition now encompasses a broad variety of more powerful productivity laptops, tablets, and 2-in-1s. The x2 11 from HP occupies the latter category, a laptop alternative that leverages a detachable keyboard to serve as the perfect hybrid platform. The first thing we noticed about the x2 11 is its display; this dinky hybrid tablet boasts an 11-inch 1440p LED screen with a maximum 400 nits of brightness and 100 percent sRGB color reproduction. It’s bright and vibrant, comfortably beating the 1080p displays of other Chromebooks despite its smaller size. It’s an edge-toedge glass panel, but it sits just inside the metal frame of the tablet and so…

RENOWNED CASE GIANT NZXT has been attempting to gain a foothold in the wider peripheral market. In our last issue (June 2022), we tested the company’s Capsule microphone, which proved to be a good start for expansion into areas where its name is less well-known. The company’s latest products are a keyboard and mouse combo, so it seems like a good opportunity to test both out in this issue, starting with the Function keyboard here, the MiniTKL variant, which is the smallest of the bunch. NZXT has also released a full-sized and a tenkeyless (TKL) option, so should you go for NZXT’s first keyboard or opt for a name with more experience in this field? If compact peripherals appeal to you then this MiniTKL form should be right up your…