Thread: Anandtech News

Right on schedule, at last week’s World Wide Developers Conference Apple announced the next iteration of their desktop OS, OS X. Version 10.11, dubbed El Capitan, is the latest in Apple’s string of yearly OS updates. And with this now being the 3^rd iteration of the company’s initiative to offer free desktop operating system upgrades, it’s safe to say that the company has settled into what is the new norm.
Meanwhile released alongside the pagentry of WWDC was the very first developer beta of El Capitan. Typically we would see Apple keep the OS under wraps from the public for another month or two until the public beta opens, however this year Apple is seemingly trying something a little different when it comes to engaging consumers and the press during the developer beta period. Rather than clamming up entirely – developers are under non-disclosure agreements – Apple invited us to take a first look at the beta OS, loaning us a 2015 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro with OS X El Capitan preloaded. To that end, today we are taking our first look at El Capitan, checking out the major new features of the OS and experiencing first-hand the software Apple is putting together for later this year.

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Today is the first official day of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, otherwise known as E3, and the Xbox team was on-stage to deliver plenty of news surrounding Xbox. It would be fair to say that in the past the Xbox team focused too much on the non-gaming aspects of the Xbox One, but today’s media briefing was all about gaming. There was quite a bit announced today, so let’s go over the highlights.

Likely the biggest news of the day was the announcement that Xbox 360 games will be playable on the Xbox One. Microsoft has built an Xbox 360 software emulator which can be launched in order to play titles from their older console. This is not vaporware either; the emulator is available starting today for people in the Xbox preview program. Currently the selection of titles is limited and more will be converted before launch, with the Xbox team targeting a holiday release for this feature. The feature will work with games that have been purchased digitally or on disc, and if you have the disc, you have to insert it, and the system will download the files to the Xbox One. I assume the disc will need to be in the device in order to play as well. So although this is an emulator, clearly Microsoft is doing a lot of work on converting the code to run quickly on the much different hardware in the Xbox One, which is x86 based, as compared to the Xbox 360’s PowerPC architecture. Fans can vote on Xbox Feedback which games they want to see converted first, and more will be added over time.
In addition, the Microsoft has created the Xbox Elite Controller, which offers up a lot more options and customizations than the current Xbox Controller. Players can choose among six thumbsticks, with different shapes, sizes, and heights, to tailor the controller to your own gaming style. The D-Pad is also new, with a unique faceted face which should help in some games, or you can switch to the traditional D-Pad if the title prefers the accuracy of that pad.

There are four slots on the back for interchangeable paddles, giving you access to more commands with more fingers. There are also hair trigger locks which reduce the movement necessary to activate the triggers, which are valuable in a game where the full range of trigger motion is not necessary. It can quickly be deactivated to get the full range back.

There will be an Xbox Accessories App on both the Xbox One and Windows 10 to let you customize the experience and map buttons, and you can save up to 255 controller profiles for custom settings on many games. You can even load two profiles and switch between them on the fly.
The thumbsticks are stainless steel, and there are low-friction reinforced rings around the thumbsticks for a long life. The new controller will retail for $149.99 and has availability in October.
Moving on from the new controller (which it appears I need to get) Microsoft also reiterated its new partnership with Oculus for the Rift launch, but in addition they are also partnering with Valve VR. This is very interesting since Valve seems to have had a cool relationship with Microsoft over the last couple of years, and it is great to see them working together on Virtual Reality. Microsoft also showed off their own Augmented Reality device, the Hololens, with a custom version of Minecraft which players can explore and build with using Microsoft’s own headset.

There was also plenty of software talk today as well, since any piece of hardware needs quality software. Microsoft is adding a new feature to allow players to try out games while they are being developed with the launch of the Xbox Game Preview pilot program. This is a lot like Steam’s Early Access. Microsoft was keen to point out that they have a lot of indie developers on-board.

Last, but certainly not least, is the list of upcoming Xbox titles, some of which are exclusive to Xbox and some of which will have a limited exclusivity window. Exclusive games to Xbox include Ashen, Cuphead, Fable Legends, Forza Motorsport 6, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Gears of War 4, Gigantic, Halo 5: Guardians, Rare Replay (a collection of old Rare games), ReCore, and Sea Thieves, with Beyond Eyes, Tacoma, and the much anticipated Rise of the Tomb Raider being timed exclusives on the platform.

Microsoft has not had the success with the Xbox One, compared in relative terms at least, to the Xbox 360, and with this briefing being exclusively focused on gaming, and the introduction of a special controller for the enthusiast crowd, Microsoft is trying to win back some mindshare. Only time will tell if they are successful.

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Today HTC has announced a pilot program of sorts for the display of native ads within BlinkFeed, their news and content aggregation application. Since Blinkfeed displays right on a user's app launcher, it's a natural place for HTC to try and put advertising, although users may not feel as enthusiastic about the changes as HTC does.
According to HTC's blog post about the changes, the display of native ads in BlinkFeed will initially be limited to users in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Taiwan, and China. The promotions will be for sponsored apps from Yahoo, Twitter, and Appia, as well as HTC's own products. HTC will be providing an option to opt-out of these advertisements, and with this being a pilot program there's no indication if or when it will ever make its way to other markets.

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The SSD industry has been talking about TLC NAND for over three years now. We published our first post, Understanding TLC NAND, back in early 2012, but in three years we have actually seen very little TLC NAND making it to the SSD market. Samsung was an early adopter back in 2012, but aside from it and SanDisk we've yet to see any TLC drives enter the market. Silicon Motion's SM2256 is set to change that because it's the first commercially available controller and firmware combo with TLC support, which will enable companies like Kingston, ADATA and the like to use TLC NAND in their SSDs. We got an early reference design sample from Silicon Motion in for testing to see how the SM2256 stacks up with the competition, so read on to see our preliminary thoughts on the new controller.

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Briefly announced and discussed during AMD’s 2015 GPU product presentation yesterday morning was AMD’s forthcoming dual Fiji video card. The near-obligatory counterpart to the just-announced Radeon R9 Fury X, the unnamed dual-GPU card will be taking things one step further with a pair of Fiji GPUs on a single card.
Meanwhile as part of yesterday evening’s AMD-sponsored PC Gaming Show, CEO Dr. Lisa Su took the stage for a few minutes to show off AMD’s recently announced Fury products. And at the end this included the first public showcase of the still in development dual-GPU card.

There’s not too much to say right now since we don’t know its specifications, but of course for the moment AMD is focusing on size. With 4GB of VRAM for each GPU on-package via HBM technology, AMD has been able to design a dual-GPU card that’s shorter and simpler than their previous dual-GPU cards like the R9 295X2 and HD 7990, saving space that would have otherwise been occupied by GDDR5 memory modules and the associated VRMs.
Meanwhile on the card we can see that it uses a PLX 8747 to provide PCIe switching between the two GPUs and the shared PCIe bus. And on the power delivery side the card uses a pair of 8-pin PCIe power sockets. At this time no further details are being released, so we’ll have to see what AMD is up to later on once they’re ready to reveal more about the video card.
Gallery: AMD Shows Off Dual-GPU Fiji Card At PC Gaming Show





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The venerable Kindle is one of my favorite tech devices. I owned the Kindle 3, but the obvious shortcoming was the lack of lighting, forcing me to use a case with a clumsy light attached. The minute the original Kindle Paperwhite was announced, I quickly ordered a couple of them and they are to this day one of my favorite pieces of technology. The Paperwhite added a “light guide” layer to the display to evenly distribute the light from the LEDs found in the bezel, which gives the e-ink display the bright white image and makes it much easier to use in dim or dark scenarios.
In 2014, Amazon released the Kindle Voyage to the US market, which is their highest end Kindle yet. It features a 300 ppi e-ink display. Today, that same display is making its way to the mid-stream priced Kindle Paperwhite which should give it even better text rendering. The new version of the Carta e-paper display has double the pixels of the outgoing model.
Amazon is also offering the choice of a new font called Bookerly, which was created specifically for reading on digital screens: “Bookerly is inspired by the artistry of the best fonts in modern print books, but is hand-crafted for great readability at any font size.”

Also announced is a new typesetting engine which is listed as “coming soon” which offers improved character placement. They have adjusted the character spacing and the new typesetting engine will do a better job of justification and hyphenation of break words to create more consistent paragraph layouts. Amazon states that this will let you read faster with less eyestrain than the current engine.

The current features like note taking and word lookup are of course staying, but will be joined by new features like Page Flip which lets you skim ahead without losing your place. I prefer to read a book the way it was written, but I know a couple of people who like to look ahead and see what’s going to happen so this will be a nice feature for them.

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Specifications
Display	6" Paperwhite display with Carta e-paper technology and built-in light 300 ppi, optimized font technology, 16-level gray scale
Size	6.7" x 4.6" x 0.36" (169 mm x 117 mm x 9.1 mm)
Weight	7.2 ounces (205 grams) Wi-Fi 7.6 ounces (217 grams) Wi-Fi plus 3G
System Requirements	None; fully wireless and no computer required
Battery Life	A single charge lasts up to six weeks (30 minutes of reading per day, wireless off and light setting at 10) Battery life will vary based on light and wireless usage
Charge Time	Approximately 4 hours from a computer via USB cable
Wi-Fi Connectivity	802.11n (WEP, WPA, WPA2 security) Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) Optional 3G Wireless on Paperwhite 3G
Content Formats Supported	Kindle Format 8 (AZW3) Kindle (AZW) TXT PDF Unprotected MOBI PRC natively HTML Word (DOC, DOCX) JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP (through conversion)
Included in the Box	Kindle Paperwhite, USB 2.0 charging cable and Quick Start Guide
Price	Kindle Paperwhite: $119 With Special Offers, $139 Without Kindle Paperwhite 3G: $189 With Special Offers, $209 Without

The Kindle is practically the definition of a uni-tasking device, but what it does, it does really well. The battery life is one of the keys to the experience, and Amazon states that the new Paperwhite can last up to six weeks if used for thirty minutes per day with the wireless off and the display at level ten. That works out to twenty one hours of usage between charges, and with my experience that is likely not an exaggeration.
Size and weight play a key part in the Kindle experience as well, and the Paperwhite has a 6-inch display inside of a small and thin body, and it weighs just 7.2 ounces or 205 grams for the Wi-Fi only model. The 3G option adds a tiny bit more to the total.
The new Kindle Paperwhite starts at $119 with Special Offers, jumps to $139 without Special Offers, and the 3G model costs $189 or $209. Shipments start on June 30^th.
Source: Amazon

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Around a few weeks before the launch of the Xiaomi Mi Note Pro, I was digging through kernel source to understand Snapdragon 810 and some other Qualcomm SoCs. We had kept track of MSM8994v1 and MSM8994v2, which were relatively well understood in terms of what they represented. V1 was an engineering sample variant, which was discussed as early as September in 2014. This variant set both the A57 and A53 clusters to a ~1 GHz maximum. V2 was the first mass production revision, which was present in both the LG G Flex 2, and HTC One M9. However, shortly before the launch of the Mi Note Pro, we noted references to v2.1 in various kernel source trees. There wasn’t much of note other than a change to the chip ID and other identifying information at this point. It’s also important to note that phones that definitely didn’t have this variant of the SoC still had references to it in kernel source. The only way to truly verify whether a device has a certain revision of an SoC is to either see whether the file is included in the compilation process or to verify the revision by checking the device itself.

With the release of the Xiaomi Mi Note Pro and after getting our hands on a sample we were able to start piecing together everything to really understand what was going on with this new variant. The first and most obvious change in v2.1 is a mild increase in GPU clocks from 600 to 630 MHz. This represents around a 5% increase in performance, which helps to close the gap with the 772-700 MHz Mali T760MP8 graphics processor used in the Exynos 7420 of the Samsung Galaxy S6. This is fairly obvious to anyone that runs a graphics benchmark on this new variant, although this is a best-case improvement as inefficiencies elsewhere can erode the difference.
The other differences are far more subtle. The first is that there’s noticeably less throttling on the A57 cluster compared to Snapdragon 810 v2, although unlike the Snapdragon 808 and competing SoCs both variants of the Snapdragon 810 still see the unfortunate characteristic of ultimately forcing all threads off of the A57 cluster to stay within TDP limits in high load conditions, such as when running Basemark OS II’s battery test.
The second difference requires testing peak CPU bandwidth and latency between L1, L2, and main memory. In the interest of seeing maximum bandwidth, this memory test is multithreaded to run on multiple CPU cores, and combines read and write bandwidth to try and get as close as possible to maximum bandwidth available. The figures that we present here will represent a scenario where two threads, one reading and one writing will load the memory system simultaneously. This is done to try to saturate the main memory controller and to circumvent ARM's bus architecture which has dedicated read and write ports, leading to only half the total possible bandwidth in each direction.
We’ve also tested against multiple other applications such as Rahul Garg’s RgBandwidth and RamBench to verify these observations. We also checked with instrumented runs that the CPU, memory controller, and CCI interconnect were all running at appropriate frequencies so these results should be largely unaffected by the governor due to the 100% duty cycle of the load during the test.

The graphs above are interesting, but they don’t really illustrate the relative difference between v2 and v2.1. To better show this, the graphs below represent the percent difference between the HTC One M9 and Xiaomi Mi Note Pro in this test, where positive values are an advantage in favor of Mi Note Pro, while negative values represent an advantage in favor of the One M9.

From the calculations, memory latency improves on an average of 15%, but this is mostly concentrated in the L1/L2 cache portion of the test, while the differences in DRAM are relatively small. If we change the scaling to show less of main memory, we can see that most of the variance is present in that portion of the test. Given that we’re looking at time on the order of nanoseconds, I wouldn’t think too hard about these differences either. The only interesting thing to note in the latency test is that the “memory mountain” model is still valid, where we can expect about an order of magnitude increase in latency for each level of cache that we miss, where L1 appears to take about 5 cycles at 2 GHz, then around 15 cycles for L2, then around 600-700 cycles for main memory. (To put that into comparison for PC CPUs, L3 cache usually hits up to 70 cycles and up to 150 cycles for Intel's CrystalWell eDRAM before the jump out to main memory.)

The memory bandwidth values are really much more interesting though, as there’s a consistent improvement in bandwidth across the board. There is some interesting behavior around L1 cache, but this is likely due to the previously mentioned ramp time for frequency scaling. If we just look beyond L2, into the main memory, the result is that there’s around a 33% increase in bandwidth, and a 38% average increase if we look at the entire sweep through memory.
Overall, for a 0.1 revision, Snapdragon 810 v2.1 is a pretty significant change where memory is concerned. We also see some improvements in terms of thermal management, but we yet have to fully characterize just how much this improvement is and if it's enough to be able to compete with Samsung's 14nm silicon in the Galaxy S6. There were rumors floating around of a new revision due to show up in the summer, and it appears that this is the rumored revision. I question whether it made sense to release devices with the v2 revision, especially if future revisions would have resolved some notable issues and dramatically improved SoC performance. I also question whether OEMs would silently introduce these SoCs into later production runs of products that first shipped with v2, which is yet another can of worms. Putting these questions aside, this new revision brings much-needed improvements to the Snapdragon 810, and should go a long way as a stop-gap until Snapdragon 820 begins shipping. We'll see how the change from v2 to v2.1 affects performance on a higher level in our Xiaomi Mi Note Pro review coming shortly.

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Earlier this week AMD held their 2015 GPU product showcase, dubbed “The New Era of PC Gaming.” As the latest stage in AMD’s master plan, AMD held a public event in Los Angeles similar to their 2014 GPU product showcase in Hawaii, where the company announced their product lineup ahead of the full launch of the products in question. In the presentation we learned some (but not all) of the details surrounding AMD’s Radeon 300 series, including the numbered products from 360 to 390, and of course the company’s new high-end flagship video card, the Radeon R9 Fury X.
Being released today are five new cards from AMD’s partners, which will form the backbone of the Radeon 300 series from $109 to $429. To our regular readers these parts will be familiar – and to some, perhaps more familiar than they’d like – while for AMD the 300 series represents their 3rd generation of retail 28nm products. It is these products we'll be taking a look at first.

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Our first encounter with Cougar's peripherals was just a few months ago, when we reviewed the flagship keyboard and mouse, the 700K and 700M. The 700K and the 700M were both high quality products, but they were steeply priced as well. Today we are going to have a look at their more affordable 600K mechanical keyboard and the 600M gaming mouse.

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