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$299, HDR Gaming, New Controller, 40% slimmer, up to 2TB HDD

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A short word coming out of E3: despite rolling out a couple of days ago, Microsoft has formally announced Cortana, the Windows-based speech recognition helper (similar to Siri and Google Now) is coming to Xbox Live and the Xbox console platform. This announcement has been suspected for a while as Microsoft integrates more of its technologies together, trying to craft a consistent user experience across as many potential devices as possible. Aside from 'Xbox On', all commands can be processed via Kinect or a headset.
According to XboxOneUK via Xbox One Preview Program’s Facebook Page, the following commands are supported:

Xbox One Cortana Commands (June 2016)
Power	“Hey Cortana, Xbox on” (only with Kinect) “Hey Cortana, turn off” “Hey Cortana, restart”
Media Controls	“Hey Cortana, pause the movie” “Hey Cortana, rewind” “Hey Cortana, play the next song”
Audio Controls	“Hey Cortana, volume up” “Hey Cortana, mute” “Hey Cortana, volume down”
Navigation	“Hey Cortana, go home” “Hey Cortana, go back” “Hey Cortana, show menu” “Hey Cortana, change view” “Hey Cortana, switch” “Hey Cortana, show notifications”
Profile	“Hey Cortana, sign in” “Hey Cortana, sign in as John” “Hey Cortana, sign out”
Friends	“Hey Cortana, is Michael online?” “Hey Cortana, what’s Amy doing?” “Hey Cortana, start a party with Ryan” “Hey Cortana, send a message to Jasmine”
Games and Apps	“Hey Cortana, snap friends” “Hey Cortana, launch settings” “Hey Cortana, play Forza”
Game captures	“Hey Cortana, take a screenshot” “Hey Cortana, start broadcast” “Hey Cortana, record that”
TV & OneGuide	“Hey Cortana, watch TV” “Hey Cortana, watch ESPN” “Hey Cortana, show the OneGuide”
Search	“Hey Cortana, search the web for news about Xbox One” “Hey Cortana, search the store for Minecraft”
Help	“Hey Cortana, help” “Hey Cortana, what can I say?”
Places	“Hey Cortana, show me a map of 123 Main Street” “Hey Cortana, how far to the Grand Canyon” “Hey Cortana, when does Starbucks open?” “Hey Cortana, find cheap pizza restaurants near me”
Facts	“Hey Cortana, who is the tallest woman in the world?” “Hey Cortana, who is the president of Finland?” “Hey Cortana, what’s the capital of Qatar?” “Hey Cortana, who won the first Super Bowl?” “Hey Cortana, how tall is Mount Kilimanjaro?” “Hey Cortana, how many floors are in the Empire State Building?” “Hey Cortana, who built the White House?” “Hey Cortana, who are Tom Hanks’ parents?” “Hey Cortana, when does Fall begin?” “Hey Cortana, where was Obama born?”
Tracking	“Hey Cortana, what time does Alaska 32 depart?” “Hey Cortana, flight status for Southwest 11?” “Hey Cortana, what’s the status of Hawaiian flight 21?”
Sports	“Hey Cortana, when is the next Seahawks game?” “Hey Cortana, what is the score of the Packers game?” “Hey Cortana, what’s the Arsenal score?” “Hey Cortana, who will win the 49ers Cardinals game?”
Show times	“Hey Cortana, what are the showtimes for Star Wars?” “Hey Cortana, what movies are playing near me?” “Hey Cortana, Daft Punk events near me?”
Finance	“Hey Cortana, convert 60 dollars to yen?” “Hey Cortana, bitcoin exchange rate?” “Hey Cortana, how much is Costco stock worth?” “Hey Cortana, what’s the stock market symbol for Ford Motors?” “Hey Cortana, how are the US markets doing?” “Hey Cortana, what’s the value of Microsoft stock?”
Math	“Hey Cortana, convert 172 pounds to kilograms” “Hey Cortana, how many meters in 1 kilometer?” “Hey Cortana, what’s the value of cos 60?” “Hey Cortana, what is the square root of 256?”
Dictionary	“Hey Cortana, define delve” “Hey Cortana, what is the meaning of spartan?” “Hey Cortana, translate hello to German” “Hey Cortana, how do you say how are you in French?”
Weather	“Hey Cortana, is it hot in Rio de Janeiro?” “Hey Cortana, will it rain this weekend?” “Hey Cortana, do I need an umbrella?” “Hey Cortana, what’s the weather right now?”

Initially, Cortana will be available for Xbox Live Preview Members, before being launched in supported markets to all users. Initially Cortana will come to Preview users in the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany and Span first. No specific timeframe has been announced as of yet to roll out to all users.
Source: Microsoft E3 and XboxOneUK

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This news piece contains speculation, and suggests silicon implementation based on released products and roadmaps.The only elements confirmed for Project Scorpio are the eight cores, >6 TFLOPs, 320 GB/s, and it is coming in 2017. If anyone wants to officially correct any speculation, please get in touch.
Here’s an announcement at E3 for you. Microsoft just announced Project Scorpio, an internal project to develop the next generation Xbox set to be released in 2017. Project Scorpio is to be backwards compatible with Xbox One, and seems to be directly in line to compete with whatever Sony are supposedly releasing in the near future. But here’s some specifications for you that has my mind in a twist.

In the presentation, Microsoft states that the Project Scorpio SoC will have eight cores, up to 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and over 6 TeraFLOPs of power. To put this into context, this is more processing power than the recently announced AMD RX 480 GPU using a GCN 4 based architecture, set to be launched later this month. Microsoft specifically announced that Project Scorpio is to be launched next year, which puts a few things together worth mentioning.
By this time next year, we expect AMD’s Zen microarchitecture to be in full swing, and AMD has already showcased a silicon sample of an 8-core Zen processor. However, the current Xbox line relies on AMD’s ‘cat’ core architecture, which according to current AMD roadmaps doesn’t seem to feature anywhere for 2017. Without a direct confirmation, it’s hard to tell if Project Scorpio is the same Jaguar cores as the Xbox One, or the newer Zen microarchitecture. I would assume we won’t find out until later next year.

Microsoft Console Specification Comparison
	Xbox 360	Xbox One	Project Scorpio
CPU Cores/Threads	3/6	8/8	8 / ?
CPU Frequency	3.2GHz	1.6GHz (est)	?
CPU µArch	IBM PowerPC	AMD Jaguar	?
Shared L2 Cache	1MB	2 x 2MB	?
GPU Cores		768	?
Peak Shader Throughput	0.24 TFLOPS	1.23 TFLOPS	>6 TFLOPs
Embedded Memory	10MB eDRAM	32MB eSRAM	?
Embedded Memory Bandwidth	32GB/s	102GB/s	?
System Memory	512MB 1400MHz GDDR3	8GB 2133MHz DDR3	?
System Memory Bus	128-bits	256-bits	?
System Memory Bandwidth	22.4 GB/s	68.3 GB/s	320 GB/s
Manufacturing Process		28nm	?

On the GPU side, the current Xbox One uses a 16 CU implementation in the SoC, with two disabled giving 14 CUs. We already know that AMD’s RX 480, running at 5 TFLOPs and built on Global Foundries 14nm FinFET process, runs in at 36 CUs. So Project Scorpio will have easily have more CUs than Xbox One, and judging by the shots in the video, the die size is relatively small. The Xbox One was built on TSMC’s 28nm HP process. At this point it’s still not confirmed if this is an AMD win, however judging by the comments towards backwards compatibility and SoC integration (where CPU and GPU are on the same silicon (or package)), all fingers would point in that direction.

AMD Radeon GPU Specification Comparison
	AMD Radeon RX 480	AMD Radeon R9 390X	AMD Radeon R9 390	AMD Radeon R9 380
Stream Processors	2304 (36 CUs)	2816 (44 CUs)	2560 (40 CUs)	1792 (28 CUs)
Texture Units	(Many)	176	160	112
ROPs	(A Positive Integer)	64	64	32
TFLOPs (FMA)	>5 TFLOPs	5.9 TFLOPs	5.1 TFLOPs	3.5 TFLOPs
Boost Clock	>1.08GHz	1050MHz	1000MHz	970MHz
Memory Clock	8Gbps GDDR5	5Gbps GDDR5	5Gbps GDDR5	5.5Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	512-bit	512-bit	256-bit
VRAM	4GB/8GB	8GB	8GB	2GB
Transistor Count	?	6.2B	6.2B	5.0B
Typical Board Power	150W	275W	275W	190W
Manufacturing Process	GloFo 14nm FinFET	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm
Architecture	GCN 4	GCN 1.1	GCN 1.1	GCN 1.2
GPU	Polaris 10?	Hawaii	Hawaii	Tonga
Launch Date	06/29/16	06/18/15	06/18/15	06/18/15
Launch Price	$199	$429	$329	$199

The memory bandwidth of Project Scorpio, 320 GB/s, is also relatively interesting given the current rates of the RX 480 topping out at 256 GB/s. The 320 GB/s number seems round enough to be a GPU only figure, but given previous embedded memory designs is likely to include some form of embedded memory. How much is impossible to say at this point.
AMD has stated that the RX 480 is a VR Gaming capable card, so given what we've said about the Xbox One S tackling VR, it's clear that Project Scorpio is right on the money. AMD's business plan as of late is to expand its custom SoC business, and thus sticking Zen and a GCN 4 based architecture on a combined package or die for Microsoft makes a lot of sense. At the RX 480 announcement, it was stated that AMD wants to power the first 100 million VR users, and this would help towards that goal.
It's worth noting that this news piece contains a decent amount of speculation based on knowledge of the market, and the only elements confirmed for Project Scorpio are the eight cores, >6 TFLOPs, 320 GB/s, and it is coming in 2017. If anyone wants to officially correct any speculation, please get in touch.
Sources: Ars Technica (Carousel Image), Verge Live Blog (Video Screen Capture)

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With the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo once again upon us, this week has been a flood of gaming hardware and software news. On the PC front, AMD is once again sponsoring PC Gamer’s PC Gaming Show, and while the company isn’t making quite as large of a presence this year – having just announced a bunch of tech at Computex – AMD is still attending E3 to tease a bit of hardware. Announced in a press release that’s going out at the same time as the PC Gaming Show starts, AMD is very briefly teasing the next two Polaris-based Radeon cards: the Radeon RX 470 and the Radeon RX 460.

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Today Huawei announced a new member to the Honor 5 series, the Honor 5A, which brings a number of upgrades to the Honor 4A it replaces. The 5A comes with either a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 SoC, which includes a 64-bit octa-core CPU based on ARM’s Cortex-A53 cores and Adreno 405 GPU built on the 28nm LP node, for the model specific to China Netcom, or a HiSilicon Kirin 620 SoC, which also includes an A53-based octa-core CPU and ARM’s Mali-450MP4 GPU built on a 28nm process. All versions include 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM, just like the Honor 4A and 5X, and 16GB of internal storage that’s expandable with a microSD card.

Screen size increases from 5-inches on the Honor 4A to 5.5-inches for the 5A, but the resolution for the IPS LCD panel remains at 720p, giving the 5A a pixel density of 267ppi. The upgraded hardware in the 5A is actually very similar now to the previously announced Honor 5X that we looked at previously this year. One important distinction between the two is display resolution: The Honor 5X’s 5.5-inch display has a higher 1080p resolution.

Honor 5
	Honor 5A	Honor 5X
SoC CAM-AL00 (China Netcom)	Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 (MSM8952) 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.5GHz 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.2GHz Adreno 405	Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 (MSM8939) 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.5GHz 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.2GHz Adreno 405
HiSilicon Kirin 620 8x Cortex-A53 @ 1.2GHz ARM Mali-450MP4
RAM	2GB LPDDR3	2GB LPDDR3
NAND	16GB + microSD	16GB + microSD
Display	5.5-inch 1280x720 IPS LCD	5.5-inch 1920x1080 IPS LCD
Dimensions	154.3 x 77.1 x 8.45 mm 168 grams	151.3 x 76.3 x 8.15 mm 158 grams
Modem CAM-AL00 (China Netcom)	Qualcomm X8 (Integrated) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 7)	Qualcomm X5 (Integrated) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 4)
HiSilicon Balong (Integrated) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 4)
SIM Size	MicroSIM	MicroSIM
Front Camera	8MP	5MP, 1/4" OmniVision OV5648, 1.4µm pixels, f/2.4
Rear Camera	13MP, Sony, f/2.0, AF, HDR, LED flash	13MP, 1/3.06" Sony IMX214 Exmor RS, 1.12µm pixels, f/2.0, AF, LED flash
Battery	3100 mAh non-removable	3000 mAh non-removable
Connectivity	802.11a/b/g/n, BT 4.0, GPS/GNSS, microUSB 2.0	802.11a/b/g/n, BT 4.1, GPS/GNSS, microUSB 2.0
Launch OS	Android 6 with EMUI 4.1	Android 5.1 with EMUI 3.1

Both the front and rear cameras also receive significant upgrades. The rear camera increases from 8MP on the 4A to 13MP. It’s not clear if the Honor 5A is using the same 13MP Sony IMX214 Exmor RS sensor that the Honor 5X uses, however. Sitting atop the rear camera is a 5-element, 28mm wide-angle lens array with an f/2.0 aperture. The front camera sees a sizeable increase in resolution too, jumping to 8MP from the 4A’s rather low 2MP.
Because the Honor series targets cost-sensitive consumers, some features need to be sacrificed. The Honor 5A does not include a fingerprint sensor or NFC support, for instance. It also does not support 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
Overall the Honor 5A is a significant upgrade over the 4A, with specs that rival the Honor 5X. Moving to an octa-core CPU with a max frequency of either 1.5GHz or 1.2GHz should yield a small uptick in performance over the 4A’s quad-core Snapdragon 210 SoC, and the significantly larger 3100mAh battery should noticeably extend battery life beyond what the 4A’s 2200mAh battery provides. Whether the larger display is an improvement is a matter of personal taste, but the regression in pixel density is unfortunate.

Image from tech.163.com

The Honor 5A is available in six colors, including white, black, blue, pink, yellow, and gold. It will be available for purchase in China this summer for a price of ¥ 699 (USD $106).
Gallery: Honor 5A

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As we get to iOS 10, there are a number of new features that Apple has added to iOS. While not a total redesign on the order of iOS 7, iOS 10 now has a number of design refreshes to keep pushing forward in terms of functionality and usability of Apple’s mobile devices, which are increasingly the core of Apple’s revenue base.

To start, the lock screen, notification system, and 3D Touch on apps have been redesigned. With the lock screen, a number of people complained that TouchID was too fast on the iPhone 6s, which made the lock screen only visible for maybe a few hundred milliseconds before it was flashed off to something else. With iOS 10, the lock screen is automatically shown when motion sensors detect that you’ve raised the phone, similar to the Apple Watch.

Notifications are also noticeably changed to be more actionable. On the lock screen, they no longer darken the background and it’s possible to view videos, photos, and do things like reply to messages and keep a conversation going within the notification rather than entering another application, which avoids costly context switches from a UI perspective. These notifications can be accessed using 3D Touch although it wasn’t really made clear at the keynote how things would work for iOS devices without 3D Touch.

While initial launch of the iPhone 6s didn’t really integrate a huge amount of functionality into 3D Touch when using the gesture on app launch, with iOS 10 the same gesture now integrates widget-like functionality that allows you to quickly peek into apps to see relevant information about them without actually launching the app.

In addition to these redesigns, the keyboard has received new functionality to allow for bilingual and contextual predictions using neural networks to better predict what you want to say, but apparently all of this is done of the device so it’s fairly likely that the models won’t be as robust as the ones that Google will build. However, Apple emphasizes that this improves privacy.

The other changes here include Siri, Apple Maps, Home, and Messages, which now have third party app integration. Additionally, Apple Maps has the ability to see traffic, dynamic zoom, live traffic, and destination prediction. The Home app allows for easy control of all HomeKit enabled smart home devices, and Messages has a whole host of new features regarding emoji suggestions, effects, third party stickers and apps, deep linking, handwriting, and “invisible ink” for messages that have to be swiped to be revealed. For the most part these features are nothing life-changing, but should be good for quality of life improvements for those on the platform already. Apple Pay is also now enabled on the web to enable fast payment with iOS devices.
Overall, iOS 10 is a decent step up, but for the most part like the smartphone market itself it appears to be a mostly incremental release. Outside of design changes and improving 3D Touch usability, most of the changes are to add extensibility and enable third party apps to integrate into the OS better than before. The other changes here would be what I would call app-level changes, things like the addition of voicemail transcription, redesigned news, music, and maps apps. It’s not likely that users will find any particular reason to switch that they didn’t have before, but iOS continues to gain refinement and stays current with iOS 10. iOS 10 will be available for public beta this summer, with release in the fall. It will come to all iPhones as old as the iPhone 5, all iPads including the iPad 2 and iPad mini, and the iPod Touch 5G and 6G.

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While Apple Watch and watchOS 1 was a solid first step towards seriously addressing the smartwatch market, it was obvious to me that it was still in need of development. Apple had come far, but still had far to go. With watchOS 3, we’re finally starting to see the refinements needed to make watchOS truly mass market, with focuses on responsiveness and adds a fair number of new features to help make the overall user experience more compelling.

At an OS level, the rather painful loading screens seen in previous iterations of watchOS are now dead, which is a fairly massive improvement. I’m not sure what architectural changes happened here yet, but it’s likely that offloading more compute onto the watch and periodic refresh of app data on the watch, along with more advanced multitasking is a fairly critical part of making all of this happen. It’s likely that this will have a power impact, but given the user experience improvements I think this is likely to be an acceptable trade-off.

Other than this architectural change, there have been a number of changes to the UI. Rather than overloading Glances with both a control center and various other glances, it looks like the two have been separated to better mesh with how iOS works. Rather than placing contacts on the side button, it looks like a Dock for apps launches instead. Other UI changes include a simple swipe to change the watchface on the fly and improved notification handling to make interactions like replying to a message from the watch faster than before.

On the feature side, apps like Activity now feature a multiplayer component by allowing you to share your activity data with friends and family. Activity also supports wheelchair mode to allow for more widespread usability, and has a whole host of new algorithms designed to properly track activity for those that are wheelchair-bound. There’s also a Breathe app, which is supposed to make it easier for people to do deep breathing/meditative breathing, along with Home for remote control of smart home devices. There’s also support for in-app Apple Pay, Mac unlock with Watch proximity, and SOS mode to automatically call emergency services with a long hold of the side button. There’s also improved workouts, with the ability to set no time limit for a workout and automatic workout pausing based upon motion detection.

Overall, watchOS 3 is starting to feel like it’s approaching what I really want from a smartwatch in terms of functionality and polish, and I think with Apple Watch 2 or 3 and maybe watchOS 4 or 5 we’ll finally see a smartwatch that I can whole-heartedly recommend for the first time, although it’s definitely possible that a company other than Apple may pull this off first. WatchOS 3 will be available in beta this summer, and will release to all Apple Watches this fall.

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Micron is the second company to the 3D NAND flash milestone, with today's release of the Crucial MX300 750GB Limited Edition. This follows on from two years ago when Samsung became the first manufacturer to ship SSDs with 3D NAND flash, the 850 Pro - a drive launched as a flagship high end drive and remains the fastest consumer SATA drive today. By contrast, the Crucial MX300 is intended to be a mainstream affordable SSD based on 3D TLC NAND, making the MX300 more of a direct competitor to the 850 Evo.

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With Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in full swing, as part of the company’s annual festivities they have unveiled the next version of their venerable Macintosh operating system. Since shifting to free, yearly updates, the annual update has become a big part of the WWDC atmosphere, and this year is no different, as Apple continues to iterate in small (but important) steps with their desktop OS.

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