Thread: Anandtech News

A couple of months ago we reviewed a few of the newest six-core Intel commercial CPUs that are also used in low-end servers. Intel has also launched some quad-core models, which we are focusing on today. These Xeon E quad-core processors compete directly against AMD's Ryzen Pro product line, focusing on manageability, ECC memory support, and guaranteed product longevity.

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Western Digital is working on its own low-latency flash memory that will offer a higher performance and endurance when compared to conventional 3D NAND, ultimately designed to compete against Optane storage.

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One of the things that caught our eyes at Mobile World Congress in 2018 and 2019 were new, high-end smartphones coming from China-based manufacturers that are better known for their value handsets. Ulefone is one such company that is trying to break into the market for advanced smartphones by relying on MediaTek's premium, sub-flagship SoC offerings. Last year Ulefone demonstrated its T2 Pro 6.7-inch handset designed for demanding customers. This year the company showcased its T3 smartphone the promises to be even more impressive.



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Corsair this month has rolled out its first keyboard designed primarily for HTPCs. The K83 Wireless Entertainment Keyboard incorporates a tenkeyless keyboard using Corsair's low-profile switches, along with a touchpad, a joystick, and a dedicated volume scroller to to flesh out the functionality of Corsair's lap-friendly keyboard.
Corsair is of course no stranger to lapboards. The company has been offering a lapboard version of the gaming-focused K63 keyboard since last year. However whereas the K63 laptop setup ultimately used a standard wireless keyboard with an extra lapboard accessory – one whose lap-accommodations were focused on providing space for a wireless mouse – the K83 is an outright built from scratch lapboard, and one designed for broader uses as a general purpose HTPC keyboard.
At its core, the Corsair K83 Wireless Entertainment is a 78-keys compact keyboard that uses Corsair’s ultra-low-profile scissor key switches, and a controller that supports a 20-key rollover as well as a 1000 Hz polling rate. So although it's not solely a gaming-focused keyboard, the K83 comes with gaming credentials, which is further underscored by its specially-painted WASD keys. The board can connect to host PCs using a 2.4 GHz dongle, Bluetooth 4.2, or a USB cable, and when working wirelessly, Corsair says that the battery should last for up to 40 hours.

Meanwhile to build up its HTPC feature set, the Corsair K83 Wireless Entertainment is outfitted with a joystick to navigate through menus and play games, a multi-touch touchpad with discrete left and right click buttons, media playback buttons (that work when the Fn button is pressed), and even a dedicated volume control "scroller". This essentially makes the K83 a media keyboard on steroids, with further couch-friendly control options integrated directly into the board so that it can be used without requiring a discrete mouse. The joystick is an especially interesting design choice – Corsair is basically looking to emulate the right-half of a gamepad – and I'm not sure there's any other keyboard quite like this on the market.
Of course, as this is a Corsair keyboard, the company's software stack is also a big part of their feature set. The K83 keyboard is compatible with the company's iCUE software, which can be used to recalibrate the joystick, configure Windows touchpad gestures, create macros, remap keys, adjust backlighting, and so on.

Finally, one of the particularly interesting HTPC-focused features of the Corsair K83 Wireless Entertainment is that Corsair is that Corsair is officially supporting the keyboard with more than just macOS and Windows, allowing it to be used with set-top boxes and TVs. Other supported devices include NVIDIA's Shield TV, the Apple TV, Amazon's Fire TV, and Samsung's Tizen-powered TVs. Of course, not every feature works with every device – with Corsair taking care to document what works where – and generally speaking the more restricted an ecosystem, the fewer extra features like the touchpad work. But it's still an interesting take on compatibility, and making the keyboard more useful for more living rooms.

The Corsair K83 Wireless Entertainment Keyboard is already available directly from the company as well as from its resellers. The board runs for $99.99 in the US.
Related Reading:

• Interacting with HTPCs: Logitech and Perixx Options Reviewed
• Corsair Launches New K70 RGB MK.2 and STRAFE RGB MK.2 Mechanical Gaming Keyboards
• Logitech Announces The CRAFT Keyboard With Creative Dial Integration
• Corsair Launches Splash-Resistant K68 Mechanical Keyboard

Source: Corsair

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Sometimes things happen that are unexpected – just ask Ned Stark. In a far less fictional event, Microsoft has posted an update on their DirectX Blog announcing that they’ve brought a form of DirectX 12 to Windows 7, via official support for the latest DX12 version of World of Warcraft on Windows 7. Where do we even begin?
For some background, Microsoft’s latest DirectX API was created to remove some of the CPU bottlenecks for gaming by allowing for developers to use low-level programming conventions to shift some of the pressure points away from the CPU. This was a response to single-threaded CPU performance plateauing, making complex graphical workloads increasingly CPU-bounded. There’s many advantages to using this API over traditional DX11, especially for threading and draw calls. But, Microsoft made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 on Windows 10, with its WDDM 2.0 driver stack.
Today’s announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels. If Microsoft had wanted to back-port DX12 to Windows 7, you would have thought they’d have done it before Windows 7 entered its long-term servicing state. As it is, even free security patches for Windows 7 are set to end on January 14, 2020, which is well under a year away, and the company is actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid having a huge swath of machines sitting in an unpatched state. In fact, they are about to add a pop-up notification to Windows 7 to let users know that they are running out of support very soon. So adding a big feature like DX12 now not only risks undermining their own efforts to migrate people away from Windows 7, but also adding a new feature well after Windows 7 entered long-term support. It’s just bizarre.

Now before you get too excited, this is currently only enabled for World of Warcraft; and indeed it's not slated to be a general-purpose solution like DX12 on Win10. Instead, Microsoft has stated that they are working with a few other developers to bring their DX12 games/backends to Windows 7 as well. As a consumer it’s great to see them supporting their product ten years after it launched, but with the entire OS being put out to pasture in nine months, it seems like an odd time to be dedicating resources to bringing it new features.
Microsoft does say that DX12 will offer more features on Windows 10, which makes sense since the graphics stack was designed for it right from the start, but if you do play World of Warcraft on Windows 7, you’re going to get a free performance boost. You may still want to look into getting off of Windows 7 soon though, since this isn’t going to move the January 2020 end-of-support date back for gamers.
For Blizzard, the publisher of World of Warcraft, this is a huge win for their developers, since they’ll no longer need to maintain two versions of the game.
Overall, this is a big deal.

"This is a big deal" - Ryan Smith, Editor-in-Chief of AnandTech

Perhaps they are also working on Continuum and Windows Store updates for Windows 7 as well. They do have nine months after all.
We've reached out to AMD and NVIDIA for responses on whether there are specific driver versions that are required. NVIDIA has responded letting us know that Windows 7 users will just need the latest Game Ready Driver for this.
Source: Microsoft DirectX Blog

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This evening – or rather this morning in China – AMD is rolling out a new mid-to-entry level Radeon RX video card. Dubbed the Radeon RX 560 XT, the new part is a lower-tier Polaris 10-based card that’s designed to fill the gap between the RX 560 and the RX 570 in the Chinese market. This new SKU will only be sold in China – don’t expect to see it come to North America – with AMD’s close partner Sapphire being the sole vender of the card.
By the numbers, the Radeon RX 560 XT is a relatively straightforward cutting down of the Radeon RX 570, itself a cut-down Polaris 10 SKU. Relative to the 570, the 560 XT drops another 4 CUs, bringing it down to 28 CUs. Past that, the clockspeeds have also taken a hit; the 560 XT will top out at just 1073MHz for the boost clock, instead of 1244MHz like its fuller-fledged 570 sibling. So for shader and texture performance, it will deliver around 75% of the throughput of the RX 570.
[TABLE="align: center"]
[TR="class: tgrey"]
[TD="colspan: 7, align: center"]AMD Radeon RX 500 Series Specification Comparison (China)[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: tlblue"]
[TD="width: 155"] [/TD]
[TD="width: 120, align: center"]AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP[/TD]
[TD="width: 120, align: center"]AMD Radeon RX 570[/TD]
[TD="width: 120, align: center"]AMD Radeon RX 560 XT[/TD]
[TD="width: 120, align: center"]AMD Radeon RX 560[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Compute Units[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]32 CUs
(2048 SPs)[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]32 CUs
(2048 SPs)[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]28 CUs
(1792 SPs)[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]14/16 CUs
(896/1024 SPs)[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Texture Units[/TD]
[TD="colspan: 2, align: center"]128[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]112[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]56/64[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]ROPs[/TD]
[TD="colspan: 2, align: center"]32[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]32[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]16[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: tlgrey"]Base Clock[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]1168 MHz[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]1168 MHz[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]973 MHz[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]

One of the expanding elements of the storage business is that the capacity per drive has been ever increasing. Spinning hard-disk drives are approaching 20 TB soon, while solid state storage can vary from 4TB to 16TB or even more, if you’re willing to entertain an exotic implementation. Today at the Data Centre World conference in London, I was quite surprised to hear that due to managed risk, we’re unlikely to see much demand for drives over 16TB.

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Cooler Master has introduced a new air cooler specifically designed for AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper processors. Dubbed the MasterAir MA621P TR4 Edition, the cooler features a special base for use with AMD’s TR4 CPUs, as well as multiple heat pipes and up to three fans to cool AMD's mighty processors. And, for the aesthetically-minded out there, the new cooler also includes addressable RGB lighting.



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In an interview published this week with Blocks & Files, Toshiba outlined the company will be relying on a mix of hard drive technologies in order to keep increasing hard drive capacities. Along with current-generation two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technologies, the company will also be tapping both microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) as well as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for future drives. Already gearing up to ship its first 16 TB TDMR drives, Toshiba's short-term development plans call for it to adopt SMR as well as MAMR. Meanwhile in the longer-term, HAMR will be introduced for further capacity increases.
Earlier this year Showa Denko, Toshiba’s supplier of HDD media, revealed that the company would be supplying platters for hard drives based on MAMR technology. Toshiba has since confirmed their plans to use MAMR in this week's interview, but in an added twist, the company also noted that some of its high-capacity MAMR hard drives will use shingling as well.
“MAMR will be used to advance the capacity of both CMR (discrete track) recording and to SMR (shingled track) recording,” Scott Wright, director of HDD marketing at Toshiba America Electronic Components.
Overall, It is not a secret that for years now Toshiba has been working on hard drives featuring SMR technology. However unlike its competitors, the company has yet to introduce any commercial SMR hard drives, so these new MAMR + SMR drives would be the first commercial SMR deployment for the company. SMR of course brings some new performance trade-offs due to the read-modify-write cycle introduced by shingled tracks, but it still makes a great deal of sense for high-capacity HDDs since it allows drive vendors to increase their capacities without switching to a new type of media.
Toshiba's MAMR-based HDDs will begin sampling later this year. And, accounting for a few quarters for datacenter operators to validate the new drives, we should see their MAMR hard drives to enter volume production in 2020.
Looking further out, Toshiba has also said that sooner or later it will have to use HAMR, due in large part to the higher scalability that the technology offers.
“In theory, MAMR does not advance long-term areal density gain as far as what may be achievable with HAMR. MAMR is certainly the next step; HAMR is very likely an eventual future step up the areal density ladder.”
By adopting MAMR for their 2019 – 2020 nearline HDDs Toshiba and Western Digital can continue using HDD media that is similar to platters used today. By contrast, Seagate is set to skip MAMR and use HAMR along with brand new disks instead.
Related Reading:

• 18 TB HDDs: Toshiba Collaborates with Showa Denko for MAMR HDDs
• Toshiba at CES 2019: World’s First 16 TB TDMR HDD Debuts
• Toshiba Launches 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs for Desktops and NAS [UPDATED with MSRPs]
• State of the Union: Seagate's HAMR Hard Drives, Dual-Actuator Mach2, and 24 TB HDDs on Track
• Western Digital to Demo Dual-Actuator HDDs Next Week: Double the Actuators for Double the Perf

Source: Blocks & Files

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Motorola and Verizon have begun taking pre-orders for the 5G Moto Mod, the addon-accessory for the Moto z3 smartphone introduced last year. The device supports 5G mmWave radio, sub-6 GHz connectivity. The 5G Moto Mod only works with the Moto z3, and will available exclusively to Verizon customers in the U.S.

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