Gadgetory

everyone this is another hardware news recap for the last week in the computer hardware industry we've got a lot of good items for today including just a teaser of some meltdown inspector coverage we have coming up within the next couple days we decided to reach out to some of the initial researchers who found the meltdown inspector exploits and asked them a couple of questions demystify some of the more confusing elements and debunk some of the myths that have arisen from the ashes of the insanity as everyone has panics about these bugs so that'll be a really good content piece I'm looking forward to that it'll be in the same tune as the RAM and the GP research pieces that's coming up soon Samsung's got GD r 6 and news for us Andy has hired a basically a replacement for Raja Kaduri and a counterpart along with the replacement and Andy's also killed off their primitive shader function and most reasonable capacity we spoke to Micro Center a bit and then Microsoft telemetry news what's new and a Silverstone cooler so all that more for this week before that this video is brought to you by the gamers Nexus at patreon and our patreon backers you want to help us out directly you can go to patreon.com/scishow and team or you can support us at $5 or higher and get access to behind-the-scenes videos as we release them once or twice a month learn more at the link in the description below so for a quick preview of what's going on for the site this week again that meltdown specter piece is coming up that's our big research piece right now we've spoken with a couple of different research and security firms that discovered the initial exploit and basically emailed them a set of questions to say can you clarify this for us which in many cases was can you clarify the specter require physical access to the computer because that was something we'd seen printed by a lot of comments and I genuinely didn't know so we asked them and they gave us some answers on that we asked about what they thought was overlooked with spectra and meltdown so out of all the media blitz and all the consumer reports and things like that what's something that everyone has failed to mention and then on the flip side of that what is something that's either blown out of proportion or just straight false so lots of cool stuff coming up for that also we have a probably article only benchmark of the Xbox one X Dragonball Fighter Z or whatever that came is called it just showed up Namco Bandai had us on their media list from years and years ago when we did more Games coverage so we're gonna benchmark that and we'll put that in just an article on the website if you're curious about the framerate but let's get into the hardware news here samsung has g DD r 6 information and Sam Sun revealed somewhat recently that they entered mass production with the industry's first GTD r 6 memory which will of course be used on future graphics cards likely sooner than you might think this is announced in addition to using GD r 6 for things like AI automotive VR was an interesting side note in there as well as a our augmented reality and also network systems so gamers for the most part are just going to be looking forward to GPUs but there's a whole lot of other stuff in the ecosystem Samsung's first GDD r 6 ICS will be available in 16 gigabit densities offering 18 gigabits per second per pin transfer rate and up to 72 gigabytes per second of bandwidth per chip Samsung's ggd are six speeds are more than double that of gddr5 eight gigabit per second and higher than g 5x memory add up to 11 gigabits per second the new memory is built on Samsung's 10 nanometer class technology class here referring to anything between 10 and 19 nanometers stretching it a bit we can assume that Samsung isn't that 10 nanometers yet with GD dr6 otherwise they would unambiguously acknowledge that achievement still according to Samsung 10 nanometer class technology brings about a 30% productivity increase presumably compared to 20 nanometer manufacturing and that productivity increase probably translates some more chips per wafer additionally Samsung has noted the voltages of these chips will be down to one point three five volts operating for the voltage from 1.5 v previously required 4G dr5 or g5x this means higher or better efficiency you have less heat to dissipate and worry about which is particularly important if you're sharing cold plates with thins and Samsung doesn't really elaborate on this they just point to improved circuit design and that's about it they also made no mention of when G GD r6 will ship globally or commercially but they've basically touted that they will have it sometime in 2018 and it's in production so Samsung is seemingly on schedule here and we can reasonably assume that Samsung's clients are planning products with the solution already which would include the GPU makers and the announced it's hiring of two new senior members for the Radeon Technology Group were RTG filling in for the role left behind by Raja Kaduri who departed for Intel not too long ago the two new hires are Mike Rayfield SVP and general manager of AMD RTG and david wayne SVP of engineering for RTG David Owens roles that will pertain entirely to architecture and hardware development of future and the GPUs while Rayfield will handle overall direction strategy and business development mike ray field has been in the industry since about 1983 his work experience includes 16 years as director of sales at Texas Instruments two years at Cisco for business development right around the dot-com boom seven years at Nvidia is a mobile division as a general manager and five years at micron as a general manager of the mobile units David Wayne's history the engineer of the two dates back to the beginning of consumer graphics including a history as a design manager SGI which is the company from which Jensen Owen later defected to form and Vidya wayna also worked his way up from engineering manager at ATI to engineering director to senior director and stated ATI and AMD from 2000 to 2012 later leaving for synaptics in 2012 through present relating to Andy's RTG groups the user mark Souder on 3ds Center org posted some information from an and the breakout conference a couple weeks ago that noted that and the apparently intends to kill its implicit primitive shader functions which was supposed to be a major feature of the Vega architecture primarily RX Vega it is a mostly gaming targeted function so to bring everyone up to speed on what that means primitive shaders are something we talked about when we viewed Vega frontier edition and then later rx Vega and when everyone is saying wait for drivers they were basically saying wait for the primitive shader function the implicit primitive shader function to be functional and that's because the primitive shader function is supposed to somewhat intelligently discard primitives which would be things like geometry triangles stuff like that and we have a pretty law in interview with Mike Mantor of AMD talking about what the plans were for that function those will probably never come to be at this point so this was done by combining the vertex and geometry shader functions and D at times claimed a 2x increase in speed for vertex shader code execution enabled by this function and now what's happening is the implicit part of the primitive shader functionality is being removed it looks like and instead they will leave an explicit shader path so if a game developer explicitly supports it meaning the game developer manually writes code to leverage the primitive shader functionality that was discussed at launch then it will work but there's no implied functionality it requires someone to sit down and write the code for it now this would be okay except AMD's Vega market share is basically zero and if there is no market share to speak of for a an architecture which presently spans two devices why would you code for it as a game developer there's so much more you can spend your time on so it's unfortunate part of that is because Vega had a very high cost to make and still has a high cost to make and it's hard for them to make money on it part of it's because it's in high demand by miners and part of its just global shortage of supply or increase in cost from memory and things like that so they got has not really saturated the market in our opinion to get significant development support for this functionality from game developers however it's possible that a company like IDI for example with doom or perhaps with Wolfenstein or any of those other games that have been advancing the low-level API front maybe one of them will do something with the explicit primitive shader discard but for now it's it's looking like that's not really gonna be the case next news item Micro Center we complained a lot about them and their prices in our I think asked GN video so got some news on that front Micro Center did notify us and confirmed that they are working to inform all of their sales associates of their own sales programs so hopefully next time we're anyone else goes in the store and asks about the program for building your own system discounts they should be up to speed because we knew it existed we asked about it but I mean it was obviously a disconnect where not every employee in the store knows the rules so that's what happens when you have retail stores with lots of employees not everyone's up to speed it sounds like they're they're doubling down on that effort to get everyone up to speed and all the sales associates on the floor if you encounter a micro center store that doesn't know what the build your own computer discount is you can tell them this per micro centers own website video cards as part of this effort to get them into the hands of gamers video cards are limited to one per household not person they do not offer price matching apparently unless they're matching in an upward direction and they do however offer the coupon if you can get an associate who understands that where if you spend $700 and purchase a processor and other components that push you to 700 so CPU motherboard Ram for example gets you there quickly spent 700 bucks by a CPU and whatever else is required to get there and then they discount the GPU back towards MSRP so that's what micro centers told us hopefully you're able to to take advantage of that you still will need to go in there and ask the representatives when the shipments come in though because from what I've been told Micro Center is basically clearing their GPU inventory within an hour of getting it so even with that news you need to go make friends with someone who works there and ask them when the shipments come in because otherwise you're not gonna get one most likely unless you camp in front of the store at 9:00 a.m. when they open so our ever thanks to Margaret Centre for hopefully correcting that if they can get everyone on the same page it sounds like I guess like a 50% decent solution there's not a lot they can do in all fairness because I mean demand is high the supplies low and cost for GP Manufacturing's gone up so not a lot that can be done anyway in Microsoft telemetry news a Windows diagnostic data viewer has been added to the next Windows 10 release windows insiders will get early access to this and Microsoft describes this as part of their commitment to quote be fully transparent on the diagnostic data collected from your Windows devices how it is used and to provide you with increased control over that data remember that earlier Microsoft actually released a special telemetry free version of Windows 10 for the China market and for the US and most the rest of the world there's still all the telemetry in there now they're late letting you see what data they're collecting on your usage although we're unclear on whether you can toggle any of that it doesn't sound like you can maybe some of it you can because they do say increase the control over that data but either way you'll be able to see what they're spying on you about so that's cool I guess common data is primarily being reported this will include operating systems name version device ID device class diagnostic level selection crash logs any other failure logs event your type of information additionally device connectivity and configuration device properties and capabilities preferences and settings peripherals device network information product and service performance data that show the device health performance and reliability data movie Wow move the Swiss this note was added by Patrick I didn't know how this one movie consumption functionality on the device and device file queries and important to note that the functionality is not intended to capture user viewing or listening habits but I guess just the aggregate telemetry pertaining to those things product and service usage data is also being looked at including details logged from usage of the device operating system applications and services and then software setup and inventory such as all installed applications install history application install history windows update history device update information and so forth so the good news is now you can see all of those things that they're pulling for allegedly improvement of the operating system but I mean you can basically get Windows 10 for free now and there's a reason for that they're making their money somewhere last one here Silverstone's got a new Argonne series cooler we've actually historically liked their Argonne coolers and they've done pretty well in our testing this one however is a low-profile cooler it is the Argonne AR 11 and it's it's low to the socket it supports a 95 watt TDP or greater depending on case airflow and it's using a 92 millimeter fan that's only 15 millimeters thick that spins at 1200 to 3000 rpm and maybe 55.8 or so CFM of air at forty four point five decibels when it's maxed out dimensions it's about the full size you can get before exiting the clearance zone is 97 by 94 by 47 millimeters and it's got four six millimeter heat pipes with aluminum fins for the fin stack and then a fan on top of it price is TBD but if you like small form-factor pcs it does look like a promising cooler so that's all for this one as always you can subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow Saxa styles that directly or go to store that gamers access net to pick up a shirt like this one if you'd prefer to help us that way thank you for watching I'll see you all next time