Gadgetory

this week's Hardware news recap includes lots of cool information including some intrigue surrounding government scrutiny over meltdown inspector no one saw that coming and also a couple of news items on AMD and board partners from Nvidia and Andy including an official GPU price increase via MSRP and not just a retailer increased so we'll be talking about all that more for this week before that this video is brought to you by Thermaltake and the view 71 enclosure the view 71 is a full tower case that's capable of fitting three video cards and most configurations it's also one of the better cooling cases in our recent case testing bench lineup the view 71 has hinged a tempered glass doors on either side that make it easy to open and show off and it comes with at least one rain fan though you can get the RGB version if you prefer learn more at the link in the description below this first news item is pretty straightforward it's an increase in official MSRP in some video cards by their respective vendors so this is something that we'll see happening more and more over the next month or so if if GPU prices and memory prices remain as crazy as they are and this is also something that we preempted in our what do video card makers think of miners part 2 video so in that video we're talking about how one of the key contributors to GPU price is not actually cryptocurrency miners but rather the price of memory because video cards of course need memory and it comes from the same people who make system memory so keeping that in mind what we learned was typically a GPU maker would see a memory volatility price maybe or price volatility of about five dollars so if you spend X dollars your memory in quarter three you might spend X plus 5 or X minus five and quarter 4 and that's not really enough to adjust the official MSRP of a card however recently that has gone from five dollars to twenty to thirty dollars so we had multiple vendors tell us this where their cost not what you pay what they pay to buy the memory has gone up twenty to thirty dollars for eight gigabytes of gddr5 which means that they can't really make much money so fun behind-the-scenes fact here if you don't know the type of margins that a GPU gets by the time you buy the video card the retailer doesn't get a whole lot of margin but they certainly get some of it depending on if they're gouging right now however the board partner is somewhere in the four to eight percent range plus or minus a bit depending on which card it is and how advanced it is that's not a lot of margin a twenty to thirty dollar increase in your cost to build the device destroys the margin so unfortunately some of the vendors are now increasing their official MSRP which means it's gonna be offset by retailers to because they're paying more for the device as well for their wholesale cost or whatever it may be so it's unfortunate however from what we've seen the when they sell for MSRP it shouldn't be that much of a hike compared to the third-party retailers who are hiking it to to 4x the MSRP so same stuff as before just be careful who you're buying it from but yeah that's a that's about what watch looking like for GPS right now basically comes down to memory price increasing next news item is also very interesting this one comes from Deir Bauer who is a professional overclock or overclocked engineer he has his own YouTube channel and you should subscribe to him if you haven't because he has told us that he's got a third video in a series of looking into epic and thread Ripper and trying to determine how closely related those two products are if you remember a while ago and he put out a statement saying that the thread Ripper CPUs do not have what some were calling dummy dies and we were given the official terminology for the extra two pieces of silicon in thread refer we were told that those are called silicon substrate interposers so that's what AMD told us to call the two inactive or dummy dies in thread Ripper they're Bauer decided to start digging into that he wanted to see if the thread Ripper extra two dies are electrically connected or not and would be basically a bend down epoch so if the epic CPU failed the bidding process if it failed validation and the yields aren't quite as good as a.m. these as they are then potentially you could turn epic into thread Ripper and end up with a product that's still sellable so that's what he's been digging into there Bauer had two videos so far one is where he D leads both components and visually looks at them he was able to identify that the PCBs are in fact different so it's not an identical PCB for the two CPUs there's a difference in for example an extra resistor or SMD of some kind and some solder pads that exist on one product but not the other in the second video de Brouwer sent the CPUs out to be x-rayed to look into and these statements about whether they're electrically wired or not and what he found was that they are in fact electrically connected the extra two dies and his conclusion was twofold one option was that AMD is fudging the yield rate and is using dead silicon on the threader for CPU however Durbar noted to us that he doesn't necessarily believe in this option as being the the the real one his second conclusion possibility was that AMD is going to release this EP with greater than 16 cores for enthusiast desktop which seems far more likely so that's kind of where we're at right now the Infinity fabric does support 32 cores on the thread river for sockets and interestingly they're bauer or roman he was able to test the epic CPU in an asus x 399 motherboard and found that there's an identification pen in the 4096 pins on this in the socket tape over the pen and was able to get all the way up to memory initialization and boot so it kind of boots doesn't quite make it but a very interesting stuff the conclusion here was that thread of her for and the SP 3 socks for epic had the same pin out and for the socket and he's got a third video coming up on Saturday which is something that he just noted to us and that will check which ties are active on his 1920 X and on his epic CPUs so go subscribe to dare bower if you haven't because that should be pretty interesting coming out on Saturday let's just go through a couple more AMD news items while we're on the topic this one we don't have a ton of information on but Andy has officially bacterium to some extent if this story is accurate anyway couldn't really find an official statement from AMD on it however we found a statement from the etherium Enterprise Alliance which is a collection of fortune 500 companies I am going to be honest and state that we don't know a whole lot about the e3 Ameriprise Alliance and their about page is bereft of information we went to it it's got about 20 words on it so you guys work with me here but basically AMD has allegedly joined this group alongside over 200 other member companies of the EEA and the website for what it's worth does say that their objective is to quote learn from and build upon the only smart contract supporting blockchain currently running in real world production etherium to define enterprise grade software capable of handling the most complex highly demanding applications at the speed of business which is of course second only to the speed of light so we tell you more but that's really all that their website says so for what it's worth it's more if if this is all accurate it's more indication that AMD is getting behind blockchain and that was first shown with their Vega Frontier Edition rebrand before it was discontinued were they branded as a blockchain pioneers card so more news on that front from AMD will try and keep up with that one if you know more about the EEA posted below so that I can educate myself because their website doesn't have a lot of good information next one Microsoft now we're getting to specter and meltdown stuff so Microsoft has rolled back the Intel meltdown patches that were pushed some of these were causing reboots and other system and stability issues for users who applied them Windows has released an update that quote specifically disables only the mitigation against CBE 2017 - five seven one five which would be branch target injection vulnerabilities and basically that means it's rolling the patch back this is done because the reboot bugs that were causing problems and are associated with Intel's microcode push Microsoft is taking most of the blame for that even though it was an Intel micro code update Intel recommended a halting deployment of the current microcode On January 22nd and Microsoft has had to rely on Intel for updated micro code so this is an intel's court not microsoft's even though they're the ones who looked the fools for pushing a patch and then rolling it back i'm sure they were very happy about that but the mitigation patch was preventative and microsoft says that there are no known reports of this being used in attacks yet the CBE 5 7 1 5 or meltdown attacks so if you had the patch it's going away but also in news for a specter and mouth on this one is pretty interesting as well the US government is getting involved now and oregon congressman Greg Walden alongside ranking member Frank pallone from New Jersey issued letters to Intel arm Microsoft and Amazon and yet undisclosed companies pertaining to the secrecy surrounding meltdown and spectre vulnerabilities for which we recently published a series of expert interviews so if you want more information check out our interviews one of the letters addresses Apple CEO Tim Cook directly and this is from those two congressmen and the letter states while we acknowledge that critical vulnerabilities such as these create challenging trade-offs between disclosure and secrecy we believe that this situation has shown the need for additional scrutiny regarding multi party coordinated of vulnerability disclosures therefore and pursuant to rules 10 and 11 of the United States House of Representatives we ask that you respond to the following questions as soon as possible but no later than February 7th 2018 the question sent to cook and others include requests for information pertaining to the companies that were involved in proposing the information embargo on spectra and meltdown and again to clarify this is not the kind of embargo with that press is involved in we had no idea what was going on this is a special embargo for software and hardware companies to ensure that they can secure their devices prior to anyone knowing including press and that lifted on in January early January so other questions asked for information or analysis on efforts used to contain and close the exploits and basically was taken a stab at the fact that these the small group of companies including the five listed were basically exclusively informed to the point where you now have small business or Enterprise IT groups scrambling to rework their security and and infrastructure for servers with very little notice only a few companies including Amazon had the information early the fact that Amazon had the information early means that they potentially had a business advantage as they were able to update their services a bit before some of their competitors and what this sort of government scrutiny seems to be looking at so to borrow a quote from our interview with GData and some experts on meltdown and specter enters Fogg said we really need to have a discussion about ad networks use of JavaScript and this story is related to that one this story is about certain advertisers leveraging the YouTube ad network not the pre-rolls that we make but the ads you see before the videos to use consumer computers to mine coin hive is being used here it's a JavaScript cryptocurrency mining software that can be run in browser and it can be used to hijack CPU resources Trend Micro has spotted a 285 percent increase in coin hi of miners which alerted them to the problem someone was distributing coin hi via Google double-click ads on YouTube or other websites that run double click ads and Trend Micro noted that this affected countries including Japan France Taiwan Italy and Spain and the best protection here is to keep your browsers up to date this is something that we've seen in the past where websites like the Pirate Bay have leveraged computer resources of their visitors to actively mine which is something that as website owners we actually strongly disagree with that idea I would rather serve ads then burn your GPU at a hundred percent load while you're visiting the site however not everyone believes in that so this new one is violating to be clear Google and YouTube's Terms of Use for their ad networks but that doesn't stop advertisers from pushing through a malicious ad that violates those terms it does however get them removed once Google discovers it so there's a a figure we have from Trend Micro that shows the activity of the what they call malvert izing campaign from January 18th to 24th and it's it's pretty interesting data's how basically as anders fogh from GData said we need to have a look at how ads are served and secure that this next one goes back to Andy for a moment and sapphires so Sapphire created what is effectively an RX 555 GPU or a slightly lower tier 560 this is adding to the confusion surrounding and these low-end components where you have different Cu counts there's a little while ago we had a story about I think it was the 5/6 that one between 14 and 16 to use going against the initial launch specification and now the rx 550 is being modified by sapphire so the spec for the rx 550 low-end GPU which was released to compete with the 1050 calls for 8 compute units so 8c use and the rx 550 poles from the Sapphire will contain 10 compute units the same amount as the original no the same amount as one of the RX 5 60s getting a bit confusing now so 10 compute units at 64 stream processors for compute unit per M these architecture but you had 640 streaming processors as opposed to the original 512 stream processors so quite a big difference there actually in performance potential and AMD's specification website we checked it just to make sure that website lists the compute unit count for every other card that they make that we could see from the RX 500 series except for the rx 550 so there's no official documentation on their current version of the website that says whether it should be 8 or 10 to use it's just left blank but either way Sapphire is creating an rx 550 that will have 10c use so just like you have to do with the 5 60s now where some of them are basically four sixties that have been rebranded you'll need to look carefully at the five fences you're buying because if someone reviews the pulse-width tends to use that performance will not be the same as one of the cards with 8 CS just be aware of what you're buying make sure you read the description pages it's not as simple as just the name of the anymore next news item is on hardware info hardware info 64 is one of the best logging utilities we certainly recommend using it it's a software utility and they just released an update that listed unreleased and the products in their update notes for supporting those products in logging activities and this included quote enhanced support of AMD's starship Matisse and Radeon rx Vega M GPUs matisse is theoretically the desktop send to component and starship is potentially according to video cards a 48 Core 96 thread processor and that's based on an old road map that video cards obtained so grain of salt with that one but hardware info has since amended their update to read simply enhanced support of AMD Radeon rx Vega am removing the Matisse and starship notes so it seems like that's been modified prayer requests I'm sure but either way it gives us a bit of info as what's coming out and when and then a couple of small site news items here we've been tasking dragon ball fighter z deal with it her performance and we'll have an article on the website with graphs of a dragon ball fighter Z's performance in terms of the frame rate and if it operates at sixty or thirty and when it operates at thirty and so forth it was part of our ongoing efforts to expand and iterate on our console testing methodology the game does not really deserve a video it's pretty straightforward but we're gonna put out an article and then we use the game to further advance our software free consultation which will allow us to do more console versus PC comparisons in the future the very short summary of this is that it's a sell shader cel-shaded fighting game it's not really that Hardware intensive some of the animations appear to be hand drawn or handcrafted via software and those animations run at 30 fps or less and then the game is about 60 FPS almost 100% of the time with a couple of drops every now and then so we've got tests on that and we'll publish that on the website very soon that gamers nexus net next is a new series so we're doing videos that we are using a working title of bench theory for where they are basically behind-the-scenes deep dives of what research goes into our benchmarking methodology we are revising our bench methodology for GPU CP is pretty much everything this year for 2018 this is something we do every year around this time and as such it's a good time now to provide some extra information on what we did for the last year because a lot of it we do make public but some stuff we keep behind closed doors until we advance our own testing for competitive reasons obviously however because we're changing everything it's a good time to put it out so I keep an eye out for a bench Theory series we have a couple coming up one of them that should be live when this goes up is a look at benchmark duration ie 30 seconds 1 minute 90 seconds 5 minutes how much is enough and when do you need to change those intervals and we all we're also looking at the standard deviation run to run and test variance between different games to determine how accurate are the games which then helps us know how many times we need to run a test for averages to be actually accurate for example if you have a lot of variants standard deviation of 10 FPS 4.1 or something low as you probably need to run the test more times or it's just a highly variable game and if that's the case need to make a note of that in the content so we have all that coming soon subscribe for more as always you go to patreon.com/scishow stew further this type of content or go to stored on cameras nexus net slash mod mat to pick up a mod mat like this one we are currently in backorder we sold through our entire first run thank you to those of you who bought them you should be getting them very soon if you haven't already and we have a second production run on the way we're just waiting for production to finish so you can backorder them now if you want to grab one from the second round that's all for this one thanks for watching I'll see you all next time we have more of that coming out soon subscribe boys subscribe for hallways