Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap the leading story for this week is Intel poaching distinguished engineer Tom Peterson from Nvidia this is a major news item it's important for a lot of reasons even if you don't follow industry people because tom has been an internal advocate at Nvidia and has made some pushes for things that consumers or media or partners have concerns demands or questions about internally so Nvidia is losing that person also a key engineer and this is where Intel's building battle against the two incumbent GPU makers expands because Intel has been already acquiring AMD talent media reporter talent and is now pulling people from Nvidia so that'll be our leading story for today before that this video is brought to you by EVGA SZ 390 dark motherboard the Z 390 dark is a flagship motherboard for Intel's unlocked case cue CPUs with tuning done by overclocked engineering team at kingpin and 10 to enable higher memory and CPU frequencies the motherboard uses a unique rotated socket design to move EPS 12-volt cables to the right side making cable management easier and also sticks to two DIMM slots to improve memory overclocking stability and Headroom we previously analyzed the BRM and full and found it among the best in class 4 z 390 overclocking and it also got rid of RGB LEDs learn more at the link in the description below quick GN store update first we just restocked the blue beer glasses so if you want one of the cobalt blue beer glasses with the gold tinted rim you can go to store it on cameras nexus net pick them up in 1 2 or 4 packs for discounts as you go up and those will be there for you if you want them so Nvidia losing a key engineer to Intel this let me tell you why you need to care about this first Tom Peterson as I said has been an internal advocate for media and this means every company sort of has at least one person who is a hub for transacting between the corporate people at the company and the people outside of the company and that hub or that conduit is critical if they're good at their job because they keep the rest of the company sort of slightly in check to some extent or least in touch with the audience and as companies grow they do lose touch with what the audience wants because they don't need to care anymore when they're in a dominating position so NVIDIA losing tom is both exciting and concerning on the exciting side intel has now demonstrated that it's serious enough to start pulling on talent from the biggest GPU maker in the space and it is starting by pulling on someone who is to our knowledge a direct report to Jensen or extremely close if not so that's a that's a big move that's a power play by Intel and the upside of that is that Nvidia desperately needs competition because Nvidia does act in a very controlling fashion with with its board partners with media and this is a concerning thing Nvidia also though is in this process losing someone who does help keep the company in touch with the rest of the world and so the concerning side then and videos front is that we don't know what's gonna happen for example the overclocking we don't know that tom was pretty involved with overclocking tom was also involved with building the boost algorithm was involved with building benchmarking software and things like FCAT if you remember that he was he was big on pushing frame time analysis which of course we use heavily now big on pushing VR benchmarking software and building it and did some engineering work on how the clock behaves for NVIDIA GPUs has also listened very seriously to points we've had and others have had about overclocking on NVIDIA hardware and locking Nvidia hardware and things like that so losing that conduit is we're not sure how that will impact Nvidia in future generations now these engineers when they leave you have to remember that they they have already been working on the next product that's not out yet so the impact from Raja at AMD the impact from Tom at Nvidia that's going to carry on for at least another generation although will lessen as time goes on but the the immediate change is that Intel will be gaining an important engineer so technically at time of filming this news is not public but we have confirmed it with parties at both companies so yeah this is a this is a a big deal at this point we're not quite sure what'll happen but in the very least it looks like Intel is quite to be a serious competitor to Nvidia and then the big question after this is you know the these people that Intel is pulling on they all have influence they have friends in the industry and you'll notice that those people start coming on board afterward it last week or two weeks ago we had a news story about Intel hiring Kyle Bennett from hard OCP yeah I think some of you misunderstood the hiring press thing and thought that it was like paying for reviews that's not what it was they literally hired Kyle Bennett like he doesn't he doesn't really run hard OCP anymore so it's been mothballed less he said so Kyle Bennett works at Intel Ryan Shrout works at Intel Roger Kaduri we're excited Intel Chris hook we're excited Intel all these people know each other and Allen mal ventano an excellent well former writer on SSD reviews and now an employee of Intel also works at Intel as I said so Intel has been really expanding its tendrils and pulling all these people on and all these people no other people so the question then is who does Tom pull on if anyone from Nvidia that's really what we're wondering is do any engineers follow and really start to build a serious GPU division at Intel that has a lot of experience has worked at on various successful and unsuccessful products both are important points on a resume because you know what failure is and you know what success is so it's it's very interesting and even if you don't really care about who industry people are which is valid if you don't know their names this is a major development and we'll see we'll see Intel's going to be a very interesting company over the next few years anyway I told you so that's the next story asus has been distributing malware accidentally there's a few things ACS has done lately that we've complained publicly about and one of the biggest ones that we mentioned maybe your to ago was when ASU started using new update tools and started pre-installing almost like rootkits into the flash into flash that they put on motherboards so that when you booted a system for the first time it would pop up all these driver install tools now on the surface that looks like a nice consumer thing because it helps someone who doesn't know what they're doing to install drivers for the first time beyond that the concern becomes that you've now put storage on the motherboard and if that becomes exploitable and it will be exploitable then you've now made a way for malware to revive itself after the OS has been cleared because it's on the motherboard so that's the biggest thing we complained about with Asus and its security in recent years and that's not even what we're talking about today but it's probably something we're going to be talking about again when it's exploited and becomes an attack vector for malware if it hasn't been already so anyway Asus has done some some pretty not great things on the security front according to Kaspersky Lab Asus is a live update utility was recently hijacked and it was used to spread malware that became known as shadow hammer so hammer is a malicious back door at masquerades as a quote critical security update and it is now estimated to have affected over 1 million users Asus being a leading vendor in the market this is obviously a problem the threat was detected in January and it's estimated to have taken place between June and November of 2018 so you could be affected if you're using Asus hardware making the attack so tricky to detect was the fact that the the trojan eyes do utility used authentic certificates a suits tech computer incorporated certificates and was hosted on Asus servers that do the updates so asus has since issued a press release and also a legitimate security update it's also issued a diagnostic tool that users can use to determine if they are affected and what was not issued however was an apology what was not issued was an indication that Asus is taking the matter overly serious and the press release attempts to actually water down the findings of the security firm that discovered the attack according to Kaspersky shadow hammer may be the largest supply chain attack ever discovered rivaling the shadow pad and ccleaner attacks and is obviously of concern so if you have this ASU software installed the live update utility you may want to get rid of it and you may also want to use the ACS published Diagnostics tool to see if you're affected here because it does affect a lot of people this isn't human like a browse safely thing and you'll be fine this is a if it's on your computer you might not be fine so also if there's if you're using a board with Asus firmware that's another point of concern for the future just keep that in mind bad moves by asus on the security front Intel ninth gen processors transitioning to a new stepping so Intel uses revised steppings to correct errors in the processors they use them to augment some of the properties of the processors clock speeds minor voltage changes things like that and you'll see stepping sometimes we're in the overclocking community you might hear that one stepping is superior to others for overclocking for various reasons maybe process maturity or just because of changes in errata they're prepping the platforms for the new ninth gen processors within an hour zero stepping moving from p0 previously according to Asus the newer chips using the RZ or stepping ID will be coming in the second quarter thus far there's no indication as to what the new stepping will bring specifically but as stated it's typically errata changes small changes to clocks things like that Intel will also issue a specification update to detail the changes when the time has come so once the processors are actually here we'll know what's changing Samsung tempers earning expectations amidst a memory price decline something we've been talking out for a few weeks now so and what has been an unprecedented move for Samsung the company recently released a statement or a warning rather that its first quarter earnings expectations are anticipated to miss the mark quote the company expects the scope of price declines and main memory chip products to be larger than expected and this is something we noted in our last episode where memory prices are currently in a freefall with prices expected to hit lows not seen since 2011 also affecting Samson's earnings are the sluggish demand for display panels which represents another sizable chunk of Samson's business prices for both memory and display panels specifically OLED are expected to rebound though in the second half of the year and as noted by Samsung officials it has never before offered a statement before earnings reports however after having to revise the earnings guidance for fourth quarter 18 and again for the first quarter of 19 due to memory prices Samsung has evidently decided it was time to break its code of silence according to industry profits and clairvoyants digit times PCIe SSD s are becoming more ubiquitous and look to be experiencing a surge to 50 percent market share in 2019 this will also achieve market share parity with 2.5 inch SSDs on the SATA interface and is a big move the looming NAND oversupply and steep production and memory prices have led to 512 gigabyte PCIe SSD prices falling off by 11 percent in the first quarter of 2019 and two of these six gigabyte options often see similar price drops and have in the past couple of months throughout the year 1 terabyte models are expected to come down as well further narrowing the on established price disparity between SATA and PCIe protocols we previously reported about Intel and micron parting ways on the joint venture to develop non-volatile memory with each company agreeing to pursue new things people pursue new non-volatile memory interests independently and in tile with octane and 3d crosspoint while micron would follow on with quantex so it was a mutual departure this however got a bit messy because Doyle river is one of the Intel engineers who jumped ship to micron allegedly brought Intel IP and trade secrets in tow to micron as moving over so this is old news at this point but what's new is that Intel has filed the lawsuit against rivers and rivers micron and Intel have been locked in a legal dispute since the filing most recently Intel was awarded a court order that states Rivers quote shall not possess use or disclose any confidential proprietary or trade secret Intel documents related to 3d crosspoint or Intel's obtained branded products including about personnel working on those products that he acquired while working for Intel and that contain information Intel has not disclosed outside of Intel except under non-disclosure agreement protecting its confidentiality additionally the court order gives rivers three days to return any data that may be in his possession pursuant to the court order and Intel's lawsuit according to his attorney the embattled Rivers has nothing to return nor hide quote mr. rivers doesn't have anything to return this is from Daniel Sakaguchi an attorney defending rivers my apologies on the pronunciation quote we continue to take the position that Intel's claims are greatly exaggerated Intel's allegations are that rivers brought the USB drive out of Intel when departing Intel with sensitive information on it rivers refutes those allegations unsurprisingly and states that the files are of personal or sentimental value to him and in no way constituted any IP or trade secret theft the register has a thorough breakdown of the events so far so if you want to learn more we'll link their article in our show notes below but that's kind of the news up to now of this event DNA sequencing that successfully used as a storage medium how long until this one is exploited for malware perhaps we could ask Asus apparently DNA makes for a pretty good memory substrate sponsored by DARPA and Microsoft several scientists at the University of Washington demonstrated proof of concept of DNA as a storage medium the quote was our device encodes data into a DNA sequence which is then written to a DNA boy uh oligonucleotide oligonucleotide using a custom DNA synthesizer pooled for liquid storage and red using a nano pour sequencer and a novel minimal preparation protocol we demonstrate an automated five bite right store and read cycle with a modular design enabling expansion as new technology becomes available so using this system a simple five byte message hello was written and successfully stored and read out without data loss over a period of 21 hours scientists have long touted the potential for DNA as a storage medium and its potential over silicon and magnetic tape scientists and companies like Intel micron and Microsoft are all invested in DNA storage most of the world's archival data is stored on magnetic tape but there's hope that someday in the not so distant future DNA will become the de-facto archival storage technology so that's it for this week's news recap as always subscribe for more to catch our reviews and other videos coming up this week and our factory tours the ones that are left you can also go to patreon.com/scishow and exes to catch our newest behind-the-scenes video we have another one going up in a few days on patreon or store doc gamers Nexus down now to help us out there as well thank you for watching I'll see you all next time