Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome back to the hardware news recap for the past week let's get started with the biggest item here and that's that there's rumored integration of am the zen architecture in the PS 5 or whatever the next playstation maybe that's not immediately all that alarming or different because they're using AMD now they probably will continue to do so but this is the first real concrete potential evidence that we have pointing towards design inclusion in the next playstation that would be the first time a Xena architecture specifically has been using a console so we'll be talking about that also new Specter attack vectors that look like they could exploit firmware access which is alarming for a number of reasons and some news on an embarrassing mining ad that will go through momentarily before that this video is brought to you by Thermal Grizzlies high-end thermal paste and liquid metal Thermal Grizzlies cryo not is an affordable high quality thermal compound that doesn't face some of the aging limitations of other pastes on the market cryo not has a thermal conductivity of 12.5 watts per meter Kelvin focuses on endurance is easy to spread and isn't electrically conductive making it safe to use on GPU dies thermal grizzly also makes conductor not liquid metal which we've used to drop 20 degrees off some temperatures than our dee-lighted tests by a tube at the link in the description below first up leading at Linux publication fir onyx they are in the technical coverage space like we are except they cover basically Linux exclusively into great depth they published a story that noted a Sony programmer submitting code updates for something called ZN ver1 which includes low-level virtual machine updates or LLVM LLVM is used in software compiling and a sony engineer's work on updating LLVM with Xen update specifically would align with Playstations utilization of virtualization to compile software for onyx notes the following quote on Friday Simon Pilgrim submitted to clean up for Zen ver1 code last week there are more changes across at multiple commits and these upstream LLVM improvements by the Sony programmer have been going back at least two weeks with this just not being someone off clean up a tent and then they go on to thank a reader veronik Saul so indicated that the LLVM updates are specifically for sand architecture and if you are one for connecting dots and forming conspiracy theories based in reality this one would seem too soundly suggests the Zen architecture inclusion in the next play station logically the ps5 though way microsoft's done they're naming we'll see about that so it'll be interesting to see if am these products get used in in playstation five but more importantly or more interestingly we're curious to see if any Raven Ridge or APU products specifically our leverage there and how the semi custom side of Andes business will go about customizing those for the playstation 5 because Raven Ridge is a pretty good fit for a console so with some up fitting and changes for consoles specifically it could be a logical inclusion and we'll see what they do with that next one Spectre attacks that can access firmware so first off the interesting thing here is that anything that can write to firmware is a really scary type of malware and it's not because it can break the motherboard so you saw a lot of comments on stories about this specific news item where people were most concerned that their motherboards would be bricked intentionally and you'd be left with that one actually what's most concerning is anything that can write to firmware can survive a format can survive reinstalling Windows which is the most common go to fix for any kind of malware on a computer whether it's you doing it for your own clean up sake or anyone really bringing it to something like Geek Squad or some other computer shop that's the go-to fix if you can't figure out how to get rid of it otherwise so the security firm eclipse iam has published a new application respect or variant one which allows access to system management mode SMM an element of the bios eclipse IAM is headed by yuri bull ijen Bulacan I'm sorry former chief threat researcher and senior director of advanced threat research at Intel and according to eclipse iam this quote runtime part of firmware often referred to as my handler has long been of interest to security researchers and a target for advanced attackers since this code has high privileges and operates outside the view of other software including the OS and any security applications the exploit could be used to reveal secrets in memory as well as expose the confidential workings of SMM and further vulnerabilities Eclipse iam has been working with Intel since March on this and both Intel and Eclipse iam agree that Intel spectrum mitigations should apply to this vulnerability however eclipse iam raises the point that fixing the problem will require customers to manually update firmware which not everyone will do either because of laziness or because you just don't know that you should and a lot of customers probably don't even know what BIOS is to be completely fair and Intel serves a lot of people outside the infinity of space so it's fun to keep an eye on next one is just kind of interested amusing amusing a little sad Bitcoin specifically is using 0.5% by end of year will be using 0.5% of the world's electricity as an estimate so this is not blockchain as a whole this is not Bitcoin and all the altcoins it's not Bitcoin ITT it's just straight Bitcoin and the report is on live mint.com which suggests from a an economist research paper that Bitcoin specifically and alone will be consuming 0.5 percent of the world's electricity by end of year which is about as much as the country of Ireland estimates are that Bitcoin processing consumes 2.5 5 gigawatts that's up not exactly what he said in the movie but and that a single transaction can use as much power as the average household in the Netherlands in a month this is the part that I am unclear on and we did do something and try and figure out what they meant by this in the article but what we don't know is when this live Mint website says it could use as much power one transaction uses that much power we don't know if they mean one transaction as in I send Bitcoin to you or if they mean like something to do with mining on a greater scale ie I don't know discovering a new block or however it works so I'm not clear on exactly what they meant by that but the bigger thing to this the bigger aspect that I did to point out is that just like making an electric vehicle or something like that are a hybrid vehicle there's an ecological cost outside of just the straight usage of power there's consideration of where is the power source what's your closest source of power that's providing electricity to the mining devices which would be a six at this point and then also speaking of basics what is the impact of creating all of them so there's there's a bit more than just straight power drop but we're not gonna get into any further details than that because I'm not a boxing expert so that's the news item anyway the next one Andy unifies it's discrete GPU and APU drivers this is something we've been waiting for for a while now so they're unified driver packages maybe probably if they work properly anatec points out that the release notes for the Radeon software adrenalin Edition second quarter 2018 wickel is a listing support for the 2400 g2 2200 G and that Andy has called it a unified driver and users have installed it successfully with a range of APs and GPUs installed simultaneously it's also the first official driver released for the rise in ApS since the launch in February so looks like now you can actually have an APU with an AMD GPU and have both of them accessible via drivers that's a good news for where anyone in that situation next one intel has put forth a plan to invest five billion dollars in fab 28 one of their factories in Israel the plan is set to be approved by the Israeli government in the coming weeks as part of the deal until will receive a 5% tax rebate until 2027 if approved and a one hundred ninety five million dollar government grant and a further one hundred ninety five million dollars if they make quote further strategic investments to significantly upgrade its plant technologically intimated a six billion dollar investment in fab 28 back in 2014 probably with the intention of gearing up for 10 nanometre which has since been delayed into eternity and then this one was our favorite news item for the week it's an embarrassing mining hat Biostar would like you to know that you too can be part of the exciting world of cryptocurrency mining just like these smiling models of stock photos that have been photoshopped together with new I minor device from Biostar they released three models of people I minor systems filled with either five 60s or five 70s the ERX series that is and ready to mine the marketing seems eager to prove that crypto isn't just for sweaty nerds you play games in their basements but is also for fashionable stock photo models and anyone can do it it's fashionable it's easy and there's also no price listed yet but ahead expect Abel does note that Fiat only sorry specs for each model can be found on bio stars at website so yeah it's I think they said it's ultra easy money easy to set up easy to make money and it sounds like the kind of cringe-worthy advertising phrasing you'd see and I don't know an infomercial so maybe may work on that one a bit Biostar if you're trying to win anyone over although they are certainly doing themselves no favors by doing the whole look at look look at awesome Millennials to use the word of an attack we're selling a product that will just print you money and making it sound like it's a whole lot of it at that Liam Lee has new Borah light fans we had a one of our patreon backers I'm talking to you asking about this while ago and I sent Leo me an email and this was their answer basically so they've been out to their new Borah light 120 fans that have a range of 900 to 1500 RPM at a max CFM of forty eight point three features include 12 RGB LEDs for quote majestic illumination in the central hub and an outer frame of CNC milled aluminum so visually they're very similar to the aluminum frame the Borah is that Leone sent us for our 11 dynamic review I'm sure we have some footage of that but the frame on the new model is more circular and over hands the edge of the blades slightly so you can't actually see the gap between the blade and the fan frame which is just a visual thing really most importantly they have normal PWM and RGB headers rather than those six pin connectors that only fitly on the controllers and have been there's all kinds of problems with their existing fan lineup you can't use them with anything else except for the Leone controller so they fixed that the fans are available in packs of three with a six way fan splitter with pwm cable through a RGB splitter and anti-vibration pads the whole thing is at 40 bucks for all of that so we may cover that in our fan round up but that's TBD and then final news item here GPX ice blocks coming out for AMD and video cards from alpha cool alpha cool has announced the GPX ice block full coverage GPU cooler for AMD and NVIDIA cards the block includes a backplate completely enclosing the PCB there are two variants the 150 euro GPX plexi is the fancier one with a large window and RGB lighting while the 120 euro acetal one is exactly the same but with a metal cover and no lighting the RGB lighting is compatible with the Asus biostar gigabyte and msi alpha cool claims performance of the two versions as identical and the Pascal or Titan version of the card and Vega versions are also available now this is something we saw briefly at PAX but they're now finally coming out so you can check the product listings for compatibility with specific cards if you're interested in that and then finally for hardware sales for the week we've continued to notice that prices are returning toward MSRP so we'll link one of the cards that we found in the description below they change everyday so we're just gonna link one of the 10 C's cards that's been on sale lately and buy buy on sale sadly I mean at MSRP ish so don't really want to call it a sale when you're talking about coming down from I don't know $300 over MSRP so merely $50 over MSRP but it seems like they're coming back down so a link 1 below if you want to pick up a video card at a reasonable ish price then we'll have that link for you otherwise we also noticed an acer 1440p 144 Hertz monitor for a little bit cheaper than normally and an Intel 86 hundred K marked down by about 20 bucks so not a huge sale there but something worth pointing out and these rise in CPUs and thread ripper seem to have more or less normalized at these new our prices with the 1000 series now that the 2000 season ship and honestly this is something that we've wanted from Intel for a long time because if you've not noticed whenever Intel ships a new generation of processors it seems like the new gen and the old gen basically the same price if you look from case Q to case Q and Andy's actually dropped the prices on the 1000 series CPUs with the launch of the 2000 series and that's what you would expect but that's not what we've seen for the last five years from Intel so at least those have continued to follow or I have at least stabilized at this point for AMD Rison anyway that's it for this week as always subscribe to get more coverage throughout the week we have a lot of really cool stuff coming up this week and go to patreon.com/scishow sacks it stops out directly go to store it on cameras nexus net to pick up one of our mod match or one of our glass crystals the GM teardown logo laser etched in 3d we now have an autographed one up there as well also one quick thing Computex will be happening soon so if you're not subscribed to make sure you are because that's where all the new PC hardware news will be coming out for the next year or so that's in about a week from now thanks for watching I'll see you all next time