Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware box news corn had a few weeks off from presenting the news thanks to getting sick then moving house but I am back with a few episodes before Computex kicks off in a little over a week as Computex is so close there haven't been many PC hardware product launches this week because they're all being safe for Computex but there's still some interesting topics so well let's get into it everyone watching this video I'm sure is super excited to see what AMD has in store for us with their upcoming third generation rise in CPUs and Navi GPUs there have been a few leaks floating me on the place giving supposed to the specifications for some CPU models but haven't been able to conclusively verify that stuff yet so not going to be the focus of this video with that said AMD has confirmed at their annual shareholder meeting the both third generation and their all-new Navi GPU architecture on seven nanometer will debut in q3 2019 I don't think this will come as a surprise to anyone q3 has been right on the mark for some time now and fits in nicely with their launch event plans over the coming weeks speaking of launch events there are two events coming up for AMD that will be of interest one is it Computex their keynote there which was announced a while ago and just this week aim D officially announced their second event next horizon gaming at e3 on June 10th like the Computex event AMD's III keynote will be live streamed so you will get all the news as its announced we're not 100% sure what will be shown at either of these events but considering the e3 event is just a few weeks after the Computex event you'd have to expect a neat split of announcements between the two considering Computex will have a lot of X 570 stuff from motherboard partners CPUs would likely be the focus of that event so hopefully we will get rise in 3000 information there and then at e3 we're probably looking at the GPU side of things with Navi not just for discrete cards but also for consoles given the technology will be used in upcoming devices from Sony and presumably Microsoft as well exciting times for AMD fans of the industry in general always nice to get some major product launches to spice things up for the second half of the year in not as good news Intel has been hit with another security flaw originating from speculative execution once again a bit of a disclaimer here because I'm not a security expert so I suggest reading the original article from ARS technica and others that go into more detail but I'll try my best to summarize the issues here what we are looking at our three new floors namely Riedel or our IDL there's fallout and zombie load and they are all closely related to the original speculative execution issues from January last year called meltdown inspector the more technical name for the new floors is micro architectural data sampling or MDS it has to do with gathering data from buffers within the processor and exploiting how those buffers are utilized for speculative execution while any sort of hardware related floor is bad news one positive is that actually using these walls for nefarious purposes is difficult and would require many attempts to gather enough useable data and sort through that data from the rubbish that's because there is not much control over what appears in the buffers that MDS exploits researchers from vu Amsterdam did show a proof-of-concept attack where a password file could be read by MDS however the attack required the system to run a command repeatedly so that the right data would appear in the buffers intel says that MDS is already addressed at the hardware level in many of our recent eighths and nitrogen Intel core processes which basically means coffee Lake and whiskey Lake anything before that is vulnerable though and until our pushing up marker code updates for Sandy Bridge and up to address the problem there are a few other interesting tidbits surrounding this story the first is that fir onyx did some testing on Linux with the cry 9 79 80 XE a vulnerable Skylink X CPU to see what the performance impacts are from software side and microcode mitigations Intel said it should be under 3% for the most part although in some workloads it could be higher for Linux found similar there were a few tests where the performance difference was massive but a regular impact was maybe up to 5% or so I did also see a report claiming that Intel tried to bribe of EU Amsterdam into downplaying the severity of the vulnerabilities however when looking into I'm not sure when the bribe is the right word to use here the source is an article translated from Dutch which seems to suggest that Intel attempting to pay out via their bug bounty program and that payment being refused constitutes a the article also claims the video forced Intel to reveal this floor now rather than six months later not really short the situation is there anyway enough about this issue I don't think many consumer platforms will up to include the microcode fixes given the difficulty of attack so I don't think there will be many performance considerations for everyday uses and apparently the latest chips are safe anyway as for AMD they've already stated that their CPUs are not vulnerable to this sort of attack and I believe it's the same for ARM chips as well in other news a tech powerup for remember allegedly found references to both the Radeon rx 640 and Radeon 6:30 in the latest drivers these are said to be straight rebrands of the rx 550 X and Radeon 540 X so nothing at all exciting here whatsoever but it does bring into question what AMD might use as a name for the next-generation GPUs will they stick with an RX 600 series form in range of products or choose to use rx 3000 like has been heavily rumored left to wait and see on that one this is a story from a couple of weeks ago that just happened to pop out from my timeline now and what is a bit of a surprise Samsung is set to discontinue their popular be die eight gigabit memory chips in the second quarter of 2019 which is well I guess it's right now there is no firm date set for their demise but in samsung's latest ddr4 sdram component product guide BD is listed as end-of-life while other dies including CDI and DD an eight gigabit capacities and a dice for sixteen gigabit and thirty two gigabit are living on beta as were very popular for high in memory because of their excellent quality and ability to clock high with good timings a lot of people when building a new systems specifically seek out B dies for their memory to ensure the best performance with beady eyes getting discontinued it's only a matter of time before they disappear from the market completely and who knows how many modules have been stockpile of the big dim manufacturers also be interesting to see where the next generation of high-performance memory chips are coming from whether that's a different Samsung die or perhaps from a different manufacturers so there's definitely interesting times ahead for the day Ram market there's also been an interesting turn of events with the launch of Rage 2 and I'm not really talking about the mixed reviews here but more the situation with the DRM users quickly discovered that if you bought Rage 2 on Steam you would have had to deal with de nouveaux DRM which is one of the most notorious DRM technologies out there but if you bought the game through Bethesda's store and used their launcher you were playing with a version of the game that did not include de nouveaux whether or not there was any performance difference between the versions remains to be seen and it could offer a good test platform to finally see whether de novo really has the big performance impact a lot of people claim but in the meantime the developers of Rage 2 noticed the discrepancy between the versions and well luckily instead of just adding it to the pathetic version they did in fact remove de novo from the Steam version so at least that's a positive result for gamers hot chips in 2019 is heading up to be one of the most exciting shows in years for fans of various hardware architectures the event which is held in August and known for its in-depth insights into chip technologies has a schedule that's absolutely jam-packed with talks from all the major companies on all their major technologies looking through the schedule as kindly posted by an air tech we can see that AMD are talking about sent to Matisse very early on day 1 and also deliver a keynote address whether or not we get new insights it will depend on whether AMD will launch sent 2 before August but you'd think so at this point then later we have talks from intel on octane tsmc on their no technology Intel again on 3d packing in Lakefield and talks from both Nvidia and AMD on their chewing and larva architecture so definitely fun times ahead the Epic Games store everyone's second least favorite game store after the Microsoft Store of course has launched its first-ever sale in an attempt to win people over everything on the store priced over $15 has received at least a $10 discount including for pre-order games like Borderlands 3 although we still don't advise pre-ordering anything at this stage there are other deals on their life Metro Exodus for nearly half prices not quite there but considering the store doesn't have anywhere near the amount of games as Steam and is still trying to gain market share I don't think we'll see any steam like super sales for a little while that said it's a good start and it's worth a browse if there are any epic exclusives that interest you in particular lastly we have a bit of a monitor story for you as followed by TFT central the newest seuss tough gaming VG 32 BQ is the first monitor on the mark to support both variable refresh rates and backlight strobing blur reduction at the same time there have been plenty of monitors that include both features but to enable one you had to disable the other so for those it like the increased clarity of backlight strobing you can only run it at a fixed refresh rate the VG 32 VQ has a new mode called LMB sync with LM be standing for extreme low motion blur which is basically a Seuss's brand name for backlight strobing here you can combine adaptive sync it up to 144 Hertz with backlight strobing although presumably there is going to be a high minimum refreshers backlight strobing often isn't very effective below a hundred Hertz the fluid becomes too obvious so will be interesting to see how they handle that it's also interesting to see as soon as expand the tough gaming brand to include monitors so hopefully you'll be able to get that one into review in the coming months anyway that's it for this week's news corner one more of these to go next week before the big show of the in Computex both Steve and I will be flying over to Taiwan to give you all the news and tidbits from there subscribe to get news corner in your inbox approximately every week I guess except for the last three weeks or so and of course we have a patreon page as well for you to enjoy I'll catch you in the next one