Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware unboxed news corner this week's news recap is probably going to be a bit shorter than the previous episodes as two of the major news stories that came out since last week we've already covered on the channel so in case you missed it go back and check out our coverage of the NVIDIA GeForce Partner Program and the suspicious AMD security flaws unveiled by CTS labs in this week's news corner we'll be discussing a new tomb raider game intel's hardware fixes for spectre and meltdown delays to those 4k 144 Hertz and monitors you keep asking about Rison 2000 series pre-orders and more we'll start with Intel's announcements surrounding meltdown and Spectre and specifically the changes they are making to upcoming hardware releases to protect against these nasty vulnerabilities the basic gist here is Intel has developed our Hardware fix for meltdown and one of the two Spectre variants the one that exports branch target injection these fixes will be implemented into new 8th gen processes that are set to ship in the second half of 2018 along with cascade lake which is Intel's upcoming Xeon an h EDT platform that refreshes sky like X essentially on 14 nanometers Intel doesn't specifically say what 8th gen process is set for release in the second half of the year we'll get these fixes but they're most likely product line they're referring to is Cannon Lake KB Lake G and 8th generation H series processors will likely miss out on the fixes and they're scheduled for launch in q2 intel also hasn't said how we'll be able to tell what chips have the hardware fixes for meltdown inspector although they do want to be transparent about it it's worth pointing out that Spectre variant 1 the bounds check bypass exploit will not be addressed with hardware fixes so we'll still be relying on software mitigations to protect us from some aspects of Spector it seems this particular exploit is difficult to address so we could be without a hardware solution for some time naturally the biggest question will be how performance is affected once Intel rolls out hardware changes to protect against these issues the software solutions did result in a performance in in some circumstances with existing chips so there is a chance these upcoming processes with hardware fixes will not have the same performance improvements that Intel will once expecting and as a quick note Intel has now released micro code updates that address meltdown inspector for all processes since Sandy Bridge and fixes for even older CPUs are currently being worked on in display news it's disappointing to hear that the hotly anticipated 4k 144 Hertz HDR displays from a sous asa and AOC are once again delayed this time through the third quarter of 2018 this news comes from TFT central and we've been able to confirm it with our own sources that the company's preparing to release these monitors so these monitors are based on a new AU Optronics panel and they were originally announced at CES 2017 and were expected to launch at some point during 2017 then they were delayed to q1 of 2018 and now they've been delayed further hopefully they are quality monitors when they do come out as we've been waiting a while now and the actual models I'm referring to at the Seuss page 27 UQ the acer x 27 and aoc AG 273 ug you guys have been asking me to review these for months and you'll be waiting here for longer now unfortunately and on top of this the 35 inch 34 40 by 1440 200 Hertz HDR displays the asou speed v vq and asa ex35 are also delayed now to q4 of 2018 this is just speculation on my part but I believe these monitors have been delayed to coincide with the release of invidious next-generation consumer GPUs there were rumors for a while that Nvidia would announce these graphics cards at GTC this month which would have coincided with the old q1 2018 launch date for these displays now we're not expecting next-generation GPUs from Nvidia until the third quarter and guess what these displays have been delayed until q3 as well it could be a coincidence for the first 4k 144 Hertz HDR displays are g-sync compatible and basically in video exclusive I believe in video has acquired the launch rights to these ao Optronics panels these juicing displays which is why there are no free sink alternatives are now so they likely have the ability to sink the release to the launch of their new GPUs again just speculation but that's probably what's happening here we should be hearing more about rising 2nd gen pretty soon but before AMD can officially tell us anything pre-order pages have appeared for the rise in 2000 series that spilled the beans on some things like TDP and clock speeds at least assuming the details are correct so at the top we allegedly have the risin 720 700 X and risin 720 700 no 2800 X here and these are the 8 core 16 thread options the 2700 X is a hundred and five watt part up from 95 watts and will apparently be bundled with a wraith prism cooler clock speeds are looking like 3.7 gigahertz base and 4.3 5 gigahertz boost no clock speeds listed for the 2700 bits a 65 watt part and comes with the Wraith spire cooler the 6 core 12 thread parts are the risin 520 600 X and risin 520 600 the 2600 X has a 95 watt TDP comes with the Wraith spire cooler and has clock speeds of 3.6 gigahertz base and at 4.2 5 gigahertz boost the 2600 is a 65 watt part and comes with the Wraith stealth cooler a release date is listed as April 19th on one of these pre-order pages video cards also have this slide that allegedly shows pricing for these CPUs though the embargo date listed on the sliders in 2017 so who knows whether this is actually legitimate or not anyway that's the situation with risin 2000-series pre-orders and again we should be getting some official news on that soon more interesting display news this time related to free sync new updates are set at the Xbox one X and Xbox one s that will bring support for free sync allowing gamers to hook up a compatible monitor and achieve adaptive synced gameplay in Xbox titles now this isn't as useful as free sync on PC as a lot of console games are locked to either 30 or 60 FPS and keep the framerate pretty consistent throughout gameplay however for those tiles that are unlocked or fluctuate below their target framerate free sync will help to smooth things out it will be a niche feature considering most Xbox owners hook up their console to a TV and basically no TV support adaptive sink but it is neat to have anyway and a nice inclusion considering the Xbox uses AMD hardware support for free sync when we roll that in a spring updates the Xbox one ecosystem a future update slated for launch later in 2018 will also allow the Xbox one to automatically select low latency modes on supported TVs again neat for those console gamers out there in game news shadow of the Tomb Raider has been revealed in a short 23 second teaser the sequel to rise of the Tomb Raider will be fully revealed on April 27 and then release of the world on September 14th this year on PC Xbox one and PlayStation 4 there's no xbox timed exclusivity for this game unlike with rise of the Tomb Raider there have been rumors surrounding shadow of the Tomb Raider for some time now which escalated when people uncovered a launch date in a teaser website ahead of the first reveal and I say first revealed because there's another reviewer coming in April as I mentioned I kind of miss the days when companies were just reveal games and give us all the information in one go rather than this drip-feed business but I guess it's still good news to hear about this game really not much else to say apparently shadow of the Tomb Raider will be the climactic finale of Lara's origin story which of course tells us nothing about whether this is actually the final game in the series or not after all it is just the finale - an origin story in other game used the crash bandicoot insane trilogy is coming to PC on July 10th alongside Xbox one and intend o switch if you interested in the game which did exclusively launch on ps4 last year then you won't have to wait much longer to get it on PC and fortnight as well that's also coming to iOS and Android for those who love mobile gaming with cross-platform support for playing with console and PC gamers moving into the quick fire topics of the week I don't care much about this story but President Donald Trump has used his presidential powers to block Broadcom from acquiring Qualcomm in a 117 billion dollar hostile takeover welcomes executive team was against the acquisition but shareholders were largely in favor as Broadcom is offering a bit more per share than the current price then Trump heard about Broadcom a company with ties to Singapore and blocked the deal citing national security concerns it's basically the whole story with that one another quickfire topic here google has announced it will ban cryptocurrency ads from June 2018 probably because most crypto ads are super dodgy the ban covers crypto currency exchanges wallets trading advice services and initial coin offerings in response cryptocurrency prices fell across the board which I'm sure will please a lot of you guys that are hoping everything will crash so you can buy graphics cards at a reasonable price again unless good news a power outage on March 9th at samsung's NAND manufacturing plant in Pyeongtaek south korea has caused a global reduction in output for the month to the tune of 3.5% samsung's upward specifically has dropped by 11 percent due to the incident with up to 60,000 wafers damaged it's not clear whether NAND prices will be affected as a result luckily we're talking about non-volatile nanti rather than DRAM which is already stupidly expensive but it's never good to hear about production capacity being affected and that's it for this week's news corner as always if you like this give it a thumbs up subscribe for more as we do these weekly every Friday now I'll catch you in the next one you