Gadgetory

welcome back to the hardware box news corner plenty of news to get through this week including four interrelated stories in a row so strap yourselves in for that one plus the usual range of other tidbits thankfully there won't be any gtx 1180 rumors in this one so let's get on with it we're going to start with a quick interrelated story here earlier this week at the data center Innovation Summit Intel revealed their official xeon roadmap for the next few years and surprise there's more 14 nanometer processes coming in 2019 the roadmap starts with cascade Lake which we already knew is coming in the fourth quarter of this year with support for avx-512 B n ni Intel obtained persistent memory and hardware security mitigations for some of the issues Intel has been facing recently nothing really has changed here and of course these chips will be 14 nanometers probably 14 nanometer + + next year Intel is stuck on 14 nanometers again for their Xeon line which I'm sure wasn't their original plan many years ago anyway Intel our famously struggling with 10 millimeters so what we're getting for service in 2019 is Cooper Lake again built on 14 nanometer but with some improvements to various service specific instruction sets and so forth and then finally in 2020 Intel will transition Xeon to 10 nanometer with ice Lake cascade Lake will use the existing hardware platform introduced with Sky like SP last year while Cooper Lake and ice Lake will move to a new platform with an LGA 4189 socket while we're not usually a channel that discusses server hardware it will be interesting to see how Intel's the online competes on 14 down a meter with ambe's upcoming epic lines using seven nanometer process tech from other fabs until sluggish progress on 10 nanometer could start to hurt them very soon the second Intel story surrounds whiskey Lake the code name for Intel's upcoming line of 14 nanometer processors HP accidentally published specs for their upcoming Pavilion x360 laptops which revealed a new set of 15 watt u series processors that are likely whiskey Lake interestingly the SKUs use eighth generation browning which replaced them in the same series as current 8th gen KB Lake refresh parts anyway the big news here is whiskey Lake will bring massive improvements to turbo frequencies compared to K like refresh while base clocks allowed to do the same a CP like the core i7 85 65 you boasts a 4.6 gigahertz turbo clock competitors 4 gigahertz with the existing core i7 8550 you similarly the I 580 265 you has the 700 megahertz higher boost clock in the 8250 you and the i3 80 145 you jumps up by 500 megahertz over the I 380 130 you other specifications appear to remain the same the core i5 and i7 models will still be quad cores while the core i3 will be a dual core processor graphics also appears to be the same offering Intel UHD 620 with 24 execution units these new whiskey leg processes should improve performance for 15 watt class products in short workloads that can make good use of they're significantly higher boost clocks but I'd spent clock speeds to fall rapidly after the first few seconds leaving us with sustained performance around the same level as existing cable oak refresh CPUs another Intel story this time relating to a new line of knucks codenamed crimson Canyon set for launch in September and available for pre-order now crimson Canyon NOx combine a 15 watt Intel Ussuri CPU with discrete AMD Radeon graphics the first nut from Intel to feature a discrete GPU and I guess a continuation of Intel's partnership with AMD on graphics there are two basically identical crimson Canyon skews the only difference being a gig of ram versus four gigabytes both use the core i3 8121 you intel's 15 watt cannon like part built on 10 nanometer tech while it is attending a meter cpu it's not exactly impressive packing just two cores and four threads called - 2.2 gigahertz with a boost clock of 3.2 gigahertz there's no I GPU in the 8121 you hence why Tinto's included a Polaris based AMD Radeon 540 GPU in these systems as well the 4 gig configuration will be available five hundred and thirty dollars while the eight gig model will come in at $575 this actually seems pretty expensive considering the rest of the wig hardware you get so I'm not sure if these nuts will sell particularly well in to release their new SSD 660 pay during the flash memory summit 2018 the first mainstream drive to use qlc memory for those not familiar with ql seed increases the number of voltage levels per cell allowing for bits to be stored compared to three for TLC and two for M see which of course improves density but as there are more voltage levels tolerances are higher which potentially hurt performance and endurance PC perspective reviewed the SSD is 660 P defended to perform pretty darn well for a budget class SSD particularly in random workloads and anything that doesn't saturate the SLC cache when the cache is saturated right speeds are slower due to those tighter tolerances but the cache is quite large so for most workloads it shouldn't be a huge issue the drives come in at $20 per gigabyte as well which is very competitive considering the performance and the 5-year warranty is a nice bonus it sounds like a pretty compelling SSD option and could replace slower SATA drives at similar prices AMD has launched a new game bundle for their graphics cards called raised the game basically if you purchase an RX Vegas 64 Vega 56 rx 5 ad or rx 570 from a participating retailer you'll get 3 free games Assassin's Creed Odyssey Strange Brigade and star control origins none of these games have been released just yet but you do get all three when you purchase one of the cards from a participating retailer between August 7th and November 3rd while stocks last of course when you redeem your coupon you'll be sent the game keys for the titles when they are released Assassin's Creed Odyssey is obviously the big one here and that will be released on October 5th while strange Brigade comes out on August 28th and start control origins on September 20th if you were interested in these games and wanted an AMD GPU it's a pretty good deal especially considering it's available with the cheaper rx 570 Japan next has a new 35 inch ultra wide gaming monitor known as the you've got to be kidding me known as the JN 35 VCG 200 u w HD while it is being advertised as a 200 Hertz curved display it isn't using the new 34 40 by 1440 200 Hertz panels instead it's just a regular old 2560 by 1080 a.m. VA panel this means fairly typical specs 300s brightness 2001 contrast ratio 3 millisecond grader great response times and support for AMD freesync and with the top-end refresh rate of 200 Hertz I'd expect the monitor to support low framerate compensation although the refresh rate floor isn't specified and next is selling the monitor for a discounted price of around seventy thousand yen which is about six hundred and thirty u.s. dollars that discounted price is probably a little on the high side concerning the ace of predators ed thirty-five is available with similar specs and gsync is sort of freesync for six hundred dollars but the panel could be different this story broke much early in the week but it's still interesting if you missed it amy has designed a new semi custom SOC for a Chinese game console which includes Zen CPU cores and a Vega GPU on the one die considering this sot specifications it is an entirely new die rather than a repurposed apu or other semi custom chip which makes it particularly interesting the chip used for the Zhongshan soup or console packs for Zen cores and eight threads clocked up to three gigahertz alongside 24 Vega compute units clocked up to 1,300 megahertz it also includes a gddr5 controller which will be attached to eight gig of ram in the console it's an interesting mix of pieces from other AMD products the CPU is very similar to current Zen based Raven Ridge a piece like the horizon 520 400 G while the Vega GPU is like a higher cost version of the GPU included with Intel's KB Lake G in terms of performance the Zen CPU will be much faster than the eight core Jaguar included with the Xbox one and PlayStation 4 series while the GPU will sit between the ps4 and PS 4 Pro though closer to the regular ps4 this chip is a nice little win for AMD semi-custom division which is clearly gaining more partners than just the big console manufacturers the superball console is expected to launch in China before the end of 2018 so it'll be interesting to see what it brings now into the quicker topics to run at this news corner firstly for at 76 won't be coming to steam instead it will be exclusive to the Bethesda dotnet platform yeah it's just awesome that we're gonna have to install another launcher for this sort of games I guess at least it's not the Windows Store interested to hear your thoughts on this one let us know in the comments below if not having for that 76 on Steam will impact your decision to buy or play it and in other news discord is launching a game store this is an interesting one because discord is widely used by gamers to chat with friends or even your favorite youtubers through patreon exclusive discord rooms intent on that one so there's actually a chance that storm might be successful when you purchase through the store games are added to your discord account and then you can launch them through the app with other basic functionality I still recommend as we'll use steam to buy their games and discord to chat though that's it this week's news corner as always hit the subscribe button to get this segment in your inbox every Friday and activate the Bell icon so YouTube actually works properly consider supporting us on patreon links to that in the description below and I'll catch you in the next one