Author: batteryforpc

In most functional ways, Google’s Virtual Desks for Chrome OS fully arrived in the latest version: Chrome OS 78. With all the animations, features and new set of keyboard shortcuts now available to users right out of the box, Virtual Desks feels nearly complete. We talked briefly about the last, lingering piece that was missing in gesture navigation with Chrome OS 78 and that was the inability for users to move between active Virtual Desks with a gesture on the trackpad.

When turning on the single flag needed to enable this feature, the choice of gestures is a tad bit questionable. Again, as we’ve talked about in the past, there are many folks who’ve been using Chrome OS for a very long time and certain multi-finger moves on the trackpad surface are inexorably tied to certain things in our minds now. The biggest one for me is the 3-finger swipe left and right to scrub through tabs.

For me, this is one of those tiny gestures that sets using a Chromebook apart from other devices. If you’ve not tried it, you most definitely should get it into your normal workflow. With a quick 3-finger slide left or right on the trackpad, you can seamlessly move between your open tabs in the browser and it is easily my favorite productivity gesture on a Chromebook that you can’t leverage on any other operating system.

Here’s the issue. With the addition of Virtual Desks, Google chose to take that 3-finger gesture and apply it to Virtual Desk navigation instead. So, when you turn on the flag for Virtual Desk gesture navigation right now, your 3-finger swipe will no longer move you through open tabs in your browser. Instead, this behavior has been mapped to a 4-finger swipe left or right and my brain has not been able to handle it. 

I’m not kidding: I’ve had Virtual Desks turned on in every way, shape and form since they were introduced and ever since they changed around the 3/4-finger gestures, I’ve been trying to retrain my brain with absolutely no success. As a matter of fact, right before this paragraph started, I was going to swipe over to my Gmail tab and check something and instead went to my adjacent Virtual Desk. It’s starting to get aggravating.

Thankfully, we’ve spotted a bug report entry that shows clearly that Google is planning on implementing Virtual Desk gestures in a way that keeps the beloved 3-finger gesture mapped to tab scrubbing. I and many other users can breath a bit easier knowing that one of the best navigation moves in the OS is here to stay. No need to retrain my brain. No need to force myself to forget years of habit. Check it out below:

Desks: Prepare Virtual Desks Gestures for launch

This CL makes the following changes:

– Tab scrubbing will always use 3-finger gestures.

– 4-finger horizontal swipes will switch desks only if

the flag “–enable-virtual-desks-gestures” is enabled.

– 3-finger horizontal swipes while in Overview will always

move the highlighter.

This CL is meant to be merged back to M-79.

A follow-up CL will remove the “–enable-virtual-desks-gestures”

flag entirely on M-80, so that virtual desks gestures will always

be enabled going forward.

Instead, moving between Virtual Desks will happen with a 4-finger left/right gesture. I know other operating systems use a 3-finger gesture, but I genuinely feel like Google is making the right call, here. After all, mapping the more-complex navigation (moving entire desks) to the more-complex gesture makes way more logical sense. And, as much as I love Virtual Desks, the more useful navigation is really tab scrubbing in Chrome OS, so I’m extremely excited to see it will continue forward as it always has: untouched and unmatched.

A Geekbench 4 submission today shows off the power of two AMD EPYC Rome 7H12 64-core, 128-thread server-grade processors in one Cray Shasta supercomputer. AMD added the 7H12 to its second-gen EPYC line in September.

AMD currently has three 64-core, 128-thread EPYC chips in its arsenal; although, more might be on the way. With a 2.6 GHz base clock and 3.3 GHz boost clock, the EPYC 7H12 is the fastest performer out of the three existing models. The chip is rated rated for 280W, which is 55W higher than the EPYC 7742, so the 7H12 should have a higher all-core turbo clock.

The Shasta was rocking two EPYC 7H12 processors, meaning it had 128 cores and 256 threads at its disposal. The system put up a single-core score of 4,512 points and a multi-core score of 181,580 points.

Surprisingly, Shasta’s configuration wasn’t enough to put the supercomputer in first place on the Geekbench 4 rankings. The current Geekbench 4 multi-core record belongs to a Gigabyte R282-Z92 system, which sports a pair of EPYC 7742 chips. Shasta lags behind the R282-Z92 by roughly 3.4% and 7.6% in the single-and multi-core scores, respectively.

On paper, the EPYC 7H12 should outperform the EPYC 7742. Due to the lack of detailed information, we can only assume that the discrepancy is attributed to the fact that both systems were running different memory, operating systems and versions of the Geekbench 4 software.

Gigabyte has added an interesting feature to its newest Aorus RGB memory kit, one that allows it to run faster in certain motherboards with minimal fuss. It’s called “Aorus Boost,” and it gives users up to a 4 percent bump in performance.

Even without the boost feature, Gigabyte’s new 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3600 memory kit is the fastest one it has released so far. At 3600MHz, the timings are configured at 18-19-19-39, according to the RAM’s main product page and Gigabyte’s press release. (Curiously, the specifications section lists slightly higher timings—19-19-19-43 on Intel platforms and 20-19-19-43 on Ryzen configs, so go figure.)

It’s the boost feature that is somewhat interesting, though.

“Many users often look to overclock their RAM and tweak their timings for higher memory frequencies and better performance. Memory overclocking can be a hit or miss though with users often spending lots of time trying to unlock better memory performance to little effect as their overclocked memory performance falls short of their expectations,” Gigabyte explains.

This is where Aorus Boost comes into play. On certain Aorus X570 and Z390 motherboards, there is an Aorus Memory Boost setting in the BIOS that will apply the necessary settings to increase the frequency up to 3733MHz. Compatible motherboards include the following models:

Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce 5G

Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce

Z390 Aorus Xtreme

Z390 Aorus Master

Z390 Aorus Ultra

Z390 Aorus Pro WiFi

X570 Aorus Xtreme

X570 Aorus Master

X570 Aorus Ultra

X570 Aorus Pro WiFi

X570 Aorus Pro

X570 I Aorus Pro WiFi

It’s not clear what effect this has on timings; I presume they get loosened a touch. Outside of the boost feature, Gigabyte says this kit is built on a “10-layer, sophisticated PCG that ensures the stability and performance” of the memory chips, which are “100 percent sorted and tested.” Binning is a common practice on the best RAM kits, though, so this is not unique to Gigabyte.

There are two versions of this kit available. Both sport a pair of 8GB modules, but the second version also includes a couple of “demo modules.” These are dummy modules for people who want to fill all their DIMM slots with RGB lighting, without buying more RAM.

Gigabyte did not say when this RAM will be available or how much the two versions will cost. As a point of reference, Gigabyte’s Aorus RGB 16GB DDR4-3200 memory kit with demo modules sell for $169.99 on Amazon.

That said, if you are in the market for RAM (or pretty much anything else), it might be worth waiting a week to see what of Black Friday deals emerge.

According to a report by Chinese media IThome, Jiangsu Huacun Electronic Technology has demoed its PCIe 5.0 controller at the 2019 Nantong New Generation Information Technology Expo. The memory and storage manufacturer is optimistic that the controller will be in mass-production by the end of 2020.

It was only this year that computer hardware started to arrive with support for the PCIe 4.0 standard. Presently, PCIe 4.0 is still limited to AMD’s current Ryzen desktop CPUs, Ryzen Threadripper HEDT (high-end desktop) CPU line and Epyc server processor portfolio. Intel has yet to board the PCIe 4.0 train, but is expected to do so soon.

Little is known about the HC9001 PCIe 5.0 controller. It’s reportedly produced with the 12nm manufacturing process by the China National Research Institute and Jiangsu Huacun Electronic Technology. The HC9001, which is China’s first domestic PCIe 5.0 controller, is gaining a lot of buzz, so perhaps we’ll get more information as time progresses.

The PCIe 5.0 standard promises to deliver a throughput up to 128 GBps over a x16 slot. This is double the bandwidth of what the PCIe 4.0 interface can do. At this point, PCIe 5.0 would be overkill for the average consumer, considering that today’s mainstream graphics cards and SSDs aren’t fast enough to use PCIe 4.0 to its max potential. However, PCIe 5.0 will certainly be a welcomed progression in the cloud computing, big data, AI and 5G industries.

An unconfirmed Intel roadmap shows the chipmaker adopting the PCIe 5.0 standard with its forthcoming Sapphire Rapids enterprise-grade processors in 2021. So far, we haven’t heard anything about PCIe 5.0 on the AMD front.

OnePlus users beware: WhatsApp will (probably) drain your battery.

According to posts on Reddit and the OnePlus official forums, the latest version of WhatsApp (v.2.19.308, which dropped at the end of last month) is seriously eating into the battery life of a whole range of OnePlus phones, including the OnePlus 7T series that only arrived in October. The issue is affecting devices running either Android 9 or 10 and those hit by it are seeing up to 50 per cent of their battery life being consumed by WhatsApp, even overnight.

Users have found various workarounds for fixing something the developers should really have caught before releasing the app into the wild, including force-stopping WhatsApp when it’s not being used. This admittedly defeats the purpose of the always-on messaging app WhatsApp is supposed to be, but at least stops it from killing your battery overnight.

The problem seems to have been fixed in the latest version of WhatsApp (v.2.19.325), which hasn’t yet hit the Google Play Store, but you can download it direct from WhatsApp if you’re one of those affected. 

At Microsoft Ignite last week, a slide announced that Microsoft’s project to rebase its perennially unloved Edge browser on Google’s open source project Chromium is well underway. Release candidates for the new Chromium-based Edge build are available on consumer and server versions of Windows (including Windows 7 and Server 2008, which have already left mainstream support), as well as MacOS, Android, and iOS.

Sharper-eyed attendees also noticed a promise for future Linux support.

Curious folks can download canary or beta versions of the new Edge for most operating systems from Microsoft Edge Insider—although there’s nothing there yet for Linux. Browsing the Edge Insider site from Chrome on Linux replaces the download button with “Not supported for Linux.” Using Firefox instead presents you with a download button for the Windows 10 version, presumably due to that browser’s newly enhanced privacy controls.

We downloaded the Edge beta on a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM and took it for a quick spin. So far, it looks very much like Chrome itself—enough so that you might not notice which browser you’re using unless you look very specifically.

For the moment, it doesn’t look like there’s much to get excited about in Edge’s new Chromium flavor—it’s pretty much just Chromium with one additional button that lets you go to your Favorites and another smiley-face button that sends feedback to developers. Browsing to chrome://extensions redirects you to edge://extensions and presents you with an offer to head to the Microsoft Store to find some. The profile button, similarly, takes you to a Microsoft login page rather than a Google one.

It seems unlikely that the Linux world is going to go ga-ga for what seems to essentially be a reskinning of Chromium—but that might be missing Microsoft’s real thrust here. Many developers—including Linux developers—choose Azure over rival cloud services like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, and bringing Edge to Linux may represent little more than a way to offer those developers deeper ties into Microsoft’s profile and identity management services.

If a developer already has and uses Azure authentication for work, the ability to tie that authentication directly to the browser itself may be just enough to make Edge interesting.