Category: Article

A NES MOTHERBOARD FOR THE OPEN SOURCE GENERATION

As the original hardware from the golden era of 8-bit computer gaming becomes a bit long in the tooth, keeping it alive has become something of a concern for enthusiasts. There have been a succession of remanufactured parts for many of the major platforms of the day, and now thanks to [Redherring32] it’s the turn of the NES console.

The OpenTendo is a completely open-source replacement for an original front-loading Nintendo Entertainment System motherboard, using both original or after-market Nintendo CPU and PPU chips, and other still readily available components. It doesn’t incorporate Nintendo’s CIC lockout chip — Drew Littrell wrote a great article on how that security feature worked — but if you really need the authenticity there is also the NullCIC project that can simulate that component.

It’s an interesting exercise in reverse engineering as well as a chance to look at the NES at the chip level. Also for Nintendo-heads, it provides all the component footprints and schematic items in KiCAD format. Will many be built? Given that the NES was the best-selling console of its time there should be no shortage of originals to be found, but that in no way invalidates the effort put into this project. There will be NES consoles somewhere running for decades to come because of work such as this, simply remember that you don’t need to blow in the slot to make it work!

Intel 14nm Rocket Lake-S Leaked: New Core Architecture, Xe Graphics, PCIe 4.0

A new leak by VideoCardz on Sunday suggests that Rocket Lake-S will be a major upgrade from any of Intel’s prior 14nm desktop silicon. Purportedly coming late this year on the 500-series platform, a leaked block diagram says the chips will bring a new core architecture, Xe graphics, 12-bit AV1, PCIe 4.0, twice the DMI 3.0 lanes and Thunderbolt 4. Notably, Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) security instructions have been removed.

Rocket Lake-S (RKL-S) is set to succeed this spring’s Comet Lake-S. In turn, it is expected to be succeeded by 10nm++ Alder Lake-S, which may feature Intel’s big.Little hybrid architecture. This means that Rocket Lake-S will be Intel’s last 14nm platform for the consumer market. For servers, Intel has planned Cooper Lake on 14nm++ this year.

New CPU Architecture, Retiring Grandpa Skylake

Before diving further, it is worth giving a small refresher about Rocket Lake. The codename first surfaced a year ago in two roadmap slides via Tweakers. The sides suggested that Rocket Lake would be manufactured on 14nm and come with both 14nm and 10nm graphics and up to 10 cores (more recent rumors have reduced this to eight cores). 

This hinted at Rocket Lake using Intel’s long-announced mix-and-match chiplet strategy to mix a 14nm CPU with a 10nm graphics chip. Given the development work that this must have required and earlier comments at its 2018 Architecture Day about making its IP more flexible in terms of which process technology it is manufactured on, it has been speculated (first by Tom’s Hardware), that Intel might have backported one of its 10nm architectures to 14nm; possibly this year’s Willow Cove from Tiger Lake. This would bring architecture parity to the desktop, which is still based on Skylake through Comet Lake-S, while Intel works on its process technology. 

This, indeed, seems to be the case, and would immediately be the highlight feature of Rocket Lake. The slide says it has “increased performance with new processor core architecture.”

Leaks had previously already come out suggesting that Rocket Lake would feature AVX-512 support. While this could have meant that Intel brought its server Skylake silicon to the desktop, Intel’s wording seems pretty unambiguous that it is not a Skylake derivative. Given the timing of Rocket Lake, our best bet would be that it comes with a backported version of Tiger Lake’s Willow Cove.

Intel claimed that Ice Lake’s Sunny Cove delivers an 18% instruction per clock (IPC) improvement over Skylake. Willow Cove, in turn, might improve IPC another 5-10% or so. This would deliver a solid 25% or so increased IPC relative to Skylake. 

Aside from yield worries, the peak frequencies for the early versions of 10nm compared to 14nm is also likely to have played a role in choosing 14nm for Rocket Lake. It will be interesting to see what frequencies this new architecture can deliver on Intel’s highly-optimized 14nm process, but it certainly looks like it will bring significant performance improvements.

However, it looks like SGX will be absent. This features, introduced in Skylake, has recently come under attention due to the LVI vulnerability, but has long been an attack vector. 

New GPU Architecture, ‘Xe’cellent news

Rocket Lake will also bring the new Xe Architecture for integrated graphics (internally codenamed Gen12). This is the same architecture present on both Tiger Lake and DG1. This new architecture will also come with support for both AV1 encode and decode, which is a big deal given how CPU intensive the codec is. This in turn implies that both Tiger Lake and DG1 will also support it, which is great news. 

While it has not been confirmed by this leak, previous leaks have indicated a 32EU implementation, which is more than previous Gen9 iterations that come with 24 EUs, but significantly less than Tiger Lake’s 96 EUs. Nevertheless, the combination of Gen12, more EUs and higher frequencies could mean double the integrated graphics performance on desktop.

The slide does not confirm whether the Xe graphics will be a backported 14nm version or, as the Tweakers roadmap suggested, a separate 10nm chiplet. In the case of a 14nm backport, it also could be integrated either on-die or as a chiplet.

I/O: PCIe 4.0, DMI 3.0 x8 and Thunderbolt 4

Rocket Lake-S also has significantly updated I/O, which is an area where AMD has taken the lead with PCIe 4.0 support. Rocket Lake-S is set to level the playing field in that regard, and direct lanes from the CPU go up from 16 to 20, which means both an NVMe drive and GPU will have direct connection. The DMI link from the CPU to chipset has also been increased from x4 to x8, which will double bandwidth to devices connected via chipset. The lanes that hang off the chipset remain at PCIe 3.0, though, which tracks well with our previous reporting that Intel encountered issues with implementing PCIe 4.0 on its chipsets. 

There will also be support for Thunderbolt 4, although this does not have a higher speed than Thunderbolt 3, as well as integrated USB 3.2 Gen 2×2.

Other features that are mentioned as new for the Rocket Lake platform are enhanced display capabilities with integrated HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4a, enhanced media with 12-bit AV1 and HEVC compression, new overclocking features, increased DDR4 speed and USB audio offload.

IN LIGHT OF DELAYS, CHROME IS SKIPPING VERSION 82

Earlier this week, Google developers hit the brakes on releasing new versions of Chrome and Chrome OS. Citing the fact that many are working remotely, the Chromium team continues to develop future releases of the browser and OS but are primarily focusing on making sure that the current version 80 is as stable and secure as it can be.

There hasn’t been an official statement on how long Chrome releases will be paused but it appears that developers will be skipping at least one milestone version. In an update to the Chromium Dev Group announcement that covered the initial pause of Chrome releases, Chrome’s Director of Technical Program Management shared the news that the development of M82 was being abandoned.

Here are some of the immediate actions based on the above decision:

We will abandon current M82 branches, remove infra support, and stop testing/merges to the branches

We will not push any new M82 releases to Dev, and we will stop stabilization for Beta

We will move Dev channel to M83 asap

We will keep Beta channel on M81 until M83 is ready to be promoted 

Jason Kersey, Director, Technical Program Management

The update doesn’t specifically reference Chrome OS but the original post does refer back to the announcement that both the browser and the OS would be held back. In the end, the pause should have little bearing on the features and updates that arrive when the delay is over. It simply means that 83 will contain the majority of features we were expecting in 82 and this change will keep the Chrome and Chrome OS release calendar closer to its original schedule. Presumably, the Dev channel of Chrome and Chrome OS will be making the move to version 83 in the coming week.

Intel Core i5-L15G7 Lakefield CPU Rivals Qualcomm Snapdragon 835

A second Intel Lakefield processor has finally popped up in the wild. Twitter user @InstLatX64 recently spotted the Core i5-L15G7 in a Geekbench 5 submission. Based on the model name alone, the Core i5-L15G7 should be a lower-specced model in contrast to the previously-tested Core i5-L16G7. 

The Core i5-L15G7 chip is listed with five cores, which correspond to one powerful Sunny Cove core and four slower Tremont cores. The compute die should be on the 10nm process while the base die remains on the 22nm process. Intel will build Lakefield with Foveros, a technology that allows stacking different chips on top of each other. Lakefield should debut with TDP (thermal design power) rating between 5W and 7W.

One of the first Lakefield chips appeared with a boost clock in the 3.1 GHz range. Subsequently, the Core i5-L16G7 showed up with a 1.4 GHz base and 1.75 GHz boost clock. Geekbench 5 seemingly detects the Core i5-L15G7 with a 1.38 GHz base clock. However, the Lakefield part was running as high as 2.95 GHz during the benchmark. The logical deduction is that the reported clock speeds are for the Sunny Cove core rather than the Tremont ones. 

Digging deeper into the Geekbench 5 report reveals the Core i5-L15G7’s cache configuration, which isn’t always visible in the submission itself. The Core i5-L15G7 seems to have 1.5MB of L2 cache and 4MB of L3 cache.

The plan behind Lakefield is to combine performance with power efficiency into a single package, similar to Arm’s big.LITTLE architecture. Lakefield goes neck-to-neck against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. 

The Snapdragon 835, which powers the Asus NovaGo TP370QL, is equipped with eight Kryo 280 cores, split into two groups of 2.6 GHz and 1.9 GHz. The device scores 355 points in the single-core test and 1,533 points in the multi-core test. In single-core workloads, it’s evident that the Core i5-L15G7 is far superior. With a single-core score of 725 points, Intel’s Lakefield chip delivers up to 104.2% higher single-core performance than the Snapdragon 835. Multi-core workloads are another story though. The Core i5-L15G7 scored 1,566 points, so it’s only 2.2% faster.

However, the Core i5-L15G7’s multi-threaded performance is no match for Qualcomm’s more recent offerings, such as the Snapdragon 8cx that’s inside the Samsung Galaxy Book S. For reference, the Snapdragon 8cx rocks eight Kryo 495 cores, four clocked at 2.84 GHz and the remaining at 1.8 GHz. The Samsung Galaxy Book S puts up single-core and multi-core scores of 703 points and 2,770 points. While the Core i5-L15G7 maintains 3.1% single-core lead over the Snapdragon 8cx, Qualcomm’s chip ultimately offers up to 76.9% higher performance in multi-threaded workloads.

Given that Lakefield is Intel’s first generation of Foveros-based chips, the performance doesn’t look too bad. The leaked Core i5-L15G7 is unreleased silicon after all, hence Intel still could probably tweak the chip for more performance. Furthermore, Geekbench 5 has often been criticized for its applicability as a benchmarking tool on a whole. We’ll just have to wait for a proper evaluation of the Lakefield devices that drop this holiday season.

Honor MagicBook 14 coming to the UK on April 7

Back in November, Honor announced the latest entries in its MagicBook laptop lineup with 14 and 15.6-inch models. The two were later confirmed to go international and now Honor has officially confirmed the arrival of the 14-inch MagicBook to the UK with a base price of £550 (€595/$638). Actual sales start April 7 through Amazon and Argos.

This gets you an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U CPU, Radeon Vega 8 GPU, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB PCIe SSD storage. The screen comes with an FHD (1920 x 1080 pixels) resolution and sleek side and top bezels. The battery is rated at 56Wh which is Honor claims is good for 10 hours of office tasks or over 9 hours of web browsing. The bundled 65W USB-PD charger promises a 46% charge in just 30 minutes.

In terms of I/O, you get a type-C port, HMDI and two USB type-A ports (one 2.0 and one 3.0). There’s also a built-in pop-up 720p cam in the top row of the keyboard. The laptop weighs in at 1.38kg and ships with Windows 10 Home.

Huawei is Teasing the Reveal of its New GT 2e Smartwatch

Huawei looks set to launch a new smartwatch alongside the upcoming P40 this month.

The news comes directly from Huawei on its Weibo account, where it has shared a video teaser and images referencing the new device. The title of the video gives the game away in its entirety, reading, “HUAWEI Watch GT 2e – Coming March 26th.” That date has also been confirmed as the launch for the Huawei P40 by CEO Richard Yu, so we’ve got two new gadgets to look forward to next week.

The name itself suggests that the new smartwatch is a refreshed version of the existing Huawei Watch GT 2 which had a very unique (or bloody stupid, depending on your viewpoint) launch event last year, that saw members of the public diving into the Royal Victoria Dock to grab one for free from a semi-submerged kiosk.

The GT positioned itself as a smartwatch for athletes, boasting 15 sports modes with full-scale monitoring of 190 date types. The new ‘e’ presumably has something further to offer this particular crowd, based on the nature of the images and sporty things going on in the video, but we don’t know what yet. But we only have a week to wait.

What Do You Get When You Buy a GoPro Knock-Off?

GoPro’s dominance has shifted slightly in recent years but when it comes to dedicated action cams with incredible stabilization, it’s hard to beat. That performance comes at a price, however, so what do you get when you buy yourself a budget option?

In this excellent video, Gene Nagata a.k.a. Potato Jet puts the AKASO V50 Pro Native 4K30fps 20MP WiFi Action Camera with EIS Touch Screen to the test, pitting it against the GoPro Hero 8 Black. The AKASO is one-third of the price of the GoPro and the box includes a watch that enables remote control, along with a spare battery and charger — all items that are missing from the basic GoPro Hero 8 option. At just $120, it’s something of a bargain.

Nagata runs through a load of comparisons and while video quality and stabilization is definitely not on par with the GoPro, much of the AKASO’s limitations seem to be about usability and durability. As with most camera gear, you will get what you pay for.

Notably, if you opt for the AKASO, you’re investing in technology from a company that has no proven record. There may be a warranty but making the claim might be tricky, and once outside of that first year of use, it’s hard to know how long the camera will hold up. Of course, at that price point, it’s much more replaceable, so it probably balances out.

Have you bought a cheap action cam? Are there any models that stand out above the rest? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

LEE Filters Unveils LEE85 Filter System for APS-C Mirrorless Cameras

UK-based LEE Filters has released a brand new filter system that was designed to work best with smaller mirrorless cameras like Fuji’s X-series. The LEE85 System aims to give mirrorless APS-C shooters a more portable and size-appropriate option, without skimping on features.

“The LEE85 Filter System has been engineered specifically for photographers with smaller bodied cameras and lenses who need to travel light but don’t want to compromise on filter quality and versatility,” reads the description on LEE’s website. “[It’s] both compact and easy-to-use. It’s perfect for any kind of photography on-the-go, especially handheld.”

The holder itself is similar to the company’s LEE100 system, allowing you to slot in up to 3 filters (including the circular polarizer) and featuring a locking dial that allows you to adjust the holder’s orientation on the adapter ring before locking it down completely while you shoot.

The System will be sold in various kits with three different adapter rings—58mm, 67mm and 72mmm—and a set of corresponding filters that were designed for smaller sensors and the smaller holder.

In the illustration below, you can see how a LEE100 Hard Grad (left) needs to be substituted for a LEE100 Very Hard Grad (right) to get the same effect on a crop-sensor camera body. In addition to being more portable and convenient for smaller sized cameras, the LEE85 Hard Grad’s transition is already adjusted for the smaller image sensor.

The LEE85 System is due out in Q2 of 2020, assuming no pandemic-caused delays. For now, there’s no official release date or price associated with the system and its various kits.

Best laptops with the longest battery life in 2020: Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, and more

Laptops have become more essential than ever for remote access to work, school, and web-based apps. Maximizing battery life becomes an even greater priority to make sure we remain connected to the rest of the world without interruption. These dozen laptops can keep you online and working longer when you need to be unplugged.

A laptop with good battery life used to be mean a skinny, under-powered notebook that sacrificed performance to squeeze every extra minute out of a charge. Obviously the more powerful a system is, the more power it draws, and the less time a battery can handle supplying that power. 

But research into extending battery life — not to mention work from processor manufacturers — has yielded huge dividends over recent years, and while the super-svelte portables and the laptops designed for basic productivity tasks (think Chromebooks) still provide the most time between charges, there are far more systems that boast solid battery life without sacrificing nearly as much performance as they once did.

Because impressive battery life can be found in pretty much every category of laptops these days, we’re here to help you figure out which ones actually provide the best battery life for different laptop types, from Chromebooks to 2-in-1 hybrids to even gaming laptops. Check out a dozen of our picks for laptops with the longest battery life below. 

Disclosure: ZDNet may earn an affiliate commission from some of the products featured on this page. ZDNet and the author were not compensated for this independent review.

Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1

A business convertible laptop with a number of features — and a price tag to match — the Latitude 7400’s most impressive spec has to be its battery life. While laptop review sites have varying methods of battery testing, top reviewers are getting at least 13 hours of juice from the system.

Though its eighth-generation Core processors options aren’t Intel’s latest, they’re still powerful Core i5 and i7 options. Step up from the base configuration, and you get 8GB or 16GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB solid-state storage, a full 1,920×1,080 14-inch display, and a larger 60Whr battery that can maximizes battery life. Regardless of configuration, once you do reach the end of your charge, Dell claims the ExpressCharge feature provides an 80% recharge in a just an hour.

Acer Aspire 5

In a world of snazzy luxe notebooks and dirt-cheap laptops, it’s hard for a solid mainstream laptop to stand out. But that shouldn’t stop you from looking past Acer’s Aspire family, which offers all-around quality at a reasonable price While the Aspire 5 won’t stand out in most areas, long battery life is its calling card. In its review of the Aspire 5, our sister site CNET got over 8.5 hours of juice from its battery. 

That finding is close to the 9 hours Acer claims for the Aspire 5, and is noticeably higher than most sub-$500 laptops provide. You also get decent performance from Intel Core and AMD Ryzen processors, and Acer even throws in a full HD 15.6-inch screen to boot.

Acer Swift 1

Need a little more battery life and don’t mind a bit less performance than the Aspire 5? Acer has you covered with the Swift 1, a 2020 version of what we used to think of as the type of laptop that would sport good battery life: It’s pretty cheap and small, and won’t be confused with a $2,000 gaming laptop in the performance realm.

Nonetheless, the Swift 1 is more than competent for basic tasks, which you can perform all day thanks to its battery life. CNET’s testing found that the laptop provided more than 9 hours of life between charges, close to the 10 hours that Acer claims for the Swift 1. It manages to hit that figure by using lower performance, but more efficient Intel Pentium and Celeron processors, though Acer does throw in a full HD 14-inch display even on the base configuration. 

Apple MacBook Pro

Just from its name along, the MacBook Air should have the best battery life of Apple’s laptops, right? Not anymore, as the latest MacBook Pro models have surpassed the svelte Air. One advantage of the MacBook Pro’s bigger size is that Apple can squeeze a bigger battery within it, and in the case of the 16-inch version, it’s much bigger: 100Whr compared to the 58Whr of the 13-inch edition. 

While you’re supposed to get an extra hour of battery life from the bigger MacBook Pro, it also has more room for top-notch components that can quickly erase that advantage. If you want a more consistent 10 hours of battery life, the smaller MacBook Pro might be the ticket if you’re set on an Apple laptop with the top battery life. 

Asus ExpertBook B9450

Asus isn’t the first name when you think of business laptops, but that might change with the ExpertBook B9450, which weights a mere 1.9 pounds and promises up to an astounding 24 hours of battery when it launches in the coming weeks.

To go up against the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPads of the world, a full day’s battery life definitely helps, as does its meeting of MIL-STD 810G durability standards. Other cool features include a LED number pad that’s built into the trackpad area of the keyboard and, like the Dell Latitiude 7400, a quick-charging mode that recharges the battery up to 60 percent in just 40 minutes. Designed around the principles of Intel’s Project Athena initiative, the ExpertBook B9450’s combination of top battery life and design savvy could make it a business laptop worth considering compared to the more traditional players in the market.

Google PixelBook Go

Google rolled out the Chromebook concept years ago around a cheap laptop with minimal specs that could offer excellent battery life using the efficient Chrome OS and cloud-based apps. While it’s succeeded wildly with that concept, its own forays into Chromebook systems has taken a different tact, emphasizing higher specs and a higher price tag.

Its Pixelbook Go costs more than many mainstream Windows laptops, thanks to specs like Intel Core processors, superior keyboard and a full HD 13.3-inch touchscreen display. It’s also one of the increasing number of Chromebooks that offers Google Play store integration for access to Android apps. In terms of battery hours, Google claims 12 hours between charges, butZDNet’s own Matthew Miller says he’s been getting closer to 10 hours. He’s also been using it as his daily laptop, which should say something about the effectiveness of Google’s approach.

HP Spectre x360

HP really stepped it up with the latest version of its ultraportable business 2-in-1, which gets a processor boost, receives some significant cosmetic surgery, and still retains superior battery life.

Specifically, the newest Spectre x360 leaps from 8th-generation to 10th-gen Intel Core CPU options, significantly improving its performance. It also loses a lot of unnecessary bezel space, making it 13 percent smaller than it previously was. Even with those changes, the Spectre x360 still provided 10.5 hours of battery life in CNET’s testing, part of the reason it earned our sister site’s Editors’ Choice award.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

The ExpertBook B9450 is designed to compete against the likes of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, one of the leading ultraportable business laptops. It’s a tall order, as the ThinkPad is a staple of the corporate world, and Lenovo doesn’t rest on its laurels with the X1 Carbon, including solid battery life. 

There’s one important caveat to its battery duration, however: If you opt for the 4K display with 500 nits of brightness, battery life plunges. If you can live with the 1080p display for superior battery performance, you still get a 2.4 pound system with a carbon-fiber chassis that has passed a dozen different MIL-STD-810G durability tests. 

LG Gram 17

As with gaming laptops, desktop replacement notebooks with large displays are notoriously power hogs, making “battery life” seem like a bit of an oxymoron. But that was before the likes of the 17-inch version of the LG Gram hit the scene.

It might be built around a 17-inch 2,560×1600 display, yet this Gram manages to weigh less than 3 pounds. That svelteness, along with eschewing the discrete graphics that many desktop replacements offer, helps allow it to eek out some phenomenal battery life — over 12 hours inCNET’s testing. And that was before LG updated the Gram lineup for 2020 and increased the size of the battery in its largest laptop from 72Whr to 80Whr.

Microsoft Surface Book 2

If anyone knows how to claw the most battery life out of Windows, it should be Microsoft, so it should come as no surprise that two of its Surface devices appear in our roundup. While the world waits for a possible Surface Book 3, it still has the Surface Book 2 to handle productivity duties.

Despite being bigger than the original Surface Book (sporting a 15-inch screen compared to the original’s 13.5-inch display), the sequel manages to provide well over 10 hours of battery life. That’s even when equipped with a Core i7 CPU and GeForce GTX 1060 discrete graphics, as ZDNet’s own Ed Bott found when testing out the Surface Book 2. It owes its fantastic battery life to a jumbo-sized 102 Whr battery, which can also quickly recharge the laptop in relatively little time.

Microsoft Surface Pro X

Whereas the Surface Book 2 looks to serve as a desktop replacement, the Surface Pro X looks to serve as a very portable traveling companion. Microsoft’s thinnest, lightest Surface device, the Pro X is also one of the few Windows systems using an ARM processor rather than one from AMD or Intel.

You should expect about a dozen hours of battery life from the Pro X, even with a very high-res 2,880×1,920 13-inch display. In our review, the ARM chip managed better performance than you might expect from technology best known for powering smartphones, but the newest Qualcomm SQ1 processor trounced the previous Snapdragon chip that HP used in its Envy x2. There are a couple of disadvantages to the Surface Pro X — namely, full ARM compatibility with Windows apps is still developing, and the starting price does not include a digital pen or keyboard to turn this into a full convertible device. But battery life definitely isn’t one of them. 

MSI GS65 Stealth

In 2020, there can even be a winner for best battery life for a gaming laptop, as component makers have squeezed more power out of tinier processors and graphics cards. The current holder of the title is the MSI GS65 Stealth, which comes in at a little over 4 pounds despite packing a six-core Intel Core i7-8750H CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or 1070 discrete graphics card.

While being just 0.7 inches thick, the GS65 Stealth manages to smush in an 80 Whr battery, which provides several hours of power away from an outlet. Although 6 or 7 hours can’t compare to the other models in this roundup, that’s much better than the 2 or 3 hours many gaming laptops offer. As a result, an otherwise very good midrange gaming notebook becomes a great choice compared to more power-hungry rivals.

Samsung Chromebook 4

Unlike the Pixelbook Go, Samsung’s latest Chromebook is based on the original concept: Low power, low cost. The 11.6-inch Chromebook 4 starts well under $300, in large part due to components like Intel’s Celeron N4000 processor, just 32GB of onboard storage, and a run-of-the-mill 1,366×768 screen.

While that might not be cause for much excitement, its battery life should be — Samsung claims 12.5 hours, and though Laptop Mag only got about 10.5 hours in its review, that still was an hour longer than the average Chromebook it’s tested. Samsung has also upped the design quality compared to similarly priced Chromebooks, with an aluminum top and durability features that allow it to pass a number of MIL-STD 810G tests. Better still, you move up to a Chromebook 4+ with a 15.6-inch display (albeit with less battery life) and still only pay around $300.

Kirin 820 5G specs leak: first G77 GPU from Huawei, 7nm process

The upcoming Kirin 820 will be the first 5G-connected chipset from Huawei aimed at the mid-range. Leakster Digital Chat Station has provided the first unofficial details about the hardware.

This will be a 7nm chip with Cortex-A76 acting as the big cores, just like in the Kirin 810 and 990 4G. The ISP and NPU are “fully upgraded”, presumably compared to the 810.

Interestingly, this will be the first chipset to come out of the HiSilicon foundries to use the Mali-G77 GPU (even the Kirin 990 uses G76). According to ARM, the G77 is 120% to 140% faster per mm² compared to the G76, it’s 30% more energy efficient as well.

The Mali-G77 is also used in Samsung’s Exynos 990 chipset found in some Galaxy S20 versions. Of course, Huawei probably won’t configure the mid-range chip with 11 cores, but the GPU will still be miles ahead of the Mali-G52 found inside the Kirin 810.

This chipset will be used in the Honor 30S, more models are probably on the way too.