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According to chatter on the grapevine, Intel’s first-ever DG1 GPU will be just 23% more powerful than Tiger Lake graphics and is currently struggling to meet its TDP envelope of 25W. Oh and notice the rumor tag and its implications, or forever hold thy silence. Intel’s Xe GPUs have captured the imaginations of tech enthusiasts everywhere and practically all of us cant wait for the duopoly to become a triopoly. But if this rumor is true, (and this is the second time we are hearing something along these lines) there might be more than a few hiccups before that dream can become a reality.

Intel’s DG1 GPU struggling to fit inside TDP envelope of 25W, performance numbers alleged for the first time at 23% faster than TGL

The interesting thing about this rumor is that DG1 was obviously only going to be a training vehicle for Intel to cut its teeth into the world of dGPUs but we have previously heard rumors that Intel wasn’t able to get any AIB on board to trial run DG1. While this is understandable considering no AIB would want to be the guinea pig for Intel to learn the ropes, another potential reason for this refusal has emerged: Intel unable to control the TDP envelope of the platform.

Before we go any further, here is what the Reddit thread states:

New news from Intel insiders this weekend. DG1 is not shaping up very well at all.

In terms of performance DG1’s envelope is stated to be Tiger Lake + ~23%.

Thermals/Power is looking to be dismal as Koduri is having a hard time reigning in DG1’s power envelope. Anyone that has followed his GPU designs know that this has been his downfall forever.

Intel does actually have a couple of notebook design wins currently but it was explained to me that these were deals to lend a bit of legitimacy to Koduri’s program, rather than to actual translate to sales/profits. It was stated that Intel would “give these things away,” if it had to.

The real question now is should we expect to see Koduri still be working for Intel after Q3’20? If not, you can expect to never see DG2 make its way to a retail product.

The thoughts of Intel actually being a player with the likes of AMD and NVIDIA in the world of GPUs is slowly slipping away.

While the rumor has other points of note as well, including the fact that the team is not able to get the TDP envelope under control, I personally believe that this is not something that would be cause for concern for Intel at this stage. This early in the game, the aim should be to get a working dGPU – tweaking can wait. The gaming market has already indicated on multiple occasions that TDP is the least of their concerns and frankly – a 25W GPU isn’t something anyone would seriously buy anyways (unless priced at throwaway MSRP).

A discrete GPU with 23% more performance than Tiger Lake would make sense if the pricing is just right and considering Intel has the financial horsepower (ahem) to employ predatory/penetrative pricing in its first run to break into the market, this shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Yet, here we are, the second in a string of rumors claiming Intel has run into serious trouble with its dGPU efforts.

I still maintain this though: I haven’t heard anything so far that should be cause for concern. Building a GPU isn’t a walk in the park. If it was, we wouldn’t have a duopoly right now. Multiple stumbles, hurdles, and heartbreak are expected before you can have a viable product in hand and if anyone has the will and resources necessary to pull this off, its Intel.

PhysX has been Nvidia’s party trick for well over a decade, but it seems that after all these years AMD wants to play catch up on that front too. The red team’s latest announcement is that its new FEMFX library is finally available, which offers deformable physics effects through the GPUOpen set of AMD-built libraries for developers.

The name FEMFX stems from FEM, which stands for Finite Element Method. AMD describes this as “Solid objects are represented as a mesh of tetrahedral elements, and each element has material parameters that control stiffness, how volume changes with deformation, and stress limits where fracture or plastic (permanent) deformation occur.”

The intention is not for all objects to have these properties, but rather in addition to existing solid objects in order to balance out the workload that stems from a scene — having all elements as finite elements would create a very demanding workload. Of course, if developers are so inclined, they could use the FEMFX library to create entire worlds which are completely destructible.

As mentioned, FEMFX is built as a highly-threaded library, which is a great way for AMD to promote its multi-core Ryzen CPUs. The core counts of those chips have been reaching levels where it no longer makes sense for most gamers to dish out for the higher-end models, so adding multi-threaded CPU-based physics to games can be a great way to utilize otherwise idle cores in the higher end Ryzen chips during gaming.

Some of the materials that can be simulated are elastic deformation, denting metal, wood destruction, and even melting. AMD’s full list of features is below.

Elastic and plastic deformation

Implicit integration for stability with stiff materials

Kinematic control of mesh vertices

Fracture between tetrahedral faces

Non-fracturing faces to control shape of cracks and pieces

Continuous collision detection (CCD) for fast-moving objects

Constraints for contact resolution and to link objects together

Constraints to limit deformation

Dynamic control of tetrahedron material parameters

Support for deforming a render mesh using the tetrahedral mesh

Continuing our dive into newcomer Realtek’s SSD controller lineup thanks to several ADATA products, we turn to the ADATA XPG SX6000 Pro, an entry-level NVMe SSD.

As mentioned in our previous SSD review, Realtek is a well-known PC components supplier that is relatively new to the SSD controller business. ADATA has provided Realtek with their most significant SSD design wins, starting with the original SX6000 that used Realtek’s very first SSD controller, the RTS5760. The SX6000 Pro targets the same entry-level NVMe market segment, but switches to the second-generation RTS5763DL controller. That newer controller brings a desperately-needed process shrink to enable an upgraded PCIe link and much better performance and power efficiency.

As a late entrant to the SSD market, Realtek is focusing primarily on NVMe rather than SATA. Given that they also prefer to be the low-cost, high-volume alternative rather than pursue high-end niches, the RTS5763DL is probably the most important SSD controller in their current lineup. This controller has a four-channel NAND interface, four PCIe lanes and no DRAM controller, so at a high level it is on par with the Silicon Motion SM2263XT and the upcoming Phison E13T.

ADATA has paired the Realtek controller with Micron’s 64-layer 512Gbit TLC NAND, organized as four packages with four dies each for our 1TB sample, all on one side of the M.2 card thanks to the small size of the controller and the lack of an extra DRAM package. The use of 512Gb instead of 256Gb dies cuts costs slightly, but is usually avoided on high-end drives because having fewer dies limits the degree of parallelism available to the SSD controller. This isn’t a problem for the 1TB SX6000 Pro since the four-channel controller is a bigger limitation. Since the 256GB and 512GB models of the SX6000 Pro don’t have severely curtailed performance specs, ADATA may have made the smart choice to use the 256Gb dies on at least the smallest model.

For SATA SSDs, the lack of a DRAM cache pretty much always condemns a drive to have extreme low-end performance. For NVMe SSD, going DRAMless doesn’t carry such a harsh penalty and entry-level NVMe SSDs usually have no trouble offering better real-world performance than mainstream SATA SSDs with DRAM caches. This is often achieved with the help of the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature that lets the SSD borrow a chunk of the host system’s DRAM (64 MB in the case of this drive) to use as a cache for the drive’s internal data structures used for managing the flash memory. However, toggling HMB on and off didn’t produce a meaningful performance difference for any of our tests on the SX6000 Pro, which leaves us questioning whether ADATA and Realtek enabled the feature just to check a box on the spec sheet. We can’t actually directly observe the drive’s use of HMB without a PCIe bus analyzer, but regardless of how (or if) the SX6000 Pro is making use of HMB, the lack of a measurable effect means we’re only bothering to graph the results from our test runs with HMB on, which is the default for any recent OS.

As usual, ADATA bundles the SX6000 Pro with a thin heatspreader that the user can apply if desired, which we never do for regular reviews. ADATA is also selling the same drive as the XPG GAMMIX S5, which has a slightly fancier heatsink pre-installed.

The Competition

We have tested several other entry-level NVMe SSDs that are in direct competition with the SX6000 Pro. The Mushkin Helix-L uses the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller, another DRAMless 4-channel design with HMB support. The Intel 660p (and the newer 665p) use the SM2263 with DRAM, and use QLC NAND instead of TLC. The Toshiba (now Kioxia) BG4 doesn’t currently have a retail version, but it’s a popular OEM SSD that likewise is DRAMless.

Phison’s entry-level NVMe solutions are missing from this comparison because their E8T controller is pretty old and unpopular at this point, and drives using the successor E13T and E19T controllers haven’t quite hit the market. The recently-released WD Blue SN550 adds the 1TB option that the earlier SN500 lacked. These two drives are particularly interesting because they are DRAMless NVMe SSDs that don’t use the Host Memory Buffer feature, but our test results from the 250GB SN500 don’t really provide a fair comparison against 1TB drives.

As always, it’s important to keep an eye on how entry-level NVMe drives perform relative to the more popular high-end models with 8-channel controllers and full-size DRAM caches, because the cheapest high-end drives are usually priced pretty close to entry-level NVMe SSDs. And lastly, representing the SATA SSD market segment, we include the Crucial MX500 as the mainstream choice, and the ADATA Ultimate SU750 featuring Realtek’s DRAMless 2-channel SATA controller.

We’ve not been shy about reporting on the Pixelbook Go’s appeal since it was released a little over a month ago. I have zero issues telling anyone I talk to that it is the best Chromebook experience on the market right now even if the asking price is a tad bit high in some people’s opinions. I have no problem proclaiming that it is my favorite Chromebook ever made and that until some of the upcoming ‘Hatch’ Chromebooks hit the market, I’m not even considering buying anything other than it for my daily workflow.

But we’ve also been pretty blunt about the one big flaw the Pixelbook Go shipped with: the dreaded screen flicker. When I started seeing it at first, I thought I might be imagining things, but it was soon confirmed that I wasn’t. From our individual experiences here in the office and others online, it became quite clear that there was an issue with the Pixelbook Go and it wasn’t really getting better with any of the offered workarounds.

Up until yesterday, all we had was a promise that a fix would arrive in Chrome OS 79 and I’d actually pinned quite a bit of hope on those promises. After all, the bug didn’t cause anything to be broken, but when you are using a premium device you don’t expect to be distracted by your screen glitching out on a consistent basis. The stress of using the Pixelbook Go like this was was only compounded by the fact that I still felt like it was the best Chromebook out there and was still recommending it based on the fact that a fix was inbound very soon.

On both sides of the coin (as a user and one recommending this device to others) I’m overly excited to report that after a full day of testing, Google has erradicated the screen flicker issue from the Pixelbook Go with Chrome OS 79. Before the update, I’d see the flicker at least once every 5 minutes and I’ve now gone a full day without seeing a single issue.

The fix remedies the singular complaint I’ve had with the Pixelbook Go since launch and serves to make using it feel like a seamless, fully-enjoyable experience again. I know it is functionally a small thing, but seeing a visual fault over and over every day has a way of stealing the feeling of reliability of any device. With this removed, I feel so much more comfortable relying on my Pixelbook Go as my go-to Chromebook and it makes me want to recommend it to anyone interested that much more.

Microsoft finally revealed its next-generation console at the 2019 Game Awards on December 12. The device was revealed as the Xbox Series X, but yesterday, Business Insider reported that Microsoft actually plans to call its next-gen console “Xbox.”

So does that mean there won’t be a device called the Xbox Series X? No. It turns out that there will be a specific version of the upcoming Xbox called “Xbox Series X.”

“The name we’re carrying forward to the next generation is simply Xbox,” a Microsoft rep told Business Insider. “And at The Game Awards you saw that name come to life through the Xbox Series X. … Similar to what fans have seen with previous generations, the name ‘Xbox Series X’ allows room for additional consoles in the future.”

Microsoft wasn’t ready to reveal any of those additional consoles, so it simply led with the Xbox Series X. But now we know there could be an Xbox Series Y, Z or “… of Unfortunate Events.”

The point is that this current generation’s mix-up, whereby the Xbox One was followed by the very different Xbox One S and Xbox One X, won’t be repeated.

Recently, CHUWI has launched UBook Pro Intel N4100 processor version. Not only Intel N4100 processor performs well in daily usage, but also regulates power consumption intelligently. With great performance and decent price, UBook Pro can be more cost-effective.

CHUWI has released the unboxing video on Youtube, which showed the detailed hardware information and actual experience of UBook Pro Intel N4100 version. As you can see in the video, the unboxing suit include UBook Pro, power adapter, keyboard and stylus.

UBook Pro has a 9 mm full-metal body, equipped with 12.3 inch 3:2 display ratio IPS screen, weights at only 781g.

The u-shaped kickstand supports stepless adjustment, with the maximum opening Angle of 145°, it can be transformed into laptop, workstation or tablet, which means that almost all scenes in life.

HiPen H6 stylus can draw delicately on the screen, supports up to 4096 pressure levels.

Intel N4100 processor is built with Intel’s most advanced 14nm+ manufacturing process, quad-core, four threads, the highest frequency reaches up to 2.4 GHz. With the storage combination of 8GB LPDDR4 and 256GB SSD, UBook can be more smooth and efficient in daily usage.

In the real CPU-Z test, Intel N4100 processor had a single-core score of 182 and a multi-core score of 588. The processor also performed well in GeekBench software with single-core score of 1765 and a multi-core score of 5197. In addition to great performance, Intel N4100 processor also consume low power.

Equipped with Intel UHD Graphics 600 core graphics card，UBook Pro can decode 4K video easily, which provides smooth experience in watching video.

With Win10 operating system and magnetic backlit keyboard, UBook Pro can work efficiently. Benefit from the full-size key cap, user can keep the highest productivity by typing smoothly.

In conclusion，Book Pro Intel N4100 version performs well in hardware configuration and daily usage. Meanwhile, lower price makes it become more cost-effective. You can check all the exact details on the official website too.

After rolling out to Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux, version 79 of Chrome OS is now available. Notable features in Chrome OS 79 include a reworked Overview mode for tablet devices and lockscreen media controls.

Virtual Desks widely rolled out with last month’s release. Chrome OS 79 continues iterating on them by having links you click always open in the current workspace.

Dedicated Chrome OS tablets are still relatively rare, but all 2-in-1s have the same tablet mode. An updated Overview mode for slates, convertibles, and detachables lets you scroll vertically through open windows. There are about six cards to a page with the next column peaking to signal you have more open.

You can long-press on one and drag to either side of the screen for split view. This new Overview — which is particularly ideal on smaller screens — is in contrast to the regular laptop version that just shrinks cards as more windows are added.

Building on version 76 in August adding Android-esque media controls in the Notification Center, Chrome OS 79 lets you see what audio is streaming with playback controls on the lockscreen. It works with both Android apps and any playing media on the web.

Manage your apps in Settings allow you to control basic application preferences and permissions from a single list. Google plans to further improve application management in the future.

Click in further and you can see whether you’ve granted an app permission to your location, microphone, camera, and more. Quickly adjust these settings based on your preferences, through one centralized menu.

A new “tab freezing” feature in Chrome 79 works to save memory, CPU, and battery resources. Tabs in the background for over 5 minutes will be frozen and not able to perform tasks. There is an exception for audio and video, while sites can experimentally opt-out.

This release also expands Google’s password and phishing protections in Chrome. More details are available here.

Originally planned for the previous release, Chrome 79 features an experiment for 1% of users that enables secure DNS connections through DNS-over-HTTPS. This prevents user tracking and malicious redirects. A new flag allows you to opt-out of the DoH test: chrome://flags/#dns-over-https.

Chrome will check if the user’s DNS provider is among a list of participating DoH-compatible providers and if so, it will enable DoH. If the DNS provider is not on the list, Chrome won’t enable DoH and will continue to operate as it does today.

Chrome will begin marking sites that use TLS 1.0 or 1.1 “Not Secure” and remove the lock symbol. This measure starts in January 2020 as Google encourages sites to move away from legacy TLS.

Google is working on a shared clipboard between computers and Android that’s available from the right-click menu. Copied text can be shared on devices that are logged in to the same Google Account and have Chrome Sync enabled. Text is end-to-end encrypted and Google notes how it can’t see the contents. It began rolling out in October for a “limited number of users” and will be “released to all users in a future version of Chrome.”

Apple iOS 13 comes with a number of cool security and privacy features, including the ability to better control apps such as Google and Facebook. But iOS 13.3 has upped the stakes even further by adding the ability to use security keys such as Yubico’s YubiKey in Apple’s Safari browser.

When iOS 13.3 dropped last week, I wrote about the basic considerations that need to be taken into account when using security keys. The best option for now is the YubiKey, which is the first featuring USB-C and lightning connectors on a single key. Also worth noting is that YubiKey maker Yubico now makes an authenticator app to use if a service doesn’t offer built in support for security keys.

Apple iOS 13.3: Using a security key now

The ability to use security keys in Safari is an exciting development, so how do you get started?

Once you have your key, in the case of YubiKey, there are some instructional videos and guides on how to set up authentication across sites. I’ll use the example of Twitter to get you started.

First, log into Twitter via the Apple Safari browser on your iPhone. You might have Face ID set up to authenticate you as an extra secure layer. Once you’ve logged in, go to the security section in your settings and toggle on the switch to indicate that you want to use a security key.

After you have done this, you will be asked to put your key into the device. You will be asked to press the key to indicate it’s you. Now you are ready to use it as a layer of authentication to log into Twitter.

Once this is set up, it’s easy to log into other services on your iPhone’s Safari browser using your security key. The video below shows how I used the YubiKey to log into my Twitter account.

Why use a security key with your iPhone?

Big sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google will always be at risk of getting hacked, and people often use weak passwords or repeat their credentials across a number of services.

This is why extra methods of authentication beyond passwords are so important. Biometrics are partly resolving the issue but security keys provide something robust–a physical padlock of sorts that you have in your possession.

They also help to protect you against phishing, where attackers will try to steal your credentials by encouraging you to enter them on a fake log in page.

Securing your iPhone using iOS 13

Apple’s iOS 13 offers great improvements in security–although it is also important to note that the operating system update has come under fire recently for not applying the same controls to Apple’s own apps. With this in mind, I created a guide to securing all your apps in iOS 13, including Apple’s. Along with using biometrics such as Face ID, security keys are a great addition. 

The previous iteration of HP’s premium convertibles did nearly everything right. They had an eye-catching design, a wide range of components, solid build, you name it. But sadly, those highlights were often drowned out by a clunky touchpad experience that left people feeling frustrated. But now, HP has returned to fix the Spectre’s lingering issues and then some, and the result is simply one of the best all-around 13-inch laptops you can get right now.

On the outside, aside from a new Poseidon blue paint job (along with the existing black and silver model seen here), the new Spectre x360 13 looks quite similar to the outgoing version. However, a closer examination reveals that HP has reduced the x360’s top and bottom bezels by more than 50 percent. Not only does this get rid of the massive chin found on the previous Spectre x360 13 and allow for a superb screen-to-body ratio of just over 90 percent, it also meant HP could reduce the size of the Spectre’s chassis, resulting in a body that’s almost an inch shorter from front to back (0.9 inches or 23mm shorter to be exact).

That might not sound like much, but when you combine those size reductions with a chassis that weighs just 2.88 pounds, you get a 2-in-1 that slips into almost any bag and is incredibly easy to carry around. Critically, HP didn’t mess with the Spectre’s port selection, which means you get three USB ports (with two featuring support for Thunderbolt 3), along with a headphone jack and a microSD card slot.

As someone who appreciates clever design, I love how HP installed one USB-C port on the tiny diagonal section on the back right of the laptop. It’s the perfect position for plugging the Spectre in to recharge while still keeping cables out of the way. Same goes for the power button on the back left of the machine, which is easy to reach in both laptop and tablet modes, but in such a way that you practically never press it accidentally.

Another neat touch is that because the Spectre’s body is now too thin to support a traditional full-size USB port, HP switched over to a collapsible design that help the laptop retain its Type-A connection without ruining its slim, tapered edges. Getting at least three USB ports is key (though one more would be really ideal) because with one USB port often reserved for charging, having two other USB ports free means it’s still possible to leave your dongle at home without really limiting expandability.

With a peak brightness of 365 nits, the Spectre’s 13.3-inch 1,920 by 1,080 touchscreen performs respectably well, though if you want a display with a bigger impact, you’ll probably want to upgrade to HP’s optional 4K OLED touchscreen. And while I don’t necessarily think it’s something that qualifies as a con, the Spectre’s 16:9 aspect ratio does seem like it’s slightly optimized more for entertainment than productivity, at least compared to laptops with taller 16:10 or 3:2 displays (like the Surface Laptop 3).

As for the Spectre’s keyboard, you get a nice bounce with a decent amount of travel, something that prevents typing from ever feeling dead or lifeless. And with new Microsoft Precision drivers, HP’s touchpad finally gets the accuracy and quick response people have been pining for on previous models. That said, because of the Spectre’s overall smaller dimensions, the new X360 13’s touchpad is slightly smaller too, giving you less space to work with overall. This isn’t a big deal as left to right as HP’s glass pad is plenty wide. Yet sometimes it feels like an extra couple millimeters would go a long way while scrolling.

I also want to call out the presence of dedicated controls for turning off the Spectre’s webcam (which does support Windows Hello face login) and microphones. For the mic, there’s a dedicated button on the keyboard for disabling the microphone, complete with an indicator light so you know it’s really muted. And on the right side of the system between the microSD card reader and the USB-C port, there’s a second toggle for disconnecting the webcam. HP probably could have combined these functions into a single button, but I’m glad it didn’t.

Meanwhile, the Spectre x360 13′ provides solid performance, with our $1,300 Core i7-1065G7 review unit offering a sweet spot between price and power. The i7 CPU gives you a bit more raw computing power than a base Spectre x360 13 with an i5 chip, while the upgrade to 32GB of Intel Optane memory and a 512GB SSD makes it so that opening bigger programs like Photoshop feels just a bit snappier.

Finally, with a time of 10 hours and 23 minutes on our video rundown test, the Spectre x360 doesn’t last quite as long on a charge as the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (11:30). You still get more than enough battery life to last pretty much all day. But if you upgrade to the 4K OLED screen, expect battery life to drop a bit.

With the latest Spectre x360 13, HP delivers practically everything we look for in a quality ultraportable. It’s well built while also sporting slick, distinctive styling that won’t get the Spectre x360 confused with similar systems from Apple or Dell. Battery life and performance are strong, as are the Spectre’s selection of ports, and discrete toggles for the system’s microphones and webcams are a welcome addition to help reduce paranoia about day-to-day privacy.

And with smaller bezels on a more portable body and a touchpad with more responsive drivers, HP addressed the previous model’s greatest weaknesses. This version of Spectre x360 13 is the culmination of great design and thanks to meaningful tweaks over the past couple generations, HP has really made damn fine laptop.

README

The Spectre x360’s integrated Iris Plus graphics are fine in a pinch, but pro video editors will want to step up for something with a discrete GPU

HP hits a sweet spot for ports with two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 plus a collapsible port for USB 3 Type-A

HP has finally ditched Synaptics touchpad drivers for Windows Precision drivers.

If you’re using the Spectre on your lap, the system’s rear vent can sometimes get a bit toasty

The Spectre x360 13’s 16:9 display is nice for watching movies, but may feel slighty cramped for productivity.

Because of the Spectre x360’s new smaller dimensions, HP had to move its speakers from the top of the laptop to the bottom.

This build of the G7 15 gaming laptop has a 9th Gen i7-9750H, 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD/256GB SSD storage, and a GTX 1660 Ti graphics card. Throw in a reasonably bright IPS (around 300-nits) display, and you have a pretty powerful entry-level system. You’d be able to play most games at a generous frame rate at 1080p, with some concessions in the settings for demanding games. You won’t be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra settings, but you could probably play this Cyberpunk-inspired map in Minecraft.

I always prefer it when my gaming laptops don’t look like gaming laptops. If you’re the same way, the G-series redesign laptops are sleek looking without being too over top with obnoxious RGB lighting or racing stripes on the chassis. You’ve also got all the ports you need if you’re looking to be productive at work or school.

This slim gaming laptop comes with a free 3-month subscription to Xbox Game Pass for PC that’ll give you to over a hundred games to play like Halo: The Master Chief Collection or Pathologic 2. If security is concerned for you, you also get a free year subscription of McAfee Livesafe to protect your expensive new purchase—though Windows 10’s built-in antivirus protection is quite good on its own.