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Cray has said it will build a family of supercomputers for government research labs and universities. The kicker? The exascale machines will be powered by Arm-compatible microprocessors.

The HPE-owned biz has partnered with Fujitsu to roll out the beefy big iron. Fujitsu will supply its homegrown A64FX processors – understood to be 48-core 64-bit Armv8-compatible beasts – to drive applications on the systems, while Cray will integrate the chippery into its line of CS500 supers.

It’s still early days, so the full specs aren’t out yet nor even the codenames for the exaFLOPS-grade computers. The exascale kit is expected to ship from 2020 to the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as Stony Brook University in New York. Elsewhere in the world, other institutions including the RIKEN center for computational science in Japan, and the University of Bristol in the UK are eagerly awaiting the toy sets.

RIKEN is due to receive its own highly customized A64FX-powered exascale super, dubbed Post-K, from Fujitsu; the Cray-built one will sit alongside it.

Cray’s gear, in recent times anyway, usually houses x86 processors, such as Intel Xeons and lately AMD Epycs. These latest additions to its portfolio of machines, however, will be decked out with Arm-based CPU cores.

Fujitsu’s A64FX supports for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and Arm’s Scalable Vector Extensions, a set of instructions to accelerate matrix calculations, making it ideal for physics simulations, machine-learning workloads, and such number-crunching. The maximum theoretical HBM RAM bandwidth will be greater than one terabyte per second, Cray claimed.

The new supercomputers will likely be used to model complex 3D systems, from the weather and materials to nuclear energy and weapons.

“The most demanding computing work at Los Alamos National Laboratory involves sparse, irregular, multi-physics, multi-link-scale, highly resolved, long running 3D simulations,” said Gary Grider, deputy division leader of the HPC division at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Wednesday. “There are few existing architectures that currently serve this workload well.”

You can read more details and technical analysis over on our HPC and AI sister site, The Next Platform. Also, tune into TNP for coverage of Supercomputing 2019 next week. 

It’s that time of the year again: X019, Microsoft’s annual celebration of all things Xbox, is upon us once more. This year the global Xbox celebration is taking place in the Copper Box Arena, London with Microsoft promising the event will be “filled with news, first looks and surprises, and Xbox FanFest, all livestreamed and starting on Inside Xbox”.

Last year’s event saw Microsoft announce the big news that Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment had joined Microsoft Studios, alongside Xbox Game Pass updates, some Black Friday deals news and a bunch of new Xbox One game reveals.

However, with Xbox Project Scarlett due for release in late 2020, we’re expecting X019 to be a much bigger show – we may even get a closer look at Microsoft’s next-generation hardware.

TechRadar will be reporting live from X019 in London, bringing you the biggest announcements as they happen.

X019: what is it?

Outside of E3 2019, X019 is Microsoft’s biggest event of the year. Marketed as “the annual global celebration of all things Xbox”, the event is typically Microsoft’s way of updating fans on the things it announced at E3 as well as making big new announcements or providing first looks at upcoming games and/or hardware.

With Xbox Project Scarlett releasing in late 2020, we think (and hope) X019 will be dominated by news on Microsoft’s next-generation console.

X019: when is it?

X019 runs from November 14 to November 16. The annual celebration begins with the fifth anniversary of Xbox FanFest, which kicks off at the Copper Box Arena, London at 7pm GMT / 2pm EST / 11am PST on November 14. This is a ticketed event, but it will be streamed as well.

Shortly after, a special Inside Xbox stream will take place at 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 12pm PST on November 14.

The rest of the annual event is broken into sessions – which tickets are required for. Morning sessions will run from 10am to 2pm GMT / 5am to 9am EST / 2am to 6am PST, while afternoon sessions will run from 3pm to 7pm GMT / 10am to 2pm EST / 7am to 11am PST.

Most of X019 will be available to watch online.

X019: how to watch

If you haven’t got a ticket, you can watch X019 from the comfort of your own home (or sneakily at work).

X019: what we’re expecting

Here’s everything we’re expecting from Microsoft’s Xbox X019 (and what we’re not):

Xbox Project Scarlett

As much as we’re hoping we’ll hear more about Xbox Project Scarlett, it doesn’t actually look all that likely. For one, it’s probably not a great plan for Microsoft to reveal Xbox Scarlett this close to Black Friday and Christmas when the company will be aiming to shift as many current-gen consoles as possible.

Secondly, in reply to a fan asking if X019 will focus on games or just controllers, Xbox Games Marketing general manager Aaron Greenberg replied with the following:

Whether that means X019 will have a primarily games focus is up for speculation, but that has often been the case in previous years. However, we’re still holding out hope for some juicy new details on Xbox Project Scarlett – and its launch title, Halo Infinte.

Black Friday deals

Yep, every year Microsoft uses the event to announce its annual Black Friday Xbox One deals.

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Game announcements/first looks

We’re definitely expecting some game announcements at X019, especially based on Greenberg’s tweet. We’re hoping for a closer look at Halo Infinite and maybe even a few surprise announcements, alongside DLC for the likes of Gears 5.

Surprises?

In an interview with Twinfiniteat Gamescom 2019, Xbox’s Aaron Greenberg stated that there is some big news coming at X019 for titles coming in early-mid 2020.

“We have some surprises planned,” he said. “I’ll just leave it at that. But yeah, I think that we’ll have a great show. We also have a lot of games coming out in the spring. It’s I think the biggest lineup of games we’ve ever had in the spring. In that window of time between X019 and E3, we have a lot of stuff to show, and people can get hands-on with it and talk about it.”

Related product: Microsoft Xbox One X

Our Verdict:

☆☆☆☆☆

The Xbox One X does what no console has done before: native 4K HDR gaming. However, while games look stunning – with a fantastic level of detail accentuated by the console’s HDR support – their larger file sizes will mean that the 1TB hard drive fills up fast. Memory issues aside, the Xbox One X fulfills the promise of 4K HDR gaming and offers the most premium gaming experience on a console, bar none.

FOR Native 4K HDR gaming

4K Blu-ray player built-in

Improves 1080p experience

AGAINST 1TB HDD fills up fast

Games aren’t always 60fps

Skewed price-performance ratio

Asus Japan announced this week that it’ll show off two new single-board computers at the upcoming ET & IoT Technology 2019 event kicking off November 20 in Yokohama, Japan. The latest Tinker Edge T and Tinker Edge R are designed specifically for IoT (Internet of Things) and edge AI applications.

The Tinker Edge T measures 85 x 56mm, which is around the size of a credit card. The Tinker Edge R adheres to the Pico-ITX form factor (100 x 72mm). Both single-board computers depend on a small heatsink with an accompanying cooling fan to stay cool during operation.

Asus Tinker Edge T

The Tinker Edge T utilizes a NXP i.MX 8M SoC, consisting of a quad-core Cortex-A53 up to 1.5 GHz with one Cortex-M4F real-time core. The system also relies on the Vivante GC7000 Lite 3D graphics engine and Google’s Coral Edge tensor processing unit (TPU), which is optimized for Tensorflow Lite and boasts performance up to 4 tera operations per second (TOPS).

Asus Tinker Edge R

The Tinker Edge R employs a Rockchip RK3399 Pro system on chip (SoC) that boasts a three-in-one design. The chip combines the dual-core Cortex-A72, which runs a clock speed of up to 1.8 GHz and quad-core Cortex-A53 up to 1.4 GHz with a quad-core Mali-T860 GPU at up to 800 MHz. It’s also equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of delivering up to 3 TOPS of performance.

Asus’ announcement states that the Tinker Edge R and Tinker Edge T are compatible with the Debian and Android operating systems. However, we expect them to support other Linux distributions and operating systems, such as Windows 10 IoT Core or FreeRTOS.

With a focuses on AI processing, both boards face competition in Nvidia’s Jetson Nano, which features a quad-core Arm A57 at 1.45 GHz, along with Nvidia Mawell graphics.

Asus didn’t reveal the pricing or availability of the new single-board computers.

Microsoft is allowing Surface Pro X owners to get access to early native ARM copies of its Edge Chromium browser today. The software giant is making the ARM version of Edge available in the daily Canary channel, and it will mean that devices like the Surface Pro X will gain access to a more capable and more performant browser.

Microsoft released the Surface Pro X earlier this month with the older Edge browser preinstalled, but owners have so far had to use an x86 copy of Chrome or Edge Chromium in emulation mode. This hits battery life and performance on ARM-powered devices significantly. The Verge has been testing early Canary versions of the ARM64 Edge Chromium release, and it’s far better for performance and battery life than using Chrome in emulation.

We’ve seen big improvements in switching tabs, rendering web content, and scrolling speeds. While the speed improvements are obvious, this is an early copy of Edge Chromium for ARM and tabs do occasionally crash. Still, it’s worth trying out if you own a Surface Pro X.

While the ARM64 version enters into the Canary channel today, Microsoft revealed last week at Ignite that a final version of Edge Chromium won’t launch on ARM in time for the January 15th release. Microsoft will make Edge Chromium available on Windows and macOS in January, with an ARM64 release to follow. You can download the ARM64 Edge Canary version over at Microsoft’s Edge Insider site.

Videocardz has done it again. Looks like Intel is working on a powerful new Xe-based 7nm GPU codenamed “Ponte Vecchio” – after an old bridge in Florence, Italy. A quick Google search of the codename also comes up with a Linkedin recruitment ad for an Engineer that will be working on Arctic Sound/Ponte Vecchio-based solutions. Intel’s 7nm Xe-based Ponte Vecchio GPUs will be featured in Project Aurora – an exascale supercomputer from Intel which is expected to go online in 2021.

Intel Ponte Vecchio GPUs will be featured in Aurora Exascale Supercomputer – based on 7nm Xe GPU architecture

Videocardz states that up to six Ponte Vecchio GPUs will be utilized in an upcoming exascale supercomputer called Aurora in conjunction with two Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors. The GPUs will be connected using CXL (Compute Express Link) with a OneAPI software stack. The leak further states that Ponte Vecchio GPUs will utilize Foveros packaging technology along with CXL. While Ponte Vecchio is not a gaming GPU, it will feature ultra-high cache and high memory bandwidth.

Intel’s Ponte Vecchio GPU will have high double-precision FP throughput as well. The company also further mentioned all the other segments that Xe GPUs will be operating in including HPC/Exascale, DL/Training, Cloud GFX, Media Transcore Analytics, Workstation, Gaming, PC Mobile and Ultra Mobile. WhyCry mentions that Intel is planning to reveal more details about its upcoming 7nm based Xe GPU ‘Ponte Vecchio’ on November 17, 2019.

I did a bit of googling and the codename turns up several Linkedin job listings including the word “Ponte Vecchio” along with the already-known codename “Arctic Sound”:

This not only shows that Ponte Vecchio is something Intel has been working on for a while now, but also indicates that P.V is a derivative of the Arctic Sound GPU family – which was targetted directly at the Data Center. While you will have to wait for the 17th for the full disclosure according to VCZ, we can assume that this is going to be a bleeding-edge product that is not going to be aimed at gamers.

Intel’s plans for gamers remain up in the air and while we know that the company will be launching in late-2020, it is unclear whether this is going to be a gaming GPU or just a data-centric one. Chances are that Intel is going to launch with a low powered training vehicle (DG1?) before ramping up to something powerful that can potentially take on NVIDIA’s TITANs and give AMD a run for its money in the entry-level segment as well.

Over the past few years, we’ve spilled a fair amount of digital ink talking about what a Chrome OS phone could or should look like. (If someone were to take the initiative to make one.) For the most part, I’ve imagined a device that looks and functions just like any other smartphone, only running Chrome OS and Android in tandem. That device would work as a phone but then be able to dock and extend a full version of Chrome OS to another display.

It seems that one company has decided to take the leap into this arena but have come up with a very unique twist on the concept and I must say, I am very intrigued. castAway™ Case has launched on IndieGoGo and is offering to turn your smartphone into a foldable, dual-screen workhorse that matches a Chromium OS-powered tablet with your Android or iOS device. The concept is quite fascinating as it solves a number of problems that have often come up when talking about bridging mobile and desktop.

The tablet side of the device features an OP1 processor, 4GB of RAM and 32Gb of storage. This is all shoved into a tiny 6.3″ or 5.8″ QXGA touchscreen. Essentially, we’re looking at the same internals found in the original Samsung Chromebook Plus or the Acer Chromebook R13. The case cradles the tablet and your phone and connects them with castAway’s “magic” magnetic hinge system.

On the software side, the tablet and phone will be synced using castAways’ MultiTask+™ app which allows them to “communicate over encrypted Wifi.” Even when the tablet is detached and functioning as a standalone PC, it will continue to sync with your phone via the MultiTask+™ application. The team is also working on a dock for the castAway tablet that features power, LAN and HDMI connections which means you could seriously use this as not only a companion to your smartphone but your desktop device, as well.

I’ll be interested to see castAway in action. As a prototype that’s built on a low-powered ARM platform, you shouldn’t expect a premium Chrome OS experience but I don’t think that’s the big takeaway here. The castAway crew will be creating an Open Source project around their MultiTask+™ to encourage developers to find new and inventive ways to leverage this concept. With Qualcomm headed to Chrome OS, I could imagine a newer ARM-based version of this concept could be very appealing to a variety of users.

If you’re interested in learning more or perhaps supporting this project, you can get all the details on castAways’ IndieGoGo page where you can reserve yours. The castAway case is slated for launch in May of 2020. Looking forward to seeing how this one pans out. The only missing piece is support from Google that would allow an official build of Chrome OS to run on the tablet.

According to the most recent leaks, Tokina is preparing to reveal a redesigned 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens for Canon and Nikon full-frame DSLRs very soon. The lens will allegedly replace the brand’s current 100mm f/2.8 AT-X M100 AF Pro D seen above.

The news comes to us from the ever-reliable Nokishita, who tweeted about the upcoming lens last night. “It seems that Tokina will announce ‘ATX-i 100mm F2.8 FF MACRO’ in the near future,” reads the translated tweet. “The mount is Canon EF and Nikon F.”

According to Nikon Rumors, the lens will feature Tokina’s more modern Opera design found in lenses like the Opera 16-28mm f/2.8 FF and Opera 50mm f/1.4 FF, and based on the model name it will be the second ATX-i lens from the brand, joining the Tokina ATX-i 11-16mm CF f/2.8 for crop-sensor DSLRs.

This is good news for everybody, since Tokina’s latest lenses tend to punch above their price point, and neither Nikon nor Canon have released a new full-frame, 100mm DSLR-mount macro lens in over 10 years—Nikon’s 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens was released in 2006, and Canon’s 100mm f/2.8L USM Macro in 2009.

Stay tuned for the official release “in the near future.” If previous experience is anything to judge by, Nokishita’s leaks often come within weeks, if not days, of an official announcement from the brand.

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.