Event will be fully remote and livestreamed.

New Surface hardware is likely to surface at Microsoft’s September 22 event

These aren't "hybrids"—their NAND components aren't used for user data.

Like last year's 20TB SMR drives, the OptiNAND drives employ EAMR in the form of an additional current to the main pole of the write head.

The triple-stage actuator—much like the three knuckles of a human finger—enables rapid, fine head positioning in both last year's and this year's 20TB drives.

Last year, Western Digital's 20TB drives needed Shingled Magnetic Recording to reach their high areal densities. This year, the added edge comes from offboarding metadata instead of shingling sectors.

The most tangible milestone achieved by Western Digital's newly announced architecture is a nine-platter, 20TB drive that does not require Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) techniques. The new disk uses a subset of Western Digital's EAMR technology, which has been rebranded ePMR—presumably to emphasize that it's not SMR, which has severe performance and usability implications for many common workloads.

The new drive uses the same EAMR and triple-stage actuator technology as last July's 18TB and 20TB offerings but gets its boost in areal density from offloading onboard metadata to the flash side of the OptiNAND architecture. The metadata we're talking about isn't filesystem metadata—it's hardware metadata, accessible by the drive's firmware but not exposed outside the drive itself.

Repeatable Runout (RRO) is a description of a rotational system's inaccuracies that can be predicted ahead of time—for example, a steady wobble caused by the microscopically imperfect alignment of a rotor. RRO data is specific to each individual drive and is generated at the factory during manufacturing and stored on the disk itself.

In typical conventional drives, RRO metadata is interleaved with customer-accessible data on the platters themselves, reducing the overall areal density of the disk due to reducing the number of tracks per inch (TPI) available for customer data. OptiNAND architecture allows Western Digital to move this metadata off the platters and onto the onboard NAND.

In order to hit 20TB on a nine-platter drive with current recording technologies, you need a next-generation "edge" of some sort. In last year's 20TB drives, that edge was SMR—in this year's newest models, it's OptiNAND.

Sync write acceleration

Although Sivaram opened up our interview declaring that OptiNAND is not for storing customer data at all, there is one exception—the contents of the drive's DRAM cache can be flushed to OptiNAND in the event of an unexpected power loss.

This has a massive impact on the drive's performance when the drive is asked to perform sync writes—a special mode of operation typically requested by databases, virtual machines, and most NFS exports. When an application requests a "sync write" to a drive, all of the normal write aggregation and caching operations become unavailable—the application tells the operating system, "I'm not doing anything else until you verify that this data is stored permanently and safely on disk."

OptiNAND architecture allows drives to complete those sync() calls instantaneously without lying about the safety of sync write data. Instead of pausing everything the drive is doing to seek the heads to the proper places and write the data to the magnetic medium, the drive can simply say, "Your data is safe" once the writes are accepted into the drive's own DRAM buffer.

Normally, this would be considered an unsafe violation of write barrier mandates. But on the OptiNAND drives, up to 100MiB of "cache-disabled" writes can be accepted into DRAM because, in an emergency power-off event, the drive's onboard capacitor can keep the DRAM viable for long enough to flush the write cache to OptiNAND. On restoration of power, the dirty data temporarily written to OptiNAND is read back and immediately committed to rotational storage.

Allowing the drive to "fudge" on write barriers by relying on capacitor power to flush dirty writes from DRAM to OptiNAND can improve performance for those writes drastically—in many cases, probably by a factor of ten or more.

Use cases and availability

According to Sivaram, the new OptiNAND drives will be useful anywhere conventional hard drives are used. Without the performance bottleneck of either drive or host-managed SMR, the drives can be expected to function as plug-and-play replacements for older, smaller drives in everything from the NAS to the data center.

The 20TB OptiNAND disks are currently in the early stages of production, with samples shipping to select Western Digital enterprise customers only. However, the technology is expected to serve as "the foundation for future designs and innovations" across Western Digital's entire rotational storage product line, with market-specific products becoming available later this year.

We have requested product samples for direct testing and review.

Western Digital introduces new non-SMR 20TB HDDs with onboard NAND

GPU prices back on the upswing, indicating stock issues not going anywhere

ASML’s next-generation extreme ultraviolet lithography machines achieve previously unattainable levels of precision, which means chips can keep shrinking for years to come.

 

Inside a large clean room in rural Connecticut, engineers have begun constructing a critical component for a machine that promises to keep the tech industry as we know it on track for at least another decade.

 

The machine is being built by ASML, a Dutch company that has cornered the market for etching the tiniest nanoscopic features into microchips with light.

 

ASML introduced the first extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines for mass production in 2017, after decades spent mastering the technique. The machines perform a crucial role in the chipmaking ecosystem, and they have been used in the manufacture of the latest, most advanced chips, including those in new iPhones as well as computers used for artificial intelligence. The company’s next EUV system, a part of which is being built in Wilton, Connecticut, will use a new trick to minimize the wavelength of light it uses—shrinking the size of features on the resulting chips and boosting their performance—more than ever before.

 

The current generation of EUV machines are already, to put it bluntly, kind of bonkers. Each one is roughly the size of a bus and costs $150 million. It contains 100,000 parts and 2 kilometers of cabling. Shipping the components requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. Only a few companies can afford the machines, and most of them go to the world’s big three leading-edge chipmakers: the world’s leading foundry, Taiwan-based TSMC, as well as Samsung, in South Korea, and Intel.

 

“It is really an incredible machine,” says Jesús del Alamo, a professor at MIT who works on novel transistor architectures. “It’s an absolutely revolutionary product, a breakthrough that is going to give a new lease of life to the industry for years.”

 

In Connecticut, a giant hunk of aluminum has been carved into a frame that will eventually hold a mask, or “reticle,” that moves with nanometer precision while reflecting a beam of extreme ultraviolet light. The light pinballs off several mirrors shaped and polished with astonishing precision to etch features just a few dozen atoms in size onto future computer chips.

 

The finished component will be shipped to Veldhoven in the Netherlands by the end of 2021, and then added to the first prototype next-generation EUV machine by early 2022. The first chips made using the new systems may be minted by Intel, which has said it will get the first of them, expected by 2023. With smaller features than ever, and tens of billions of components each, the chips that the machine produces in coming years should be the fastest and most efficient in history.

 

ASML’s latest EUV machine promises to keep alive an idea that has come to symbolize the march of progress—not just in chipmaking, but in the tech industry and the economy at large.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, an electronics engineer and one of the founders of Intel, wrote an article for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics, a trade magazine, that included an observation that has since taken on a life of its own. In the article, Moore noted that the number of components on a silicon chip had roughly doubled each year until then, and he predicted the trend would continue.

 

A decade later, Moore revised his estimate to two years rather than one. The march of Moore’s law has come into question in recent years, although new manufacturing breakthroughs and chip design innovations have kept it roughly on track.

 

EUV uses some extraordinary engineering to shrink the wavelength of light used to make chips, and it should help continue that streak. The technology will be crucial for making more advanced smartphones and cloud computers, and also for key areas of emerging technology such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and robotics. “The death of Moore’s law has been greatly exaggerated,” del Alamos says. “I think it’s going to go on for quite some time.”

 

Amid the recent chip shortage, triggered by the pandemic’s economic shock waves, ASML’s products have become central to a geopolitical struggle between the US and China, with Washington making it a high priority to block China's access to the machines. The US government has successfully pressured the Dutch not to grant the export licenses needed to send the machines to China, and ASML says it has shipped none to the country.

 

“You can’t make leading-edge chips without ASML’s machines,” says Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University studying the geopolitics of chipmaking. “A lot of it comes down to years and years of tinkering with things and experimenting, and it’s very difficult to get access to that.”

 

Each component that goes into an EUV machine is “astonishingly sophisticated and extraordinarily complex,” he says.

 

Making microchips already requires some of the most advanced engineering the world has ever seen. A chip starts out life as a cylindrical chunk of crystalline silicon that is sliced into thin wafers, which are then coated with layers of light-sensitive material and repeatedly exposed to patterned light. The parts of silicon not touched by the light are then chemically etched away to reveal the intricate details of a chip. Each wafer is then chopped up to make lots of individual chips.

 

Shrinking the components on a chip remains the surest way to squeeze more computational power out of a piece of silicon because electrons pass more efficiently through smaller electronic components, and packing more components into a chip increases its capacity to compute.

 

Lots of innovations have kept Moore’s law going, including novel chip and component designs. This May, for instance, IBM showed off a new kind of transistor, sandwiched like a ribbon inside silicon, that should allow more components to be packed into a chip without shrinking the resolution of the lithography.

 

But reducing the wavelength of light used in chip manufacturing has helped drive miniaturization and progress from the 1960s onwards, and it is crucial to the next advance. Machines that use visible light were replaced by those that use near-ultraviolet, which in turn gave way to systems that employ deep-ultraviolet in order to etch ever smaller features into chips.

 

A consortium of companies including Intel, Motorola, and AMD began studying EUV as the next step in lithography in the 1990s. ASML joined in 1999, and as a leading maker of lithography technology, sought to develop the first EUV machines. Extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV for short, allows a much shorter wavelength of light (13.5 nanometers) to be used, compared with deep ultraviolet, the previous lithographic method (193 nanometers).

 

But it has taken decades to iron out the engineering challenges. Generating EUV light is itself a big problem. ASML’s method involves directing high-power lasers at droplets of tin 50,000 times per second to generate high-intensity light. Lenses absorb EUV frequencies, so the system uses incredibly precise mirrors coated with special materials instead. Inside ASML’s machine, EUV light bounces off several mirrors before passing through the reticle, which moves with nanoscale precision to align the layers on the silicon.

 

“To tell you the truth, nobody actually wants to use EUV,” says David Kanter, a chip analyst with Real World Technologies. “It's a mere 20 years late and 10X over budget. But if you want to build very dense structures, it’s the only tool you’ve got.”

 

ASML’s new machine introduces an additional trick to produce smaller features on a chip: a larger numerical aperture, which increases the resolution of imaging by allowing light to travel through the optics at different angles. This requires significantly larger mirrors and new software and hardware to precisely control the components. ASML’s current generation of EUV machines can create chips with a resolution of 13 nanometers. The next generation will use High-NA to craft features 8 nanometers in size.

 

The most prominent company using EUV today is TSMC, whose customers include Apple, Nvidia, and Intel. Intel was slow to adopt EUV and fell behind rivals as a result, hence its recent decision to outsource some of its production to TSMC.

 

ASML doesn’t seem to think the progress built on top of its machines will slow.

 

“I don’t like to talk about the end of Moore’s law, I like to talk about the illusion of Moore's law,” says Martin van den Brink, ASML’s chief technology officer, via a video link from the Netherlands.

 

Moore’s 1965 article was actually more focused on the march of innovation than just shrinkage, Van den Brink notes. While he expects High-NA EUV to keep spurring progress in the chip industry for at least the next 10 years, he believes that shrinking chip features using lithography will become less important.

 

Van den Brink says ASML has researched proposed successors to EUV, including e-beam and nanoimprint lithography, but has not found any of them to be reliable enough to justify substantial investment. He predicts that new methods of speeding up the throughput of lithographic machines while accounting for thermal stability and physical disturbances will help increase yield. Even if chips did not become faster, this would result in the most advanced chips becoming cheaper and more widely used.

 

Van den Brink adds that other manufacturing tricks, including efforts to build components vertically on a chip—something that Intel and others have already begun doing—should keep improving performance. He notes that the executive chairman of TSMC, Mark Liu, has said he expects a threefold improvement in combined performance and efficiency each year for the next 20 years.

 

Demand for faster chips is hardly likely to go down. Mark Lundstrom, a professor at Purdue who began working in the chip industry in the 1970s, wrote an article for Science magazine in 2003 that predicted Moore’s law would run into physical limits within a decade. “In my career, multiple times we thought ‘OK, this is the end,’” he says. “But there's no danger at all that things will slow down in 10 years. We'll just have to do it differently.”

 

Lundstrom remembers visiting his first microchip conference in 1975. “There was this fellow named Gordon Moore giving a talk,” he recalls. “He was well known within the technical community, but nobody else knew him.”

 

“And I remember the talk that he gave,” Lundstrom adds. “He said, ‘We will soon be able to place 10,000 transistors on a chip.’ And he added, 'What could anyone possibly do with 10,000 transistors on a chip?’”

The $150 Million Machine Keeping Moore’s Law Alive

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Halo Infinite in December

As is tradition at the end of August, gamescom took place this week, and thus a number of game announcements and related news tidbits were present. Microsoft of course chose to have its own showing, which revealed a number of first-party, Game Pass, and streaming-related things.

For one, Xbox Cloud Gaming (Project xCloud) is set to be made available for the Xbox One and Xbox Series families of consoles in Holiday 2021 – which holiday though, is up to Microsoft, and the solution will support 1080p 60FPS streaming. You’ll be able to differentiate between titles which do or do not support this feature via the small cloud icon, often placed directly onto the ‘Play’ button.

And as Cloud Gaming is part of Game Pass Ultimate, we’d be remiss not to mention the fact that Microsoft’s gaming sub is also gaining 10 Humble Games-published games when they launch. This being positioned as a partnership, means we could see more games arrive to the service in the future.

Speaking of the future, State of Decay 2 has crossed the 10 million player mark, with the developer announcing that the game’s Trumbull Valley will become a regular open-world region. This all is set to land September 1 as part of the game’s Homecoming update.

Sticking to the very same month, September 7 will be bringing World Update VI to Flight Simulator, with the Top Gun: Maverick free expansion landing November 19 (aligning with the release of the eponymous movie). Also in September, Minecraft Dungeons is set to dig its way to Steam, surfacing on September 22.

Moving onto October, the just-announced Wasteland 3: Cult of the Holy Detonation expansion is prepped to hit digital shelves – on October 5 -, followed by Age of Empires IV on October 28 (which just revealed its Holy Roman Empire and Rus civilizations).

In chronological order we then arrive at the month of November, with the 9th marking the release of Playground’s Forza Horizon 5, and the 15th seeing the launch of the special edition, Halo Infinite-themed Xbox Series X and Elite Series 2 Controller. The 15th also happens to be the 20th anniversary of Halo and the original Xbox (the Xbox one, not Xbox One).

As for the game after which the special edition is modeled, Halo Infinite was said to launch on December 8 according to a leak, a leak which was not long after officially confirmed during the gamescom presentation. Another notable launch, though not first-party, is Destiny 2: The Witch Queen expansion, landing February 22.

Loosely confirmed for sometime in the future is also Crusader Kings III. Pardox’s grand strategy will be hitting both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S…at one point, which I suspect depends entirely on how long it’ll take the developers to finish the game they’re currently playing. This may take a while, though hopefully not as long as Starfield, some of the major locations for which were revealed this week.

Of course, it’s not all about waiting for some nebulous time in the future to enjoy games as, for example, Double Fine’s excellent Psychonauts 2 is already available – you can check out our review here – as is the ability to grab Mayhem, a Borderlands-inspired ship in Sea of Thieves.

If the above aren’t quite your thing, there are Deals with Gold to browse for Destiny 2, Crysis Remastered and many more, as well as Warhammer: Chaosbane, Mulaka, Zone of the Enders HD Collection, and Samurai Shodown II to look forward to as September’s Games with Gold.

And as if that was not enough, a Halo Infinite dynamic theme has now been added as an option for Xbox Series X|S owners, and your Xbox 360 gamerpics are now going to be properly displayed for those of you who own an Xbox One or Xbox Series console.

Oh yeah, and the chunk of text above doesn’t quite cover all the Xbox announcements at gamescom. For those, take a trip to this link to find out more.

Tweaked support lists

testing of Microsoft’s upcoming major version of Windows continues in the Beta and Dev channels, both of which got build 22000.168 on Friday. Beyond the usual array of known issues and fixes, the build introduces a couple of new features like expanded language support linked to the Chat with Microsoft Teams feature, as well as a new Microsoft 365 widget, and small tweaks to the Store’s Library performance and general UI.

In case you’re not quite happy with the various bugs or potential crashes experienced as part of the Dev channel, even Microsoft itself has sent out a formal communication advising testers to move to the Beta channel. The company states that upcoming builds “may be less stable” and will not align with the version of the OS expected to be made available to the public later in 2021.

Speaking of availability, the firm has added the 7th-gen Core X and Xeon W series of processors from Intel – as well as the Core i7-7820HQ from the Surface Studio 2 – to its list of supported Windows 11 processors. The likely reason for this hodge-podge of official support has more to do with VBS (virtualization-based security), a feature that’s not present in unsupported CPUs.

Unfortunately, first-gen Ryzen processors from AMD did not make the cut, but if you really want to install this OS, Microsoft has left the door open for enthusiasts to use it on unsupported hardware. Be warned thought that you may not receive feature and security updates due to the hardware not being officially supported. As always, Microsoft takes another gold medal for clear and concise communication.

Lastly, if you don’t want to bother with the whole Insider Program testing, there’s Windows 11 in React, a browser-based simulation of Microsoft’s upcoming OS that you can try out. Though nowhere near as responsive as testing things on actual hardware or in a VM, it is nonetheless, an option.

Also an option would be for you to check out our Closer Look series, in which we focus on certain Windows 11 features. After Search, we’ve also moved the spotlight onto Widgets, as well as one of the more visible changes, the new Start menu.

Database chaos

Continuing with the rather unfortunate security news left and right, there’s a report from Upgard, a firm specializing in risk and attack surface management. According to it, due to folks using the default configs in Power Apps portals, 38 million customer records were exposed – across various companies - featuring everything from phone numbers to social security numbers.

This was due to these portals being configured by default to have APIs (and thus data related to them) publicly accessible. The issue even affected some of Microsoft’s own apps, according to Upgard.

Thankfully, Microsoft released an update in August to make APIs private by default. As with any kind of bad news, the flaw above was not the singular one to make headlines this week.

By way of security firm Wiz, a critical Azure Cosmos DB flaw was discovered, a flaw which makes use of a default configuration in Microsoft’s “planet-scale”, fully managed NoSQL database offering.

Dubbed ChaosDB – with a naming convention which follows in the footsteps of vulnerabilities like PrintNightmare -, the flaw makes use of Cosmos DB’s Jupyter Notebook integration. More specifically, the capability was introduced in 2019, and enabled by default for everybody in February of this year.

As a result of poor configuration of this feature, Wiz was able to trigger a privilege escalation which broke the notebook’s container, allowing the researchers to access Cosmos DB’s primary keys and the access token for the notebook’s blob storage. With this, the firm was able to gain admin access to all of the data hosted by the impacted accounts.

The vulnerability was discovered on August 9 and privately reported to Microsoft on August 12 – for which Wiz was awarded $40,000. Within 48 hours of the flaw being reported, Microsoft disabled Jupyter Notebook in Cosmos DB, as well as patched the vulnerability and informed its customers (including Fortune 500 companies) that it recommends rotating the private access keys.

According to the company, it has received no indication that any other external entity outside Wiz “had access to the primary read-write key”.

Dev channel

• The final Edge Dev 94 build (94.0.992.1) is now out, adding a myriad of fixes and features.
• Microsoft has fixed the bug causing in-place upgrade incompatibilities for Windows on ARM64 machines.
• Support for Office Android apps on Chrome OS is set to be dropped by Microsoft next month.
• The Surface Duo 2 has been spotted in benchmarks, sporting a Snapdragon 888 and 8GB of RAM.

Logging off

We wrap things up this week with an announcement about change – or rather, two announcements*.

You’ve seen quite a bit of Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay, but this week he’s been in the news once more. Panay has gotten a promotion and is now part of the SLT which, contrary to first impressions no, is not some kind of sandwich like a BLT. Rather, it's the Senior Leadership Team.

These are the folks who form the advisory board for CEO Satya Nadella, amongst whom are also former CVP of Azure Scott Guthrie – now EVP of the Cloud and AI group – and the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer.

It will be interesting to see how the direction of the company changes now that Panay has a somewhat bigger say in the matter – otherwise he wouldn’t have been promoted to this position.

Missed any of the previous columns? Check them all out at this link.

Microsoft Weekly: Halo Infinite in December, tweaked support lists, and database chaos

In terms of changes, it features, perhaps among other things, a lighter finger-friendly screw with plastic heads, on the PS5's base, that can be turned and loosened using our fingers instead of needing tools like screwdrivers.

But this can't explain the substantial weight difference. A quick teardown of the new model by popular YouTuber Austin Evans has revealed that the new model also features a downgraded heatsink which has been significantly cut down from the original model. Most of the weight difference between the two variants appears to be from this change.

As one would expect, this leads to a difference in temperatures with the newer variant running significantly warmer reaching temperatures of 55°C whereas the original version would reach around 52°C. The measurements were taken in ambient 24°C surroundings.

There's a tiny silver lining though. The fan noise in the new CFI-1100B variant is lower than the older model which means people who are really sensitive about noise may prefer the newer version.

The fan is also apparently a better designed one compared to that on the original version and this may be contributing to the lower sound output despite the device running warmer.

While CFI-1100B is the revamped version of the Digital Edition of the PS5, there could also be a revised disc edition in the works or already existing as a different PS5 variant with the ID "CFI-1115A" which was spotted back in May by Twitter user @geronimo_73.

Source and images: Austin Evans (YouTube)

Sony's revamped PS5 apparently runs hotter than the original

Summer of 58, released last month, has been well-reviewed on Steam, with an overall “Very Positive” rating and loads of fans leaving nice comments, giving particular praise to its atmosphere and jump scares. But as a short experience—it can be completed in around 90 minutes—that’s left the game vulnerable to Steam’s blanket two-hour refund policy.

The policy, which lets any Steam user get a full refund on a game if they’ve played it for less than two hours, means well! And if you were only 90 minutes into Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Crusader Kings III, it would be a perfectly fair and practical way of handling the matter.

For games that can be finished in under that time, though, it’s a huge problem. As we saw back in April, when Before Your Eyes ran into the same situation, the policy means that users can buy a good short game, enjoy it then still get a refund and nobody asks any questions, leaving the creators empty-handed.

That’s left Emika Games without the funds to continue work on their next game, From Day To Day, and as a result they’ve issued a statement saying they are “leaving game development for an indefinite time to collect [their] thoughts.”

Friends! Thank you for your support! I’m leaving game development for an indefinite time to collect my thoughts. The fact is that my game Summer of ‘58 does not reach 2 hours of playing time by Steam standards, in this regard, a huge number of returns on the game, even with positive reviews, and I do not earn anything to create a new game. Thank you very much for supporting me. I am very glad that you like my games, but since I have no conditions to do something new, I have to do something else. I will immediately answer everyone who asks about From Day To Day, this game will not see the light of day in the near future. See you later.

SOURCE: https://kotaku.com/steams-two-hour-refund-policy-forces-horror-developer-i-1847568067

The Phoenix controller in Samsung's own product images isn't present on newer drives.

Recently, major SSD vendors Crucial and Western Digital have both been caught swapping out TLC NAND in their consumer SSDs for cheaper but much lower-performance, lower-endurance QLC NAND. Samsung appears to be joining them in the part-swapping corner of shame today, thanks to Chinese Youtuber 潮玩客, who documented a new version of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus using an inferior drive controller.

 

Although the consumer-facing model number of the drives did not change—it was a 970 Evo Plus last year, and it's still a 970 Evo Plus now—the manufacturer part number did. Unfortunately, the manufacturer part number isn't visible on the box the SSD comes in—as far as we've been able to determine, it's only shown on a small label on the drive itself.

Falling off the write cliff

This CrystalDiskMark test makes the newer, inferior drive look faster than the original in most tests—but notice the very small 1GiB test size. This test isn't escaping the SLC write cache!

 

In this HD Tune Pro test, we can see the "write cliff" effect on both drives as the SLC cache is exhausted—but the difference isn't HD Tune Pro vs CrystalDiskMark, it's 1GiB test vs 200GiB test.

 

We can also see the "write cliff" effect in a simple large file copy—when the write cache is exhausted, the new drive is far slower than the old.

 

We tested the 970 Evo Plus (alongside the 980, and the older 970 Pro) in March, clocking it at write speeds of 1,600+ MiB/sec on 1MiB workloads. Our benchmarking was done with he old version, part number MZVLB1T0HBLR. The newer version—part number MZVL21T0HBLU—is considerably slower. According to 潮玩客's test results, the newer version only manages 830MiB/sec—half the performance of the original.

It seems likely that Samsung, like Western Digital, hoped the part swap would go unnoticed because the end result was "good enough." Under most light usage workloads, a user might never notice the new part number's lower performance—because like nearly all modern SSDs, the 970 Evo Plus features a SLC write cache that's much faster than its main storage NAND, and the new part's performance drop doesn't become apparent until after the cache is exhausted.

潮玩客 first tested the old and new 970 Evo Plus drives using CrystalDiskMark, and the drives appeared near-identical. But that's because CrystalDiskMark by default uses a very small 1GiB test size, which clearly is not enough to exhaust either drive's write cache. (We at Ars frequently use CrystalDiskMark—but we select larger test sizes, for precisely this reason.)

In longer tests, both drives decrease sharply in performance as cache fills, which is expected. But while the older drive retains nearly two-thirds of its original performance, the newer version craters to less than a third. We can see this effect not only in artificial benchmarks, but also in large file copies, as seen in 潮玩客's later tests.

The controller is the culprit

The best news for impacted 970 Evo Plus owners is that they should "only" be taking a massive performance hit, without a corresponding decrease in write endurance. That's because unlike Crucial and Western Digital's part-swaps, Samsung didn't drop from TLC flash to QLC—it just swapped out the controller.

The older, higher-performing drives have a Phoenix controller and the newer, lower-performing drives use one made by Elpis. Tom's Hardware points out that Samsung is already known to be facing controller shortages, with its own Texa controller factories having been idle since February.

Although Samsung's part swap will likely have a lower direct customer impact than Western Digital's or Crucial's, it's still disappointing that the company is pulling this without informing the public. Ultimately, we're talking about two versions of the same model with significantly different components and a drastic reduction in performance, with very little way for a customer to spot the difference—and pandemic or no pandemic, that's just not okay.

Listing image by Samsung

Samsung seemingly caught swapping components in its 970 Evo Plus SSDs

This piece of news comes from Bloomberg, which reports that Panos Panay is now an executive vice president at Microsoft and a member of the senior leadership team, which means that he will be advising CEO and board director Satya Nadella on strategic decisions.

This move means that Windows will finally have a seat at the senior leadership table, which hasn't been the case since former Executive Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group Terry Myerson departed from the company in 2018. While Microsoft hasn't updated its list of Executive Officers recently, Panay will be joining Xbox chief Phil Spencer, cloud and AI guru Scott Guthrie, and more in advising the CEO as part of the senior leadership team.

This is Panay's second promotion in just over a year. In February 2020, the executive was entrusted to lead both the Windows and hardware division at Microsoft. While the company's Surface hardware has been struggling in the revenue department recently and the Surface Duo is also considered a flop, Panay's innovative approach to premium hardware is something that is worthy of respect, at the very least. Outside of Microsoft, the executive is also a member of Sonos' board of directors.

Microsoft promotes Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay to senior leadership team

Xiaomi India today announced two new Windows laptops with premium features and affordable price tag. Mi Notebook Pro and Mi Notebook Ultra are the two laptops. You can read about them in detail below.

Mi Notebook Ultra:

• Mi TrueLife+ 15.6-inch Display:
  • 3200×2000 resolution
  • 16:10 aspect ratio
  • 242 PPI
  • 89.1%Screen to Body Ratio
  • 100% sRGB Wide Colour Gamut
  • 90 Hz refresh rate
  • TUV Rheinland Low Blue Light protection 
• Design:
  • Made from 6-series aerospace grade aluminium alloy.
  • Thin: 17.9mm, Light: 1.7kg
  • Robust Hinge: Tested for up to 30000 operations
  • 170 Grit Sandblasted Texture
  • 2 in 1 Fingerprint Reader + Power Button
• Keyboard and Trackpad:
  • Full Size Keyboard and Larger Trackpad
  • 3 Level Backlight Off?Bright?Brighter
  • 5,000,000 times each key is rated to last 5M strikes
  • 1.5 mm Deep key travel
• Performance:
  • Intel 11th-Generation Tigerlake H35
  • Intel Iris Xe Graphics
  • Thick 6mm Diameter Heat Pipe and Large Diameter Fan for sustained performance.
  • Up to 16GB high speed 3200MHz dual channel memory
  • 512GB NVMe SSD
• Connectivity:
  • WiFi 6
  • Bluetooth 5.1
  • Thunderbolt 4 and Type C USB
• 12 Hr+ All Day Battery, 65W USB C charger
• Price: 59,999 INR ($810 USD)

Mi Notebook Pro:

• Mi TrueLife+ 14-inch Display:
  • 2.5k resolution with 215 PPI
  • 16:10 aspect ratio
  • 89.1%Screen to Body Ratio
  • 100% sRGB Wide Colour Gamut
  • TUV Rheinland Low Blue Light protection 
• Design:
  • Made from 6-series aerospace grade aluminium alloy.
  • Thin: 17.3mm, Light: 1.46kg
  • Robust Hinge: Tested for up to 30000 operations
  • 170 Grit Sandblasted Texture
  • 2 in 1 Fingerprint Reader + Power Button
• Keyboard and Trackpad:
  • Full Size Keyboard and Larger Trackpad
  • 3 Level Backlight Off?Bright?Brighter
  • 5,000,000 times each key is rated to last 5M strikes
  • 1.3 mm Deep key travel
• Performance:
  • Intel 11th-Generation Tigerlake H35
  • Intel Iris Xe Graphics
  • Thick 6mm Diameter Heat Pipe and Large Diameter Fan for sustained performance.
  • Up to 16GB high speed 3200MHz dual channel memory
  • 512GB NVMe SSD
• Connectivity:
  • WiFi 6
  • Bluetooth 5.1
  • Thunderbolt 4 and Type C USB
• 11 Hr+ All Day Battery, 65W USB C charger
• Price: 56,999 INR ($770 USD)

Source: Xiaomi

Xiaomi India announces Mi NoteBook Pro and Ultra with premium features and affordable price tag

The company says that, in the future, it will also introduce a new model number when making any hardware changes to its products that impact performance.

Western Digital added that, although it didn't inform customers of this change, it updated the WD Blue SN550 data sheet.

"In June 2021, we replaced the NAND in the WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD and updated the firmware," a Western Digital spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

"At the time, we updated the product data sheet. For greater transparency going forward, if we make a change to an existing internal SSD, we commit to introducing a new model number whenever any related published specifications are impacted.

"We value our customers and are committed to providing the best possible solutions for their data storage needs."

Writing speed decrease of up to 50%

The first to report that Western Digital swapped the high-performance flash memory in its Blue SN550 M.2 NVMe SSDs with a lower quality one without letting its customers know was the Chinese tech news site Expreview.

The NAND replacement resulted in overall writing speeds decreases of up to 50%, according to Expreview, a report that Tom's Hardware later confirmed.

While in normal conditions, the SSDs with swapped NAND memory are as fast as those with the original hardware, the new ones cannot keep up with the writing requests once the 12 GB SLC cache is exhausted, and their performance will tank from 610 MBps to a meager 390Mps.

Even though the company didn't reveal the reason behind the change, a possible explanation is the ongoing global semiconductor chip shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which spread to impact almost 170 industry sectors.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, is also planning to increase prices by as much as 20% during late 2021 or early 2022, as reported by Wall Street Journal today.

Western Digital confirms speed crippling SN550 SSD flash change

Microsoft today announced that Ignite conference will be held digitally on November 2-4, 2021. In the Ignite conference, you can expect latest product demos, Q&A with Microsoft experts, technical deep-dives, and more. Also, the event will be free and open for everyone.

You can find more details about this event here.

Microsoft Ignite conference is coming digitally on November 2-4, 2021

On August 24th, 2011 — ten years ago today — Apple co-founder Steve Jobs resigned as CEO, leaving the world’s newly minted most valuable brand in the hands of his successor Tim Cook. Just six weeks later, Jobs died. Needless to say, Cook had some big shoes to fill: Jobs is remembered as the visionary CEO and marketer behind the Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTunes, and the App Store.

A decade later, what has Tim Cook built?

The most valuable and profitable company in the world

Apple is bigger than oil.

A company that turns a web of complex components into sophisticated computing devices now makes more money than those that effectively pump barrels of cash out of the ground. And it’s because Tim Cook meticulously crafted the overseas supply chains to make it so, contracting manufacturers like Foxconn which employ hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers for Apple’s production lines, and delivering a remarkably steady gross margin for years. In August 2011, shortly before Jobs stepped down, Apple had already briefly passed Exxon to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, on the back of Tim Cook’s efforts as COO and interim CEO. Even in 2019, when Saudi Arabia opened up state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco for trading, it didn’t dominate for long: Apple surpassed it last July on its way to a $2 trillion market cap, and Apple is approaching $2.5 trillion now. It’s more profitable than Saudi Aramco, too.

By any metric imaginable, Tim Cook has grown Apple into a behemoth over the past decade. Revenues reached a record $111 billion this holiday season, quadruple what the company saw the same quarter in 2011. Profits more than quadrupled from $6B in Q1 2011 to $28.8B in Q1 2021. The company holds nearly $200 billion in cash, more than double the already-staggering $76 billion it had in 2011, and Apple has more than doubled in size with 147,000 full-time employees — compared to 60,400 the year Jobs stepped down.

As of June 2021, Apple now makes an average of $10,000 every second, $3,600 of which is pure profit. How long ago did you start reading this story? Chances are Apple grossed half a million dollars by the time you finish this sentence.

All of these numbers reflect how Cook’s Apple relentlessly pumped out premium products that consumers were eager to buy, steadily improving them year by year, at a pace Jobs’ Apple never did. Between 2013 and 2018, Apple sold more iPhones every single year than it did during the five years Jobs was in charge.

For some, the dollar signs alone are proof Cook has been a complete success. If you spent $1,000 on Apple stock the week Steve Jobs stepped down, it’d be worth nearly $11,000 today, not including dividends.

But measuring Apple by financial performance alone is only half the story. If you were hoping Cook would be a Jobs-esque product visionary, you probably haven’t been quite as impressed.

Hardware swings

As the venerable tech journalist Walt Mossberg wrote for us two years ago, Tim Cook’s Apple has yet to produce a truly game-changing hardware product — nothing on the scale of the iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The biggest new Apple products under Tim Cook are either iPhone accessories like the Apple Watch and AirPods, or products his Apple delivered because they were what customers were asking for — like iPhones with larger screens. “Steve was pretty adamant that big phones aren’t something we’re going to do,” says tech analyst and former Apple marketing director Michael Gartenberg, noting it was part of the discussion around the iPhone 6 Plus launch in 2014. “Tim said consumers want it, we’ve got the capability to do it, so we’re going to do it.”

But there have also been some surprisingly public failures, like the unceremoniously canceled AirPower charging pad, the difficult-to-upgrade Mac Pro that Apple admitted was a mistake, and most of all, the shameful five-year saga where Apple’s flagship MacBook laptops had keyboards that just couldn’t be trusted not to break.

And whether he was chasing Steve Jobs’ notion of a post-PC world or attacking it on his own terms, Cook’s Apple spent years focused on the iPad at the expense of the Mac, only to discover it was alienating some of its most important fans: the Apple developers it relied on to create iPhone and iPad apps.

(It’s particularly egregious when you consider that 2013 Mac Pro and 2016 MacBook Pro were supposed to be Apple’s answers to the idea it’d abandoned Mac power users.)

The Apple Watch is now a hit product in a category of one, as Google and others continue flailing to compete. But part of the Apple Watch’s success is simply how expectations lower over time. When it was announced in late 2014 as Cook’s first big new product, it was explicitly introduced as a product innovation on par with the Mac, iPod, and iPhone, with its digital crown touted as “Apple’s most revolutionary navigation tool since the iPod Click Wheel and iPhone Multi-Touch.” The pitch was that it could change your life by changing your health — and that it was a luxury product, too, with an 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition variant starting at $10,000.

But Apple had to reboot the entire Watch interface and ditch the ultra-luxury versions before finally finding its footing with the Apple Watch Series 3 in 2017. Even now, there’s not a lot of evidence it’s meaningfully improving people’s health, aside from the occasional anecdotal reports about people whose watches detected a fall or a heart rate spike in time to save their life.

Apple’s AirPods, its second big wearable product under Cook, are also a smash hit. But in many ways, AirPods are symbolic of the entire Cook era, where a seemingly obvious idea, executed at scale and tied tightly to the iPhone, becomes not only a business but also a cultural success. “It’s that process, that continued refinement of Apple, that has been Tim Cook’s genius,” says Gartenberg, pointing out how Cook’s Apple also did the seemingly impossible by transitioning the Mac away from Intel processors practically overnight.

While it’s too early to tell, the M1 chip may go down as one of Cook’s biggest swings: his Apple channeled the company’s relentless efforts to improve its Arm-based iPhone processors year after year after year into a new M1 laptop chip that blew away the skeptics, upending our entire concept of laptop performance. Jobs may have bought P.A. Semi in 2008 to reduce the company’s reliance on partners to power the iPhone, but by 2011 Apple hadn’t yet introduced its own CPU cores inside an Apple A-series chip, much less its own graphics. Cook’s Apple made it happen, and Cook took a victory lap this April by adding the new M1 chip into the iPad.

Still, both the AirPods and Watch have fundamentally been accessories for the iPhone, not new computing platforms in their own right: standalone Watch apps have not become a booming market. Cook’s biggest promises have mostly yet to pan out: he spent a year after Jobs’ death talking about Apple’s TV efforts, only to totally start over with the Apple TV Plus streaming service. He’s repeatedly said Apple’s greatest contribution to the world would be in health, with the Watch and the Peloton-like Fitness Plus platform the small beginnings of that effort.

And while Cook has teased for half a decade that augmented reality might become a new platform — calling it “a big idea like the smartphone,” “profound,” and “critically important” to Apple’s future — it’s largely just been teasers. Very little has come of ARKit, which brought basic augmented reality apps to the iPhone, since its 2017 debut, and Apple’s rumored AR headset has — if understandably — been a year or two away for the last three years in a row.

The services turn

If Tim Cook stepped down from Apple tomorrow, though, analysts wouldn’t be asking if a product visionary will take his place — they’d be wondering whether the next CEO will continue turning Apple into a services company.

In the second quarter of 2016, Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri drew financial analysts’ attention to a remarkable fact it had quietly been disclosing for well over a year — Apple was becoming a services company, too. The App Store and the company’s other paid subscriptions were accelerating quarter over quarter and year over year — and they had raked in $4.8 billion in Q1 2015 alone. In 2017, after pulling in over $7 billion per quarter for three fiscal quarters in a row, Apple declared its services business was the size of a Fortune 100 company all by itself. Last quarter, Apple saw a record $17.5 billion in services revenue, nearly half the size of the iPhone and more than double any other hardware category.

As emails from the Epic v. Apple trial (#10) revealed, the App Store alone had already eclipsed the company’s entire Mac and iPad businesses in 2016, with only the iPhone towering above it. Add movies, music, books, magazines, paid iCloud storage plans, AppleCare, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, and Apple Fitness Plus, and you’ve got a wide array of services collectively pulling in billions.

It’s not clear which of these make a dent beyond the App Store, as Apple stopped talking about Apple Music’s paid subscribers after it hit 60 million in June 2019, and the company still effectively gives away Apple TV Plus for free.

But Cook’s sights are set beyond content services, too: with Apple Pay, the Apple Card, Apple Cash, and the upcoming Apple Pay Later, the company seems to be edging into banking as well, locking in a cut of your transactions at the same time it’s locking you into its software ecosystem.

There is one place that Cook’s Apple admirably won’t go: while some of Apple’s service upsells can be highly annoying, Cook has been a champion for user privacy, calling it “a fundamental human right,” and famously fighting the FBI over requests that, privacy advocates agreed, might lead to governments having backdoors into users’ phones. It’s the rare tech giant that isn’t using your data as a revenue stream.

Some of Apple’s services play goes back to the days of Steve Jobs. One year before he died, he delivered an internal strategy presentation where he declared 2011 the “Year of the Cloud,” and that Apple should “tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem.” But the majority of Apple’s services today were introduced on Tim Cook’s watch, and Apple Pay in particular should go down as one of the company’s game changing moves — while other phone makers do have a direct equivalent, it was Cook’s Apple that drove instant, seamless, touchless payments across large parts of the world.

Growing pains

The question now is whether Apple can keep up with its all-encompassing pursuit of growth, because after a decade some cracks are beginning to show.

Consumers, competitors, and lawmakers around the world are starting to treat Apple like just another giant company trying to extract revenue any way it can — and as the company has become responsible for a billion devices and 2 million apps, its reputation is starting to take some brutal body blows.

Apple has never apologized so much as it has in the past few years, whether it’s for artificially slowing down older iPhones to preserve their batteries, secretly having human contractors listen to Siri recordings, or backing away from forcing a developer to add in-app purchases.

Even as Tim Cook continues to push Apple as a privacy company, where what happens on your phone stays on your phone, Apple is grappling with the reality of child porn and making potentially worrying privacy concessions as a result.

The company’s embroiled in lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny around the globe alleging the App Store is a monopoly, and while it’s entirely uncertain whether judges will agree, Apple’s own internal emails do a pretty good job of showing how the company values lock-in and favors some developers over others, despite Tim Cook’s testimony under oath.

Even as Apple tries to maintain the image of a technological leader that puts people first, the company has deployed an army of lobbyists to kill regulation it opposes in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Louisiana, and Georgia — where Apple reportedly threatened to pull its investment from a historically Black college if a challenge to its App Store went through. The company has asked the Biden administration to pressure the South Korean government from enacting a similar law. Even as Apple projects an image of its App Store as a trustworthy place to shop, it’s become increasingly obvious that its 500 human reviewers don’t have time to catch the most egregious scams successfully bilking users out of millions of dollars, even though emails show Apple’s been aware of the problem for years.

Cook’s all-important supply chains have consistently been under fire, too, with reports that Apple turned a blind eye to labor law violations in China.

Although Apple prides itself on a culture of secrecy, it’s currently undergoing a wave of employee activism that might change that culture forever in ways beyond Cook’s control — although the company may be illegally trying to control it anyhow.

And even though Tim Cook has touted diversity for many years, and deserves credit for coming out as the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Apple’s own leadership page is still extremely white.

It’s possible Tim Cook won’t be the one to solve these problems. He’s been with the company for 23 years, and he recently told Kara Swisher he probably won’t still be there after another decade has passed. But few of them were problems in the Steve Jobs era: many are a function of the Apple that Tim Cook built.

Tim Cook’s Apple, ten years later

Dying Light 2 has twice the number of parkour moves to brain zombies with

Microsoft’s gamescom 2021 showcase is happening today where the firm is announcing new titles making it to its Xbox Game Pass subscription, showing off flashy new gameplay trailers, and more. Along with those announcements, the company also unveiled the next major World Update for Flight Simulator and a few other additions making it to the simulation title over the next few months.

Flight Simulator World Update VI brings visual improvements to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland this time around. As expected, these include high-resolution scenery, new 3D cities, over 100 points of interest, and a bunch of new airports such as Lübeck, Stuttgart, Klagenfurt, and St. Gallen. There are also new bush trips, landing challenges, and discovery flights that are aimed at showing off the visual upgrades. The update will begin rolling out to users for free on September 7.

In addition to the visual upgrades, the Redmond firm is introducing a new ‘Local Legends’ series of additions that aligns with the World Updates. These are aimed at adding specific aircraft based on the regions in the World Update, highlighting airplanes that are “not as well known to a worldwide audience”. The addition for this time is the Junkers JU-52, a “famous German plane from 1930”. The firm adds that it has gone to “great lengths” to recreate the offering, even going as far as creating high-resolution scans, collaborating with the grandson of the plane’s original designer, and a pilot who last few the aircraft. The Junkers JU-52 will be a $14.99 addition and will be available on September 7.

Another addition to the simulator expected to make it in November is the Volocopter, an eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) air taxi made by a German company. The firm adds that the addition of this helicopter-like vehicle is the “first step” towards introducing more helicopters, something that has been widely requested. There is no word on whether this will be a free addition.

Lastly, the company is adding STIHL National Championship Air Races to Flight Simulator this fall, thanks to its partnership with RARA (the Reno Air Racing Association). This is said to be the “world’s fastest motorsport” with planes flying as fast as 500mph at an altitude of 50 feet to 250 feet. These races bring multiplayer racing to the game, where users will be able to compete with friends around the globe. The firm did not, however, mention if these will be a part of a free update or if this “first major expansion” will be a paid add-on.

While it was not mentioned in today’s announcement, the game will also be receiving a Top Gun: Maverick expansion on November 19, aligning with the release of the Top Gun: Maverick movie. While this was announced along with the Xbox console launch announcement, not much in the way of details has been revealed yet.

You can take a look at everything that Microsoft showed off at its gamescom 2021 showcase here.

Microsoft announces next major Flight Simulator update, multiplayer racing, and more

Undead Labs' updates to State of Decay 2 continue, with the zombie survival game soon receiving another massive open-world map, one that will be awfully familiar to players of the original game. Moreover, the game has now passed the impressive milestone of having 10 million players across PC (Windows 10, Steam and the Epic Games Store), Xbox consoles, and Xbox Game Pass since launch.

Fans should already know a variant of the original game's Trumbull Valley has been a part of State of Decay 2 for a while now as a part of its Heartland storyline. However, now with the forthcoming Homecoming update, the map is being turned into a regular open-world region like the other zombie-filled landscapes available for sandbox play, and there are improvements.

Set after the events of Heartland, this updated version of Trumbull will see overhauled regions, new characters, and continue to the main storyline as a whole. The map will also feature six new bases, unique weapons and outfits, alongside new missions, achievements, and more.

The Homecoming update will be available to all State of Decay 2 owners and Xbox Game Pass subscribers on September 1.

State of Decay 2 crosses 10 million players, Trumbull Valley returns in new update

igor'sLAB was able to get its hands on the latter and tested the card to see how the yet-to-be-released Radeon RX 6600 could potentially perform against other graphics cards, and especially Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060.

Workstation cards are mostly the same hardware-wise with a few tweaks here and there. It's the drivers that make the most difference. In order to emulate this, the W6600's memory was overclocked from 14Gbps to match that of the 6600 XT's at 16Gbps. This increased the bandwidth of the emulated RX 6600 to 256GB/s. Alongside this, the latest Radeon software 21.8.1 driver was installed which is said to be optimized for the Navi 23 GPU.

A total of nine games were tested at the highest available settings. They are:

• Borderlands 3
• Ghost Recon Breakpoint
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Marvel's Avengers
• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• Necromunda: Hired Gun
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• Wolfenstein Youngblood

The images below show how the emulated RX 6600 performs on average in these titles and also relative to its primary competitor, the RTX 3060:

The power consumption, as well as the efficiency exhibited by the GPU, relative to the other cards has been measured too:

Just like the bigger Navi 23 GPU, the emulated RX 6600 also seems exceptionally efficient when it comes to power draw. In fact, a recent report suggested the RX 6600 XT may be the most efficient ethereum mining GPU from this generation of cards.

If you're interested, you can check out the full performance review by igor'sLAB that goes into a lot more details through the link below.

Source and images: igor'sLAB

Yet-to-release RX 6600 emulated and put through paces vs. RTX 3060 and more

The report comes courtesy of Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, as reviewed by MacRumors, which suggests a refreshed Mac mini will come out in "the next several months" with a processor that's believed to be more powerful than the current M1. While Apple is yet to confirm the M1X, an earlier report from Jon Prosser cited the processor as one of the next big changes coming to Mac mini.

Prosser also claimed at the time that Apple was making a thinner version of the small desktop computer with more ports. The latest report now corroborates that claim, with Gurman saying we should expect a high-end Mac mini "with more ports than the current model."

Aside from the Mac mini, Apple is also rumored to introduce redesigned MacBook Pro models this fall, also reportedly powered by the M1X chip. The updated MacBook Pro announcement was expected to take place at Apple's WWDC event in June, although it didn't materialize.

Apple may release a redesigned Mac mini with a faster 'M1X' processor soon

More Windows 11 changes

As hinted at by the Redmond giant, the various changes brought forth with Windows 11 are slowly but surely starting to appear. This week, the company teased an updated version of the Paint app, featuring newer icons, the expected rounded corners, and even dark mode support.

Paint joins the already available to test newer Clock app, which made its debut via build 22000.160, which arrived in both the Dev and Beta Insider Preview channels. As always, the build also contains a number of known issues, which should be expected, given that it’s a test version we’re talking about here.

Coinciding with the release of the build above is also the arrival of the first-ever dedicated Windows 11 ISOs, which contain build 22000.132. In case your VM – or if you’re testing this on actual hardware, your partition – is acting up, you can now clean install this Insider build to rule out any in-place upgrade related issues.

In addition to the new build and the ISOs, you can also preview Windows 11 for Azure Virtual Desktop, with Microsoft confirming – along with Intel – that the upcoming operating system is optimized for the latter’s Alder Lake architecture, namely the big.LITTLE design which is similar to ARM chips.

For those who do not want to (or can’t) upgrade to Windows 11, there’s also Windows 10 21H2, build 19044.1200 of which was also made available this week to Release Preview Insiders. It brings, along with a number of fixes, support for WPA3 H2E, a new deployment method for Windows Hello for Business, and GPU computer support in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows (EFLOW).

It’s not all good news though, as the Default apps settings page in Windows 11 has caused the ire of the other browser makers. This is due to the convoluted manner of setting up say, Chrome as your default browser. When you do so, you’ll also get a prompt asking you to reconsider your choice, and if you’re using the newly (re)introduced widgets, those will outright ignore your preference and still launch Edge. No statement from Microsoft has been released regarding this so far.

Until the above is rectified, there’s always the option of simply typing in name of the app you’re looking for in the Start menu. If you’re curious how the search functionality works in Windows 11, we’ve got you covered.

Higher-res dashboard

For those who bought an Xbox Series X and were rather pleased with its gaming performance, a sometimes-criticized aspect of the software side was the dashboard UI. Unlike its ability to play games at 4K and up to 120FPS, the console’s UI was stuck at 1080p, which made for a jarring transition from game to dashboard.

Folks in the Alpha – Skip Ahead ring of the Xbox Insider preview, as per Xbox Director of PM, Jason Ronald, are now able to test out a variant of the UI which is “displayed in a higher native resolution”. Whether this is 1440p or 4K is not yet known, and its seems that the resolution bump will be limited to Series X owners, with Series S not being mentioned. If all goes well in testing, the higher-res UI should make its way to regular users in the coming months.

Something that you won’t need to wait months for is the arrival of new games in Game Pass, with Humankind, Need for Speed Heat, Train Sim World 2, and more already being made available in the subscription. Psychonauts 2 and Myst are set to join the roster on August 25 and 26, respectively.

Speaking of new, there’s now a new Xbox Stereo Headset – available now for pre-order priced at $59.99, and launching September 21 -, as well as a Skyrim Anniversary Edition, set to be made available November 11, 2021, exactly 10 years after the original release.

In other gaming news, Sea of Thieves saw an increase to 4.8 million monthly active players, due to the Pirates of the Caribbean cross-over, while 343 has announced that Halo Infinite’s campaign co-op and Forge will not be available at launch. The game will have seasons, each of which will last about three months. Co-op is planned for launch in Season 2, while Forge features are targeting a Season 3 launch.

Lastly, in case your backlog simply isn’t big enough, there are myriad Deals with Gold to peruse, including discounts for games like Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, Child of Light, Fallout 3, and more.

Security flaws

Yet another week’s gone by, but unfortunately, yet another security flaw has been discovered. Coming by way of Google’s Project Zero is an elevation of privilege flaw in Windows. This one concerns the Windows Filtering Platform (or WFP), and its interaction with AppContainers. Specifically, due to WFP’s default rules, a malicious actor could connect to the TCP sockets of AppContainers and inject malicious code – hence the elevation of privilege.

The OS mentioned in the report is Windows 10 version 2004, with Project Zero stating that it had awarded this flaw a low criticality rating and that it had reached out privately to Microsoft on July 8, 2021. On the 15 of that same month, the Redmond giant asked for a 14-day extension (which was granted) due to the complexity of the issue. On July 19 though, Microsoft stated that the issue would not be fixed due to the exploit requiring that an AppContainer is already exposed to the internet. Now, the company has started working on patching the issue once again, but has not provided a time frame for a fix yet.

In light of this and its previous efforts, Microsoft has been quite vocal about the adoption of Zero Trust security models – the aptly named “never trust, always verify” set of principles. This is also reflected in the way in which the company recommends that users manage their security on Windows 365 Cloud PCs.

Dev channel

• Azure Government Top Secret is now generally available.
• Microsoft Universal Print will soon be integrated directly into OneDrive.
• Microsoft 365 apps and services have dropped support for IE11.
• Support for regional accents has been added to Microsoft’s Translator app.
• Microsoft 365 is set to become more expensive for commercial customers.

Logging off

We end the column with a look at an alternate version of Windows 11’s Start menu, courtesy of one of our readers.

While the UI direction in which Microsoft is taking its next major OS is somewhat promising, there are certainly some rough edges here and there. Among them, the new – but perhaps not totally improved – Start menu.

The sentiment above was also echoed by our very own Dot Matrix, who decided to put together a concept showcasing how, with a few tweaks, the new Start menu could be a tad more functional. The result is a bit of a fusion between the Windows 10 and 11 approach, making much better use of the available space as compared to the ‘default’ counterpart. The full concept details can be seen here.

Missed any of the previous columns? Check them all out at this link.

Microsoft Weekly: More Windows 11 changes, higher-res dashboard, and security flaws

Intel has been struggling to deliver impressive generational performance improvements over the last few years, and it looks like their new Alder Lake generation will be no exception.

 

At their recent Architecture Day 2021 event Intel promised that their Alder Lake-S processor would deliver 19% instructions per cycle (IPC) improvements over their Rocket Lake S- processor over a wide range of benchmarks.

 

A leaked Adobe After Effects benchmark of an Intel Core i9-12900K processor was discovered on Puget Systems’ PugetBench database by Twitter leaker Benchleaks and the improvements are much less impressive.

 

 

 

 

The results, which range between 1541 and 1575, was on an ASUS ROG STRIX Z690 motherboard, paired with a GeForce RTX 3090.

This can be compared to a recent 8C/16T Rocket Lake-S Core i9-11900K benchmark running on a similar system with DDR4-2133 dual-channel 64GB system compared to the 12900K’s DDR5-4800 dual-channel 64GB.

In the best case, the Core i9-12900K is only around 11.5% faster than the older processor.

Of course, a 10% increase in performance is nothing to sneer at, and battery life improvements related to the big.LITTLE architecture, combined with Windows 11 optimizations, should still make the upgrade more than meaningful.

However, it is also clear that there is no need for those with year-old systems to feel they need to upgrade for a performance boost.

via Neowin, VideoCardz

Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900K leak suggests performance might be underwhelming

New rumor points to two Apple hardware launch events in September

While the chief architects of Zen were Michael Clark and Suzanne Plummer, renowned engineer Jim Keller also had a huge role in its design philosophy. Since then, Keller has left AMD and is now working at Intel. And according to YouTuber Moore's Law Is Dead (MLID), "Jim Keller is building a Zen 5 killer" at Intel.

This Zen 5 killer is what Intel is allegedly working on under the leadership of Keller and the project is called "Royal Core". The Royal Core parts will reportedly make a full debut after 2024 in Nova Lake.

AMD is expected to debut Zen 4 next year with Ryzen 7000 (Raphael) processors and Socket AM5 motherboards. So, it will likely be at least a couple of years before we see Zen 5 in action.

Not only Zen 5, but Royal Core allegedly hopes to out-compete the Arm and M1 threats that Intel is currently having to face. In fact, apparently, we wouldn't even have to wait till 2025 for that as Intel is already reportedly planning to take on M1 with its upcoming Arrow Lake design. Arrow Lake-P according to YouTuber AdoredTV will be a mobile CPU design with six P-cores, eight E-cores (6+8), and 320 EUs.

Intel has been dedicating large portions of its chips' die areas towards integrating more graphics in its mobile SKUs for a while now and the same is the case for Alder Lake architecture too which was announced yesterday. And it seems the practice will continue for Intel's future designs as well.

Other sources, like an ex-Redditor with the username "mooreslawisnotdead" say that Arrow Lake will be a valiant effort but won't be able to topple the M1 in power efficiency. In fact, this is the same poster who leaked these alleged next-gen product codenames first, although the Royal Core moniker is new.

While the user has since deleted his Reddit account for some reason after posting this, the information was saved by an AnandTech forum member.

• Raptor Lake (Raptor Cove / Gracemont) Q3'22 / Q4'22 - 10% CPU perf boost and 8/16 configuration puts intel back on par but expect AMD/Apple to refresh their products as well.
• Meteor Lake (Redwood Cove / Crestmont) Q2'23 - Intel's first true chiplet or tile based design. Different dies built on TSMC / Intel processes. More of a node shrink with single digit performance improvements. AMD will again extend lead with Zen 4+ / 5.
• Arrow Lake (Lion Cove / Skymont) Q4'23 - Will feature an updated compute tile with 8/32 config for the high end enthusiast products. Might achieve parity with AMD offerings at the time but loses out to Apple in power efficiency.
• Lunar Lake (Lion Cove / Skymont) Q4'24 - This is the product that will use TSMC 3nm as reported by Nikkei. Big performance jump expected and designed to achieve parity or beat AMD and Apple in both performance and power efficiency.
• Nova Lake (Panther Cove [tentative]/ Darkmont) 2025 - This will mark the biggest architectural change in cpu architecture since the Core architecture is introduced in 2006. Intel is working to build an entirely new architecture from the ground up much like Ryzen with up to 50% cpu performance improvement from lunar lake.

While all this is unconfirmed news which is still at least a couple of years away if authentic, it will be interesting to see what Jim Keller manages to accomplish at Intel as the man has a near-perfect track record so far.

Source: MLID (YouTube) via Curmudgeon666 (AnandTech forum)

Update: The article was written under the misconception that Jim Keller was still working for Intel after he joined the firm in 2018. However, Keller had departed from the company last year in June.

Intel states it was due to personal reasons for which he left, but rumor has it that Keller wasn't very pleased with Intel's inability to go below the 10nm lithography quickly enough which would be essential to carry out his ambitious CPU plans.

Jim Keller had reportedly suggested to Intel's management that it outsource some of the chip production at that time which Intel had allegedly refused. Following this, Jim Keller is said to have left the company as a consequence of this disagreement. While this may simply be a rumor, it is interesting that Intel with its IDM 2.0 strategy has decided to move towards this outsourcing path recently. For example, its upcoming discrete gaming Arc GPUs will be built on TSMC's N6 process.

So although Keller isn't at Intel anymore, it is possible that the rumored Royal Core project could still become a real thing since Intel will be able to use a supposedly superior process node that Keller allegedly required. In fact, this has happened in the past too.

For instance, after joining AMD in 2012 to work on Zen, K12, and Project Skybridge, Keller left the company three years later in 2015; and the Zen-based CPUs didn't come around until first-gen Ryzen hit in 2017.

Intel reportedly developing a "Zen 5 killer" with next-gen Royal Core project [Update]

After five successful world updates which have seen Microsoft Flight Simulator steadily improving to look even better than it did before, the latest World Update 6 has been pushed back to ensure quality. 

“In order to ensure that World Update 6 reaches a very high level of quality, we have decided to move back the release date to September 7th,” Asobo Studio announced via a development update. 

“We are very excited about this update as it features many enhancements to the region,” the Asobo team went on to explain in the development update post, revealing that World Update 6, which focuses on Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, includes “new aerials and elevation maps, new photogrammetry cities, 4 hand-crafted airports, nearly 100 POIs and new discovery flights, landing challenges, and bush trips.”

Originally scheduled for release on August 24th, this delay is only two weeks thankfully, so we’re not left waiting for more Microsoft Flight Simulator content for long. In the meantime, Asobo did at least give us the highlights from World Update 6’s release notes. 

On top of being able to read through the preliminary release notes, there is, of course, still a lot of content in Microsoft Flight Simulator to enjoy, with five prior world updates, and not to mention the whole world to explore.

Microsoft Flight Simulator’s World Update 6 is now due to launch on September 7th, for both PC and Xbox Series X|S.

Microsoft Flight Simulator’s World Update 6 has been delayed

Still light on details, but the Arc GPUs will be a big step up from integrated.

Earlier this week, Intel announced Arc, the branding for the new gaming GPUs that will face off with Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon cards when they launch early in 2022. Today, Intel provided a few additional details on Arc, its underlying Xe-HPG architecture, its graphics drivers, and the "XeSS" upscaling technology that will work with both Intel's GPUs as well as GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.

 

The HPG in Xe-HPG stands for "high-performance gaming," and it builds on the Xe-LP ("low-power") graphics tech included in Intel's 11th-generation Tiger Lake laptop processors and the low-end DG1 dedicated GPU. At a high level, Xe-HPG will support all of the features in DirectX 12 Ultimate, just like Nvidia's RTX 2000- and 3000-series GPUs and AMD's RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000-series cards. This includes, most notably, support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, variable rate shading, and mesh shaders.

 

Intel is replacing the "EU" as its base GPU hardware measurement with the "Xe-core," a mix of 16 vector engines, 16 matrix engines, some cache, and a few other elements.

Four Xe-cores combine with ray tracing and fixed-function hardware to form a render slice...

... and a render slice is combined with more cache and a memory interface to make a GPU.

Alchemist chips will scale up to eight render slices total, though Intel wasn't specific about what configurations it planned to bring to market.

Since at least 2006, Intel has talked about its GPU hardware in terms of "execution units," or EUs. The company is doing away with that terminology for Xe-HPG, replacing it instead with the concept of the "Xe-core." Each Xe-core is composed of 16 vector engines and 16 matrix (or XMX) engines, as well as L1 cache and some other hardware. Four Xe-cores combine with ray-tracing units and other fixed-function hardware to form a "render slice," which is the bare minimum any Xe-HPG GPU will need to function (along with L2 cache and a memory interface).

Alchemist-based chips can include "up to" eight of these render slices, which implies that we'll see at least a couple of different Arc GPUs with different levels of computing power. But Intel hasn't disclosed any specific hardware configurations, and it also hasn't gone into any detail about clock speeds, the memory interface, or the amount or type of RAM that the first Arc GPUs will include. (Quick terminology reminder: Xe-HPG is the name of the GPU microarchitecture, Alchemist is the codename for the chips based on Xe-HPG, and Arc is the consumer branding you'll see on store shelves.)

The XMX hardware in Xe-HPG GPUs will be key to Intel's AI-accelerated upscaling technology, also called Xe Super Sampling or XeSS. Like Nvidia's DLSS, the idea is to upscale lower-resolution images with as little quality loss as possible. Doing so will make it possible to play a game at 4K resolutions without requiring the graphical horsepower necessary to actually render a native 4K image.

Intel says that you'll get the best image quality and performance out of XeSS if you're taking advantage of its XMX hardware, but there's a separate version of XeSS that uses DP4a instructions common in modern GPUs from Nvidia and AMD as well. Intel didn't call out specific GPU models, but DP4a instructions are included as far back as the Pascal architecture in Nvidia's still-popular GTX 1060 and 1050 series cards. Nvidia doesn't actually support either of these models with DLSS. Integrated GPUs will be able to benefit from XeSS as well. The SDK for the XMX version of XeSS will be available this month, with the DP4a version following later this year.

When they're released, Arc GPUs will use the exact same driver package as Intel's integrated GPUs, so improvements made to benefit one architecture can potentially benefit all of them (Intel boasted that it had overhauled its graphics driver in the past year to improve performance in CPU-bound games running on Xe-LP GPUs by between 15 and 80 percent).

Finally, the elephant in the room: Intel isn't making Alchemist chips in its own chip factories, at least not now. The company announced that it will use TSMC's 6 nm process for Alchemist chips, meaning that Intel's GPUs will need to fight for capacity with AMD, Apple, and everyone else manufacturing cutting-edge chips at TSMC.

"The reason [for using TSMC for Xe-HPG] is simple," wrote Intel SVP Stuart Penn in an accompanying press release. "Just as our designers use the right architecture for the right workload, we also choose the node that best fits that architecture. At this point in time, these foundry nodes are the right choice for our discrete graphics products."

Intel provides more details on its Arc GPUs, which will be made by TSMC

Microsoft release August 2021 Update for Surface Duo (changelog)