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As a consequence of Huawei’s dispute with the US government, the company announced its latest flagship phone without Google apps. The Mate 30 Pro still runs Android, but it was unclear how easy it would be to manually install apps like Gmail and Google Maps. An app called LZPlay appeared online several days ago that made the process easy — too easy, as it turns out. LZPlay and its website have vanished after developers began asking questions about how the app worked its Google-installing magic.
For Google’s apps and services to run correctly on a phone, they need to be installed in the system partition, which is protected on all new phones. Some Chinese OEMs include apps to sideload Google apps un un-certified devices, but the Mate 30 Pro is in an even worse place. Huawei can’t have any Google code on its phone, so it doesn’t even include the system “stubs” for Google Mobile Services (GMS) that make it possible to install the apps yourself.
Thus, Huawei fans were relieved when LZPlay appeared recently. It could install GMS packages on the Mate 30 Pro without rooting or unlocking the bootloader, both of which require security workarounds. So, problem solved? Not so fast. Developer John Wu took a closer look at the LZPlay installer, finding evidence of powerful Huawei-certified features.
The LZPlay page before it went offline.
All Android devices have an option to set apps as administrators, allowing them to access protected system functions like setting lock screen rules and remote wiping. Huawei’s admin mode includes a few undocumented custom APIs like “MDM_INSTALL_SYS_APP” and “MDM_INSTALL_UNDETACHABLE_APP.” Those are the APIs LZPlay uses to get Google apps running correctly on the Mate 30 Pro. Only apps signed with Huawei’s keys can access these functions. Thatstronglyimplies that Huawei itself either developed or supported the development of this app, and that could add to its legal issues.
Shortly after the likely Huawei connection came out, the website hosting LZPlay went offline. Around the same time, Google removed the Mate 30 Pro from its certification whitelist, adding yet another roadblock for anyone hoping to install GMS on that phone. There’s no evidence Google had anything to do with LZPlay, but someone probably realized how it looked to specifically allow the Mate 30 Pro to act like a certified device when it isn’t.
So, the Mate 30 Pro is in a rough spot. It’ll never have broad appeal without GMS, and it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon.
The Samsung R&D Center in Austin, Texas (SARC) was founded in 2010 to develop CPUs and system IP, including interconnects and memory controllers. Development for Samsung’s custom CPU core is reportedly handled here, which would make sense — Samsung’s CPU dev team has at least a few ex-AMD employees on it, and Austin has been a major hub for AMD for decades. According to rumors, however, SARC has just been hit by major layoffs.
The scope of these layoffs is currently unclear. Some sources have said that a single project was canceled, while others have implied a larger number of employee firings. Like Apple and Huawei, Samsung has invested in building its own custom CPU cores based on its own version of the ARMv8 architecture rather than solely licensing cores from ARM itself. Samsung, however, has struggled to compete in this space.
Anandtech has written excellent deep dives into both the M3 and M4 CPU cores. Tests on the chip at the microarchitectural level have shown that its overall performance is capable of matching the Snapdragon 855, barely, but at significantly worse power efficiency. Evaluated strictly on its technical implementation, the M4 doesn’t look great, as exemplified by this quote:
In the SPECint2006 geomean score, the Exynos 9820 slightly loses out in the to the Snapdragon 855. More importantly, it uses 47% more energy and power to achieve this same performance. In SPECfp2006 this efficiency difference drops to 21% – although the performance on the M4 cores is also 7% less.
Elsewhere, however, Anandtech makes it clear that the gap between the two devices as far as how they feel to use is much smaller. The Snapdragon 855-powered variant still got the nod for being a better iteration of the Galaxy S10 as a whole, but the publication went out of the way to say that the major differences between using the two devices largely come down to software, particularly camera software. Battery life was even slightly better on the Exynos variant rather than the Snapdragon. To be clear, Samsung has shipped Galaxy phones with two different SoC solutions in them for quite some time. Some customers, including US customers, get the Snapdragon version of a device, while international customers tend to get the Exynos variant.
The M4 CPU cores may not have been instant Apple-killers, but the CPU was judged to be an improvement over the M3 in many regards. It isn’t clear whether the shortcomings of the M4 design would be reason enough to kill the effort at SARC or to reassign the CPU development team there. According to scattered reports, these layoffs are specific to the CPU team, with the GPU and SoC development teams being unaffected or less-affected (again, the situation is unclear).
Samsung could license ARM cores while still designing its own SoCs. This is route Qualcomm has taken for its own chips, which still use custom GPUs, DSPs, and AI accelerators, but have a bog-standard Cortex ARM core. We have reached out to Samsung for further comment on this situation but the company has not responded to our queries. We will update this story if we receive a response about the Austin situation. Those of you who know something or have been laid off are invited to contact us if you have information. We will keep all details anonymous. One commonality to the rumors is that they’ve all focused on the CPU division, so we’re assuming that the impact (if real) is confined to that business for now.
Keeping your sensitive data in the cloud is often a risky proposition, but Microsoft is trying to give users a safe place to stash things online. After testing the feature in a handful of countries, the OneDrive Personal Vault is live for everyone. Personal Vault uses robust encryption and additional access controls ensure that you’llprobablybe the only person peeking at that data.
Personal Vault is part of the existing OneDrive service, so you won’t need to set up a new account or download new apps. Just make sure you’re all up-to-date, and look for the new Personal Vault section of the app. The app keeps unauthorized people from checking out your secure files by requiring a secure authentication method — a PIN, fingerprint, face ID, or single-use code sent to a verified email. The vault also closes and locks itself after a period of inactivity.
Microsoft suggests people might want to keep photos of important documents and IDs like passports. Of course, you don’t want something like that floating around in your camera roll. That’s why the Personal Vault includes an option to capture photos directly in the app, bypassing less secure areas of your phone. To prevent accidentally leaking your own data, Personal Vault files cannot be shared via the app. If you want to share something in the vault, you’ll have to move it to another folder first.
The Personal Vault is available on both Android and iOS.
When something is in the Personal Vault, Microsoft protects it with BitLocker encryption. Files are encrypted at rest and during transfers. So, they’re only decrypted when you verify your identity to view them. Like other OneDrive files and folder, the files in the Personal Vault can sync to your connected desktop computers. However, the files remain in a BitLocker encrypted area of your hard drive.
The feature is still rolling out to devices, but you’ll know you’ve got it when the safe icon appears in the folder list. Just tap on that, and you can start adding files. Unfortunately, Microsoft has tied Personal Vault into the pricing scheme for OneDrive. Users on the free tier have 100GB of space, but the vault can only host three files. Anyone with a paid Office 365 account has 1TB of space, and there’s no separate limit on Secure Vault files.
Intel has an upcoming refresh for its High End DeskTop (HEDT) product family, based on its Cascade Lake X series of processors. Cascade Lake-X is the latest iteration of the company’s 14nm product line, with technologies like Intel DLBoost for accelerating AI workloads and some additional new features we’ll touch on below.
Up until now, one of the weaknesses of the Intel HEDT product family has been the vastly superior pricing available on AMD’s Threadripper. We weren’t supposed to be able to share details of this with you until October 7, but Intel has opted to release certain information earlier than it originally expected to do so. As a result, here’s a sneak peak of what Cascade Lake will bring to the table.
The improvements on this page are the sorts of gains you’d expect in an iterative platform refresh. Formally supported RAM clocks are creeping up, as has RAM capacity — up to 256GB, whereas the Core i9-9980XE topped out at 128GB. Features like DLBoost are now available in HEDT, building on the AVX-512 support available in previous chips. PCIe lane support has been bumped up, to 72 lanes from the 68 total available on the X299 platform before. Features like 2.5G ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 are useful to some customers, but unlikely to be major platform drivers.
This slide, however, should make people sit up and pay attention. The specs haven’t changed much — the Core i9-10980XE is still a 3.0GHz base clock CPU (like the 9980XE), with a 3.8GHz maximum all-core boost. It offers a higher maximum Turbo clock of 4.6GHz – 4.8GHz depending on whether Turbo Boost 2.0 or 3.0 is used, compared to the 4.4GHz maximum on the Core i9-9980XE, but those gains aren’t enormous, either.
But the price? List price on the Core i9-9980XE is $1,979 – $1,999, and while these prices have little to nothing to do with what OEMs pay for these chips, the new Cascade Lake lineup is a huge improvement over what has come before. This echoes claims Intel made last month at IFA, in which it promised that Cascade Lake would deliver substantially improved performance-per-dollar.
Up until now, stepping on to the HEDT platform has been significantly more expensive than the Intel desktop equivalent. While there’s still going to be a cost adder, the price of using HEDT will be much lower than it has been in the past. And it means that when AMD launches Threadripper on 7nm, those chips will be facing steeper competition than they’ve had in years past. Up until now, Threadripper has had the run of the tables as far as price/performance was concerned, while Intel held on to a narrow per-core lead in terms of absolute highest performance. Now, Cascade Lake is primed to go up against AMD’s 16-core chips at a much more modest cost premium.
It’s not clear how AMD will adjust its own pricing from this point. When AMD announced the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, it declared the CPU would cost $750. This would seem to put a floor on the price of any introductory Threadripper, since there’s no reason for AMD to charge less for a 16-core TR than it would charge for a 16-core Ryzen. AMD still has some room to adjust its own positioning here, both before TR launch and before the debut of any Ryzen, but it’ll be interesting to see if Team Red adjusts its own product SKUs after these astronomical price cuts from Intel.
Intel expects to launch its Cascade Lake X family of products in November. We’ll have coverage when they debut.
NZXT’s BLD Start PCs are designed to be cost effective gaming desktops that are built entirely from aftermarket components. In other words, you could build this entire system by yourself with the exact same parts. Typically, building a gaming computer of your own will net you more bang for your bucks, but this system’s relatively low price tag may make you think twice about building a custom PC of your own.
Design & Hardware
This pre-built system comes built inside of one of NZXT’s H500 PC cases. The base model retails for $899 and features an MSI B450 Tomahawk motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 hexa-core processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card. For a base model, it also comes rather well equipped with 16GB of TeamGroup T-Force Delta DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,000MHz and a 512GB SSD.
Add in a copy of Windows and it would cost you right around $850 to build this system yourself, which means you save relatively little by opting to go in that direction. That’s also not considering the added time required to build it on your own.
Our sister site PCMag tested one of these systems. The model they received is labelled as the NZXT BLD Start PC Plus, which features an upgraded Nvidia GeForce GX 1660 Ti graphics card and twice as much storage space. The 1TB SSD utilized by NXZT in this system is one of Intel’s 660P series M.2 NVMe drives that features read/write speeds of up to 1,800MB/s. These upgrades feel well worth the cost, as it just raises the system’s price to $999.
Benchmarking
PCMag tested this system with several benchmarks and compared the results against a few other pre-built systems that they tested before. None of these systems are evenly matched, and all of them are available in multiple hardware configurations, which limits what we can learn by comparing the test results. As these systems do sort of compete with each other, it does gives us some insight into which is better for the price, as well as helping readers like you to know which offers a level of performance that is adequate for your needs.
Kicking things off with Cinebench R15 to test the CPU, we get rather predictable results. The AMD Ryzen 5 2600 simply can’t quite stand toe-to-toe with the faster Ryzen 7 2700X inside of the Origin PC Neuron or the Core i7 CPUs powering the Lenovo and Digital Storm PCs. It does turn in respectable performance numbers though.
3DMark’s graphics tests also bear no surprises. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti inside of the NZXT BLD Starter PC Plus easily surpasses the slower RX 580 and scrapes by the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. It fails to compete with the RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 GPUs, but it’s literally not supposed to by design.
We see essentially the same results in real-world benchmarks on Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Conclusion
Considering that this system offers solid performance and comes at a price just slightly above the cost of its parts, this is really a no-brainer. If you want a decent gaming PC and either don’t have time to build a custom one or don’t know how to, then NZXT’s BLD Start PC Plus is an excellent solution. Its closest competitor is the Lenovo Legion T730, but that system costs $1,529 and offers worse gaming performance as well as a smaller SSD. The faster Digital Storm Lynx and Origin PC Neuron as configured both cost considerably more.
The HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop tested here does present a strongly priced if slower alternative. It retails for $569.99, but at the added cost of swapping the SSD for an HDD and cutting the RAM in half. All things considered, I’d recommend the NZXT as the best pre-built system here.
Microsoft’s original vision for Surface always included an ARM processor. When the firm unveiled the original Surface RT and Surface Pro, the RT was an ARM-powered device running the then-new Windows 8. Surface RT was supposed to be the low-cost, low-power, tablet option for users who prioritized battery life and wanted a long-lived system with modest performance.
It bombed.
Consumers were confused by the fact that it ran Windows but didn’t actually run any of the applications they expected to run on Windows. Return rates were supposedly sky-high. Microsoft’s Surface 2 continued to use ARM, but the firm moved away from ARM processors with the Surface 3 and stuck with x86 on its other products. Software availability and compatibility appears to be the principle reason why — the Windows Store of the era was a trainwreck and most common applications never surfaced in an ARM-compatible flavor.
The company’s latest Windows-on-ARM effort has been different. Microsoft has already been supporting Windows x86 applications on ARM hardware via emulation, with 32-bit x86 application support, though this isn’t universal. Some applications don’t work under emulation for one reason or another and 64-bit apps are not supported. It’s absolutely possible that the company will unveil further improvements to its underlying emulation engine during the actual Surface event which might end up changing our perceptions of the limits of this device.
Assuming that it doesn’t, it’ll be very interesting to see how well customers respond to this latest effort to bring ARM to Windows. Some publications believe this is an absolutely necessary step. The Verge argues:
The benefits of switching to ARM are manifold. The main one is battery life, which is often rated above 20 hours for a laptop. That’s substantially better than anything Intel currently has to offer. It also makes it significantly easier to add LTE options (and, presumably, 5G) to hardware. ARM processors also tend to run cooler than x86 processors, which frees up manufacturers to experiment with different (read: thinner and lighter) form factors…
So: longer battery life, easier cellular integration, and thinner devices. As nice as the Surface Pro can be, there is a limit to how much it can improve in those areas, and that limit’s name is x86.
The ARM-based Surface does appear to be a thinner machine, as my colleague Ryan Whitwam has discussed, so that angle is covered — but I’m not convinced that this edition of Windows-on-ARM is going to work any better than the last one. Roughly a decade ago, a new type of computer came to market. Known as a netbook, it ran on a low-cost, low-end Atom microprocessor. Lest anyone think I’m remembering the situation via rose-colored glasses, let me be clear: I loathed first-generation netbooks based on chips like the N270. They were bottom-end, ultra-low cost systems in plastic shells and they sold like wildfire thanks to a combination of all-day battery life and what apparently passed for good-enough performance for an awful lot of people.
ARM-based systems, to date, have not replicated this trend. The first wave of Snapdragon 835 and Snapdragon 850-powered systems that came out were praised for great battery life, panned on actual performance, and didn’t sell well. According to Qualcomm, its Snapdragon 8cx platform can compete with an Intel Core i5 in native applications. The question is, how many of those will there be, apart from Office apps? Firefox released a native ARM beta back in April, but a native Chrome version hasn’t been publicly released yet.
It’s hard to predict how people will react in a situation like this. On the one hand, many functions that once required native apps can now be handled in-browser. On the other, people tend to like to know that every application they use on a regular basis will be supported on both platforms.
Back in 2011, I was convinced that Microsoft had to build an ARM version of Windows in order to survive, but the consumer response to Windows RT showed this wasn’t accurate. Offered the chance to buy ARM hardware with Windows, consumers emphatically rejected the idea. They haven’t particularly warmed to it since Snapdragon 850-powered PCs were released. If Microsoft releases a dramatically improved emulator and Qualcomm’s 8cx platform is significantly faster than the Snapdragon 850, we may finally see ARM start chipping away at x86’s market share directly. But there’s another possibility here — one reflected in the actual sales patterns of the hardware people have chosen to buy these past seven years.
Windows PC sales have absolutely fallen, but x86 remains the sole platform of note for Windows. All attempts to split the ecosystem have thus far been unsuccessful. It’s possible that emulation often doesn’t work very well as a market strategy because customers are wary of the idea and find it an unappealing way to preserve app compatibility. This, combined with the inevitable performance hit, may make emulated hardware unattractive.
I can’t speak for others, but I do not enjoy computing across multiple devices and have no interest in owning multiple computers. My preferred number of computers is one. Two is by necessity, not convenience. I am not interested in owning an ARM-based product with less-than-perfect compatibility across the entire realm of x86 computing because I am not interested in being stymied in my ability to run any application I choose on the platform of my choice. These machines would need to hit much lower price points than we’ve seen in the past year in order to be remotely attractive — at least to me. Obviously some people prefer buying the most optimized system for a specific task and might choose to buy this Surface model as well.
Maybe a year from now we’ll all be writing about how this new ARM Surface was the model that finally broke the dam and sparked a wave of ARM-based laptop sales. Maybe it’ll be hailed as the modern version of Asus’ EEE PC when it comes to setting the trend for a new wave of notebook models. Maybe we’ll find out that Microsoft has radically improved emulation, reducing the performance penalty and adding x86-64 support.
But I’d be surprised. I suspect the ARM efforts Microsoft is making will have a marginal impact on the x86 PC market.
