High refresh rate gaming is a glorious experience, and so is high resolution gaming too, but ne’er the twain shall meet, at least on PC, due to various roadblocks. Sure, high refresh rate 4K TVs are common in living rooms, but on PC the hardware hasn’t existed previously because gamers prefer lower resolutions at high refresh rates for fast and fluid gameplay. Plus there’s the fact that no single GPU available today can run AAA games at 4k with a high refresh rate, and the connections also haven’t supported that type of configuration previously. None of that has dissuaded Samsung however, as at CES it announced the world’s first 4K gaming monitor that can run at a jaw-dropping 240Hz refresh rate.
The curved gaming monitor, which is dubbed Odyssey Neo G8, will be arriving sometime in 2022 and is packed with next-gen features. For starters it’s a 32″ curved panel, with a 1000R curvature, which for the laymen means it’s really curvy, as in “wrap around.” It sports a 4K (3,840 x 2.160) resolution, 240Hz refresh rate, 1ms grey-to-grey (GtG) response time, and Samsung Mini LEDs for a staggering 2,000nit peak brightness for what the company calls “Quantum HDR 2000.” It also supports Nvidia G-Sync and FreeSync Premium Pro for AMD cards, and has LEDs on the back that project colors being shown onto your environment for more immersion. As far as that refresh rate goes, things get a little tricky here. Previously there was not a single connector that could handle 240Hz at 4K resolution, and there still isn’t, kind of. Both DisplayPort 1.4a and HDMI 2.1 don’t support that configuration, as both of them only offer 4K resolution at a 120Hz refresh rate. However, as Ars Technica points out, HDMI 2.1 can merge two display streams via the VESA standard called Display Stream Compression (DSC), effectively allowing the ultra-high refresh rate via two independents connections.
Samsung’s Neo G8 features an aggressive 1000r curvature. (Image: Samsung)
Since it’s compressing the input to achieve that refresh rate, there’s a possibility that there will be a loss of image quality, but VESA says the result is lossless, so most people would never notice. We’ll have to wait and see what reviewers think once they land on test benches later this year. DisplayPort 2.0 could have also handled this scenario since it supports 4K at 240Hz without compression, but that standard is still missing in action despite being approved over a year ago. As Ars notes though, products with this new connector might arrive in the second half of 2022, so our fingers are crossed.
The bigger question here is what will gamers actually do with this monitor? There still isn’t a single GPU that can handle this level of action, and we’re including the recently announced RTX 3090 Ti in that equation too. AAA gaming at 4K@240Hz is out of the question, but perhaps less demanding games might be able to achieve something close to what the monitor offers. It would still require a beefy GPU to get anywhere close to something above 100Hz at 4K resolution.
Like everything else announced at CES, there are no specifics on pricing or availability, only that it’ll appear sometime this year. Also, even though no current GPU has enough muscle to run this particular configuration with AAA games, the rumors about the next-gen GPUs hint that they might be up to the task. If that is the case, that combo could indeed be gaming nirvana, assuming you have the budget for it, and also have a GPU-purchasing bot handy.
CES has kicked off, with a flurry of releases from the usual suspects. Like a lot of companies, AMD uses CES to preview the products it will launch throughout the year. Things were pretty quiet for AMD in the back half of 2021, but the company has a number of interesting launches teed up for 2022. Major new CPU and SoC initiatives from AMD in 2022 include the Ryzen 6000 Mobile family, Zen 4’s debut, and AMD’s V-Cache-equipped Zen 3 cores.
V-Cache Comes to Just One CPU
When AMD announced V-Cache, we thought the company’s higher-end chips like the 5900X and 5950X would be the obvious targets for the capability. One of the best ways to improve the performance of memory-bound CPUs is to add more L3 cache, so the larger CPUs seemed like prime targets.
Instead of going that route, AMD is going to introduce just one V-Cache enabled SKU. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D will be an 8C/16T CPU with a 3.4GHz base clock and a 4.5GHz boost. That’s slightly below the base/boost clocks of the Ryzen 7 5800X, which comes in at 3.8GHz and 4.7GHz respectively. According to AMD, it made the decision to lower clock speeds slightly rather than binning a stricter variant of the chip.
The reason AMD is limiting itself to just one SKU is that the 5800X3D is a bit of a pipecleaner (that’s our term, not AMD’s). A two-chiplet design is more complex than a single chiplet and requires a second die, which would increase CPU prices and lower availability at a time when parts are already in short supply.
This is the kind of limited launch we would expect when a company is testing a new capability, and integrating a huge L3 cache directly on top of the CPU definitely qualifies. We know Milan X will debut V-Cache in servers this year and expect to see the capability on at least some Zen 4 chips going forward, though AMD has not confirmed that it will offer a 64MB V-Cache as a standard option on any specific Zen 4 parts.
The 5800X3D is specifically intended for gamers and will deliver an estimated 1.15x performance improvement on average in gaming titles relative to the 5900X. AMD claims between a 1.0x and a 1.4x speed-up at 1080p High. Productivity gains are also expected but are generally lower than 1.15x. Performance in games against the Intel 12900K at 1080p High ranges from 0.98x – 1.2x faster, in an unspecified suite of titles. Overclocking might nudge those results higher, though AMD’s CPUs aren’t known for overclocking performance these days.
The big question here is where AMD will price the CPU. Right now, the 5900X is a $550 CPU and the 5800X is $450 on paper. Amazon shows the 5800X available for $400 as of this writing, but your mileage may vary. The 5800X3D needs to keep its price around $500 to be taken seriously or else risk being outclassed by the 5900X. While the 5800X3D may be faster in gaming, the 5900X will likely still retain an advantage in any well-threaded application. We expect a launch later this spring and will have more details on price and positioning closer to that date.
Ryzen 6000 Mobile SoC Family
Next up, there’s the Ryzen 6000 Mobile family and what AMD is calling “Zen 3+.” This new family of CPUs encompasses 10 chips and spans 15W – 45W, but eight of the 10 SoCs are 35W-45W parts. These new SoCs are built on TSMC’s 6nm node. 6nm is a cost-optimized version of 7nm that offers roughly 1.18x better density but no official performance or power improvements.
Zen 3+ CPUs are power-optimized versions of Zen 3. They do not offer any architectural improvements over Zen 3 cores; the gains for Zen 3+ over Zen 3 in mobile are due to factors like better power management, higher clocks, and potential gains in power efficiency, not any architectural changes.
In AMD’s lingo, “HS” series chips are 35W parts while “H” series chips are 45W. Most of the new chips have 12 RDNA2 compute units up from eight on Vega, but the 6600H, 6600HS, and 6600U offer just six CUs. AMD’s decision to define these chips as 15W-28W as opposed to 15W may reflect higher burst power consumption despite efficiency improvements. Base clocks on the Ryzen 6000 Mobile U-series are much higher than they were on the previous 5000 series.
Given the improvements between RDNA2 and Vega we’re willing to bet that six RDNA2 core clusters should still match or exceed eight Vega CUs, but we won’t know that for certain until laptops are available for review.
AMD has increased top end frequencies in the Ryzen 6000 Mobile family and claims the new cores sustain much higher single-threaded clocks than previous chips. Performance on the 6800U is claimed to be between 1.1x and 1.3x faster than the 5800U, though this will undoubtedly depend on the cooling solutions and overall design of the comparison laptops.
AMD is claiming a range of power improvements in specific use-cases, mostly web browsing, video streaming, and video conferencing. These are all common areas where manufacturers prefer to share power consumption data because it’s easiest to show improvements here. Real-world power consumption depends on the screen, Wi-Fi radio, and other system components in addition to the SoC and GPU (if any).
AMD is claiming a 1.5x larger compute engine (that’s the bump from 8 CUs to 12), up to 1.5x more memory bandwidth (courtesy of the shift to DDR5), an L2 cache that’s 2x larger and twice the ROP throughput. Vega 8 is a 512:32:8 design (cores, TMUs, ROPs), implying that mobile RDNA2 is somewhere between 768:32:16 and 768:64:16. Clock speeds have also increased on some parts, from 2GHz to as high as 2.4GHz.
AMD argues that these improvements are collectively worth 1.8x – 2x performance in the same power envelope. There are several reasons to think the company is telling the truth. We know that RDNA2 is ~1.25x more efficient than Vega, clock for clock. A 1.2x clock increase isn’t worth much on its own, because mobile SoCs are so bandwidth-limited. With Ryzen 6000 Mobile, however, AMD is also moving to DDR5 with support for DDR5-5200 and LPDDR5-6400. Compared to DDR4-3200, DDR5-5200 offers 1.62x more bandwidth. The exact improvement will depend on what you own now versus what you buy, but a 1.5x – 1.65x increase in memory bandwidth over DDR4 is likely worth 1.2x – 1.5x depending on the game. The exact amount will depend on the specifics of the individual title. Factor in some modest improvement from clock speed and AMD’s performance claims start looking plausible. It wouldn’t be surprising if the 15W-28W APUs are more power-limited than anything else when it comes to beating the older Ryzen 5000 Mobile family.
AMD will be encouraging OEMs to use its mobile gaming GPUs and 35W+ APUs in the same system so as to take advantage of capabilities like SmartShift Max. SmartShift Max is AMD’s brand name for allocating system power flexibly between CPU and GPU to maximize overall performance. The feature has seen relatively limited uptake thus far, but AMD emphasized that it expects more than 200 premium design wins in 2022, far more than just a few years ago. If the company’s mobile GPUs are competitive (or simply available) we may see more laptop manufacturers take advantage of this capability.
From AMD’s earlier SmartShift presentations.
AMD will also be the first laptop SoC designer to implement Microsoft’s “Pluton” core to handle security functions; systems with the feature should be available late this spring. There may also be a pair of TenSilica DSPs integrated into the SoC (a Vision Q6 and C5, reportedly), but AMD did not announce those features.
Zen 4
The last major announcement from AMD relates to Zen 4. AMD has confirmed that Zen 4 will ship in the back half of the year on TSMC’s N5 node. The new SoC will use the AM5 socket and will transition to a Land Grid Array (LGA).
After decades of futzing with pins, AMD will do away with them in consumer desktop systems. Some of AMD’s power circuitry is moving to the top of the chip now that the bottom will be nothing but pins, leading to this rather interesting heatspreader design:
The group of people who can’t stop themselves from getting paste on top of the chip — and you know who you are — had best start practicing their application technique.
AM5 will support AM4 coolers, making a new cooler potentially unnecessary for would-be upgraders. AMD may change some of its TDP targets, but it is unlikely to adjust them dramatically compared to AM4. Zen 4 will use DDR5 and will offer support for PCIe 5.0. It will likely take until at least the end of 2022 for DDR5 to become available at reasonable prices and there are no devices with PCIe 5.0 support shipping to customers just yet, so AMD isn’t missing much by delaying official support until the back half of the year.
Our Thoughts
It’s great to see AMD finally moving beyond Vega. After a poor initial showing in 2017, the GPU architecture redeemed itself as a mobile chip and powered multiple generations of AMD APUs. It’s time for AMD to unify its gaming architectures and RDNA2 is a worthy successor. The increased power efficiency claims and additional performance should help AMD stay competitive against Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs and mobile Alder Lake. The shift to DDR5 will do only good things for AMD’s mobile GPU and integrated GPU performance.
The 5800X3D announcement is a little disappointing if you hoped to see 16-core options with 96MB of L3 per chiplet, but there’s no guarantee that we won’t see those chips in 2022 or early 2023. It’s possible that AMD will use the 5800X3D as a pipecleaner and announce a wider range of V-Cache-equipped CPUs later this year.
It’s over. If you try to start up your aging Blackberry smartphone today, it’ll fail to work as it always has in the past. BlackBerry, formerly known as RIM, is sticking with the timeline announced in 2020 to shut off services for BlackBerry OS, marking the end of an era in mobile technology.
BlackBerry was once the king of “smartphones” in the days before Apple redefined what people expected from a mobile device. The company’s superb physical keyboards, messaging, and connectivity were all considered the gold standard, but BlackBerry was also bloated and slow to change. It mocked the iPhone as a toy, but a year later it released one of several touchscreen phones called the Storm. It missed the point, utterly failing to compete against the iPhone, thus beginning BlackBerry’s long slide into smartphone irrelevance.
One of the major issues holding BlackBerry back was the centralized nature of its products. The iPhone had a full web browser and connected to the same internet as computers did, but BlackBerry pushed everything through custom server infrastructure. That’s what carriers wanted back then, but Apple changed the game.
Any hope BlackBerry had to salvage a second-place finish was dashed to ribbons by Google. Android took off in 2009 and 2010 by leaning on carrier partnerships, which used to be BlackBerry’s bread and butter. By the time Blackberry was able to modernize its software with BBOS 10, it was too late. It tried to make a few of its own Android phones like the Priv, but the project was quickly canceled.
The KEYone was manufactured by TCL. It runs Android, so it’s unaffected by today’s shutdown.
If you do ever see a BlackBerry phone these days, it probably wasn’t built by the company. In 2016, BlackBerry signed a deal with TCL to manufacture Android phones under the BlackBerry name. We got several of them, like the passable KEYone and KEY2, but the partnership ended in 2020. Today, Blackberry is focused on enterprise products and services, and naturally, it doesn’t want to continue supporting smartphones from more than a decade ago.
According to BlackBerry, any remaining legacy BBOS devices “will no longer be expected to reliably function” starting today. They’ve lost the ability to receive provisioning updates which means no data, phone calls, SMS, or even 911 functionality. Applications will also have limited capabilities. That applies to devices connecting via carrier networks or Wi-Fi. If you’ve got a classic BlackBerry, it’s not a phone anymore — it’s a paperweight.
Nvidia pulled the wraps off some of the worst kept secrets in the tech world today in its CES keynote address, revealing several new GPUs for both desktop and mobile, updates on the adoption of several of its technologies such as RTX and DLSS, as well as products and services for everything from eSports to “creators.” Here are some of the highlights.
The big announcement is the all-new RTX 3090 Ti, which is pretty much exactly what we speculated it would be a few weeks ago. It is the “Big” Ampere chip with nothing cutdown or left out of the die. It’s the swan song for Ampere and the pinnacle of the company’s current technology. It’ll pack 10,754 CUDA cores, compared to 10,496 in the previous version. Though it has the same 24GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus, the Ti version’s chips have been upgraded to 21Gb/s compared to 19Gb/s on the 3090. The company says the GPU will be capable of roughly 40 teraflops of compute performance, which is four more than the 3090’s 36 Teraflops. Oddly, the company didn’t divulge any information about pricing or availability, and only said more information would be forthcoming soon. We can assume from the recent past that the price will likely be “if you have to ask” and its availability will be listed as a “laughing” emoji.
RTX 3050 partner cards.
On the other end of the spectrum it also launched the RTX 3050, which aims to bring ray tracing to the masses at just $249 MSRP. This midrange GPU will feature 2,560 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a narrow 128-bit memory bus, which the company says allows it to play ray traced games at 60fps. We must assume given its specs they mean at 1080p and with DLSS enabled, also. The RTX 3050 will be available (cough) on January 27th. It’s not clear that games will be playable at those settings, but Nvidia is finally bringing ray tracing to midrange GPUs.
The RTX 3050 may be a good upgrade for midrange gamers even if ray tracing performance isn’t very strong. With 2560 CUDA cores and a 1.78GHz clock, this GPU may offer a great upgrade path for anyone still using a GTX 1060 or possibly even a GTX 1660. A TDP of 130W means the GPU only requires a 550W power supply. The one potential weak spot of the card is the 128-bit memory interface. The RTX 3050 is likely to field somewhere between 224-240GB/s of memory bandwidth. That’s a modest increase over the GTX 1060 or GTX 1660 but we know ray tracing puts additional pressure on memory bandwidth.
Nvidia also declared laptops as the fastest-selling category of PCs currently, which is not much of a surprise given the fact that we’re all still stuck at home, and for this crowd the company announced two new high-end mobile GPUs: the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti. Nvidia has packed the 3080 Ti with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, which the company says makes it the perfect laptop for both gamers and content creators. In fact, it says a laptop with the 3080 Ti inside it will be faster than the Titan RTX. Laptops with this new flagship mobile chip will start at $2,499. The 3070 Ti-based laptops will start at $1,499, and there’s not much information beyond that.
Additionally, the company is adding more RTX titles to its roster, with the latest being The Day Before, Rainbow Six Extraction, Escape from Tarkov, and Dying Light 2 Stay Human. It also announced seven new titles will support its low latency technology dubbed Reflex, including the upcoming God of War on PC. Finally, in what seems like a snub of the much-maligned Battlefield 2042, it announced it is bringing Battlefield 4 and 5 to its GeForce Now streaming platform starting today (January 4).
The rollout of new wireless technology on AT&T and Verizon’s networks will not go ahead as planned this week, according to an announcement from the carriers. This comes after the Federal Aviation Administration asked for a second voluntary delay to ensure that the new C-band frequencies won’t pose a danger to air travel. Initially, AT&T and Verizon were steadfastly against this, but they reversed course quite abruptly early this week. Instead of going live on January 5th, AT&T and Verizon will get to fire up the C-band in about two weeks, give or take.
This dispute goes back almost two years, long before Verizon and AT&T purchased their c-band licenses during the January 2021 auction. The FCC warned the aviation industry that the C-band spectrum was about to become more active. Satellite TV operators previously used the C-band, but the move to newer technologies freed it up for cellular networks. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) built in a few hundred megahertz of buffer between C-band (around 4GHz) and the spectrum used in radio altimeters (3.7-3.8GHz), but it wanted airlines to make sure all of its equipment met current standards.
In a letter seen by the Wall Street Journal, the carriers claim that the aviation industry dragged its feet, and they have already been very accommodating by delaying the C-band launch from December 5th to January 5th. The carriers also agreed to lower transmission power on the C-band for six months while the aviation industry evaluated any possible interference with cockpit systems.
A 5G millimeter wave cell site on a light pole in Minneapolis.
In the letter, AT&T and Verizon offered to further limit C-band power using France as a model, which is considered one of the more conservative countries in controlling 5G frequencies. France already has 5G operating in the C-band, and the FAA lets US airlines fly into and out of French airspace without any additional restrictions. That apparently wasn’t good enough for regulators. AT&T says Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg requested the delay on behalf of the FAA, and the company is “confident further collaboration and technical assessment will allay any issues.”
Despite their head start in 4G, both Verizon and AT&T are lagging behind in the era of 5G, and it’s not hard to see why they’re anxious to get moving. T-Mobile is sitting pretty on a pile of mid-band spectrum it acquired in the Sprint merger, giving it plenty of room for its 5G network. AT&T and Verizon have been relegated to high-frequency millimeter wave 5G and a smattering of low-band signals, neither of which are ideal for 5G on mobile devices. Both carriers already have devices on their networks with latent support for the C-band. All they need to do is light it up, and it sounds like that’ll happen on January 5th, whether the FAA likes it or not.
Alienware pulled the wraps off a Skunkworks project called Concept Nyx At the CES trade show in Las Vegas this week, revealing what looks like a gigantic PC tower that would function as a gaming server for an entire household. The concept was created by the company’s “consortium of wizards” that it calls the Experience Innovation Group (EIG), and it has the goal of letting everyone in a house stream any game they want to any device they want, all at the same time. It’s a lofty goal indeed, and something Alienware calls “the future of gaming,” but like all concepts that get shown off at CES (cough, Razer) there’s no indication it actually exists, even in Alienware’s lab. Still, it’s fun to consider its possibilities.
According to Alienware’s landing page for the concept, here’s how it works. You come home from work and like any rational adult you want to shoot some stuff to unwind a bit before bed. The problem is, your kids are playing Minecraft; one on your PC and the other on a tablet. With Project Nyx you could just sit down on your couch and start playing a game on your TV with a controller, without interrupting either of the kiddos’ adventures. In the middle of all this, your spouse could start playing a game on their laptop too, all powered by the same computer; the Nyx monolith. Then, your kids announce they’re going to bed, so you put down the custom Nyx controller, and hop onto your primary PC and resume your game right where it left off. You can even send a request to your spouse to join your game, and all of this happens seamlessly with no latency, of course.
Concept Nyx includes an all-new controller designed by Alienware.
Alienware describes the problem they are trying to solve thusly, “how to simultaneously allow players in a household to easily access their full game library and play on any device, even if they want to change screens during gameplay.” To achieve this they are leaning into Edge computing, which takes the processing power required for gaming out of the cloud and brings it close to where the gamer is, so it is the opposite of streaming services like GeForce Now and Google Stadia. The processing would all be done locally, on the Nyx tower, then streamed over the network to multiple clients with low latency. Even more pie in the sky: Alienware says anyone in the house will be able to access any game, regardless of where it was purchased, all through a custom app that would need to be installed on every device. The company says its technology would allow up to four games to be streamed simultaneously, but there is no mention of any hardware specifications, Internet speed requirements, or what CPU and GPU are actually powering the darn thing.
Like any concept shown off at CES, there’s not many details available such as when it might launch or what it would cost, so take all this information with a large grain of salt. Companies like to show off these futuristic projects just to generate some headlines, but very few of them ever make their way to store shelves. Still, what’s interesting here is how Dell and Alienware are taking gaming in the opposite direction of where everyone else seems to be heading, which is towards cloud-based streaming solutions. Whether or not it will ever actually become a functioning product remains to be seen. Perhaps they’ll decide it’s not cost effective at some point and just, um, nix the whole thing entirely.
NASA spent 20 years designing and building the James Webb Space Telescope on Earth, and it left the planet behind forever on Christmas Day 2021. Since then, NASA has been working to unfurl the observatory, which was bundled up to fit inside the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. After a brief delay over the weekend, the team has started the painstaking process of tensioning the sunshield. This is one of those make-or-break parts of Webb — if the sunshield doesn’t deploy correctly, the telescope may never work as intended.
Getting Webb into space was a nerve-wracking experience for all involved, but that was only the beginning. Hundreds of tasks need to go right over the next few weeks as Webb deploys all its hardware. Shortly after launch, NASA confirmed deployment of the solar panel and the primary communications array. Webb also extended its tower assembly (where the mirrors attach to the spacecraft) and the momentum flap, which counters the force of solar wind on the solar panel. That brings us to the sunshield, which began deploying last week.
Webb requires a sunshield because it was designed to operate in the mid-infrared. Hubble, by contrast, operated mainly in the visual spectrum. Infrared wavelengths of light can reveal much older, dimmer objects, as well as objects like protoplanets hiding behind dense clouds of dust and gas. To observe in the infrared, Webb needs to keep its instruments cool, thus the sunshield.
Last week, the spacecraft extended two support arms for the shield, one on the front and the other on the rear. Then, the team activated the left and right booms that opened the shield into its distinctive diamond shape. Rather than move immediately to the tensioning step on Sunday, NASA opted to assess the observatory’s status — they only get one chance at this.
The Webb Telescope during testing on Earth.
The sunshield consists of five layers (see above) of polyamide film known as Kapton. To cool the instruments as designed, the layers need to be tensioned to create a small gap between each one. NASA started on Monday with just the first layer, triggering embedded cables to pull the ultra-thin material taut. It will take two or three days to get all five layers aligned, but that will take care of one of the most perilous parts of the deployment process.
It will take several more weeks to get Webb into its final configuration, but it won’t be ready to start operating when it reaches the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point. Outside the moon’s orbit, Webb will be able to block solar radiation with the sunshield and cool down its instruments over the course of months. NASA will also need to conduct tests and calibration on the observatory before it starts doing science. We should get the first Webb data around the middle of 2022.
