Microsoft is in the process of testing its xCloud game streaming service, but that’s not the only way to get your Xbox games on more devices. The company has also launched a test of its new Xbox game streaming service. This streaming option has more hardware requirements, but it won’t require subscribing to a whole new service.
Microsoft’s xCloud relies on a server someplace online to render games and stream the video to your devices. The upshot there is you don’t need to have an Xbox running to play Xbox games. The new Xbox Console Streaming feature does require you to have an Xbox One, and that piece of hardware does all the rendering and streaming. If you already have a big game library, that could make your streaming experience much better.
Currently, the Xbox Console Streaming test is available to Xbox Insiders in the Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead rings, but only those in the US and UK. Once enabled, the streaming test lets you load up and render your library of games on the Xbox One you already have, and the console streams to your mobile device.
You will need a few things in addition to the Xbox in order to enjoy Console Streaming. Microsoft says your home internet needs at least 4.75 Mbps of upload (9 Mbps preferred) and 125 ms or less of latency (50 ms or less preferred). The Xbox needs to be configured for instant-on and connected to your network via an Ethernet cable — every little bit of latency counts in situations like this.
Your console will tell you if something isn’t working.
The game streaming preview only works on Android devices running 6.0 Marshmallow or higher. You’ll also need a wireless Xbox controller with Bluetooth support. Microsoft also strongly suggests you pick up a controller mount for your phone. On the phone side, you need at least 4.75 Mbps down, but Microsoft still says 10 Mbps is preferable.
Interestingly, Microsoft doesn’t mention anything about the local network conditions, and that suggests it won’t support direct streaming when you’re at home. It’s targeting game streaming to your phone while you’re out in the world. So, you might not get any latency benefits while you’re on your home network.
Microsoft will expand the test to more regions and testing groups down the road. First, it wants to see how it works for Insiders.
For much of the past year, Intel’s Core i9-9900K was the top x86 CPU on the market. AMD’s Ryzen 2700X offered excellent performance-per-dollar and made a strong argument in its own right, but the Core i9-9900K was the top-end performer in absolute terms. That remained the case until July 7, when AMD’s new 7nm Ryzen 7 family debuted and retook the overall performance lead. Since July, Intel has held a narrow lead in 1080p gaming and been pushed backward everywhere else.
The Core i9-9900KS debuting today is a strategic attempt to strengthen the markets where Intel still holds a lead, and to play on a strength of Intel’s where AMD is currently struggling: clock speed. As we’ve discussed, AMD’s 7nm CPUs do not hit their full boost clocks on every single CPU core. UEFI adjustments shipping now improve the clock speed on some AMD chips relative to where they were in August, but AMD’s sustained clocks on the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 family are lower than their Intel counterparts. The 9900KS is designed to capitalize on this by offering higher all-core boost frequencies.
The Core i9-9900KS is a specially binned 9900K with two differences: It has a 4GHz base clock, up from 3.6GHz on the Core i9-9900K, and it can run at 5GHz on all CPU cores if appropriate thermal and power conditions exist. This is not equivalent to a 5GHz “guaranteed” boost clock speed. Intel CPUs will boost up to certain base frequencies depending on how many CPU cores are loaded. The Core i9-9900K boosts to 5GHz with up to two cores loaded, but it drops to a maximum of 4.7GHz with all eight CPU cores loaded. The Core i9-9900KS boosts up to 5GHz, no matter how many cores are loaded.
Intel is introducing this chip with a price of $513, which puts it up against AMD’s Ryzen 7 3900X, at least in theory — that chip hasn’t been as easy to find as it should be, though it was available on Newegg as of this writing for $529.
Test Setup, CPU Clock
Our Core i9-9900KS was tested using an Asus ROG Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi) motherboard with UEFI 1302. An Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU using the 430.86 WHQL driver was used for testing. All available patches and updates for Windows 10 were installed.
We must note that we had significant issues stabilizing our system with 32GB of RAM installed. Our standard test configuration is 32GB of G.Skill TridentZ (F4-3200C14Q-32GTZ). While Intel warns against attempting to use four DIMMs while overclocking to DDR4-3200 or above, we had problems with 32GB of RAM even when running at DDR4-2133. RAM that worked perfectly when paired with our Core i9-9900K was not stable, even at DDR4-2133, when paired with the 9900KS. Asus, meanwhile, told us that it did not observe these same problems with the 1302 UEFI when they ran their own tests.
It is not clear where the problem is. The Maximus XI Hero has been perfectly stable in the past when paired with this exact DRAM. Multiple sets of DRAM had issues and reseating the CPU did not solve the problem. We fell back to 16GB of RAM clocked at DDR4-3600 in two DIMMs for this testing (Crucial Ballistix, BLE8G4D36BEEAK.M8FE1). This configuration had no issues.
UEFI 1302 on the Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi) offers three different Asus Multicore Enhancement settings. Auto (Lets BIOS Optimize), Disabled (Enforce All Limits) and Enabled (Remove All Limits). If set to “Auto,” the 9900KS is very nearly the same speed as the 9900K, according to our testing. “Disabled” opens the throttle on the CPU a bit more. When we queried Asus on how Disabled worked, the company told us that this setting “relaxes all thermal limits plus tightens timings.”
The Enabled setting appears to tell the CPU core to run at an all-core boost of 4.8GHz in all cases. This was unstable in our testing. We tested in the Disabled (Enforce All Limits) mode, with Windows 10 set to Balanced power profile.
Our Blender benchmark results are presented separately from the rest of our tests due to the size of the graph.
The Core i9-9900KS is 5-8 percent faster than the Core i9-9900K in this series of rendering tests. The Ryzen 7 3700X is still ahead of the Core i9-9900KS in virtually every case, though the difference has narrowed and the 9900KS is now on-top in the barbershop_interior render. The Ryzen 9 3900X is still much faster than the 9900KS — the extra cores aren’t something some extra clock can challenge.
Our non-gaming test results are embedded in the slideshow below.
Gaming Benchmarks
Our gaming results are presented in the slideshow below, but I’m going to go ahead and spoil them for you. Despite a bare 1fps pickup in a couple of 1080p results, the 9900KS and the 9900K are within 1 percent of identical at the detail levels that people practically play with.
For all intents and purposes, the game situation is exactly what it was in July. The 9900KS gives Intel an extra frame per second in a few titles and nothing else. You don’t need the highest-end CPU to hit top frame rates in games and Hyper-Threading actually seems to hurt titles by a few percent compared with non-HT, in at least some cases.
Conclusion: There’s a Limited Amount of Gas in This 8-Core Tank
In 2017, Intel’s 8700K won accolades for a great balance between core counts and clock speed. Last year, the 9900K established itself as the premium chip to beat, even if the 2700X had significant competitive strengths of its own. This year, the tables have turned. While the Core i9-9900KS does indeed manage to beat the Ryzen 7 3700X core-for-core in a number of tests where the Core i9-9900K came up just short, the Ryzen 9 3900X is there to challenge it, every step of the way.
That leaves the Core i9-9900KS in a precarious position. It offers excellent per-core performance, but it’s fighting to beat a chip that sells for $184 less. If what you care about is gaming and only gaming, the Core i7-9700K offers equally good performance for much less money. If you need high core counts, the Ryzen 9 3900X packs superior performance for the same price. The Core i9-9900KS is actually a pretty good step up from the Core i9-9900K, offering 5-8 percent more performance for ~5 percent more money, but it’s beset on every side by competitors.
The truth is, Intel is in a tough competitive spot right now. There are no desktop 10nm chips coming in the near future and while we’ve heard rumors of 10-core Comet Lake CPUs arriving in 2020, for now, the company has to hold the eight-core desktop line. Outside of 1080p gaming, it’s hard to point to very many price/performance wins for Intel at this point. If the 9900KS could hold an all-core 5GHz boost it would undoubtedly help, but it still wouldn’t be enough in and of itself to completely close the gaps. Thus far, Intel has chosen to maintain its higher prices rather than slash desktop pricing. Lower prices are coming to the HEDT family, however, with the launch of Cascade Lake X.
The 9900KS does give Intel a slightly better competitive position versus AMD right now, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental issues that are making Ryzen CPUs strong competitive options in the first place. That kind of realignment will have to come with Comet Lake, if it can be achieved at all.
Your smartphone might have a few different depth-sensing technologies for features like face unlock and portrait mode photos. The exact method of measuring the distance to a subject varies, but they might all one day end up being replaced by a new type of sensor based on nature. A team of Harvard researchers has designed the new 3D sensor using the same technique as a jumping spider.
Most depth-sensing systems in use today rely on stereo vision (multiple sensors a set distance apart) or projected light (IR illumination). A jumping spider has eight eyes, but it doesn’t use stereo vision like humans do to estimate distance. They don’t even have the brainpower to process vision as we do. Instead, each eye uses a multilayered retina to process images with different degrees of blur based on distance. As a result, jumping spiders can accurately determine the distance to their prey with incredible accuracy across a wide field of view.
The Harvard team used this as a model for its new “metalens” sensor, which can calculate distance without any traditional optical elements. It doesn’t have layers like a spider eye, but it does split light to generate two differently de-focused images on a photosensor. This is known as “depth from defocus.”
Of course, the key to the jumping spider’s hunting prowess is the way its nervous system interprets the blurred images as a depth map. The team developed an AI-powered version of that, too. Data from the metalens feeds into a custom algorithm that compares the split images. It can then generate a real-time depth map that tells you how far away your target is. Like the vision processing of the jumping spider, this process is highly efficient. You don’t need any bulky sensors or powerful CPUs to generate the distance map. The metalens sensor used in the experiment is only three millimeters across.
The researchers see the potential for metalens depth sensing in self-driving cars and robots. Rather than having a few cameras spread around a vehicle and complex algorithms to generate depth maps, a larger number of tiny metalenses spread around could quickly and easily tell the computer how far away everything is. The technology could also come to phones in the future, replacing the bulky multi-sensor 3D sensor platforms like Apple Face ID and Google’s Face Match.
Dell’s new Latitude 5300 2-in-1 laptops are designed to be an affordable business solution for those people that need a tablet and a laptop. In testing, the 5300 did a decent job, but here you don’t get enough performance for your money.
Overview
The Latitude 5300 was constructed out of plastic that has been reinforced by carbon fiber to feel more sturdy and durable. It’s non-metal chassis is one way that Dell aimed to cut the system’s cost and make it more affordable. The 13.3-inch system is also relatively light at 3.15lbs. Other than that, the rest of the system’s features aren’t particularly impressive.
Testing
Our sister site PCMag tested a model that retails for $1,519 and comes equipped with an Intel Core i5-8365U processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and a 1080p display.
The system performed well when tested with Cinebench R15, coming in second place. Surprisingly it also beat out HP’s EliteBook, which is equipped with an Intel Core i7 processor.
The Dell Latitude 5300 also showed positive results when tested with Photoshop CC. It came in third place behind the two Intel Core i7 notebooks, but it beat out the other Core i5 computers with a healthy margin.
All of these notebooks rely on the integrated graphics processor inside of the Intel processor, and as such they are not really meant for gaming. PCMag ran a couple of graphics tests on the system just to be thorough, however. The tests showed most of the systems performing fairly similar to teach other in 3DMark.
PCMag didn’t test any games, but running Unigine Superposition 1.0 showed the Dell fall into last place behind all competing systems.
Conclusion
Given the Dell Latitude 5300‘s price and features, I wouldn’t recommend it. Although PCMag gave it a rating of 3.5 out of 5, it’s far too expensive to competitive. I see laptops with Intel Core i7 processors and 16GB of RAM on a regular basis that cost less than the Dell Latitude 5300, and those systems would undoubtedly perform better due to their superior hardware.
This system does have the added advantage of its compact size and 2-in-1 feature, but realistically there are far better 2-in-1 options available than the Dell Latitude 5300.
ATLANTA — Move over, Tesla Semi. Hyundai has the newest and coolest big rig in a fuel-cell-powered tractor and a nitrogen-cooled trailer introduced here today at a big truck show. The truck part (tractor) is the Hyundai HDC-6 Neptune concept with as many as eight hydrogen tanks propelling itself farther than even what Tesla promises for its semi.
A plucky band of automakers, led by Hyundai, continues to believe the future of transportation, especially long-haul trucks, is better served by converting hydrogen to electricity to feed electric motors. The added weight of batteries in a long-haul truck cuts too heavily into the common 80,000-pound limit for tractor, trailer, and cargo. For local-delivery trucks and for passenger cars, battery electric vehicles still make sense.
What Hyundai showed at the North American Commercial Vehicle (NACV) show is a concept. Turning the truck and trailer into commercially available vehicles requires a bigger fuel cell and regulatory approval. A fleet of 1,600 smaller fuel cell-electric trucks is being delivered now through 2023 in Switzerland, which places a heavy highway tax on diesel trucks.
The HDC-6 Neptune tractor is a Class 8 truck, meaning it’s the front end of a tractor-trailer combination weighing 80,000 pounds, including cargo. Until self-driving gets real (the 2030s, most likely), Hyundai envisions the cab as a “personal studio” space for driver and co-driver. Because there’s no engine or transmission, the floor is low, the ceiling is tall enough for NBA players, and the sleeping area is up top, up three stairs. The rear of the truck cab has a refrigerator, cooktop, microwave, what looked to be a small washer-dryer, and — drumroll — a toilet and shower. That’s exactly what America needs — America’s truck drivers need — with interstate truck rest areas full and parked trucks spilling out hundreds of yards beyond the rest areas. In the future, with full self-driving (Level 5) the tractor could be downsized with the entire cab filled with hydrogen tanks.
The cab of the Neptune concept has driver assists, drowsiness monitor, head-up display, translucent pillars (LCD displays show what’s hidden behind them). Here in autonomous mode, the driver can project a movie on the inside of the windshield.
According to Dr. Maik Ziegler, vice-president of Hyundai’s commercial vehicle R&D strategy group, battery power means more steps and more complexity. The goal, Ziegler said, “is to provide electrons to the motor.” That will be accomplished more efficiently, he believes, with fuel cells, where the fuel cell stack combines onboard hydrogen with oxygen in the air to produce water — definitely not a pollutant — while throwing off electrons every time two parts hydrogen meet with one part oxygen.
A long-haul battery-electric tractor capable of a full day’s drive weighs a freaking ton extra — 10-12 tons extra, actually — because of the lithium-ion batteries when it’s something like the Tesla semi. That’s compared with a diesel-engine truck with fuel, which needs 85-100 pounds of fuel to drive 100 miles. A fuel cell electric truck might have 2,000 to 4,000 pounds of added weight, mostly in the carbon fiber, bulletproof tanks. Enough hydrogen to go cross-country weighs less than 100 pounds. Hydrogen is stored at 350 bar (5000 psi) or 700 bar (10,o00 psi), or as liquid hydrogen. Hyundai’s fleet of passenger cars, centered on Southern California, uses 700 bar tanks. The higher the pressure, the heavier the tanks must be.
“If you need to charge a truck quickly, you need a one-megawatt power source,” Ziegler says. “If you want to charge 1,000 trucks, you need a nuclear power plant.” (Or a big-city-size power gas or coal power plant, but nukes sound more ominous.)
The cost of hydrogen needs to fall further, Ziegler says. If it’s created using wind or solar as a power source, it’s a clean fuel. He said Australia, with abundant sunshine and land, has the potential to be a major supplier.
A nitrogen tank under the Hyundai Translead trailer keeps the refrigerator box cold for 3-5 days without needing a diesel refrigeration system.
The trailer concept is from a Hyundai subsidiary, Hyundai Translead. The 53-foot refrigerated trailer (reefer) is cooled by a big nitrogen tank under the load floor. Much as traditional refrigeration is done, by allowing a gas to expand inside closed metal tubing and become cold, this truck uses nitrogen. Once the nitrogen has expanded, it’s vented to the outside air. Since the earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen already, there’s no air pollution.
The sides and top are made of rigid foam inside plastic inner and outer layers. There are no metal rivets, a major source of heat intrusion into a traditional reefer. Stuart James, chief sales officer of Hyundai Translead, says the onboard load of nitrogen should keep the cargo cold for at least three to four days. Monitors and telematics track temperatures in five 10-foot zones, warn if the cooling system has issues, and if nitrogen inadvertently gets into the cargo box — 100 percent nitrogen will not support life — it shuts down the cooling system.
As for when such a vehicle might become a commercial entity, Hyundai says it needs to judge commercial and government demand. In polluted megacities, some are headed toward banning diesel trucks, so the options drop to electric vehicles powered by batteries or fuel cells.
Meanwhile, Tesla and Nikola Motor are moving toward Class 6 to Class 8 trucks that are battery-powered. Nikola is working on hydrogen power as well. Production of the Tesla Semi has been delayed until at least 2020 and possibly 2021.
On October 29, 1969, the first successful message was sent over ARPANET. UCLA student Charley Kline transmitted from an SDS Sigma 7 computer to an SDS 940 machine at the Stanford Research Institute. The initial message was inauspicious — the letters “lo” were sent before the machine crashed. The very first message sent over ARPANET was, therefore, “lo,” which means the internet’s grandfather managed to use slang (or at least Orson Scott Card’s version of it) before transmitting an intelligible command. In retrospect, we probably should have interpreted this as an ominous clue.
“It was inadvertent, but it turned out to be prophetic and powerful that the message we delivered was ‘LO,’ as in ‘lo and behold,'” said UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, who was hired to head the project.
The first genuine command transmitted over ARPANET, incidentally, was “login.”
ARPANET was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the forerunner of DARPA today. ARPANET was the ancestor of the modern internet. It was the first packet-switching network to implement the TCP/IP protocol. The TCP/IP protocol was designed to be latency and fault-tolerant in a way that existing telephone networks were not. The major goal of the project was to allow for the more efficient sharing of computer resources. Computers were rarer in the 1960s than they are today, and not everyone who worked on an ARPA project had access to the horsepower they needed. The idea of connecting to a remote machine to tap non-local resources is so common today, it’s difficult to remember there was a time when the feature had to be invented out of whole cloth. Nevertheless, it was.
There’s disagreement over whether ARPANET had a specific goal of robust communication in the face of nuclear war. The RAND corporation has drawn a link between some of the early work it did on packet-switched networks (as opposed to circuit-switched networks) and the comparative robustness of the former. The Internet Society and Charles Herzfeld, former ARPANET director, have both argued that ARPANET was not conceived of as a means of creating a network that would survive a nuclear war. While RAND published some theoretical work on packet-switched networks at the same time researchers were creating what would become part of ARPANET, the two projects were not connected and the two groups were not aware of each other.
First ARPANET IMP log: the first message ever sent via the ARPANET, 10:30 pm PST on 29 October 1969 (6:30 UTC on 30 October 1969). This IMP Log excerpt, kept at UCLA, describes setting up a message transmission from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. Image and caption via Wikipedia
The initial proposals for ARPANET were anything but lauded. According to Wikipedia, “Most computer science companies regarded the ARPA proposal as outlandish, and only twelve submitted bids to build a network; of the twelve, ARPA regarded only four as top-rank contractors.” An article at The Conversation makes a similar point.
Predictably, the new network was scarcely used at the beginning. Excluding, in fact, the small circle of people directly involved in the project, a much larger crowd of potential users (e.g. graduate students, researchers and the many more who might have benefited from it) seemed wholly uninterested in using the ARPANET. The only thing that kept the network going in those early months was people changing jobs. In fact, when researchers relocated to one of the other network sites – for instance from UCLA to Stanford – then, and only then, the usage of those sites’ resources increased.
It’s easy to look back today and see the modern internet as the inevitable result of technological progress. It wasn’t. It was a slow process of creating communication protocols to bridge the gaps between incompatible systems and to develop common languages and approaches to communication challenges, all done with a fraction of the computing power available in a modern smartphone. The initial four locations connected to ARPANET were UCLA, Stanford’s Augmentation Research Center, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah School of Computing. From there, it extended to Massachusetts. By 1981, the network had grown to 213 machines.
ARPANET was formally shut down in 1990, succeeded by the internet. Upon its decommissioning, Vint Cerf, the architect of TCP/IP, wrote the following lament:
It was the first, and being first, was best, but now we lay it down to ever rest. Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears. For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years of faithful service, duty done, I weep. Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.
Requiescat in Packet, ARPANET. And happy birthday. Your grandkid is kind of a big deal.
in order to enjoy Console Streaming. Microsoft says your home internet needs at least 4.75 Mbps of upload (9 Mbps preferred) and 125 ms or less of latency (50 ms or less preferred). The Xbox needs to be configured for instant-on and connected to your network via an Ethernet cable — every little bit of latency counts in situations like this. 
