PCWorld April 2017

RYZEN PERFORMANCE IS the mystery that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories, performing like a champ (go.pcworld.com/ryzenrev) in productivity and content creation tasks but occasionally delivering fewer frames than you’d expect in games. AMD debunked most of those conspiracy theories in a recent blog post (go.pcworld.com/ryzenblog). For starters, the company said Windows 10’s scheduler isn’t guilty. Internet hardware detectives had started to focus their blame on Windows 10 scheduler, the part of the operating system that doles out work to each individual core or thread in a chip. Many believe Windows 10 scheduler is throwing out work to the wrong cores or threads, hobbling performance. “We have investigated reports alleging incorrect thread scheduling on the AMD Ryzen processor,” AMD’s Robert Hallock wrote in the blog post. “Based on our findings, AMD believes…

NVIDIA JUST UNLEASHED what it calls the “ultimate GeForce card,” and the blisteringly fast GTX 1080 Ti (see our full review on page 49) indeed delivers unparalleled levels of gaming performance. But the version you can buy today isn’t truly the apex of graphics technology, even if the core graphics processor itself is. Customized graphics cards always push performance far past what reference cards offer, thanks to a mixture of beefy cooling solutions and mild-to-heavy overclocks. But while the initial salvo of GTX 1080 Tis are limited to $700 “Founders Edition” (go.pcworld.com/gtx foundersedexpl) reference cards, the likes of EVGA, Asus, Zotac, and other Nvidia partners haven’t been shy about showing off their plans for the new GeForce flagship… even if they haven’t been forthcoming about concrete price and release date details. Here’s…

WHILE MANY IT departments grapple with big data, IBM says it has the smallest data in the world: one bit on one atom. Researchers at IBM’s Almaden lab in San Jose, California, have written and read a bit of data on a single atom using magnetism, a feat they say is a world first. It could lead to storage that’s hundreds of times denser than anything available now, able to hold the entire Apple iTunes library of 35 million songs on a device the size of a credit card, the company says. Much denser storage could mean smaller phones, PCs, and even data centers in the future. Current hard-disk drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a bit. Other scientists have used single atoms for storage before, including in experimental devices that used…

WHEN IT COMES to performance, most people think that Radeon graphics cards hold an edge over Nvidia’s GeForce army in DirectX 12 games on account of the dedicated asynchronous shaders lurking inside AMD’s hardware. That’s never been the universal truth that some people think it is—async compute is just one, not-always-utilized feature of DX12—and now Nvidia’s busting the myth even more with a driver update designed to supercharge GeForce performance in DirectX 12 games. “By refining the code in our own driver, and working side-by-side with game developers, Nvidia has delivered performance increases by an average of 16% across DirectX 12 titles,” senior PR manager Brian Burke said in a press release. Here are some specific examples Nvidia passed along: Ashes of the Singularity—9% Gears of War 4—10% Hitman—23% Rise of the Tomb Raider—33% Tom Clancy’s…

INTEL IS NO longer satisfied just partnering with other companies to create self-driving cars: it wants to own the whole stack. Well, at least as far as the autonomous hardware and software go. The chip maker recently announced it is purchasing Jerusalem-based Mobileye for $15.3 billion. The two companies were already working together on various projects. The pair announced a partnership with BMW in July 2016 with the aim of putting an autonomous car on the streets by 2021. Then in November, the two companies partnered with auto parts maker Delphi to create the Automated Driving Group (go.pcworld.com/intelautocars), which will create a self-driving car system that can be sold to automakers. Mobileye is best known for supplying car maker Tesla with hardware for its semi-autonomous system, Autopilot. That relationship ended last fall…

AMONG THE MANY announcements at Google I/O in 2015 was one that seemed like a fantasy (go.pcworld.com/gglefabric): connected clothing that could control music and lights, and even interact with images on a nearby screen. Dubbed Project Jacquard (go.pcworld.com/jacquard), Google proved it was serious about the tech by partnering with Levis to make a denim jacket that it showed off at last year’s I/O, and now we finally know how much it’s going to cost. And it’s not horribly expensive. Although it is a couple hundred dollars more than the Commuter Trucker Jacket (go.pcworld.com/levisjacket) on which it is based, the $350 jacket is set to go on sale in the fall (pushed back from its original spring launch), and is presumably the first in a full line of smart clothes. Google demoed the…