Tech Advisor July 2022

AMD has made a change to its mobile CPU road map, adding an ‘extreme gaming laptop CPU’ for 2023, code-named ‘Dragon Range’. It made the announcement at a small press conference following the release of its second-quarter 2022 earnings, which showed a reported record revenue of $5.9 billion on net income of $786 million. Dragon Range, like AMD’s ‘Raphael’ desktop processor, will use the company’s Zen 4 architecture disclosed this past January at CES 2022. There, AMD announced the Ryzen 7000 processor that’s presumed to be Raphael; it will be launched before the end of 2022, AMD said. Dragon Range and ‘Phoenix’ will be AMD’s CPUs for gaming laptops in 2023. The tech giant described Dragon Range as a CPU for “extreme gaming laptops” that are thicker than 20mm, and…

Linux users are a self-sufficient bunch, but when it comes to hardware, they’re often at the mercy of enormous manufacturers to get working drivers. While Nvidia has offered proprietary drivers similar to its Windows offerings for years, the company is changing tack and will now publish open-source GPU drivers (fave.co/3yTOVbP). The initial offerings are now live on GitHub (fave.co/388BeL8) as well as Nvidia’s self-hosted download pages (fave.co/3yQBHg7). Nvidia is following in the footsteps of its rival AMD, which has offered open-source graphics card drivers since 2015. But the company isn’t in any particular rush. Initially, only data centre hardware is supported with beta drivers. Drivers for consumer and workstation‑level GeForce cards are considered ‘alpha’ quality at the moment, and closed-source drivers will continue to be available for those who need…

AMD has made a change to its mobile CPU road map, adding an ‘extreme gaming laptop CPU’ for 2023, code-named ‘Dragon Range’. It made the announcement at a small press conference following the release of its second-quarter 2022 earnings, which showed a reported record revenue of $5.9 billion on net income of $786 million. Dragon Range, like AMD’s ‘Raphael’ desktop processor, will use the company’s Zen 4 architecture disclosed this past January at CES 2022. There, AMD announced the Ryzen 7000 processor that’s presumed to be Raphael; it will be launched before the end of 2022, AMD said. Dragon Range and ‘Phoenix’ will be AMD’s CPUs for gaming laptops in 2023. The tech giant described Dragon Range as a CPU for “extreme gaming laptops” that are thicker than 20mm, and Phoenix as…

The future of Outlook is here, albeit with some caveats. Microsoft officially released the new Outlook for Windows last month, with features that integrate Microsoft’s futuristic Loop interface as well as more practical innovations such as quick document attachments, a ‘My Day’ summary, and reminders to respond to important email. For now, though, the new features are only available to members of the Office Insider programme, specifically the Beta Channel. We’ve seen the ‘future of Outlook’ many times over the years, from 2015’s simple, effective Outlook apps for iOS and Android, to 2017’s more cohesive approach toward unifying Outlook across various platforms. We’re also seeing the first fruits of ‘Project Cortex’, in how Microsoft (and its rival, Google,) are blurring the lines between various applications. But Microsoft has also been…

Linux users are a self-sufficient bunch, but when it comes to hardware, they’re often at the mercy of enormous manufacturers to get working drivers. While Nvidia has offered proprietary drivers similar to its Windows offerings for years, the company is changing tack and will now publish open-source GPU drivers (fave.co/3yTOVbP). The initial offerings are now live on GitHub (fave.co/388BeL8) as well as Nvidia’s self-hosted download pages (fave.co/3yQBHg7). Nvidia is following in the footsteps of its rival AMD, which has offered open-source graphics card drivers since 2015. But the company isn’t in any particular rush. Initially, only data centre hardware is supported with beta drivers. Drivers for consumer and workstation‑level GeForce cards are considered ‘alpha’ quality at the moment, and closed-source drivers will continue to be available for those who need more reliability…

If images begin to look sharper on Microsoft Edge compared to other browsers, there’s a reason for that. Microsoft is building in what it calls a “Turing Image Super Resolution engine” into Microsoft Edge, ‘upscaling’ low-resolution images with higher fidelity. In effect, Edge will create a higher-resolution image using artificial intelligence, where it didn’t exist before. Upscaling isn’t new; Adobe Lightroom’s Super Resolution allows you to upscale a 12 megapixel image to 48Mp, for example, to print larger prints. TopazLabs’ Gigapixel AI is a dedicated, paid tool to do the same, and there are other free services available on the web that will perform the same services with varying results. The services differ from Microsoft in that they’re often designed to enlarge a photo without losing detail, in the service…