Maximum PC January 2019

HUMANS LIKE to know what’s coming. Look back through history, and it’s littered with future-gazers, augurs, oracles, and prophets trying to guess what’s going to happen next. We like to think we’ve come a long way from casting bones and imbibing noxious substances in order to foresee what the gods have in store for us, but realistically, a lot of our divinations have just gone a bit more high tech. Supercomputers may be the stuff of tech dreams, but much of the time, they’re trying to predict the future. From analyzing weather data to ascertain which way a storm is going, to trying to spot trends in the shares market, our greatest technological wonders are dedicated to trying to guess what’s going to happen next. We have whole industries built on…

AMD CERTAINLY has ambition, and a hectic release schedule. It was only last March that the first Zen chips appeared, and since then we’ve had a myriad variants, and a second iteration of the design, the Zen+. The EPYC range of server processors came along in June, and repeated the trick Ryzen had managed on the desktop: It offered a price to performance balance that left Intel more than a little bruised. EPYC sold well, taking a decent bite out of Intel’s Xeon market share, but there’s much more to be had. We are about to see EPYC 2, codename “Rome,” a 7nm server chip that is ready for sampling now, and due for commercial release this year. EPYC 2 will be the first AMD chip to use the new Zen…

FACEBOOK HAS LURCHED from one public relations mess to another for a couple of years now. The latest and biggest problem stems from the poor way it managed news output during the 2016 elections. The story has now taken a bizarre twist. It is being sued by an app developer called Six4Three, whose owner, Ted Kramer, has called Facebook “the biggest violator of data misuse in the history of the software industry.” Six4Three had an app that searched for pictures of people in bikinis on Facebook (not exactly a noble quest). Facebook shut it out and killed its business. As part of the case, Six4Three obtained private internal documents that revealed how much Facebook, and Zuckerberg in person, knew about the problems with privacy, and the abuse of it by…

INTEL HAS A NEW FLAGSHIP CPU: the Core i9-9980XE, a 14nm process Skylake-X that boasts 18 cores. There’s an obvious rival in view, too: AMD’s 32-core Threadripper. The Core i9-9980XE has a base clock of 3.0GHz, with a Turbo of 4.5GHz, and a useful all-core Turbo of 3.8GHz. Adding two cores over the i9-9960X has cost 100MHz on the base clock, but it receives a bump in L3 cache, now 24.75MB. Performance is mixed. For straight single-core jobs, it loses to its sister chips, who can pump the clock better, especially the 5GHz available to the i9-9900K. In multicore jobs, it struggles to keep pace with Threadripper’s finest. It’s very quick everywhere, nicely balanced overall, but it’s not often the absolute fastest anywhere. Being Intel’s king of the hill, you know there’s…

RECENT TESTERS of pilot versions of Windows 10 were surprised to find something extra in their inbox: ads. It didn’t last long, the “feature” quickly disappeared. Microsoft has claimed it was an A/B test that was never meant to be seen by Windows Insiders. The company’s head of communication, Frank X. Shaw, said it was “an experimental feature that was never intended to be tested broadly, and is being turned off.” If so, why was such a detailed FAQ prepared for users? An FAQ that clearly states that the company is running a pilot of the system in four countries to “get user feedback on ads in Outlook.” The ads appear in non-work accounts, including Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Their targeted nature can be turned off, via privacy settings, but this…

TRIUMPHS ✓ LIFE IN MAGNETIC MEDIA Seagate plans to push the HDD to 100TB by 2025, using new heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. ✓ DDR5 ARRIVES Hynix has produced the first JEDEC-compliant DDR5 memory modules, capable of 5,200Mb/s, 60 percent faster than DDR4. ✓ MORE FLEXIBLE FUN Samsung finally showed off its foldable phone at its Developer Conference. It launches in 2019. TRAGEDIES ✗ RIP STEAM LINK After the current stocks are sold, that’s it for Steam’s Link; there wasn’t any profit in the sales it generated. ✗ THE COST OF MINING A new report claims that mining cryptocurrencies uses more power than mining metal. ✗ REPAIRS THAT BRICK Apple has confirmed that its T2 security chip may kill your device unless you use authorized dealers for repairs.…