Maximum PC November 2019

ACCORDING TO POPULAR CULTURE, that headline is spot on, at least. While we don’t always adhere to the idea, we can see that there are moments when free is your best option: If you’re looking at doing something as a one-off, you don’t want to drop a big bag of cash on a product you’re not going to use a lot, so free definitely makes sense. A quick look at the top-selling apps shows that the biggest sellers are all covered by free alternatives, whether you’re talking office software, security, video, image, or audio editing. Some of these free alternatives are just as feature-packed as their big-dollar equivalents. But your time isn’t free, so which ones are worth spending it with? This is where we come in, with our cover feature…

AMD’S RYZEN 3000 series has been a huge hit. Armed with lots of zippy Zen 2 cores and AMD’s competitive pricing, sales have been brisk. Exact figures are hard to come by, especially for the US market; retailers in other regions are more forthcoming. The major German and South Korean vendors put AMD and Intel neck and neck. This has to be taken with a pinch of salt, of course—these companies represent a fraction of the total market. One source worth taking seriously is Mercury Research, which has been producing PC component market reports since 1994. It has AMD’s market share of desktop CPUs at 17.1 percent, up 4.8 percent over a year. The 3000 series only launched in July, so we can expect things to swing even more toward…

LAST MONTH, Intel kicked off its new generation of Ice Lake CPUs, carrying the new 10nm Sunny Cove microarchitecture, with 11 low-power chips for mobile devices. This month, the range has been filled out by another eight processors, again all low-power U-series and Y-series parts. They run from a Core i7-10710U with six cores and an all-core boost of 3.9GHz, down to a Core i3-10110U, with two cores running at 3.7GHz. The four new U-series chips also get support for LPDDR4X memory, with a 32GB maximum, and all get Wi-Fi 6 support. The U-series runs at 15W, while the more abstemious Y-series runs at 7W. However, these aren’t Sunny Cove parts. The new chips are all 14nm Comet Lake chips, which use the old Skylake microarchitecture. This means you don’t get…

THE BODY RESPONSIBLE for laying out the specs of USB, the USB Implementer’s Forum, has published the full specification for version 4.0, officially USB4, with no space. It blends in Thunderbolt tech, which was developed by Intel, later in collaboration with Apple, and mixed PCIe and DisplayPort signals into one serial stream. Thunderbolt never went mainstream, being expensive to implement. By mixing Thunderbolt into USB, Intel loses these payments, but gains exposure, including AMD mobos. USB4 will use USB-C connectors exclusively. Data transfer rates are up to 40Gb/s, twice USB 3.2’s rates, and eight times the original USB 3.0 rate. There are lessor modes of 10 and 20Gb/s for less demanding devices. It will be backwardly compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.2, and Thunderbolt 3. It can transfer video and data…

A SECURITY RESEARCHER has found an unprotected server with a massive cache of Facebook data on it. The database contains 419 million phone numbers, including 133 million from the US. Most were linked to Facebook usernames, and many had real names, birthdays, and other personal data attached. The server’s owner was informed, and the data taken down. Facebook claimed that “The data set is old and appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers. The data set has been taken down and we have seen no evidence that Facebook accounts were compromised.” Are we reassured? For over a year, millions of user details were left unguarded. Who collected the data, and why? Facebook is trying to…

TRIUMPHS ✓ TAPE’S NOT DEAD Fujifilm’s LTO-8 tape cartridges offer 30TB of compressed backup using nanocubic barium ferrite. Cost effective and useful. ✓ CARBON CHIP MIT engineers have built a 15,000-transistor RISC-V CPU using carbon nanotubes; in 2013 they managed 178 transistors. ✓ ROBOT HUGS The Cushybot One means you can interact with your child from anywhere. Adorable but spooky. TRAGEDIES ✕ TESLA LOCKED OUT A server outage meant Tesla 3 owners couldn’t get into their cars using the app, unless they were carrying the key card. ✕ WIKI HIT BY DDOS A huge denial of service attack powered by botnets took down the Wikimedia server for hours. ✕ MOST DOWN-VOTES An EA post about unlocking Star Wars Battlefront characters enters the Guinness Book of Records—for down-votes.…