APC March 2022

Awards time is almost upon us! As you read, the editorial team is debating the great many products we saw through 2021, and from all the many worthy finalists picking winners. Every important PC category is covered – we are examiningCPUs, motherboards, graphics cards, systems and laptops, peripherals and components, plus the super-special Excellence and Gold awards. All will be revealed in the next issue of APC, so it’s a special one to grab. We’ll be covering all the good stuff that was released in Australia through 2021, and it’s always an honour for us to be able to acknowledge the talent at the many companies that provide us all with the gear we love. In other rather exciting news, we’ve also been examining ways of improving APC for you,…

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“Championing technology doesn’t mean we’re unrelenting yes-men and -women, however, and APC aims to be as objective as possible in all our coverage.” APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, and beyond. We have two goals: to find the best modern tech and to help you make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms.…

Meta (previously known as Facebook) is building a new AI supercomputer, called the AI Research SuperCluster, at a currently undisclosed location. According to Meta, it’ll be the world’s fastest supercomputer to date when complete, with a performance metric of over 220 Linpack petaflops. RSC is operational right now but is still being built out. Specs for this new supercomputer are quite impressive, as the RSC currently features 760 of Nvidia’s cutting-edge DGX A100 AI compute units and includes eight Nvidia A100 GPUs in each unit. This makes for a total of 6,080 GPUs for the entire supercomputer. But, once complete, RSC will pack a whopping 16,000 GPUs with an additional 1,240 DGX nodes to its name. The second installation phase will be completed sometime in July.…

Elon Musk’s Starlink service is rolling out a Premium Tier that can provide up to 500Mbps, twice the bandwidth that can currently be achieved with the standard service. The new tier will charge $3,500 for all of the required hardware, alongside a $700 deposit fee and an expected Australian price of around $500 for a monthly subscription service. SpaceX is targeting businesses in remote regions that are currently being forced to pay significantly higher rates for poor service. Starlink is promising a better experience for business. Starlink Premium users can expect download speeds between 150Mbps and 500Mbps and latency as low as 20ms in most locations.…

Intel’s latest Core i9-12900HK processor may just have won the mobile x86 vs. Arm performance war, but it comes at a cost. The mobile 14-core Alder Lake chip has bested Apple’s M1 Max in multiple workloads, including a 30 percent win in a multi-threaded test, but the former is far more power-hungry than the latter. We’ve already seen what the M1 Max can do in the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro, and the Core i9-12900HK, which powers MSI’s latest GE76 Raider gaming laptop, isn’t a slacker, either. Both processors leverage different architectures, with the Arm-based M1 Max residing exclusively inside Apple’s closed ecosystem, so an apples-to-apples comparison isn’t always straightforward. However, some benchmarks do work on both types of hardware, including Geekbench 5, HandBrake, and Cinebench R23, so we charted out…