While we wait year after year for completely redesigned MacBooks, the flagship MacBook Pro has slowly remade itself with regular incremental upgrades. This is especially true of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, which received a hefty internal tuneup last summer, and is getting another one today — including an update to its much-maligned keyboard. Back in …
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Good news, MacBook users. Apple will replace all butterfly switch keyboards for free — even on its new MacBook Pro models unveiled Tuesday. The company on Tuesday said it has extended its MacBook keyboard replacement program, which repairs the keyboard that first appeared in the 2015 MacBook. Users have complained about sticky keys, as well as letters typing in duplicate …
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Samsung will bring a breakthrough processor technology to market in 2021. It’s a fundamental reworking of the most basic electronic elements that’ll speed performance 35% while cutting power use 50%. The technology, called gate all around, or GAA, refashions the transistors at the heart of chips to make them smaller and faster, Samsung said Tuesday at its Samsung Foundry Forum …
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The “exascale” computing race is getting a new entrant called Frontier, a $600 million machine with Cray and AMD technology that could become the world’s fastest when it arrives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021. Frontier should be able to perform 1.5 quintillion calculations per second, a level called 1.5 exaflops and enough to claim the performance crown, the …
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If you’re feeling like Google’s data centers are holding back your AI abilities, the company now lets you gang together lots of its tensor processing unit (TPU) chips for better performance. The Google Cloud service now offers TPUs linked together into “pods,” the company announced at its Google I/O conference Tuesday. The resulting speedup is chiefly of interest to the …
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While every laptop and its brother is partying with a bump to ninth-gen Intel Core mobile processors and Nvidia’s new, cheap mobile gaming GPUs, Razer’s gone beyond, launching a major overhaul of its 2-year-old 17-inch Blade Pro, which shrinks both in size and price. It takes on the same design as the most recent Blade 15 Advanced, bringing slim display …
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Of all the manufacturers gearing up for today’s launches of the ninth-gen Intel mobile Core processors and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 and 1660 Ti, none seemed busier than Asus. In addition to the usual revving of its gaming notebooks, the company introduced some new designs in conjunction with a new affordable G series, added some AMD Ryzen-based options and even busted out a …
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Intel launched its ninth-generation (aka Coffee Lake refresh) desktop CPUs in October 2018 with its most powerful offerings, and true to form now hits us with its mobile analogs, the H series Core i9, i7 and i5 processors, as well as the stragglers — all 18 of them — of the desktop versions. The eighth-generation Coffee Lake rollout was more …
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Processor progress is harder to come by these days, but Samsung says it’ll build chips next year that will give you a bit more battery life or a little more speed. Through improvements charted by Moore’s Law, chip electronic components called transistors get steadily smaller. On Monday, Samsung said it’s taken the next step along the Moore’s Law path, shrinking …
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The upcoming USB 4 will restore a useful feature we lost with the technology’s modernization: USB hubs that let you multiply the utility of a single port on your PC. USB, short for Universal Serial Bus, is a remarkably successful standard more than two decades old now. It’s spread far and wide, but the newer USB-C technology doesn’t work well …
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