If you think you're immune from a scary exploit found in Intel's Active Management Technology just because you're a consumer, think again.The exploit, disclosed on May 1, lets bad actors bypass authentication in Intel's remote management hardware to take over your PC. This hardware, built into enterprise-class PCs, lets IT administrators remotely manage fleets of computers—install patches and software, and even update the BIOS as though they were sitting in front of it. It is, in essence, a God-mode.Here's the fine print: Many early news reports said "consumer PCs are unaffected." But what Intel actually said was, "consumer PCs with consumer firmware" are unaffected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you think you're immune from a scary exploit found in Intel's Active Management Technology just because you're a consumer, think again.The exploit, disclosed on May 1, lets bad actors bypass authentication in Intel's remote management hardware to take over your PC. This hardware, built into enterprise-class PCs, lets IT administrators remotely manage fleets of computers—install patches and software, and even update the BIOS as though they were sitting in front of it. It is, in essence, a God-mode.Here's the fine print: Many early news reports said "consumer PCs are unaffected." But what Intel actually said was, "consumer PCs with consumer firmware" are unaffected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today’s processors, made using a single continuous slab of silicon, may soon give way to multiple chips interconnected at high speeds, Intel said Tuesday morning.Intel said its new Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge, or EMIB, technology would let a 22nm chip connect to a 10nm chip and a 14nm chip, all on the same processor.“For example, we can mix high-performance blocks of silicon and IP together with low-power elements made from different nodes for extreme optimization,” said Intel’s Murthy Renduchintala, who heads the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group.That’s a radical departure from how the company has constructed most CPUs and SoCs, where all components of a CPU or SoC are built on the same process. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today’s processors, made using a single continuous slab of silicon, may soon give way to multiple chips interconnected at high speeds, Intel said Tuesday morning.Intel said its new Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge, or EMIB, technology would let a 22nm chip connect to a 10nm chip and a 14nm chip, all on the same processor.“For example, we can mix high-performance blocks of silicon and IP together with low-power elements made from different nodes for extreme optimization,” said Intel’s Murthy Renduchintala, who heads the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group.That’s a radical departure from how the company has constructed most CPUs and SoCs, where all components of a CPU or SoC are built on the same process. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ryzen performance is the mystery that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories, performing like a champ in productivity and content creation tasks but occasionally delivering fewer frames than you'd expect in games. AMD debunked most of those conspiracy theories in a blog post Monday night. For starters, the company said Windows 10’s scheduler isn’t guilty. Internet hardware detectives had started to focus their blame on Windows 10 scheduler, the part of the operating system that doles out work to each individual core or thread in a chip. Many believe Windows 10 scheduler is throwing out work to the wrong cores or threads, hobbling performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD’s upcoming Ryzen CPU will occupy less space and offer twice the amount of cache of Intel’s 6th-generation CPU, according a news report. Oh, and there will indeed be a quad-core model.AMD engineers made the disclosure in a paper this week during the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, according to EE Times' Rick Merritt.The engineering paper said a quad-core Ryzen chip built on a 14nm process would be about 10 percent smaller than a comparable 6th-generation Intel Skylake CPU built on a 14nm process, while offering twice the L2 cache of the Intel chip. The paper appears to count only the amount of space used for the x86 cores on an Intel CPU in its comparison. Like other mainstream CPUs, Intel’s Skylake chips also include graphics cores aboard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Read professional reviews of Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup, and you’ll come away thinking the new laptops have great battery life.Dive into a customer forum, though, and the upshot will be exactly the opposite: The new MacBook Pros have “piss poor” battery life.That characterization came from user yillbs on MacRumors.com. “I don’t think anyone can convince me that this thing isn’t just flat out the worst battery life ever on a MacBook,” yillbs wrote, clearly frustrated. “I’ve been defending it like mad, but at this point... how can you? 4.42 hours is just bad.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Now that Apple’s introduced the first major update to its MacBook Pro lineup in years, it’s time to square off the best of the best in Mac and PC laptops to see who currently prevails in this age-old rivalry.
It’s benchmarks at dawn between the new MacBooks, the new Surface Book i7, and a posse of other Windows laptops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s always been difficult trying to find the right category for Microsoft’s hybrid tablet/laptop Surface Book. And now with the new Surface Book i7 in hand, it’s even harder to figure out just what square hole to put this round peg into.Before we get too far into the review, let me say that the Surface Book i7 is incredibly fast for a laptop in its class, offering no less than twice the performance of the original Surface Book, which itself outstripped all others in its day. Even better, it has stupidly long battery life that bests all the laptops we’ve tested.Done. Fini. Move along, right? Well, not quite. The world isn’t the same as it was a year ago and the Surface Book i7’s competitors have been hard at work too, and there are aspects of Microsoft’s hybrid device that aren’t perfect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What will the next Macs have? Ask a PC Image by Gordon Mah UngAt long last, Apple is expected to unveil new MacBooks and possibly other Mac hardware on Thursday. The usual rumors fly ahead of the event, hinting at everything from long-overdue internal updates to innovative OLED touch strips.To find out just what Apple could (and should) introduce, however, all I had to do was look at what PC makers have already been shipping for months. Who knows—maybe Apple did the same thing. As we eagerly await the coming of the new Macs, check out the features we hope Apple ripped off from PC makers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We’ve all heard tales of foreign intelligence entities breaking into hotel rooms and cloning a person’s hard drive while he or she is in the bar downstairs.You might dismiss it as the stuff of urban legend or Jason Bourne movies, but this style of attack does highlight one of the most basic weaknesses of today’s PCs: Their data is extremely vulnerable once an attacker has physical access to a machine. Cold boot attacks, USB exploits,or DMA attacks over FireWire, among other breaches, are all possible if a bad actor can get his or her hands on the hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We’ve all heard tales of foreign intelligence entities breaking into hotel rooms and cloning a person’s hard drive while he or she is in the bar downstairs.You might dismiss it as the stuff of urban legend or Jason Bourne movies, but this style of attack does highlight one of the most basic weaknesses of today’s PCs: Their data is extremely vulnerable once an attacker has physical access to a machine. Cold boot attacks, USB exploits,or DMA attacks over FireWire, among other breaches, are all possible if a bad actor can get his or her hands on the hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Separating the true nerds from the wannabesYou can tell from five feet away if a screw is used to install a power supply or an optical drive. You can recite how much cache was in a Northwood Pentium 4. If you’re that kind of nerd, you won't have any problem with our PC Nerd Quiz. Or will you? We’ve assembled a mix of challenging questions designed to separate the true nerds from the wannabes. Let's see how you do. Ready? First question... To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The third time could be the charm for Intel and its Thunderbolt technology. A year after introducing Thunderbolt 3 at Computex 2015, Intel is finally starting to see success with its high-speed external I/O—enough that even doubters might agree it’s winning.You needn’t look far for signs that Thunderbolt 3 will succeed where its two predecessors failed dismally on the PC. This year’s top-tier laptops from HP and Dell, as well models from MSI, Asus, Razer, and Acer, all prominently feature Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Almost all of the high-profile laptops of the last few months have prominently featured Thunderbolt 3 ports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
USB Type C is the intriguing new port that began appearing in laptops, tablets, phones, and other devices well over a year ago, but we had no real way test its throughput performance until now. Thanks to Sandisk’s Extreme 900, we’re finally able to push that tiny reversible port to its limits. To do that I gathered up no fewer than eight laptops equipped with USB Type C ports, and threw in a desktop PCIe card for good measure too.What your USB-C port isn't telling you
USB Type C is supposed to be a universal standard, but it’s just universally confusing. A USB Type C port can run at either 5Gbps or 10Gbps and still be labeled USB 3.1 by the laptop maker. USB Type C even technically supports USB 2.0 speeds at a pathetic 480Mbps. So when you see a USB Type C port, the only assumption you can make is that its transfer speeds can vary from as low as 480Mbps to as high as 10Gbps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel wants you to know just how real and just how fast its game-changing Optane storage technology is, so it demonstrated how its new pervasive memory technology leaves a conventional NAND SSD in the dust.The demo, the first public one using a traditional desktop environment, took place Wednesday morningat the company’s annual developer forum in Shenzhen, China. Intel executive Rob Crooke showed identical desktop computers performing a simple file copy.+ MORE INTEL: What's happening with the Intel executive turnover? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD's new Polaris graphics architecture ushers in a fourth-generation graphics core, unheard of power efficiency, and perhaps more importantly for the company, hope.The company said Monday that Polaris will pack a mostly redesigned GPU including the new fourth-gen GCN cores, a new memory controller, new multimedia cores, and a new geometry processor. Perhaps more importantly, it'll be just as fast as a comparable Nvidia part, while using a lot less power, the company said. In a demo to the press, AMD showed off a PC with an early Polaris GPU running Star Wars Battlefield at 1920x1080 resolution at 60 fps and consuming just 86 watts. The exact same system outfitted with a GeForce GTX 950 consumed 140 watts. AMD used desktop parts to sub in for laptop parts as it didn't have mobile components yet, but the chip will initially be aimed at laptops and more entry-level desktop graphics cards.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel’s fifth-generation Broadwell CPU has been the default laptop processor of choice since its debut in January, but it’s been difficult to get a real bead on just how much of an improvement it really was over its Haswell predecessor.That’s because unlike desktops, where it’s easy to control the environment they run in, laptops are complete packages. I tried to compare the updated ThinkPad Carbon X1 Carbon with Broadwell to the Haswell ThinkPad Carbon X1, for instance, but it wasn’t quite apples-to-apples. I initially determined that the Broadwell CPU was significantly faster than the Haswell. Something didn’t ring right, though, and ultimately I decided Lenovo’s redesign of the laptop likely contributed to the results and really made it useless to try to draw any conclusion on the CPUs themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you’re in a panic because the Internet told you that your shiny new SSD may lose data in “just a few days” when stored in a hot room, take a chill pill—it’s apparently all a huge misunderstanding, according to the man who wrote the original presentation all the fear is based on.In a conversation with Kent Smith of Seagate and Alvin Cox, the Seagate engineer who wrote the presentation that set the Internet abuzz, PCWorld was told we’re all just reading it wrong.“People have misunderstood the data that they’re looking at,” Smith said. Cox agreed saying there’s no reason to fret. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The MacBook Air's battery life is legendary. Colleagues who drive MacBook Airs claim they can get all-day battery life, and that no similarly sized PC can do the same. But now we have a real contender: The Dell XPS 13. Time to test those claims.Before we dig in, it's important to note that there's no single test that can compare PC and MacBook battery life directly. We have to arrive at comparable numbers through reasoned use of similar tests. I'll also be discussing other reviewers' tests to help paint a more detailed picture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Gordon Mah Ung