Pieces of Eight
It’s March 14th, happy Pi Day, and the battle of the unreleased smartphones rages on as the mobile tech world awaits the official unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus later this month, and the Apple iPhone 8/10/Edition/Pro or whatever it will be now has another speculative render for us to enjoy ahead of its expected September reveal.
The folks over at BGR posted up pix of the new Samsung flagship phone a couple of weeks ago, so the S8 is pretty much a known quantity at this point. But it’s being overshadowed by the 10th anniversary iPhone, whatever it’ll end up being called, and now artist Arthur Reis is taking his turn at iPhone 8 digital prognostication, which features some new looks at the “all screen” design but adds dual cameras, wireless charging and few other interesting bits.
The video popped up on the Concepts iPhone YouTube channel, which has a somewhat spotty track record of getting predictions right, but, hey, they have lots of great ideas about what might be, albeit in render form. Keep in mind we won’t likely know what the new iPhone will actually look like until Tim Cook waves it at the crowd in September. The Galaxy S8 phones, on the other hand, will be revealed March 29th and should ship a few weeks later.
It’s the scheduler! No, it’s the threading!
Computer chip maker AMD continues to gather momentum as its new Ryzen series of CPUs get released, and we’ve got a full review of the now 1700 model, which is a step down from the 1800 in terms of price, but suffice to say it performed well in our rigorous torture tests. However, AMD has come up against some issues with their new chips when it comes to gaming performance, and they took to their blog Monday to put the lid on some theories as to what’s up.
First of all, AMD said in no uncertain terms that the Windows 10 “thread scheduler” was not to blame for and slowdown in performance. Likewise, they also said a popular theory that the “symmetrical multi-threading” section of the chip was to blame was also inaccurate. So what’s the problem? A lack of optimization, according to AMD. The company also said that as time goes on, that optimization will, of course, improve.
In real world terms, the problems are trifling, as our testing showed the 1800 and 1700 to be solid choices for PC builders no matter what the computer is going to be used for. Check out our full review for the AMD Ryzen 1700 here.
A lesson learned with a wink and smile
Remember last year when well-intentioned British scientists launched an online vote to name their new polar research ship? Yep, bad idea. The winning name? Boaty McBoatface.
Well, that name didn’t pass master with thine of the stiff upper lip, and the ship ended up honoring dinosaur enthusiast and nature film narrator extraordinaire Sir David Attenborough. But those Brits aren’t entirely humorless, so the McBoatface moniker has actually landed on an actual watercraft: a very yellow robotic submarine that will indeed be aboard Sir David’s properly named vessel. And this is no bathtub sub, either.
The newly christened Boaty is about ten feet long and can deep dive to about 15,000 feet below the waves. It then radios back if it found any underwater polar dinosaurs Attenborough can add to his park. Or, you know, other more boring “sciency” stuff. But, there is also a cartoon version of Boaty that scientists hope will get young Attenborugh types interested in undersea exploration, rather than resurrecting dinosaurs.
