Maximum PC - UK (2020-01)

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12 MAXIMUMPC JAN 2020 maximumpc.com

TRIUMPHS TRAGEDIES

SUSPENDED ANIMATION

A trial to treat trauma can put

people into suspended animation

for up to two hours, by replacing

blood with ice-cold saline.

GLASS STORAGE

Microsoft’s Project Silica has

stored the movie Superman in

a pane of glass using 100-plus

layers of “voxels.”

5G TYRE

Pirelli’s Cyber Tire uses sensors

and 5G to transmit data on road

conditions to nearby cars.

MY PEOPLE TO DIE

Microsoft has stopped

development for My People in

Win 10. Very few people used it.

PATCH HITS PERFORMANCE

A fix for a bug in Intel’s Skylake

architecture has taken a couple

of percent off its performance;

compiler fixes will reduce that.

UBER TO RECORD YOU

As an aid to security, Uber plans

to make audio recordings of your

journey, initially in Latin America,

but destined to come here.

A monthly snapshot of what’s good and bad in tech

Tech Triumphs and Tragedies

AMD HAS A NEW WORKSTATION graphics card

based around its 7nm Navi GPU: the Radeon Pro

W5700. It’s a workstation version of the consumer

RX 5700, and uses the same Navi 10 GPU. AMD has changed its card naming

convention, shortening the WX prefix to a plain W, and bringing the numbers

into line between the two ranges. The W5700 has 36 compute units, 8GB of

GDDR6, and runs at a maximum clock of 1,930MHz. This is faster then the RX

5700, and pushes the 32-bit floating point performance above the RX 5700 XT.

It’s for graphics work, not AI; AMD is still behind Nvidia here. The W5700 is

touted as a replacement for both the Vega-based WX 8200 and Polaris-based

WX 7100; it isn’t as fast on paper as the former, but it is much more efficient.

AMD released benchmarks pitching it against the Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000,

where it more than holds its own. The W5700 costs $799, and more Navi

workstation cards are expected soon. –CL

Workstations get

efficient 7nm graphics

NAVI GOES

PROFESSIONAL

FIREFOX BUG SCAM

SCAMMERS HAVE BEEN EXPLOITING a bug in Firefox that can cause the browser to freeze,

even resisting a restart. When you hit a booby-trapped page, the malicious code stops

Firefox, and a pop-up appears that claims your Windows Registry key is illegal. You are

invited to ring technical support within five minutes, or your system will be disabled.

You’re put through to a person claiming to be from Microsoft, who tries to get you to pay

for a Windows license you don’t need. It can get nasty, as you can’t close the pop-up. The

only way to get out of the loop is to shut down the process in Task Manager. If you have

Tab Restore enabled (turned off by default), it reappears next time you start the browser.

To clear it, you then need to disconnect from the network or change the preferences.

Mozilla has fixed the bug, and by the time you read this, it should be patched as part of

build 71, but there is another lock-up bug that remains unfixed two years after it was

reported. It’s a pity it takes a callous scam to get these vulnerabilities mended.–CL

ANOTHER AUTHENTICATION

POP-UP EXPLOITATION

THE WORLD OF CONSUMER GPUS has been

a contest between AMD and Nvidia for so

l o n g , i t ’s h ar d to r em e m b er th at th e m ar ket

used to be crowded with contenders. That

will change—Intel has been working on its

own discrete graphics card tech, the Xe

Graphics Architecture, for some time. Its

first iteration, code-named Ponte Vecchio,

is a 7nm chip (Intel’s first). It uses a high-

speed Compute Express Link (CXL) and

Intel’s 3D Foveros system, which enables

chips to be built in layers. It has also

announced its first card featuring Ponte

Vecchio, which Intel claims is an exascale

GPU (capable of a billion, billion FLOPs).

Before we get carried away, Intel is

aiming its initial efforts at the very top of

the market; this is a server card for heavy

HPC and AI workloads. And to make good

on that exascale promise requires multiple

cards working together. There are some

mouth-watering high-end technologies at

play. The CXL interface requires PCIe 5.0,

for example; we’ve barely got PCIe 4.0 on

desktops. Intel has released some baffling

material on Xe, but what is clear is that it

has been engineered to be highly scalable,

and interconnected at all levels.

The consumer version of the Xe

Graphics Architecture won’t arrive until

next year, and will probably be built on a

10nm process. Performance will be in

the more realistic teraFLOP department.

The Xe family will eventually come in

three main brands: the high-end Xe-HPC,

Xe-HP for data centers and professional

workstations, and Xe-LP for consumers.

Intel has made plans for virtually every

market segment, right down to laptops

and integrated graphics. This is a massive

project, in time and money, and it’s clear

Intel is serious about making a concerted

grab for the GPU market. It’s about time

we had another horse in the race. –CL

INTEL ENTERS

DISCRETE

GPU MARKET

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