Maximum PC - UK (2020-05)

quickstart

12 MAXIMUM PC MAY 2020 maximumpc.com

TRIUMPHS TRAGEDIES

CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE

Activision’s free battle royale

game clocked up 30 million

players in its first two weeks.

3D PRINTERS HELP OUT

Two Italian 3D printing

companies have been producing

valves for ventilation machines.

COMPUTER VS. COVID-

The Department of Energy’s

Summit supercomputer is

running simulations to test

compounds for possible

coronavirus inhibitors.

SELF-DRIVING THEFT

Uber’s acquisition of Primo self-

driving tech is explained: The

hire from Waymo had stolen it.

ALIEN LIFE NOT FOUND

The SETI project is to close after

21 years. It used distributed

analysis of radio signals to

search for alien life.

PC SALES SLUMP

It looks as if one victim of the

coronavirus will be PC sales,

which are predicted to fall by

30 percent or more.

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

Tech Triumphs and Tragedies

HIGH-END VR requires high-end

hardware. Or it did. Cloud gaming

company Shadow is running a

streaming VR system called the

VR Exploration Program, which we

assume is a beta test. The initial test will only work using an Oculus Quest

headset and a pretty zippy connection: 15ms response, 100Mb/s download,

and 20Mb/s upload. The game streaming services run from $11.99 to $39.

a month. Shadow’s approach is different from Stadia—you can play your PC

games on a multitude of devices, including smartphones, Macs, and any old

PC. Your games actually run on a beefy Win 10 box in Shadow’s data centers.

Log on and add any games you own to your cloud box. Shadow doesn’t sell you

games; what you get is remote access to a high-end rig. VR is power-hungry

and pricey; streaming it might lower the expensive initial hurdle. Could this

approach finally move VR mainstream? We won’t hold our breath. –CL

Now you don’t need

a high-end rig

STREAMING VR

WIN 10 HITS A BILLION

IT IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to get an accurate figure on how many people are using

what OS, but Microsoft thinks that after five years, Win 10 is now running on one billion

machines. Quite an achievement, but not what Microsoft had originally planned. It

wanted to reach that target in 2017, but the free upgrade from Win 7 wasn’t as popular

as the company imagined. Win 10 was called the last version of Windows by Microsoft

back in 2015, it has also been called the “forever version.” Instead of new releases, we

just have a continually updated version, including UI changes to keep things fresh.

However, there is still a lot of work to do yet. Despite the withdrawal of official

support, Win 7 stubbornly refuses to fade away. There are an estimated 300,000 Win 7

systems—about a quarter of all PCs. Apparently, it is still rather popular in China. Even

Steam still has a solid minority of Win 7 users—about 10 percent. As XP proved, it can

take a long time for some people to move on.–CL.

ALTHOUGH WIN 7 STILL

UNACCOUNTABLY POPULAR

AMD’S MOBILE CHIPS have generally taken

second place to its desktop versions. No

longer: AMD claims to have been working

on “Renoir” since 2017, optimizing it for

mobile work. The result is a carefully

packaged chiplet design with up to eight

7nm Zen 2 cores and Vega-based graphics.

Finally, AMD’s mobile chips have the

latest silicon, with the attendant jump in

IPC. A significant improvement over the

3000-series, which is hardly sparkling.

There’s the usual split: the U range for

low-power work, with a TDP of 15W, and

the beefier H and HS series, with a TDP of

35 or 45W. The initial range of nine starts

with the Ryzen 3 4300U, with four cores and

four threads, running at a base of 2.7GHz.

Then there are three six-core Ryzen 5s:

the 4500U has six threads; the 4600U

and 4600H get the full 12. The pattern is

repeated with the three eight-core Ryzen 7

versions, the 4700U having eight threads,

the 4800U and 4800H getting 16. At the

top of the 4000 tree we have the eight-

core Ryzen 9 4800H and HS. The 4800H

has a base clock of 3.3GHz, with a boost

of up to 4.4GHz; the HS clocks at 3.0 and

4.3GHz respectively. Both have eight Vega

graphics cores running at 1,750MHz.

AMD’s comparisons with an Intel

Core i7-9750H show the 4800H beats it

by 8–80 percent in a set of productivity

benchmarks. It can give Intel’s i9-9980H

something to think about, too, just leaving

the i9-9980HK out of reach.

AMD chips tend to be used in generic

laptop designs, while the high end was

designed around Intel’s best—not helped

by AMD’s reputation for poor battery life,

which it claims to have addressed. Intel’s

mobile parts are split between 10nm Ice

Lake and 14nm Comet Lake, a choice of

better GPU or CPU performance. AMD is

about to give Intel the same headache it

has given it in the desktop market. –CL

Renoir brings healthy

performance jump

AMD MOBILES

GO ZEN 2

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