maximumpc.com AUG 2019 MAXIMUMPC 13
Whatever you make of the politics behind
the US-China tussle, the ramifications are
getting serious. A slew of big companies
have been obliged to stop doing business
with Huawei, including Intel, Qualcomm,
Broadcom, and Google. No Google means
no Android OS. The bulk of Android may be
open source, but crucial parts of it—the
Play Store, Gmail, location services, and
more—aren’t. Huawei has been working
on its own OS since 2012; according to
sources inside China, it could be out by
this fall. It will be compatible with Android,
although recompiling apps makes them
considerably faster. The Chinese market
is huge, and difficult to break into. Google
won’t want to be left out for too long, or it
may find it hard to get back. The company
is in talks with the US government to try to
get an exemption from the ban.
Huawei may be able to live without
Google’s Android, but it has also lost
access to ARM, and replacing the silicon
isn’t going to be so easy. Chips using
licensed ARM technology run on about
95 percent of the world’s smartphones.
Alternative designs are thin on the
ground—a couple of open-source projects
(MIPS and RISC-V), and little else. Huawei
owns HiSilicon, which makes Kirin SoCs
(based on ARM designs), but starting from
scratch on new designs would take years.
Before the ban started, Huawei stockpiled
enough chips for over three months.
When this pile runs dry, it’ll be in trouble.
Where does all this leave owners of
Huawei phones? Thankfully, you’ll be fine.
All the bans only apply to new devices.
What happens if the situation hasn’t been
resolved before the release of Android
Q isn’t clear. For now, the advice has to
be to avoid new Huawei phones until the
situation settles down again. –CLChinese firm is shunned
GooGle and
aRM dRop
Huawei
are you ready
for PCIe 5.0?
We haven’t got PCIe 4.0 going
yet, and already the official specs
for PCIe 5.0 have been released.
Speeds are set to double from
16GT/s to 32GT/s per lane. PCIe
4.0 was announced in 2011, but
graphics cards didn’t need it.
They rarely hit the buffers when
running on an eight-lane PCIe
3.0 slot, let alone a 16-lane slot.
PCIe 4.0 enables you to use fewer
lanes on some peripherals,
dropping the graphics card to a
four-lane connection for example.
It also helps AMD as it uses PCIe
lanes as the processor chipset
interconnect. Cheap, fast SSDs
change all that. A four-lane M.
board needs all the bandwidth it
can get. Storage demands may
prompt a fast adoption of PCIe 5.0.Xbox Game Pass
Comes to PC
Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass for
PC will run in beta at first, at $4.
a month, then will jump to $9.99 a
month. There’s a healthy library of
over 100 titles, and it should grow
fairly quickly. The Xbox console
version of Game Pass (they have
exactly the same name, which
could get confusing) has over 200
titles, although a good few of those
are getting old. It’s a good deal for
PC gamers, as you get to pick your
games and play them online with
your buddies; console gamers
have to part with $14.99 a month
for Xbox Live Gold to do that. It also
gives you a 20 percent discount on
games, and 10 percent on add-
ons. Microsoft describes the Xbox
Game Pass as a “Netflix-style
subscription service.”Stadia Due this Fall
the GameS InDuStry is about to get a good shaking: Google’s Stadia game streaming
service is due to go live in November. Stadia Pro at $9.99 a month gives access to the
full library of games, while a special Founders Package at $129.99 gives you three
months’ subscription, a Stadia controller, and a Chromecast Ultra. Sometime next
year there will be a free version, called Stadia Base. This will limit you to running
games at 1080p, and you don’t get your pick from the library, although you can buy
individual titles. The launch games list is short—just 32, with no exclusives—but they
are all top titles (Balder’s Gate III anyone?), and there are a lot more in the pipeline.
The exact resolutions you’ll be able to use effectively will depend on the speed of
your Internet connection. Google says you’ll need 10Mb/s for 720p, double that for
1080p, and 35Mb/s for 4K. If you have a data cap, you could be in trouble, too. You
also need low latency; critical for gaming, and doubly critical for multiplayer games.
Stadia’s rival, Microsoft’s xCloud, is also due a public trial. The difference is that
Stadia offers more than running a game on the cloud; it’s a development platform, too.
xCloud is, put crudely, a rack of console motherboards playing games; we haven’t
really left the Xbox environment. Google’s Stadia is more ambitious—a developer
could potentially make just one version of its game that’ll run pretty much anywhere
with a decent broadband connection at 4K. Potentially, Stadia could kill not only the
idea of owning games, but owning the means to run them independently, too. –CLTom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Breakpoint, one of Stadia’s
initial lineup, looking good.©^
ubisoft.