Workstation

Jim Harris, an author and speaker on disruptive innovations, has released a new report on consumer tech ahead of MWC 2019. In it, he claims that 59% of all the money spent in the same market in 2018 was expended on smartphones. Harris also asserts that Android is now the most popular software platform.

A YouTuber has asserted that Microsoft will port some games and features to the Nintendo Switch later this year. The indie title Ori has been specifically named in relation to this new purported deal to link the two platforms. This development will also apparently bring Xbox Game Passes to the Switch.

Adobe is offering a discount on the prices of all-app Creative Cloud (CC) plans. This offer applies to monthly-paid prices for CC and CC plus Adobe Stock plans only, and drops them to US$39.99 and $69.98 respectively. It is valid from now until March 1, 2019.

Microsoft's next probable major software release is 19H2, the April 2019 update. However, a build associated with a release in 2020 is the one that has most recently popped up for users in the Skip Ahead program. Despite this, the company insists 19H2 will be ready on time.

Acer has released a report in which it puts its January 2019 revenues at about US$540 million. These figures have decreased by 23.7% compared to December 2018 and by 1.3% compared to January 2018. The company has cited the ongoing effects of the SoC shortage in explaining these changes.

NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, referenced both Unreal and Unity Engines in relation to ray-tracing during a company conference call about its fourth-quarter earnings conducted this week. That is odd, however, as only Unreal has ray-tracing support at present. Therefore, Huang may just have leaked Unity's imminent roll-out of similar capabilities.

Shuttle has expanded its range of compact Mini PCs. The DH370 is a barebones PC based on the H370 chipset that can be equipped with up to a hexa-core processor.

A new piece in Bloomberg has cited sources allegedly close enough to Activision Blizzard to allege that the gaming company will let "hundreds" of staff go. The firm is apparently taking this action to maximise profits and to "centralize functions". An announcement to this effect is expected on February 12, 2019.

AMD has released its final financial report for 2018. It shows that the company had made nearly US$6.5 billion for this year, which is a 23% increase compared to 2017. The company also claims to have posted a net income of $337 million, whereas it had made a net loss the previous year. Analysis has also shown that AMD has increased its share of server and PC markets.

Many Skype users may be reluctant to take a call due to how messy or inappropriate their surroundings may be. Now, however, the app's latest update adds a toggle that blurs everything but the caller out of a camera's shot. This new 'background blur' option is generated by AI, and should function on most PCs.

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's chief executive officer (CEO), will deliver the keynote speech at this year's GPU Technology Conference (GTC). This event will take place in several locations in San José, California, from March 17 to 21, 2019. Huang will present on his company's recent breakthroughs in AI, robotics and self-driving tech during his speech.

The next Oculus VR headset to be released is rumored to be called the Rift S. The latest leaks on this device suggests that it will come with its own onboard tracking cameras, rather than rely on USB-connected sensors. It may also fix the original Rift's problems with the appearance of 'god rays' on the lenses, and adjust for room lighting with 50-to-60Hz modes.

The latest update to the VLC media player (4.0) will bring more features, especially for iOS. However, it will also no longer support older versions of the same platform, along with some others (e.g. Windows XP). It also now offers the ability to play a full list of music without pauses of any kind.

A post on Reddit allegedly contains a screenshot of a Gmail app interface that integrates many features taken from Inbox. They include a pinned-only toggle, per-subject bundling and Assistant-esque reminders. They may have been picked for preservation by Google before Inbox shuts down for good.

The new Xeon W-3175X workstation-oriented processor sports no less than 28 cores and 56 threads, runs at 3.1 GHz (4.3 GHz turbo boost), has a TDP of 255 W, and supports up to 512 GB of hexa-channel DDR4 ECC memory. Announced back in October, now it is finally available for purchase at a price of US$2,999.

Jumping from the GTX 1080 to the RTX 2080 will cost users an extra $250 USD. Eurocom is proving that the MXM form factor is here to stay even in the face of Dell's proprietary DGFF solution for the Alienware Area-51m.

Facebook has just announced an initiative in which messages from its own Messenger, as well as from its acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp, will be integrated using a singular infrastructure. This contravenes an earlier commitment on the part of the parent company that these 3 services would remain independent. This plan has also raised alarm among privacy experts and WhatsApp staff.

A new report by ResearchAndMarkets.com indicates that the wireless headphone market will continue to show healthy growth into the year 2024. At that point, it could be worth as much as US$34 billion. The report indicates that this could be driven by increasing sophistication in wireless audio features and technology.

Navi is the currently-accepted name for the generation of AMD processors to succeed the Radeon VII GPU. Cards based on this upcoming 7nm platform may be released later this year. A new leak points to new chipset variants for the series that may differ from those mentioned in previous rumors.

An ever-increasing body of leaks point to '1660 Ti' as the name for one of the first GTX cards to feature the Turing architecture. It suggests that it may be an RTX 2060 counterpart, just without ray-tracing. A new rumor has indicated, however, that it will not have as many CUDA cores as the low-tier RTX.

Netflix has announced plans to inflate its prices by up to 18%. However, this will only affect new and existing customers who use US dollars to pay for their subscriptions. This move resulted in a 6.5% increase in its stock price yesterday (January 15, 2019).

Recently, Twitter revamped its platform with the 'Interesting Tweets' feature. However, some users have asserted that the tweets chosen by its algorithm persisted in timelines regardless of whether they turned it off in Settings or not. Now, a new option to return to a completely chronological order of tweets is being rolled out.

AMD could make 5000 - or less - Radeon VII GPUs for sale for their February release, according to sources cited in a new TweakTown report. This may be because the new 7nm cards are Radeon Instinct cut-downs. In addition, this report indicates that there will be a dearth of Radeon VII custom cards.

Anandtech claims to have obtained access to some materials that indicate Intel is planning to release a new, extremely high-end desktop CPU. This processor, the i9-9990XE, is described as having a base clock of 4.0 GHz, 14 cores, 28 threads and a TDP of 225 watts. However, it will be open to OEM bids only.

According to preliminary estimates by Gartner, Lenovo was the world’s largest PC vendor in 2018 in terms of units shipped. The Chinese company was at the top of the pile for the last quarter of the year (4Q18) and beat out HP and Dell for the year overall. However, Lenovo only came third for 4Q18 shipments in the US, behind HP and Dell.

The developer studio Bungie has announced that it will publish its flagship series, Destiny, independently, thus ending its partnership with Activision. This eventuality has been anticipated by industry insiders and observers for some time. However, this is the first time that Bungie has made an official statement on the subject.

The AMD keynote for this year mainly revolved around the announcement of the Radeon VII GPUs. However, the company's CEO also revealed that the third generation of Ryzen desktop processors would become available soon. There was not much additional detail given on this new CPU line, besides that it is definitely of a 7-nanometer architecture.

The CEO of AMD, Dr. Lisa Su, devoted much of the company’s CES 2019 keynote to unveiling and detailing the Radeon VII GPU. However, the presentation also turned to CPUs thereafter, whereupon the second-generation EPYC chipset for servers was discussed. AMD is clearly upbeat about the capabilities of these new processors.

Asus has revealed the StudioBook S (W700) workstation that comes with either an Intel Xeon E-2176 or an Intel Core i7-8750H processor and an Nvidia Quadro P3200 graphics card. The powerful 2.39 kg/5.27 lb laptop, which is aimed at content creation professionals, also comes with a Pantone-validated 17-inch FHD NanoEdge display and up to 64 GB DDR4 2666 MHz RAM.

Asus has issued a press release to reveal the new Mini PC ProArt PA90 compact workstation computer. The Taiwanese manufacturer has managed to pack some impressive hardware into the device, including up to an i9-9900K processor, 64 GB RAM, and up to an Nvidia Quadro P4000 GPU option. The Mini PC is aimed at professionals who deal with CAD elements in their workflow.

Bethesda has announced that it will push another new updated to Fallout 76 in order to fix the numerous issues players have highlighted in the past. This new patch also apparently includes new features for the game itself, which include the ability to set up a player-run store. Fallout 76 will also gain new PvP functions and vaults.

Do you still enjoy Steam on your Windows XP machine? Seems that's just too bad for you, then. Valve's prior announcement that it will cease support for Windows XP and Vista comes into effect today. Users still on these platforms were still able to play games, but lost access to all other Steam features, in 2018; now, they are losing access to the client as a whole.

Under normal circumstances, the most up-to-date version of Windows begins to drag in a majority of market share (defined as the percentage of PCs that run it) in the year of its release. Windows 10 1809 has not enjoyed this level of success so far. In fact, according to a new report by AdDuplex, it has only attained 6.6% of the total market share from 2016 to 2018.

Microsoft has reportedly begun to induce PCs to download and install the latest Windows 10 update, whether the user seeks for it or not. The company claims that this is necessary to protect devices against security threats. However, there are a number of workarounds for this situation.

Epic Games is now sitting on US$3 billion in gross profits this year. According to a new article in TechCrunch based on the claims of a 'knowledgeable' source. This level of success is (somewhat obviously) made off the back of Epic's flagship, Fortnite. It is a particularly impressive claim, considering that this title's revenue is largely derived from in-game purchases.

A Twitter-based leaker claims to have found a Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) certification for the full list of Gigabyte/AORUS graphics cards to incorporate the RTX 2060 GPU. According to this extensive listing, the two brands are making no less than 40 separate SKUs of this line. They range from 3 to 6GB in capacity, are either GDDR5 or GDDR6 and cover many form-factors and editions, from Mini ITX to AORUS Extreme.

Fallout 76 has been lambasted by users and critics over its significant bugs and lack of playability at launch. Its developers, Bethesda, has attempted to make restitution for these shortcomings through an offer of free access to older Fallout titles on PC to all who logged into '76, regardless of platform.

The small MXM form factor is getting its time in the spotlight now that gaming laptops are expected to make the transition from Nvidia Pascal to Turing soon. Eurocom is taking a jab at the “planned obsolescence” of most laptops whereas the CPU and GPU in many Eurocom laptops are easily upgradeable by the end user.

Microsoft is now rumored to be working on 4K webcams. These accessories, which are likely to go under the Surface brand, will be compatible with Windows 10-powered devices and the Xbox One. The new webcams, which may also support Windows Hello, may be available next year.

The RTX 2070 with Max-Q design is NVIDIA's upcoming mid-range laptop card. It has been spotted in leaked Final Fantasy XV benchmarks. The results (assuming they are genuine) put the new mobile GPU at the top of a list that also includes the GTX 1080 (desktop and Max-Q versions) and the Radeon RX Vega.

A Videocardz correspondent claims to have received tips to the effect that NVIDIA will be bringing out a Turing-based card without ray-tracing capabilities next year. It may be called either the GTX 1160 or GTX 1660 Ti, and may be launched alongside the RTX 2060. This putative card is rumored to incorporate the TU116 GPU.

The current Windows Insider Preview build (or Windows 10 19H1) has been updated to include support for the 'shruggie' and other emojis of its types in the OS' hotkeys. This may finally bring a welcome end to workarounds with keyboard shortcuts and so on. 19H1 should be available in early 2019.

NVIDIA's Titan RTX, the best-spec'd (and most expensive) iteration of Turing architecture out there, has been reportedly overclocked and benchmarked. A Twitter enthusiast has claimed that it achieved just over 41,000 in the graphics portion of 3DMark Fire Strike. However, JayzTwoCents asserts that his own Titan RTX did not break 37,000 in the same sub-test, and that it was not much faster overall than an overclocked RTX 2080 Ti.

A simplified Start menu, Windows Sandbox, Kaomoji and more are rolling out to the Insider Preview Fast ring in the latest 19H1 build. Build 18305 is available to download now from Windows Update.

Tencent Games has asserted that it has drawn level with Epic Games' Fortnite in terms of mobile user numbers for its own game, PUBG. This means that PUBG has made it to about 200 million users. It is estimated that both games also have the same approximate number of users who play at least once a day (30 million).

Are you tired of using Photoshop to clear the background from your photos so you can replace it? The makers of remove.bg clearly thinks you are. It offers a service in which its AI identifies the main subject matter of any image, then makes the background around it transparent.

The latest JEDEC standards for high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) allows for 24GB rather than 8GB of memory, as well as speeds of up to 307GB per second, per stack. This effectively increases the amount of memory NVIDIA or AMD can put on a single HMB2 card to as much as 96GB, with bandwidths of 1.2 TB per second.