Month: June 2020

This is AMD’s secret weapon against Intel and it could change personal computing forever

AMD’s big announcement this week was the launch of the new Ryzen 3000 XT CPUs – a stopgap between the current generation and the Ryzen 4000 series expected to launch later this year.

Tucked away at the foot of the press release is mention of something that might become a fundamental part of AMD’s toolset, sooner rather than later, as it seeks to compete more sustainably with arch nemesis Intel.

TechRadar Pro covered the launch of AMD StoreMi back in April, but version 2.0 has now been announced and will include “a new caching-based acceleration algorithm that enhances data integrity and prioritizes most-used data, speeding up boot times by up to 31% and decreasing game load times by up to 13% vs an HDD only”.

The tests were carried out using a hard drive of unknown capacity (or spinning speed) with a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD, again of unknown origin. In reality, you should be able to mix and match any sort of storage, regardless of whether it is magnetic or not.

No RAMDisk yet

Sadly, this version of StoreMI doesn’t (yet) include the Radeon RAMDisk, which would achieve the Holy Grail of allowing RAM and storage to mix, similar to what Intel has done with Optane.

We still believe this facility will arrive at some point, but why? Well, AMD has been working very closely with Microsoft on the brand new Xbox Series X gaming console and one of the biggest leaps in performance has come from moving to a new storage system that combines software (DirectStorage) with customized hardware. 

It turns out that DirectStorage is something Microsoft plans to bring to Windows as well, as it can reduce the processor overhead from I/O operations from multiple cores to just a fraction of a single core. While it will not be tied to any custom hardware, AMD is likely to benefit due to the modular nature of its CPU architecture.

So where does that leave us? In a not-so-distant future, one can imagine an AMD system that pools together all the available memory/storage resources, managed intelligently in a way that’s far more efficient than what Windows 10 achieves with Virtual Memory, the part of your storage component the operating system uses as RAM.

All this is pure speculation, of course, but the fact AMD has dedicated resources to StoreMi makes us optimistic about its future.

iPhone 12 Pro killer feature confirmed — and Galaxy Note 20 should be nervous

One of the biggest questions we have heading into the iPhone 12 launch is how the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro phones will be different. And now a new leak has seemingly confirmed one of the top features for the iPhone 12 Pro.

Ross Young, founder and CEO of Display Supply chain Consultants, posted a list on Twitter of phones launching in 2020 that he anticipates will feature 120Hz displays. This includes the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy Note 20 Plus/Ultra but also the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max. 

As initially reported by GSMArena, this is an important development because we have seen rumors that Apple was wavering on whether to add a 120Hz display to the iPhone 12 Pro lineup. According to leaker Max Weinbach back in May, Apple would not adopt 120Hz “unless it is perfect” and that engineers were unhappy with it due to color calibration issues.

So to see the iPhone 12 Pro and iPone 12 Pro on this list is certainly a positive development. Apple already offers a ProMotion display on the iPad Pro that scales up to 120Hz depending on the content that’s on screen.

In this latest Twitter thread, Young said he expects “Apple’s pro’s to have it and to at least switch between 60 and 120Hz.” That’s good, but it won’t match the LTPO technology that will apparently power the Galaxy Note 20 Plus/Ultra. This will reportedly allow Samsung’s flagship to scale from 1Hz to 120Hz, which would presumably save power.

Regardless, the apparent confirmation of ProMotion 120Hz screens on the iPhone 12 Pro will help Apple tick that box in the minds of phone shoppers that care about specs and should give it enough ammunition to battle the Galaxy Note 20 Plus/Ultra. Also note that Young’s list doesn’t include the regular Galaxy Note 20, so the best 120Hz display could be reserved for the pricier flagship phablet.

The GSM Arena report also echoes other iPhone 12 Pro rumors we’ve heard previously. For instance, the 6.7-inch iPhone 12 Pro Max will reportedly be thinner than the iPhone 11 Pro Max at 7.4 mm vs 8.1 mm. And because the iPhone 12 Pro is expected to use a stacked motherboard, Apple should be able to squeeze in bigger batteries this time around.

Other iPhone 12 Pro rumors point to Apple’s more premium phones offering three rear cameras plus a LiDAR sensor for enhanced performance in iPhone AR apps and photography workflows. The regular iPhone 12 handsets are expected to offer just two rear shooters and lack a telephoto zoom. 

In addition, the iPhone 12 Pro should pack in more RAM and support both mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G. The regular iPhone 12 will likely support only the latter 5G flavor. None of the new iPhone 12 phones are expected to come with EarPods in the box, so you’ll likely see Apple push the AirPods and AirPods Pro even more this fall.

As for the Galaxy Note 20 Plus/Ultra, it has a lot more going for it than its own 120Hz display, based on the rumors. This includes a 108MP camera, a dedicated camera sensor for auto focus, an improved S Pen and a bigger battery.

Initial tests shows impressive performance gains with new 5600M AMD GPU in 16-inch MacBook Pro

Apple added this week a new GPU option for the 16-inch MacBook Pro lineup. Customers can now purchase Apple’s high-end notebook with an AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU at $800 additional cost from the base model MacBook Pro.

But how does it compare with the other GPUs? YouTube channel Max Tech shows exactly that in its newest video, revealing impressive performance gains with this new model.

In Geekbench 5 Metal tests, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with 5600M graphics scored 43144, while the previous high-end model with an 8GB AMD 5500M GPU scored 28748. The entry model achieved only 21328 with the 4GB 5300M, which is basically half the performance of the new 5600M.

These performance gains should be reflected mostly in 3D intensive graphics tasks. The Unigine Heaven Gaming Test shows that 5300M can only reach 38.4 frames per second in the highest settings, while the 5500M scored 51.1 FPS and the new 5600M got 75.7 FPS. Again, that’s twice the graphics performance of the base model 16-inch MacBook Pro.

However, what’s really interesting in the tests is that the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the 5600M GPU beats the AMD Vega 48 on the latest iMac 5K and the Vega 56 on the iMac Pro.

Other tests show that the new 5600M GPU can render 4K videos in Final Cut Pro without even using its full potential, but the final results were not so different from each model. A 4K video was exported in 3 minutes and 36 seconds with the 5300M, 3 minutes and 21 seconds with the 5500M, and 3 minutes and 3 seconds with the new 5600M.

Although the new AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU makes the 16-inch MacBook Pro an even more expensive machine, it can be very useful for professionals who work constantly with 3D graphics. For regular video editing, the base model can still handle the job.