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Galaxy S10 launch date confirmed: Feb. 20 at Samsung’s Unpacked event in San Francisco - CNET
The Expected Linux Driver State For The Radeon VII - Phoronix
Google Assistant Updates at CES 2019 - Digital Trends

Galaxy S10 launch date confirmed: Feb. 20 at Samsung’s Unpacked event in San Francisco - CNET

Posted: 10 Jan 2019 08:54 AM PST

samsung-galaxy-unpackd-2019-official-invitation-1920x1080 — Samsung

Phones don't typically get a lot of love at CES, but Samsung managed to steal the spotlight by using the show to announce the launch date for its 10th anniversary Galaxy phone, widely expected to be called the Galaxy S10.

The event will take place Wednesday, Feb. 20 at 11 a.m. PT at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. CNET will be on the ground to cover the announcements live.

Samsung's Unpacked events are always a tremendous affair, but this year the company's showing in 2019 matters more than perhaps ever before. Samsung is still hanging on as the world's largest seller of mobile phones, but Chinese rival Huawei is hot on Samsung's heels in the second slot (having booted out Apple), ramping up innovations in 2018 like triple rear cameras and flashy finishes that Samsung has been slow to match.

While Huawei faces bracing challenges of its own, the entire industry is feeling the burn as sales slow. Even Apple, whose iPhones sales made it a trillion-dollar company in 2018, has taken a hit on its new iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR, citing flagging interest in China. It's against this backdrop of softening interest that Samsung is launching a slew of devices in 2019, including a foldable phone and 5G-ready devices.

The mobile giant kept its invitation short and sweet, noting just the date and time of the event, and the livestream URL just below a central image. It's that visual that contains all the clues to what we'll be seeing. A graphic of the number 10 looks like it's been knocked over to the side, then split horizontally into north and south parts. The top half of the digit depicts black ink on a blue and pink background, while the bottom half shows white lettering on a dark purple surface that fades to black.

Now playing: Watch this: Samsung's foldable phone is coming soon

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The 10 clearly represents Samsung's 10th anniversary phone, or the Galaxy S10. But the seam running down the middle of the phone suggests the edges of two curved devices sitting side by side. These could hint at multiple device colors, or even two separate phones.

In fact, we know that Samsung has numerous new phones planned for the year: the Galaxy S9 successor, a foldable phone that could be called the Galaxy X, and 5G devices for Verizon and AT&T. Galaxy S10 rumors suggest three separate S10 phones in their lineup: a standard Galaxy S10, a larger S10 Plus and the S10 Lite, or S10 E.

Any of those would be plausible options, but I'm going to go ahead and speculate that the blue and pink device on top represents the foldable phone, with the sky blue stripe evoking boundless possibility. With a foldable phone, Samsung might be saying, the sky's the limit.

Launching two unique devices at the same event would be a risk for Samsung, since one could overshadow the other. A foldable "Galaxy X" phone, for example, would surely suck all the oxygen out of the relatively run-of-the-mill Galaxy S10.

But we only glimpsed Samsung's foldable phone back in November, and only saw the prototype from afar for a few seconds. It's possible that Samsung could tease the device further without completely unveiling it, too. Mobile World Congress is around the corner, after all, and it's a favorite stage for Samsung unveilings. The company has also been known to host Unpacked events in New York after MWC.

What do you read into the Unpacked invitation for the Galaxy S10? Share your theories in the comments below. Catch up on all the Galaxy S10 rumors here, and about the Galaxy X foldable phone here.

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This story originally posted at 7 a.m. PT.

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Samsung Galaxy S10

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The Expected Linux Driver State For The Radeon VII - Phoronix

Posted: 10 Jan 2019 03:16 AM PST

With yesterday's surprise announcement of the Radeon VII "Radeon 7" as a new $699 7nm second-generation Vega consumer graphics card launching in early February, you may be wondering about the open-source Linux driver support state. While nothing official has come down the wire yet, here is what appears to be the state for this new Vega graphics card on Linux.

AMD hasn't communicated yet about the Linux driver support for Radeon VII, I don't have any review sample or the like at this time, but given the number of questions since yesterday about Linux support, here's what I know based off my close monitoring of the AMD open-source Linux driver development.

Radeon VII is almost definitely part of the new batch of Vega PCI IDs added last month to the AMDGPU kernel driver. If it isn't, well, then there isn't any Radeon VII Linux support right now. But considering the hardware launch is less than one month away and is just a Vega refresh, it's pretty safe to assume it's part of those IDs added. And we haven't heard of any other new Vega cards since December...

Those IDs made it into the Linux 4.20 kernel, which debuted just before Christmas. The IDs were also marked for back-porting to existing kernel stable series (i.e. LTS kernels). But for those on non-rolling-releases like Ubuntu 18.10 where new kernel versions aren't included as part of SRUs, you may need to grab yourself a new kernel and Mesa build from third-party repositories/PPAs for seeing Radeon 7 support.

We haven't seen any Radeon Linux driver patches then specifically targeting those new IDs. So there doesn't appear to be any power management changes, dropping of any Vega workarounds compared to first-gen, etc. We have seen some common Vega updates obviously recently, including just yesterday for updating some golden registers for Vega, but nothing catered explicitly conditionalized around these new IDs.

So unless there is a set of patches not yet published that are needed for Radeon VII or AMD sneaked in some changes under a carefully crafted commit message, it appears to be a clean 7nm shrink of Vega / identical to Vega 20 Radeon Instincts from the driver perspective. Hopefully other patches aren't needed as otherwise it would jeopardize the Linux driver support at launch-day with those patches not likely to hit the kernel and Mesa before 7 February in the leading Linux distributions. Also, hopefully it's not like the recent Radeon RX 590 launch where the Linux support appeared in order but last-minute retail vBIOS changes led to problems and that taking a few weeks post-launch to sort out before the RX 590 Linux driver support was in good standing.

So, fingers crossed, the Radeon VII is ready to go on Linux if you are using Linux 4.20+ (the PCI IDs are marked for stable as mentioned, but using the latest kernel is always recommended for optimal support and performance) and with Linux 4.20 there are some nice performance improvements or if opting for the Linux 5.0 release candidates there is the long-awaited FreeSync support. On the Mesa side, the new Vega IDs are in Mesa 18.2.8 and newer. Obviously there too, I always recommend the very latest stable Mesa (18.3.1+) if you do not want to ride Mesa Git snapshots for the bleeding-edge features and performance out of RadeonSI and RADV.

AMD hasn't yet communicated whether I'll be receiving a Radeon VII review sample for Linux benchmarking but otherwise will be (sadly) picking one up ASAP in February for shedding more information on the Linux state of this 7nm Vega and obviously a ton of gaming and compute benchmarks. Besides the Radeon VII gaming performance reportedly competitive with the RTX 2080, the OpenCL performance improvements mentioned during Wednesday's keynote were also quite enticing.

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Google Assistant Updates at CES 2019 - Digital Trends

Posted: 09 Jan 2019 03:00 AM PST