Technology - Google News

AMD announces Ryzen 9 4900H and 4900HS mobile chips - The Verge
Microsoft Beats PS5 to the Punch with Impressive Xbox Series X Features - Push Square
Microsoft Teams struggles as coronavirus pushes millions to work from home - VentureBeat

AMD announces Ryzen 9 4900H and 4900HS mobile chips - The Verge

Posted: 16 Mar 2020 06:10 AM PDT

AMD is announcing two new laptop CPUs this morning: the Ryzen 9 4900H and the 4900HS. The chips are the top-performing members of AMD's new 4000 mobile series, which is based on the company's 7nm Zen 2 architecture, and they aim to take on Intel's Core i9 laptop line. You should see them in new laptops starting this upcoming Spring.

The chips are designed to power desktop-class gaming and productivity in (relatively) portable laptops. AMD announced that the 4900HS will appear in Asus' 14-inch ROG Zephyrus G14, which weighs just over 3.5 pounds — that's a pretty small form factor to feature a flagship processor. Asus is marketing the model as "the world's most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop."

The 35W 4900HS offers an eight-core, 16-thread design and 3.0 GHz clock speeds that can boost up to 4.3 GHz. The 45W 4900H has a 3.3 GHz base with a boost up to 4.4 GHz.

AMD hasn't yet given reviewers a chance to benchmark the systems. But the company (unsurprisingly) promises that its new chips deliver superior performance to that of their Intel competitors. In AMD's own testing, the 4900HS outperformed Intel's Core i9-9880H by 28% on Cinebench R20 (which leverages the CPU to render a complex image), 23% on video transcoding, 56% on image rendering, and 32% on audio encoding. The i9 won out by 8% on PCMark 10 DCC, which measures overall system performance for content creation. No public benchmarks for the 4900H as of yet.

AMD also claims the 4900HS, paired with a Nvidia RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU, can surpass 60 frames per second on a number of AAA titles, including Rise of the Tomb Raider (104 FPS), Hitman (90 FPS), and Far Cry 5 (90 FPS). This isn't particularly surprising, however — we'd expect most modern H-series chips to produce decent gaming results when paired with a 2060 Max-Q.

Both chips will be able to make use of AMD's SmartShift feature, which enables the system to shift power between the CPU and GPU to optimize for games of different intensities.

To reiterate: these are AMD's benchmarks, which we haven't been able to independently verify. But if Ryzen 9 chips are at all comparable to Intel's top-of-the-line processors, that certainly signals an upcoming shift in the mobile market. In recent memory, AMD's mobile processors have been known as lower-cost options compared to Intel's offerings; this would be the first time of late that AMD has offered a chip competitive with Intel's best.

AMD's Ryzen 4000 series also includes the Ryzen U-Series, designed for ultra-portable laptops, and other members of the Ryzen H-Series — the six-core Ryzen 5 4600H and the 8-core Ryzen 7 4800H. Onstage at CES 2020, AMD CEO Lisa Su claimed that the chips are twice as power-efficient as second-generation Ryzen chips.

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Microsoft Beats PS5 to the Punch with Impressive Xbox Series X Features - Push Square

Posted: 16 Mar 2020 05:45 AM PDT

While we'd expected this year to be all about PlayStation 5, a combination of coronavirus and Sony's general reluctance means we've had to make do with a logo thus far. Fortunately, that similar-looking symbol has gone on to become one of the most liked gaming images in Instagram history, but there's no doubt that fans' patience is beginning to wear thin as forum goers bemoan the lack of information.

Microsoft, perhaps in dire need of publicity wins, has been much more outspoken about its device – and it's allowed tech experts Digital Foundry to peek behind the curtain as part of a colossal Xbox Series X expose. It's a dense read, but it ultimately boils down to an eye-watering 12.155 teraflops of GPU compute power – double that of the already potent Xbox One X.

We'll leave you to read the full breakdown or sister site Pure Xbox's summary, but features that could certainly have Sony sweating include the ability to suspend multiple games at once, as well as system-wide optimisations to reduce screen tear and input lag. Perhaps most interesting of all, the Redmond firm's continued investment into backwards compatibility means all titles will be updated to support HDR.

It'll be interesting to see whether this new information coaxes Sony out of its slumber, or whether coronavirus has seriously impeded its communication plans for PS5. The world will be listening when the Japanese giant eventually decides to speak, but after catching Microsoft cold with a series of Wired reports last year, it feels like it's been all together too quiet of late.

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Microsoft Teams struggles as coronavirus pushes millions to work from home - VentureBeat

Posted: 16 Mar 2020 08:08 AM PDT

Microsoft Teams users in Europe are reporting major issues accessing the service today, at a time when millions of people are relying on technology to help them work and study remotely.

As people around the world are increasingly working from home in an effort to avert a COVID-19 catastrophe, cloud-based collaboration and communication tools will prove pivotal to companies' success. So Microsoft Teams' struggles this morning could not have come at a worse time.

As Europe's newly enlarged remote workforce logged on this morning, users from across the continent turned to Twitter to complain that all was not well inside Microsoft Teams. The company itself confirmed that it was investigating "messaging-related functionality problems," but reports suggest many users have also encountered problems creating new teams, modifying members, recording meetings, screen-sharing, and more.

We're investigating messaging-related functionality problems within Microsoft Teams. Please refer to TM206544 in your admin center for further details. ^JP

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) March 16, 2020

While the underlying issue is likely a vast increase in the number of people using Microsoft Teams to work from home, it's undoubtedly compounded by the fact that many schools are embracing distance learning during the COVID-19 crisis.

Last week, Microsoft announced an enhanced version of the free Microsoft Teams product — removing restrictions to the number of people who can join a team and offering additional features usually reserved for paid users. The company also revealed that it was offering a six-month free trial for the premium tier of Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams passed 20 million daily users back in November, and alongside rivals like Slack it's emerging as a crucial tool for those who work from home and for increasingly distributed workforces, where team members may be spread across offices and locations.

Recent figures suggest more than two-thirds of the global workforce already work remotely at least one day a week, but with COVID-19 wreaking havoc around the world, many more people will be working from home for at least the next couple of months. Some have argued that this could lead to a permanent shift toward remote working, but the tools and technologies to enable this would need to prove their worth — which is why all eyes will be on Microsoft Teams, Google's G Suite, Slack, Zoom, and the rest in the coming months.

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