PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst calls Qualcomm "a little too unbothered by Apple's M1 Macs" Qualcomm executives brushed off a question about Apple's new M1-based Macs during a question-and-answer session at the company's Snapdragon Summit today, where Qualcomm announced a new flagship smartphone chipset but no upgrades to its year-old chips for PCs... In general, reviews of Qualcomm-powered laptops such as the Microsoft Surface Pro X have celebrated the devices' long battery life, but lamented problems with third-party apps that were originally coded for Intel processors. That stands in stark contrast to Apple's new M1-based Macs, which don't seem to be slowed down as badly by older software...

"It's a great validation of what we've been doing for the past few years and [Qualcomm's product line] is just going to get stronger and stronger as we broaden our scope," said Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm SVP for mobile. Katouzian made sure to subtly call out ways in which Qualcomm's always-connected PCs are superior to Apple's newest Macs. The Macs lack 4G connectivity and still have poor-quality, 720p front-facing cameras... Katouzian also pointed out that (presumably unlike Apple) Qualcomm addresses "many tiers...and many price points" with its 7c, 8c, and 8cx laptop chipsets, letting Windows laptop makers drive prices well below the MacBook Air's $999 list price.

The core problem with Qualcomm's always-connected PC strategy is one that Qualcomm itself can't fix. While Qualcomm could, and probably will, soon announce a laptop chip that's based on the new Snapdragon 888 and has a level of raw power closer to Apple's M1, it's really down to Microsoft, as well as peripheral and app makers to solve the platform incompatibilities that have frustrated PC reviewers.
Hot Hardware cites Microsoft's promises of changes come in future updates to Windows 10, arguing that "with the arrival of x64 emulation and a growing library of native Arm64 apps, Windows 10 on Arm is going to be an even more powerful platform." From a performance perspective, while running Windows 10 on Arm, these [Snapdragon 8cx] chips may currently be at a disadvantage to the Apple M1, but some day in the not so distant future that might not be the case. We have no doubt that Qualcomm is likely working on a new Windows PC-centric SoC that is based on Snapdragon 888 or similar architecture. Qualcomm has promised a 25 percent uplift in CPU and a 35% lift in GPU performance over the Snapdragon 865, with the Snapdragon 888, which already offers a big boost over the previous gen Snapdragon 855/8cx. So, Qualcomm has the potential to put up a strong showing against the Apple M1, whenever its next-generation Snapdragon PC chip launches.
That may be, but John Gruber at Daring Fireball argues that currently "M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs — all Intel-based Macs, including automobile-priced Mac Pros, and every single machine running Windows or Linux." Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Well, that just doesn't happen, your instincts tell you. One company, even a company like Apple, doesn't just embarrass the entire rest of a highly-competitive longstanding industry. But just because something hasn't happened — or hasn't happened in a very long while — doesn't mean it can't happen. And in this case, it just happened... M1 Macs completely upend what we can and should expect from PCs. It's a breakthrough along the lines of the iPhone itself in 2007.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Ars Technica: Micro Magic Inc. -- a small electronic design firm in Sunnyvale, California -- has produced a prototype CPU that is several times more efficient than world-leading competitors, while retaining reasonable raw performance. EE Times reported on the company's new prototype CPU, which appears to be the fastest RISC-V CPU in the world. Micro Magic adviser Andy Huang claimed the CPU could produce 13,000 CoreMarks (more on that later) at 5GHz and 1.1V while also putting out 11,000 CoreMarks at 4.25GHz -- the latter all while consuming only 200mW. Huang demonstrated the CPU -- running on an Odroid board -- to EE Times at 4.327GHz/0.8V and 5.19GHz/1.1V. Later the same week, Micro Magic announced the same CPU could produce over 8,000 CoreMarks at 3GHz while consuming only 69mW of power.

Part of the difficulty in evaluating Micro Magic's claim for its new CPU lies in figuring out just what a CoreMark is and how many of them are needed to make a fast CPU. It's a deliberately simplified CPU benchmarking tool released by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, intended to be as platform-neutral and simple to build and use as possible. CoreMark focuses solely on the core pipeline functions of a CPU, including basic read/write, integer, and control operations. This specifically avoids most effects of system differences in memory, I/O, and so forth. [...] With that said, it's worth pointing out that -- if we take Micro Magic's numbers for granted -- they're already beating the performance of some solid mobile phone CPUs. Even at its efficiency-first 3GHz clockrate, the Micro Magic CPU outperformed a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. The Snapdragon 820 isn't world-class anymore, but it's no slouch, either -- it was the processor in the U.S. version of Samsung's Galaxy S7.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtualization engineer has shown what Windows 10 on Arm could be like if Microsoft licensed its Arm-based OS to the public rather than just to Windows 10 manufacturers. From a report: With Apple's new M1 Arm-based system on chip, Mac users who need to use Windows 10 can't run Microsoft's Arm-based version of Windows using Apple's Bootcamp. The key obstacle is that Microsoft doesn't license Windows 10 on Arm to any entities other than its own Surface group and Windows 10 on Arm OEMs like HP, Asus and Lenovo. Technically, there's nothing stopping owners of the M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13-inch or Mac mini from running Windows 10 on Arm, as Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi recently pointed out. [...]

But Microsoft's reluctance to create a license for Windows 10 on Arm for end users hasn't stopped creative engineers from putting together a working example of what things could be like if it did. AWS principal engineer Alexander Graf did just that, using the open-source QEMU virtualization software for Windows on Arm. QEMU emulates access to hardware such as the CPU and GPU. [...] "Who said Windows wouldn't run well on #AppleSilicon? It's pretty snappy here," Graf wrote in a tweet. Graf previously worked on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) for Linux distribution SUSE for over a decade. Now he's a KVM developer at AWS, which this week announced new Mac instances for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) based on Nitro System, an AWS hypervisor for EC2 instances. [...] A developer using the handle @imbushuo on Twitter has posted Geekbench versions 4 and 5 scores that compare Windows 10 on Arm on an M1 computer with the Microsoft-made Surface Pro X. Windows on an M1 got a single-core score of 1,288 and multi-core score of 5,685 whereas the Surface Pro X's scores were roughly 800 and 3,000 in those respective benchmarks.

"PHP version 8.0 has arrived, bringing with it a major update to the 25-year-old programming language..." writes Tech Republic.

New language features include the nullsafe operator and attributes (commonly known as annotations in other languages) to add metadata to classes — and more: The JIT compiler is designed to bring performance improvements to web applications by turning code into instructions for the CPU at runtime. Meanwhile, union types is a feature that allows data of more than one type to be held by a variable. Named arguments allow developers to assign values to a function by specifying the value name, allowing optional parameters to be ignored. Alongside these, version 8.0 of PHP brings optimizations and enhancements to the language's type system, syntax, error handling and consistency....

Commenting on PHP 8.0, PHP programmer and stitcher.io developer, Brent Roose, noted that the latest version of the language may require developers to review code for any breaking changes.

Long-time Slashdot reader 00_NOP is a software engineer (with a PhD in real-time computing) re-visits a historic research paper on the financial trade-offs between disk space (then costing about $20,000 per kilobyte) and (volatile) memory (costing about $5 per kilobyte): Thirty-five years ago that report for Tandem computers concluded that the cost balance between memory, disk and CPU on big iron favoured holding items in memory if they were needed every five minutes and using five bytes to save one instruction.

Update the analysis for today and what do you see?

Well my estimate is that we should aim to hold items that we have to access 10 times a second.
And needless to say, some techniques for saving data space are more efficient than they were 35 years ago, their article points out.

"The cost of an instruction per second and the cost of a byte of memory are approximately equivalent — that's tipped the balance somewhat towards data compression (eg., perhaps through using bit flags in a byte instead of a number of booleans for instance), though not by a huge amount."

Reviews are starting to pour in of Apple's MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini featuring the new M1 ARM-based processor -- and they're overwhelmingly positive. "As with the Air, the Pro's performance exceeds expectations," writes Nilay Patel via The Verge.

"Apple's next chapter offers strong performance gains, great battery and starts at $999," says Brian Heater via TechCrunch.

"When Apple said it would start producing Macs with its own system-on-chip processors, custom CPU and GPU silicon (and a bunch of other stuff) to replace parts from Intel and AMD, we figured it would be good. I never expected it would be this good," says Jason Cross in his review of the MacBook Air M1.

"The M1 is a serious, serious contender for one of the all-time most efficient and highest-performing architectures we've ever seen deploy," says ExtremeTech's Joel Hruska.

"Spending a few days with the 2020 Mac mini has shown me that it's a barnburner of a miniature desktop PC," writes Chris Welch via The Verge. "It outperforms most Intel Macs in several benchmarks, runs apps reliably, and offers a fantastic day-to-day experience whether you're using it for web browsing and email or for creative editing and professional work. That potential will only grow when Apple inevitably raises the RAM ceiling and (hopefully) brings back those missing USB ports..."

"Quibbling about massively parallel workloads -- which the M1 wasn't designed for -- aside, Apple has clearly broken the ice on high-performance ARM desktop and laptop designs," writes Jim Salter via Ars Technica. "Yes, you can build an ARM system that competes strongly with x86, even at very high performance levels."

"The M1-equipped MacBook Air now packs far better performance than its predecessors, rivaling at times the M1-based MacBook Pro. At $999, it's the best value among macOS laptops," concludes PCMag.

"For developers, the Apple Silicon Macs also represent the very first full-fledged Arm machines on the market that have few-to-no compromises. This is a massive boost not just for Apple, but for the larger Arm ecosystem and the growing Arm cloud-computing business," writes Andrei Frumusanu via AnandTech. "Overall, Apple hit it out of the park with the M1."

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the past two years, some of the world's biggest chip makers have battled a series of hardware flaws, like Meltdown and Spectre, which made it possible -- though not easy -- to pluck passwords and other sensitive secrets directly from their processors. The chip makers rolled out patches, but required the companies to rethink how they approach chip security. Now, Microsoft thinks it has the answer with its new security chip, which it calls Pluton. The chip, announced today, is the brainchild of a partnership between Microsoft, and chip makers Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Pluton acts as a hardware root-of-trust, which in simple terms protects a device's hardware from tampering, such as from hardware implants or by hackers exploiting flaws in the device's low-level firmware. By integrating the chip inside future Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm central processor units, or CPUs, it makes it far more difficult for hackers with physical access to a computer to launch hardware attacks and extract sensitive data, the companies said. "The Microsoft Pluton design will create a much tighter integration between the hardware and the Windows operating system at the CPU that will reduce the available attack surface," said David Weston, director of enterprise and operating system security at Microsoft.

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen noticed a strange sound in one of their old machines, prompting them to ponder: what is the ultimate backup system? I've researched this topic a number of times in the past and never found a good answer...

I think the ultimate backup would be cloud-based, though I can imagine a local solution running on a smart storage device — not too expensive, and with my control over where the data is actually stored... Low overhead on the clients with the file systems that are being backed up. I'd prefer most of the work to be done on the server side, actually. That work would include identifying dupes while maintaining archival images of the original file systems, especially for my searches that might be based on the original folder hierarchies or on related files that I can recall being created around the same time or on the same machine...

How about a mail-in service to read old CDs and floppies and extract any recoverable data? I'm pretty sure I spotted an old box of floppies a few months ago. Not so much interested in the commercial stuff (though I do feel like I still own what I paid for) as I'm interested in old personal files — but that might call for access to the ancient programs that created those files.

Or maybe you want to share a bit about how you handle your backups? Or your version of the ultimate backup system...?
Slashdot reader BAReFO0t recommends "three disks running ZFS mirroring with scraping and regular snapshots, and two other locations running the same setup, but with a completely independent implementation. Different system, different PSU, different CPU manufacturer, different disks, different OS, different file system, different backup software, different building construction style, different form of government, etc."

shanen then added "with minimal time and effort" to the original question — but leave your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

What's your ultimate backup solution?

The first benchmark of Apple's M1 chip shows that the multi-core performance of the new MacBook Air with 8GB RAM beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. "That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870," reports MacRumors. The MacBook Air with M1 chip and 8GB RAM features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. From the report: Though the M1 chip is outperforming the 16-inch MacBook Pro models when it comes to raw CPU benchmarks, the 16-inch MacBook Pro likely offers better performance in other areas such as the GPU as those models have high-power discrete GPUs. It's worth noting that there are likely to be some performance differences between the MacBook Pro and the "MacBook Air" even though they're using the same M1 chip because the "MacBook Air" has a fanless design and the MacBook Pro has an new Apple-designed cooling system. There's also a benchmark for the Mac mini, though, and it has about the same scores. The "Mac mini" with M1 chip that was benchmarked earned a single-core score of 1682 and a multi-core score of 7067.

There's also a benchmark for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chip and 16GB RAM that has a single-core score of 1714 and a multi-core score of 6802. Like the "MacBook Air," it has a 3.2GHz base frequency. A few other "MacBook Air" benchmarks have surfaced too with similar scores, and the full list is available on Geekbench. [...] When compared to existing devices, the M1 chip in the "MacBook Air" outperforms all iOS devices. For comparison's sake, the iPhone 12 Pro earned a single-core score of 1584 and a multi-core score of 3898, while the highest ranked iOS device on Geekbench's charts, the A14 iPad Air, earned a single-core score of 1585 and a multi-core score of 4647.

Samsung LSI today announced the new Exynos 1080 SoC (system on chip), a successor to last year's Exynos 980. This year's 1080 is seemingly positioned a little above the 980 in terms of performance as we're seeing some quite notable gains in features compared to the 980. From a report: It's to be remembered that this is a "premium" SoC, meaning it's not a flagship SoC, but it's also not quite a mid-range SoC, fitting itself in-between those two categories, a niche which has become quite popular over the last 1-2 years. The new SoC is defined by having a new 1+3+4 CPU configuration, as reasonably large GPU, and full 5G connectivity integrated, and is the first publicly announced SoC to be manufactured on Samsung's new 5LPE process node. On the CPU side of things, this is the first time we've seen Samsung adopt a 1+3+4 CPU configuration, now adopting the Cortex-A78 architecture on the part of the performance cores. One core is clocked at 2.8GHz while the three others are running at 2.6GHz. Qualcomm had first introduced such a setup and it seems it's become quite popular as it gives the benefit of both performance and power efficiency. The four big cores are accompanied by four Cortex-A55 cores at 2.0GHz.

Gordon Mah Ung, writing at PC World: Let me just say it outloud, OK? Apple is full of it. I'm referring to Apple's claim that its fanless, Arm-based MacBook Air is "faster than 98 percent of PC laptops." Yes, you read that correctly: Apple officials literally claimed that the new MacBook Air using Apple's custom M1 chip is faster than 98 percent of all PC laptops sold this year. Typically, when a company makes such a claim, it publishes a benchmark, a performance test or actual details on what it's basing that marketing claim on. This to prevent lawyers from launching out of missile silos across the world. Apple's website restates the claim by stating: "M1 is faster than the chips in 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year." The site also includes a detail note that states: "Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM. Performance measured using select industry-standard benchmarks. PC configurations from publicly available sales data over the last 12 months. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect approximate performance of MacBook Pro."

So, not only does Apple not say what tests it's basing its claims on, it doesn't even say where it sources the comparable laptops. Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus' stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware's updated Area 51M? The answer, I'm going to guess is "no." Not at all. Is it faster than the miniLED-based MSI Creator 17? Probably not, either. And what is that "performance" claim hinged on? CPU performance? GPU performance? Performance running Windows? Is it using the same application running on both platforms? Is it experiential? Is this running Red Dead Redemption II or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War? Is it running CyberLink's PowerDirector? Is it running Fortnite? While I have absolutely no idea what Apple is basing its claims on, I can tell you that I am 98 percent sure that any of the above laptops listed will wreck the MacBook Air doing any of the tasks I just named.

When Apple makes its claims, my guess is they are comparing the new M1 to Intel-based processors ranging from Atom to Celeron N to Core i3 and up, all with integrated graphics. But by not defining the word "performance," all this becomes just pure marketing spin. And is it really fair to compare a $999 MacBook to one that costs $150? Because $150 PCs are included in the 98 percent of laptops sold. Maybe Apple should compare its own $150 MacBook Air against a $150 Chromebook or Windows-based laptop. Of course, that would mean Apple would have to sell a product that most people can afford. I have no doubt the M1 will be impressive, but do I think it's going to compare to 8-cores of Ryzen 4000 performance or a GeForce RTX 2060? No.

szczys writes: When the Raspberry Pi 400 (a keyboard form-factor single board computer) was released last week, the company hinted at overclocking. Testing has now shown that the heat spreader used in that design does an excellent job. The chip was already clocked at 1.8 GHz, versus the stock 1.5 GHz in the original Raspberry Pi 4 Model B board. But it can be safely overclocked to 2.15 GHz, as can the Compute Module 4 with an adequate heat sink.

At 2.0 GHz, the Pi 400 got up above 60 C and showed signs of continuing to warm up even after 50 minutes, but it was nowhere near throttling. So I tried 2.2 GHz, at which speed the CPU refused to boot entirely. Backing down to 2.15 GHz, it ran just fine, so I left it for three hours. It settled in at a cozy 62.5 C, which is warm, but well within specs.

I ran the CM4 with the larger heatsink at 1.8 GHz to give some basis for comparison to the cheap heatsinks. What a big difference a big hunk of aluminum makes! It settled in at a comfortable 68 C or so. Even pushing it up to 2.15 GHz and leaving it for a couple hours, it stayed just a hair below 70C (158F) -- a safe margin on the throttling threshold -- and only a few degrees warmer than that huge heat spreader in the Pi 400.

Further reading: The Verdict After Hackaday's Teardown of a Raspberry Pi 400: 'Very, Very Slick'.

Today, Apple showed off the first Macs powered by its new M1 CPU, delivering impressive performance and excellent battery life, however they won't come without any compromises. According to Engadget, citing Paul Gerhardt's tweet, "tech spec pages for the new machines reveal that none of them are compatible with external GPUs that connect via Thunderbolt." From the report: Only some people would require add-on oomph in any case, but Apple's support for external graphics cards gave it some extra gaming cachet and informed creative professionals their needs would continue to be met. Now, they'll have to wait and see if things change for higher-end models as Apple Silicon spreads throughout the company's PC lineup.

There's also been some focus on the fact that the 13-inch MacBook Pro M1 models only include two USB-C ports onboard instead of four, but whether or not you think that's enough ports, it's consistent with the cheaper Intel models it replaces. A more striking limitation is the one we've already noted, that the MBP is limited to 16GB of RAM -- if you think you'll need 32GB then you'll have to opt for an Intel-powered model.

Apple announced three Macs today that are powered by the company's new M1 chip. They are: MacBook Air: The first Mac that will be powered by the M1 chip is the MacBook Air. According to Apple, the new Air is 3.5x faster with up to 5x graphics performance than the previous generation thanks to the M1 processor. The new MacBook Air doesn't have a fan, so it'll be completely quiet at all times. It has up to 18 hours of total battery life when watching videos or 15 hours when browsing the web. You can get it with up to 2TB of storage and 16GB of memory, with the price still starting at $999.

Mac Mini: Additionally, Apple will release an Apple Silicon-powered Mac Mini. It's the same design Apple used for the DTK, but with the M1 processor. The new Mac Mini starts at $699, a drop in the price of $100, and supports up to a 6K display via USB-C Thunderbolt ports with USB-4 support.

MacBook Pro: Lastly, Apple is updating the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. Again, Apple touted performance gains in the MacBook Pro with 2.8x CPU gains and 5x GPU gains thanks to the M1 in the MacBook Pro. It keeps its cooling system but now gets 17 hours of battery life when browsing the web, or 20 hours when watching video. Apple kept the price of the MacBook Pro at $1,299 starting price.

Apple has introduced the new M1 chip that will power its new generation of Arm-based Macs. It's a 5nm processor, just like the A14 Bionic powering its latest iPhones. From a report: Apple says the new processor will focus on combining power efficiency with performance. It has an eight-core CPU, which Apple says offers the world's best performance per watt of an CPU. Apple says it delivers the same peak performance as a typical laptop CPU at a quarter of the power draw. It says this has four of the world's fastest CPUs cores, paired with four high-efficiency cores. It pairs this with up to an eight-core GPU, which Apple claims offers the world's fastest integrated graphics, and a 16-core Neural Engine. In addition, the M1 processor has a universal memory architecture, a USB 4 controller, media encode and decode engines, and a host of security features. These include hardware-verified secure boot, encryption, and run-time protections.

"You can't send Hackaday a piece of gear without us taking it apart," warns an article shared by Slashdot reader beggarwoman.

Hackady's verdict? The new Raspberry Pi 400 "is very, very slick." Inside, there's a flat-flex that connects the keyboard, and you see that big aluminum heat sink. It's almost the full size of the keyboard, and it's thick and heat-taped to the CPU. You know it means business. It's also right up against the aluminum bottom of the keyboard, suggesting it could get radiative help that way, and maybe keep your fingers warm in the winter. (I didn't feel any actual heat, but it's gotta go somewhere, right? There are also vents in the underside of the case.)

Four PZ1 screws and a little bit of courage to unstick the pad get you underneath the heat spreader to find, surprise!, a Raspberry Pi 4. This was a little anticlimactic, as I've just spent a couple weeks looking over the schematics for my review of the new Compute Module 4, and it's just exactly what you'd expect. It's a Raspberry Pi 4, with all the ports broken out, inside a nice keyboard, with a beefy heat spreader. Ethernet magnetics sit on one side, and the wireless module sits on the other. That's it!
"[C]ombine this with a small touch screen, and run it all off of a 5 V power pack, and you've got a ton of portable computing in a very small package.

"If you're not mousing around all the time anyway, there's a certain streamlined simplicity here that's mighty tempting."

The chip expected to be at the core of the first Apple Silicon Mac -- the "A14X" -- may have been benchmarked just days before the next Apple event. From a report: The alleged CPU benchmarks for the "A14X" show a 1.80GHz processor capable of turbo-boosting to 3.10GHz marking this the first custom Apple Silicon to ever clock above 3GHz. It is an 8-core processor with big-little arrangement. The GPU results show 8GB of RAM will be included with the processor. The single-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 1634 vs the A12Z at 1118. The A14 scored 1,583 points for single-core tests, which is expected as single-core results shouldn't change much between the regular and "X" models. The multi-core benchmark for the "A14X" scored 7220 vs the A12Z at 4657. The A14 scored 4198 for multi-core, which means the "A14X" delivers a marked increase in performance in the sorts of environments that the GeekBench test suite focuses on. The additional RAM and graphics capabilities boost this result much higher than the standard iPhone processor. For comparison, a 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Intel Core-i9 processor scores 1096 for single and 6869 for multi-core tests. This means the alleged "A14X" outperforms the existing MacBook Pro lineup by a notable margin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This weekend, Intel released preliminary information on its newest laptop part -- the Xe Max discrete GPU, which functions alongside and in tandem with Tiger Lake's integrated Iris Xe GPU. We first heard about Xe Max at Acer's Next 2020 launch event, where it was listed as a part of the upcoming Swift 3x laptop -- which will only be available in China. The new GPU will also be available in the Asus VivoBook Flip TP470 and the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1.

During an extended product briefing, Intel stressed to us that the Xe Max beats Nvidia's entry-level MX 350 chipset in just about every conceivable metric. In another year, this would have been exciting -- but the Xe Max is only slated to appear in systems that feature Tiger Lake processors, whose Iris Xe integrated GPUs already handily outperform the Nvidia MX 350 in both Intel's tests and our own. The confusion here largely springs from mainstream consumer expectations of a GPU versus what Intel's doing with the Xe Max. Our GPU tests largely revolve around gaming, using 3DMark's well-known benchmark suite, which includes gaming, fps-focused tests such as Time Spy and Night Raid. Intel's expectations for the Xe Max instead revolve, almost entirely, around content creation with a side of machine learning and video encoding.

Xe Max is, roughly speaking, the same 96 Execution Unit (EU) GPU to be found in the Tiger Lake i7-1185G7 CPU we've tested already this year -- the major difference, beyond not being on-die with the CPU, is a higher clock rate, dedicated RAM, and separate TDP budget. Tiger Lake's Iris Xe has a peak clock rate of 1.35GHz, and it shares the CPU's TDP constraints. Iris Xe Max has its own 25W TDP and a higher peak clock rate of 1.65GHz. It also has its own 4GiB of dedicated RAM -- though that RAM is the same LPDDR4X-4266 that Tiger Lake itself uses, which is something of a first for discrete graphics and might lead to better power efficiency.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the Raspberry Pi 400, a compact keyboard with an ARM-based computer built in. Just plug it into a TV or monitor using one of its two micro HDMI ports, insert a microSD card, attach a power cord and mouse, and you've got yourself a basic computer for day-to-day tasks, coding, or media playback. It's available starting today as a standalone machine for $70 or in a bundle including a mouse, power supply, microSD card, HDMI cable, and beginner's guide for $100. From a report: The hope is the Pi 400's form factor, plus these optional bundled items, makes it more approachable and user-friendly. That's important when you're selling an affordable computer, and it's especially important when you're selling an accessible device to help children learn to code. It looks more like a piece of consumer electronics than the basis for a DIY project. [...] Aside from its keyboard and form factor, the Raspberry Pi 400 is a very similar computer to last year's Raspberry Pi 4. It's got a slightly faster quad-core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A72 CPU, up from 1.5GHz in the Pi 4, 4GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.0, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. There are a pair of micro HDMI ports that can each output up to 4K / 60Hz, two USB 3.0 ports, and a single USB 2.0 port. Power is provided via a USB-C port, there's a microSD card slot for storage, and there's a GPIO header for attaching a variety of more niche devices.

"BDY electronics, a Chinese laptop manufacturer, has unveiled an all-new 13.3-inch laptop sporting Longsoon's new Dragon Core 3A4000 quad-core 14nm CPU," reports Tom's Hardware: The biggest feature of this laptop is the CPU, featuring Longsoon's latest 14nm quad-core 3A4000 CPU. Longsoon claims the CPU is 100% faster than the previous generation 3A3000 and is comparable in performance to AMD's "Excavator" cores used in the A8-7680 Godavari architecture.

Of course, this demonstrates how far behind Longsoon is from TSMC and Intel in performance, speed, and efficiency of its latest node. However, the chairman of Loongsoon Technologies, Hu Weiwu, says, "14nm and 28nm (for its GPU node) is enough for 90% of applications.," so it appears the company isn't too worried about catching up to the performance leaders like Intel and AMD.

Due to this laptop being in the Chinese market, Windows is not supported at all. It only runs Chinese "domestic operating systems" that are typically modified versions of Linux. Fortunately, this does mean you can install any Linux flavor you want on the laptop, which can be handy if you don't want to run China-specific apps only.
Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm points out that Loongson's upcoming 3a5000 CPU "will be a 12nm CPU that is 50% faster than the 3A4000."