Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.7 rc7 today, saying it "looks very normal... none of the fixes look like there's anything particularly scary going on."

But then he added something else: [T]he biggest excitement this week for me was just that I upgraded my main machine, and for the first time in about 15 years, my desktop isn't Intel-based. No, I didn't switch to ARM yet, but I'm now rocking an AMD Threadripper 3970x. My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be, which doesn't matter so much right now during the calming down period, but I will most definitely notice the upgrade during the next merge window.
The Register writes: Torvalds didn't divulge any further details about his new rig, but the 3970x is quite the beast, boasting 32 cores and 64 threads at 3.7GHz with the ability to burst up to 4.5GHz, all built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process... Torvalds has probably acquired a whole new PC, as the Threadripper range requires a sTRX4 socket and those debuted on motherboards from late 2019.

Whatever he's running, it has more cores than Intel currently offers in a CPU designed for PCs. Even Chipzilla's high-end CoreX range tops out at 18 cores. AMD will be over the moon that such a high profile IT pro has adopted their kit and pointed to its performance.
Or, as long-time Slashdot reader williamyf puts it, "Good endorsement for AMD, a PR blow for Intel."

New submitter FallOutBoyTonto shares a reprot from AnandTech: AMD today is reversing its decision to limit the BIOSes on the 400-series chipsets. To cut a long story short, the TL;DR mantra from AMD is: "We've heard our audience, and we understand the concerns. We are going to work out a way to support Zen 3 on our 400-series chipsets between now and launch -- we're still working out the what and the how, but we will update you closer to Zen 3 launch. [...]

1. We will develop and enable our motherboard partners with the code to support 'Zen 3'-based processors in select beta BIOSes for AMD B450 and X470 motherboards.
2. These optional BIOS updates will disable support for many existing AMD Ryzen Desktop Processor models to make the necessary ROM space available.
3. The select beta BIOSes will enable a one-way upgrade path for AMD Ryzen Processors with 'Zen 3,' coming later this year. Flashing back to an older BIOS version will not be supported.
4. To reduce the potential for confusion, our intent is to offer BIOS download only to verified customers of 400 Series motherboards who have purchased a new desktop processor with 'Zen 3' inside. This will help us ensure that customers have a bootable processor on-hand after the BIOS flash, minimizing the risk a user could get caught in a no-boot situation.
5. Timing and availability of the BIOS updates will vary and may not immediately coincide with the availability of the first 'Zen 3'-based processors.
6. This is the final pathway AMD can enable for 400 Series motherboards to add new CPU support. CPU releases beyond 'Zen 3' will require a newer motherboard.
7. AMD continues to recommend that customers choose an AMD 500 Series motherboard for the best performance and features with our new CPUs."

Google today announced that Chrome will soon start blocking resource-heavy ads. From a report: The company ads that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage because they "drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money." There are three possible thresholds an ad can hit to be blocked: 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage. Google will be experimenting with this change "over the next several months" and will roll it out on Chrome stable "near the end of August."

Alienware has announced the second generation of its flagship Area-51m gaming laptop, the Area-51m R2. It's largely similar on the outside to the original Area-51m, but the specs are almost completely overhauled on the inside, with 10th Gen Intel processors, new Nvidia GPUs, faster RAM, and better display options. From a report: All of those upgrades will be limited to the new R2 model, though. Despite Alienware's goals for future-proofed upgradable parts, the Area-51m has failed to live up to its potential. One of the biggest draws of the Area-51m was the option for user-replaceable parts. Most modern laptops have nearly all of their internal components sealed in place in an effort to cut down on size. But the Area-51m took a different approach. It was big, easy to disassemble, and made it simple to replace nearly every internal component, from RAM to the CPU to the GPU to even the thermal cooling components. The idea was to make something more portable than any other desktop but more customizable than any laptop. Alienware's parent company, Dell, even built its own system for replaceable GPUs in laptops, called DGFF (Dell Graphics Form Factor) to make it easier to upgrade in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AnandTech: Today alongside with the launch of the Xiaomi Redmi K30 5G Racing Edition, Qualcomm is announcing the new Snapdragon 768G SoC which powers the device. The new SoC is a direct follow-up to the Snapdragon 765G announced last December, and the two chips are very likely the same silicon design, with the new variant increasing the clock frequencies.

The new chip features the same Cortex-A76 cores in a 1+1 configuration (one Prime high-clocked core, and one medium clocked core), alongside 6 Cortex-A55 cores. The difference in CPU performance lies in the frequencies of the big cores which are now at up to 2.8GHz and 2.4GHz for the Performance and Middle core -- a more notable uplift from the 2.4 and 2.2GHz clocks of the Snapdragon 765G. GPU clock frequencies have also been increased, resulting in at 15% performance boost over the Snapdragon 765. The rest of the chip is seemingly identical to the Snapdragon 765 series.

"AI has ushered in a new golden age of semiconductor innovation," reports Forbes: For most of the history of computing, the prevailing chip architecture has been the CPU, or central processing unit... But while CPUs' key advantage is versatility, today's leading AI techniques demand a very specific — and intensive — set of computations. Deep learning entails the iterative execution of millions or billions of relatively simple multiplication and addition steps... CPUs process computations sequentially, not in parallel. Their computational core and memory are generally located on separate modules and connected via a communication system (a bus) with limited bandwidth. This creates a choke point in data movement known as the "von Neumann bottleneck". The upshot: it is prohibitively inefficient to train a neural network on a CPU...

In the early 2010s, the AI community began to realize that Nvidia's gaming chips were in fact well suited to handle the types of workloads that machine learning algorithms demanded. Through sheer good fortune, the GPU had found a massive new market. Nvidia capitalized on the opportunity, positioning itself as the market-leading provider of AI hardware. The company has reaped incredible gains as a result: Nvidia's market capitalization jumped twenty-fold from 2013 to 2018.

Yet as Gartner analyst Mark Hung put it, "Everyone agrees that GPUs are not optimized for an AI workload." The GPU has been adopted by the AI community, but it was not born for AI. In recent years, a new crop of entrepreneurs and technologists has set out to reimagine the computer chip, optimizing it from the ground up in order to unlock the limitless potential of AI. In the memorable words of Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware...."

The race is on to develop the hardware that will power the upcoming era of AI. More innovation is happening in the semiconductor industry today than at any time since Silicon Valley's earliest days. Untold billions of dollars are in play.
Some highlights from the article:

• Google, Amazon, Tesla, Facebook and Alibaba, among other technology giants, all have in-house AI chip programs.

• Groq has announced a chip performing one quadrillion operations per second. "If true, this would make it the fastest single-die chip in history."

• Cerebras' chip "is about 60 times larger than a typical microprocessor. It is the first chip in history to house over one trillion transistors (1.2 trillion, to be exact). It has 18 GB memory on-chip — again, the most ever."

• Lightmatter believes using light instead of electricity "will enable its chip to outperform existing solutions by a factor of ten."

MojoKid writes: AMD unveiled two new Ryzen 3 processors recently, designed to drive its Zen 2 CPU microarchitecture into more affordable price points. The new Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X are entry-level 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs that will run in any socket AM4 motherboard, with price points of only $99 (Ryzen 3 3100) and $120 (Ryzen 3 3300X). They are both quad-core/eight-thread chips, with similar cache configurations (2MB L2 + 16MB L3), and they both include basic Wraith Stealth coolers in their retail boxes. Internally, however, these two processors are somewhat different. The Ryzen 3 3100 is setup in a 2+2 configuration with two cores active per CCX (CPU Core Complex). The Ryzen 3 3300X, however, has a 4+0 configuration, with all of its active cores residing on a single CCX. These differences should result in better overall performance for the Ryzen 3 3300X, over and above just having a higher peek clock speed of 4.3GHz, versus 3.90Ghz for the Ryzen 3 3100. In the benchmarks, these new AMD quad-core chips offer similar or better performance versus competitive Intel Core i5 chips, but at significantly lower price points.

Ammalgam shares a report from Redmond Pie: Microsoft has officially announced the Surface Book 3. Not much has changed for the device in terms of external design, but internal circuitry is where it's at. This newest addition to the Surface family was formally unveiled alongside the Surface Go 2 today. And the detachable PC finally got the long overdue refresh. Microsoft decided to go with the latest Intel 10th generation CPUs, codenamed Ice Lake. There was talk that the company might opt for the Comet Lake processors. Both are 10th generation chips, but Ice Lake is made on a 10nm process, while Comet Lake is 14nm. [...] As for the CPU options, we have the Core i5-1035G7 and Core i7-1065G7 available. The Core i5 models don't offer dedicated graphics, while the 15-inch variant of the Surface Book 3 only comes in the Core i7 flavor. GPU got a real look, too. The 13.5-inch Surface Book 3 gets you the 4GB Max-Q variant of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, while the 15-inch one comes with a GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q with 6GB.

On the display side, we have a 3000 x 2000 screen on the 13.5-inch model, while the 15-inch one offers a resolution of 3240 x 2160. Microsoft also claims that the Surface Book 3 has the best battery life of any device it has made up until now. It's rated at 17.5 hours on the 15-inch model and 15.5 hours on the 13.5-inch variant. Some neat improvements when it comes to port selection, with both the USB Type-A and Type-C ports now being USB 3.1 Gen 2, meaning you get 10Gbps instead of 5Gbps. There is also a Surface Connect port on both the base and the tablet, to go with the 3.5mm audio jack in the tablet. All these enhancements mean that the starting price of the Surface Book 3 is a bit higher at $1,599. It will be available on May 21.

The developers of the open-source QEMU (Quick EMUlator) emulator, which can run programs on various architectures such as ARM and RISC-V, have released version 5.0. Slashdot reader syn3rg writes: Hot on the heels of the 4.0 release (from a major release perspective), the QEMU team has released version 5.0. This version has many changes, including:

• Live migration support for external processes running on QEMU D-Bus
• Support for using memory backends for main/"built-in" guest RAM
• block: support for compressed backup images via block jobs
• ARM: support for the following architecture features: ARMv8.1 VHE/VMID16/PAN/PMU ARMv8.2 UAO/DCPoP/ATS1E1/TTCNP ARMv8.3 RCPC/CCIDX ARMv8.4 PMU/RCPC
• ARM: support for Cortex-M7 CPU
• ARM: new board support for tacoma-bmc, Netduino Plus 2, and Orangepi PC
• MIPS: support for GINVT (global TLB invalidation) instruction
• PowerPC: 'powernv' machine can now emulate KVM hardware acceleration to run KVM guests while in TCG mode
• PowerPC: support for file-backed NVDIMMs for persistent memory emulation
• RISC-V: experimental support for v0.5 of draft hypervisor extension
• s390: support for Adapter Interrupt Suppression while running in KVM mode

"Not a current user, but I'm happy to see the project advancing," adds syn3rg.

For the full list of changes, you can visit the changelog. QEMU 5.0 can downloaded here.

An anonymous reader quote Hot Hardware: If you're looking for the best gaming CPU or the best CPU for desktop applications, there are only two choices to pick from: AMD and Intel. That fact has spawned an almost religious following for both camps, and the resulting flamewars, that make it tricky to get unbiased advice about the best choice for your next processor.

But in many cases, the answer is actually very clear. In fact, for most users, it's a blowout win in AMD's favor. That's an amazing reversal of fortunes for the chipmaker after it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy a mere three years ago, making its turnaround all the more impressive as it continues to upset the entrenched Intel that enjoyed a decade of dominance... Pricing is the most important consideration for almost everyone, and AMD is hard to beat in the value department. The company offers a plethora of advantages, like bundled coolers and full overclockability on all models, not to mention complimentary software that includes the innovative Precision Boost Overdrive auto-overclocking feature.

You also benefit from the broad compatibility of Socket AM4 motherboards that support both forward and backward compatibility, ensuring that not only do you get the most bang for your processor buck, but also your motherboard investment. AMD also allows overclocking on all but its A-Series motherboards (see our article on how to overclock AMD Ryzen), which is another boon for users. And, in this battle of AMD vs Intel CPUs, we haven't even discussed the actual silicon yet. AMD's modern processors tend to offer either more cores or threads and faster PCIe 4.0 connectivity at every single price point.
"We're not covering laptop or server chips," the article notes, adding "There's a clear winner overall, but which brand of CPU you should buy depends most on what kind of features, price and performance are important to you."

Still, it's noteworthy that AMD beats Intel in 7 out of 10 comparisons. The three in which Intel won were gaming performance ("only because we measure strictly by the absolute top performance possible"), drivers and software ("the company has an army of software developers [and] a decade of dominance also finds most software developers optimizing almost exclusively for Intel architectures"), and overclocking, where Intel "has far more headroom and much higher attainable frequencies.

"Just be prepared to pay for the privilege."

Intel CEO Bob Swan cited a quote from former CEO Andy Grove as particularly apt during the pandemic. In a call with analysts, Swan noted that Grove once said, "Bad companies are destroyed by crises; good companies survive them; great companies are improved by them." From a report: Swan made the remarks after reporting what he said were "outstanding" results for both earnings and revenues in the "incredibly challenging" first quarter. But investors were spooked and drove the stock down 5% in after-hours trading, in part because Intel decided not to offer full financial guidance for all of 2020, due to uncertainties in the market. Intel also said its gross profit margins, or the money it makes on the sale of its products, would likely be lower in the second quarter. That is in part because the company is recording higher expenses as it prequalifies the manufacturing of its second generation of 10-nanometer products -- which is considered a normal expense in a process technology transition.

Microsoft's Surface Go 2 is right around the corner. While nothing is set in stone, Windows Central reported Monday that the product could be announced sometime in May. From a report: Thanks to leaked benchmarks, which I've been able to confirm via my own sources, we already know everything about the CPU, RAM, and storage options inside the Surface Go 2. But what about any external hardware changes? According to sources familiar with the matter, I'm told that Surface Go 2 will feature a larger 10.5-inch display without increasing the overall size of the device. Its exterior chassis will be identical to the original Surface Go, including dimensions and placement of the ports. That means keyboards and accessories designed for the 2018 Surface Go will work just fine on the Surface Go 2 as well.

MojoKid writes: Intel unveiled its NUC 9 Ghost Canyon platform back at CES earlier this year, but the company has just announced general availability and lifted the embargo on full product reviews. An array of NUC 9 systems are launching today, with the top-end Intel NUC9i9QNX featuring a Core i9-9980HK Comet Lake-H 8-core CPU. The NUC 9 is built around Intel's NUC Compute Element, which essentially places the CPU, chipset, IO, and cooler onto a removable add-in card in a chassis that measures only 9.37 x 8.5 x 3.78 (WxDxH) inches. The Intel NUC 9 Extreme is a different sort of animal than traditional small form factor PCs though, and the version of the system that was tested at HotHardware is quite powerful, thanks to the inclusion of 16GB of RAM, an Intel Optane 905P boot drive, a secondary Kingston SSD, and an ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 discrete GPU, though the NUC 9 does have integrated graphics as well. A barebones Intel NUC 9 Extreme (model NUC9i9QNX), without any components or accessories will sell for about $1,639, but fully configured like the one in the review will retail north of $2000. It's not cheap, but Intel's NUC 9 Extreme is a very compact, robust, reasonably quiet and capable little machine.

Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone as soon as next year -- and eventually Chromebooks as well, Axios reported Tuesday. From the report: The move could help Google better compete with Apple, which designs its own chips. It would be a blow to Qualcomm, which supplies processors for many current high-end phones, including the Pixel. The chip, code-named Whitechapel, was designed in cooperation with Samsung, whose state-of-the-art 5-nanometer technology would be used to manufacture the chips, according to a source familiar with Google's effort. Samsung also manufactures Apple's iPhone chips, as well as its own Exynos processors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We've seen several smartphone brands cheat benchmarks over the years, ostensibly in a bid to earn some ill-deserved praise among enthusiasts. But a new report suggests chipset manufacturer MediaTek could be gaming these scores. AnandTech uncovered evidence of benchmark cheating by MediaTek when it received a Helio P95-powered Oppo Reno 3 Pro (European version) and a standard Dimensity 1000L-powered Oppo Reno 3 (Chinese model). The outlet's suspicions were raised when the Reno 3 Pro beat the Reno 3 in the PCMark benchmark utility. This was strange, because the Helio P95's Cortex-A75 CPU cores are two generations older than the Dimensity 1000L's Cortex-A77 CPU cores. Furthermore, the P95 only had two of these cores versus the newer chip's four heavyweight cores.

A stealth version of the PCMark benchmark utility -- which manufacturers can't identify -- was installed on the Reno 3 Pro. This revealed a 30% drop in benchmark score compared to the previous questionable score, with Anandtech saying some tests in the benchmark dropped by 75%. The outlet also tested the Chinese version of the Reno 3 Pro, which swaps the Helio P95 for a Snapdragon 765G, and noted the phone ran the benchmark without resorting to cheating. AnandTech then dug into the offending device's firmware files and found references tying benchmark apps to a so-called "sports mode." It's believed that this mode ramps up things like the memory controller and scheduler in order to facilitate faster performance.

"In December, security researchers noticed an uptick in brute-force attacks against publicly exposed Microsoft SQL servers," reports CSOnline.

"It turns out the attacks go as far back as May 2018 and infect on average a couple thousand database servers every day with remote access Trojans and cryptominers."

Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: While the primary goal of the attack seems to be cryptocurrency mining, "what makes these database servers appealing for attackers apart from their valuable CPU power is the huge amount of data they hold," say researchers from Guardicore who investigated the attacks. The researchers also note that most machines (60%) stay infected only briefly, but "almost 20% of all breached servers remained infected for more than a week and even longer than two weeks," and 10% become reinfected...

[T]he attackers aggressively remove malware from competitors from targeted machines.
Many of the infected machines are located in America, India, South Korea, and Turkey, according to the article, which adds that the researchers traced the campaign back to China.

"The scans and attacks originate from Chinese IP addresses -- likely associated with infected and hijacked machines -- and the command-and-control servers are also hosted in China and use Chinese language for their web-based management interfaces."

Microsoft announced today a new security feature for the Windows operating system. From a report: Named "Hardware-enforced Stack Protection," this feature allows applications to use the local CPU hardware to protect their code while running inside the CPU's memory. As the feature's name suggests, its primary role is to protect the (memory) stack -- where an app's code is stored during execution. "Hardware-enforced Stack Protection" works by enforcing strict management of the memory stack through the use of a combination between (1) modern CPU hardware and (2) shadow stacks. The term shadow stacks is a new one and refers to a copies of a program's intended execution flow (also referred to as the code's execution order). The new "Hardware-enforced Stack Protection" feature plans to use the hardware-based security features in modern CPUs to keep a copy of the app's shadow stack (intended code execution flow) in a hardware-secured environment.

Now that Microsoft and Sony have published the technical specifications of their respective next-gen gaming consoles, we can compare them head-to-head to see which one has the edge. While Sony appears to lag behind Microsoft when it comes to specs, the PS5's speedy custom SSD may be its secret weapon. Engadget reports: Sony's lead PlayStation architect, Mark Cerny, finally gave us an in-depth look at the PS5 in a livestream event, in lieu of a major GDC keynote. [...] Cerny confirms that the PlayStation 5's graphics processor will feature 36 compute units and up to 10.28 teraflops worth of compute performance. That's a bit less than the Xbox Series X's 12-teraflop GPU, but realistically you might not see many differences in performance. There are plenty of other system optimizations, like the company's focus on a custom 825GB SSD, that'll be a huge leap over the PlayStation 4. That SSD will push 5.5 gigabytes per second compared to a mere 50 to 100 MB/s, meaning it can fill the system's 16GB of GDDR6 RAM in two seconds. And on the plus side, Sony will let you plug in a standard NVMe SSD to expand storage while Microsoft will rely on specialized 1TB SSD expansion cards.

Cerny was quick to point out that teraflop numbers are a "dangerous" way to measure absolute levels of performance. A teraflop from the PlayStation 5 translates to much more gaming performance than a teraflop from the PlayStation 4, thanks to the new console's more-efficient architecture. Still, it's not exactly unfair to compare the PS5 to the Xbox Series X, since both systems will be based on AMD's CPUs and GPUs. It's interesting to see how Sony and Microsoft devices take advantage of AMD's hardware. The PS5's eight-core Zen 2 CPU will run up to 3.5GHz with variable frequencies, so it can slow down when necessary. The Xbox Series X, meanwhile, will lock its Zen 2 processor at 3.8GHz, and devs can also choose to run their games at 3.6GHz with hyper threading. Sony also chose to use 36 RDNA 2 compute units running at up to 2.23GHz with a variable frequency while Microsoft stuffed its system with 52 compute units running at 1.825GHz. Cerny argues that running fewer cores at a higher frequency rate is more beneficial than running more cores at a lower rate, since it will lead to a speed bump across many GPU tasks.

Sony definitely has the lead with its custom SSD with 5GB/s of raw bandwidth and 8 to 9GB/s of compressed throughput. The Xbox Series X's SSD will be limited to 2.4GB/s of raw data and 4.8GB/s compressed. Again, while the numbers are significantly different, it's unclear how the performance will vary in real-world use. Microsoft also has a slightly higher GDDR6 memory bandwidth -- 10GB at 560GB/s and 6GB at 336GB/s -- than Sony's 448GB/s, which could make up for the slower storage. As for backwards compatibility, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 will support PS4 and PS4 Pro games, but the company made no mention of retro PS1, PS2, and PS3 titles. Microsoft, on the other hand, stated that the Xbox Series X will support all games playable on the Xbox One, including those Xbox 360 and original Xbox console titles currently supported through backwards compatibility on the Xbox One.

Despite COVID-19 forcing Apple to close down all retail stores outside of China indefinitely, the company just announced a new 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro (starting at $799 and $949, respectively). From a report: Last refreshed in 2018, the new iPad Pros come with a faster A12Z Bionic chip equipped with an 8-core CPU and GPU, a new ultra-wide camera and a "LiDAR scanner" for AR. However, the most surprising (or not surprising) announcement is a new Magic Keyboard accessory with a trackpad (which starts at $249). Simply put: Apple just turned the iPad Pro into a laptop. The gap between an iPad Pro and Microsoft's Surface Pro is now narrower than ever before. This could mean the beginning of the end for MacBooks. There's lots to unpack about the new iPad Pros.

Apple is saying the A12Z Bionic chip has an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU, but stopped short of saying how much faster it is compared to the A12 Bionic in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. Apple only says the gigabit-class LTE is 60 percent faster and the battery life is still the same 10 hours. The cameras on the back look like the iPhone 11 Pro's triple-camera setup at first glance. But they're not. First, the ultra-wide camera is 10 megapixels versus 12 megapixels on the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. And second, the third lens isn't a telephoto lens, but a "LiDAR Scanner" which Apple says improves AR applications. The LiDAR Scanner "measures the distance to surrounding objects up to 5 meters away, works both indoors and outdoors, and operates at the photon level at nano-second speeds."

MojoKid writes: Though Ryzen 4000 Series laptop processors aren't available just yet, some of AMD's partners are going to begin taking pre-orders for notebooks soon. As such, AMD is lifting the veil on additional details and the architectural enhancements that make Ryzen 4000 Series AMD's strongest mobile processor line-up to date. AMD Ryzen 4000 series CPUs are based on the Zen 2 architecture, similar to the current Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors. AMD is touting an approximate 25% IPC increase versus Zen 1-based mobile parts, but there are additional benefits that boost performance and efficiency throughout the chips as well. These are monolithic SoCs, with up to 8-cores / 16-threads, that are manufactured on TSMC's 7nm node. AMD is claiming 20% lower SoC power, 2X the perf-per-watt, 5X faster state switching, and an approximate 3.4X improvement in relative power efficiency, in comparison to its mobile platform from 2015. AMD is claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current-generation Intel mobile processors and significantly better multi-threaded and graphics performance versus Intel, thanks to the increased core / thread counts and integrated Vega-based GPU of its Ryzen 4000 series. Battery life performance is claimed be strong as well, due to architectural enhancements for power optimization throughout the Ryzen 4000 design. AMD Ryzen 4000 Series laptops should be shipping in market sometime in the next month or so.