Latest News - Page 2207

Oh look, a huge Coffee Lake leak on the eve of AMD's big launch of Ryzen Threadripper, what a surprise. Intel is kicking up its Core i7-8700K to a 6C/12T design, shifting away from the Core i7-7700K and its 4C/8T power.

There are some benchmarks of the purported Core i7-8700K, with a CPU-Z benchmark result of 2323 for single-thread performance, and a multi-threaded score of 13,980. This is a big increase from the 4443 on the 7700K, but is achieved from the higher CPU core count (4C/8T vs 6C/12T).

Intel will be clocking the Core i7-8700K at up to 4.7GHz on maximum single-core CPU clocks, while it'll hit 4.6GHz on dual-core, 4.4GHz on quad-core, and 4.3GHz on hexa-core. It'll support dual-channel DDR4, feature a 95W TDP, and integrated graphics.

If you want to grab Google's Pixel smartphone, now's the time. The device was one of the best phones of last year, and we know that the company will soon launch its successor. But before the Pixel 2 becomes official, Google has decided to offer last year's phones at a significant discount.

The Google Pixel is now listed at $524, saving you $125 off the original price. The Pixel XL has an even higher discount of $200, and you can now get it for a price of $569.

And if the discounts weren't enough, Google will also give you a free Daydream View device with both phones.

Square Enix's MMO segment is enjoying landmark success thanks to Final Fantasy 14's new Stormblood expansion.

In its latest quarterly earnings filings, Japanese games-maker Square Enix confirmed that Stormblood is having a big effect on earnings. Stormblood was only on the market for 10 days before the company's fiscal Q1'18 quarter ended on June 30, and in that time the expansion managed to help surge MMO segment revenues by 67% year-over-year and 58% quarter-over-quarter.

While Square Enix didn't reveal exact sales numbers or revenues for Stormblood, it did announce figures for the MMO segment: in that 10-day period, Stormblood helped earn 9.3 billion yen ($84.304 million) in net sales, which is roughly 21% of the total Digital Entertainment revenues for the quarter. The company notes that Stormblood helped surge physical and digital sales as well as active paid subscriptions for Final Fantasy XIV.

Square Enix today announced that its landmark MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has amassed 10 million players since its revival in 2013.

Shortly following the release of the new Stormblood content expansion, Japanese games-maker Square Enix has hit a major milestone with its lucrative and popular Final Fantasy XIV MMO. The company reports that FFXIV has breached 10 million cummulative players worldwide, including free trials and paid subscriptions.

Interestingly enough, Square Enix notes that Stormblood significantly contributed to the company's first quarter earnings. In just ten days of availability, Stormblood helped the MMO segment amass 9.3 billion yen ($84.304 million) in net sales revenue, representing a mighty 67% year-over-year. Square Enix says net sales were raised from both Stormblood digital and physical purchases, as well as a surge in active paid subscriptions.

Enermax today revealed its new compact Platimax D.F. PSU that offers big power in a small package.

Like the rest of the PSUs in the series, Enermax's Platimax D.F. 1200W of power supply is fully modular, offering versatility to gamers and users, and is rated 80 Plus Platinum for high efficiency. Enermax's new PSU is sized at only 160mm in depth, making it one of the most compact 80 Plus Platinum 1200W power supplies on the market. The PSU comes with premium Sleemax individually sleeved cables and built-in DFR (Dust Free Rotation) Tech to reduce dust, and also features the company's smart semi-fanless control for silent operation.

Platimax D.F. is now available on the market with 4 models: 750W, 850W, 1050W and 1200W, all of which come with a 5-year warranty. Pricing has yet to be revealed, and full specifications can be found below.

Ubisoft has confirmed that its massively popular shooter Rainbow Six: Siege has broken yet another userbase milestone.

Rainbow Six: Siege is almost two years old, and the shooter is still engaging a core userbase of 2.3 million gamers every day. In a recent blog post, Ubisoft announced that Rainbow Six: Siege has amassed 20 million users milestone, echoing the statements made by company president and CEO Yves Guillemot in recent quarterly earnings. "Rainbow Six Siege recently hit the 20 million registered player mark, with more than 2.3 million players signing on every day," the blog post confirmed.

While the userbase metric is quite impressive, what's even more interesting is that Ubisoft is successfully monetizing this strong engagement with microtransactions and Rainbow Six: Siege's new loot box system, which allows users to spend real money on Renown to unlock in-game items.

Flash Memory Summit 2017 - Micron has led the charge at FMS 2017 this year, breaking the 10TB NVMe SSD barrier with an 11TB version of their new Micron 9200 Series of NVMe SSDs.

Micron has compared their new 9200 Series NVMe SSD against the "nearest competitor in terms of capacity and performance in an OLTP database workload", with the Micron 11TB 9200 ECO SSD being 45% faster, and packed twice the capacity.

The company is pushing their new Micron 9200 SSDs for the Micron SolidState platform, and with the new 9200 Series SSDs, data centers can push up to 250TB per node. With 250TB per node, the Micron 9200 SSDs enable 5PB per rack of high-performance NVMe SSD storage.

OnePlus 5, the company's flagship, was launched back in June, and now, the company has announced that they will soon launch a Soft Gold edition of the device.

The Soft Gold version will come in only one configuration, with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The 8GB/128GB configuration will only be available in Midnight Black and Slate Gray.

The Soft Gold OnePlus 5 will be available on the OnePlus 5 in select quantities so if you want to grab one, you'll have to hurry.

Flash Memory Summit 2017 - Seagate has just unveiled their two new Nytro series SSDs, with the new Nytro 5000 and Nytro 3000.

Seagate's new Nytro 5000 is a M.2 SSD while the new Nytro 3000 is a SAS-based SSD, each hitting different segments in the cloud/datacenter markets. The Nytro 5000 is a cheaper, low-power alternative for data center environments at up to 2TB.

For everything over 2TB in the data center, Seagate has the Nytro 3000 whcih comes in up to 15TB (4x more than its predecessor), and reads at up to 2.2GB/sec over the 12Gbps SAS connection. Organizations can opt for the Seagate Nytro 3000 SAS SSD if they need next-gen speeds, reliability, and endurance.

Rainway developer Andrew Sampson has teased some footage of Half-Life 2 running on his Nintendo Switch, using PCs to stream the game to his Nintendo Switch through the Rainway app.

This is not the first time Sampson has shown off HL2 running on the Switch, but it is definitely the first time the Joy-Con controllers have worked with Rainway. There's no ETA on the Rainway app, but you can register for the beta on the official website, with beta testing kicking off on November 25.

Back in February I wrote an article about Intel reacting to the release of AMD's new Ryzen processors that were due in the coming weeks, and since then all I've seen Intel do is react to every release: Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7, and especially Ryzen Threaderipper. Chipzilla is scared, and I love it.

Now we're hearing that Intel is reacting to the price/performance monsters that are Ryzen, with their upcoming Core i3-8300 processor based on the Coffee Lake CPU architecture. Core i3-8300 will be a 4C/8T processor, a departure from the usual 2C/4T that Core i3 CPUs arrive as, with Intel leaving the Core i5 as a quad-core 4C/4T processor without Hyper-Threading enabled. Core i7 processors are usually quad-core processors with HT enabled, minimum.

But with AMD hitting the $109 price point with Ryzen 3 1200 being a 4C/4T processor, Intel isn't even close with its $129 processor in the Core i3-7100 which is a 2C/4T processor. Intel's higher-end 4C/4T processor is $179, with the Core i3-7100 being $70 more than Ryzen 3 1200. The Core i3-8200 would be an interesting move, but something that Intel is going to have to do in order to fight on a totally revamped battlefield.

Intel has detailed its upcoming Skylake-X family of processors, with details on t he Core i9-7920X, Core i9-7940X, Core i9-7960X, and the Core i9-7980XE.

The 12-core CPUs will arrive on August 28, 14/18-core processors on September 25, and the 4/10-core processors are available right now, along with the required X299 motherboards. We now have full details on the Core i9-7980XE processor, Intel's flagship Extreme Edition CPU. The Core i9-7980XE will rock a slower 2.6GHz base clock, but will ramp up to an incredible 4.2/4.4GHz under Boost 2.0/3.0, respectively. The Core i9-7980XE will rock a large 24.75MB of L3 cache, a 165W TDP, and a mammoth price of $1999.

The bigger deal here is that we have details on the 14-core and 18-core SKUs, with the Core i9-7940X leading the pack with a base clock of 3.1GHz, and Boost 2.0 and Boost 3.0 clocks of 4.3GHz and 4.4GHz, respectively - while it rocks 19.25MB of L3 cache, 44 PCIe lanes, a 165W TDP, and a cost of $1399. There's also the Core i9-7920X with a slightly lower base clock of 2.9GHz, but the same 4.3/4.4GHz boost clocks, and reduced L3 cache of 16.5MB and lower 140W TDP with a lower $1199 price.

Games titan Activision promises more remasters after big success of recent Crash Bandicoot remaster trilogy.

The massively successful sales performance of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy on PS4 has caught the attention of Activision, but the trend isn't exactly new for the company. In a recent earnings call Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg discusses the game's huge reception and what the future holds for remasters.

"We knew there was a passionate audience out there for Crash, but we had no idea...it's hard to tell if that's a vocal minority or a mass audience until we put something out there. Crash has surpassed all of our expectations by a pretty wide margin," the CEO said.

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime confirms the studio is incubating a number of new IPs and ideas, as well as plans for new titles in existing IPs.

Activision's second quarter 2017 earnings call was full of great news for Blizzard. Not only is the company bringing in tons of revenue from Blizzard games like Overwatch and Hearthstone, the company is working on a handful of new IP to fill out its future slate of releases.

During the earnings call, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime teased the new IP slate by saying the current pipeline of games and ideas is better now than in the company's entire history--and considering Blizzard made gems like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo, that's saying a lot.

Google's Pixel smartphone was one of the best phones of last year, and the company has already confirmed that its successor would come this year. The Pixel 2 is certainly one of the most anticipated smartphones this year, and as the launch date approaches, we are getting a better idea of how the phone will look.

A new leak has appeared allegedly showing a Pixel 2 device in the wild. According to the photos, Google once again won't go for a dual camera setup. Earlier reports mention that the company will ditch the 3.5mm headphone jack, which appears to be a trend this year.

Read also: Qualcomm's Snapdragon 836 will debut with the Pixel 2

More details about RED Digital's upcoming Hydrogen phone are starting to flow out. In a recent video, RED user and YouTube tech celebrity MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) showed off a prototype of the RED Hydrogen.

This non-working prototype shows the overall design of the phone without any actual working parts. It shows the three different zones of the back of the device which included the area around the dual camera, the center area with the RED logo and the bottom with the data and power pins for connecting modules.

Read also: RED Hydrogen One is the world's first holographic phone

Activision continues its fiscal year with another strong quarter driven by consoles and digital content.

Activision recently reported its Q2'17 and second-half earnings for 2017, and the results have yet again beaten corporate guidance.

For the second quarter ending June 30, Activision pulled in a total of $1.631 billion, outpacing guidance by $206 million, or 14.5%. The company attributes this growth to successful engagement and monetization strategies across its entire slate of games, with Blizzard's key franchises earning the lion's share of revenues during the quarter thanks to Overwatch's landmark seasonal and anniversary events as well as World of Warcraft's latest expansion and new Hearthstone content.

Samsung is still ramping up to the announcement of their next-gen Galaxy Note 8 later this month, with our first tease of the Galaxy Note 9 that is destined for 2018.

According to a new report from KGI Securities, the new Galaxy Note 9 will feature an under-display fingerprint sensor. The upcoming Galaxy Note 8 will rock a fingerprint sensor on the back, something that the next-gen Galaxy S9 will include. Samsung was reportedly meant to use an under-the-display fingerprint sensor in the S8 and S9, but ran into technical difficulties of getting it done, hence the Note 9 reportedly the first with the under-display fingerprint sensor.

Another thing to consider is that Samsung isn't the only one having issues getting an under-display fingerprint sensor into their phones, with Apple rerpotedly set to include a virtual button on their new iPhone, as even they couldn't get an under-display fingerprint sensor in a 2017 smartphone. KGI reports that the "Galaxy S9 will have the new selling points of upgraded iris recognition and dual camera, Samsung has no need to risk adopting under-display optical fingerprint solution in a hurry".

Ubisoft is pushing out a gigantic patch for Rainbow Six: Siege, with the non-4K update coming in at 26GB, while the 4K update is a massive 42GB.

The team has said that the new patch includes a new baseline that will be the foundation for all future RS:S patches, with the development team replacing countless data forges (the compressed archives that include all of the other files). Future patches shouldn't be as big, but up to 42GB is just MAMMOTH.

Ubisoft is including multiple texture optimizations for Rainbow Six: Siege on the PC, with tweaks made to the texture quality of each level of graphics setting. There's also improved character textures and environmental texture quality, too. The team explains: "Environment textures take up ~60% of available VRAM, and without making the Ultra HD pack unusable by anyone but those with the most powerful builds, the upgraded environment textures did not fit into the Ultra HD pack. Now that we have streamlined the way data and textures are handled, we are able to include these upgrades in the Ultra HD pack, and make it accessible by players that meet the 6GB VRAM minimum requirement".

Razer already has its Chroma lighting system, showing off its beautiful RGB LED goodness that syncs your RGB LEDs between gaming mice, keyboards, and mousepads - oh and even laptops, and a cup holder.

Well now, Razer has unveiled their new Chroma Hardware Development Kit that uses Chroma-compatible LED light strips that you can add to your gaming PC, or behind your displays and the sides of your desk. The results? Absolutely GORGEOUS.

Razer is selling the full Chroma Hardware Development Kit for $79.99 - currently sold out, which normally includes the base module, and 4 x lighting channels and 2 x LED strips. You can buy additional LED strips with a 2-pack costing $29.99.