Weekly News Roundup #1
The idea behind this is I take 1 article every day thats somewhat interesting and give my comments on it.
This will be posted weekly on Saturdays. and cover a news article from Monday to Friday.
Monday
Google restricts Huawei’s use of Android
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48330310
This news is very troubling as it means that a law in one country is affecting phones all over the world. It won't stop security updates but Huawei will no longer be able to use android for new phones or release version updates to existing phones.
Now i would not have a problem with what america is doing to this company if it was not for one thing proof. Not once have I seen the american intelligence community actually offer lines of code from any one of huawei's products showing a backdoor, or it sending logs to the chinease government. Now America on the other hand has been caught putting backdoors into American products sold to other world powers see the article here, and there wasn't a global ban on American products so this whole situation seems excessive.
This is just my opinion but I believe this to be another one of the american government's business decisions (Make america great again) to try and bring manufacturing back to the country. But in the process this is damaging the global market and stopping a company's growth by stopping one of their revenue streams.
Tuesday
Sapphire: AMD will unveil two Navi SKUs on Monday (Computex)
Source: https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/130772-sapphire-amd-will-unveil-two-navi-skus-monday-computex/
While i take these leaks with a grain of salt I am hoping for some upper level competitiveness from AMD in the graphics market. While its mentioned that the top we will be seeing will be 2070 levels im hoping for another card in the near future that can challenge the 2080, However with this 2070 being mentioned to be water-cooled this version of Navi may not live up to my expectations.
It was also mentioned that there is no ray tracing hardware in this generation of Navi cards, to me this is not that big of a loss. The current gaming market there are very few games that actually make use of ray tracing. Even with the dedicated hardware you currently take a big hit to your performance, My hope is that AMD takes their time with this particular feature so that you can have both frame-rate and pretty images.
Wednesday
Apple introduces first 8-core MacBook Pro, the fastest Mac notebook ever
As the article states Apple is adding an 8 core variant to its MacBook Pro line. Now while i cant say more performance is not a good thing in most cases, This is not one of them. I am well aware of the thermal cooling limitation of the MacBook Pro, Even with a 6 core in this machine there is not enough heat sink to dissipate the heat that it generates. Adding 2 more cores to this thermal solution will just overwhelm it sooner, this will probably be further exacerbated by Apples fan curve opting for silence over performance.
The only potential band aids i can see applied to this problem is reducing the max power draw or just letting it thermal throttle, Both of which where done in the 6 core and will have to be greater in the 8 core.
This is where the performance question comes in at £260 premium over the 6 core will you actually get 33% extra performance of the extra 2 cores? Or will it be held back so much by the thermal solution that it would be more sensible to stick with the 6 core for more sustained performance? We will have to wait for 3rd party reviewers to test this for us.
Thursday
Qualcomm guilty of abusing chip patent monopoly, biz promises to appeal
Source https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/22/qualcomm_found_guilty/
I totally agree with the decisions made here. They have bullied intel out of making modems as the most recent example. Qualcomm is now being forced to share their IP’s at a fair price by the american government, This should open up the market to more competition and might actually decrease the costs of lots of popular electronics if more companies can actually produce them.
Now i am not aware of all the ins and outs of american law however the company will be appealing this decision. This could mean that the judgement be delayed until this appeal is concluded, which means we will not see any reduced costs or other players in the market for a long time yet.
Now Apple having paid $4.5 billion in their spat with qualcomm earlier might be feeling quite foolish for paying as much as they have. But realistically at the time they had no option as Qualcomm hold the basic patients to make a smartphone work.
Friday
Third time's a charm? SpaceX hopes to launch 60 Starlink broadband sats into orbit tonight
Source https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/24/spacex_starlink_launch/
Space X has finally managed to launch their Starlink satellites, This is the second launch after their launch of 2 test satellites in february 2018. They have now launched 62 out of the planned 4049 for this phase of deployment of this constellation. The reason for this massive number is due to the low altitude that this constellation is planned to orbit at, this gives the benefit of lower latency than the geostationary orbit communication satellites as they are closer. But because they are closer you need to have more of them due to the horizon getting in the way.
There are quite a few benefits globally for this SpaceX project, People in the middle of nowhere will have access to high speed low latency internet without the need for a dish or paying through the nose (apparently), you will still need an antenna but due to the nature of this constellation you should not need anything directional. This will also be of benefit to quite a few americans as quite a few areas are stuck with a monopoly and paying a lot of money for not much speed. This should bring in competition to all areas of the country and should either bring prices down or allow people to change to a provider that is.
I do hope to go see a lunch at some point….. But i will need to find the time….. And the money….. And renew my passport.