We already knew that Resident Evil Village will release on a slew of platforms, including the PS5 and Xbox Series X / S. And today, Google announced that the game will also arrive on Stadia. To encourage you to buy this version, Google will throw in a free Stadia Premiere kit to anyone who preorders Resident Evil Village before May 21st. The promotion is available for both the Standard and Deluxe Editions of Resident Evil Village, which cost $60 and $70, respectively.
Normally priced at $100, Google’s Stadia Premiere Edition features a white Stadia controller, a Chromecast Ultra, and, for new users, a one-month trial subscription to Stadia’s Pro-tier service. Stadia Pro includes 4K streaming and a growing collection of free games, similar to Sony’s PlayStation Plus service.
Google had a similar promotion last year when it offered complimentary hardware if you preordered the Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077. The Resident Evil Village promotion announcement comes at an interesting time as Stadia’s future looks questionable. In February, Google shut down its internal Stadia development studio. That same month, reports from Bloomberg and Wired shed light on some of the tech giant’s failures in building its cloud gaming platform.
Before Resident Evil Village arrives on May 7th, Google also announced today that Stadia Pro members can redeem a free copy of Resident Evil 7 Gold Edition when the game launches on the cloud gaming service on April 1st.
João Silva 12 hours ago Featured Tech News, Operating Systems
Back in 2019, Microsoft announced an operating system dedicated to dual-screen devices named Windows 10X. Initially scheduled for a release in 2020, Microsoft changed its focus onto devices with a single screen and changed the release date to H1 2021. Now, a new report suggests the release has been delayed once again, with Microsoft planning to release it in H2 2021.
According to Windows Central, Microsoft plans to release the final build of Windows 10X in late spring, but the first devices featuring it may only arrive a few months after. Microsoft refused to comment on the delay, but it has likely occurred to ensure stability at launch.
Some have theorised that the delay could be down to Microsoft introducing support for Win32 apps. However, Windows Central’s sources claim that Microsoft still has no plans to support Win32 on Windows 10X. Instead, users will need to find alternatives, such as Windows Virtual Desktop, or cloud-based apps.
Windows 10X has been in the works for a couple of years now, aimed at entry-level and business PCs. Microsoft’s previous attempt at this came in the form of Windows 10 S, which was also aimed at students.
KitGuru says: This is Microsoft’s second attempt at re-building Windows 10 for the purposes of education and business. It could be a while before we see it in action though. Microsoft typically makes Windows OS announcements each year in April, so we should have an update on this soon.
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The final PCIe 6.0 specification is still months away, but the final draft released about five months ago allows chip designers and IP developers to start implementing the new technology into their products as no new features will be added or modified. This week Synopsys introduced the industry’s first complete PCIe 6.0 IP solution that allows chip creators to integrate the new interface into their designs to be made using a 5-nm fabrication process.
Synopsys’ DesignWare IP package for PCIe 6.0 includes a controller (with a Synopsys interface or optional Arm’s AMBA 5/4/3 AXI interfaces), physical interface (PHY), and verification IP. The solution that Synopsys offers allows chip designers to throw the controller IP and physical interface into their 5-nm design and then verify that everything works correctly using the verification IP provided. For example, designers of ASICs for AI as well as HPC applications, GPUs, SSD controllers, and other bandwidth-sensitive applications that require the high bandwidth that a PCIe 6.0 interface can provide.
How much bandwidth? Up to 128 GB/s over an x16 interface — in each direction. That means a PCIe 6.0 solution could potentially transfer up to 256 GB/s of data. Yes, please, we’ll take two!
(Image credit: Synopsys)
The controller fully supports a data transfer rate of up to 64 GT/s per pin, up from 32 GT/s in case of PCIe 5.0 and 16 GT/s in case of PCIe 4.0. It also supports pulse amplitude modulation with four levels (PAM4) signaling, low-latency forward error correction (FEC), FLIT mode, and L0p power state — all key new features of PCIe 6.0. On top of that, Synopsys’ DesignWare PCIe 6.0 controller also supports Synopsys’ own adaptive DSP algorithms that optimize analog and digital equalization to reduce power by 20% across chip-to-chip, riser card, and backplane interfaces.
(Image credit: PCI-SIG)
Synopsys says that the architecture of its PCIe 6.0 controller and physical interface are placement-aware to minimize package crosstalk at high data transfer rates. Furthermore, the company claims that it uses an optimized datapath to ensure ultra-low latency.
“Advanced cloud computing, storage and machine learning applications are transferring significant amounts of data, requiring designers to incorporate the latest high-speed interfaces with minimal latency to meet the bandwidth demands of these systems,” said John Koeter, senior vice president of marketing and strategy for IP at Synopsys. “With Synopsys’ complete DesignWare IP solution for PCI Express 6.0, companies can get an early start on their PCIe 6.0-based designs and leverage Synopsys’ proven expertise and established leadership in PCI Express to accelerate their path to silicon success.”
It’s only in the past 18 months that we’ve seen consumer hardware — GPUs and M.2 SSDs — supporting PCIe 4.0, with Nvidia adding support for Gen4 with Ampere starting last September. We’ve got some time before PCIe 5.0 starts to show up in the best graphics cards and best SSDs, not to mention motherboards, but PCI-SIG is already basically finished with the next iteration. How much will the increased bandwidth matter for storage and graphics workloads? For home users, probably not much at all. These high-speed interfaces primarily target data center and supercomputer workloads, and it will likely be many years before consumer hardware needs this much speed.
(Pocket-lint) – GoPro put a colour screen on the front of the Hero 9 Black, bringing it more in line with the DJI Osmo Action, and while it was at it decided we needed a bigger battery too. That means you can finally see yourself when you’re filming, and you can shoot for longer.
With that said, its predecessor – the Hero 8 Black – was and still is a great action camera. So should you stump up the extra for the 9 or will the Hero 8 do everything you need it to?
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Design and Displays
Hero 8: 66.3 x 48.6 x 28.4mm
Hero 9: 71.0 x 55.0 x 33.6mm
Hero 8: Monochrome status screen on the front
Hero 9: Colour live preview screen on the front
Both: Built-in mounting arms
Both: Colour touchscreen on the back, Hero 9 larger
Both: Waterproof to 10m
The Hero 8 Black was an important product for GoPro, freeing the company from the constraints of needing to fit its tech into a specific size body, just so it would fit in the mounting accessories. Instead, it built-in mounting arms to the bottom of the camera, allowing you to mount it to all the accessories, without a clip-on shell, and that has returned in the Hero 9.
That’s seen GoPro increase the size of its flagship action camera by a noticeable – but not huge – amount. It’s a few millimetres taller, wider and thicker than the 8 Black, but the trade-off should prove worth it for the bigger battery and more powerful internals. Plus, the bigger screen and colour screen on the front.
Speaking of those displays, the latest model’s front screen is full colour and can be used as a live preview display, while the 8 Black has the more traditional monochrome status display which only shows you status information.
The best GoPro: Which should you buy today?
Both cameras feature a similar design in terms of button and port placement. They both have the shutter button on the top and the mode/power button on the left edge. However, the mode/power button on the 9th gen protrudes more from the surface and is much easier to press and to feel without looking. The Hero 8’s button is flush with the surface, and so virtually impossible to find by touch.
Just underneath that, the Hero 9 also has a speaker designed to pump out water, similar to the feature Apple has used in its watches for a while. So if you do take it underwater to test its 10m depth resistance, it will expel any water that seeps into the speaker channels.
Video capture and streaming
Hero 8: Up to 4K/60 FHD/240 footage
Hero 9: Up to 5K/30, 4K/60, FHD/240
Both: 1080p live streaming
Both Heros support a wide range of resolution and frame-rate combinations at various focal lengths, thanks to the ‘digital lenses’ that are built into the software.
As far as resolution goes, the Hero9 is the champ here. It can shoot up to 5K resolution at a 16:9 ratio with wide, linear and narrow ‘lenses’. At 4K resolution, it can go up to 60 frames per second and up to 240 frames per second at 1080p. It can also shoot at 2.7k resolution, and various resolutions using up to4K at 4:3 ratio. Hero 8 is similar, except it maxes out at 4K resolution. It also doesn’t feature horizon levelling feature available at certain settings.
Both cameras can be used for live streaming and both can do so at 1080p resolution. Both also use a combination of EIS and algorithms to stabilise footage using a feature called HyperSmooth. With the Hero 9, that’s been boosted further, making it even smoother than before while also offering the horizon levelling feature. What’s more, if you buy the additional Max lens you get horizon levelling on everything, even when you rotate the camera 360-degrees.
Stills and performance
Hero 8: 12MP stills
Hero 9: 20MP stills
Both: SuperPhoto + HDR
Both: RAW support
Hero 8: 1220mAh battery
Hero 9: 1720mAh battery
Both: GP1 chip
There are two big performance upgrades with Hero 9: Photo resolution and battery life. It has a 20-megapixel sensor versus the 12-megapixel sensor on the previous model. Similarly, it has a higher capacity battery, with an additional 500mAh on top of the 8th gen’s 1220mAh battery to give a total of 1720mAh.
GoPro says you’ll get an extra 30% video capture time from that battery, and that is definitely useful when it comes to action cameras. There’s nothing worse than running the battery flat during a downhill biking session.
Both cameras have the same image/data processor – called the GP1 – and they both support RAW image capture as well as GoPro’s advanced HDR image processing.
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Price
Hero 8: $299 with a subscription ($349 without)
Hero 9: $399 with a subscription ($499 without)
The most cost-effective way to buy a new Hero camera is with an annual GoPro subscription. If you buy Hero 8 with the subscription, the camera will cost you $299/£279, while Hero 9 is $399/£329. If you buy the cameras without the subscription, the Hero 8 is $349/£329 and Hero 9 is $499/£429.
Given the added value of the subscription – which gets you unlimited cloud storage, a replacement camera when yours breaks and accessory discounts – it makes complete sense to opt for that with the lower upfront outlay. You get 12 months subscription paid for in advance with that price. GoPro is obviously hoping users stick around for more than a year and keep subscribing afterwards.
Conclusion
Given the price difference, the Hero 8 Black is actually very good value for money. It’s $100/£100 cheaper than the Hero 9 but does a lot of the same stuff.
With that said, with its new colour screen, higher resolution sensor and longer battery life the additional outlay is definitely worth it for the Hero 9. Especially when you consider that its price with the subscription is only a little higher than the price of the Hero 8 Black without a subscription.
If you want the best action camera going, grab the Hero 9. If you’d rather save the cash, or if you’re coming from an older model like the Hero 5 or Hero 6, the Hero 8 will do you just fine and is still a major upgrade on those two.
OtterBox, the company best known for its ruggedized cases, has developed a $30 clip that can attach your phone to an Xbox controller for playing games. Called the Mobile Gaming Clip, it’s part of a growing trend of accessories for playing cloud-based console games right on your phone. What makes OtterBox’s clip different is it can also work as a phone stand, separate from the controller — although the phone stand feature isn’t quite as robust as what I was hoping for.
OtterBox’s clip is designed specifically for Xbox controllers, and it works with controllers made for the Xbox One, Series X / S, or the Elite Series 2 controller. There’s also a little cutout for the charging port, meaning if you need to connect your Xbox controller to a USB cable, you will not need to remove the clip from the controller. You can also detach the arm from the clip itself and use it as a stand to prop up your smartphone for tabletop gaming, watching movies, or video calls.
With Microsoft rolling out xCloud, it’s partnering with multiple manufacturers to make a variety of mobile gaming accessory companies, including OtterBox, Razer’s Kishi, and 8BitDo’s SN30 Pro for Android, provide different experiences. Microsoft is aiming to ensure there is a big ecosystem of gaming peripherals once its cloud gaming service becomes more widely available.
Setup for the OtterBox Mobile Gaming Clip is straightforward: connect your Xbox controller to your phone, attach the clip to your controller, mount the phone, and start playing. It does require more force than other gaming clips to attach it to the controller. Once you have it properly installed, the clip tightly clasps across the controller, so you don’t have to worry about it getting loose and falling off.
Some mobile gaming clips, like PowerA’s MOGA Mobile Gaming Clip, tend to feel unbalanced, particularly with a big or heavy phone or a phone with a bulkier case. OtterBox’s Mobile Gaming Clip has a better distribution of weight, which made the controller feel a bit more balanced.
One reason for that is OtterBox’s Mobile Gaming Clip has a “rapid adjust feature,” which means you can adjust the angle of your phone when using the clip. The clip’s arm can extend a bit, allowing you to experiment with the angles you prefer. There’s also a latch located on the arm of the Mobile Gaming Clip that allows you to lock it in place so it doesn’t shift around while in use.
There are three claws to keep your phone in place. The bottom claw extends, allowing bigger phones to fit into the accessory by extending a few centimeters. This makes it easy to fit bigger phones into the gaming clip. The claws don’t block me from reaching the volume or power buttons on my iPhone XR, though it is a bit cumbersome to have to unlock my phone while using the mount because it’s sideways in the mount. The design also makes it easy to use a pair of wired earbuds or connect a charger to charge my phone while I continue gaming.
I had to remove a case I was using that had a PopSocket attached in order to securely get my phone in place.
I did have some issues when I tried to mount my phone; the phone case I use primarily has a PopSocket attached in the center, and it added too much thickness and made my phone less secure in the clip, even popping out when I moved the clip even slightly. I ended up having to remove the case from my phone every time I wanted to use the clip. If you don’t have an accessory like a PopSocket on your phone, the clip should work with almost any standard case.
The most interesting feature for OtterBox’s Mobile Gaming Clip is tabletop mode. You can switch from the controller to tabletop mode by detaching the arm to the clip portion of the accessory, allowing you to use the gaming clip as a viewing stand for gaming or even watching movies and TV shows. The tabletop feature is an ambitious idea, but it ends up being more of a kickstand than an actual stand. You have limited ability to adjust the angle of the phone in this mode, and you can’t raise the phone up off the table in any way.
Yet, the option for a tabletop mode does address one of the biggest problems with mobile gaming clips: hand fatigue from the weight of a controller, phone, and clip combined. OtterBox helps solve this problem by allowing you the ability to take a break from the gaming clip but still giving you that freedom to continue gaming on your phone.
Tabletop mode is a great idea that can reduce hand fatigue, but the feature feels mostly like an afterthought.
In the last few years, the cloud and mobile gaming market has become a more exciting space in the industry, with successful free-to-play titles like Call of Duty Mobile and Microsoft truly beginning its push into cloud gaming. As cloud gaming continues to grow, there’s likely going to be a big expansion in the availability and variety of gaming clips like this one. This means if you do not like the current options available on the market, there is a high probability that similar products will be released in the coming months and years.
OtterBox’s Mobile Gaming Clip is not the perfect mobile gaming accessory, but it is one of the better mobile gaming accessories available now. It allows me the option to use a controller I own and not one designed for a specific product (aside from the fact that it has to be an Xbox controller). It’s also a bit more flexible in how to use it when compared to other mobile gaming accessories such as the Razer Kishi, which encloses your phone in a pair of controllers.
At $30, OtterBox’s clip is less expensive than those solutions, but there are still cheaper options if you want to clip your phone to an existing controller. I like how the clip does not feel unbalanced when attached to the controller, and the tabletop mode is interesting. But it ends up feeling like more of an afterthought because of how limited the clip ends up being when used on a table. Yet, the things OtterBox’s Mobile Gaming Clip does right are enough to justify the $5 to $10 price premium compared to other options available on the market.
(Pocket-lint) – Arlo has been refining and expanding its offering over the past few years, with the Arlo Pro cameras moving to their third version and evolving into the Pro 3 Floodlight Camera, a hybrid of two areas that Arlo operates in – cameras and lighting.
While most Arlo cameras now offer some sort of LED illumination, the Floodlight goes a lot further, crossing over into space that was previously dominated by dedicated security lights. So is this fusion a best of both worlds?
Design and installation
Dimensions: 218.5 x 77.9 x 190.5mm / Weight: 650g
Wire-free installation
Waterproof
The Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight Camera essentially looks like an Arlo Pro 3 camera sitting in the middle of an LED bar. The design maintains a familiar look to the body of the camera, the big difference being that spread of lights to the front. But this camera is longer in the body than the regular Pro 3 too and has a more substantial wall-mount to accommodate the additional weight.
As before, there are two main components to the light: the wall mount and the casing; and the camera, light and battery assembly. The latter combination slides into the casing and clicks into place.
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That means there are no seams or joints on the body, the only place where there’s a joint is around the end of the casing where it meets the back of the light – and well sealed to keep water out. It’s survived some heavy rain and having used Arlo cameras over a number of years, we’ve found them to be waterproof, so no concerns here.
There’s also no way to lock the camera into the housing, you just have to press a button to release it. That’s not a problem for cameras mounted high, but if it’s within reach, it could potentially be removed easily – and not necessarily by yourself.
Installation is simple, because there’s no need for a wired connection, it’s a battery-operated device. That means you can position the light wherever you please, but you will have to drill into the wall to secure the mounting plate. All the screws and wall plugs are supplied in the box, and it’s a quick job to get it up there.
Once the mounting plate is in place, you can attach the remainder of the casing, secured with another screw so it can’t be easily removed. Then the camera assembly slides into the housing and locks into place. The angle can be adjusted, with a ring around the base of the mount to tighten it all up and keep the camera pointing in the right direction.
Pocket-lint
Arlo has an healthy range of accessories and if you’d rather have this as a wired device, you can buy a charger that magnetically fixes to the bottom, while there’s also a solar charger option too.
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Setup and the Arlo system
2.4GHz Wi-Fi or SmartHub or Base Station connection
Arlo app control
The Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight will either act as a standalone camera – connected to your Wi-Fi network – or it can connect to an Arlo SmartHub or older Arlo Base Station. In some previous devices the SmartHub was obligatory, but the Pro 3 Floodlight gives you a little more freedom, meaning it’s a more affordable route to getting a single Arlo device up and running.
Using the SmartHub means you get 2K local streaming and 2K local recording on a microSD card, as well as auto zoom and tracking features, so it delivers a wider array of features than the standalone route.
Pocket-lint
Setup is all managed by the Arlo app on your smartphone and that’s the place to start. Given the size of the camera, it’s worth charging and connecting before you put it in place on your wall, just to make sure everything is working correctly – something that’s easier to do when you don’t have to worry about climbing up and down a ladder repeatedly.
The Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight will happily work within an existing Arlo system, the main advantage here being much more substantial illumination.
Once connected and installed, you’ll have to decide how your camera behaves. Unlike some systems, Arlo doesn’t just start recording everything automatically, you have to decide what you want the camera to do. This is important because they are battery operated and capturing every movement will soon drain the battery.
As this is both a light and a camera, you also have to decide if you want to separate these functions. You can choose, for example, to have the light come on when movement or sound is detected, or you can have video captured, or both. Depending on how and where you install the camera, you do at least get the chance to choose and via the app you can create operation modes to cover all your needs.
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Talking about battery life, Arlo says that the battery will last 6 months, although we suspect that’s in an environment where it’s not triggered. We suspect the typical battery life would be around 3 months, but it’s going to depend on things like the temperature and how much you capture – dependent on the volume of usage. We’re on track for about 2 months of usage, but we have the device illuminating on motion detection and capturing the cats coming and going on the garden whenever it’s triggered.
Recharging takes 5-6 hours for this extended battery pack and you have to remove the entire camera array to plug it in via Micro-USB to get it recharging. For those who don’t want to worry about battery life, we’d recommend the solar panel to keep it running instead.
Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight Camera performance
2K HDR video capture (2560 x 1440 resolution)
2-3000 lumen floodlight
160-degree wide angle
Built-in siren
2-way audio
The camera on the Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight is basically the same as the Arlo Pro 3. That gives you a great wide-angle lens covering 160-degrees, with the option to reduce that angle of capture if you want something narrower.
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There’s a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, although you can opt for lower resolution if you want. To view those 2K videos you’ll need a device that supports HEVC (iOS 9 or later, Android 5 or later), but that covers most smartphones from beyond the past few years. The advantage that a higher resolution offers is that you can zoom in to see a little more detail on captured video if you need.
It’s a good resolution, able to capture plenty of detail and thanks to that huge floodlight on the front, when triggered in low light, you’ll get high quality video at night too. It’s better than the non-Floodlight version because there’s a lot more light available for night-time capture, although for some it might be too bright and be irritating to neighbours – but you can also change the brightness.
You can capture night video without the floodlight, with IR illumination able to provide some coverage, although not to the same extent as the full floodlight experience and that’s rather more basic – but still useful.
With all that light available, the Pro 3 Floodlight also works great as a welcome home light, even if you only have video capture when you’re away from home. Via the app you can also manually turn on the light, which is useful if you want to do something outside when it’s dark.
Motion detection can be defined in zones (if you’re an Arlo Smart subscriber), which means you can choose not to have it triggered by passing cars, only motion on the driveway, for example. You can also set the sensitivity for motion or audio triggers. As we said above, these triggers can be ascribed to both the camera, the light or both together.
Able to capture audio, you can also talk through the Arlo’s built-in speaker, meaning you can converse with someone you catch doing something you’re not happy with – while there’s also a siren that you can manually trigger, or have automatically trigger, which you probably don’t want outdoors, but could be useful if you’re using it to monitor your garage or storage shed.
As with other recent Arlo devices, you’ll need an Arlo Smart subscription to get the most from the Pro 3 Floodlight Camera – priced at $2.99/£2.99 a month. That unlocks smart features like like the detection zones, auto pan and zoom, and 2K video cloud storage for 30 days.
It’s all about the Arlo app
Voice assistant compatibility
Remote monitoring
Customisation
While the Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight Camera can act as a standalone device, it works best as part of a system. That’s because you’ll need to use the Arlo app to control it – and it’s better to have one app, rather than a collection of apps to control a range of cameras from different manufacturers.
Unlike something like a lightbulb, the range of options that Arlo presents means there’s a lot more to get to grips with, but there’s some integration with other systems, like Apple Homekit, Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT and SmartThings. You can, for example, view your Arlo cameras through a device such as the Amazon Echo Show, but we still maintain it’s better to use the Arlo app directly, as you can then view your history and have full control of your devices.
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You can also have voice-controlled activation of your Smart Hub. This will allow you to arm your Arlo system via voice through a virtual assistant like Amazon Alexa – with the option to have PIN protection for voice disarming too.
The Arlo app, on the whole, is good. It takes some time to learn your way around it and explore the wealth of features, but it’s generally stable. There will be the occasional time when you open the app to have it reported that you have no connection and can’t see any cameras, but generally restarting the app (and checking you actually have a connection of course) resolves that.
Alerts can be customised and with an Arlo Smart subscription, you can choose the type of alert you want too – such as vehicle, animal or person. You then receive a rich notification on your smartphone, getting a thumbnail of the person detected, for example.
Verdict
Arlo is one of the most popular home camera brands and it’s easy to see why, thanks to the versatility that the system offers. The Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight Camera offers all the advantages of the Arlo camera system, but with that powerful lighting giving you more options – and the flexibility to choose how it is used.
It’s a bit of a big beast, but given that you could remove your regular floodlight once you have the Arlo in place probably offsets that worry.
Overall the great performance, good quality video night and day, along with a wire-free setup and the option for hub-free operation means it’s great on its own or as part of a wider system of cameras.
Alternatives to consider
Pocket-lint
Ring Floodlight Cam
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Less pretty than the Arlo, this camera offers greater flexibility with directional spotlights. It’s around the same sort of price, but uses the Ring system instead, with a 1080p camera, although it is a wired camera.
Read the Ring Floodlight Cam review
Pocket-lint
Netatmo Smart Outdoor Camera
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The Netatmo camera is wired – designed to replace an existing outside light – so it’s not quite as simple as the Arlo, but it does come with no ongoing costs. That’s because it saves the footage to internal storage which you can then access via the smartphone app. It’s a 1080p camera.
Nvidia on Thursday announced a new subscription tier for its GeForce Now cloud gaming service called Priority that will replace its existing paid Founders tier and contain the same perks like extended session length and RTX support. The catch: the change will come with a price increase, from what used to be a $4.99-per-month subscription to what will now be a $9.99-per-month one for new subscribers. Nvidia will also start offering a $99.99-per-year Priority subscription.
However, those who had active memberships as of yesterday, March 17th, will be eligible for the Founders pricing for life, Nvidia says, which comes out to a little less than $60 per year. The company still plans to offer a free tier of GeForce Now, too, but that tier restricts you to a one-hour session length. Nvidia says the price hike is meant to represent the platform’s evolution since it launched in beta way back in 2015 and entered what Nvidia has referred to as a public testing phase a year ago.
“As GeForce Now enters year two, and rapidly approaches 10 million members, the service is ready to kick things up a notch,” the company said in a statement. “GeForce Now launched out of beta last February with Founders memberships — a limited time, promotional plan. On Thursday, Founders memberships will close to new registrations and Priority memberships, the new premium offering, will be introduced.”
Image: Nvidia
Those who have tried out GeForce Now with a Founders subscription but let that subscription lapse may be displeased to find out that Nvidia does not intend to give the $4.99-per-month pricing to anyone who may have been a paying subscriber in the recent past, even if you let your subscription lapse a few days ago. You’ll need to have been an active, paying Founders member as of yesterday, and you’ll also need to keep the membership active to continue paying the reduced price. If you cancel, you’ll lose the promotion for good.
“Members need to be subscribed to the Founders membership as of 3/17/2021, and keep their membership in good standing, to be eligible for the benefit. If you were previously a Founders member but downgraded, unfortunately you’re not eligible,” an Nvidia spokesperson clarified to The Verge.
To its credit, Nvidia hasn’t sold monthly memberships for some time now, instead selling a promotional six-month bundle for $24.99. That makes it less likely that someone who subscribed any time in the last few months will find themselves ineligible for this Founders pricing perk.
Nvidia intends to continue upping its investment in the platform as it’s proved quite successful, with close to 10 million members, in the otherwise struggling cloud gaming scene. Most recently, Google closed down its in-house game development studios creating titles for its Stadia service, while Amazon’s Luna platform remains in beta.
GeForce Now differs from those platforms by letting members stream games they’ve already purchased from Epic, Steam, and other digital distributors over the cloud. The service’s paid tier launch last year was a bumpy one after high-profile publishers like Activision Blizzard and 2K Games pulled their libraries, the dispute caused by Nvidia streaming those companies’ games without explicit permission.
Since then, Nvidia has switched to an opt-in model to court game makers to the platform on friendlier terms, a strategy that’s paid off as Nvidia has added roughly 10 new games to the platform every week. The company now has a full list of supported titles on its website, a welcome addition after the rocky licensing fallout of last spring.
Nvidia says the tech will keep improving over time, while its “GFN Thursday” new game onboarding will jump from 10 new titles added per week to 15 by the end of the year. GeForce Now will later this month get support for Adaptive Vsync, which “synchronizes frame rates at 60 or 59.94 Hz server-side to match the display client-side, reducing stutter and latency on supported games,” the company explains. Nvidia says it’s also releasing a “new adaptive de-jitter technology” to increase bit rates for games streamed over slower networks. (Nvidia could not, however, provide a timeline for when the platform will support 4K streaming when asked.)
Other benefits coming soon include account linking for games with cross-platform support and improvements to preloading to cut down load times by half, both coming in the next one to two months. Nvidia says it’s also adding data center capacity in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as bringing online its first Canadian data center in Montreal later this year, both of which will help reduce wait times.
As for the company’s iOS beta, which launched back in November, Nvidia didn’t have much new to share. But a company spokesperson did say that “all previously announced projects continue to be on the roadmap in collaboration with the team at Epic,” referencing the ongoing work to bring Epic’s Fortnite back to the iPhone and iPad via GeForce Now on the mobile web after it was banned by Apple and Google last summer.
Microsoft’s Presenter Coach, which helps you practice presentations, has been available on the web version of PowerPoint for a while now, but it’s finally coming to the desktop and mobile versions of the app. According to Microsoft, the feature will now be available on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and, of course, the web.
PowerPoint Presenter Coach listens to you while you practice a presentation out loud — it analyzes what you’re saying, and can warn you if you’re talking too fast or slow, using filler words like “um” or “ahh,” or just reading the words off the slide (a personal pet peeve of mine). Trying it out on both PowerPoint for Windows and iOS, it worked shockingly well, doing pretty much everything Microsoft says it should. At the end it gives you a little report, telling you what you need to practice.
Along with the expanded availability, there are also some new ways that the feature can try to make your presentation better: it can look at body language (how close you are to the camera, if you’re making eye contact or putting things in front of your face), and warn you if you’re repeating words or saying them wrong. And yes, it still tells you not to swear in your presentation.
PowerPoint for web (seen here) censors the profanity, but the version for Windows hilariously doesn’t.
When I tried it, the feature didn’t show up in the Mac version of the app, but I was able to use it on iOS. Microsoft was not immediately available for comment about when the feature would show up on the Mac, or on whether the vocal and video analysis was done on-device or in the cloud for the desktop and mobile versions.
For the privacy-conscious, though, it is worth noting that when I tried it in airplane mode, it told me I had to connect to the internet to use the coaching feature.
On March 18th, a four-hour version of director Zack Snyder’s original vision for Justice Leaguewill hit HBO Max.
Early reviews are mostly littered with praise for the movie, calling it a win for fans of Snyder’s other superhero films (Batman v Superman, Man of Steel). Others acknowledge that, hey, at least it’s better than the original film released in 2017, which was spliced together by Joss Whedon after Snyder had to step back from the project to cope with the sudden death of his daughter. Whether the movie lives up to people’s expectations or not, the very existence of it — the marketing behind it, what it represents to fandom as a whole — is a turning point for online fandom.
A quick reminder of what the last four years have consisted of from various corners of the internet: after Justice League came out in 2017, Snyder fans immediately took up a petition asking Warner Bros. to release an alternate of the film — the true version they called the Snyder Cut. Over the years, calls for Warner Bros. to take action have grown, as has the fandom. Billboard signs in Times Square, bus ads in San Diego during Comic-Con, and small demonstrations outside Warner Bros.’ headquarters in Burbank all existed in an attempt to rally WarnerMedia executives into giving them the version of Justice League they were promised through setups in Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman, and more.
Like any massive faceless group centering their online personas on one particular thing or person, the Snyder Cut fandom (or the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut collective, as they became known) was a mixture of positives and negatives. The positive aspects are inspiring. Together, the group has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for suicide prevention awareness, a cause close to Snyder’s heart after his daughter’s death. A fandom rooted in a specific director spawned some genuinely thoughtful social media campaigns. There’s no denying that.
It’s also impossible to ignore the negatives. Critics and reporters received countless death threats and vile slurs all because they expressed disinterest in a Snyder Cut or called Snyder’s other work bad. Warner Bros. and DC Comics executives like Geoff Johns and former Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara were lambasted by Snyder fans to the point that Johns seemingly stopped using Twitter altogether. When new Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff joined the company, her Twitter mentions were full of people demanding the Snyder Cut.
“It took them a long time, the people who really wanted to be productive in this moment, to realize that they’re going to get judged by [negative] actions also,” Sean O’Connell, a journalist and author of Release the Snyder Cut, a book detailing the campaign over the last four years, tells The Verge. “The Snyder movement doesn’t have a really strong hold on policing the people in their movement who continue promoting that negativity.”
Even with critics, academics, and journalists calling out the toxic parts of the fandom, there were some members within the group who only seemed incentivized by ongoing acknowledgment and less-than-subtle encouragement from Snyder himself. The director recently told TheNew York Times that “it’s in some ways fun to surf the wave of a cultural phenomenon,” adding that “in other ways it’s terrifying and horrible.”
Snyder Cut fans are far from the only fan base with a toxic cloud hanging over parts of it. Star Wars is a perfect example. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, alongside actors John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran, received hordes of harassment from bitter Star Wars viewers. Boyega and Johnson publicly fought back against trolls, while Tran decided after some time to leave social media platforms like Instagram for her own mental health. At the time, Lucasfilm executives didn’t say anything publicly, nor did any of the official Star Wars social media accounts.
One of the biggest changes that has come about in an internet-first, social media-dominant world is that fans of massive properties feel closer to talent, executives, and companies than ever before. In turn, companies are trying to figure out how to navigate extremely loud voices on increasingly global platforms. Universal leaned into the #JusticeForHan hashtag when marketing its upcoming F9, a popular fan-driven movement. Sony reworked the overall tone for Venom after the first trailer failed to garner hype from Marvel fans. And perhaps most notably, Paramount completely redesigned its CGI version of Sonic the Hedgehog after the first trailer led to immediate negative reaction from fans.
Parts of the Snyder Cut fandom have drawn direct comparisons to what happened with BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 in 2012. After the game’s ending drew heavy criticism from fans, BioWare released an alternate ending to try to smooth over a vocal part of the fan base. The DLC was called Mass Effect: Extended Cut, and it became an example of corporations giving in to social media pressures.
“It’s such a slippery slope,” O’Connell says. “I don’t think that studios and corporations are going to make decisions going forward to placate fans on social media because that’s a risky gamble. At the same time, this entire DCEU experiment, to me, has been reactionary to the studio’s detriment. They started chasing the Marvel model instead of just believing in whatever Nolan had started and what Snyder tried to continue.”
AT&T has arguably leaned into the Snyder fandom the most as it tries to garner more attention and subscribers for its new HBO Max streaming service. After years of Warner Bros. repeatedly not saying anything about rereleasing a version of the film in theaters, the announcement of Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max came with AT&T’s official Twitter account celebrating a prickly fandom. This hasn’t stopped other Snyder fans from already replying to other AT&T tweets with pleas to #RestoreTheSnyderUniverse, demanding the director be given another shot at creating his entire superhero world, something current DC Films head Walter Hamada has no intention of doing.
The Snyder Cut is, according to several reviews, much better than the original. It exists as a testament to having a director see their entire project through from beginning to end. But #ReleaseTheSnyderCut is not the same as Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and there is a reason why WarnerMedia is releasing it as a four-hour film with effectively no oversight on HBO Max instead of rereleasing it in theaters (even with the pandemic) and spending $100 million on marketing.
It is, as Snyder told TheNew York Times, a “social experiment.” The problem with an experiment is that no one knows what that means two years, five years, or three decades from now. O’Connell doesn’t believe this would have happened if Warner Bros. waited another year or HBO Max hadn’t launched. It’s a moment to appease fans and drive subscribers to a platform that WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar consistently refers to as the future of the company.
“It’s the culmination of this entire experience: I fought and used the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, and it’s in my world, in my computer, on my TV, in my house,” Snyder said.
That’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League. The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fandom isn’t suddenly going to disappear, as my colleague Joshua Rivera wrote at Polygon. For both the positive campaigners who are happy to finally have Snyder’s version available to watch and the negative spouting trolls who can claim victory on social media and continue fighting with people, they got what they wanted. Their tactics worked. One of the largest corporations in the United States gave in to demands from anonymous people. That’s not something people forget, and it only incentivizes a very specific type of action further.
Xbox is announcing the next round of games coming to Game Pass, and it’s a pretty stacked deck with games like Undertale and Octopath Traveler, both of which are coming to Xbox for the first time.
Coming to all the Game Pass platforms (cloud, console, and PC) are:
Undertale (available today)
Empire of Sin (Available March 18th)
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (March 25th)
Narita Boy (March 30th)
Coming to just cloud and console is Outriders (April 1st), and coming to just console and PC are Octopath Traveler and Genesis Noir, both on March 25th.
The PC is also getting some love, with a few of games being added to the platform that were previously not available to PC Game Pass subscribers:
Nier: Automata (March 18th)
Torchlight III (March 18th)
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire – Ultimate Edition (March 25th)
Supraland (March 25th)
And finally, as if there weren’t enough games, Star Wars: Squadrons will be available on EA Play for console players starting on March 18th. Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will have access to the game through the included EA Play subscription.
Overall, there are some great games in here if you’re a Game Pass subscriber, whether you stream your games, play them on console or PC, or some of each. Undertale coming to the service (and platform) feels like a finally, given the game’s incredible popularity and the fact that it’s been available on most platforms for a while now (it was released on the PlayStation Vita almost three years ago). The game was first released in 2015.
Of course, many of these games are also becoming available for purchase on the Xbox as well, for those who prefer owning their games. And, as always, there must be some sort of balance in the universe, so three games will be leaving Game Pass on March 31st: HyperDot, Journey to the Savage Planet, and Machinarium. If you’ve been meaning to play any of those titles, it’s probably time to hop on it!
GoPro is releasing a new version of its main smartphone app that will now be called “Quik.” The new app will remain the main interface for connecting to and controlling GoPro cameras, but it is also getting new features, including one called “mural” that’s sort of like a private Instagram feed meant to help people organize their favorite images and videos — regardless of whether they were taken by a GoPro camera — and save them from the “abyss of your camera roll,” GoPro CEO Nick Woodman says in an interview.
Close followers of GoPro’s efforts in the software space know that the company already once launched an app called Quik way back in 2016 that was all about auto-editing footage to a beat. But that app has not been supported for a while and will no longer be available to download after today with the launch of the new Quik app.
The auto-editing feature will live on in the new app, which launches on iOS and Android today. It also has a few other features like a video editing suite (including a speed adjustment tool), themes and filters, and unlimited original quality cloud backup of everything posted to the mural feed. GoPro is charging $1.99 per month or $9.99 per year for those features, though the basic camera connection and control side the app will remain free to use for people who don’t want to pay for the new stuff. Customers who already pay for GoPro’s Plus subscription service (which includes unlimited cloud storage, live-streaming functionality, and camera replacement) will get Quik’s features for free.
Woodman sees the new Quik app as something of a culmination of a yearslong effort at GoPro to diversify away from hardware that started around 2013 and 2014. And by gearing the app at a wider audience, not just GoPro users, he thinks there’s great opportunity to be had.
In fact, that wasthe strategy with the original Quik app, which let users mash together photos and videos from their camera roll without requiring the use of a GoPro. And it worked: Woodman says that app still had “roughly eight million monthly active users” despite having been essentially abandoned by the company.
While he doesn’t expect all of those users to pony up for the paid version of the new app, he thinks many will appreciate the mural feature because he still doesn’t see any good solutions to that camera roll clutter problem — especially not albums. “Albums suck. Albums are just miniature camera rolls,” he says. “You don’t go into albums [thinking] ‘This is going to be a super awesome experience. Hey honey, let’s AirPlay our album to the TV and kick back and reminisce.’ You don’t do that.”
Users can build out the mural feed in the Quik app a few different ways. One is fairly straightforward: after you open the Quik app and give it access to your camera roll, you can scroll through and add photos to the mural feed or to “events” (not albums, of course) on the feed. The more attractive option, in Woodman’s eyes, is to add photos and videos you take on the fly using the share sheet every time you capture a “keeper.” (Users can also text or email photos to the mural feed.)
That said, Woodman thinks people may use the feed in all sorts of ways, like saving images that inspire them or for planning a project, a la Pinterest. Others will just use it for their GoPro footage and photos and nothing else.
“It can be all of those things,” he says. “I think that what we’re solving for people is like a very relatable and widespread problem: I don’t have a convenient, private place to put content that matters most to me, and you know what, sharing it to your Instagram feed ain’t working because there’s that tension of, ‘Well, this matters to me, but I know it’s not going to really matter to anybody that I would socialize it with.’”
GoPro has carved out a decent supplemental business so far with its Plus subscription service, with nearly 800,000 paying subscribers as of the end of 2020 (the equivalent of just shy of roughly $40 million of annual revenue). But with Quik, Woodman sees not just a great business opportunity or a chance to reach new customers. He sees it serving a higher purpose.
“Not to bash on social feeds, like there’s a lot of good from them, we get a lot of inspiration from what other people are doing. But damn it, man, you can get a lot of inspiration from just looking at what you’ve been doing with your life. It’s pretty awesome,” he says. “This is the cosmic moment where I point to the deeper meaning behind what it is that we’re doing for people with Quik, because I think we’re really going to help people develop a stronger sense of self-esteem, self-worth, and ultimately happiness. You don’t have to find happiness in what other people are doing. There’s a ton of happiness to be found in what you’re doing with your life and and Quik helps you bring that to the forefront.”
Philosophical value aside, bringing more customers under the GoPro tent has long been a goal for Woodman; it’s a big part of what inspired the company to make a more concerted push into software. But whether or not GoPro turns the new Quik app into a moneymaker, that it’s attempting another shift in its software strategy is on its own a sign that the company is back on solid ground. It spent the last few years pruning its camera lineup back to the essentials, quickly scuttling a dalliance with the drone market, and focusing more on selling directly to consumers. That has the company back in the black and willing to take chances again.
“We’re known for enabling amazing content. It’s just until now, it’s always required a GoPro,” Woodman says. “[But it’s] too limiting to just serve people through our hardware alone. Let’s also serve people through software. Meet them where they are. And we can build a phenomenal business.”
BMW is pulling the curtain back on its next iteration of iDrive, the software and infotainment platform that has served as the centerpiece of the automaker’s in-car experience for the last 20 years.
The eighth version of iDrive will mostly live on a new “curved” display that starts behind the steering wheel and extends halfway across the dashboard. This involves merging the 12.3-inch instrument cluster and the central 14.9-inch infotainment screen into a single unit angled toward the driver. The size of the screen will vary, depending on the vehicle, but the screen will have the appearance of “floating,” the automaker said. The new iDrive will make its debut later this year in BMW’s new iX electric SUV, as well as the BMW i4 electric sedan.
The brain of this car will also be a significant improvement over past models, BMW says. The onboard computer will be able to process 20 to 30 times the data volume of previous models, or around double the amount of data that was previously possible. This will enable a greater fusion of the vehicle’s sensors, which will help enable higher levels of autonomous driving.
According to BMW chief technology officer Frank Weber, iDrive is a “major step” toward fully autonomous vehicles. He explained that iDrive is designed to support both Level 2 and Level 3 autonomous driving systems.
“It is not an evolutionary step from what we had in the [previous] generation,” Weber said. “It’s an all new, all new system when it comes to sensors, computing, [and] the way it was developed.”
Advanced driver assistance systems, defined as Level 2 by the Society of Automotive Engineers, include lane keeping, blind-spot detection, automatic emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control. Most major automakers include some version of advanced driver assistance in their vehicles today. Level 3 refers to highly automated driving, also called conditional automation, where the driver still needs to be able to take over the vehicle upon request.
Other automakers have been tripped up by the promise of Level 3 driving. Audi, for example, said its A8 sedan would come with a feature called Traffic Jam Pilot that, when active, would relieve human drivers of the need to pay attention during stop-and-go traffic. But the feature was contingent on approval from local authorities, and Traffic Jam Pilot remains dormant in most markets around the world. Audi has no plans to activate the feature, and Level 3 automation remains a morass of legal, regulatory, and business-related challenges.
Weber wouldn’t say when BMW would introduce Level 3 automation and hinted it was conditional on racking up more test miles in vehicles equipped with the new version of iDrive.
“Nobody currently can offer at start of production Level 3 capabilities, because you need so many test miles,” he said. “And so you need a production vehicle, and then you run all your validation tests for Level 3.”
iDrive can be controlled with touch, voice activation, or gesture control. There are three main layouts: Drive, in which drivers can use a “dynamically changing area in the center of the information display to show individually selectable information”; Focus, “designed for extremely dynamic driving situations”; and Gallery, which minimizes the driving content “to clear as much space as possible for widget content.”
There is a theme of personalization that runs through the automaker’s new software update. BMW’s Personal Intelligent Assistant, built on top of Microsoft’s Azure cloud system, will “adjust to the driver’s individual needs and routines,” the company says, making it “a central operating channel of human-machine interaction.”
The virtual assistant, which has been available in BMW’s cars for a number of years, will play the role of a “digital character which can engage in natural dialogue with the driver and front passenger – similarly to a relationship between humans.” Expect some similarities to Mercedes-Benz’s MBUX system or Volvo’s Android-powered Google Assistant.
Using ultra-wideband (UWB) technology, iDrive will be able to load a driver’s personal settings as soon as they start approaching the vehicle by sensing their key fob or smartphone. BMW describes this as a “great entrance moment,” which includes geometric projections, lighted door handles, and other lighting effects.
There will be three driving modes: sport, personal, and efficient. These control driving functions like engine throttle, steering characteristics, regenerative braking, and chassis settings, as well as internal and external sounds. New modes may be added via over-the-air software updates in the future.
Information about navigation, parking, and EV charging will be fully integrated into iDrive. BMW extends its theme of personalization to its mapping capabilities with a new feature called “learning navigation,” in which the vehicle will learn and anticipate the destination the driver is likely to head for next, based on the driver’s personal ID. This is meant to be a time saver, as well as a way to identify possible road hazards that may delay the journey.
iDrive will support both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto wirelessly, the company said. For several years, BMW had the dubious distinction of being one of the few automakers to charge its customers an annual fee to mirror their smartphone’s display on their car’s infotainment screen. BMW reversed that decision in 2019, and since then offers both CarPlay and Android Auto to its customers for free.
(Pocket-lint) – Arlo is a big name in home security, with a wide range of cameras, so extending its offering to the front door makes a lot of sense.
Having originally launched an Audio Doorbell – which connected to an Arlo system – the obvious leap was to integrate video and audio to make it a complete doorbell viewing and answering solution, either as part of a wider Arlo system or as a standalone device to rival Ring.
Which is exactly what you get with the Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free. But is it good enough to stand up against the competiton?
Design and installation
Doorbell dimensions: 47 x 143 x 37mm
Includes flat & angled mounting plates
Weather-resistant design
Battery powered
We’ve all become familiar with video doorbells following the rise of Ring, which dominates this market. The Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free is larger than Ring’s equivalent device, so it’s a little less subtle on the door, standing out more. It’s both taller and thicker than Ring’s devices.
At the top of the Arlo sits the camera, while the large doorbell button is towards the bottom, encircled with LEDs which illuminate as someone approaches it.
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The Arlo doorbell comes with both flat and angled mounting plates in the box, along with screws and plugs if you are mounting to a wall. In reality you can use any screws, but mounting is a simple case of screwing the mounting plate in place and then clipping the body of the device into place.
The camera body itself detaches from the backing plate via a pin release mechanism, the sort of thing you’d use to open a SIM tray of a phone. That needs to be considered when mounting, as you’ll need access to this hole on the top. That also means that anyone who wants to steal it only needs a bent pin, but they’d be doing that while being captured on camera.
The device is weatherproofed, too, designed to withstand rain.
Unlike with Ring, you’ll have to remove the entire Arlo unit to get to the battery inside. In some ways that’s easier, because you don’t have to mess around with a tiny screw or face plate. You can buy spare batteries too, making a quick change possible.
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The battery version of the Arlo Doorbell can also be connected to existing doorbell wiring, with connectors on the rear – although we didn’t test this aspect of the device.
The Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free doesn’t come with a chime – i.e. the ability to sound a ringer elsewhere in your home – so that’s something else you might consider adding. That will mean it can audibly ring in any room of your house, so you’re not dependent on your phone, or hearing the sound from the device itself on the front door. But also consider you can have it alert you via an Amazon Echo if you create a simple Alexa Routine.
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Connectivity and the Arlo app
Hub or Wi-Fi connection
Setup via the Arlo app
No desktop app
Connecting to the Arlo Video Doorbell is much the same as connecting any other Arlo device. You’ll need to use the Arlo app on your phone or tablet and this will walk you through the process for both installing the doorbell and getting it connected.
The Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free can connect to either Wi-Fi or an Arlo hub. Supporting Wi-Fi means you don’t have to be an existing Arlo system user to get started. If you have a hub and want to connect to that you also have that choice. The advantage of connecting to an existing hub is that you’ll then have the option for local video storage on microSD – so you don’t have to then have an Arlo Smart subscription to store video.
The doorbell then appears within the Arlo app. If you’re an existing Arlo user, that means it will sit alongside your other Arlo devices; if you’re new to Arlo and only plan to use have the doorbell then that’s all you’ll see in the app.
The app then gives you all the controls you’ll need for the device. That includes the option to disable the LEDs on the button when motion is detected, manage what happens when someone pushes the doorbell, change the video settings, set activity zones, and adjust the audio.
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You also get control over the mode that you’ll use for the Video Doorbell. These will be familiar to Arlo users, but on the doorbell they only really define what happens when motion is detected. You might choose to remove motion alerts when you’re at home, in which case you can “disarm” the doorbell, keep them on all the time using “armed”, or have them turn on when you leave home using geofencing or according to a schedule – such as only at night.
You can create custom modes too, which will be more relevant to those with existing Arlo devices. It’s here that you can create a mode that, for example, turns on your Arlo Light when motion is detected on the Doorbell, or begins capture on another Arlo camera you might have.
This gives plenty of flexibility for what happens from Arlo’s end, but it’s worth noting that because you can link Arlo to other major smart home platforms – like Alexa, Google Home and SmartThings – you can also set up Routines on those platforms involving other devices. For example, turning on a Hue light when your Arlo doorbell detects motion.
One downside, however, is that there’s no desktop app. Yes, you can log-in through a browser, but when working at home, having a proper desktop app just for your doorbell makes everything easier. Ring has one and it’s something that’s currently missing from Arlo’s offering.
Do I need an Arlo Smart subscription?
Arlo’s original devices didn’t need a subscription. You got a week of cloud storage for free – and that was a major advantage over other systems. With the release of more advanced devices, Arlo has tied 30-day cloud storage and a range of advanced features to its Arlo Smart plans.
For a doorbell, you might question whether you need those extra features. You can run the Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free without a subscription, but you lose the cloud storage of motion captures if you don’t have an Arlo Smart plan.
As we said above, if you’ve connected the doorbell to an Arlo hub, you can use the local storage option to record to microSD – but there’s no way of monitoring those backups from your phone, you have to physically remove the card and view it on another device. That might work for some, but we suspect part of the appeal of a connected camera is being able to look back at what’s happened on your phone and download the videos you want to keep.
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Arlo Smart plans also drive other features – like AI detection of what’s been spotted, which can tell you if it’s a person, vehicle or animal. If you’re in a protracted argument about whether the neighbour’s cat is leaving deposits on your front lawn, this might be exactly the feature you need.
Arlo Smart also enables rich notifications, which will highlight what you’re looking at when those notifications appear on your phone.
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The Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free comes with 3-months Arlo Smart as a trial, so you can see how you get on and make your decision. We’ve generally found that Arlo products run smoother if you have a paid subscription, as you get access to all the features.
Without a subscription you can still live-view the video, get notification alerts, and will have the doorbell ring your phone when the button is pressed. And for some that’s all you’ll want – without ongoing costs.
Camera features and performance
180 degree view, 110 degree motion sensor
1536 x 1536 resolution, 1:1 aspect ratio
HDR, IR night vision
The big difference between Arlo’s doorbell and Ring’s is the camera. Arlo has gone for a 1:1 aspect, a square sensor behind that ultra-wide lens, rather than rectangular. The practical benefit is that you can see a lot more of the person at your door. Rather than just seeing a face, you’ll get a better head-to-toe view of that person.
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Depending on the arrangement of your door and the surrounding area, this might be a lot more useful than some rival cameras. For us, it means you can see a lot more of the area surrounding the door and porch, rather than the wider view that Ring offers.
The doorbell is effective at detecting motion, often alerting you to motion just before the doorbell is pressed, so you can get a double notification. The detection for us turned out to be a couple of meters, so will detect people coming up the path, although it’s more effective as people get closer.
We’ve not had the same long-distance alerts that we’ve sometimes had from Ring, which included vehicles on the road when the sun was reflecting off them. Such sensitivity can be adjusted, as well as having the option to specify detection zones (another Arlo Smart feature) if you need to obscure something.
The quality of video capture is good, with HDR (high dynamic range) allowing the camera to balance out scenes when lighting is uneven. There’s IR (infrared) extending the skills to low-light conditions too. While darkness reduces the effective range, IR does paint the subject nicely when approaching the doorbell, so it’s still easy to recognise who it is at night.
The camera is a good wide-angle too, as we mentioned above, although on a doorbell this is less important than it might be on a security camera covering a wider area of view.
The experience of using the Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free is excellent, with the video results generally better than some close rival products. Certainly, the 1:1 aspect offers a natural advantage giving a more useful view for objects closer to the camera, appropriate for a doorbell.
Calling your phone has an advantage
SIP calling
Rich notifications
One of the other advantages that Arlo offers is how the “ring” comes through to your phone. Rather than it being served up via a notification, it comes in as a SIP call. The technicalities don’t matter, but it means that when someone presses your doorbell, your phone rings like an incoming call.
You’ll see that someone has pressed the doorbell, leaving you to either accept that call – and talk to that person – or decline the call and just go and open the door.
When you accept the call, you’re shown the live feed from the door and you have the option to unmute the microphone to talk, or to use messages instead – with responses like “we’ll be right there” or “you can leave the package outside”, meaning you don’t actually have to talk to whoever is at the door. These options provide great versatility in how you answer the door – and you can use these whether you’re at home or not, the caller won’t be able to tell the difference. They’re also captured on the recorded video (as in the example above), so you’d have a record of the conversation.
If you’re already on a call on your phone, Arlo will burst in on that call too, so you’ll quickly have to multitask to either put your other call on hold or send a quick reply to whomever is at the door.
We’re also a fan of the notifications that Arlo sends through. These rich notifications are the same as you’ll get from Arlo’s other cameras (if you have an Arlo Smart subscription), telling you what type of occurrence has triggered the motion and giving you a preview thumbnail. That means you can glance at your phone and see whether you need to pay attention to it or not.
Battery life
The battery life on the Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free has seen us through a month of use and still has about 50 per cent remaining, so we’re on course to get the best part of two months from it – and this includes several weeks around the 0°C mark.
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Arlo says that you’ll get three to six months from it, so we’re not hitting that sort of figure – but it still compares favourably with other battery-powered doorbells. Warmer temperatures will undoubtedly extend the usage. And, of course, you can adjust various features to prolong the battery life.
Verdict
Arlo’s first venture into doorbells with the Audio Doorbell never really captured the spirit of what people wanted from a connected device. Fortunately, the Video Doorbell offers a lot more, rivalling and bettering competitors in a number of areas.
The downsides are few: the lack of chime in the box means you’ll have to fork out for one separately, while an Arlo Smart plan will see an ongoing cost to really get the best out if this model.
Yes, this doorbell is a little on the large side, but the calling mechanism and quick replies, quality of the video, and potential for integration into other systems – not to mention folding it into an existing Arlo system – make it rather easy to recommend.
Alternatives to consider
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Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus
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The Plus version of Ring’s video doorbell adds a unique function: Pre-Roll video. This will capture 4 seconds of black-and-white video before the motion was triggered, so you get a wider window of capture for any given event. Wide support from Alexa and other platforms, as well as a complete package from Ring itself, makes this video doorbell rightly popular.
Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus review
Writing by Chris Hall. Editing by Adrian Willings.
AMD unveiled its EPYC 7003 ‘Milan’ processors today, claiming that the chips, which bring the company’s powerful Zen 3 architecture to the server market for the first time, take the lead as the world’s fastest server processor with its flagship 64-core 128-thread EPYC 7763. Like the rest of the Milan lineup, this chip comes fabbed on the 7nm process and is drop-in compatible with existing servers. AMD claims it brings up to twice the performance of Intel’s competing Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, Cloud, and enterprise workloads, all while offering a vastly better price-to-performance ratio.
Milan’s agility lies in the Zen 3 architecture and its chiplet-based design. This microarchitecture brings many of the same benefits that we’ve seen with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series chips that dominate the desktop PC market, like a 19% increase in IPC and a larger unified L3 cache. Those attributes, among others, help improve AMD’s standing against Intel’s venerable Xeon lineup in key areas, like single-threaded work, and offer a more refined performance profile across a broader spate of applications.
The other attractive features of the EPYC lineup are still present, too, like enhanced security, leading memory bandwidth, and the PCIe 4.0 interface. AMD also continues its general approach of offering all features with all of its chips, as opposed to Intel’s strict de-featuring that it uses to segment its product stack. As before, AMD also offers single-socket P-series models, while its standard lineup is designed for dual-socket (2P) servers.
(Image credit: AMD)
The Milan launch promises to reignite the heated data center competition once again. Today marks the EPYC Milan processors’ official launch, but AMD actually began shipping the chips to cloud service providers and hyperscale customers last year. Overall, the EPYC Milan processors look to be exceedingly competitive against Intel’s competing Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips.
Like AMD, Intel has also been shipping to its largest customers; the company recently told us that it has already shipped 115,000 Ice Lake chips since the end of last year. Intel also divulged a few details about its Ice Lake Xeons at Hot Chips last year; we know the company has a 32-core model in the works, and it’s rumored that the series tops out at 40 cores. As such, Ice Lake will obviously change the competitive landscape when it comes to the market.
AMD has chewed away desktop PC and notebook market share at an amazingly fast pace, but the data center market is a much tougher market to crack. While this segment represents the golden land of high-volume and high-margin sales, the company’s slow and steady gains lag its radical advance in the desktop PC and notebook markets.
Much of that boils down to the staunchly risk-averse customers in the enterprise and data center; these customers prize a mix of factors beyond the standard measuring stick of performance and price-to-performance ratios, instead focusing on areas like compatibility, security, supply predictability, reliability, serviceability, engineering support, and deeply-integrated OEM-validated platforms. To cater to the broader set of enterprise customers, AMD’s Milan launch also carries a heavy focus on broadening AMD’s hardware and software ecosystems, including full-fledged enterprise-class solutions that capitalize on the performance and TCO benefits of the Milan processors.
AMD’s existing EPYC Rome processors already hold the lead in performance-per-socket and pricing, easily outstripping Intel’s Xeon at several key price points. Given AMD’s optimizations, Milan will obviously extend that lead, at least until the Ice Lake debut. Let’s see how the hardware stacks up.
AMD EPYC 7003 Series Milan Specifications and Pricing
Cores / Threads
Base / Boost (GHz)
L3 Cache (MB)
TDP (W)
1K Unit Price
EPYC Milan 7763
64 / 128
2.45 / 3.5
256
280
$7,890
EPYC Milan 7713
64 / 128
2.0 / 3.675
256
225
$7,060
EPYC Rome 7H12
64 / 128
2.6 / 3.3
256
280
?
EPYC Rome 7742
64 / 128
2.25 / 3.4
256
225
$6,950
EPYC Milan 7663
56 / 112
2.0 / 3.5
256
240
$6,366
EPYC Milan 7643
48 / 96
2.3 / 3.6
256
225
$4.995
EPYC Milan 7F53
32 / 64
2.95 / 4.0
256
280
$4,860
EPYC Milan 7453
28 / 56
2.75 / 3.45
64
225
$1,570
Xeon Gold 6258R
28 / 56
2.7 / 4.0
38.5
205
$3,651
EPYC Milan 74F3
24 / 48
3.2 / 4.0
256
240
$2,900
EPYC Rome 7F72
24 / 48
3.2 / ~3.7
192
240
$2,450
Xeon Gold 6248R
24 / 48
3.0 / 4.0
35.75
205
$2,700
EPYC Milan 7443
24 / 48
2.85 / 4.0
128
200
$2,010
EPYC Rome 7402
24 / 48
2.8 / 3.35
128
180
$1,783
EPYC Milan 73F3
16 / 32
3.5 / 4.0
256
240
$3,521
EPYC Rome 7F52
16 / 32
3.5 / ~3.9
256
240
$3,100
Xeon Gold 6246R
16 / 32
3.4 / 4.1
35.75
205
$3,286
EPYC Milan 7343
16 / 32
3.2 / 3.9
128
190
$1,565
EPYC Rome 7302
16 / 32
3.0 / 3.3
128
155
$978
EPYC Milan 72F3
8 / 16
3.7 / 4.1
256
180
$2,468
EPYC Rome 7F32
8 / 16
3.7 / ~3.9
128
180
$2,100
Xeon Gold 6250
8 / 16
3.9 / 4.5
35.75
185
$3,400
AMD released a total of 19 EPYC Milan SKUs today, but we’ve winnowed that down to key price bands in the table above. We have the full list of the new Milan SKUs later in the article.
As with the EPYC Rome generation, Milan spans from eight to 64 cores, while Intel’s Cascade Lake Refresh tops out at 28 cores. All Milan models come with threading, support up to eight memory channels of DDR4-3200, 4TB of memory capacity, and 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity. AMD supports both standard single- and dual-socket platforms, with the P-series chips slotting in for single-socket servers (we have those models in the expanded list below). The chips are drop-in compatible with the existing Rome socket.
AMD added frequency-optimized 16-, 24-, and 32-core F-series models to the Rome lineup last year, helping the company boost its performance in frequency-bound workloads, like databases, that Intel has typically dominated. Those models return with a heavy focus on higher clock speeds, cache capacities, and TDPs compared to the standard models. AMD also added a highly-clocked 64-core 7H12 model for HPC workloads to the Rome lineup, but simply worked that higher-end class of chip into its standard Milan stack.
As such, the 64-core 128-thread EPYC 7763 comes with a 2.45 / 3.5 GHz base/boost frequency paired with a 280W TDP. This flagship part also comes armed with 256MB of L3 cache and supports a configurable TDP that can be adjusted to accommodate any TDP from 225W to 280W.
The 7763 marks the peak TDP rating for the Milan series, but the company has a 225W 64-core 7713 model that supports a TDP range of 225W to 240W for more mainstream applications.
All Milan models come with a default TDP rating (listed above), but they can operate between a lower minimum (cTDP Min) and a higher maximum (cTDP Max) threshold, allowing quite a bit of configurability within the product stack. We have the full cTDP ranges for each model listed in the expanded spec list below.
Milan’s adjustable TDPs now allow customers to tailor for different thermal ranges, and Forrest Norrod, AMD’s SVP and GM of the data center and embedded solutions group, says that the shift in strategy comes from the lessons learned from the first F- and H-series processors. These 280W processors were designed for systems with robust liquid cooling, which tends to add quite a bit of cost to the platform, but OEMs were surprisingly adept at engineering air-cooled servers that could fully handle the heat output of those faster models. As such, AMD decided to add a 280W 64-core model to the standard lineup and expanded the ability to manipulate TDP ranges across its entire stack.
AMD also added new 28- and 56-core options with the EPYC 7453 and 7663, respectively. Norrod explained that AMD had noticed that many of its customers had optimized their applications for Intel’s top-of-the-stack servers that come with multiples of 28 cores. Hence, AMD added new models that would mesh well with those optimizations to make it easier for customers to port over applications optimized for Xeon platforms. Naturally, AMD’s 28-core’s $1,570 price tag looks plenty attractive next to Intel’s $3,651 asking price for its own 28-core part.
AMD made a few other adjustments to the product stack based on customer buying trends, like reducing three eight-core models to one F-series variant, and removing a 12-core option entirely. AMD also added support for six-way memory interleaving on all models to lower costs for workloads that aren’t sensitive to memory throughput.
Overall, Milan has similar TDP ranges, memory, and PCIe support at any given core count than its predecessors but comes with higher clock speeds, performance, and pricing.
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Milan also comes with the performance uplift granted by the Zen 3 microarchitecture. Higher IPC and frequencies, not to mention more refined boost algorithms that extract the utmost performance within the thermal confines of the socket, help improve Milan’s performance in the lightly-threaded workloads where Xeon has long held an advantage. The higher per-core performance also translates to faster performance in threaded workloads, too.
Meanwhile, the larger unified L3 cache results in a simplified topology that ensures broader compatibility with standard applications, thus removing the lion’s share of the rare eccentricities that we’ve seen with prior-gen EPYC models.
The Zen 3 microarchitecture brings the same fundamental advantages that we’ve seen with the desktop PC and notebook models (you can read much more about the architecture here), like reduced memory latency, doubled INT8 and floating point performance, and higher integer throughput.
AMD also added support for memory protection keys, AVX2 support for VAES/VPCLMULQD instructions, bolstered security for hypervisors and VM memory/registers, added protection against return oriented programming attacks, and made a just-in-time update to the Zen 3 microarchitecture to provide in-silicon mitigation for the Spectre vulnerability (among other enhancements listed in the slides above). As before, Milan remains unimpacted by other major security vulnerabilities, like Meltdown, Foreshadow, and Spoiler.
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The EPYC Milan SoC adheres to the same (up to) nine-chiplet design as the Rome models and is drop-in compatible with existing second-gen EPYC servers. Just like the consumer-oriented chips, Core Complex Dies (CCDs) based on the Zen 3 architecture feature eight cores tied to a single contiguous 32MB slice of L3 cache, which stands in contrast to Zen 2’s two four-core CCXes, each with two 16MB clusters. The new arrangement allows all eight cores to communicate to have direct access to 32MB of L3 cache, reducing latency.
This design also increases the amount of cache available to a single core, thus boosting performance in multi-threaded applications and enabling lower-core count Milan models to have access to significantly more L3 cache than Rome models. The improved core-to-cache ratio boosts performance in HPC and relational database workloads, among others.
Second-gen EPYC models supported either 8- or 4-channel memory configurations, but Milan adds support for 6-channel interleaving, allowing customers that aren’t memory bound to use less system RAM to reduce costs. The 6-channel configuration supports the same DDR4-3200 specification for single DIMM per channel (1DPC) implementations. This feature is enabled across the full breadth of the Milan stack, but AMD sees it as most beneficial for models with lower core counts.
Milan also features the same 32-bit AMD Secure Processor in the I/O Die (IOD) that manages cryptographic functionality, like key generation and management for AMD’s hardware-based Secure Memory Encryption (SME) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) features. These are key advantages over Intel’s Cascade Lake processors, but Ice Lake will bring its own memory encryption features to bear. AMD’s Secure Processor also manages its hardware-validated boot feature.
AMD EPYC Milan Performance
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AMD provided its own performance projections based on its internal testing. However, as with all vendor-provided benchmarks, we should view these with the appropriate level of caution. We’ve included the testing footnotes at the end of the article.
AMD claims the Milan chips are the fastest server processors for HPC, cloud, and enterprise workloads. The first slide outlines AMD’s progression compared to Intel in SPECrate2017_int_base over the last few years, highlighting its continued trajectory of significant generational performance improvements. The second slide outlines how SPECrate2017_int_base scales across the Milan product stack, with Intel’s best published scores for two key Intel models, the 28-core 6258R and 16-core 4216, added for comparison.
Moving on to a broader spate of applications, AMD says existing two-socket 7H12 systems already hold an easy lead over Xeon in the SPEC2017 floating point tests, but the Milan 7763 widens the gap to a 106% advantage over the Xeon 6258R. AMD uses this comparison for the two top-of-the-stack chips, but be aware that this is a bit lopsided: The 6258R carries a tray price of $3,651 compared to the 7763’s $7,890 asking price. AMD also shared benchmarks comparing the two in SPEC2017 integer tests, claiming a similar 106% speedup. In SPECJBB 2015 tests, which AMD uses as a general litmus for enterprise workloads, AMD claims 117% more performance than the 6258R.
The company also shared a few test results showing performance in the middle of its product stack compared to Intel’s 6258R, claiming that its 32-core part also outperforms the 6258R, all of which translates to improved TCO for customers due to the advantages of lower pricing and higher compute density that translates to fewer servers, lower space requirements, and lower overall power consumption.
Finally, AMD has a broad range of ecosystem partners with fully-validated platforms available from top-tier OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo, among many others. These platforms are fed by a broad constellation of solutions providers as well. AMD also has an expansive list of instances available from leading cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle, to name a few.
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Model #
Cores
Threads
Base Freq (GHz)
Max Boost Freq (up to GHz11)
Default TDP (w)
cTDP Min (w)
cTDP Max (w)
L3 Cache (MB)
DDR Channels
Max DDR Freq (1DPC)
PCIe 4
1Ku Pricing
7763
64
128
2.45
3.50
280
225
280
256
8
3200
x128
$7,890
7713
64
128
2.00
3.68
225
225
240
256
8
3200
X128
$7,060
7713P
64
128
2.00
3.68
225
225
240
256
8
3200
X128
$5,010
7663
56
112
2.00
3.50
240
225
240
256
8
3200
x128
$6,366
7643
48
96
2.30
3.60
225
225
240
256
8
3200
x128
$4,995
75F3
32
64
2.95
4.00
280
225
280
256
8
3200
x 128
$4,860
7543
32
64
2.80
3.70
225
225
240
256
8
3200
x128
$3,761
7543P
32
64
2.80
3.70
225
225
240
256
8
3200
X128
$2,730
7513
32
64
2.60
3.65
200
165
200
128
8
3200
x128
$2,840
7453
28
56
2.75
3.45
225
225
240
64
8
3200
x128
$1,570
74F3
24
48
3.20
4.00
240
225
240
256
8
3200
x128
$2,900
7443
24
48
2.85
4.00
200
165
200
128
8
3200
x128
$2,010
7443P
24
48
2.85
4.00
200
165
200
128
8
3200
X128
$1,337
7413
24
48
2.65
3.60
180
165
200
128
8
3200
X128
$1,825
73F3
16
32
3.50
4.00
240
225
240
256
8
3200
x128
$3,521
7343
16
32
3.20
3.90
190
165
200
128
8
3200
x128
$1,565
7313
16
32
3.00
3.70
155
155
180
128
8
3200
X128
$1,083
7313P
16
32
3.00
3.70
155
155
180
128
8
3200
X128
$913
72F3
8
16
3.70
4.10
180
165
200
256
8
3200
x128
$2,468
Thoughts
AMD’s general launch today gives us a good picture of the company’s data center chips moving forward, but we won’t know the full story until Intel releases the formal details of its 10nm Ice Lake processors.
The volume ramp for both AMD’s EPYC Milan and Intel’s Ice Lake has been well underway for some time, and both lineups have been shipping to hyperscalers and CSPs for several months. The HPC and supercomputing space also tend to receive early silicon, so they also serve as a solid general litmus for the future of the market. AMD’s EPYC Milan has already enjoyed brisk uptake in those segments, and given that Intel’s Ice Lake hasn’t been at the forefront of as many HPC wins, it’s easy to assume, by a purely subjective measure, that Milan could hold some advantages over Ice Lake.
Intel has already slashed its pricing on server chips to remain competitive with AMD’s EPYC onslaught. It’s easy to imagine that the company will lean on its incumbency and all the advantages that entails, like its robust Server Select platform offerings, wide software optimization capabilities, platform adjacencies like networking, FPGA, and Optane memory, along with aggressive pricing to hold the line.
AMD has obviously prioritized its supply of server processors during the pandemic-fueled supply chain disruptions and explosive demand that we’ve seen over the last several months. It’s natural to assume that the company has been busy building Milan inventory for the general launch. We spoke with AMD’s Forrest Norrod, and he tells us that the company is taking steps to ensure that it has an adequate supply for its customers with mission-critical applications.
One thing is clear, though. Both x86 server vendors benefit from a rapidly expanding market, but ARM-based servers have become more prevalent than we’ve seen in the recent past. For now, the bulk of the ARM uptake seems limited to cloud service providers, like AWS with its Graviton 2 chips. In contrast, uptake is slow in the general data center and enterprise due to the complexity of shifting applications to the ARM architecture. Continuing and broadening uptake of ARM-based platforms could begin to change that paradigm in the coming years, though, as x86 faces its most potent threat in recent history. Both x86 vendors will need a steady cadence of big performance improvements in the future to hold the ARM competition at bay.
Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for Ice Lake to get a true view of the competitive x86 landscape over the next year. That means the jury is still out on just what the data center will look like as AMD works on its next-gen Genoa chips and Intel readies Sapphire Rapids.
A great kit for learning IoT skills via a curated selection of lessons. The initial cost may seem high, but you get a lot of quality kit and content for your money.
For
+ Great value kit
+ Lessons are simple and easy to follow
+ Easy to assemble
Against
– Not much use outside of learning
– Initial cost will scare off casual makers
The Arduino is a great piece of technology and the Uno model is still the benchmark from which other microcontrollers are compared (see Arduino vs Raspberry Pi Pico). Since the Uno, Arduino have released a large number of boards. Some of these boards retain the form factor, but there are many, including the board at the heart of the $99 Oplà IoT kit, which uses a layout compatible with bradboards and stacking atop embedded devices.
The Oplà IoT kit is a package of WiFi enabled microcontroller, carrier board and sensors designed for introducing the Arduino workflow to education. The kit also provides 12 months free access to the Arduino IoT Cloud, which makes up about 80% of the total cost of the kit.
Design and Use of the Oplà IoT kit
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The Oplà IoT kit is the collective name for the MKR IoT Carrier board and an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010. The MKR IoT Carrier board is a circular board with five touch-sensitive pads around the perimeter, along with three sensors for humidity, light and temperature at the bottom part of the board. In the center we see a circular 1.5-inch OLED display.
On the rear of the carrier board is where all of the extra features are hidden. Starting in the center, we see a header designed to accommodate the included MKR WiFi 1010. Around the perimeter are breakouts for power, GPIO pins (I2C, A5 and A6) along with breakouts for the two onboard 24V relays, used to control external low power circuits.
A microSD card finishes the components around the perimeter of the board, but we haven’t talked about the battery connector. There is a large metal holder, designed for use with an 18650 Lithium Ion battery (not included) which can power the kit while away from the outlet. We can charge the battery while the kit is in use, but you need to be careful about observing the battery polarity as 18650 batteries that are installed incorrectly can catch fire.
The carrier board is merely a breakout board with extra components. The brains of the kit is the MKR WiFi 1010, a board which is at home in a breadboard as well as the carrier board. The MKR IoT Carrier Board is compatible with many other boards in the MKR range, so if you already have a MKR board, then the MKR IoT Carrier can be purchased separately.
Included in the box are a series of sensors for movement (PIR) and soil moisture, necessary for the lessons. To house the carrier board, we have a hard plastic case, resembling a smoke alarm, which keeps the components safe.
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The Oplà IoT kit is designed around a series of eight lessons delivered as IoT applications and, as such, the kit comes with a 12 month subscription to the Arduino IoT Cloud, a web based application where we can create “things” that are in reality projects powered by devices such as the Oplà IoT kit, which can send and receive data via the cloud. We undertook the Weather Station project and followed the guidance provided by the Arduino website. We created a thing called Weather Station and then connected our kit as a device. We were then able to write the code for the project and upload it to the board.
The IoT Cloud also provides a means to create a dashboard, which uses the live data from our sensors to update widgets in the browser. This was remarkably easy to do and created a great user interface for our project.
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Can we use the kit with the Arduino IDE? Yes we can. We tested v 1.8.13 and the latest beta of version 2.0.0 of the Arduino IDE. No matter which “offline” IDE we use, there is a caveat and that is we lose the ease at which we can create “things” and dashboards. If you are a seasoned Arduino developer, then you will no doubt know how to get around this issue and be happy to use the IDEs. As this kit is targeted at learners, they will no doubt lean on the cloud as their workflow of choice.
Use Cases for the Oplà IoT kit
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The Oplà IoT kit is made for educational purposes, and that aspect of the kit is where it excels. As a general IoT project kit it is rather bulky and would be hard to enclose in a custom enclosure. That being said, if you have never used an Arduino, then this is a great way to learn how to build IoT devices powered by Arduino.
The 12 month subscription is worth around $84 and that is a substantial percentage of the ticket price for this kit. If you just want to build an IoT device, and you already have the skills, then purchasing one of the MKR boards is a much more cost effective route.
Bottom Line
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The initial price of this kit is $99 excluding taxes, and this may put some people off, but let’s dig into what we get. We get 12 months of access to the Arduino IoT Cloud (an $84 value), a MKR WiFi 1010 worth approximately $30 and the IoT Carrier board which can be purchased separately for $57, along with a selection of sensors and components worth an additional $20. That’s a total of $191 not including taxes! The kit is fun to build and use, and we can take the skills learnt and apply them to future projects.
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