Home/Software & Gaming/Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Mako improvements can be toggled on or off
Matthew Wilson 3 days ago Software & Gaming
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is coming up in just one week’s time, complete with new graphical enhancements and a ton of gameplay tweaks to modernise the whole trilogy. You don’t have to play with all the changes enabled though, for instance, the Mako in Mass Effect 1 can still be driven using the original control scheme.
I’m not sure why you would want to do this, the Mako was horrible in Mass Effect 1. However, if you did enjoy these portions of the game in their original form, then you won’t have to use the new driving improvements, as they can be toggled off.
Speaking on this, Mass Effect Legendary Edition environment director, Kevin Meek (via PCGamer), said: “For those people out there who do like pain, we’ve left the option to leave it back kind of closer to the original controls as well if you want. Playing the Mako today versus playing the Mako back in the original, especially on PC, it’s like night and day”.
Fixing the Mako in Mass Effect 1 is one of this remaster’s big changes, alongside other combat and gameplay tweaks. With all of this in place, it should be easier to move from one title to the next without having to relearn certain mechanics. Mass Effect Legendary Edition launches on the 14th of May.
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KitGuru Says: Are many of you planning on picking up Mass Effect Legendary Edition next week?
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Mustafa Mahmoud 3 days ago Console, Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
Unlike the start of the previous generation, where game publishers were trigger happy when it came to reselling older titles at a higher resolution or framerate, this generation has seen a shift toward free next-gen upgrades (with some exceptions). The latest game to get a free next gen patch is the action-rpg Remnant: From the Ashes.
Making the announcement on its website, the developers said “We’re incredibly excited to announce that on Thursday, May 13, Remnant: From the Ashes will receive a free major upgrade patch that will add the option to run the game at 4K resolution at 30fps the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, or 1080p resolution at 60fps on both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S!”
That is not all however, as the team confirmed that the game will be coming to Xbox Game Pass for PC (and can also be purchased outright from the Microsoft Store).
Remnant: From the Ashes is a tough but rewarding third-person shooter with satisfying gameplay, selling over 1.6 million copies. This free next-gen upgrade will only serve to improve that further – though it is slightly disappointing to see the 60fps mode limited to 1080p. Described by some as “Dark Souls with guns”, now is a better time than ever to check out Remnant: From the Ashes.
KitGuru says: What do you think of the game? Have you played it? Which other games do you want to see get a next-gen patch? Let us know down below.
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Matthew Wilson 3 days ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
In a surprise update released last night, Ubisoft announced that it is working on a new game in The Division franchise. We aren’t getting The Division 3 yet, but Ubisoft is making a free to play spin-off title.
Known as ‘The Division Heartland’, this is a new game set in The Division universe developed by Red Storm Studio. Heartland will be a standalone game, so prior knowledge of The Division 1 and 2 won’t be required to jump in.
The Division Heartland will be making its way to PC and consoles in late 2021 or early 2022. In addition, Ubisoft Massive is working on new content for The Division 2, which will begin rolling out later this year. There is also a mobile version of The Division on the way.
Unfortunately, that’s all the information we have for the time being, but we should hear more in the coming months. Ubisoft will be attending E3 in June, during which we’ll see announcements for many upcoming projects.
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KitGuru Says: A free to play game based on The Division could work, but very little has been revealed so far. What do you think about Ubisoft’s new plans for The Division?
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Matthew Wilson 4 days ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
Today, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition begins rolling out on PC, with totally reworked graphical features and ray-tracing effects. Next month, the Enhanced Edition update will also be coming to the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 consoles.
On the console side, the Enhanced Edition will offer ray-tracing on consoles for the first time, including ray traced emissive lighting. For the first time on console, Metro Exodus will also feature higher resolution and frame rate modes, as well as an FOV slider:
In the video above, we can see the Enhanced Edition in action running on an Xbox Series X. This particular version will run at 4K and 60 frames per second, as does the PS5 version. The Xbox Series S on the other hand will run the game at 1080p and 60 frames per second.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition launches on Xbox Series X/S and PS5 on the 18th of June. It will be a free update for all existing owners of the game. For those who don’t own the game already, a new ‘Complete Edition’ will be released, containing all the new enhancements and the two story expansions.
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KitGuru Says: I’m looking forward to seeing Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition in action first-hand. It’ll be particularly interesting to see the comparisons between the console edition and the PC version. Are any of you planning on diving back into Metro Exodus when the Enhanced Edition drops?
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The Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the first quarter of 2021, which finds AMD scoring its highest single-quarter market share increase in the server market since 2006, leading to record revenue as it steals more sockets from Intel. Those share gains are isolated, though, as AMD lost share in the notebook segment and overall market share while remaining flat in desktop PC chips. Those regressions might not be as problematic as they appear on the surface, though, due to AMD’s shift to producing pricier chips that generate more profit. (We have the full breakdown for each segment at the end of the article).
“While we don’t often discuss average selling prices, we note that this quarter saw unusually strong price moves for AMD — as AMD shipped fewer low-end parts and more high-end parts, as well as shipping many more server parts, the company’s average selling price increased significantly,” said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research.
It’s clear that AMD has prioritized its highest-end desktop PC models and its server chips during the pandemic-induced supply chain shortages. These moves come as the CPU market continues to move at a record pace: Last quarter marked the second-highest CPU shipment volume in history, second only to the prior quarter. Also, the first quarter usually suffers from lower sales volume as we exit the holiday season, but the first quarter of 2021 set yet another record – the 41% on-year gain was the highest for the CPU market in 25 years.
These developments benefit both companies, but AMD has clearly suffered more than Intel from the crushing combination of supply shortages and overwhelming demand. AMD actually recently lost share to Intel in both notebooks and desktop PCs for the first time in three years, but it reminded at a flat 19.3% of the desktop PC market during the quarter, meaning it stopped the slide despite supply challenges.
However, Intel’s Rocket Lake processors landed right at the end of the quarter, and they’re particularly competitive against AMD’s Ryzen 5000 in the lower end that tends to move the most volume. Additionally, these chips are widely available at retail at very competitive pricing while AMD’s chips are still a rarity on shelves at anywhere near the suggested selling price. That will make the results of the next quarter all the more interesting.
Both Intel and AMD set records for the number of units shipped and revenue during the quarter for mobile chips. AMD couldn’t stop the slide in notebook PC chips, but as McCarron points out, the company has prioritized higher-priced Ryzen “Renoir” 5 and 7 models while Intel has grown in its lower-margin and lower-priced Celeron chips. AMD slipped 1 percentage point to 18% of the notebook PC unit share.
Most concerning for Intel? It lost a significant amount of share to AMD in the profitable server market. AMD notched its highest single-quarter gain in server CPU share since 2016 at a growth of 1.8 percentage points, bringing the company to 8.9% (a few caveats apply, listed below).
While a 1.8 percentage point decline doesn’t sound too severe, it is concerning given the typically small changes we see in server market share. Intel’s data center revenue absolutely plummeted in the first quarter of the year, dropping 20% YoY while units shipped drop 13%, but Intel chalked that up to its customers pausing orders while ‘digesting’ their existing inventory. However, AMD’s financial results, in which the company’s server and semi-custom revenue jumped 286%, imply that Intel’s customers were actually digesting AMD’s chips instead.
AMD’s strong gains in server CPU share during the quarter occurred before its newest AMD EPYC Milan chips and Intel’s newest Ice Lake chips had their official launch, but both companies began shipping chips to their biggest customers early this year/late last year. Additionally, samples of these chips are in customers’ hands long before general availability, so large volume purchases are often decided long before server CPUs hit the shelves.
AMD’s big supercomputer wins with its EPYC Milan chips foretold strong buy-in from those seeking the highest performance possible, and it appears that momentum has carried over to the broader server CPU market. Given that most of these customers already know which company they’ll use for their long-term deployments, it is rational to expect that AMD’s server charge could continue into the next quarter.
Finally, AMD lost 1 percentage point in the overall x86 CPU market share, receding to 20.7%. Again, this comes as the company struggles from pandemic-induced supply chain shortages that it is minimizing by prioritizing high end chips. Meanwhile, Intel is leveraging its production scale to flood the lower-end of the market and gain share, but that comes at the expense of profitability.
Below you’ll find the specific numbers for each segment, complete with historical data.
1Q21
4Q20
3Q20
2Q20
1Q20
4Q19
3Q19
2Q19
1Q2019
4Q18
3Q18
2Q18
1Q18
4Q17
3Q17
2Q17
1Q17
4Q16
3Q16
AMD Desktop Unit Share
19.3%
19.3%
20.1%
19.2%
18.6%
18.3%
18%
17.1%
17.1%
15.8%
13%
12.3%
12.2%
12.0%
10.9%
11.1%
11.4%
9.9%
9.1%
Quarter over Quarter / Year over Year (pp)
+0.1 / +0.7
-0.8 / +1.0
+0.9 / +2.1
+0.6 / +2.1
+0.3 / +1.5
+0.3 / +2.4
+0.9 / +5
Flat / +4.8
+1.3 / +4.9
+2.8 / +3.8
+0.7 / +2.1
+0.1 / +1.2
+0.2 / +0.8
+1.1 / +2.1
-0.2 / +1.8
-0.3 / –
+1.5 / –
+0.8 / –
–
1Q21
4Q20
3Q20
2Q20
1Q20
Q419
3Q19
2Q19
1Q2019
4Q18
3Q18
2Q18
AMD Mobile Unit Share
18.0%
19%
20.2%
19.9%
17.1%
16.2%
14.7%
14.1%
13.1%
12.2%
10.9%
8.8%
Quarter over Quarter / Year over Year (pp)
-1.0 / +1.1
-1.2 / +2.8
+0.3 / +5.5
+2.9 / +5.8
+0.9 / +3.2
+1.5 / +4.0
+0.7 / +3.8
+1.0 / +5.3
+0.9 / ?
AMD bases its server share projections on IDC’s forecasts but only accounts for the single- and dual-socket market, which eliminates four-socket (and beyond) servers, networking infrastructure and Xeon D’s (edge). As such, Mercury’s numbers differ from the numbers cited by AMD, which predict a higher market share. Here is AMD’s comment on the matter: “Mercury Research captures all x86 server-class processors in their server unit estimate, regardless of device (server, network or storage), whereas the estimated 1P [single-socket] and 2P [two-socket] TAM [Total Addressable Market] provided by IDC only includes traditional servers.”
Flexxon, a Singapore-based security firm, has introduced an SSD with embedded AI-based security capabilities that the company says promises protection against traditional threats like malware and viruses, or physical tampering with the drive.
Modern SSD controllers rely on several Arm Cortex R cores and are basically rather high-performance system-on-chips with fairly sophisticated compute capabilities. These very capabilities, along with firmware enhancements, are what powers Flexxon’s X-Phy SSD platform.
The platform relies on a technology that Flexxon calls AI One Core Quantum Engine and a special secured firmware. The company’s description of its technology is vague at best, so it is unclear whether its engine is a completely self-sufficient/isolated platform or a combination of software, hardware, and firmware.
(Image credit: Flexxon)
This AI One Core Quantum Engine presumably runs on an NVMe 1.3-compliant SSD controller and monitors all the traffic. Once its algorithm detects a threat (a virus, malware, an intrusion), it can block it to protect the firmware and data integrity. Furthermore, the company says the self-learning algorithm can detect abnormalities and identify them as threats, the company said without elaborating. Meanwhile, the drive comes with a special application. The X-Phy drive looks to be compatible with all major operating systems, based on an image published on the company’s website.
(Image credit: Flexxon)
The SSD is also equipped with “a range of features including temperature sensors to detect unusual movements that occur” in a bid to protect against physical intrusion. If the device detects tampering, it will lock itself and alert the owner via email. It is unclear how the device can alert its owner via an email if someone steals it from a PC that is shut down. Of course, there are ways to monitor HDD activity when the PC is off to lock the SSD if it is removed. Still, there isn’t a way to issue a notification about a physical intrusion if the OS isn’t running (unless, of course, the SSD is not equipped with a modem).
Flexxon stresses that the X-Phy SSD does not replace traditional security measures and calls it ‘the last line of defense.’
(Image credit: Flexxon)
Flexxon’s X-Phy SSD is currently in trials with “government agencies, medical and industrial clients” and the manufacturer expects it to be available in Q4 2021 or in early 2022. The drive will be available in 512GB and 1TB 3D NAND configurations in M.2-2280 and U.2 form-factors with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The SSD will support LDPC ECC as well as dynamic and static wear leveling. Expected prices are unknown.
Unit shipments of hard drives in the first quarter of 2021 were down both sequentially and year-over-year as consumer devices continued their migration to SSDs. Still, HDD capacity sold during the quarter set a new record of 288 exabytes as hyperscalers and enterprises upgraded their storage capabilities. Seagate remained the world’s largest maker of hard drives in terms of units and exabytes (EB) shipped.
Nearly 60% of New PCs Use SSDs
The industry shipped as many as 83.981 million PCs in Q1 2021, according to IDC. Meanwhile, only about 34.97 million hard drives for consumer PCs were sold last quarter (based on data from Trendfocus), so nearly 60% of personal computers shipped in Q1 used SSDs. This is not particularly surprising as many modern notebooks cannot house a hard drive. In contrast, enthusiast and workstation-grade desktops use SSDs because HDDs are rather slow for modern workloads by today’s standards.
The industry shipped 14.79 million hard drives for desktops (down 23% quarter-over-quarter) and 20.18 million drives for laptops (down 31.4% QoQ) in Q1, according to Trendfocus. The average capacity of an HDD for a client PC in the first quarter was 1.82TB (2.13TB for desktops, 1.58TB for notebooks), so most computers used rather inexpensive hard drives.
64 Million HDDs Sold in Q1
Hard disk drive shipments in the first quarter of 2021 totaled 64.17 million units, according to Trendfocus (via StorageNewsletter). Coughlin Associates (via Forbes) estimates that the hard drive TAM (total addressable market) in Q1 2021 was 64.1 million units, down from 67.8 million in Q1 2020. Meanwhile, Nidec believes that the industry sold 63 million units in the first quarter, up from 59 million units in the same quarter a year ago.
(Image credit: Future)
Seagate retained its position as the world’s leading maker of HDDs, with about 27.54 million HDDs sold in the first quarter and 42.9% of the market. Western Digital shipped 23.09 million drives and commanded 36% of the market. Toshiba was the distant No. 3 with 13.54 million HDDs supplied and 21.1% of the market.
Seagate also led in average HDD capacity (5.07TB per drive) and exabytes shipments (139.5EB) in Q1 2021. In contrast, the average capacity of a Western Digital hard drive in Q1 was 4.72TB, and the company shipped 109.04EB of hard drive storage devices.
Since the remaining three HDD makers don’t disclose their detailed unit shipments, the numbers published by analysts are basically educated guesses. Meanwhile, the first quarter of 2021 did not bring many surprises as far as sales of hard disk drives are concerned, so the sales numbers and market shares should be quite accurate.
288 EB ~ 303 EB Shipped in Q1
The general trend for the hard drive market was set several years ago: HDD unit sales are declining while exabyte shipments are growing. Nothing changed in Q1 2021. Trendfocus believes that the total capacity of HDDs shipped by the industry was 288.28EB. By contrast, Coughlin Associates estimates that HDDs sold in Q1 2021 can store 303.34EB of data, up from 278.03 in Q1 2020.
The lion’s share of exabyte shipments belongs to 3.5-inch hard disk drives for servers, enterprise, nearline, and surveillance applications. About 16.05 million of such drives were sold in the first quarter, but with an average capacity of 12TB, they can store 192.78EB, thus commanding 66% of exabytes shipments in Q1 2021.
Console HDDs Are Dropping, DAS Remains Strong
Consumer electronics HDDs are a rather large category of storage devices for applications like game consoles, direct-attached storage (DAS), digital video recorders (DVRs), and similar things. Shipments of CE HDDs in Q1 2021 totaled 9.95 million units, according to both Trendfocus and Coughlin Associates. Meanwhile, the industry shipped 14.4 million CE hard drives in Q1 2020, based on data from CA.
Since the latest game consoles from Microsoft and Sony no longer use HDDs, it is not surprising that shipments of hard drives for consumer electronics dropped significantly — by 31% — year-over-year.
In fact, manufacturers shipped only 2.53 million 2.5-inch CE HDDs with an average capacity of 0.72 TB per unit in Q1 2021. The vast majority of 2.5-inch CE HDDs have been used for game consoles and branded external drives for years. So, as production of previous-generation gaming systems from Microsoft and Sony is winding down, shipments of 2.5-inchers will decline further.
By contrast, sales of 3.5-inch CE HDDs remain strong. Trendfocus says about 7.42 million of these drives shipped during the quarter. An average capacity of a 3.5-inch CE hard drive was about 3.47TB, which indicates that most of them were used for various demanding applications, such as DAS. Branded DAS with high-capacity HDDs inside seems to be a pretty successful business for HDD makers as many people buy direct-attached storage for their PCs that come with SSDs (which do not always feature enough capacity for things like media).
Enterprise HDDs Booming
Enterprise HDDs have been the one bright spot in recent years. The enterprise-grade HDD category includes various drives for a wide variety of applications, including servers (both cloud and on-premise), enterprise NAS, nearline, and surveillance. In total, 19.25 million such HDDs were shipped in Q1 2021, according to Trendfocus.
Surprisingly, despite general trends, shipments of 2.5-inch enterprise-grade HDDs (which includes legacy 10,000/15,000 RPM drives) totaled 3.2 million units, up both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. The average capacity of these HDDs was 1.37TB, so some legacy datacenters probably upgraded their capacities or just replaced old drives during the quarter.
Sales of 3.5-inch enterprise-grade HDDs exceeded 16 million units and increased sequentially and annually in the first quarter. Enterprise-class 3.5-inchers shipped by the industry in Q1 could store 192.78EB of data, and their average capacity now slightly exceeds 12TB.
Meanwhile, sales of nearline HDDs for exascalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure are booming. Seagate says that hard drives with 16TB and higher capacities (i.e., 16TB, 18TB, and 20TB) contributed nearly 50% of its capacity shipments during the quarter (139.5EB), which equals nearly 70EB.
Summary
The HDD market in Q1 2021 brought no surprises and was consistent with trends set in the last five years or so.
Mainstream client PCs are on track to replace HDDs with SSDs, but at the same time, people are buying more DAS, NAS, and cloud storage. To that end, shipments of client HDDs are declining, whereas sales of hard drives for other applications are growing.
Enterprise-grade 3.5-inch HDDs are thriving. Now that data is generated not only by users but by computers themselves (in various forms), demand for storage will only grow and 288EB ~ 303EB of HDD storage shipped in Q1 2021 will increase rather rapidly in the coming quarters.
Another emerging driver for HDD demand is of course Chia cryptocurrency. At press time (on May 8), storage space allocated to the Chia network was nearing 3 exabytes, increasing three times from about 1 exabyte at the end of April. From the general market point of view, that is slightly over 1% of exabytes shipped in Q1, but it is already hard to acquire a high-capacity HDD at retail. What is going to happen next and whether Chia is set to become a factor that will cause a global shortage of hard drives is something that remains to be seen, but signs are not good for general users.
Fine. He’s the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, the founder of The Boring Company and Neuralink, a certified member of the PayPal Mafia, and a well-known internet troll.
He sounds rich.
He is. Depending on where the market closes on Friday, he’s either the first or the second richest person in the world. The other contender is Jeff Bezos. A substantial part of both men’s net worth is tied up in their company stock.
Okay. What is Saturday Night Live?
Saturday Night Live is an American television show that has been on the air since 1975. It is in a sketch comedy format. There is usually at least one good sketch in each 90-minute episode, and it is often the digital short.
SNL features a guest host, usually an actor with a movie to promote, and a musical guest, usually promoting a recently released album. After the “cold open,” a topical sketch about current events, the host gives a monologue.
What is Elon Musk doing on SNL, though?
Selling Teslas and getting richer.
Musk’s sales acumen is a running theme in Ashlee Vance’s biography of him and in the lore Musk loves to promote about himself: arbitraging Easter eggs with his cousins, running a nightclub out of his frat house, writing a computer program at age 12 and sending it to PC Magazine for $500. A major component of sales, of course, is advertising, and the most powerful form of advertising is “earned media,” or mentions you don’t have to pay for. You know, like the kind you get by guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.
Tesla famously doesn’t do paid advertisements. It doesn’t need to. Appearing on PewDiePie’s Meme Review is free. So is getting papped in a Cybertruck at Nobu. So is squiring musician Grimes to the Met Gala. Parties for people who own Teslas, Boring Company Flamethrowers, or who are just big fans have been part of his promotional efforts for years. He has a spicy Twitter account — spicy enough to earn Jack Dorsey’s endorsement and piss off the Securities and Exchange Commission — and his tweets often make headlines. This is to say nothing of the infamous Joe Rogan blunt-smoking episode.
This isn’t Musk’s first foray into Hollywood, either. He was an executive producer of Thank You for Smoking. He’s also appeared in Rick and Morty, Big Bang Theory, South Park, The Simpsons, and Iron Man 2.
Most CEOs don’t do this. Tesla gets compared to Apple a lot, and I would like you, for lols, to just visualize Tim Cook appearing on Joe Rogan’s show at all. Okay. Can you even see him drinking whiskey? He’s certainly not gonna pass that dutch. Steve Jobs appeared in only one movie, a 1988 documentary about Bruce Springsteen.
SNL promises to be an hour and a half of Elon-friendly writing, with goofs that burnish his reputation and let him laugh at himself. Plus, he gets to remind everyone Tesla exists and basically re-created the electric car market at a time when a lot of his competitors have jumped into EVs. My only real unanswered question about this is: Why isn’t the musical guest Grimes, tho?
Do you think he’ll pump Dogecoin?
I mean, yes, probably? One hedge fund made very good returns on the GameStonk debacle by selling immediately after Elon Musk pumped GameStop, so that’s something to consider.
Is Tesla involved in Dogecoin?
Not as far as I know, and I love reading their financial documents. Tesla is involved, however, in bitcoin. You can even buy a Tesla with bitcoin.
Why has Elon gotten involved in Dogecoin and GameStonk?
They’re popular online, and he, famously, loves memes — even if he often arrives at them late.
It also seems like he really wants to be liked. Musk has spent a lot of time courting an online fan base — some of his media appearances, like on Rick and Morty and Meme Review, seem designed to appeal to that fan base. While those fans may or may not convert into actual Tesla purchases, they help keep Musk relevant and are useful in hassling his critics online.
Okay, but what matters more to Musk, money or popularity?
Ahahahaha you are asking me to read Elon Musk’s mind? Fine, great, hold on, let me concentrate. I see… an army of angry squirrels.
No, seriously, though — Musk has been consistent about his admiration for humorists. He considered buying The Onion’s parent company in 2014 but ultimately didn’t put in a bid. Later, he funded a humor effort called Thud,which he briefly suggested would be part of his “intergalactic media empire.” Thud crashed and burned shortly after it launched.
Judging by his past beef with the SEC and his history with Thud, which was never meant to make money, I would argue the thing that matters most to Musk is neither money nor popularity. It’s his ability to do whatever he damn pleases. Arguably, that’s part of what makes him popular — popular enough to host SNL, even. Now the question is, will he send the ratings to the Moon?
The new Chia cryptocurrency has already started making waves in the storage industry, as we’ve reported back in April. With Chia trading now live, it looks set to become even more interesting in the coming months. The total netspace for Chia has already eclipsed 2 exabytes, and it’s well on its way to double- and probably even triple-digit EiB levels if current trends continue. If you’re looking to join the latest crypto-bandwagon, here’s how to get started farming Chia coin.
First, if you’ve dabbled in other cryptocurrencies before, Chia is a very different beast. Some of the fundamental blockchain concepts aren’t radically different from what’s going before, but Chia coin ditches the Proof of Work algorithm for securing the blockchain and instead implements Proof of Space — technically Proof of Time and Space, but the latter appears to be the more pertinent factor. Rather than mining coins by dedicating large amounts of processing power to the task, Chia simply requires storage plots — but these plots need to be filled with the correct data.
The analogies with real-world farming are intentional. First you need to clear a field (i.e., delete any files on your storage devices that are taking up space), then you plough and seed the field (compute a plot for Chia), and then… well, you wait for the crops to grow, which can take quite a long time when those crops are Chia blocks.
Your chances of solving a Chia coin block are basically equal to your portion of the total network space (netspace). Right now, Chia’s netspace sits at roughly 2.7 EiB (Exbibytes — the binary SI unit, so 1 EiB equals 2^60 bytes, or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes decimal). That means if you dedicate a complete 10TB (10 trillion bytes) of storage to Chia plots, your odds of winning are 0.00035%, or 0.0000035 if we drop the percentage part. Those might sound like terrible odds — they’re not great — but the catch is that there are approximately 4,608 Chia blocks created every day (a rate of 32 blocks per 10 minutes, or 18.75 seconds per block) and any one of them could match your plot.
Simple math can then give you the average time to win, though Chia calculators make estimating this far easier than doing the math yourself. A completely full 10TB HDD can store 91 standard Chia blocks (101.4 GiB). Yeah, don’t get lazy and forget to convert between tebibytes and terabytes, as SI units definitely matters. Anyway, 91 blocks on a single 10TB HDD should win a block every two months or so — once every 68 days.
Each Chia plot ends up being sort of like a massive, complex Bingo card. There’s lots of math behind it, but that analogy should suffice. Each time a block challenge comes up, the Chia network determines a winner based on various rules. If your plot matches and ‘wins’ the block, you get the block reward (currently 2 XCH, Chia’s coin abbreviation). That block reward is set to decrease every three years, for the first 12 years, after which the block reward will be static ad infinitum. The official FAQ lists the reward rate as 64 XCH per 10 minutes, and it will get cut in half every three years until it’s at 4 XCH per 10 minutes with a block reward of 0.125 XCH.
Of course, luck comes into play. It’s theoretically possible (though highly unlikely) to have just a few plots and win a block solution immediately. It’s also possible to have hundreds of plots and go for a couple of months without a single solution. The law of averages should equalize over time, though. Which means to better your chances, you’ll need more storage storing more Chia plots. Also, just because a plot wins once doesn’t mean it can’t win again, so don’t delete your plots after they win.
This is the standard cryptocurrency arms race that we’ve seen repeated over the past decade with hundreds of popular coins. The big miners — farmers in this case — want more of the total Chia pie, and rush out to buy more hardware and increase their odds of winning. Except, this time it’s not just a matter of buying more SSDs or HDDs. This time farmers need to fill each of those with plots, and based on our testing, that is neither a simple task nor something that can be done quickly.
Hardware Requirements for Chia Coin Farming
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
With Ethereum, once you have the requisite GPUs in hand, perhaps some of the best mining GPUs, all you have to do is get them running in a PC. Chia requires that whole ploughing and plotting business, and that takes time. How much time? Tentatively, about six or seven hours seems typical per plot, with a very fast Optane 905P SSD, though it’s possible to do multiple plots at once with the right hardware. You could plot directly to hard drive storage, but then it might take twice as long, and the number of concurrent plots you can do drops to basically one.
The best solution is to have a fast SSD — probably an enterprise grade U.2 drive with plenty of capacity — and then use that for the plotting and transfer the finished plots to a large HDD. Chia’s app will let you do that, but it can be a bit finicky, and if something goes wrong like exceeding the temp storage space, the plotting will crash and you’ll lose all that work. Don’t over schedule your plotting, in other words.
Each 101.4 GiB plot officially requires up to 350 GiB of temporary storage, though we’ve managed to do a single plot multiple times on a 260 GiB SSD. Average write speed during the plotting process varies, sometimes it reaches over 100MB/s, other times it can drop closer to zero. When it drops, that usually means more computational work and memory are being used. Plotting also requires 4 GiB of RAM, so again, high capacity memory sticks are par for the course.
Ultimately, for fast SSDs, the main limiting will likely be storage capacity. If we use the official 350 GiB temp space requirement, that means a 2TB SSD (1863 TiB) can handle at most five concurrent plots. Our own testing suggests that it can probably do six just fine, maybe even seven, but we’d stick with six to be safe. If you want to do more than that (and you probably will if you’re serious about farming Chia), you’ll need either a higher capacity SSD, or multiple SSDs. Each plot your PC is creating also needs 4GB of memory and two CPU threads, and there appear to be scaling limits.
Based on the requirements, here are two recommended builds — one for faster plotting (more concurrent plots) and one for slower plotting.
Our baseline Chia plotting PC uses a 6-core/12-thread CPU, and we’ve elected to go with Intel’s latest Core i5-11400 simply because it’s affordable, comes with a cooler, and should prove sufficiently fast. AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X would be a good alternative, were it readily available — right now it tends to cost about twice as much as the i5-11400, plus it also needs a dedicated graphics card, and we all know how difficult it can be to find those right now.
For storage, we’ve selected a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB that’s rated for 1400 TBW. That’s enough to create around 800–900 plots, at which point your Chia farm should be doing quite nicely and you’ll be able to afford a replacement SSD. Mass storage comes via a 10TB HDD, because that’s the most economical option — 12TB, 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB drives exist, but they all cost quite a bit more per GB of storage. Plus, you’ll probably want to move your stored plots to a separate machine when a drive is filled, but more on that below.
The other components are basically whatever seems like a reasonably priced option, with an eye toward decent quality. You could probably use a smaller case and motherboard, or a different PSU as well. You’ll also need to add more HDDs — probably a lot more — as you go. This PC should support up to six internal SATA HDDs, though finding space in the case for all the drives might be difficult.
At a rate of 18 plots per day, it would take about 30 days of solid plotting time to fill six 10TB HDDs. Meanwhile, the potential profit from 60TB of Chia plots (546 101.4 GiB plots) is currently… wow. Okay, we don’t really want to get your hopes up, because things are definitely going to change. There will be more netspace, the price could drop, etc. But right now, at this snapshot in time, you’d potentially solve a Chia block every 11 days and earn around $5,900 per month.
What’s better than a PC that can do six plots at a time? Naturally it’s a PC that can do even more concurrent plots! This particular setup has a 10-core CPU, again from Intel because of pricing considerations. We’ve doubled the memory and opted for an enterprise class 3.84TB SSD this time. That’s sufficient for the desired ten concurrent plots, which will require up to nearly all of the 3.57 TiB of capacity. We’ve also added a second 10TB HDD, with the idea being that you do two sets of five plots at the same time, with the resulting plots going out to different HDDs (so that HDD write speed doesn’t cause a massive delay when plotting is finished for each batch).
Most of the remaining components are the same as before, though we swapped to a larger case for those who want to do all the farming and plotting on one PC. You should be able to put at least 10 HDDs into this case (using the external 5.25-inch bays). At a rate of 30 plots per day, it should take around 30 days again to fill ten 10TB drives (which aren’t included in the price, though we did put in two). As before, no promises on the profitability since it’s virtually guaranteed to be a lot lower than this, but theoretically such a setup should solve a Chia block every seven days and earn up to $9,800 per month.
Chia farming rig from https://t.co/IPJadpARFa 96 terabytes running off a RockPi4 Model C pic.twitter.com/F6iKOMIdIyJanuary 15, 2021
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Long-term Efficient Chia Farming
So far we’ve focused on the hardware needed to get plotting, which is the more difficult part of Chia farming. Once you’re finished building your farm, though, you’ll probably want to look at ways to efficiently keep the farm online. While it’s possible to build out PCs with dozens of HDDs using PCIe SATA cards and extra power supplies, it’s likely far easier and more efficient to skip all that and go with Raspberry Pi. That’s actually the recommended long-term farming solution from the Chia creators.
It’s not possible to directly connected dozens of SATA drives to Raspberry Pi, but using USB-to-SATA adapters and USB hubs overcomes that limitation. There’s the added benefit of not overloading the 5V rail on a PSU, since the enclosures should have their own power — or the USB hubs will. And once you’re finished building out a farm, the power costs to keep dozens of hard drives connected and running are relatively trivial — you could probably run 50 HDDs for the same amount of power as a single RTX 3080 mining Ethereum.
How to Create Chia Plots
We’ve mostly glossed over the plot creation process so far. It’s not terribly complicated, but there are some potential pitfalls. One is that the plotting process can’t be stopped and restarted. You don’t want to do this on a laptop that may power off, though theoretically it should be possible to put a system to sleep and wake it back up, and then let it pick up where it left off. But if you overfill the temp storage, Chia will crash and you’ll lose all progress on any plots, and since it can take six or seven hours, that’s a painful loss.
The first step naturally is to install Chia. We’re using Windows, though it’s available on MacOS and can be compiled from source code for various Linux platforms. Once installed, you’ll need to let the blockchain sync up before you can get to work on farming. However, you can still create plots before the blockchain gets fully synced — that takes perhaps 10 hours, in our experience, but it will inevitably start to take longer as more blocks get added.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
You’ll need to create a new private key to get started — don’t use the above key, as anyone else on the ‘net can just steal any coins you farm. Screenshot and write down your 24 word mnemonic, as that’s the only way you can regain access to your wallet should your PC die. Store this in a safe and secure place!
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Next, you’ll see the main page. As noted above, it can take quite a while to sync up, and any information displayed on this screen prior to having the full blockchain won’t be current. For example, the above screenshot was taken when the total netspace was only 1.51 EiB (sometime earlier this week). The Wallets and Farm tabs on the left won’t have anything useful right now, so head over to Plots and get started on the plotting process.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
If you’ve previously generated plots, you could import the folder here, but your key has to match the key used for generating plots. If you were to gain access to someone else’s plot files somehow, without the key they’d do you no good. Again, don’t lose your key — or share it online! Hit the Add a Plot button, though.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Here’s where the ‘magic’ happens. We’ve specified six concurrent plots, with a ten minute delay between each plot starting. That should result in roughly a ten minute delay between plots finishing, which should be enough time for the program to move a finished plot to the final directory.
The Temporary Directory will be your big and fast SSD drive. You could try for a smaller delay between plots starting, but six concurrent plots will certainly put a decent load on most SSDs. Note also that Chia says it needs 239 GiB of temporary storage per plot — it’s not clear (to us) if that’s in addition to the 101.4 GiB for the final plot, but the amount of used space definitely fluctuates during the course of plot creation.
Once everything is set, click the Create Plot button at the bottom, and walk away for the next 6–8 hours. If you come back in eight hours, hopefully everything will have finished without incident and you’ll now see active plots on your Chia farm. Queue up another set of six plots (or however many plots your PC can handle concurrently), and done properly you should be able to get around three cycles in per day.
Then you just leave everything online (or migrate full drives to a separate system that uses the same key), and eventually you should manage to solve a block, earn some XCH coin, and then you can hoard that and hope the price goes up, or exchange it for some other cryptocurrency. Happy farming!
Chia Farming: The Bottom Line
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Just looking at that income potential should tell you one thing: More people are going to do this than what we’re currently seeing. That or price is going to implode. For the cost of an RTX 3080 off of eBay right now, you could break even in just a couple of weeks. Our short take: anyone looking for new hard drives or large SSDs — could be in for a world of hurt as Chia causes a storage shortage.
During its first week of trading, Chia started with a price of around $1,600, climbed up to a peak of around $1,900, and then dropped to a minimum value of around $560. But then it started going up again and reached a relatively stable (which isn’t really stable at all) $1,000 or so on Friday. A couple more exchanges have joined the initial trio, with OKex accounting for around 67% of trades right now.
More importantly than just price is volume of trading. The first day saw only $11 million in trades, but Thursday/Friday has chalked up over 10X as much action. It might be market manipulation, as cryptocurrencies are full of such shenanigans, but anyone that claimed Chia was going to fade away after the first 12 hours of trading clearly missed the boat.
Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Chia will take a lot more effort to bring more plots online, but we’re still seeing an incredibly fast ramp in allocated netspace. It’s currently at 2.7 EiB, which is a 55% increase just in the past four days. We’ll probably see that fast rate of acceleration for at least a few weeks, before things start to calm down and become more linear in nature.
There are still concerns with e-waste and other aspects of any cryptocurrency, but Chia at least does drastically cut back on the power requirements. Maybe that’s only temporary as well, though. 50 HDDs use as much power as a single high-end GPU, but if we end up with 50X as many HDDs farming Chia, we’ll be right back to square one. For the sake of the environment, let’s hope that doesn’t happen.
The Longing feels like a troll. It’s a game that takes 400 real-world days to finish, and it moves at a pace that could only generously be described as glacial. The first word that ever appears on screen is “Wait!” Simple tasks, like walking up some stairs or opening a door, drag on forever. And yet, here I am, a month after I first started, and I can’t seem to stop playing.
The game puts you in the role of a “shade,” a small creature who lives in service to an ancient king. At the outset of The Longing, the king tells you he must go into a kind of hibernation and leaves you to, well, wait. The towering king sits in a giant throne, occasionally snoring, and you’re left alone in a dark, twisting, subterranean world. You have 400 days until he wakes up. What are you going to do?
The Longing is, at its core, a game about killing time. There’s no explicit goal other than to wait, as the clock ticks down whether you’re playing or not (you can actually see the countdown at all times, an ever-present part of the game’s interface). The game takes place in the crumbling remnants of a long-forgotten underground kingdom. You have a small room beside the king’s throne — one you can customize by hanging pictures, building a bed, or digging out an extra room — but the rest of the place is one giant maze. You’ll come across stairs leading in every direction, and tunnels that end with multiple doors to walk through.
Your main obstacle in exploring is the pace. The shade moves almost comically slow, shuffling along as if it’s not in any rush at all. There’s definitely no run button. Sometimes you’ll come across areas that are inaccessible for weeks. You might have to wait for a dripping ceiling to fill in a hole so you can swim across, or for a patch of moss to grow to break your fall after jumping off a cliff. To make things even more challenging, there’s no map, so it’s easy to get lost or struggle to find your way back home.
Moving through The Longing becomes almost meditative. For the most part, nothing happens, but every so often you’ll come across something really cool, like an ancient library where you can raid all of the books, or a waterfall splashing on to crystals, or maybe a room filled with a bright light that never seems to end. I’ve made “friends” with a spider and talked to a stone wall. As you explore, the shade will talk to itself in tweet-worthy missives like “this seems like a great place to be lonely” or “I have never understood life.” If you don’t feel like wandering, you can always just sit down and read Moby Dick or spend time drawing sketches to decorate your home.
In some ways, The Longing almost plays like an idle browser game, something you set in the background and return to when something interesting happens. Those games are often about watching numbers increase over time, like in a roleplaying game, but in The Longing you simply get a quiet space for contemplation. Some aspects can be automated: you can ask the shade to go for a walk to a random place or head home without any player input. There have been times when I’ve set the shade to do a task — like digging a new room in its hovel or using a pickaxe to knock down a shiny jewel — before heading off to do something in the real world, like wash the dishes or vacuum.
Much of the time The Longing is boring, though that’s by design. It makes the moments of discovery all the more thrilling. It’s become a habit for me, spending an hour or so each day making my way through its winding halls, in hopes of finding something new or interesting. Sometimes I stumble across a wall covered in ancient symbols. Other times I climb a huge set of stairs that lead to nowhere.
Is it worth all of that time and effort? I’ll tell you in 353 days.
The Longing is available now on PC and the Nintendo Switch.
Microsoft has been trying to build a lighter version of Windows for more than 10 years without success. The latest effort, Windows 10X, has reportedly now been shelved, in favor of improving Windows 10 instead.
Petri reports that Windows 10X will no longer ship this year, and the OS will likely never arrive in its current form. Microsoft had originally been planning to deliver Windows 10X, a more lightweight and simplified version of Windows, alongside new dual-screen devices like the Surface Neo. That was before the pandemic hit, and Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows 10X for single-screen laptops instead.
The Surface Neo was supposed to ship with Windows 10X.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The switch was designed to position Windows 10X as more of a Chrome OS competitor. Windows 10X included a simplified interface, an updated Start menu without Live Tiles, multitasking improvements, and a special app container for performance and security. Microsoft’s overall goal with 10X was to create a stripped-back, streamlined, and modern cloud-powered version of Windows.
Microsoft has always seen Chromebooks as a big threat in businesses and schools, but over the past year there has been a big increase in demand for regular Windows laptops. Despite a global chip shortage, the PC market hasn’t slowed down during the pandemic. Microsoft has directly benefited with increased Windows revenue. Windows OEM revenue grew by 10 percent in the recent quarter, reflecting strong consumer PC demand. Windows non-pro OEM revenue also grew by 44 percent.
There are now 1.3 billion active Windows 10 devices, according to Microsoft. That’s a huge amount of existing devices, and it appears Microsoft is now focused on improving the core of Windows instead of delivering a new variant. Microsoft has been gradually working on improving the user interface of Windows 10, with new system icons, File Explorer improvements, and even the end of Windows 95-era icons.
The Windows 10X Start menu.
All of these visual changes are part of a broader effort codenamed Sun Valley. Microsoft has not yet officially detailed this work, but a job listing earlier this year teased a “sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows.” We’re expecting a lot of visual changes to arrive in the Windows 10 21H2 update that should appear in October.
Elsewhere, Microsoft is also focusing on improving Windows for those who rely on it daily. The software maker is finally fixing the rearranging apps issue on multiple monitors, adding the Xbox Auto HDR feature and even improving Bluetooth audio support.
It’s clear Microsoft is getting back to the basics, after more than a decade of trying to simplify Windows. Windows RT first debuted in 2012, and then Windows 10 S arrived in 2017. Both failed to simplify Windows, but Windows 10X had some interesting changes that will undoubtedly make their way to Windows 10.
(Pocket-lint) – Sonos offers multiple speakers within its portfolio, but as great as they are, none had been portable, none had been water-resistant, and none had offered Bluetooth audio support. The Sonos Move, however, changed all of that.
While Sonos previously focused on offering speakers designed for the home that require mains power and use a mesh Wi-Fi network to talk to each other, the Sonos Move was the first portable Bluetooth smart speaker marking the beginning of Sonos outside of the home.
Move was first, but since its release, there is also now the smaller, and more portable Sonos Roam to consider if you’re in the market for a Bluetooth Sonos speaker. You can read our full Sonos Roam review separately, but here we are focusing on the larger, more powerful, Sonos Move.
Sonos Move vs Sonos Roam: What’s the difference?
Design
IP56 water- and dust-resistant design
Capacitive touch controls
Integrated handle
Measures: 240 x 160 x 126mm
Weighs: 3kg
Sonos plays close attention to design and all its latest speakers – from the 2015 Play:5 to the Sonos Arc – share similar design features, like capacitive touch controls, black and white colour options and plastic detailing.
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The Sonos Move has the same design ethos as these newer Sonos speakers, with rounded edges, capacitive controls and an almost identical top to the Sonos One – albeit oval shaped and with repositioned controls – but it raises the stakes when it comes to durability.
While the design of the Sonos Move clearly resembles the Sonos portfolio, it offers an IP56 water and dust resistance and it is one tough little cookie – although it’s not actually that little. Sonos says the Move can withstand pretty much every obstacle life might throw at it, whether that be sand, water or a drop on concrete, and while we didn’t fancy testing the last of those, it’s clear this speaker is able to hold its own.
To achieve this, the bottom of the device is silicone with a clear coat of paint over the top to deter dust. Everything inside has been considered, too, from a custom-made polycarbonate basket case reinforced with glass for the mid-woofer, to the colour of the Move itself – it is Shadow Black and not just plain, absorbant black to take UV exposure into account. We had it outside in 25C with the sun shining directly on it for several hours but it didn’t feel too hot as a result. There’s a Lunar White model too, which are the same colour offerings as the Sonos Roam.
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As we say, though, this portable speaker is not small. It’s wider and taller than the Sonos One and it weighs a hefty 3kg – so you’ll need a pretty decent-sized backpack to lug it around. The point is that you can bring it wherever you want, whether that’s your garden, the beach or a camping trip. At this scale we suspect it’ll be nearer to the home, for a garden party, while the smaller Sonos Roam is more suited to the park or beach.
On the rear of the Move is a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth toggle switch, a power button and a pairing button – the last of which all Sonos speakers except the Roam offer. The buttons are all positioned on an inward slant that allows for the convenient integrated handle – which is built into the design, rather than a separate strap or handle – to exist within this design format.
When the Sonos Move is on its Loop Dock charging cradle it looks like any other Sonos speaker and blends into the home. You’d never know it was portable from the front, giving it an element of surprise about it. If you’re thinking about buying a permanent in-home Sonos speaker but might want to occasionally take it out and about then we can see why this design makes perfect sense, though the same can definitely be said for the Roam too.
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A USB Type-C port sits below the integrated handle and the buttons, as well as two charging pins below that for the Loop Dock – which the Sonos Move snaps into place on.
Hardware & Specs
Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy
AirPlay 2 support
45W power
The Sonos Move delivers 45W of power, coupled with Bluetooth for audio streaming capabilities rather than needing a mesh-connected device. The Sonos One, by comparison, doesn’t offer Bluetooth for audio streaming (only for quick setup), making the Move the first Sonos speaker to offer the technology, followed by the Roam.
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The Sonos Move also supports Apple’s AirPlay 2 – as per the Roam, Arc, Beam, One, Play:5, and the Sonos One SL (the voiceless version of the Sonos One) – which allows for easy streaming from an Apple device without the need to open the Sonos app. It’s quick, convenient and it offers Apple users integration with Siri for voice control too.
The Wi-Fi/Bluetooth toggle switch on the rear of the Sonos Move allows users to switch the speaker between modes – something the Roam does automatically. When the Move is ready to pair, the LED light on the top flashes blue then goes solid blue when pairing is successful. We paired our Apple iPhone 11 at the time of review with it in a matter of seconds and switching between the two modes is virtually instant, making it pain-free, even if the Roam does make this element more seamless.
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The power button, meanwhile, allows users to switch the Sonos Move off entirely, otherwise it will stay in a low power mode when not being used – useful for quick wake-up if it’s grouped with another Sonos speaker or an alarm is set, for example.
Features
Automatic Trueplay
Alexa and Google voice control
The Sonos Move functions as a typical Bluetooth speaker when in Bluetooth mode, allowing users to send music to it via a paired device, as you would the Ultimate Ears UE Megaboom 3, for example. In Bluetooth mode, the Move isn’t controlled via the Sonos app, with the control shifted to your device and the streaming service you are using instead.
When not in Bluetooth mode, the Move functions as a traditional Sonos speaker, but it appears with a battery indicator in the Sonos app. Functioning as a traditional Sonos speaker means you can group it with other Sonos speakers, control it through the Sonos app and access all the features that come with that app, including compatibility with over 100 music streaming services, stereo pairing and customisation of equalisation levels (EQ).
Sadly, you can’t use two Sonos Move speakers in a surround setup, as you can with all other Sonos speakers except the Sonos Roam, which also doesn’t offer the feature. Read our Sonos tips and tricks to learn more about the features offered by the Sonos system as a whole.
The Sonos Move also offers a feature called Automatic Trueplay. Trueplay is a software feature Sonos introduced with the Play:5 in 2015 and it allows users to tune their Sonos speakers according to its surroundings using an Apple iOS device. You can read all about it in our seperate feature.
Best speakers for PC gamers 2021: All the sound and RGB lighting you could ever need
By Adrian Willings
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Automatic Trueplay uses the four built-in microphones on the Sonos Move to listen to the sound produced by the speaker and tune it automatically according to its surroundings, making for a much simpler process than the original (where you had to walk around the room waving your iOS device up and down slowly, yep, really).
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The Automatic Trueplay feature was introduced on the Move to combat the issues of moving a speaker from outside to inside and still ensuring it sounds good. An accelerometer helps the Sonos Move detect when it has been moved, allowing it to adjust itself within around 30 seconds to what it deems as the best for its new surroundings. You can turn it off in the Sonos app if you don’t want it though.
Additionally, the Sonos Move supports Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa voice control. As with the One, Beam, Arc and Roam, which offer the same control, you can’t have both assistants setup at the same time – but you will be able to switch between them as you please, as well as turn the microphone off (an LED light on the top of the Move indicates when the microphones are on). You can also choose to have Alexa on one compatible Sonos speaker and Google Assistant on another if you want.
When the voice assistants are setup, you get almost all the same features you would an Amazon Echo or Google Home or Nest speaker device, bar a couple, meaning you’ll be able to ask Alexa or Google anything you like, such as set a timer or alarm, control compatible smart home devices, or find out about your day or commute.
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Voice control is only available when in Wi-Fi mode (AKA standard Sonos mode), but don’t mistake this for only when docked on the Loop Dock. For us, we get Wi-Fi in our garden at home and therefore we could use Google Assistant on the Move in the garden during a BBQ with friends, which was great.
Sound and performance
Two Class-D digital amplifiers, tweeter and mid-woofer
10 hours battery life
Replaceable battery
The Sonos Move has a downward-firing tweeter at the top of the speaker, coupled with a mid-range woofer inside. For those wondering why the company has used a downward-facing tweeter, Sonos told us it was to achieve evenly dispersed sound; there’s what the company calls a Wave Guide inside to enable this to happen.
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Based on our experience at review and continued experience, the Sonos Move offers a great sound quality for its size and the sound is evenly dispersed. It’s on the bassy side, which is typical of Sonos speakers, but we see that as a good thing compared to other portables that can’t deliver in this regard.
There’s plenty of volume too – which you definitely need when outdoors – and the Move copes well with mid-range, treble and vocals. You don’t get as wide a soundscape as per the Play:5, but the Move sounds better than the Sonos One to our ears. That gives you an idea of its positioning in the range. It’s also more powerful than the Roam, which you would expect.
Sonos claims the battery will deliver 10 hours of music playback. We had the Sonos Move outside on Wi-Fi, on mid-volume for four hours and we only managed to drain the battery to 80 per cent, so we suspect this figure is based on use at louder volumes, thus you might get more out of it.
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The battery can be replaced too – it will last around 900 charging cycles, which is around three years on average – after which it is recommended to replace it to continue to get longevity out of the device. Sonos offers a battery replacement kit that allows you to do this yourself.
Verdict
We waited a long time to see Sonos launch a portable speaker with Bluetooth streaming before Move was finally revealed. In fact, we asked co-founder Tom Cullen about a portable speaker back in 2015, so it’s something we’ve been pining after for a while and now we have two choices.
The Move is bigger and heavier than we expected, and certainly not cheap, but with its price and size comes durability, toughness and performance – and that’s no bad thing, especially if you actually plan to make use of the Move’s portability. We also suspect many will use it as a sometime portable, not as a constant cart-around speaker.
There are other great portable Bluetooth speakers out there – including Sonos’ own Roam that is far smaller and better designed for constant portability – but there are none quite like the Sonos Move in terms of sound output and features, especially not for those already invested in the Sonos system. It’s the Bluetooth speaker Sonos fans were waiting for.
This article was first published on 5 September 2019 and has been republished to represent its full review status.
Also consider
Pocket-lint
Sonos Roam
squirrel_widget_4437410
The Sonos Roam is the second portable, Bluetooth speaker from Sonos. It’s much smaller than the Move and while it isn’t as powerful, it offers some great features like automatic switching between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as a feature called Sound Swap.
Sonos Roam review
Pocket-lint
Sonos One
squirrel_widget_148504
The Sonos One isn’t portable like the Move, nor does it offer Bluetooth audio capabilities, but it is cheaper, it has built-in Google Assistant and Alexa capabilities, and it offers a good sound for its size. Two Sonos One speakers can also be used in a surround setup with a Sonos Arc, Sonos Beam and Sonos Sub.
Sonos One review
Pocket-lint
Ultimate Ears Megaboom 3
squirrel_widget_145462
The Megaboom 3 is quite a bit smaller and cheaper than the Sonos Move and it doesn’t offer the soundscape as a result of this, but it is completely waterproof, it offers decent bass for its size, and it is more portable than the Move. It’s that last point that’s a big sell here.
Ultimate Ears Megaboom 3 review
Pocket-lint
JBL Link Portable
Smaller and more compact than the Move, the Link Portable doesn’t deliver the same sound experience as a result, but there are plenty of features, including Google Assistant, AirPlay 2, Chromecast support and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
In the past few weeks we saw a number of indicators that Razer is getting ready to launch an AMD-based Blade gaming notebook. In a rather odd-looking Twitter conversation on Thursday night that went into Friday morning, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan and Frank Azor of AMD suggested the possibility of a collaboration.
“What do you think about making an AMD equipped Razer Blade laptop, @minglintan,” asked Frank Azor, AMD’s gaming chief in a Twitter post.
I dunno guys. What do you all think? Do you all want to see an @AMD equipped @Razer Blade? https://t.co/u6hpVPWFj3May 7, 2021
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“I get a ton of requests all the time to make an AMD gaming laptop,” Min-Lian Tan, a co-founder and CEO of Razer, responded shortly. “What do you guys think?” […] FWIW I think we could design/engineer a pretty awesome AMD gaming laptop. The current laptops out there don’t really push the limits of what can be done. What would you guys like to see in a Razer Blade with AMD?”
FWIW I think we could design/engineer a pretty awesome @AMD gaming laptop. The current laptops out there don’t really push the limits of what can be done. What would you guys like to see in a @Razer Blade with AMD?May 7, 2021
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Razer is the last major notebook brands to exclusively offer Intel-based machines, which has frustrated some gamers looking for more choice. Back in 2019, Tan told Tom’s Hardwarethat “we do have quite a number of customers reaching out to us asking us about AMD[.]”
Last month someone submitted benchmark results of two Razer machines, codenamed PI411, featuring AMD’s unlocked Ryzen 9 5900HX processor accompanied by Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 or RTX 3070 GPU with an 80W TGP. That’s a clear indicator that the PC maker was at least experimenting with AMD’s CPU.
The 3DMark submission itself does not mean that a product is coming to the market as some products do not meet certain goals that manufacturers set. But when high-ranking executives start to talk about new products publicly, it certainly suggests that some plans are being set internally.
Tan is a self-described loose cannon on social media, once telling Tom’s Hardware that “my PR team and my legal team lives on tenterhooks that I’m gonna say something stupid.” But with a partner involved, this seems like it could potentially lead to something real.
A so-called scratch build is one that’s been designed and built from the ground up, without the use of a pre-existing case. That’s what Menhir is: a scratch build made of 8mm sheet aluminum and Ayous wood.
As the name suggests, my source of inspiration while designing this were the vertical monoliths called Menhir, thanks to their peculiar shape.
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
The idea was to make a mini-ITX case with a compact footprint, that could house a big graphics card (RTX 2070 Super Strix) and a capable watercooling loop (dual 240mm radiators), and the vertical design was the best fit for the feat, since I also wanted to have an exotic looking build. Another goal was to achieve a design that may very well go in a home environment, hence the choice of using wood to give it a warmer feel.
In this article I’ll show the whole process behind the making of Menhir. Let’s get started!
Making the 3D Model
Since I started using a CNC router for my projects, I had to learn how to use Fusion 360 to come up with my designs and custom parts. So now the first step into any new project is actually brainstorming various ideas and trying to model them in 3D.
Designing Menhir was quite challenging because I wanted a very tall build, but still have something that wouldn’t feel out of place as a mini-ITX build, so the compact footprint was a very important factor. Moreover, vertical designs aren’t a super popular option yet, so it’s easy to overdo it and make something that feels out of place. Balance is key!
The first iteration of Menhir’s design was a pretty boxy case, just very tall. That’s not what I wanted.
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
So I started playing around with angles and the wooden outer shell, until I came up with the final shape, which has the outer shell rotated 90 degrees from the aluminum enclosure. The footprint had to be made just a bit larger in this final version, but it was worth it to allow for a more unique design.
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Making the Aluminum Parts
Once all the parts were designed and set up into Fusion 360, I went ahead and fixed the 8mm aluminum sheet on the CNC.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Most of the parts of this case will be cut from this single 500 x 1000mm sheet, so it will start taking shape pretty quickly. In addition to all the big panels of the case, I had to cut a bunch of small brackets to be able to assemble everything together.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
And here’s every 8mm panel cut and ready to be finished.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
For finishing these plates, I wanted to leave the aluminum pretty raw, so I sanded them down with 180 grit and an orbital sander, in order to get that rough and textured look.
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The little mounting brackets I cut at the CNC earlier, had to be given a few extra threaded holes on the edges, so I did that on the drill press and then assembled the first few parts for a test fit.
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Here it is next to A.R.E.S., another one of my PC builds, for a quick size comparison. A.R.E.S. is about 75cm/29.5in tall.
With the ongoing pandemic and chip shortages still making headlines semiconductor revenue totalled $464 billion in 2020 and will top $522 billion 2021, according to IDC. Despite widespread shortages, sales of chips are going to grow further this year as more devices are getting smarter and more chips are consumed overall. Fuelled by home working and education computing is set to be the main driver of growth as each PC uses dozens of chips many of which are made using an advanced process technology. Meanwhile, shipments of chips for smartphones, consumer electronics, and automotive applications will also be strong.
Global semiconductor revenue increased by 10.8% last year to $464 billion and will grow another 12.5% this year to $522 million because of growth in consumer, computing, 5G, and automotive semiconductors, a new report from IDC says. Shortages of chips will continue through 2021, but since the industry will adopt more expensive chips for a wide variety of applications, sales of semiconductors are destined to grow once again.
Semiconductors for PCs and servers outpaced the overall chip market and grew 17.3% year-over-year to $160 billion in 2020. There were several factors that drove sales of PC and server chips to new heights. Demand for PCs grew rather dramatically last year, which caused shortages. Meanwhile, CPUs and GPUs are made using sophisticated fabrication technologies and therefore are rather expensive. Finally, supply constraints allowed manufacturers to further increase prices of their products. IDC predicts that sales of semiconductors for computing will grow 7.7% to $173 billion in 2021.
“Demand for PC processors remains strong, especially in value-oriented segments,” said Shane Rau, research vice president, Computing Semiconductors. “The PC processors market looks strong through the first half and likely the whole year.” IDC forecasts computing systems revenues will grow 7.7% to $173 billion in 2021.
Chips for smartphones have been a major semiconductor revenue driver for about a decade since the market of handsets was growing rapidly. Last year unit shipments of smartphones dropped by 10%, but since new 5G devices use more expensive SoCs and more chips in general, smartphone semiconductor revenue increased 9.1% year-over-year. IDC believes that sales of chips for mobile phones will grow by 23.3% in 2021 to $147 billion.
“2021 will be an especially important year for semiconductor vendors as 5G phones capture 34% of all mobile phone shipments while semiconductors for 5G phones will capture nearly two thirds of the revenue in the segment,” said Phil Solis, research director for Connectivity and Smartphone Semiconductors.
Chips for consumer electronics totalled $60 billion in 2020, up 7.7% year over year as sales of devices like game consoles, tablets, wireless headsets, smart watches, and set-top-boxes were strong.
“New gaming consoles from Microsoft and Sony, continued strong sales of wearables from Apple, and the rise in smart home networks managed by Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant will accelerate growth in 2021 to 8.9% year over year,” said Rudy Torrijos, research manager, Consumer Semiconductors.
Shipments of chips for automotive applications recovered in the second half of 2020, but many semiconductors for cars are in tight supply now, a situation that will persist throughout 2021, according to IDC. Nonetheless, automotive semiconductors revenue is expected to grow 13.6% year-over-year, the analysts note.
“Overall, the semiconductor industry remains on track to deliver another strong year of growth as the super cycle that began at the end of 2019 strengthens this year,” said Mario Morales, program vice president, Semiconductors at IDC.
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