Today is world backup day, so why not celebrate it by picking up a new storage device for your computing needs. Today you can get a fast 500GB PCI-E 4.0 NVMe SSD for just $99.99, and there are several other external and internal storage devices that are also on sale.
This WD M.2 SSD has a capacity of 500GB and it can transfer data at a blistering fast rate of up to 7,000MB/s. These speeds are only possible when used in an M.2 slot with PCI-E x4 lanes, but when in the proper slot it can operate far faster than most SSDs on the market. It’s also fairly affordable too for such a fast drive as it has been marked down from Amazon from $149.99 to $99.99.
This compact external SSD is small enough to fit and your pocket. It can also hold up to 2TB of data, and it can read data at up to 550MB/s. SanDisk also designed this drive to be durable and water-resistant with an IP55 rating. Right now it’s marked down from $459.99 to $239.99 from Amazon.
This large 8TB HDD was designed for enterprise operations with support for workloads of up to 550TB of data read and written per year. It’s also estimated to last for an average of 2,000,000 hours before failing, which makes it an exceedingly reliable drive for users that need to store a large amount of data. Currently you can get one of these drives from Amazon marked down from $279.99 to just $170.09.
This drives lets you carry around 10TB of data in a compact package that transfers data relatively quickly over USB 3.0. Right now it’s marked down from $189.99 to $151.99 on Amazon.
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It’s been almost a decade since ARM unveiled ARMv8, its 64-bit architecture. The company has now developed ARMv9 to focus on extending the length and breadth of its addressable ecosystem.
Unlike ARMv8, ARMv9 isn’t a ground-up overhaul of ARM’s entire instruction set. The new architecture includes various improvements ARM has released to ARMv8 as optional standards; they’ll now be incorporated into the baseline. ARM is also including a follow-up SIMD instruction set to Neon, dubbed SVE2. SVE2 is an extension of ARM’s earlier Scalable Vector Extensions SIMD implementation, which focused primarily on high-end computing. The fastest supercomputer in the world, Fugaku, is based on a Fujitsu A64FX processor that implements SVE, but most ARM chips today still rely on Neon.
One of the big differences between SVE2 and competing Intel standards like AVX-512 is that SVE2 offers variable vector sizes from 128 to 2,048 bits. Developers are only supposed to need to compile their code once to take advantage of this improvement. If ARM decides to implement wider SVE2 registers, pre-existing code will be able to take advantage of them. SVE2 also introduces new instructions to improve its performance and overall capabilities relative to SVE. Accelerators are expected to provide most AI processing needs, but SVE2 can improve the performance of AI calculations running on the CPU.
Confidential Compute Architecture
We’ve seen a number of high-profile hardware attacks in the past few years and ARM has clearly been paying attention. The company is announcing its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA). Available detail is currently high-level, ARM will give more information on the feature later this summer.
CCA introduces Realms, which are sandboxed application containers intended to execute the program from the hardware it’s running on. Neither the OS nor hypervisor can see into these containers. Realms don’t use a conventional hypervisor, they rely on a “Realm Manager,” which is roughly 1/10 the size.
CCAs are intended to shrink the degree of trust required when running applications in the cloud on an unknown platform. As the cloud becomes more prevalent, there’s a greater need to offer secure hosting to companies working with sensitive data. With that said, this looks like another closed approach to security. One point of disagreement between Intel, AMD, ARM, and the general security community is how much public information companies should provide about these solutions to enable thorough testing.
ARM also shared some performance estimates for future products. It expects the upcoming Matterhorn and Makalu CPUs to deliver a cumulative 30 percent performance improvement. This suggests ARM is having more trouble finding ways to boost performance than it once did, though a 15 percent annual rate of increase is still quite good. ARM also intends to introduce ray tracing features on future Mali GPUs. Ray tracing tends to hit desktop and mobile PCs quite hard, so it’ll be interesting to see if game developers can bring this capability to much smaller devices.
ARMv9 CPUs won’t be available until 2022, so we won’t see any devices using the new ARMv9 architecture this year. The performance and security benefits from the new ISA are tuned to address the evolving computer market and while the pace of improvements may be slowing, ARM is confident there’s plenty of gas in the tank.
The value of Bitcoin is surging once again, and that has turned some moderately wealthy crypto enthusiasts into millionaires. Phillipe Christodoulou was one of them with his hoard of 17.1 Bitcoins, worth just over $1 million at today’s exchange rates. However, he recently made the mistake of downloading an app from the iOS App Store. In the blink of an eye, his fortune was gone, and he blames Apple.
Unlike traditional banking and fiat currency, there’s no backup and no legal framework that can retrieve stolen cryptocurrency. If you lose access to the bits of data that represent your digital money, it’s gone forever. People have routinely thrown out huge fortunes with the trash or accidentally beamed millions of dollars to the wrong anonymous digital wallets. Christodoulou thought he was doing everything right by keeping his Bitcoins on a secure hardware wallet called Trezor, but then he went looking for a Trezor app in the App Store.
Apple has long claimed its application repository is superior to Google’s because it’s highly curated and more secure. Every app on the App Store goes through a review process, leading to uncountable horror stories about developers who are unable to publish or update apps because of some esoteric rule or content violation. The fake Trezor app made it through just fine, though.
Trezor uses a website for PIN authentication before the hardware wallet is unlocked, and it seems Christodoulou figured there would be an app. The company doesn’t make one, though. The scam app had five stars and looked legit, but after he used the app to unlock his wallet, those 17.1 Bitcoins were gone forever. Christodoulou is upset with the thieves, of course, but he’s reserving most of his venom for Apple itself. “They betrayed the trust that I had in them,” Christodoulou told the Washington Post.
Trezor hardware wallets are a secure way to store your Bitcoin… unless you give a malicious app access.
It’s easy to empathize with Christodoulou. Apple has been telling people to download with confidence for years, citing its careful curation of the walled garden. Apple has confirmed there are more of these Bitcoin scams hiding in the App Store’s nearly 2-million-strong catalog. However, it won’t talk about the scale of the problem. Google is not immune, either. There are fake Trezor apps appearing over there as well, but the Android scammers haven’t hit the jackpot as they did with Christodoulou.
Apple has refused to identify the scammer account or state whether it has provided information to law enforcement. It’s unlikely anything will get Christodoulou his Bitcoins back. Anyone with a large crypto cache is advised to be very careful which apps they use to access it.
Intel’s new Rocket Lake desktop platform has arrived at a critical moment for the company. Just weeks ago, the CPU manufacturing giant unveiled a plan to overhaul its manufacturing business, open a client foundry business, build new fabs, and strike deeper partnerships with rival foundries like Samsung and TSMC. These initiatives are all part of new CEO Pat Gelsinger’s goal of reclaiming manufacturing leadership over the next four to five years.
Like the IDM 2.0 plans Intel unveiled earlier in March, Rocket Lake represents a fundamental break from the past. The 2011-day reign of Skylake is over. For the first time in five and a half years, Intel has a new desktop microarchitecture. One can imagine Intel engineers breaking out the champagne when Rocket Lake taped out, purely for the joy of building something else.
Rocket Lake, in a nutshell.
Unlike Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake, Intel’s Rocket Lake SoC uses the Cypress Cove microarchitecture. Cypress Cove is a backport of Intel’s 2019 Sunny Cove CPU design. Sunny Cove was built on 10nm and wasn’t capable of reaching high clocks. Backporting the design to 14nm allowed Intel to recover the clock it lost in the 14nm – 10nm transition.
Intel has promised Cypress Cove delivers a 1.19x IPC improvement compared to the 10th Gen Core family. Other new features debuting with Rocket Lake include a new, Xe-based GPU core (not something we’re discussing in this piece), support for the AVX-512 instruction set, an improved memory controller with support for higher-clocked DRAM, and an additional four lanes of CPU-attached PCIe 4.0 storage relative to what’s available on the Core i9-10900K. Rocket Lake also uses an x8 PCIe 3.0 chipset link if paired with a 500-series chipset. 10th Gen CPUs installed in the same boards use x4 links.
The Core i9-11900K uses an LGA1200 motherboard socket, which it shares with the 10th Gen CPU family. There’s some cross-compatibility between Intel’s 400-series motherboards and 11th Gen CPUs; check this article for details.
Competitive Positioning
Note: All references to MSRPs throughout this story are strictly hypothetical. AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs are still carrying a premium and 11th Gen is too new to make any judgments about availability.
After stepping up to 10 cores last year with the Core i9-10900K, Intel is backing down to eight once more with the Core i9-11900K. During our briefing, the company tried to claim it was forced to reduce its CPU core counts because eight cores represented “the most we could fit.” This is ridiculous twaddle.
While we don’t have the exact die size of the Core i9-11900K, the 10-core Intel Core i9-10900K has a 206.1mm sq die. Back in the 22nm days, Intel’s Xeon Phi had a 705mm sq die, and the company hasn’t torn out its large-die manufacturing equipment, so reports of a supposed die size restriction are nonsensical. Our results suggest Intel dropped back to eight CPU cores because Cypress Cove’s power consumption on 14nm made more than that a bad idea, not because it couldn’t build a larger chip. It’s fine to say that a given core count represented the best overall design point.
The Core i9-11900K enters this fight hemmed in on every side. AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X is theoretically less expensive, at $450. Intel chose to price the Core i9-11900K at $539 where it competes against the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X at $549. Lower in the stack there are very well-positioned chips such as the Core i5-11600K, but we’ll be considering that CPU in a separate article.
The Core i9-11900K needs to match or exceed the performance of its predecessor and justify its price premium over the Ryzen 7 5800X. Ideally, it would carry the fight to the Ryzen 9 5900X, but asking an eight-core chip to beat a 12-core is a lot and Intel historically prices their CPUs at a premium compared with AMD.
Tests and System Configuration
We’ve ported our CPU results over to the same graphing engine we debuted for the 6700 XT launch last week. Our results are therefore organized a bit differently. The tabs in the graph below will display a different set of benchmark results depending on which option you select. You can click on the color buttons to remove a result if you’d like to compare specific solutions.
Application and game-specific configuration details are given below:
Blender Benchmark 2.0.5: We display the total wall-clock render time for multiple Blender scenes, including BMW, Fishy_Cat, Koro, Classroom, Pavilion, and Victor. This is a standalone benchmark tool provided by Blender that anyone can use. Rendering times are reported in minutes.
Cinbench R20 and R23 Cinebench R20 and R23 are an older and a newer version of the same benchmark. Maxon, the developer of Cinema4D, has created Cinebench to serve as a simple rendering test for their larger application. Rendering time is reported in scores and higher scores are faster.
Corona Render 1.3: Corona Render is an unbiased, physically based renderer with plugins available for applications like 3ds Max. Render times are reported in minutes.
Handbrake 1.33: We’ve temporarily reintroduced Handbrake as a video transcoding benchmark. We convert the 4K film Tears of Steel using the Fast 1080p30 preset, but we altered the preset to retain the source video’s frame rate. Performance is reported in both H.264 and H.265.
IndigoBench: IndigoBench tests IndigoRenderer, another unbiased, photorealistic GPU and CPU rendering package. Performance is reported in Msamples/sec and higher scores are faster.
V-Ray: V-ray, as the name implies, is a flexible ray tracing solution deployed across the 3D industry. We measure CPU performance in vsamples/sec, with higher scores indicating higher performance.
y-cruncher: We use y-cruncher to calculate the first 5 billion digits of Pi and report the wall-clock time required. We use an optimized executable corresponding to each CPU’s microarchitecture. The 11900K is tested with AVX-512 enabled, both Zen 5000 CPUs run Zen 2-optimized code, and the Core i9-10900K uses an executable optimized for Broadwell and Skylake. There is no Zen 3-optimized version (yet).
Next up, games:
Assassin’s Creed: Origins: Ultra Detail, DX11.
Borderlands 3: Ultra Detail, DX12.
Far Cry 5: Ultra Detail, High Detail Textures enabled, DX11.
Metro Exodus: Extreme Detail, Hairworks and advanced physics disabled, DX12.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Tested at High Detail, with SMAATx2 enabled. Uses DX12.
Strange Brigade: Ultra Detail, Vulkan.
All systems were tested with an MSI RTX 3080 Suprim X using Nvidia’s 461.92 driver series. The Core i9-11900K was tested on an Asus motherboard, while the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 9 5900X were both tested in an MSI X570 Godlike motherboard. Both the Intel and the AMD systems were configured with 32GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3600 RAM in four slots.
We had no stability problems with our Asus ROG Maximus XIII Hero beyond a dead M.2 slot. We opted to test the board using a PCIe 3.0 riser card. This worked but blocked our ability to test PCIe 4.0 southbridge support.
Performance Analysis:
Our performance data shows that the Core i9-11900K mostly matches the multi-threaded performance of the Core i9-10900K, while substantially exceeding it in single-threaded tests. In some cases, the Cypress Cove-powered Rocket Lake is even faster than its 10-core predecessor. Single-threaded performance is about 5 percent higher than AMD in tests like Cinebench and no less than 20 percent and 23 percent higher than the Core i9-10900K. Single-threaded workloads are a minority of tasks these days, but the uplift here is very real.
Intel is generally faster than the 5800X, though there are exceptions, like NeatBench 5 and 7zip’s compression test. While the 11900K is capable of besting the Ryzen 7 5800X, it’s got no chance against the Ryzen 9 5900X. Unfortunately for Intel, the 5900X is actually its closest price match. The Core i9-11900K cannot match the Ryzen 9 5900X in any of our multi-threaded application tests.
Let’s turn our attention to gaming:
The 5900X doesn’t offer much uplift in gaming compared with CPUs such as the Core i9-10900K. In 1080p, it leads the Ryzen 7 5800X by about 4.6 percent and the Ryzen 9 5900X by 2.6 percent. In 4K, there’s a 6 percent gap between the 5800X and the 11900K and a 4.5 percent gap between it and the 5900X.
As for power consumption, here’s how these four CPUs compare. Power consumption is higher here than you may see in other reviews because we’re using an MSI RTX 3080 Suprim X. This particular RTX 3080 is tuned for maximum performance and its power consumption figures reflect it.
Intel’s Power Consumption: Up, Up, and Outré
We’ve measured power in y-cruncher, using a binary tuned for each CPU. This means AVX-512 for Core i9-11900K, Broadwell/Skylake tuning for the 10900K, and Zen 2 enhancements for the AMD CPUs. There isn’t a Zen 3-optimized executable yet.
“Rocket Lake” is an incredibly appropriate name for this SoC. While we’re reporting wall power and not CPU-specific power consumption, y-cruncher has a text GUI and no graphical UI. The Core i9-11900K draws 1.73x more power than the 5800X and 1.25x more than the Core i9-10900K, even though it has fewer CPU cores. If we were using AMD’s more power-efficient X470 platform we might be able to fit two Ryzen 7 5800X’s into the same power envelope as one Core i9-11900K.
The difference between the Core i9-11900K and the Ryzen 7 5800X is large enough to make a difference to your yearly power bill, depending on how much you use the chip. If you ran both CPUs all-out for four hours per day and turned them off at other times, you’d pay $70.08 per year for the 11900K and $38.16 for the AMD CPU. If we assume 24/7 continuous operation at $0.12 per kilowatt-hour, the Core i9-11900K would run $420.48 per year against the AMD 5800X at $229.08. Neither figure accounts for the increased HVAC costs during the summer or the potential reduction in heating costs during the winter.
Conclusion: The Core i9-11900K Is Intel’s FX-9590 Moment
The Core i9-11900K’s market position reminds me of AMD’s FX-9590 launch. Believe it or not, I mean that as a compliment.
The FX-9590 was an AMD Piledriver CPU with a 4.7GHz base clock and a 5GHz boost. AMD launched it in the spring of 2013 to give its users a high(er)-performance alternative to the FX-8350. AMD couldn’t challenge Intel’s absolute performance or power efficiency at the time, but it still decided to ship the highest-performing CPU it could as an option for its own fans. I praised AMD for catering to its own fans in 2013 and I’m giving Intel a nod for doing the same thing here.
The Core i9-11900K does some things right. It sets a new high mark for single-threaded desktop CPU performance, holds an edge in gaming, and modestly leads the Ryzen 7 5800X in a number of our CPU tests. It offers PCIe 4.0 and support for AVX-512. We’re glad to see the latter rolling out in more systems, as it increases the chance of wider software support.
These strengths, unfortunately, do not outweigh the CPU’s strategic weaknesses. Outside 1T performance, the Core i9-11900K is a sidegrade from the Core i9-10900K. Intel customers still using 4-6 core CPUs would see much larger performance improvements, but AMD’s Ryzen family offers 12 cores in the same price band where Intel sells eight. The Core i9-11900K cannot match the multi-threading performance of the Ryzen 9 5900X or 5950X and it cannot match the power efficiency of the Ryzen 7 5800X. Like the FX-9590, the Core i9-11900K has been pushed far out of its metaphorical comfort zone to provide maximum performance at maximum TDP. Like the FX-9590, its appeal is limited to the enthusiast faithful rather than the general market.
It seems unlikely that the present incarnation of Rocket Lake is what Intel was hoping for when it decided to backport the Sunny Cove microarchitecture to 14nm. The team successfully brought Ice Lake’s IPC improvements backward a generation, and they did it with only minimal tweaks to top-end clocks, but the power consumption trade-off being made here is ugly.
The Core i5-11600K is winning praise for its price and positioning relative to AMD’s 5600X and we intend to take a gander at both cores in the near future, but the Core i9-11900K we’ve reviewed here today is hard to recommend. Multi-threaded performance against the Core i9-10900K is flattish to slightly down. Game performance uplift is in the mid-single digits. CPUs like the Ryzen 9 5900X outperform the Core i9-11900K in every multi-threaded non-gaming workload.
Neither AM4 nor LGA1200 are expected to be long-lived platforms at this point, but AMD still has an advantage over Intel where upgrades are concerned. Even if Ryzen 5000 was the last AM4 product AMD ever launched — and it probably won’t be — anyone who buys an eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X today has the option to step up to a 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X at some point in the future. In contrast, the Core i9-11900K is the fastest Rocket Lake CPU we’ll ever see.
Rocket Lake (desktop) and Tiger Lake (mobile) will both be succeeded by Alder Lake, Intel’s upcoming hybrid architecture that pairs small, energy-efficient Atom cores with larger big-core chips. For now, we’re presuming that Intel will launch on mobile first in late 2021 and then follow-up with a desktop refresh in 2022. We still think this is the most likely outcome, but the Core i9-11900K’s power efficiency problems make the idea of a fast replacement cycle more plausible.
One thing Rocket Lake does make clear: Intel’s 14nm node is well and truly tapped. There are no more pluses to wring out, no spare efficiency stuck amongst the couch cushions. Intel enthusiasts who are still back on slower CPUs with lower core counts may find the Core i9-11900K’s high IPC and 5GHz+ boost frequencies attractive, provided they’ve got coolers that can handle the heat. Anyone who is not specifically looking for an Intel processor may find they are better served by an AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU, assuming one can be found at MSRP.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California got a package last week, and it’s much more important than the smattering of Amazon impulse purchases that show up on most of our doorsteps. JPL has taken delivery of the Psyche spacecraft from Maxar Technologies and is now starting final assembly. Next year, this piece of hardware will ride a SpaceX rocket into orbit, and then it’s off to the asteroid belt to study its namesake, the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche.
JPL is shooting for an August 2022 launch for Psyche, which will start it on a nearly four-year journey to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Along the way, it will pass within just 500 kilometers of Mars. Then, it’s on to 16 Psyche, the heaviest known M-type asteroid that all by itself has about 1 percent of the asteroid belt’s mass thanks to its mostly iron-nickel composition. Scientists believe that Psyche is the exposed core of a protoplanet that collided with another object in the distant past, stripping away its outer crust.
The chance to study a planetary core up close, even one that’s been exposed to space for billions of years, is something NASA couldn’t pass up. The agency chose Psyche as part of the Discovery program in 2017. Missions under the Discovery banner are cheaper than those in New Frontiers or Flagship programs, which can run into the billions of dollars. Psyche is expected to cost around $117 million, including launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
Psyche is an average of 111 km (69 miles) in diameter with a maximum diameter of 277 km, making it larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware.
The newly arrived construct at JPL is what’s known as the Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) Chassis. This large, boxy module accounts for more than 80 percent of the total spacecraft mass and includes fully integrated propulsion, navigation, thermal, and electrical systems. Now it’s up to JPL engineers to complete the spacecraft by integrating communication, scientific instruments, and other systems. Psyche will reach its destination with the help of an SPT-140 engine, a Hall-effect thruster that uses solar power to accelerate xenon ions to produce thrust. It’s not much thrust — the SPT-140’s thrust is measured in micro-newtons — but it can accelerate continuously for long periods.
Psyche will use three instruments to study the asteroid: a multispectral imager to take photos of the surface, a gamma-ray spectrometer to analyze the asteroid’s elemental composition, and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic field. The image above is just an artist’s rendering, so we don’t know what the spacecraft will discover when reaching its eponymous asteroid. Regardless, this mission could change our understanding of planetary formation.
Today you can take advantage of a 10 percent discount to snag a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 laptop with an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor for just $679.99. There’s also a $50 discount on Apple’s new Mac Mini powered by the company’s M1 chip.
Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Intel Core i7-1165G7 15.6-Inch 1080p Laptop w/ 12GB DDR4 RAM and 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD for $679.99 from Dell with promo code 50OFF699 (List price $879.99)
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Coming equipped with Apple’s new M1 processing chip that has eight CPU cores and eight GPU cores to drive performance in both gaming and non-gaming tasks. This model also ships with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of fast SSD storage space. The system is also exceedingly small measuring just 1.4×7.7×7.7-inches and weighing a mere 2.6lbs. If you buy this item now then at check the price will drop from $899.00 to just $849.99.
Amazon’s Echo Show 8 features an 8-inch HD display and is compatible with a wide range of Amazon- and Alexa-enabled services. It can work as a display for home security devices like Ring’s video doorbell, and it can be used for calling people and numerous other functions. I personally like to use mine for watching YouTube videos before bed and for listening to music. The Echo Show 8 typically costs $129.99, but you buy it now from Amazon marked down to $74.99.
The Motorola Edge smartphone is built with a premium feature set including an FHD+ 90Hz OLED 6.7-inch display, 6GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage space. The phone also has high-end cameras with a 64MP main camera, and the phone should be quite fast with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 SoC to drive apps. Today you can get this phone from Amazon marked down from $699.99 to just $399.99.
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The in-development Starship rocket is key to SpaceX’s future plans, from lunar missions to Mars colonization. Elon Musk’s spaceflight company has been open with its Starship testing, even with the results haven’t been flattering. In the most recent test, the Starship SN11 reached an altitude of about eight kilometers, and then something went wrong. We don’t know exactly what happened yet, but the vessel came down in pieces. Musk quipped on Twitter that at least the crater was in the right place. Say what you will about Elon Musk, he’s pretty unflappable, even when his most ambitious aerospace project struggles to get off the ground.
The Starship is being developed with reusability in mind like the Falcon 9. SpaceX envisions a fleet of reusable Starships that can take off, land, and then fly again after refueling. While it shares this property with the Falcon 9, the two devices don’t share hardware. The Starship is larger, made of different materials, and has new engines.
SpaceX has thus far only succeeded in landing the rocket after a low altitude test. In the last flight, featuring SN10, the rocket flew high into the atmosphere, and then landed on the launch pad. It looked like everything would work out, but damage to the fuel system from the harder-than-expected landing led to an explosion several minutes later. The new SN11 flight looks like a step backward as it didn’t even reach the ground in one piece.
Looks like engine 2 had issues on ascent & didn’t reach operating chamber pressure during landing burn, but, in theory, it wasn’t needed.
Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today.
The final image from the Starship (see above) live stream featured one of the craft’s three Raptor engines reigniting for the descent sequence. Contact with the vehicle was lost moments later. Musk said following the incident that the issue appeared to be with the number 2 engine, which didn’t reach operating pressure, but it shouldn’t have been needed to get the rocket on the ground safely. Something else, possibly related to the engine, occurred after the landing burn was supposed to start. However, SpaceX can’t begin to piece together the specifics until it can examine the debris later today.
This failed test is one more potential setback for SpaceX’s aggressive timeline. Musk has said he hopes to fly a group of passengers, including Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, around the moon and back in 2023. He’s also pushed the idea that Starships could begin transporting Mars colonists in less than a decade, a timeline that most scientists consider unreasonable. Musk might not have a chance to convince everyone his vision is possible if the rocket doesn’t stop exploding.
Today, Intel is taking the wraps off Rocket Lake, formally launching its first new desktop microarchitectures since the launch of Skylake, 5.5 years ago. Our own review will be up later today, so consider this a sneak peek for what’s coming down the pipe.
Rocket Lake retains the refined 14nm+++(?) node that Intel has refined to a mirror sheen. After Intel found its 10nm node was unsuitable for desktop chips, it decided to continue updating desktop on 14nm while saving initial 10nm production runs for server and laptop chips. Intel’s 10nm process node was delayed multiple times, which left the company stuck on 14nm for much longer than it ever anticipated.
Rocket Lake uses the Cypress Cove CPU core. It’s a port of the 10nm Ice Lake CPU core that’s been backported for 14nm and redesigned to fit the characteristics of Intel’s 14nm process. The CPU retains most of the clock frequency advantages of Comet Lake’s 10th Gen CPUs, but pairs it with what Intel claims is a 1.19x IPC boost. In that context, Rocket Lake is a tremendous achievement for Intel’s design team. Backporting a design to an older node requires a rethink of the design to guarantee signal timings and equivalent performance. Kudos to the engineers for building a new chip that could pull Intel off the Skylake rock it ran aground on, even without a new process node to utilize.
Rocket Lake pricing and stats.
I’ve got a lot I want to talk about with regards to Rocket Lake later today, but I’ll say this upfront: If you’ve ever been curious about what it would look like for Intel to tune the same node, over and over, Rocket Lake on 14nm gives us a pretty good look. Rocket Lake absolutely delivers a performance improvement. It also delivers a massive uptick in per-core power consumption. Intel clearly went to the wall in an attempt to deliver more than single-digit performance uplifts, and you can see that focus reflected in the CPU’s behavior under load. The 5800X’s 7nm node shines in comparison, as we’ll discuss.
The Core i9-11900K is a competitive core, at least as far as performance is concerned, but the efficiency figures against AMD show just how hard Intel has pushed the CPU to get it into this territory. The cooling and thermal requirements are important to nail if you want to run the CPU at maximum performance. Single-threaded performance is the biggest area of uplift for Rocket Lake, as we previously expected, with more details on that point to follow.
Feel free to check out our sister site PCMag’s Core i5-11600K review for information on the midrange chip and watch ET for our further coverage coming later today.
As planning for the post-pandemic recovery gets underway, eyes are focused on the FCC and America’s future broadband policies. There are tens of millions of Americans across the United States with either no access or very limited access to affordable broadband internet. This was a known problem even before the pandemic, but COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated these issues dramatically. Home broadband use has skyrocketed over the past 12 months. There are proposals before Congress to build an $80 billion nationwide fiber network to serve rural areas that currently lack affordable wireline service. The network would offer 100/100Mbps service with symmetric upload/download bandwidth.
AT&T thinks that’s a terrible idea. The company’s blog post is only grudgingly willing to grant the idea that broadband upload speeds might need to improve in the first place.
The pandemic has broadened the consensus opinion that it’s time to revisit the FCC’s current broadband definition of 25/3 Mbps. To be clear, service at that speed is sufficient to support zoom working and remote learning. According to Zoom’s website, a group call using high quality video requires speeds of 1 Mbps up / 600 kbps down.
According to Zoom’s website, 1080p video requires a 3Mbps upload. The “high quality” referred to in AT&T’s blog post is a 480p video stream. It isn’t unreasonable to imagine a family of 3-4 people needing 7-12 Mbps in upload bandwidth to support simultaneous Zoom sessions.
Not pictured: Quality
AT&T acknowledges that the pandemic has demonstrated the need for faster download speeds, but pushes back against the idea of a nationwide fiber network as a waste of money that would pour funds into rural areas where few people live, to little effect. It writes:
[T]here would be significant additional cost to deploy fiber to virtually every home and small business in the country, when at present there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20 Mbps product… Second, as noted above, adopting a symmetrical standard could result in overbuilding existing services today that are currently meeting modern connectivity needs.
This is intended to sound like a rational argument for fitting the size of a solution to the scope of a problem. In normal conversation, overbuilding literally means “building more than you need to.” In the telecommunications industry, however, overbuilding means entering a market already served by existing providers.
What AT&T is asking for is the right to be free from meaningful competition, so long as its own services “meet modern connectivity needs.” But what defines modern connectivity needs? In part, the federal broadband standard that AT&T wants to base on the minimal streaming requirements of ScurvyVision “high quality” Zoom.
AT&T has its own reasons for pushing back against the idea of faster broadband, as Ars Technica details. If Congress prioritizes symmetric connection speeds, AT&T won’t be able to meet the service requirements with its existing VDSL service. Earlier this year, an investigation by the California state government found that AT&T raised POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) prices by 153 percent over the past decade, even as they slashed their investments into network maintenance and upkeep. Chronic service outages in excess of 24 hours have skyrocketed, especially in rural areas. AT&T’s DSL service runs over the same copper wires the company is systemically neglecting all across the United States.
AT&T isn’t fighting against building a nationwide fiber network across rural and unserved areas because it wants to stop government waste. It’s fighting to block other companies who do want to serve rural areas and rural customers from accessing federal funds that would be made available to build those networks. AT&T neither wishes to be forced to improve its service nor to lose customers for failing to do so.
Speaking for myself, I strongly favor efforts to improve rural connectivity, provided whatever partner companies are selected are held to account and required to meet service mandates. There have been far too many stories about people buying houses on the promise of internet service, only to be told they’ll need to pony up $50,000 to extend a wire or go without. The FCC’s methods for measuring rural service are terrible, though new, vastly superior data is currently being gathered. It’s long past time to deal with this problem and AT&T’s self-interested arguments for the dangers of a federal program to do so don’t pass any kind of smell test.
This compact external SSD is small enough to fit and your pocket. It can also hold up to 2TB of data, and it can read data at up to 550MB/s. SanDisk also designed this drive to be durable and water-resistant with an IP55 rating. Right now it’s marked down from $459.99 to $239.99 from Amazon.
