 Windows 10’s Start Menu and Action Center could be refreshed with UI tweaks if a new code reference spotted in the preview builds has anything to go by. On August 21, Microsoft published Windows 10 Build 20197 to the testers in the Dev Channel of the Windows Insider program. This preview build comes with a new Disk Manager and bug fixes, but it also includes reference to ‘WinUI’ for Windows 10’s Start Menu and Action Center. According to the scan of Microsoft Program Database (PDB) files in Windows 10 Build 20197, Microsoft is currently testing these features internally:  While both Apple and Google are in US and EU crosshairs, Apple is in a far more precarious position. Are iOS users ready for the pros and cons of opening Pandora's app box? This week, Apple reached a significant milestone in its nearly 45-year history: a valuation of over $2 trillion. It's the first American company to achieve that lofty status, surpassing the valuation of Saudi Aramco as a publicly traded firm. This comes only a year after reaching the $1 trillion mark, a milestone that its industry rivals Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) soon followed. But Apple's rise in valuation has placed the company under increased scrutiny and growing concerns about how it has been managing its developer ecosystem, notably its App Store. In May of last year, I discussed how the US Supreme Court paved the way for potential antitrust by allowing a class action suit against the company alleging monopolistic practices on its App Store to proceed. Although the ruling was not a judgment against Apple and was remanded to the lower courts -- the Court did not classify the company as a monopoly, and did not move forward with any antitrust penalty -- the decision does set a potentially damaging precedent for the company. By allowing this lawsuit to move forward, the high court's ruling opened up the possibility that there could be, at some point, antitrust proceedings against the company. All signs indicate that antitrust litigation against the company is virtually inevitable -- especially if Cupertino continues to maintain a status quo of allowing only Apple-trusted applications in its App Store and not permitting third-party payment services to be used for in-app transactions. In the last year, legal complaints against the company have increased, as have antitrust monitoring efforts by the US and European regulators. In 2019, Spotify issued a complaint to the European Union, alleging that because Apple's Music services aren't subject to the same 30% App Store transactional fees as third-party music services, it competes unfairly. Although Spotify's service can be subscribed to outside the App Store via an out-of-band browser purchase (in the same way other companies, such as Amazon, have also engaged in content purchases that bypass the App Store), Spotify argues that the 30% fee forces the firm to operate in an unfair environment, if it wants to offer subscriptions directly via the iOS app. This complaint has resulted in the EU proceeding with a formal investigation into Apple's App Store practices but has stated that it may take years to complete. In the past, the EU has fined American firms billions of dollars, such as its prior actions against Microsoft regarding browser bundling within Windows, which resulted in the company needing to build a "browser choice" screen into its operating system, and its $5B fine against Google for anticompetitive behavior in tying its search engine to Android. All of these legal activities seemed to have been pushed to the back burner given the current political climate and priorities of the Trump administration. The upcoming US elections and the COVID-19 pandemic have proven to be effective distractions. But recently, Apple has again come under scrutiny due to its interactions with Epic Games. The company made changes to its popular Fortnite game to allow for in-app transactions that do not go through Apple's App Store or Google's Play Store on their respective iOS and Android platforms. These changes resulted in the immediate removal of Fortnite from both the App Store and the Play Store, as well as a notification by Apple to Epic that its official developer accounts would be canceled at the end of the month due to violation of its developer agreements. Epic has since launched antitrust lawsuits against both Apple and Google, arguing that both of the companies are engaged in multiple violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act due to monopolistic practices. While both Apple and Google are in US and EU crosshairs, it could be argued that Apple is in a much more precarious position: Any antitrust activity could create more significant issues for iOS platform end-users than for Android users. Why? Android already can side-load applications, which includes third-party app stores. This capability exists in the event an end-user wants to install software that either doesn't conform to the Play Store's policies (such as adult content) or that simply isn't listed in the Play Store for whatever reason. Additionally, Android is fully open source as part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), so there is full transparency when it comes to APIs. Only apps that use Google Mobile Services -- which are fully documented by the company and licensed to devise manufacturers (such as Samsung and Microsoft) -- are considered to be proprietary. Complete details are posted on OUR FORUM.
 The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is the next-generation halo card from Team Green, and it's going to be a monster. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is now confirmed as the next halo graphics card from Team Green, thanks to Micron's inadvertent posting of memory details (the PDF is now removed). With that piece of knowledge, we've dissected the rest of what we expect to find in the RTX 3090. Nvidia has a countdown to the 21st anniversary of its first GPU, the GeForce 256, slated for September 1. The battle for the best graphics cards and top of the GPU hierarchy is about to get heated. We've talked about the Nvidia Ampere and RTX 30-series as a whole elsewhere, so this discussion is focused purely on the GeForce RTX 3090. Let's dig into the details of what we know about the GeForce RTX 3090, including the expected GPU and memory specifications, release date, price, features, and more. First, the GeForce RTX 3090 branding is the first 90-series suffix we've seen since the GTX 690 back in 2012. That was a dual-GPU variant of the GTX 680, but based on the Micron documentation, RTX 3090 will still be a single GPU. Spoiler: multi-GPU support in games is practically dead, at least on life support. Why bring back the 90 brandings? Simple: It opens the door for a new tier of performance and pricing. That's not good news for our wallets. We discussed the Micron inadvertent posting of details and more in a recent Tom's Hardware show, which you can view below. Let's dig into the details. The Micron posting gives us one extremely concrete set of data. Unless Nvidia changes something between now and the unveiling, the GeForce RTX 3090 will have 12GB of GDDR6X memory clocked at somewhere between 19-21 Gbps per pin. Let's be clear: It's 21Gbps. Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti was the first 11GB GPU, and it was a surprise. Nvidia had multiple references to build off: Turning the dial to 11, 11GB, 11Gbps clocks. The same applies to 21Gbps. This is the 21st anniversary of the GeForce 256, the "world's first GPU" according to Nvidia, who coined the GPU acronym for the occasion. There's also a 21-day countdown going on right now. Add that to the specs from Micron and 21Gbps is effectively confirmed. If I'm wrong, I'll eat my GPU hat. This is a big deal, as it's the first time a GPU will have over 1TBps of memory bandwidth while using something other than HBM2 memory. (AMD's Radeon VII has 1TBps as well, via 16GB of HBM2.) We don't have exact details on how much companies pay for HBM2 vs. GDDR6X, but there's a big premium with HBM2 — you need a silicon interposer, plus the memory itself costs more. To put this in perspective, the RTX 2080 Ti 'only' has 616GBps, so this is effectively a 64% boost in the memory performance. That leads into the rest of the GPU specs, but let's first point out that the RTX 2080 Ti has 27% more memory bandwidth than the GTX 1080 Ti. It also has 20% more theoretical computational performance (TFLOPS), and architectural updates mean it makes better use of those resources. In short, GPU TFLOPS is often scaled similarly to bandwidth. As we've already pointed out, the move to 21Gbps GDDR6X increased raw memory bandwidth by 64% relative to the RTX 2080 Ti. That means we also expect the RTX 3090 to deliver around 50-75% more computational performance. Do you know what would make for a nice target? 21 TFLOPS. Yeah, baby! How it gets it isn't critical, but there are a few options. We know from the Nvidia A100 that Ampere can reach massive sizes on TSCM's 7nm process. It's an 826mm square package, which is relatively close to the maximum reticle size — you can't make a chip physically larger than the reticle. The GA100 at the heart of the A100 also supports FP64 (64-bit floating-point) computation, which is necessary for the target market of scientific research. GeForce cards don't need FP64 and typically only have 1/32 the performance in FP64 vs. FP32 instead of the 1/2 performance found in the bigger GP100, GV100, and GA100 chips. Option one is that Nvidia strips out all the FP64 functionality, adds ray tracing RT cores in its place, and still ends up with a big chip that has up to 128 SMs. This is more or less what happened with the Pascal generation: GP100 used HBM2, GP102 used GDDR5/GDDR5X, but both had a maximum configuration of 3840 FP32 CUDA cores. Some of these would end up disabled to improve yields via binning, but if Nvidia goes with 118 SMs and 7,552 CUDA cores, then clock the chip at 1.4GHz (boost), it would have a theoretical performance of 21.1 TFLOPS. Oh, and it uses 50W more power. Learn more about this powerhouse GPU card by visiting OUR FORUM. |
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