Intel i9-13900K and i5-13600K review: Beating AMD at its own game

Enlarge / Intel's new flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-13900K. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When AMD brought the first Ryzen processors to desktops in 2017, the chips' secret weapon was cores. AMD couldn’t match Intel’s number of instructions-per-clock or hit the same clock speeds, but what it could do was sell you six or eight reasonably performant processor cores at the same price Intel charged for four.

The 12-core and 16-core options came a couple years later, bringing high-end workstation performance to much less expensive PCs—and forcing Intel to follow suit. That brought down costs. In 2014, an 8-core CPU cost $999 on top of a pricey workstation motherboard; today, you can get 8-core chips for less than $300 and pop them into an $80 board if you want.

Five years after Ryzen debuted, the shoe is on the other foot. AMD now has the technological lead, in terms of instructions-per-clock, CPU manufacturing, and power efficiency. But by throwing more cores at the problem and pricing its chips aggressively, Intel has put together a desktop lineup that’s easier to recommend than AMD’s, even though AMD just fielded its fastest desktop processor lineup ever.

Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Starlink unveils airplane service—Musk says it’s like using Internet at home

Enlarge / An airplane with a Starlink Aviation terminal installed. (credit: Starlink)

Close-up view of the Starlink Aviation terminal. (credit: Starlink)

SpaceX is now advertising Starlink Aviation, promising 350Mbps broadband with unlimited data for each airplane it's installed in.

"Starlink can deliver up to 350Mbps to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable Internet at the same time," the company said. "With latency as low as 20 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities."

Starlink said the airplane service will use a "low-profile Aero Terminal" with "an electronically steered phased array antenna, which enables new levels of reliability, redundancy and performance." It has a "simplified design" that "enables installations during minimal downtime and combines well with other routine maintenance checks," Starlink says. The service hardware also includes two wireless access points.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Thunderbolt’s next spec triples bandwidth to 120Gbps—with a catch

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Intel announced further details about the next generation of Thunderbolt today. The company wouldn't commit to a name for the upcoming specification or a release date for what we hope will be called, simply, Thunderbolt 5. However, we do know that the next Thunderbolt will support up to 80Gbps bidirectional bandwidth and be able to transmit data at up to 120Gbps.

Will it be called Thunderbolt 5? Hopefully

In a meeting with the press, Jason Ziller, general manager of the Client Connectivity Division at Intel, said the next version of Thunderbolt isn't named yet. However, he noted that Intel has typically taken a simple approach to Thunderbolt naming.

Ziller acknowledged that the USB-IF's naming scheme for USB specifications is "very confusing." The USB-IF yesterday published the unfortunately named USB4 Version 2.0 spec and, more recently, ditched its recommended SuperSpeed branding for consumers in favor of performance-based names like USB 40Gbps.

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

After 80 years, a Nazi shipwreck is causing environmental damage

Enlarge (credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images)

The V-1302 John Mahn has sat at the bottom of the North Sea off Belgium for decades. The ship began its life in Germany as a 48-meter-long fishing vessel. However, during the Second World War, the Nazi Kriegsmarine requisitioned it for use as a patrol boat. On February 12, 1942, a squadron of six British Royal Air Force planes struck it with two bombs. It sank.

It wasn’t just the boat that sank, however. Along with it went its stores of coal and its remaining ammunition, among other chemicals. While the boat’s no longer a Nazi threat, new research suggests that it has been leaking pollution—including various heavy metals—into the North Sea ever since. This, in turn, has changed the surrounding environment at a microbial level. The research is part of the North Sea Wrecks project, an effort to aid in the identification and mitigation of wrecks and their environmental impacts in the region.

“We wanted to see if old shipwrecks in our part of the sea … were still shaping the local microbial communities and if they were still affecting the surrounding sediment. This microbial analysis is unique within the project,” Josefien Van Landuyt, a PhD candidate at Ghent University and one of the paper’s authors, said in a press release.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

“Data in the Desert” hints at the future of autonomous vehicles

Enlarge / A cluster of sensors atop the roof of the DLIVEREE. (credit: Gregory Leporati)

PAHRUMP, NEVADA—You could hear Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis roaring across the desert—or, more specifically, Spring Mountain Motor Resort, a scorching-hot racetrack about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. I was driving a Porsche GT3 RS with Jamie Wall, a professional racecar driver and McLaren coach, beside me—and it handled a bit differently than the 1997 Toyota Camry I've owned for the past 18 years.

"I bet it's a fair bit faster, too," Wall laughed.

As we set out across the winding road course, our goal, technically, was loftier than just having fun: We were acquiring data that could help fuel and inform autonomous vehicles.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

What do you get when you cross an e-bike with a supercar?

Enlarge (credit: John Timmer)

"You can let everyone know that people said it's a really nice-looking bike."

I'd never received comments like that when testing previous e-bikes, but I got compliments several times when out on the Vintage Roadster, and it's easy to see why. The bike is gorgeous, evoking classic motorcycles of a century ago, straight down to a battery shaped like a two-cylinder engine.

For me, it constantly called to mind the opening scenes of Lawrence of Arabia, which show Lawrence speeding off on one of those classic machines. Those who have seen the film know that the scenes end with his death in a motorcycle crash. This brings me to my mixed feelings about Vintage's e-bike equivalent of a supercar. I was introduced to the Vintage after I reviewed a Super73 e-bike, about which I expressed some concern over how easy it was to accelerate the bike to a very illegal (and potentially dangerous) 50 km an hour. Vintage's sales pitch for the Roadster was basically "we have one that goes even faster."

Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple will release macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16 on October 24

Enlarge / Macs running macOS Ventura. (credit: Apple)

The next versions of macOS and iPadOS will be released to the general public on October 24, Apple announced today. Both updates have been available as betas to developers and users since this summer, and a near-final version of each OS should be released to those testers sometime soon.

The iPadOS 16 update runs on all iPad Pros, the 5th-generation iPad and later, the fifth-generation iPad mini and later, and the 3rd-generation iPad Air and later, dropping support for the venerable iPad Air 2 and a handful of other models (it will also ship on all the new iPads Apple announced today). The macOS Ventura update generally requires a Mac released in 2017 or later, dropping support for various models released between 2013 and 2016.

Both updates will enable some iOS 16 features on iPads and Macs, including editing and deletion of iMessages, better search in Mail, passkey support in Safari, and a new large-screened Weather app and redesigned Home app, improved gamepad support, and more. Both also include a version of the Stage Manager window management feature, and Ventura includes a redesigned System Settings app.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments