A spate of zero-day attacks have hit Google’s Chrome browser in the last few weeks, and you can add two more to the list. Google released a patch this week to fix the security flaws in its browser, but we don’t know exactly what the flaws are. Unlike the last few zero-days, Google didn’t find these security holes itself. Instead, it was tipped by anonymous third-parties, and the problems are severe enough that it hasn’t released full details. Suffice it to say, you should stop putting off that update.
Google’s internal security team is constantly trying to break Chrome in order to uncover potential bugs before they become the basis for a harmful malware campaign. And indeed, Google catches a lot of glitches and pushes out patches before anyone outside the company notices. A zero-day exploit is one that Google and the developer community didn’t catch, and could therefore leave millions of machines open to attack.
We usually get details on patches in Chrome, but Google has temporarily withheld details of these latest flaws because both have been used in the wild as attack vectors. One of the flaws, CVE-2020-16013, is related to Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. The second is CVE-2020-16017, and this one is a “use after free” problem in memory management that allows code to leak out of Chrome’s Site Isolation sandbox.
Without more details, we can’t say if these bugs are any more severe than the others we’ve seen lately. However, they could have a much greater impact simply by virtue of the fact that internet ne’er-do-wells figured out how to exploit them before Google even knew there was a problem.
You’re protected as long as you’re on Chrome version 86.0.4240.198 or higher. You can check on that in Settings > Help > About Chrome. If you haven’t updated yet, you might have a nagging “update” badge at the top of Chrome right now. Just give in. These are serious bugs that are being actively used to take over computers. Granted, high-value vulnerabilities like these are usually used to target a specific set of individuals. This still isn’t a chance you want to take, and the details of these vulnerabilities won’t stay secret forever. You don’t want to be running an old version of Chrome when the details are widely known.
Western Digital has made some changes to how it brands its WD Red Plus hard drive family after taking heat for its decision to mislabel its hard drive speeds earlier this year. At the time, individual customers performed some rather clever acoustic analysis to confirm that the hard drives Western Digital claimed were 5400 RPM drives were actually 7200 RPM drives.
Western Digital protested that this labeling was fine, because “5400 RPM class” isn’t the same as “5400 RPM”, but it ignored the fact that 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM drives typically have different power and thermal requirements, and that products designed explicitly for 5400 RPM products might have trouble with 7200 RPM drives. The idea that communicating honestly about its products is the best way to cultivate and maintain consumer trust doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone, either.
The company has now announced that it will retire certain WD Red Plus model numbers and launch new ones to replace them. Nothing is changing about the drives themselves; Western Digital is just being honest about the fact that these are 7200 RPM drives instead of 5400 RPM drives. Heise.de reports that the new model numbers are:
8 TByte: WD80EFBX (-68AZZN0) instead of WD80EFAX (-68KNBN0)
10 TByte: WD101EFBX (-68B0AN0) instead of WD101EFAX (-68LDBN0)
12 Tbytes: WD120EFBX (-68B0EN0) instead of WD120EFAX (-68UNTN0)
14 TByte: WD140EFGX (-68B0GN0) instead of WD140EFFX (-68VBXN0)
Heisse reports that WD has also updated its WD Red Pro product sheet to read “7200 RPM” instead of “7200 RPM class.”
The actual WD Red Plus product sheet hasn’t been updated yet, but presumably that’ll happen soon.
Why Did Western Digital Do This in the First Place?
The big question it’d be nice to have an explanation for is why on Earth WD did this at all. When Western Digital introduced performance classes with its Green drives, it did so as a way of hiding the fact that they spun at less than 5400 RPM, not to cleverly imply they had a slower spindle speed than they actually did.
I can imagine a scenario in which it just became easier for WD to run every drive at 7200 RPM. Back when the hard drive market was crippled by extensive flooding in 2011, one of the expected outcomes that came true was the disappearance of smaller SKUs. When companies replaced their damaged equipment, they phased out smaller and older products that had been cost-effective to produce so long as old factory equipment was still in play. Maybe WD decided to standardize all of its production on 7200 RPM motors — but why not just run the same motor at a slower speed? Alternately, why not just advertise that you now ship 7200 RPM drives standard in all product lines as a way of thumbing your nose at the competition?
It’s not strange for a company to sell a component variant that compensates for lower performance in one category with higher performance in another, such as compensating for slower spindle speeds with larger caches, or clocking a CPU with a smaller L2 at a higher frequency to compensate. But why did Western Digital go to such lengths — to the point of programming its hard drives to misreport their own SMART data — to fake the speed of its hard drives? Was it trying to prop up artificial market segmentation because it believed margins would drop if it sold mostly 7200 RPM drives?
The chances that consumers were injured by this misrepresentation are small, but WD has yet to explain its thinking.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, known more commonly as TSMC, has announced a major expansion in an unexpected place: the USA. TSMC says it will build a new semiconductor fab in Arizona. The project should get off the ground next year with funding from TSMC, the state of Arizona, and the federal government.
TSMC says it will found a wholly owned subsidiary in the US with $3.5 billion in resources. While building will get underway next year, jobs at the site will be mostly limited to construction until the facility goes into production in 2024. In all, TSMC expects to spend $12 billion on the Arizona fab between 2021 and 2029. Eventually, the fab will employ about 1,600 people, and it could compete for those employees with Intel, which has several fabs in Arizona. That’s good news for skilled workers in the state, as well as for TSMC. Intel’s presence means it won’t have to build a supply chain from scratch — there are already numerous local suppliers with whom TSMC can partner.
That’s just an estimate, of course. Delays could push the high-volume launch further out. TSMC hopes to be churning out 20,000 wafers per month in 2024 with a 5nm process. That’s the current top-of-the-line, but the company’s planned 4nm process could be available by the time the fab is done. Still, 5nm chips are happening now, and we’re talking about 2024.
Inside a TSMC foundry facility. The yellow light is required to ensure safe wafer processing.
TSMC expects it will have a 3nm process up and running by late 2022. However, it plans to keep that production in Taiwan rather than roll it out to the US subsidiary. Most of the company’s high-profile customers such as Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm want TSMC’s most advanced process to make the fastest and most efficient chips possible. 20,000 wafers sounds like a lot, but it wouldn’t be enough to supply TSMC’s high-volume customers, even just those in America. That’s why it relies on “gigafabs” in Taiwan to manufacture the latest (and most popular) semiconductor designs. Come 2024, this fab might be churning out the kind of chips you see in embedded smart devices and budget phones.
Getting a foothold in the US is important for TSMC as it aims to compete with GlobalFoundries. With a US-based factory, the company might be able to bid on US government and military contracts that would require careful oversight and US manufacturing. That’s all still a long way off — we expect to hear more details about the Arizona facility early next year, but then news should dry up until it’s ready to come online in 2024.
Intel made several announcements as part of its unveil of OneAPI Gold and a new GPU product intended for the video processing / Android cloud gaming market.
First up: the new Intel Server GPU. This new instantiation of the Xe-LP architecture has four separate graphics chips and work in tandem to process video streaming workloads, video transcoding workloads, and as a solution for Android game streaming. Xe-LP is the same architecture Intel is shipping in the Xe Max and inside of Tiger Lake. Performance reviews of Tiger Lake chips have put it somewhat ahead of AMD’s Ryzen 4000 integrated GPU, and the Xe Max is the same chip that’s inside TGL laptops, just running at a higher clock speed.
“We are on a journey from CPU to XPU,” Intel SVP and manager of pretty much everything (architecture, graphics, and software) Raja Koduri told ExtremeTech on a recent call. “Our CPU architecture has built Intel and it also played its part to enable the entire world of computing, but we know the workloads have evolved and we are striving for mastery over additional XPU architectures that are super-efficient for graphics, media, and AI, memory, security, and networking.”
Like Xe Max in laptops, the Xe-LP chip Intel is launching today is aimed at media workloads more than gaming, though in this case, the company is talking up the solution as an Android gaming platform. Apparently, Intel is working with several companies, including Tencent and GameStream, to bring Android streaming services to market. Intel’s argument is that the Xe-LP makes an attractive partner to Xeon, allowing customers to standardize on all-Intel solutions for these products.
Intel can support 120 streams in a two-GPU configuration and possibly up to 160 simultaneous players depending on the game in question. Since each card has 4 GPUs, Intel is supporting 15 Android gamers per GPU at 30fps. Android games are not nearly as hardware intensive as PC titles, but 15 streams per GPU at 30fps still works out to a cumulative total of 450 frames per second. It’d be interesting to know how the company distributes the disparate streaming workloads across the card and between the two GPUs. It’s also possible that the user claims here are a bit optimistic, of course.
OneAPI Goes Gold
Intel’s other major announcement concerns its OneAPI initiative. OneAPI is a cross-standard programming model intended to standardize code development between various system components, including GPUs, FPGAs, and CPUs. Intel has always offered its own libraries and code development tools, and the company is leveraging that expertise to create an overarching framework for product development. Support for features like AVX-512 and DLBoost is baked-in, as you’d expect.
Intel has been talking about OneAPI for several years now, but the project has only just gone gold, with toolkit availability expected in December. Free versions will be available both locally and in the cloud, and Intel will immediately transition its Parallel Studio XE and Intel System Studio tool suites to OneAPI products.
OneAPI has generated a fair bit of news for Intel over the past few years, but it isn’t very clear if it’s changed Intel’s overall fortunes in the AI market. Until its high-end Xe cards are available, Intel is working with one hand tied behind its back, as far as AI performance is concerned. Even with AVX-512 and DLBoost, a modern Xeon server cannot match the raw performance of a GPU.
With OneAPI, Intel is building an infrastructure backend it helps will attract programmers to its platforms as new GPUs — not to mention consumer CPUs with AVX-512 support — roll out in mobile and desktop through 2021 and beyond. For those of you concerned about CUDA support, there’s already a backend built into the Data Parallel C++ compiler that allows DPC++ code to run on top of CUDA GPUs. DPC++ is Intel’s unifying language implemented in OneAPI that can address FPGAs, CPUs, and GPUs and any other compatible accelerators anyone brings to market.
This announcement seems to conclude Intel’s plans for GPU launches in 2020, which means we’ll have to wait until 2021 to see what the company brings to the table in consumer cards. Tiger Lake has impressed in mobile, which hopefully implies good things about the larger cards Intel will ship in 2021.
One of the most interesting questions about any console launch is how the platforms compare against each other at debut and how the results of that comparison impact system uptake. In 2013, Microsoft tried to zig when Sony zagged at got shellacked by it, to the point that Microsoft considered killing Xbox altogether. The company learned from its mistake, and both the Xbox One X and the Xbox Series X pack more firepower than their equivalent PlayStation counterpart, at least on paper. The Xbox One X is a proven system and has often been at least modestly faster than the PS4 Pro in head-to-head match-ups, but we haven’t seen any data on the PlayStation 5 versus Xbox Series X, and the first game match-up is a bit stranger than we would have expected.
Eurogamer recently spent time with Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition on both platforms. Happily, the game has seemingly identical rendering modes between both platforms, allowing the publication to use it as a benchmark to compare them. The game runs with an unlocked frame rate when tested on a screen capable of 120Hz, and it offers multiple rendering modes to test.
Normal Mode: Full 3840×2160 rendering (no upscaling). Eurogamer reports the Xbox Series X is about 8 percent faster than the PS4 Pro in this mode.
High Frame Rate Mode: Retains 3840×2160 resolution, but reaches it by upscaling rather than by native rendering. Both consoles exceed 100fps on average in this mode, but Eurogamer reports that the PS5 is significantly faster and more consistent in many gameplay areas. They chalk this up to a potential API difference that’s bottlenecking the Xbox Series X, and there have been rumors that Sony’s console is easier for devs to work with at the moment than its Xbox equivalent. Both Sony and Microsoft have had poor dev tools at various points in earlier generations and things tend to improve as time goes by.
Ray Tracing Performance Mode: 1080p combined with real-time ray tracing plus frustum-aligned voxel fog. Eurogamer reports that RT Performance Mode runs roughly at the same speed as Normal mode, but at a much lower resolution. This is broadly similar to Nvidia RTX GPUs, which also typically take a resolution hit when RT is enabled. The two consoles are described as like-for-like here.
Ray Tracing Quality Mode: RT ray tracing combined with higher resolution, but, the higher resolution target is achieved through upscaling, not natively. The Xbox Series X is noted as winning this comparison, though it’s implied that the gap is small — smaller than in previous modes.
One negative factor that Eurogamer notes, however, is the way the PS5 handles 120Hz. When the PS5 detects a 120Hz panel, it insists on running at that refresh rate, even if doing so forces the panel out of 4K mode. Eurogamer writes:
[C]onsider a highly popular 4K screen – the LG OLED B8. PS5 sees that it is 120Hz-compatible, and overrides 4K resolution. All modes will run at a 120Hz refresh rate, at 1080p resolution – which is absolutely not ideal. Another popular screen is the Samsung NU8000. It’s a 4K screen but on PS5, Devil May Cry will force through the 120Hz refresh rate instead, resulting in a downscale to 1440p that the user has no control over.
Eurogamer has reported the issue to Capcom, and I seem to recall Sony having various problems with 720p back when the PS3 launched. Hopefully, this can be resolved via patch.
Overall, the Xbox Series X holds a lead in multiple game modes, but the gap between them isn’t as large as Eurogamer expected, or as the console’s on-paper specs would predict. This is one game and it’s the very first head-to-head game, so I wouldn’t draw conclusions yet in any case. For now, the Xbox Series X appears to have a modest advantage over the PS5, just as the PS4 had an advantage over the Xbox One, with the added wrinkle that the Xbox Series X can also slip badly for reasons that are not clear. We’ll see how figures look as OS support matures and developers get more experience with the new platform.
The news here is objectively pretty good for fans of both ecosystems. Even where the Xbox Series X apparently falls below the PS5, both consoles are putting up over 100fps.
AMD’s star has been ascending lately, and the evidence isn’t just found in the company’s improving balance sheets. According to a new report released by AMD in partnership with Mercury Research, the firm gained market share across all major segments: Server, desktop, and notebook.
Data by AMD and Mercury Research
AMD’s largest gains have been in notebook, which makes sense, given that the company’s Ryzen 4000 series has been a brand-new competitive solution in 2020. AMD began to compete more effectively on desktop several years ago and has been steadily gaining market share in that space ever since.
According to data from Mercury Research, AMD also gained market share in servers, but the size of the gain depends on whether you include data from Intel’s Atom SoC division. “AMD gained server share by either measure, but if you compared AMD EPYC v. just Intel Xeon SP, the number would be about 12.1 percent v. 10.4 percent last quarter, which is a pretty strong gain,” Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron told THG. “With Intel’s high Atom SoC growth included, though, the share gain is much smaller at 0.8 points.”
AMD did not provide figures on its own estimates for server market share growth in the quarter, saying: “AMD utilizes a server-specific TAM of roughly 20 million CPUs, based on IDC data. We will update our x86 server share once IDC Q3 2020 data is available.”
The best news for AMD is that its ASPs have been rising right alongside its absolute market share. When Intel published its own results for Q3 2020, the company noted that its ASPs had declined on all fronts:
Intel has historically bent over backward to avoid acknowledging that it faces competition in the CPU market, though CEO Bob Swan has acknowledged that his firm faced a threat from AMD in the past. The downward pressure on Intel ASPs is a general sign of improved competitive standing from AMD across the market, though Intel ascribed the shift to increased sales of its entry-level education platforms in Q3 2020. This would be an overall reference to the Chromebook market, which has exploded this year. It’s also relevant that Intel is meeting more demand in that space, since the company’s previous model for dealing with its CPU shortages was to push low-margin equipment off the stack first, ceding that share to AMD, while keeping a preferential position at the top of the market. The surge in Chromebooks has been large enough that Intel has likely been shipping more hardware into that space as well.
Looking ahead, Intel intends to launch Rocket Lake towards the tail end of Q1 2021. Estimated performance uplift for RKL over SKL is unknown, but the chip is a 14nm version of Intel’s 10nm Sunny Cove CPU. Total performance improvements over SKL should be in the 1.15x – 1.2x range when chips eventually launch, depending on whether Intel is able to maintain its full 14nm clock speeds.
AMD launches its new lineup of Zen 3 CPUs later this week, with a 1.19x IPC uplift and claimed improvements north of 1.25x when clock speeds gains are taken into account.
Several years after Intel announced it would return to the graphics arena, the company has launched its first discrete GPU — the Intel Xe Max. It’s not unusual for low-end parts and integrated GPUs to share common building blocks, but the discrete GPU packaged inside a Xe Max card is an Intel Tiger Lake GPU in nearly every respect. Same 96 EUs, 768 cores, 48 TMUs, and 24 ROPs. The only changes are the use of a dedicated 4GB VRAM buffer for the Xe Max, and that GPUs slightly higher clock speed (1.65GHz versus 1.35GHz on TGL).
Now, in theory, this could be great news for fans of multi-GPU gaming, but we have to dash your hopes — Intel has no plan to bring that kind of workload-splitting technology to market with this line of cards. Instead, Intel is positioning the Xe Max as a content accelerator, with the ability to speed up certain kinds of AI and GPU workloads while the rest of your system components are devoted to other tasks.
Intel, in other words, isn’t really positioning the Xe Max as a gaming GPU at all. The iGP should be somewhat faster than the built-in Tiger Lake solution because it has a 1.65GHz maximum clock compared with the 1.35GHz Tiger Lake parts. But the Xe Max is still limited to a 25W TDP. One rather unusual thing about the Xe Max is its use of LPDDR4X as memory (4GB total). This is the first time we’ve seen a laptop GPU equipped with that kind of VRAM, at least that I can recall.
Introducing Additive AI
But while Intel may not be planning to allow for dual-graphics gaming, it does have plans to leverage both GPUs in certain workloads. The company is working with vendors to support what it calls Intel “Deep Link” technology, which allows both GPUs to be used in the same application.
Intel is also extending its power-tuning Adaptix technology to support Xe as well, meaning the company can balance the TDP demands of both CPU, iGPU, and dGPU as one contiguous “unit.”
At least some of Intel’s overall power efficiency improvement is the result of better overall resource management.
There’s not a lot to say about the Intel Xe Max in terms of its gaming, so I’m not going to belabor the point. You don’t buy this card for a gaming GPU, but if you do want to game on it, it can broadly hang with Nvidia’s bottom-end MX350. Even so, I’d like to point out that it’s quite possible to play a lot of great games on modern solutions — it just means playing games that might be a few years old, or at 720p. Intel and Nvidia aren’t competing for gamers with these chips, but it’s possible to squeeze some gaming out of them, if you pick your titles right.
But Intel’s idea of using a secondary GPU as an AI processing unit isn’t crazy. I use the Topaz suite of applications on a near-daily basis, and they’d benefit from this kind of support.
There are only three laptops launching with the Xe Max, and Intel obviously isn’t putting some major gaming push on the topic, but this is still an important moment for Intel. The company has re-entered the GPU market, even if it’s only dipping a toe in thus far.
Apple is no fan of third-party repairs. This attitude is partly the result of a corporate culture that prioritizes total control of the iDevice ecosystem and partly economic. The more Apple services you pay for, the more revenue Apple makes. Service revenue has become a critical part of the company’s business and overall revenue from the segment has been growing at a brisk pace.
According to a recent article by Kevin Purdy of iFixit, Apple’s hostility to the right of repair has hit new heights with the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro. Purdy writes that repeated iFixit testing of the iPhone 12 has revealed that the camera assembly of one phone cannot be swapped into a different, identical device.
Initially, iFixit gave the iPhone 12a 6/10 for repairability, but further testing of the camera gave it reason to dig deeper. Purdy describes it as: “It refuses to switch to the ultrawide camera, responds only to certain camera modes, and occasionally hangs and becomes completely unresponsive.” This problem seems to be unique to the iPhone 12; the iPhone 12 Pro doesn’t appear to have a problem. But given that iFixit is not the only site to encounter this issue, it’s clearly more than just a one-off bug.
The reason iFixit suspects this may be more than a simple mistake is because Apple has updated the training guides for iPhone 12 repair to require its System Configuration app in order to make repairs to the battery, display, or camera. Previous iPhones only required this software for battery swaps:
Purdy then steps through Apple’s long history of throwing up roadblocks to make life more difficult for DIYers and small shops and notes that unlike Face ID or Touch ID, putting a lockout on the camera serves no useful security purpose whatsoever. “Putting an authentication check on a simple camera swap poisons the iPhone repair and resale market,” Purdy writes. “With no obvious benefit for iPhone buyers, it reeks of greed. Or worse: planned obsolescence.”
Apple has switched from trying to grow the iPhone addressable market to focus on extracting the maximum amount of revenue per customer. This isn’t unusual — it’s what every successful company pivots towards in one way or another over time. Eventually, everyone who is going to buy your stuff already has, and it’s time to shift business models. But Apple isn’t just looking to generate revenue by improving its services or making better TV shows — it’s locking out the ability of individuals to repair their own devices without paying Apple to do it.
Time and time again, we see concrete, specific reasons why Right to Repair legislation is necessary. It’s possible that this is just a mistake on Apple’s part, but whether it is or it isn’t, Apple is currently under no obligation to fix it. The company has been playing both sides of the field for years, protesting to DIYers that no, it really cares, while pushing at every opportunity to limit the right of end-users to repair their devices without being fed FUD at every opportunity.
On the heels of AMD’s Big Navi reveal earlier this week, there are fresh rumors for both good and ill. On the positive side of things, AMD is apparently in talks with multiple AIB partners about the possibility of building their own custom designs for the Radeon 6900 XT. Currently, AMD has only stated that there will be custom variants for the Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT families.
AMD is in talks with partners about custom models of the Radeon RX 6900 XT. So far, there is just a MBA (made by AMD) planed, but obviously partners are interested in offering own designs with custom coolers. pic.twitter.com/LTrWySzua4
On the less-good side of things, there are rumors that AMD’s stock situation may mirror Nvidia’s. According to a comment from a redditor who claims to have spoken with Morele.net (a Polish e-tailer), they do not expect great stock levels on the RX 6000 series. According to reddit + Google, the translated text reads:
“[W]e don’t know when they [AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series GPUs] will appear on the website yet. Similar accessibility problems may arise.”
This is not great news for anyone hoping to score a Radeon card before Christmas, but it isn’t the most unexpected news, either. TSMC is currently ramping the Ryzen 5000 family, the RX 6000 series, Nvidia’s 7nm Ampere HPC variant, the PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series X, all of which are using the same node. There’s also the fact that AMD may not have anticipated the GPU shortage Nvidia would encounter, which means they would not have had an opportunity to increase their own shipments to compensate.
A second rumor from the Chinese PPT Forums appears to confirm this, though Google Translate makes absolute hash of it. For example, when asked why everyone thinks AMD has sufficient production capacity to build Big Navi, the respondent states (according to Google Translate):
At present, the console’s first wave of listings has just been digested and Nami can start work directly, but people have not yet come… In terms of the timeline, even if the gods are jammed by the shift star logistics car tomorrow morning 11/ 18 It should be quite difficult to get a new card to be cool. To be honest, it is quite unexpected that Su Ma dared to bet on this release date. I personally think that the heavy volume should start in December. Of course, it may also be to give my fellow villagers time to think about how to cut XD?
“Nami” may actually be a reference to “Navi.” I’m interpreting this passage to mean: “Even if we had the parts sitting right beside the factory, it’s going to be difficult to get a new card. It’s surprising that Lisa Su picked this release date, and volume manufacturing isn’t likely to pick up until December.”
That’s me attempting to interpret Google Translate, not any kind of actual human translation, so if you can provide additional context feel free to speak up.
I don’t know if this low-production rumor should be believed. Rumors of Samsung/Nvidia issues at 8nm have implied that AMD might have made the better call, going with TSMC, but TSMC’s fab lines are full precisely because they’re handling most of the planet’s 7nm production. There have been rumors that Nvidia used Samsung over TSMC because of tight allocation. We don’t know how true that is, specifically, but it doesn’t strain credulity that fab space might be limited given that the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are both ramping towards retail release.
AMD stated in its Q3 2020 conference call that it expects to recognize more revenue from console sales in Q4 as opposed to in Q3, implying a robust ramp to meet expected launch demand. That’s why it could make sense for AMD to have limited card supply at launch — TSMC may be frantically meeting Xbox and PlayStation demand.
I want to stress that this is all theory, not established facts. We always caution readers not to read too much into the experience of any single company when it comes to allocation or product availability, and that still applies in this case. Ironically, AMD GPUs still might be hard to find this winter even if shipments are strong, if customers began buying larger numbers of AMD GPUs as substitutes for Nvidia products.
Given that we saw this exact problem four years ago, the most likely explanation is if yields are low, they’re low because of the intrinsic difficulty of the GPUs themselves. In that case, we can expect overall availability to improve in the coming months as the early manufacturing issues get sorted out.
SpaceX has been launching batches of Starlink internet satellites on a regular basis since May 2019, and there are now hundreds of nodes in its megaconstellation. That provides sufficient coverage that SpaceX has started rolling out a beta test of its new satellite internet service. According to data from Ookla Speedtest (and analyzed by our colleagues at PCMag), Starlink is living up to its lofty speed claims.
Starlink joins a market that has long been dominated by a handful of companies like HughesNet and Viasat that offer sluggish satellite internet as a last resort for consumers who don’t have any other options. The current network features almost 900 satellites, some of which orbit much lower than traditional internet satellites. That helps Starlink deliver higher speeds and lower latency.
While Starlink isn’t cheap with its $500 equipment fee and $100 monthly bill, it’s vastly outperforming the other satellite internet providers. In its invitation emails, SpaceX promises between 50 and 150Mbps, and it’s running well inside that range. With the launch of the beta, Ookla has seen the average Starlink speed jump from 30-40Mbps all the way to 79.5Mbps down.
The speed comparison is not kind to the old guard of satellite internet. HughesNet ekes out a mere 19.84Mbps down, and Viasat isn’t much better with 24.75Mbps. The difference in upload speeds is even more stark. While Starlink is currently managing a 13.8Mbps average upload, HughesNet and Viasat are at 2.64and 3.25Mbps, respectively.
Everyone focuses on download speeds, but you need a decent upload for the video chats that have become such an important part of our lives during the pandemic. Latency is also an important part of real-time services like video chats. Again, Starlink is blowing other satellite internet services out of the water. The Ookla data shows Starlink with 42ms of latency on average. That’s enough to make video chats bearable. HughesNet, by comparison, has 728ms of latency. SpaceX even claims its network will be able to get under 20ms by next summer. I get 8-10ms on my home cable connection.
Currently, Starlink’s beta is only available to select customers in the northern US. CEO Elon Musk has said he hopes to expand the beta into Canada. Eventually, the Starlink megaconstellation will feature at least 12,000 satellites with coverage for most of the world.
We’ve discussed Zhaoxin several times over the past few years and covered the company’s efforts to build a true x86 competitor. This is a difficult task for VIA, one of Zhaoxin’s shareholders and IP contributors, which hasn’t ever been competitive with AMD or Intel when it comes to building high-performance CPUs. The company originally eked out a market in the ultra-low-power segment (mini-ITX, for example, is originally a VIA standard). A few years ago, it formed an agreement with Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor to allow that company to build its own x86 designs. Now, it’s expanding that agreement with some additional IP transfers.
To date, the Zhaoxin CPUs have underwhelmed when compared with a modern x86 chip, but the overall level of performance they offer has still been improving, bit by bit. Its last chip, the KX-U6780A, managed to offer gaming performance on par with a weak, Excavator-class APU with half the cores. While this isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, it’s better competition than the company has offered in the past. With the KX-7000 family under development and supposedly targeting a 7nm process, there’s hope for future improvement.
Currently, Zhaoxin’s processors are all believed to be evolutions of VIA’s “Isaiah” core. Isaiah is a 12-year-old design built by Glen Henry at Centaur and originally marketed as the VIA Nano. The Nano actually had some mainstream success and could have been a contender against Atom in its early market. But VIA either couldn’t drive OEM interest in the part, or it ran into other, unspecified troubles. Isaiah was a major advance over the VIA C7, which was an in-order chip, but not enough details are available about Zhaoxin’s exact capabilities to really compare how the more modern architecture diverged from its roots.
VIA is selling some IP to Zhaoxin, and its 100 percent-owned subsidiary Viabase is doing the same. The total value of the deal is expected at $257M, with VIA expecting to recognize ~$197M in profit after associated costs. China is undoubtedly interested in the deal, given that the fighting between itself and the US government has deepened the urgency of developing its own local silicon manufacturing.
It’ll be particularly interesting to see if Zhaoxin’s KX-7000 family incorporates any of the improvements Centaur Technology (another VIA subsidiary, acquired alongside Cyrix in the late 1990s) announced when they debuted the CHA CPU core in 2019. CHA is expected to be the first server CPU to include an onboard AI accelerator core and it’ll offer up to eight cores with support for features like AVX2 and AVX-512.
Historically, Centaur’s designs have focused on stripping out what the company feels is extraneous cruft that leads to bad tradeoffs on performance versus power efficiency. Its CPU cores have often been designed to be “good enough” while offering exceptional battery longevity or cool-running temperatures. The fact that VIA and Zhaoxin are strengthening their ties could be interpreted as a sign that we’ll see more of VIA’s fab work showing up in China. While the US has put certain moratoriums on what Chinese companies can buy what kind of goods, we haven’t seen any information yet suggesting VIA, which holds the barest fraction of the PC market, has gotten any real attention.
The CHA was originally expected to ship this year, so KX-7000 CPUs based on it sometime in 2021 makes sense. Alternately, this could be Zhaoxin’s first independent core design, with a little help from VIA’s patent library and engineers. If they keep improving, hopefully some of these CPU cores will make their way across the ocean in larger numbers. We certainly wouldn’t mind a three-way slug-out for best CPU, if Zhaoxin can rise to the challenge in a few more years.
AMD’s Q3 2020 results are in, and they paint an incredibly strong picture for the firm on the eve of launching two next-generation consoles: Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, and the Sony PlayStation 5.
Before we dive into the modern figures, I want to quickly step back to the results AMD reported in Q3 2013, when both the PS4 and Xbox One were prepping for launch. AMD’s Q4 2013 would be slightly larger than its Q3, but you can see the console ramp very clearly in terms of revenue ($1.46B in Q3 2013 versus $1.16B in Q2).
In Q3 2013, AMD reported $1.46B in revenue. Gross margin was 36 percent, operating income was $95M, and net income was $48M. Now, here’s Q3 2020:
That’s net revenue of $2.8B (up 1.92x from 2013), an 8 percentage point improvement to gross margin, and net income of $390M (an improvement of 8.125x since 2013). Back in 2013, the PS4 and Xbox One almost certainly saved AMD as a company. These two contracts represented proven design wins with major corporations to provide silicon design work and brought in hundreds of millions in revenue every quarter on a reliable basis.
Today, AMD’s console business is a core component of its financials, but it isn’t a “must have” whose absence would doom the company. AMD’s compute and graphics division is putting up formidable figures, all on its own:
Not that I want to imply anything is wrong with the Enterprise, Embedded, and Semicustom markets. They’re also firing well, with AMD reporting record server revenue and strong ramps for both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Server revenue set a record and operating income grew substantially both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Q4 2020 could be even bigger due to demand for consoles (Q4 2013 was bigger than Q3 2013, so there’s precedent).
AMD confirmed it will begin shipping Milan (Zen 3) servers to cloud and HPC in volume in Q4, with Tier 1 OEM availability following in Q1 2021. Hyperscale HPC and OEM engagement is said to be very high overall.
According to AMD CEO Lisa Su, AMD’s repeated design wins are driving interest in its products in new segments and opportunities, with added impact from the console ramp. AMD now expects Q4 2020 revenue to be $3B, plus or minus $100M, which is up 41 percent year-on-year and 7 percent sequentially. This surge will be driven significantly by console sales, but AMD is guiding upwards on server market share and overall data center demand for its products as well.
There’s no bad news here. The company also announced its purchase of Xilinx in an all-stock deal worth $35B during the conference call, but we’ve covered that information in more detail here.
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully landed gently on the surface of the asteroid Bennu last week and scooped up a sample of pristine material from the early solar system. It’s an incredible accomplishment for all involved, but OSIRIS-REx might end up a victim of its own success. NASA reports the probe grabbed so much regolith from the asteroid that it’s leaking out of the collector. The team is now working to determine how best to keep the precious cargo from escaping.
OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016, reaching the near-Earth asteroid known officially as 101955 Bennu in late 2018. After painstaking examination of the space rock, NASA selected several possible landing zones that avoided the worst of the craggy terrain. Last week, the spacecraft descended from orbit around the asteroid, tapped the surface, and used a burst of compressed nitrogen to blow material into the sample container.
NASA hoped to collect about 60 grams of dust and gravel from the surface of Bennu. If the first attempt didn’t work, the probe had the resources to make another attempt at the secondary landing zone. However, NASA believes the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) worked a bit too well. The initial images from the sampling site showed a significant divot in the surface following the maneuver, and sure enough, the TAGSAM is so overloaded that asteroid particulates have wedged open the container’s mylar lid.
Yesterday, the OSIRIS-REx team received images of the spacecraft’s sample collector head brimming with regolith. So much sample was collected that some of it is actually slowly escaping the sampling head. More details: https://t.co/ufUXdotgsOpic.twitter.com/2wINd1Tk2g
The team initially planned to conduct a sample measurement last weekend to see how much material was in the collector and assess whether another run was needed. Examinations of the TAGSAM head (above) show the sample is leaking out through the gaps in the lid, and there’s some concern any unnecessary movements could cause more of the sample to fall out. There might be hundreds of grams of asteroid debris already inside OSIRIS-REx, so NASA has decided to focus on transferring the remaining material into the Sample Return Capsule (SRC), which will keep it secure on the return journey to Earth.
OSIRIS-REx will depart from Bennu in March of next year when the asteroid’s orbit brings it close to Earth. The SRC is expected to return to Earth in September 2023, giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study material from the birth of the solar system. Even if OSIRIS-REx only hits the planned 60g threshold, that will be much more than similar missions. The Japanese Hayabusa probe scooped up less than one gram from 25143 Itokawa in 2005, and Hayabusa2 should return to Earth with 100mg of dust from 162173 Ryugu late this year.
Note: This is not a full-fledged formal review and comparison of Topaz Video Enhance AI against other in-market applications, but a discussion of one particular application’s strengths and weaknesses. Model quality and capability are still changing significantly from version to version.
Over the past 10 months, as I’ve worked on upscaling Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager, I’ve relied on one piece of software above all others to perform the work: Topaz Video Enhance AI ($199.99, for Windows and Mac). I have recommended this product both indirectly and directly, and I’m going to continue to do so. But I need to make certain it’s clear what you are getting into.
Up until September, virtually all my focus had been on improving the quality of my video pre-processing steps. After publishing “What No Fan Has Seen Before,” I decided to turn my attention to the upscaler side of the equation.
Here’s the good news: Topaz Video Enhance AI is, hands-down, the best AI video upscaler I’ve tested. Some of its models are tunable and it can improve a broad range of video. I’ve seen it breathe new life into Grateful Dead shows, old VHS tapes, Star Trek, Stargate: SG-1 and a number of other types of content.
I cannot say that the entire community has been happy with the pace of development, but given the complexity of video editing software and the need to keep continually improving the underlying AI, I feel like things have been moving along at a reasonable clip. AI video processing is an incredibly new market, and Topaz is way out in front of any of the video editors I’ve tested (though I’m always happy to hear suggestions for other programs to test). To the best of my knowledge, TVEAI is the only application that does what it does as well as it does it.
I don’t have a lot of new footage to show just at the moment — I’ve been working on Voyager, but I’m not ready to show work. What I’ve got on tap is a version of the DS9 credits I built immediately after “What No Fan Has Seen Before” went live. This footage was produced using AviSynth+ for initial upscaling and TVEAI for processing. For those of you wondering where the tutorial I promised is — I’m still working to hammer out a workflow that’s going to deal with the full range of the show and improve the first seasons more than the current method does.
But users should be aware that there are some inconveniences to Topaz Video Enhance AI as well. First, it is not kind to system stability. It never fails to start properly when a machine is fresh from reboot, but if you’ve been using your GPU for other applications, the program may need a reboot to work properly. Stopping and starting it again pretty much always works the first time. It probably works a second time. You’ve even got a solid shot at three times. Asking it to render more than three videos in a row? That’s pushing your luck. Eventually, either the AI engine will fail to initialize or the application will crash and a reboot will be required.
Topaz Video Enhance AI seems to become unstable faster if other applications like StaxRip are running multi-threaded AviSynth+ encodes at the same time. It is not overly fond of sharing the GPU, though this behavior has improved in recent months. I’d recommend rebooting every 1-2 days to minimize the chances of a crash, especially if you’re running multiple videos in that time. Loading videos increases the chance that the next video will cause a crash, though the software can also crash on very long encodes. Preprocessing is often required for maximal upscale effectiveness, however. Personally, I just grit my teeth and reboot a lot.
One of the ways Topaz has addressed this instability issue is by creating an AutoSave mode that reloads your previous video and remembers (mostly) what frame you were on. This mitigates the hassle of rebooting four times in a single day when upscaling a great many short clips.
Model Quality Is Still a Moving Target
The quality of each AI model varies from release version to release version. One of the suggestions I’ve made to the company that it’s said it will implement is making it easier to find older versions of the software. This can be a necessity when testing to see if a given model works better in an older or a newer version.
The reason that model quality can vary is that the company is continuing to refine and train its models. There are a lot of moving parts in the equation, and Topaz has been trying to improve their application on multiple fronts simultaneously, which means some models have gotten worse and then been rolled back or repaired over time. Some spots that were hard for Topaz to upscale in February are still hard in October.
If you’re interested in this software, take advantage of the free trial to make certain its models can address your content before pulling the trigger on it.
Be advised that Topaz Video Enhance AI is not a magic bullet. Here are two very different versions of Benjamin Sisko:
Season 2. This is upscaled. It’s an older shot, and I’ve improved on it, but I haven’t fundamentally transformed it.
This is from Season 2, which appears to have been transferred to DVD in a manner intended to preserve every bit of the VHS “Super Long Play” viewing experience. Here’s Benjamin Sisko from Season 4:
Season 4 Captain Sisko. This is purely the difference in how the show was mastered to DVD, nothing I’ve done.
I’m still working to discover if the top frame can be fixed, but the fact that the image doesn’t look great is not TVEAI’s fault. There’s a limit to what the application can handle, and even some commercial video isn’t very good right now.
Topaz’s Ownership Model
Topaz has an interesting software model. When you buy Video Enhance AI, you get access to the application as it exists today and all future updates, major and minor — for one year. If you want updates thereafter, another year is $49.99. It is not clear if you are allowed to skip years while keeping the $49.99 price, or if you must keep resubscribing every year or buy the entire program again.
In the event that you stop paying the yearly update fee, you keep full access to the program as it exists the day you bought it. The question of how good of a deal this is really comes down to how rapidly Topaz improves the application. So far this year, it really has improved a lot — but it’s also got a long way to go.
Anyone considering this application should download the free trial first and test how it performs on your content. Be aware that you might wind up climbing under the hood with a wrench to bang on the video before you run it through the program. If you need to deinterlace footage, for example, that needs to happen outside the upscaler.
Topaz Video Enhance AI is effectively early-access software — in effect, if not in name. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the early access model, especially when the entire market is so new, we don’t have effective competition yet. But I also don’t want to plug this application as being astonishingly effective for my purposes without also noting that this program is not, strictly speaking, all that newbie-friendly. The MP4 encoding option tends to drop audio, which means it’s best to learn how to use FFMPEG to reassemble video from constituent frames. Use Topaz Video Enhance AI to render out to PNGs or JPG, and there’s no problem at all (this method also recovers more easily, since interrupted MP4 encodes can’t be resumed).
Topaz Video Enhance AI is a unique, interesting application and I’m eager to see where it goes, but I don’t want to paint the picture rosier than it ought to be. There’s not so much a learning curve around the program as there is a learning curve around the other things you need to do to use Topaz Video Enhance AI at peak capability. Either way, be aware it exists. If your content aligns well with its capabilities, the results can be incredible. If it doesn’t, it might not be worth investing in until the app gets some additional development time under its belt. Take advantage of the free trial and allow for the idea that you might wind up astonished. Also, allow for the idea that you hope to be astonished in about two years, once all the kinks are worked out.
I don’t know that anyone needed another reason to dislike Facebook’s decision to fuse Oculus accounts into its own Borg-like mass, but in case you didn’t have enough of them, here’s another: Delete your Facebook account and your games are gone, forever.
Important VR PSA: 👉 Deactivating your Facebook profile disables your Oculus Profile.
👉 Deleting your Facebook account takes away all your games, purchases, and progress.
Source: Eli Schwartz pic.twitter.com/dSJIcIf0ki
Facebook would undoubtedly argue that it’s just carrying out the end-user’s wish to be forgotten and that it isn’t the only company to have a policy like this. Blizzard’s Battle.net client notes that deleting your Blizzard account will also delete all of your purchase history with the company. You’ll lose your games, characters, records, and all associated data.
The difference in how the two situations feel is instructive as to why Facebook should have left Oculus and Facebook on separate systems. I might wish to step away from using Facebook without quitting VR, or wish to quit the Oculus ecosystem without deleting my Facebook account. Now that the two are joined at the hip, there’s no way to do so. Your VR gaming and your social media life are welded together, whether you like it or not. Will you be able to avoid sharing your own gaming information with other individuals? Undoubtedly. Corporations? Not a chance. Will Facebook relentlessly push you to share that information, at every turn? Undoubtedly.
In other, unrelated news, Palmer Luckey (founder, Oculus) and Robert Long (senior software engineer, Mozilla) are teaming up to offer a $10,000 reward to anyone who can jailbreak the Quest 2.
I’m still offering $5000 for a Quest 2 jailbreak! Jailbreakers, dm me. Let’s break free of FB’s anti-competitive, anti-privacy ecosystem! https://t.co/TYI0Uy1YsF
Long is one of the developers who opposed the fusion of Facebook and Oculus, saying in August: “I will no longer be working on VR projects for the Oculus platform. Including Oculus Browser specific WebXR features. If a Facebook account will be required for me to develop on Oculus’ platform then I’m not interested in supporting them further.”
Facebook has faced no meaningful penalty for its decision to combine accounts in this fashion and sales of the Quest 2 have reportedly outstripped the original Quest. There have been issues around this launch, with readers reporting being issued permabans after trying to register a new Facebook account for the first time, and other users not being able to use their devices post-account fusion. Facebook has been responsive to these issues according to multiple reports.
In this case, if you like VR, be advised that walking away from Facebook now carries an additional penalty: You’ll be permanently quitting the Oculus ecosystem and losing whatever investment you’ve made into it.
We are in the very early stages of exploring the universe, and our efforts have uncovered thousands of exoplanets. We don’t yet know if any of them support life, but maybe one day we’ll know. In the meantime, Earth is the only planet we know for certain does host life. Researchers from Cornell University and Lehigh University turned this question around. We know Earth has life, but does anyone else? The new study says that, yes, there are 1,004 nearby stars where an alien looking at Earth could potentially know we’re here.
There are more than 4,000 known exoplanets currently, and most of them were identified with the Kepler Space Telescope. We can’t just point any old telescope at a star and say, “Yep, there’s a planet there.” Stars are so much brighter by comparison that we can’t make out individual worlds. The most common way to spot exoplanets, and the method Kepler used, is to watch for the planet to transit in front of the star. When you hear about a new exoplanet discovery, that’s usually how astronomers found it.
Here’s the catch: we can only see transits if the plane of an alien solar system is aligned with ours. Otherwise, the planet doesn’t pass in front of the star from our perspective. Professors Lisa Kaltenegger and Joshua Pepper looked at this from the other side — which solar systems would be able to make a transit observation of Earth and detect life-associated molecules in our atmosphere?
Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) star catalog, the pair looked 300 light-years in all directions to find candidate solar systems, ruling out stellar remnants like white dwarfs that cannot (as far as we know) host alien life. There are a huge number of main-sequence stars in this region of space, but only a fraction of them would be able to see Earth passing in front of the sun from where they are.
The final count, according to Pepper and Kaltenegger, is 1,004. Of those, 508 have angles that would give them at least 10 hours of observational data every time Earth transited the sun. However, 5 percent of the total are stars too young to have developed planets or life. The rest, though, could hypothetically have habitable planets, and two of them have known exoplanets.
In every one of those solar systems, beings like us with an understanding of planetary transits could be seeing Earth darken the sun every year. They might be able to estimate Earth’s size and distance from the sun, and that would indicate the possibility of liquid water on the surface. If they’re a little more advanced than us, they might already have the equivalent of the James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA hopes to launch in the next few years after numerous delays. An instrument such as that could detect the presence of water vapor, methane, phosphine, and other compounds that suggest life. Maybe an alien astronomer is, right at this moment, having a eureka moment as they realize someone is looking back at them from Earth. You should wave hello to be polite just in case.
Not long after the RTX 3080 and 3090 debuted, rumors surfaced of high VRAM variants that would supposedly appear in-market by December. The reasoning was obvious — AMD is expected to launch GPUs with more VRAM than Nvidia’s equivalents. This is a known strategy for Team Red, and they’ve deployed it consistently with the Polaris GPU family against the GTX 1050 and 1060.
One reason a high VRAM version of an Ampere GPU is so interesting is that it opens up a realm of additional possibilities in AI work. According to our sister site PCMag, this plan has been at least temporarily scuttled. They state: “Two independent sources have confirmed the new RTX cards are no longer coming to market.”
Nvidia, however, isn’t the only company to blame for this production problem. Micron’s yields on GDDR6X are also reportedly poor. The difference between GDDR6 and GDDR6X is shown below:
GDDR6X is faster-clocked GDDR6, with higher RAM bandwidth per pin and per placement, and a much smaller power consumption benefit than the jump from GDDR5 to GDDR5X (Presumably pJp stands for picoJoules per bit). With GDDR5X, Micron cut what I’m assuming is per-bit power by 11.12 percent. With GDDR6X, the company only managed to reduce power by 3.5 percent.
The major innovations of GDDR6X are its new encoding scheme and the long-term potential to double bandwidth per pin compared with existing GDDR6, but these improvements come with their own difficulties as far as hitting effective yield. Up until now, we’ve focused on the Nvidia side of the equation, but Micron may be playing a part here as well. If yields on the RAM chips are low, and each RTX 3080 / 3090 high-VRAM GPU needs twice as much, that would effectively slash Nvidia’s already-limited ability to get cards into market.
I would go so far as to argue that it makes more sense that this is a VRAM shortage issue than an RTX GPU issue. We don’t have any reason to believe the qualification issues are on Nvidia’s side of things. Dividing a limited number of Ampere GPUs between SKUs will make it harder to find parts. But needing to divert twice as much VRAM to each card could choke production even further if demand is higher for those cards. While we have no insight into the particulars of the situation, it could easily be playing a part.
If rumors are true, AMD will dodge this shortage by relying on ordinary GDDR6 at lower total bandwidth compared with cards like the RTX 3090. This is not necessarily a bad thing — higher memory bandwidth is only useful to a GPU if the card is bandwidth-bound in the first place.
It wouldn’t surprise me if these cards eventually do become available, once the production-line issues are solved. A high VRAM Ampere would be a lovely part to own for certain workloads.
Microsoft has declared that beginning in 2021, you’ll have to create a Microsoft account in order to play the game. Up until now, players with a Mojang account created through Minecraft: Java Edition were tied to a different authentication system than Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, which is what you get if you buy Minecraft through Windows 10 or play it on a console.
Microsoft’s public justification for this move is that it will improve the Minecraft experience for everyone. With this shift, Microsoft will finally implement two-factor authentication and offer improved parental controls. Players will also have the option to block others in chat or to ignore invitations from certain people.
This Has Nothing to Do With Safety
Security improvements and anti-harassment tools are always welcome, particularly two-factor authentication. That said, there is no reason why these changes had to be implemented via a mandatory Microsoft account. Players have been asking for things like two-factor authentication for years via tools like Google Authenticator, especially after Microsoft added the ability to spend real money in the Minecraft Marketplace.
There is a genuine improvement that Microsoft could offer Java Edition customers in exchange for compelling them to switch, but Microsoft explicitly isn’t offering it. According to the Minecraft Java Account Mitigation FAQ, “Java Edition will still only allow you to play with other players who have Java Edition.” Microsoft even admits that this is strictly an account front-end change in the FAQ, when it states: “There will be no changes to Java Edition besides the account move and the new security features. Java Edition will still be available, supported, and updated just as before!”
The good news is, PvP and modding in the Java Edition will remain completely unchanged. The bad news is, Microsoft has so little to offer, the company attempted to pre-empt the problem by hanging a lantern off it.
Spoiler: Your reward for doing this (in-game, at least) is a… free cape. Microsoft has not revealed if players will have any input into the design of their cape, or if literally every single player will receive the exact same model.
Minecraft Java players who migrate may be forced to choose new usernames if your old name is already taken or if it violates Microsoft’s naming policies. You will be able to retain your Minecraft Java name for in-game use.
Microsoft is likely making this move for several reasons. First, running one centralized login system is probably simpler than running two of them. Second, Minecraft’s player base skews young. As Chromebooks become a larger part of the educational curriculum, Microsoft can no longer count on the idea that people will just “encounter” the Microsoft ecosystem. Satya Nadella has made it clear that Windows is a secondary priority at Microsoft compared with growing Azure and that means growing the number of backend services that can run on it.
Now that Microsoft has bought Bethesda, I’d bet $1 it’ll only be a matter of time before the same thing happens again. Bethesda is another company with a devoted fanbase courtesy of series like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. Integrating players into the Xbox ecosystem is a way of creating brand stickiness. If you’re used to logging in with your Microsoft account (the theory goes), you won’t think much of signing up for other products and services that use it.
People aren’t going to like this shift, but there’s no choice short of cracking the game. Microsoft’s FAQs are very clear. If you don’t switch to a new account, you will no longer be able to play Minecraft at some point in early 2021.
