When there has been a lot of debate regarding the AMD Zen 3 architecture support on the existing B450 & X470 motherboards, AMD was almost forced to retain support for its upcoming Ryzen 4000 CPUs on its existing 400 series motherboards.
MSI has confirmed that its existing 400-series motherboards will be compatible with AMD’s Zen 3 architecture. In a recent video by MSI posted on YouTube, the representatives did state the support for the upcoming architecture would be done via an optional beta BIOS update.
However, this process will selective, meaning you must check whether your MSI motherboard shall support or not. Both of its MAX and non-MAX motherboards will do support the BIOS update.
While MSI claims that they see no problems with bringing Zen 3 support to their MAX motherboards because of the 32 MB BIOSes. On the other hand, the problem arises with the 16 MB BIOSes of the non-MAX motherboards.
To tackle this, MSI will be stripping back the features of non-MAX motherboards by dropping support for older CPUs but MSI has not clarified which CPUs will be affected in this process. But overall, if you do own an X470 or B450 motherboard by MSI then you can easily upgrade to AMD’s upcoming CPUs without much hassle.
After a long period of strict lockdown, the government is easying the strict rules to maintain the economic situation of the country. So, retail stores of various brands will be opening in the days to come and Samsung & Xiaomi are the biggest brands with a lot of retail outlets.
People are accepting the fact that COVID-19 will exist but they need to tackle it and continue their work and so initiatives & measures should be taken to reduce the growth of the pandemic but maintaining the economic flow. So, in India, a new public-private initiative called ‘Suraksha’ has been introduced.
All of the retail stores or shops will have to be registered for the Suraksha certification, after which the staff and people working will be educated and given extensive training on how to actually operate safely. After this training, the shops will again be assed and after attaining satisfactory results, they will be given their Suraksha certification.
As Xiaomi and Samsung, the two biggest smartphone brands in India, are making their stores comply with new norms to ensure public safety. Samsung has revealed that 100% of its exclusive stores in India are Suraksha certified while Xiaomi posted a video on YouTube which says around 3000 Mi Home, Mi Studios and Mi Stores are Suraksha certified.
Apart from being certified, the stores and customers will have to follow certain measures like customers should wear a mask, following all social-distancing guidelines and also avoiding all unnecessary contact. Only a limited number of customers will be allowed at a time into the store.
There shall be a security or staff who will be checking the body temperature first and if found normal, the person has to sanitize well with the provided hand sanitizer and only the, the person can step into the store. The total process seems tiresome but nothing is more a human life so obviously one has to comply to such measures.
Furthermore, one shall not be allowed to touch products on display but if they do really want so, they can do only by requesting a pair of gloves from the staff. Also, the stores will have to be sanitized at regular intervals too and point touchless digital payments will be encouraged to avoid direct contact with the customers.
The online deliveries got relaxation earlier this month. So, the green stuff delivering platforms like BigBasket is coming to the field again. Some are also bringing improvements with them. BigBasket is one of them. It includes a voice assistant to its mobile app.
No doubt, they are very much focused to make their app more user friendly and they should be. The new addition not only takes voice inputs but also speaks out feedbacks. You can find a round-shaped floating button at the bottom right of the app screen labeled with ‘Talk’. You need to tap on it to activate.
The BigBasket app had the google voice typing feature included before. Now, they are trying something better. The partnership with Slang Lab, an Indian Startup, just makes it done.
By activating the voice assistant you can search for the items. But you can’t add them to the basket by only saying it. You have to do it yourself manually. After taking all items you need to the basket, you can directly jump to the check out page by commanding to the assistant. Pretty much handy, right?
At present, the assistant can communicate in five languages and those are English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. The searching algorithm is good enough. Using this feature, in the future, the company can analyze how its users are searching in the app and which product. The data will help to improve users’ app experience further too.
Samsung is holding an event on June 2 at 12 pm. The event will focus on the launch of the Galaxy M01 and M11 smartphones and will be an online event. Samsung has also revealed some of its key specs of both the devices. With this announce we can also expect the online listings of these smartphones. These the lower mid-range smartphone of the lineup and the M series lineup is all about mid-range devices.
Specification of Galaxy M01:
Earlier reports claim that the Galaxy M01 would come with a 5.7″ HD+ (720×1,560 pixels) display with a waterdrop-style notch and a 19:9 aspect ratio. Flipkart teaser reveals that the phone comes with a dual rear camera setup that includes a 13MP primary sensor and a 5MP selfie camera. There is also a 4,000mAh battery. The phone is also said to have an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 SoC, paired with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage.
Specification of Galaxy M11:
Flipkart’s teaser shows the display and battery details of the Samsung Galaxy M11. Nevertheless, we have detailed specifications through the earlier launch in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) market. Samsung Galaxy M11 will feature a 6.4″ HD+ (720×1560 pixels) display with a hole-punch design and is powered by an octa-core SoC, paired with up to 4GB of RAM. The phone comes with a triple rear camera setup that includes a 13MP primary sensor with an f/1.8 lens and a 2MP depth sensor with an f/2.4 lens. There is also a 5MP wide-angle shooter that has a field-of-view (FoV) of 115 degrees and an f/2.2 aperture. For selfies, the handset offers an 8MP camera sensor at the front along with an f/2.0 lens. The Galaxy M11 comes with microSD card support to enable storage expansion up to 512GB. Connectivity options on the phone include 4G, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, and GPS/ A-GPS. There are a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and a 5,000mAh battery that supports 15W fast charging.
CREDIT: ANDROID PURE
The pricing of the devices are still not revealed by the company. The Galaxy M01 can be priced withing Rs.10,000 for all its variants, whereas, the Galaxy M11 can be priced under Rs.12,000.
Asus India has made a decent progress in the country competing against the likes of Lenovo, HP, Acer and Dell. With its recent laptops in the gaming as well as premium laptops, has made it a great choice for consumers and professionals.
Also, their budget laptops are quite ‘value-for-money’ ones and undoubtedly, their Vivobook series of laptops have helped to attract more buyers in the past few years. With agressive pricing and partnering with online retailers like Flipkart and Paytm Mall has helped the brand to spread across the nation.
According to their recent press release, the company claims to have capture 15% of the market share in the Consumer Notebook Segment in Q1 2020 itself. This is significant because the market has been affected with the likes of COVID-19 which in turn has paved the way for the work-from-home culture which in turn has led to an increase in demand for laptops.
Their key points include:
Work From Home mandate fuels the demand for ASUS’ Thin & Light and Gaming laptops
Post-COVID -19 lockdown relaxation, ASUS has successfully recovered more than 90% of its national sales as compared to the pre-lockdown phase
Extensive retail expansion plans to capture offline opportunities by establishing 200 stores by the end of 2020
Interestingly, the Taiwanese giant aims to to be among the top 3 Laptop Brands by end of 2020 which is achievable if they continue to aggressively price their products and target its audience more specifically. Their Zenbook, Vivobook, TUF, ROG gaming laptop series have been received well by the consumers which has helped build a trust among its consumers.
So here’s Asus’s recent press release:
New Delhi, May 27, 2020: While the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown has disrupted the growth trajectories of brands across industries, ASUS India has defied the prevalent norms and registered exceptional growth during this period. Recent data by IDC has revealed that ASUS has garnered 15% market share in the consumer notebook segment as of Q1 2020. The brand has witnessed a 40% jump in sales in Q1 2020 as compared to Q4 2019. While the overall laptop consumer market in India declined by almost 26.5% in Q1 2020 as compared to Q4 2019, this comes as a remarkable feat for ASUS.
In the weeks following the sequential relaxation of the lockdown, ASUS has successfully recovered more than 90% of its national sales as compared to pre-COVID 19 phases. Driving this hyper-growth is the increasing demand for high-quality, feature-rich laptops to support the work/study-at-home mandate, bolstered by the rising penchant for online gaming while individuals practice social distancing at home. In line with these trends, ASUS has seen a steady rise in the demand for its ROG and Thin & Light laptop segments.
Speaking on the developments, Arnold Su, Business Head, Consumer & Gaming PC, System Business Group, ASUS India said, “India has always been an important market for ASUS hence investments and growth strategies have been in sync. Our efforts have always been to expand our base and reach out to as many people possible to make technologically advanced and affordable laptops available to them.”
“Post the lockdown has been relaxed in some geographies the pickup pace of our products has been phenomenal, so much so that we expect sales to surpass average sales in the coming weeks. It is heartening to see our brand playing a key role in ensuring smooth work/study-at-home and enthralling gaming experiences for individuals during this challenging situation.”
ASUS aims to cross the 20% market share by the end of Q3 and a lofty 23%-25% by the end of Q4 2020. To continue this growth trajectory, ASUS is set to launch an array of new products while expanding its offline presence from 100 stores to 200 stores by the end of 2020. With concerted efforts in terms of enhancing its product portfolio and refining consumer experience, ASUS aims to emerge among the top 3 brands in the consumer laptop segment by the end of 2020.
The upcoming Xbox Series X supports the games from its previous generation Xboxes i.e. Xbox One, Xbox 360, and the generation one Xbox. This is informed by the company earlier. Now they informed the implementation of technologies that automatically add HDR support and increases the frame rate too.
The Partner Project Management Director of Xbox Team Road, Jason Ronald said, “Through collaboration with the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, Xbox Series X provides a new and innovative HDR reconstruction technology that allows the platform to automatically add HDR support to games.”
The new technology is so much innovative that it does its job by itself so that no impact falls to the game. It also can be implemented to the games of the previous Xbox versions. Ronald added, “Because the platform handles the technology itself, we can enable HDR with zero impact on game performance. We can also apply it to Xbox 360 and the original Xbox games which are nearly 20 years old. Long before HDR exists.”
Rather than adding the HDR support automatically, the team also invented a new technology that has the ability to run old games in higher resolution and also can increase the frame rate. Though this technology can’t be applicable for all games, it’s limited. If your favorite game comes to the list, the frame rate will be hiked up to 60fps if it had 30fps or to 120fps if it had 60fps.
Lastly, Microsoft also revealed a quick recovery feature which helps the player to switch between multiple games quickly.
So, more leaks of the Matisse refresh CPU are surfacing recently and actually they exist because we have benchmarks to make us believe. Thanks to @_rogame who has again uncovered both the Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 9 3900XT processors.
Obviously, these are the successors to the current Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 9 3900X processors with some healthy upgrades in clock speeds. As posted in the Chiphell forums:
12-core Ryzen 9 3900XT will have a 4.1 GHz base clock and a higher boost clock speed 4.8 GHz,
8-core Ryzen 7 3800XT will have a 4.2 GHz base clock and a higher boost clock speed 4.7 GHz,
6-core Ryzen 5 3600XT will have a 4.0 GHz base clock and a higher boost clock speed 4.7 GHz
Now, 3DMark confirms that the 8-core Ryzen 7 3800XT will have 4.6 GHz boost while the Ryzen 9 3900XT can reach up to 4.7 GHz. On the other hand, the ‘so-called’ Ryzen 5 3600XT, which should bring a 300 MHz increase to the boost clock of the current Ryzen 5 3600X, has not been spotted on the 3DMark database.
Also, surprisingly, the base clock speeds of both the CPUs have seen no increment to the current variants. The Ryzen 7 3800XT has 3.9 GHz base clock speed while the Ryzen 9 3900XT has 3.8 GHz base clock speed. This shall obviously decrease the CPU performance to what we’ve actually seen in the Cinebench R20 test.
The Ryzen 9 3900XT manages to grab a score of 29,172 points, on the other hand, the average 3DMark Fire Strike deems this score to be just around 1% faster than its predecessor. On the other hand, the Ryzen 7 3800XT, which scores 25,135 points, is just 1% slower than the average benchmark results.
After launching the Exynos 880 5G SoC for mid-range smartphones, the South Korean electronics giant has silently listed the Exynos 850 SoC for budget smartphones. This new mobile SoC is based on 8nm LPP process and the company says it is designed for both smartphones and tablets.
According to Samsung, the Exynos 850 (part number S5E3830) will offer “richer user experiences with superb processing power, efficiency and connectivity”. The Exynos 850 is also an octa-core chipset with all of them being ARM Cortex-A55 cores and for GPU it features the Mali-G52 GPU.
As this is a budget SoC, the chipset does not offer 5G connectivity but features an LTE modem with Cat.7 D/L and Cat.13 U/L speeds. Along with that, it supports LPDDR4x memory and eMMC 5.1 storage.
The chipset supports up to FHD+(2520×1080) displays along with single camera support up to 21.7MP rear single camera or 16MP + 5MP dual camera. Also, it supports up to FHD 60 FPS video recording and encoding of HEVC(H.265), H.264 and VP8 codecs. For wireless connectivity, we have support for 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0 and FM Radio.
As per Samsung, the Exynos 850 SoC has already started shipping and has already been spotted in a Galaxy A21s on Geekbench. Hopefully, Samsung will be using for of this chipset in its upcoming budget offerings in all countries including India soon.
After the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H & RTX 2060 variant of the Asus TUF Gaming A15 laptop, the Ryzen 9 4900H & RTX 2060 powered variant also makes itself available at £1,399.99 or around $1,721.
The Asus TUF Gaming A15 laptop originally popped up on the Scan website featuring the 8-core, 16 threaded Ryzen 9 4900H with 3.3 GHz base and 4.4 GHz boost clock speeds along with 16 GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM & 1 TB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD.
It also features 15.6-inch FHD (1920×1080) 144Hz IPS-Type display which offers 45% NTSC colour accuracy. The laptop comes with RGB Backlit keyboard rated for 20-million keystroke durability and a durable MIL-STD-810 military standard construction.
The laptop comes with Gigabit Wave 2 Wi-Fi 5 for connectivity and its dual fans with self-cleaning anti-dust technology to extend system longevity. You can connect an external monitor for multitasking via the USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C with G-SYNC enabled DisplayPort 1.4, and play 4K Ultra HD movies, videos, and games on big-screen TVs with HDMI 2.0b.
Gaming with the #TUF Gaming A15 is no pain, only gains. 💪
R u ready to battle with an @AMDRyzen 9 CPU, GeForce RTX™ 2060 GPU, 90Wh battery life & 144Hz refresh rate? We think yes.
According to Asus, the laptop features two upgraded speakers with four cut-outs pump out 1.8x more sound with 2.7x deeper bass than its predecessor. The three heatsinks on the sides of the laptop keep it cool while prolonged gaming sessions, also you can upgrade your laptop’s RAM and SSD as it has a simplified easy-upgrade design.
The laptop has arrived in the US at Asus’s site but eventually be available for shipping from July 15. Buy the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H & RTX 2060-powered ASUS TUF Gaming A15 Gaming Laptop: https://amzn.to/3avkiL0.
Sony is launching the PS5 gaming console and we knew that from the previous announcement from the Playstation team. Yesterday the team revealed another short teaser showing the controller and made it gaming-centric. The teaser also reveals that the company is going to hold an event on June 4 at 1:10 pm Pacific time. This might be the final launch event of the PlayStation 5 gaming console.
As this teaser focuses on the gaming side of the console, it might also be a hint that the upcoming event can be more gaming-centric rather than the previous event which mainly focused on the technical revealings including the specifications of the controller and the allover PS5. Know more about the controller of PS5 from here.
“DualSense marks a radical departure from our previous controller offerings and captures just how strongly we feel about making a generational leap with PS5. The new controller, along with the many innovative features in PS5, will be transformative for games – continuing our mission at PlayStation to push the boundaries of play, now and in the future. To the PlayStation community, I truly want to thank you for sharing this exciting journey with us as we head toward PS5’s launch in Holiday 2020. We look forward to sharing more information about PS5, including the console design, in the coming months.” – Jim Ryan, President & CEO, Sony Interactive Entertainment
According to reports, the PlayStation 5 will feature eight Ryzen Zen 2 cores with a variable frequency up to 3.5 GHz, and a custom AMD GPU based on their RDNA 2 technology that promises 10.28 teraflops, based on 36 compute units running at up to 2.23 GHz. It will also feature a custom 825GB SSD as well as a dedicated hardware unit for 3D audio and will also offer hardware acceleration for real-time ray tracing.
