A mysterious “Genuine Intel CPU 0000” has appeared in SiSoft Sandra benchmark database, said to be likely an engineering sample of Intel’s upcoming Coffee Lake CPU.

The chip in question has six cores featuring a base clock of 3.1GHz and a turbo clock of 4.2GHz. It carries 256KB of L2 cache per core and 9MB of shared L3 cache. The chip reportedly has a die size of 149mm².

What tier this chip sits at is unknown, but considering the competitive pressure from AMD, it could very well slot into the consumer Intel Core i7-8700K. A quad-core variant will also be available but will be manufactured under a smaller, 126mm² die.

Coffee Lake will be [...]

According to DigiTimes, TSMC has won the bid to manufacture Qualcomm’s baseband chips on the 7nm node. The chip order is for the baseband processors only and not for application processors. Qualcomm is still making a decision between Samsung and TSMC for the production of its next-generation APs, and is waiting to see the second generation 7nm products from both companies before it makes a decision.

Both Samsung and TSMC will be switching from HKMG to EUV process technology at the 7nm node. Samsung announced that its 7nm Low Power Plus transistors made using EUV will be available in 2018, while TSMC said its 7nm EUV node will be ready by 2019.

TSMC lost [...]

We had the pleasure of hanging out with gaming peripherals maker Cougar recently at E3 2017 to check out some of their latest and greatest gaming keyboards.

The latest and what I think is the greatest is the Cougar Puri TKL. The Cougar Puri TKL is a compact, Tenkeyless keyboard for eSports gamers who want a smaller, more portable gaming keyboard to take on the go. The Cougar Puri TKL looked and felt high quality and Cougar displayed the keyboard with even more durable metal keycaps installed on the arrow keys and the gaming zone (WASD keys).

Cougar was also happy to report that they’re only using the highest [...]

Windows Insiders will be happy to see that GPU utilization is now being tracked in the task manager in the latest version of Windows 10 Preview Build (16226).

The GPU utilization graph is located under the “Performance” tab under task manager. It shows core utilization of different GPU workloads (3D, encoding, etc), GPU memory utilization, and driver version. The resource monitor includes a more detailed breakdown of individual GPU processes.

Keep in mind that you’ll have to be signed up with Windows Insider to get this update now or you’ll have to wait until Microsoft releases the next Windows update.

Read the full patch notes at [...]

PC gaming peripherals maker Mionix is spicing up its product catalog with brand new peripherals, super colorful accessories, and one of the strangest marketing campaigns we’ve seen in a very, very long time. Let me explain.

If you’re wondering what a lobster, donuts, stacks of cash, and a drink with an umbrella on it have to do with peripherals, don’t worry. I have no idea either.

The Minoix Wei, launched under the new “Get a Fresh Desk” marketing campaign, is Mionix’s newest mechanical keyboard. Despite what looks like a gaming keyboard, the Mionix Wei seems to be marketed towards a hip web developer or an insane [...]

Firefox version 54 finally adds multi-process support, bringing it in line with the modern browser process design.

Before version 54, Firefox had all of its tabs and extensions running on one process. When one tab stops working in the process tree, the problem could manifest other tabs or cause the whole session to shut down. In contrast, browsers like Google Chrome separates each tab into its own process which makes Chrome blazing fast and more stable, but it comes at the price of using more memory and resources than other browsers.

Recognizing the need for multi-process, but also recognizing the drawbacks of allowing unlimited processes to be created, Mozilla [...]

Ready your wallets, boys and girls. Paypal has just confirmed that the annual Steam Summer Sale 2017 will start on June 22.

The leak came from the Paypal UK Twitter feed. It has also announced that in addition to the sale pricing, PayPal customers in the UK will get an extra £5 off on a single purchase over £2o.

It’s official. The #SteamSummerSale starts 22/06 at 6pm BST and PayPal customers get an extra £5 off *terms apply. https://t.co/PdXnlKZ6qh pic.twitter.com/hobxCz3TBm

— PayPal UK (@PayPalUK) June 20, 2017

Steam’s annual Summer and Winter Sales are your best at scoring triple-A title games at the best [...]

Have you ever come across a great interview or a great gym soundtrack and want an easy way to separate the audio file into a MP3 to load onto your music player? Yup. We know you have and today we’ll teach you how to do it with free open source software you may already have installed on your PC.

First things first, download VLC Media Player and install it if you don’t already have it. Aside from being probably the best media player ever created, VLC’s wide range of codecs will allow you to easily extract the audio even from super obscure video files using rarely used [...]

Canard PC revealed in a tweet that AMD is preparing B2 stepping of its Summit Ridge CPUs.

The revision is expected to improve uncore features such as PCIe and memory controllers. Canard PC hasn’t revealed exactly which areas of the design will be affected, but it did mention that it hasn’t seen any improvement proposals made towards the CPU core design themselves.

A stepping upgrade is significant as stepping refers to when the design of the chip is revised in hardware which extends beyond what microcode adjustments could fix.

Ah tiens : stepping B2 en approche pour Zen. Il fixe de nombreux bugs hardware.

— [...]

In a recent job posting, Blizzard subtly dropped hints indicating that it’s planning on working on remastered editions of several of its classics such as Diablo and Warcraft. The job listing states:

Classic Games is looking for a renaissance designer to harmonize that which was, with that which will be. Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo await your machinations. If you have the desire to rise to that challenge, we’d love to hear from you.

It’s unclear if Blizzard is simply looking for an extra hand to integrate its classic lineups into newer titles or if in fact they’re planning on full remasters of their classics, but considering they recently [...]