• Apple releases 4-core 13" and 6-core 15" MacBook Pro catching up with the rest of the industry.
  
  Other developments are support for 32GB RAM on the 15" model, much demanded by graphics professionals, and up to 4TB SSD.  Which brings the price for the fully-configured 15" model to a little over A$10,000.
  
  My 3-year-old Dell Inspiron 15 7000* supports 32GB RAM and 4TB of SSD, if I should decide I want that.   The upgrade would work out to $1800.  Also, it has a higher resolution screen than the 15" MacBook Pro.
  
  The 15" model does now offer Radeon 560 graphics, so CPU and GPU alike are three times as fast as my Dell.  But no PgUp / PgDn / Home / End keys.  (AnandTech)
  
  Six Colors has more details from a Mac user perspective but no reviews yet.  (Six Colors)
  
  iMore offers the sort of first impressions article that makes me think the tame Apple press should be locked up somewhere for their own safety.  (iMore)
  
  
• Intel announces the long-awaited Xeon E family.  These bring last year's 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs to the entry-level server market, which has been stuck at four cores since the X3220 came out more than 11 years ago.
  
  Despite having the identical LGA1151 socket, these new chips will not work on either desktop motherboards or existing server motherboards, because fuck you. 
  
  Also, the new and mandatory server chipset has built-in wifi, because fuck your firewall too.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Dell announces new workstations based on the Xeon E.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Lenovo also has Xeon E workstations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Chrome 67 adds additional site isolation features to prevent code from bad sites trying to exploit CPU bugs to steal details from other sites.  This is great, only downside is that it makes Chrome even more of a memory hog.  (PC Perspective)
  
  
• Saphhire's Ryzen APU embedded board has pricing, starting at $325 for the low-end 2-core version, up to $450 for the 4-core version with Vega 11.  (PC Perspective / Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• The crappy 9th Circuit court has refused to rehear its crappy Blurred Lines decision en banc.  Unfortunately, chances of a successful Supreme Court appeal seem slim.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Lenovo's Miix 630 12" ARM Windows tablet is out, with the single available model listing for $899.  The Surface Go is cheaper, but Lenovo's price includes the keyboard and pen (each a $100+ upgrade for the Surface) and the Miix has built-in LTE, which is currently not even an option for the Surface Go.
  
  
• Intel is doomed.  Well, doomed-ish anyway.  AMD's single-socket EPYC can outperform the low end of dual-socket Intel servers, and AMD's manufacturing costs are lower so Intel can't easily undercut them on pricing.
  
  The server market has for some years been about 10% single socket, 80% dual socket, and 10% larger (four, eight, and serious big-iron systems), and Intel carefully tailored their marketing and pricing to fit that exactly.  And AMD just blew it all up.  (The Next Platform) 
  
  Article is sponsored by AMD but worth a read if you're in the industry.
  
  
• Remember the Lenovo ThinkPad E485 with the great pricing?  Well, they fixed that.  Up from A$999 to A$1299.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 14 2018 12:12 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 14 2018 10:47 AM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 14 2018 01:47 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, July 15 2018 05:41 AM (BcQU4)

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