Month: August 2017

Valentina Palladino

Despite turmoil surrounding its chip business—and the decision to stop selling consumer laptops—Toshiba hasn't stopped making portable computers. The company's Portégé and Tecra laptop families are built for businesses and employees, so they may not be as flashy as consumer devices, but they're still important. Work-issued laptops are the primary PCs for many people.

At a glance, the Portégé x30 has the painfully plain design of a work laptop, but it incorporates some features that we've been seeing take over consumer devices as of late: thin-and-light structure, USB Type-C and Thunderbolt, Windows Hello, and more. It also boasts up to 18 hours of battery life, which would be insanely useful for business users and regular consumers alike, if true. The Portégé x30 is a clamshell that tries to toe the line between commercial and consumer notebooks, and in some ways it's a good mix of the two, but in others it could use more work.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

After the ad-pocolypse earlier this year, YouTube put many new systems in place for advertisers to better control which videos their ads appeared over on the platform. The company also clarified what it means to be "advertiser-friendly" on YouTube, as well as what kinds of hate-speech would be ineligible for monetization. However, many creators have expressed frustration with YouTube, its lack of transparency and communication, and the number of videos that were (and continue to be) demonetized after the incident. So now, YouTube is rolling out a system of new icons that should help creators understand which videos are earning them money—and why other videos are not.

A blog post from yesterday outlines the expanded icon system: creators could see one of three new symbols next to each video. A green, dollar-sign circle indicates the video is fully eligible for advertising on both YouTube and YouTube Red, earning money from "the broadest set of advertisers." These videos presumably follow all YouTube's guidelines for advertiser-friendly content and are not considered controversial in any way.

A yellow, dollar-sign circle appears next to videos that can only earn limited money from advertisements on YouTube. According to the blog post, this could be for one of two reasons: either the video has been deemed "not suitable for all advertisers," or it has been completely demonetized because YouTube feels it doesn't meet their advertiser-friendly guidelines. Previously, a yellow dollar sign icon meant that a video was indeed completely demonetized because it wasn't suitable for advertisers.

Enlarge

Intel's monstrous 18-core, 36-thread Core i9-7980XE CPU launches September 25 for a whopping $2,000, Intel announced today. It will be joined by the $1,700 16C/32T i9-7960X and the $1,400 14C/28T i9-7940X, while the 12C/12T i9-7920X launches a month earlier on August 28 for $1,200. UK prices are TBC, but the top-end chip will likely start at around £1,900, and then work its way down from there.

Alongside release dates, Intel also revealed TDPs and boost clock speeds—information that was curiously missing from the original X299 announcement back in May. The Core i9-7980XE features a 2.6GHz base clock, a Turbo Boost 2.0 clock of 4.2GHz, and a Turbo Boost 3.0 clock (up to two cores) of 4.4GHz. That's accompanied by 24.75MB of L3 cache, 44 PCIe lanes, and a 165W TDP (the 10-core i9-7900K has a 140W TDP).

Boost and turbo clocks for the remaining i9 chips are largely the same, with a mere 100MHz variance, although the i9-7940X sports a higher 3.1GHz base clock. PC Gamer dug up a more detailed look at stock clock speeds, which shows the variance depending on how many cores are under load. In the case of the i9-7980XE, clock speeds vary from 4.2GHz to 3.9GHz up to 12 cores, dropping to 3.4GHz when all 18 cores are active.