Month: October 2019

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  This is a screenshot of a Fieldbit AR view of a water treatment plant. The user can see equipment identification and telemetry tagged directly to individual machines. [credit: Fieldbit ]

Veolia Water Technologies, a transnational water treatment specialist firm, is partnering with a company called Fieldbit to bring Augmented Reality to the plant floor. Don't feel bad if your first reaction to that statement is "huh?"—ours was, too. If you've ever had to work on unfamiliar or semi-familiar physical equipment, though, it gets pretty interesting.

We spoke to Robert Kodweis, Fieldbit's VP of operations, to get a better picture of what the company really does. Fieldbit is a software company, and its apps are relatively hardware-agnostic. Users can experience AR (Augmented Reality) marked-up views of equipment and spaces through smartglasses such as Realwear's HMT-1, or by using an Android smartphone app to mark up video from the phone's camera in real time—something like Pokémon Go for the industrial floor.

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  In this shot, a lineman wearing the HMT-1 AR headgear has both hands free for climbing. [credit: Realwear ]

We pressed Kodweis pretty hard on the apparent AI aspects of the application. Since the press photos we saw mostly seemed to focus on tagging particular equipment with its own telemetry via AR, we wanted to know how the system was trained to reliably recognize individual machines without seeing identification plates and serial numbers. Kodweis explained that while this spatial computing is indeed possible, it's not the big focus of Fieldbit's collaboration with Veolia.

Enlarge / Intel's clearly aiming squarely at AMD's Threadripper with the new Cascade Lake-X price cuts—and the shot lands hard, against TR2—but we still don't know what will happen when TR3 lands in November. (credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel's new Cascade Lake-X high-end desktop lineup came out this week, and in this case, the performance news comes in second to the price. It costs you almost exactly half as much to buy any given Cascade Lake-X CPU as it would have cost for its Skylake-X counterpart last year, in obvious response to AMD's Threadripper CPUs—and likely in part to the Ryzen 9 3950X, due out in November along with the next generation of Threadrippers.

Skylake-X vs Threadripper 2x

We don't have a firm set of specifications on the third-generation Threadrippers yet, but we can get a quick look at how Cascade-X compares with Threadripper 2000 below:

For one example, this year's high-end i9-10980XE goes for $980—and last year's 9980XE went for just under $2,000. We see roughly the same cost reduction across the board, down to the 10900X at $590 vs last year's 9900X at $990. This takes aim squarely at Threadripper. The interesting question is how AMD will respond with new Threadripper pricing next month; we already know the company at least pretends to enjoy playing elaborate price games.

Enlarge / That charging case uses USB-C. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a slew of laptops and tablets for its Surface line of Windows computers and related accessories. The announcements include the Surface Pro 7, the latest iteration of the company's popular line of 2-in-1 tablets; the Surface Laptop 3, a refresh of its traditional clamshell laptop; the Surface Pro X, a new 2-in-1 with a svelter design and a custom ARM-based chip called the Microsoft SQ1; and the Surface Earbuds, a pair of true wireless earbuds that integrate with the company's Office 365 software.

I attended Microsoft's reveal event in New York City and was able to get some hands-on time with the new hardware. Below you can find a few quick impressions.

Of note: perhaps the biggest news of the day was Microsoft's tease of the Surface Neo, its long-anticipated dual-screen PC, and a surprise reveal of the Surface Duo, essentially a smaller version of the Surface Neo that works as an Android smartphone. I wasn't able to get hands-on time with either of those devices beyond checking out a couple non-functional dummy models, but Microsoft says they are scheduled to release in late 2020. Regardless, here's what Microsoft has coming for the rest of 2019.

Enlarge / An aerial view of the construction site of Tesla's manufacturing facility is seen on April 8, 2019 in Shanghai. The factory is expected to begin production before the end of 2019, which could help Tesla meet its goal to deliver at least 360,000 vehicles for the year. (credit: Zhang Hengwei/China News Service/Visual China Group via Getty Images)

Tesla set new records for both production and delivery of vehicles in the third quarter of 2019, the company announced on Wednesday. Tesla produced 96,155 vehicles and delivered slightly more—97,000.

It's a modest improvement over the 95,200 cars Tesla delivered in the second quarter. But Wall Street wasn't impressed by the new figures, with Tesla stock falling about 4% in after-hours trading.

One of the most significant trends in Tesla's vehicle deliveries this year has been the sharp decline in sales of Tesla's pricier Model S and Model X models. Tesla enjoyed combined S and X sales of almost 100,000 vehicles in 2018—or nearly 25,000 per quarter.