Month: October 2019

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  The Volkswagen Jetta is a bit of a bargain generally, and the spicy version of the sedan—the Jetta GLI—especially so. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

How people react to a Volkswagen Golf GTI says a lot about whether or not they actually like cars. What's not to like? It's more sprightly, agile and quicker than the standard Golf, yet just as practical, reliable and nearly as efficient. It has defined the hot hatch for 40 years. Company executives will even describe it as "the soul of VW." But like it or not, mainstream America just doesn't do hatchbacks. So it's a good thing the GTI donates much of its formula to the Jetta equivalent, the GLI.

Being a four-door sedan, the Jetta GLI forgoes the Golf's hatch for a bit of elongation and a conventional trunk. The balance of goodness should be pretty equal among the sportier Jetta and Golf, especially since it's based on the same MQB car platform as the Golf.

And here's where the qualifiers begin. The car we tested here is the GLI S, as bargain basement as GLIs and certainly GTIs come, complete with disappointing material quality at the door panels, the dash and the gauges, the latter looking like the worst of the early 2000s VW gauges, which had more of a Fisher-Price than fein feel. (The photos are of a better-equipped GLI Autobahn they sent me in DC.)

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  The top four CPUs on the W-2200 SKU list are, effectively, Cascade Lake-X plus ECC RAM and AMT out-of-band management. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

Today, Intel's W-2200 series Xeon joins Cascade Lake-X in the 2019 HEDT lineup. The Xeon W line goes further down into low-performance territory than Cascade Lake-X does, but the top-four CPUs in the lineup effectively are Cascade Lake-X: they've got the same core and thread count, same base and turbo frequencies, same amount of cache, same number of CPU lanes, and the same advertised TDP, along with support for Deep Learning Boost, Thunderbolt 3, 2.5G Ethernet, and Wi-Fi 6.

Aside from Cascade Lake-X being unlocked for overclocking, the biggest—and so far as we can tell, only—real differentiator between Cascade Lake-X and the top four Xeon-W2200 processors is Intel vPro platform support. The vPro label means that Xeon-W2200 CPUs support up to 1TB of ECC RAM (compared to Cascade Lake-X's 256GB of non-ECC) and Intel Active Management Technology (an out-of-band management system that runs on the Intel Management Engine, not the main x86-context CPU).

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  Xeon W-2200 CPU specs. Note that the top four SKUs are essentially identical to Cascade Lake-X—but with ECC and AMT tacked on. The bottom four don't neatly correspond to any existing CPU models from another Intel family. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

The other differentiator between Cascade Lake X series and Xeon W-2200 is, of course, price. Like Cascade Lake-X, Xeon W-2200 cut Xeon W-2100's prices roughly in half—Xeon W-2295 costs $1,333 compared to Xeon W-2195's $2,553, for example. This still leaves you with about a 25% price increase going from a Cascade Lake-X CPU to its equivalent in the Xeon W-2200 line.

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  The new Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet. [credit: Valentina Palladino ]

Amazon added to its lineup of products again today, just a few weeks after introducing a slew of Echo products. This time, the focus is on tablets—the new Fire HD 10 tablet upgrades the previous version with a faster processor, longer battery life, and for the first time, USB-C charging.

The new tablet will come in a regular edition and a kids edition, but the core technology remains the same on both. Let's get the specs out of the way: it has a 10.1-inch FHD touchscreen, an updated octa-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and either 32GB or 64GB of storage that you can expand with its microSD card.

Amazon increased the battery life to 12 hours, up from the 10 hours of life the previous Fire HD10 could get. The tablet can charge fully in four hours thanks to its new USB-C port. This replaces the microUSB port that the previous model had and is arguably the most exciting thing about the Fire HD 10. It's the first Amazon device with a USB-C port for charging, giving us hope that we could see the company ditch microUSB altogether in the future.

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  As S4 begins, Elliot and Mr. Robot seem to be on the same page again.

In retrospect, it was never just the attention to technical detail or the unique visual stylings. Part of what made Mr. Robot's first season a modern classic was how it blended familiar TV formats—Elliot would take down small timers or execute highly hackable heists in episodic of-the-week adventures while the show built up longer season arcs. It's a formula other modern shows like Buffy, Justified, or Mindhunter have used to great effect, combining satisfying procedural watchability with slowly built histories and battles. For Mr. Robot, that blend allowed viewers to quickly get familiar with Elliot on a deeper level, as his technical capabilities and internal struggle with mental illness revealed themselves through a variety of situations. Those two character traits became the hallmark of the whole series.

In subsequent seasons, however, Mr. Robot tipped heavily toward that second TV format with only a few select exceptions (like when Angela hacked an FBI base camp). The show's overarching plot became more and more complicated as a result: S1's showdown between Elliot and his cronies against E-Corp evolved into a situation where this highly skilled hacker working for a Big Tech/Finance corporation contractor has been duped into executing an attack against the big corporation on behalf of a Dark Web syndicate that maybe controls the global economy... huh?

Whatever the show's fourth and final season ultimately has in store, Mr. Robot seems to be tapping back into its roots based on last night's premiere ("401 Unauthorized") and the early season episodes that follow (Ars had the opportunity to watch the first four). Yes, there's plenty of plot to plow through to see whether Elliot or the Dark Army will come out victorious. But after a second season that frustrated the show's larger audience and a third season that quietly reset the world, Mr. Robot is willing once again to devote time to doing what it does best: sketching out deep character portraits while simultaneously executing some highly entertaining self-contained adventures.