Month: May 2020

Enlarge / The future of AI is a mannequin's nightmare. (credit: Seth Ickerman + Carpenter Brut)

Two spacemen in the distant future get more than they bargained for while chasing a rogue AI to a far-off planet in Blood Machines, which debuts tomorrow on the Shudder streaming service.

The movie is a collaboration between synthwave musician Carpenter Brut and French directors Raphaël Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard (who work together under the pseudonym "Seth Ickerman"). Carpenter Brut and Seth Ickerman had joined forces before on the music video for Brut's 2016 song "Turbo Killer," which can be best described as two competing ritual sacrifices involving bad men and captive hotties. In the video, one ritual ritualizes in a delightfully artificial graveyard while the other does its thing aboard—get ready—a spaceship shaped like an inverted crucifix.

Cool. Car chases ensue, synthesizers blare, and everything is awash in the kind of threatening neon that befits an '80s homage.

Enlarge / Intel's shiny new 5.3—ish, maybe, but probably not—GHz CPU is seen here running on a Gigabyte AORUS Z490 Master board, on a Praxis wetbench chassis, with the excellent NZXT Kraken fluid cooler. (credit: Jim Salter)

We finally got our grubby paws on the flagship SKU of Intel's new Comet Lake desktop processors—the (sorta) 5.3GHz, (well over) 125W TDP i9-10900K. Intel's extremely lackluster performance marketing led us to believe the processor would probably be little if any improvement over last year's i9-9900K—but, happily, that's not the case.

The more troubling thing for Team Blue is that it isn't only competing with its own CPUs. Intel's real competition isn't itself, it's AMD—and for now at least, the company is still struggling to keep its head above water.

Performance

• 

  The i9-10900K chews its way through Cinebench R20's rendering scene quickly. Its Cinebench score is almost exactly that of a Threadripper 1950x—hardly current, but still impressive for a relatively normal desktop CPU. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Intel's new flagship i9 desktop CPU is, as you would expect, very fast indeed. Also as you would expect, for the most part its Ryzen 9 3950X equivalent kicks sand in its face and runs away laughing.