Month: September 2020

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  One of the Summit series laptops. [credit: MSI ]

This week, PC-maker MSI held a "virtual summit" where it announced a plethora of new machines, largely driven by the launch of Intel's 11th-generation CPUs. Much of what was discussed amounts to the usual suspects—various forms and configurations of gaming laptops to compete with Razer and its ilk. But the Taiwanese tech company also introduce the Summit series: slim business laptops that are outside the recent norm for the company.

MSI's existing Prestige and Modern lines will also get a Tiger Lake refresh, with retail availability expected in October.

As a laptop vendor, MSI focuses on the higher end, both in gaming and productivity laptops. Until now, all MSI models we're aware of—including the general-purpose laptops not aimed at gamers—have featured Nvidia discrete GPUs. The Tiger Lake refresh of the productivity-oriented Modern line does away with the Nvidia GPU, relying entirely on Intel's integrated Xe graphics instead. Seeing an OEM who has been all-in on discrete GPUs suddenly drop them in existing product lines is another good indicator that Intel's Xe integrated graphics will likely live up to the hype.

Enlarge / Ordered rock crystals, courtesy of a salt mine. (credit: Lech Darski)

Better batteries are a critical enabling technology for everything from your gadgets all the way up to the stability of an increasingly renewable grid. But most of the obvious ways of squeezing more capacity into a battery have been tried, and they all run straight into problems. While there may be ways to solve those problems, they're going to need a lot of work to overcome those hurdles.

Earlier this week, a paper covers a new electrode material that seems to avoid the problems that have plagued other approaches to expanding battery capacity. And it's a remarkably simple material: a variation on the same structure that's formed by crystals of table salt. While it's far from being ready to throw in a battery, the early data definitely indicate it's worth looking into further.

Lithium density

Lithium-ion batteries, as their name implies, involve shuffling lithium between the cathode and the anode of the battery. The consequence of this is that both of the electrodes will end up needing to store lithium atoms. So most ideas for next-generation batteries involve finding electrode materials that do so more effectively.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 24, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai touted inaccurate broadband-availability data in order to claim that his deregulatory agenda sped up deployment despite clear warning signs that the FCC was relying on false information.

Pai claimed in February 2019 that the number of Americans lacking access to fixed broadband at the FCC benchmark speed of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream dropped from 26.1 million people at the end of 2016 to 19.4 million at the end of 2017, and he attributed the improvement to the FCC "removing barriers to infrastructure investment." The numbers were included in a draft version of the FCC's congressionally mandated annual broadband assessment, and Pai asked fellow commissioners to approve the report that concluded the broadband industry was doing enough to expand access.

But consumer-advocacy group Free Press subsequently pointed out that the numbers were skewed by an ISP called BarrierFree suddenly "claim[ing] deployment of fiber-to-the-home and fixed wireless services (each at downstream/upstream speeds of 940mbps/880mbps) to census blocks containing nearly 62 million persons." This is an implausible assertion and would have meant BarrierFree went from serving zero people to nearly 20 percent of the US population in just six months. BarrierFree admitted the error when contacted by Ars at the time, saying that "a portion of the submission was parsed incorrectly in the upload process."

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  The new Acura TLX has just gone into production in Marysville, Ohio. It's a much faster car to build than the outgoing model, with a stiffer chassis and sharper panel creases. [credit: Acura ]

Every industry has its own yardsticks—ways that competitors can measure up against each other to see who's best. In the automotive-manufacturing world, a great way to do that is to let your body panels do the talking. Precise panel gaps are one way to do that, for example. And now that everyone has pretty much mastered the art of curves, the trend du jour is for adding sharp creases and folds. The latest Acura TLX sedan, which just went into production in Marysville, Ohio, is a good example of that.

"Our hood has a new technology called sharp edge," explained Ken Sheridan, associate chief engineer at Honda of America's Marysville factory (Honda is Acura's parent company). "The radius on those styling lines—usually they're like a five millimeter radius. In this case, they're really sharp. They're a 2.5 millimeter radius, and they come all the way into the bumper on the top of the car. It's a big thing because our whole concept is this precision-crafted performance.

"It's always a challenge once you have all this accuracy and then you put these aluminum comps—we have aluminum fenders and aluminum hoods—into our oven at about 450 degrees, and then stuff starts wants to start moving," Sheridan told me. "So we actually developed special fixturing for that to keep it at a nominal position after it's basically soaked in our oven."