Month: October 2020

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  Welcome to Cooling Springs, just one portion of the adventure through a PS5's innards in Astro's Playroom.

Astro's Playroom, included with every PlayStation 5, is clearly designed as a showcase of sorts for the system. The game takes players on a fantastical platforming adventure through an imagined version of the system's innards, and through 25+ years of PlayStation history itself.

More than that, though, the game is the perfect showcase for the PlayStation 5's new DualSense controller, and the proprietary perks it has over previous DualShock controllers. But while Sony has hyped up the DualSense's fine-tuned haptic feedback and adaptive force triggers in recent months, the company has been largely silent on one of the controller's most subtly impactful features: the built-in speaker.

Listen to your hands

Sony clearly wanted us to notice this speaker when we received our PlayStation 5 hardware; we were told, both in email and over a video-call briefing, not to wear headphones when testing Astro's Playroom for the first time. This was confusing at first, since the game's tutorial doesn't even mention the built-in speaker while running through the controller's many features. But it doesn't take long to hear the thing in action, and it's much better than you might expect based on recent console history.

Enlarge / It looks like the cow is judging me—but that's OK, I'm about to judge the cow right back. (credit: Jim Salter)

The Ice Lake-powered GWTN156-1BL we're reviewing today is one of an entire line of inexpensively manufactured, Gateway-branded laptops available exclusively at Walmart. We intended to review it last month, alongside its $350, Ryzen-powered little sibling the GWTN141-2—but it sold out so quickly we weren't able to get our hands on one until Walmart refreshed its stock last week.

Although we're really only looking at the $500 Ice Lake version today, we'll include the specs for the $350 Ryzen-powered alternative as a refresher, since we expect a lot of people may hesitate between the two. Ultimately, both machines are at least reasonable purchases—but we think the cheaper GWTN141-2 is more compelling, despite being a wimpier machine overall.

At $350, there aren't many laptop options available, and the GWTN141-2—despite its warts—comes out thoroughly on top. But at the GWTN156-1BL's $500, the market opens up considerably. Major manufacturers such as Lenovo, ASUS, and Acer all offer pretty reasonable designs for $550 or less. The refurbished market, on the other hand, still isn't very competitive—the best deals at under $600 tend to feature sixth-generation i5 CPUs which look paltry next to the Gateway's low-end Ice Lake.

Enlarge / The magnetic fields inside a tokamak. (credit: Jong-Kyu Park, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory)

Depending on who you ask, fusion power is either already here (but no one will purchase my sekrit design!), never going to happen (so stop wasting money!), or a difficult problem that might be a partial solution to an even more difficult problem. The last, being the view of scientists who actually work in the field, is often lost in all the noise.

Out of this fog of discussion, a passel of papers emerged recently, all focused on a proposed fusion project: the SPARC tokamak. One of the surprising things about SPARC is its size. Coming in at just over 3m across, SPARC will be smaller than currently operating tokamaks, like JET, which is nearly 6m across. ITER, currently under construction in France, is over 12m across. Yet SPARC and ITER are projected to have about the same performance. Both are expected to produce more energy from fusion than the direct input energy, though neither is expected to produce useful power.

So why the difference? And what does this latest batch of papers tell us about the design?