Month: May 2021

Enlarge / Intel's new Core i9-11980HK leads the 11th-gen laptop CPU lineup. (credit: Intel)

On Tuesday, Intel announced 10 new 11th-generation CPUs for high-performance laptops, like those made for gamers or content creators. Built on the 10 nm SuperFin process, the new chips are in the Core i9, Core i7, Core i5, and Xeon families, and they carry the label "Tiger Lake-H."

New consumer laptop CPUs include the Core i9-11980HK, Core i9-11900H, and Core i7-11800H—all of which have eight cores—plus the Core i5-11400H and Core i5-11260H, which each have six cores.

Naturally, Intel put the spotlight on the fastest Core i9-11980HK chip. The company claims this CPU is able to beat its predecessor by several percentage points in games like Hitman 3 and Rainbow Six: Siege, depending on the game—anywhere from 5 percent to 21 percent, according to Intel's own testing.

Intel also says that the Core i9-11980HK beats AMD's Ryzen 9 5900HX by anywhere from 11 to 26 percent. Obviously, reviewers will have to put these claims to the test in the coming weeks.

The Netflix French original series Lupin proved to be an unexpected hit when it debuted earlier this year, purportedly racking up views in 70 million households in its first month. And there's good news for those frustrated by part 1's cliffhanger ending: we'll soon find out what happens next, as Netflix just dropped a full trailer and release date for part 2 of the saga. Alas, the trailer is dubbed in English—quelle horreur!—which means we miss out on star Omar Sy's dulcet tones. (Dear Netflix: it's OK to have subtitled trailers for your foreign fare. In fact, it's far, far preferable to bad dubbing.)

(Some spoilers for part 1 below.)

As I've written previously, Arsène Lupin is the creation of Maurice Leblanc, who based the character partly on a French burglar/anarchist. Relentlessly pursued by a detective named Ganimard, Lupin is captured stealing a woman's jewels while on board a ship. Although he is imprisoned, he ultimately escapes before standing trial and goes on to pull off many other colorful heists.

Enlarge / Baltimore chief prosecutor Marilyn Mosby being interviewed by NBC News in August 2016, in the neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested shortly before his death from a spinal cord injury. (credit: Getty Images | Larry French )

Baltimore's chief prosecutor has asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop a local Fox News affiliate's negative coverage about her, claiming that the "tone of the coverage" violates FCC rules.

The office of Marilyn Mosby, the Maryland State's Attorney (SA) for Baltimore, filed the formal complaint last week against "FCC-licensed station WBFF, a Baltimore City-based Fox News-affiliated network." The complaint asked acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and the rest of the commission "to enlist the full investigative and enforcement powers granted to you by the federal government to take action against the WBFF as soon as possible." Mosby is a Democrat, and WBFF is part of the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group.

The closest the complaint comes to alleging a factual error is in reference to a guest on one segment who said that Mosby is "a follower of the George Soros playbook, who's... bought and paid for these elected DAs." The complaint said that "State's Attorney Mosby has never received a penny from George Soros or any of his political groups." However, that segment was made by one of Sinclair's national shows that runs on many stations and was not produced by WBFF.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a new low price on Apple's MagSafe Charger for the iPhone 12, with the wireless charging pad marked down to just under $30 at Amazon and Walmart. While that's still not cheap by wireless charger standards, it is $10 off Apple's MSRP and about $5 off the usual going rate we've tracked online over the past couple of months.

We recommended this charger in our guide to the best iPhone 12 accessories for supplying an advertised 15 W of power to Apple's latest smartphones, which makes it technically faster than most other wireless chargers on the market. It can get an iPhone 12 from 0 to 30 percent charge in about a half-hour and 0 to 60 percent in roughly one hour. Its magnetic design aligns easily and stays attached to those devices with little fuss, and it can work through certain MagSafe-compatible cases.

The usual trade-offs with wireless chargers still apply here, namely that it's not truly wire-free and that using a traditional USB-C-to-Lightning cable with the appropriate charger will still top your device up noticeably faster. You'll need a 20 W or higher USB-C 3.0 PD wall charger on hand to reach the MagSafe Charger's maximum charging rate, too. But if you like the convenience of simply plopping your new iPhone on a pad to charge and are willing to pay a premium for the fastest wireless speeds possible, this deal should make the cost more manageable.

Enlarge / An offshore wind farm in the UK. (credit: Dave Hughes)

After years of delays, the federal government has approved what will be the third offshore wind project in the US—and the largest by far. Vineyard Wind, situated off the coast of Massachusetts, will have a generating capacity of 800 Megawatts, dwarfing Block Island Wind's 30 MW and the output from two test turbines installed in Virginia.

Vineyard Wind has been approved a number of times but continued to experience delays during the Trump administration, which was openly hostile to renewable energy. But the Biden administration wrapped up an environmental review shortly before announcing a major push to accelerate offshore wind development.

The final hurdle, passed late Monday, was getting the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to issue an approval for Vineyard Wind's construction and operating plan. With that complete, the Departments of Commerce and Interior announced what they term the "final federal approval" to install 84 offshore turbines. Vineyard Wind will still have to submit paperwork showing that its construction and operation will be consistent with the approved plan; assuming that the operators can manage that, construction can begin.

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Samsung is planning big things for the next release of its Exynos system on a chip. The company has already promised that the "next generation" of its Exynos SoC will feature a GPU from AMD, which inked a partnership with Samsung in June 2019. A new report from The Korea Economic Daily provides more details.

The report says that "the South Korean tech giant will unveil a premium Exynos chip that can be used in laptops as well as smartphones in the second half of this year" and that "the new Exynos chip for laptops will use the graphics processing unit (GPU) jointly developed with US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices Inc."

There's a bit to unpack here. First, a launch this year would be an acceleration of the normal Samsung schedule. The last Exynos flagship was announced in January 2021, so you would normally pencil in the new Exynos for early next year. Second, the report goes out of its way to specify that the laptop chip will have an AMD GPU, so... not the smartphone chip?