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More details about Microsoft’s upcoming Surface announcements have leaked out, revealing images of what apparently are the Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3, and an ARM-based Surface, with perhaps more to come.

Evan Blass, whose Twitter handle is published what appear to be marketing materials for the upcoming Surface devices, scheduled to be unveiled at a Microsoft event on Wednesday. The published photos generally line up with what was expected, including two different sizes of the Surface Laptop 3. A Microsoft representative did not immediately respond when asked for comment.

There could be a surprise, too: a dual-screen Surface, Blass tweeted. (Though I follow Blass on Twitter and can see the images he posted, his tweets are protected—meaning that they can’t be linked to directly.)

In short, the images Blass shows point to at least several products being revealed on Wednesday:

Surface Pro 7

Surface Laptop 3 (13-inch and 15-inch)

Surface with ARM

Dual-screen Surface (known as  Centaurus)

Surface images answer several questions

Assuming they’re real—and Blass has a good reputation in this regard—the images Blass posted clear up a couple of questions. For one, the Surface Pro 7 includes both a new USB-C port as well as a USB-A connection and a Surface Connector, supporting all three I/O technologies. (The Surface Laptop 3 may also include all three ports, but of the images Blass leaked, only the left side of the chassis isn’t shown—the side that typically houses the USB-A port. It does show the Surface Connector on the right-hand side.)

Blass didn’t reveal a Surface Book 3, probably giving credence to the rumor that it won’t appear.

Given that Blass seems to have unearthed a trove of marketing materials, it’s telling that the dual-screen device he apparently found evidence of doesn’t have any pictures associated with it. That could mean that Microsoft is keeping photos of it locked down tightly, or else just a prototype will be shown on stage. We’ll know more on Wednesday.

Abigail Smith is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles on  Printer Customer Support and many other related topics. He is a very knowledgeable person with lots of experience.

The Fall harvest has brought us new crop of Lenovo Yoga laptops. This season, the password is “10th gen.” PCWorld walks you through a stack of 10th gen laptops and tells you which one is the most 10th-gen of the 10th gens.

At the more affordable end of the pool you get the Yoga C740 14 and Yoga C740 15.6. Both feature 10th-gen Comet Lake CPUs, the last of the 14nm chips, officially “14nm++.” For this lineup, Lenovo skips discrete graphics for the integrated Intel UHD graphics.

For those who want more power, Lenovo’s Yoga C940 15.6 keeps the 15.6-inch screen of the C740, but can handle up to the more powerful 9th-gen Core i9 CPU. Rather than rely on Intel’s UHD graphics alone, Lenovo also integrates an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. Because it’s a convertible laptop that you might want to take with you and use as a tablet or mini-movie theater, Lenovo drops in a screen capable of hitting 500 nits of brightness for use outdoors.

For those who actually want Intel’s latest hardware, the Yoga C940 with 14-inch panel will be the only new Yoga to feature Intel’s 10th-gen 10nm Ice Lake CPU. You can read more in the linked stories about our performance preview of Intel’s 10nm 10th gen CPU, and which 10th-gen CPUs will be best for which uses.

Abigail Smith is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles on  Printer Customer Support and many other related topics. He is a very knowledgeable person with lots of experience.

If your brain broke this morning when Intel announced its 10th-gen Comet Lake laptop CPUs, which will sell alongside its 10th-gen Ice Lake chips, we understand.

Among the two different manufacturing processes (one advanced and one very refined) as well as very different graphics cores, core counts and power levels, it’s confusing enough to make you want to switch to a Windows on ARM laptop (just kidding, we’re not that frustrated). Even Intel itself admits there “might be some confusion” between its different 10th-gen  CPUs.

How to use our chart

On the far left are the individual model numbers of each new 10th-gen CPU. As you look across the table, you’ll see important performance criteria and how we’re rating each CPU model. As you move from left to right, ask yourself how important each criterion is for what you do or might do, and note how it balances against the other CPUs.

New instructions

With the 10th-gen Ice Lake CPUs, Intel has added support for AVX512 instructions, which can speed up deep learning and AI functionality. This can manifest in photo applications that can detect faces faster and with more accuracy. We call features like AVX512 “future proof,” because the truth is the vast majority of applications today don’t use the new instructions. If you buy into the new feature, it’ll likely take months if not years for them to be used. Is it worth it? One example of “future proofing” was the SSE support in the Pentium III. It offered minimal practical benefits when launched in 1999 but rapidly became worth its weight in gold once MP3 encoders supported it. With 10th gen, only the 10nm-based Ice Lake CPUs have AVX512.

Quick Sync video encoding performance

Quick Sync is specialized video encoding hardware in Intel CPUs with integrated graphics support. The 10th-gen Ice Lake features Intel’s newest encoding engine, which can be dramatically faster especially with newer HEVC/H.265 CODECs. Applications will need to be updated to support the faster performance. If video conversion using the newest formats is important to you, the 10th-gen Ice Lake should rank higher.

Multi-core workloads like video editing

More cores are generally going to be better for most advanced content creation chores such as video editing, 3D modelling, or advanced photo tools that support the additional cores. You might also want to look to multi-core performance CPUs if you like to run multiple apps that are CPU-intensive at the same time. A CPU with more cores tends to outperform one with fewer cores when multi-tasking heavily, so look to the CPU with the most cores for that job. In this case, it’s the Core i7-10710U.

However, if your idea of multi-tasking is having Chrome open alongside Outlook, Word, and Excel, then a quad-core or even dual-core would likely be perfectly fine, as long as it’s paired with enough RAM and an SSD.

Single-core workloads like photo editing or Office

Most applications, even new ones, usually don’t take advantage of multi-core CPUs. These apps instead tend to get more performance from just a core or two running at very high clock speeds or with greater efficiency. Yes, Megahertz still matters. For this category, we rate the CPUs with the highest clock speeds, and the capability to actually hold them at the top. In this case, the 10th-gen Comet Lake CPUs that can hit 4.9GHz and 4.7GHz are likely to outpace the 10th-gen Ice Lake chips by a step or two.

Gaming and graphics performance

Gaming and graphics performance is pretty straightforward. The CPUs with the best graphics performance will give you smoother gaming or prettier graphics. With this generation, the 10th-gen Ice Lake chips with the “G7” rating get the highest rating. In fact, it can be on a par with some discrete graphics chips. We’re rating the graphics performance of the 10th-gen Comet Lake CPUs as “adequate,” because for the most part, it’s the same as previous 8th-gen, 7th-gen, and 6th-gen laptops in graphics performance.

Battery life

Our last category is how we’d rate each CPU model based on battery life. We say this with the caution that battery life of a laptop is a recipe based on each individual laptop design including the screen quality and type, the screen resolution, the battery size, and the tuning by the laptop vendor. Still, the CPUs we rate as the best are the ones intentionally tuned to lower power consumption. For 10th-gen Comet Lake, it’s the Y series of CPUs and the power-sipping dual-core 10th-gen Ice Lake CPUs.

Abigail Smith is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles on  Printer Customer Support and many other related topics. He is a very knowledgeable person with lots of experience. If you’re not running A/V protection right now and you want more than what Windows Defender offers, this is a great buy.

While Google and Apple are working to deliver typing prompts and custom profile photos in their message apps, OnePlus is beefing up its own messaging app in a different way: with a healthy dose of AI-powered organization.

On the OnePlus 7 and 7 Pro, the upcoming OnePlus 7T, and coming soon to older handsets, OnePlus’s stock Messages app will gain a “Smart SMS” feature. No longer will your messages merely populate your phone in chronological order, cluttered with bill reminders, payment notifications, and one-time passwords. Texts from businesses will clearly be separate from the ones your friends send, all sorted automatically based on content. The system went live in India Thursday, with expansion planned for additional countries, including the United States.

It’s similar to how Google’s Gmail works, and very much a why-didn’t-someone-think-of-this-sooner feature you’d normally expect from Google or another tech juggernaut. Instead, OnePlus has partnered with an AI company named Gupshup to deliver this upgrade. Gupshup CEO Beerud Sheth says it’s been a long time coming. “When you think about the enterprise messaging experience today, it essentially hasn’t changed for 20 years,” Sheth pointed out.

Cutting down on the clutter

Instead of a simple chronological list of your conversations, OnePlus Messages will feature three folders at the top of the screen: Promotional, Transactional, and OTP (one-time passwords). As messages come in, they’ll be sorted appropriately, just like Gmail’s Primary, Social, and Promotions tabs. That means messages from your bank and credit card company will land in Transactional, 2FA codes will end up in OTP, and deals and sales from stores will go straight to Promotional.

The new features won’t be optional, and folders can’t be customized or deleted, though as always you can opt for a different Android messaging app. But if you’re the kind of person who fanatically deletes unwanted messages, you may want to give it a try.

Privacy takes precedence

I know what you’re thinking: The last thing you want is for someone to be able to read your texts. Sheth stressed numerous times that the AI software works entirely on the device, and neither OnePlus nor Gupshup will see or store any messages. Privacy was paramount in developing the system, Sheth said, which is part of the reason why the model is limited to so-called enterprise messages. “There is no user data that goes from the device to the server,” Sheth said. “All computations happen on the device.”

Gupshup isn’t sure whether the public or the AI is ready to expand to personal or MMS messages. He said that it could expand to other “high-frequency use cases,” but it would take far greater training models. For now, Sheth merely wants to clear out the junk so your message list is cleaner.

“Your messaging app now is just a list of text messages,” he said. “Now it will appear as a list of cards for each of the things that you’re doing, and it makes it much easier and convenient to use.”

Abigail Smith is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles on  Printer Customer Support and many other related topics. He is a very knowledgeable person with lots of experience.

In a massive storage data dump, Intel laid out its Optane roadmap and claimed an edge in Penta Level Cell NAND technology. That’s not even mentioning the company’s plans for fatter SSDs, and how long it’ll take to get persistent memory to consumer PCs.

The announcements were made Thursday morning at a storage event in Seoul, South Korea, where Intel showed off some new technology coming down the pike. Intel also announced that, after the very public and amicable divorce from Micron, it’s moving its Optane development to Rancho Rio, New Mexico.

Optane Roadmap: Barlow Pass

If you’ve had a hint that Intel’s been closely aligning its storage efforts with its CPU efforts, that hint turned into a nudge on Thursday: Intel confirmed that its upcoming Cooper Lake and Ice Lake CPUs will have support for its 2nd-generation Optane DC Persistent Memory modules. Codenamed Barlow Pass, the Optane modules will be closely tied with the upcoming Xeon CPUs. And yup, a yet unnamed, but rumored-to-be-called Crow Pass will be tied with its upcoming Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs.

Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory are high-density, high-performance, non-volatile memory modules that go into DDR4 slots. Using proprietary methods, they allow servers to pack in terabytes of non-volatile storage closely coupled to the CPU. For software vendors who have optimized for Optane DC Persistent Memory along with Optane SSDs, both performance and cost savings can be very significant, Intel said.

2nd-gen Optane SSD: Alder Stream goes off the page

Intel’s next-generation Optane will expand beyond DC Persistent Modules to build Optane DC SSDs. Code-named Alder Stream, Intel said the performance goes off the page.

In the performance claim above, Intel shows the prowess of its first-gen P4800X Optane DC SSD as it tears up an Intel DC P4610 NAND SSD. Optane’s low latency performance has long been proven. But if you look at the next performance claim, you can see how the next-gen Alder Stream rips in latency and IOP performance. While the 1st-gen P4800X runs out of steam above half a million IOPS, Alder Stream seems nearly unstoppable.

Intel: Our PLC NAND has an edge

With half the world’s data being created in just the last two years alone, everyone will need more space, Intel officials said. That means our current QLC (Quad-Level Cell) SSDs won’t cut it.

For that, Intel said it’s moving ahead with plans for five-bits-per-cell NAND, or Penta-Level Cell (PLC). As the name implies, five bits means five possible values for each cell, compared to the original Single Level Cell’s single bit or Quad Level Cell’s four bits per cell.

Intel DC Persistent Memory DIMMS: Not ready for consumers

The last bit of news concerns Intel’s plans to get those DIMM-based Optane modules into consumers’ hands. Today, it’s limited solely to data center applications, and it will soon arrive in workstations.

Intel officials said the hardware is there, and there is already some support for DIMM-based Optane modules in Windows 10. However, the company believes it’ll take at least another year or two before applications and the OS can make full use of it.

Abigail Smith is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles on  Printer Customer Support and many other related topics. He is a very knowledgeable person with lots of experience. If you’re not running A/V protection right now and you want more than what Windows Defender offers, this is a great buy.