Technology

Intel, TSMC Reportedly in Talks to Build New US Foundries The Trump Administration is reportedly in talks with both Intel and TSMC to open new foundries in the United States. The discussions are part of the Trump Administration’s efforts to reduce the US semiconductor industry’s overall reliance on China as …

How About an Intel B150 Motherboard With an Integrated GTX 1050 Ti?   One of the downsides — or “downsides”, depending on your point of view — to living in the United States is that we don’t get a lot of the weird electronics gear that exists elsewhere in the …

How Does Windows Use Multiple CPU Cores? A reader recently contacted us and asked a question worth answering in an article. How does Windows (and perhaps all OS’s) take advantage of multiple cores? Alternatively, if this function is built into the hardware, how do the cores know which apps to …

Asrock Announces $1,100 Water-Cooled Z490 Motherboard The motherboard manufacturer Asrock has announced a unique Z490 motherboard that seems almost certain to win the coveted 2020 award for Most Expensive Yet Pointless Feature. At first glance, the fact that the Z490 features a built-in water cooler for the CPU might seem …

How Much Power Do GPUs Actually Consume? Nailing down how much power PC components consume is a surprisingly difficult question. It’s easy to answer how much power a system draws at the wall — a basic Kill-A-Watt meter doesn’t cost much, and while it doesn’t offer features like power consumption …

Deep Space Nine Upscale Project (DS9UP): Technical Goals and FAQ I’ve been needing to write a sort of “mission statement” and FAQ for this project, and this seems as good a time as any. The goal of the Deep Space Nine Upscale Project (DS9UP) is to create a version of …

Wink Suddenly Demands $5 Monthly Subscription or It Will Break Your Smart Home   For years, Wink has been one of the best ways to set up and control your smart home. Rather than dealing with half a dozen different apps, you could run everything through Wink. Easy! However, the …

Liberty’s Virgin Media and Telefonica’s O2 to merge in the UK in $39B deal The regulators said “NO” when Telefonica tried to combine its O2 operations in the UK with rival carrier, Hutchison-owned Three, back in 2015. But Telefonica didn’t let go of the idea of divestment, and five years …

How to Upscale Video to 4K, 8K, and Beyond For the past three months, I’ve been working on what I’ve named the Deep Space Nine Upscale Project (DS9UP). The goal of DS9UP is to create a new, much-improved version of the show by applying modern processing techniques to the original …

Apple’s New 13-inch MacBook Pro Is the End of the Butterfly Keyboard Ding dong, the butterfly switch is dead! After five years of unpleasant typing, Apple computer users will be able to purchase any MacBook they want without fear of being stuck with the reviled and easily broken butterfly mechanism. …