Earlier this year, we didn’t expect much from Intel’s upcoming eighth-generation Core processors. But at Computex in May, the company surprised us all by revealing they’ll be 30 percent faster than last year’s chips. That alone would have been notable, but now Intel is making an even bolder claim: They’re actually 40 percent speedier. At least, that’s the case for one of its laptop chips when running through the Sysmark benchmark. And when it comes to five-year-old computers — the kind Intel expects the majority of consumers to upgrade from — they’re twice as fast at productivity tasks. So how did Intel manage this feat? For the first time, it managed to cram four CPU cores into its U-series chips, which have typically been intended for ultraportable laptops and hybrid devices. To go quad-core with the company’s previous chips, you’d have to step up to its H-series CPUs, which are designed for more performance-focused notebooks. Additionally, Intel managed to squeeze another 500MHz of Turbo Boost performance into the chips, allowing them to reach speeds up to 4.2GHz. Whereas last year’s seventh-generation CPUs were focused on improving 4K performance, the upcoming offerings will feature far more raw performance. The eighth-generation Core family for ultraportables ranges from the i5-8250U, with speeds between 1.6GHz and 3.4GHz, and the i7-8650U, clocking from 1.9GHz to 4.2GHz. They’re all quad-core chips, but as usual, you can expect better performance from the i7 lineup. As for other notable stats, Intel claims the 8250U can encode a 4K video 14.7 times faster than a five-year-old PC running a comparable chip. In real-world terms, the eighth-gen chip converted the 4K clip in three minutes, compared to 45 minutes with its third-gen sibling. Unsurprisingly, then, the older your computer is, the bigger performance jump you’ll notice. Despite having more power under the hood, Intel says the new CPUs won’t be a step backwards when it comes to battery life. Unfortunately, there’s nothing really pushing battery life forward either. Its current benchmarks indicate that laptops running these chips should feature around 10 hours of battery life when playing 4K video. That’s pretty much the same as before. To be fair, though, last year’s chips also reclaimed some battery life with more efficient 4K performance. Intel is basically following through with its typical game plan: Release a new batch of chips for ultraportables, and then ramp things up on the desktop end. With quad-core performance, we might finally be able to see ultraportable notebooks that can go toe to toe with last year’s beefier machines. And the company continues to look ahead as well. During a private briefing, I got a chance to see a few device prototypes that looked nothing like PCs we have today. I can’t say much about them, but overall, they made it clear that Intel isn’t just planning to coast on traditional PCs forever. You can expect the first batch of laptops with eighth-generation Intel CPUs in September. Desktop models will follow later in the fall. Looking ahead even further into next year, the company expects to release its first 10-nanometer chips as part of this generation as well.
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Intel’s eighth-gen CPUs will be more powerful than we thought
Reader MojoKid writes: AMD continues its attack on the desktop CPU market versus Intel today, with the official launch of the company’s Ryzen Threadripper processors. Threadripper is AMD’s high-end, many-core desktop processor, that leverages the same Zen microarchitecture that debuted with Ryzen 7. The top-end Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is a multi-chip module featuring 16 processor cores (two discrete die), with support for 32 threads. The base frequency for the 1950X is 3.4GHz, with all-core boost clocks of up to 3.7GHz. Four of the cores will regularly boost up to 4GHz, however, and power and temperature permitting, those four cores will reach 4.2GHz when XFR kicks in. The 12-core Threadripper 1920X has very similar clocks and its boost and XFR frequencies are exactly the same. The Threadripper 1920X’s base-clock, however, is 100MHz higher than its big brother, at 3.5GHz. In a litany of benchmarks with multi-threaded workloads, Threadripper 1950X and 1920X high core-counts, in addition to strong SMT scaling, result in the best multi-threaded scores seen from any single CPU to date. Threadripper also offers massive amounts of memory bandwidth and more IO than other Intel processors. Though absolute power consumption is somewhat high, Threadrippers are significantly more efficient than AMD’s previous-generation processors. In lightly-threaded workloads, Threadripper trails Intel’s latest Skylake-X CPUs, however, which translates to lower performance in applications and games that can’t leverage all of Threadripper’s additional compute resources. Threadripper 1950X and 1920X processors are available starting today at $999 and $799, respectively. On a per-core basis, they’re less expensive than Intel Skylake-X and very competitively priced. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
According to MSPoweruser, the London Metropolitan Police are still using around 18, 000 PCs powered by Windows XP, an operating system Microsoft stopped supporting in 2014. What’s more is that the police force is upgrading its PCs from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, instead of Windows 10. Only 8 PCs at the police force are reportedly powered by the “most secure version of Windows right now.” From the report: From the looks of things, the London Metropolitan Police will continue to upgrade their systems to Windows 8.1 at the moment. Windows 8.1 is still being supported by Microsoft, although the mainstream support for the OS is set to end on the 9 January 2018. Microsoft will offer extended support for the OS until 2023, which means Windows 8.1 is still a much more secure alternative for the Metropolitan Police than Windows XP. Windows 10 still would have been the best option in terms of security, however. Microsoft is releasing security updates for the OS every month, and the new advanced security features like Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection makes PCs running Windows a whole lot more secure. The spokesman of the 0Conservative London Assembly said in a statement: “The Met is working towards upgrading its software, but in its current state it’s like a fish swimming in a pool of sharks. It is vital the Met is given the resources to step up its upgrade timeline before we see another cyber-attack with nationwide security implications.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes: The Necurs botnet has been harnessed to fling a new strain of ransomware dubbed “Jaff”. Jaff spreads in a similar way to the infamous file-encrypting malware Locky and even uses the same payment site template, but is nonetheless a different monster. Attached to dangerous emails is an infectious PDF containing an embedded DOCM file with a malicious macro script. This script will then download and execute the Jaff ransomware. Locky — like Jaff — also used the Necurs botnet and a booby-trapped PDF, security firm Malwarebytes notes. “This is where the comparison ends, since the code base is different as well as the ransom itself, ” said Jerome Segura, a security researcher at Malwarebytes. “Jaff asks for an astounding 2 BTC, which is about $3, 700 at the time of writing.” Proofpoint reckons Jaff may be the work of the same cybercriminals behind Locky, Dridex and Bart (other nasty malware) but this remains unconfirmed. And Forcepoint Security Labs reports that malicious emails carrying Jaff are being cranked out at a rate of 5 million an hour on Thursday, or 13 million in total at the time it wrote up a blog post about the new threat. Read more of this story at Slashdot.