slack_justyb writes: Mozilla has been heavily invested in WebAssembly with Firefox, and today, the organization teamed up with a few others to form the new Bytecode Alliance, which aims to create "new software foundations, building on standards such as WebAssembly and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI)." Mozilla has teamed up with Intel, Red Hat, and Fastly to found the alliance, but more members are likely to join over time. The goal of the Bytecode Alliance is to create a new runtime environment and language toolchains which are secure, efficient, and modular, while also being available on as many platforms and devices as possible. The technologies being developed by the Bytecode Alliance are based on WebAssembly and WASI, which have been seen as a potential replacement for JavaScript due to more efficient code compiling, and the expanded capabilities of being able to port C and C++ code to the web. To kick things off, the founding members have already contributed a number of open-source technologies to the Bytecode Alliance, including Wasmtime, a lightweight WebAssembly runtime; Lucet, an ahead-of-time compiler; WebAssembly Micro Runtime; and Cranelift.

Apple today launched a new 16-inch MacBook Pro. The starting price of $2,399 is the same price as the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro, which this one replaces. It has new processors, better speakers, a larger screen, and (finally) a better keyboard. The base model is powered by a 2.6GHz 6-core 9th gen Intel Core i7 processor (Turbo Boost up to 4.5 GHz) coupled with AMD Radeon Pro 5300M GPU with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, and 512GB PCIe-based onboard SSD. John Gruber, writing about the keyboard: We got it all: a return of scissor key mechanisms in lieu of butterfly switches, a return of the inverted-T arrow key arrangement, and a hardware Escape key. Apple stated explicitly that their inspiration for this keyboard is the Magic Keyboard that ships with iMacs. At a glance, it looks very similar to the butterfly-switch keyboards on the previous 15-inch MacBook Pros. But don't let that fool you -- it feels completely different. There's a full 1mm of key travel; the butterfly keyboards only have 0.5mm. This is a very good compromise on key travel, balancing the superior feel and accuracy of more travel with the goal of keeping the overall device thin. (The new 16-inch MacBook Pro is, in fact, a little thicker than the previous 15-inch models overall.) Calling it the "Magic Keyboard" threads the impossible marketing needle they needed to thread: it concedes everything while confessing nothing. Apple has always had a great keyboard that could fit in a MacBook -- it just hasn't been in a MacBook the last three years. There's also more space between keys -- about 0.5mm. This difference is much more noticeable by feel than by sight. Making it easier to feel the gaps between keys really does make a difference. Like the 15-inch MacBook Pro, all 16-inch models come with the Touch Bar. But even there, there's a slight improvement: it's been nudged further above the top row of keys, to help avoid accidental touches. No haptic feedback or any other functional changes to the Touch Bar, though.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Last May, when Intel released a patch for a group of security vulnerabilities researchers had found in the company's computer processors, Intel implied that all the problems were solved. But that wasn't entirely true, according to Dutch researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who discovered the vulnerabilities and first reported them to the tech giant in September 2018. The software patch meant to fix the processor problem addressed only some of the issues the researchers had found. It would be another six months before a second patch, publicly disclosed by the company on Tuesday, would fix all of the vulnerabilities Intel indicated were fixed in May, the researchers said in a recent interview.

The public message from Intel was "everything is fixed," said Cristiano Giuffrida, a professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the researchers who reported the vulnerabilities. "And we knew that was not accurate." While many researchers give companies time to fix problems before the researchers disclose them publicly, the tech firms can be slow to patch the flaws and attempt to muzzle researchers who want to inform the public about the security issues. Researchers often agree to disclose vulnerabilities privately to tech companies and stay quiet about them until the company can release a patch. Typically, the researchers and companies coordinate on a public announcement of the fix. But the Dutch researchers say Intel has been abusing the process. Now the Dutch researchers claim Intel is doing the same thing again. They said the new patch issued on Tuesday still doesn't fix another flaw they provided Intel in May. The Intel flaws, like other high-profile vulnerabilities the computer security community has recently discovered in computer chips, allowed an attacker to extract passwords, encryption keys and other sensitive data from processors in desktop computers, laptops and cloud-computing servers. Intel says the patches "greatly reduce" the risk of attack, but don't completely fix everything the researchers submitted.

The company's spokeswoman Leigh Rosenwald said Intel was publishing a timeline with Tuesday's patch for the sake of transparency. "This is not something that is normal practice of ours, but we realized this is a complicated issue. We definitely want to be transparent about that," she said. "While we may not agree with some of the assertions made by the researchers, those disagreements aside, we value our relationship with them."

The Zombieload vulnerability disclosed earlier this year in May has a second variant that also works against more recent Intel processors, not just older ones, including Cascade Lake, Intel's latest line of high-end CPUs -- initially thought to have been unaffected. From a report: Intel is releasing microcode (CPU firmware) updates today to address this new Zombieload attack variant, as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday -- known as the Intel Platform Update (IPU) process. Back in May, two teams of academics disclosed a new batch of vulnerabilities that impacted Intel CPUs. Collectively known as MDS attacks, these are security flaws in the same class as Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow. The attacks rely on taking advantage of the speculative execution process, which is an optimization technique that Intel added to its CPUs to improve data processing speeds and performance. Vulnerabilities like Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, showed that the speculative execution process was riddled with security holes. Disclosed in May, MDS attacks were just the latest line of vulnerabilities impacting speculative execution. They were different from the original Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow bugs disclosed in 2018 because they attacked different areas of a CPU's speculative execution process. Further reading: Flaw in Intel PMx driver gives 'near-omnipotent control over a victim device'.

ZDNet reports: In the never ending war between the chip giants, AMD has released a salvo by unveiling what are the world's most powerful desktop processors -- the new 24-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X... These 3rd-generation Ryzen Threadripper Processors are built using AMD's 7-nanometer "Zen 2" core architecture, and both chips feature 88 PCIe 4.0 lanes with extraordinary power efficiency.

On the performanced front, AMD claims that the new 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 3970X offers up to 90 percent faster performance over the competition... This performance doesn't mean the chips are power-hungry either, with AMD claiming they deliver up to 66 percent better power efficiency compared to previous generation processors. The new chips do, however, need a new socket. The new socket is called sTRX4, which offers expansion for serious multi-GPU and NVMe arrays, quad channel DDR4, ECC support, and unlocked overclocking.... [T]hey both will be available starting Tuesday, November 19.
Engadget reports: After getting some wins against Intel in the desktop enthusiast processor race, AMD is trying to run up the score with its latest model, the Ryzen 9 3950X. It has 16 cores/32 threads, a 3.5 Ghz base clock with up to 4.7 GHz boost (on two cores) and 105 watt power consumption (TDP), and costs $749, compared to $1,199 for Intel's 12-core i9-9920X. At the same time, AMD claims it outperforms the i9-9920X in gaming and even more so for content creation, where those extra cores can be best exploited.

According to the company, it'll do some Adobe Premiere tasks up to 26 percent quicker than an i9-9920X, and 42 percent faster than an 8-core i9-9900K. Better still, the Ryzen 9 3950X delivers 2.34 times more performance per watt than its Intel counterpart, and consumes 173W of absolute wall power compared to 304W for the i9-9920X. The power figures alone could be decisive for creators who run multiple workstations for 3D animation and rendering...

If $749 is $700 too much, AMD has another option -- the Athlon 3000G. The dual-core processor runs at 3.5Ghz, but AMD said it's "the only unlocked option in its segment," meaning you can push it to around 3.9Ghz. That'll boost its performance ahead of Intel's $73 Pentium G5400, AMD said. The Athlon 3000G will arrive November 19th for $49.

An anonymous reader shares a post: This week something happened that many may not have seen. Intel published a set of benchmarks showing advantage of a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 system versus the AMD EPYC 7742. Vendors present benchmarks to show that their products are good from time-to-time. There is one difference in this case: we checked Intel's work and found that they presented a number to intentionally mislead would-be buyers as to the company's relative performance versus AMD.

MojoKid writes: As the "S" in its name implies, the new Intel Core i9-9900KS that launched today is something akin to a Special Edition version of the company's existing Core i9-9900K 8-core CPU. The processors are built from the same slab of silicon -- an 8-core, Coffee Lake-refresh based die and packaged up for Intel's LGA1151 socket. What makes the Core i9-9900KS different from its predecessor are its base and turbo boost clocks, which are rated for 4GHz and 5GHz across all-cores, respectively, with enhanced binning of the chips to meet its performance criteria. The Core i9-9900KS is arguably the fastest processor available right now for single and lightly-threaded workloads, and offers the highest performance in gaming and graphics tests. In more heavily-threaded workloads that can leverage all of the additional processing resources available in a 12-core CPU like the Ryzen 9-3900X, however, the 8-core Intel Core i9-9900KS doesn't fare as well. It did catch AMD's 12-core Threadripper 2920X, which is based on the previous-gen Zen+ architecture, on a couple of occasions, however. Intel's new Core i9-9900KS desktop processor is available starting today at $513 MSRP.

During his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, said Intel CPU's security problems "are going to be with us for a very long time" and are "not going away." He added: "They're all CPU bugs, in some ways they're all the same problem," but each has to be solved in its own way. "MDS, RDDL, Fallout, Zombieland: They're all variants of the same basic problem." ZDNet reports: And they're all potentially deadly for your security: "RIDL and Zombieload, for example, can steal data across applications, virtual machines, even secure enclaves. The last is really funny, because [Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX)] is what supposed to be secure inside Intel ships" [but, it turns out it's] really porous. You can see right through this thing." To fix each problem as it pops up, you must patch both your Linux kernel and your CPU's BIOS and microcode. This is not a Linux problem; any operating system faces the same problem.

OpenBSD, a BSD Unix devoted to security first and foremost, Kroah-Hartman freely admits was the first to come up with what's currently the best answer for this class of security holes: Turn Intel's simultaneous multithreading (SMT) off and deal with the performance hit. Linux has adopted this method. But it's not enough. You must secure the operating system as each new way to exploit hyper-threading appears. For Linux, that means flushing the CPU buffers every time there's a context switch (e.g. when the CPU stops running one VM and starts another). You can probably guess what the trouble is. Each buffer flush takes a lot of time, and the more VMs, containers, whatever, you're running, the more time you lose. "The bad part of this is that you now must choose: Performance or security. And that is not a good option," Kroah-Hartman said. He added: "If you are not using a supported Linux distribution kernel or a stable/long term kernel, you have an insecure system."

theodp writes: It'll be interesting to see how Microsoft employees wary of empowering the military react to Wednesday's news of an Intel and Microsoft-led alliance that aims to enlist an army of JROTC high school students to fight the war for CS talent, with support from U.S. lawmakers. From the press release: Today, at the 2019 CSforALL Summit, leaders representing CSforALL and Air Force Junior ROTC announced JROTC-CS, an innovative new initiative that could dramatically increase the number of U.S. high school students taking an Advanced Placement computer science course, particularly among underrepresented populations like minority and female students. This public-private partnership is supported by an Advisory Consortium of industry and education organizations including founding members Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Capital One, Lockheed Martin, Snap Inc., the Air Force Association's Cyberpatriot, and the College Board. More than 500,000 cadets at 3,400 high schools across the U.S. and abroad participate in JROTC programs administered by each of the military services. Only 32% of these cadets have access to Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science Principles in their school, according to 2018-19 College Board data. The JROTC-CS initiative seeks to access this untapped human resource to address the national talent shortage in computing and cybersecurity and increase career opportunities for JROTC cadets, who are a highly diverse population — more than half are minority students and 40% are female. Additionally, JROTC is strongly represented in schools serving economically disadvantaged communities. [...] The JROTC-CS initiative is designed to complement the innovative, bi-partisan JROTC Cyber Training Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the 2020 House National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on July 12.

MojoKid writes: Intel took the wraps off a new CPU architecture today, one that is employed in its next-gen Lakefield series CPUs with Foveros chip tech that will power some next-gen Microsoft Surface devices, among others in 2020. Codenamed Tremont, it's a low-power, 10nm x86 microarchitecture that is the successor to Goldmont Plus, which was is found in current-gen Atom, Pentium Silver, and some Celeron series processors. Tremont targets compact, low-power packages and incorporates a number of updates to the instruction set, enhanced security features, and more advanced power management. Tremont delivers significant IPC (Instructions per Cycle) improvements as well, gen-over-gen versus Intel's current low power x86 architectures, to the tune of about 30%. Intel beleives Tremont-based processors will enable a new wave of innovative form factors for client devices, more efficient data center products, and new-found applications for the internet of things (IoT).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's October 15 hardware event is fast approaching, and in addition to the launch of the Pixel 4, Google Home Mini 2, Google WI-Fi 2, and a new pair of Pixel Buds, the show should usher in a new Pixelbook. We've known the new Pixelbook would be called the "Pixelbook Go," but other than a few details from Chrome OS commits, the device has mostly been a mystery. Google takes its title as "least secretive device manufacturer" very seriously, though, and recently 9to5Google managed to just get a Pixelbook Go ahead of the event. They took a bunch of pictures and video. Unlike the fairly unique design of the original Pixelbook and the Pixel Slate, the Pixelbook Go mostly just looks like a MacBook. 9to5Google got that vibe from the device in person, too, writing: "We can't fathom that this laptop won't immediately be labeled 'Google's MacBook.'" The one unique design aspect is the bottom, which is a brightly colored, ribbed pad that covers the entire bottom of the device. This device is a near-final prototype, with placeholder logos and product names.

9to5Google reports that the keyboard is "just as good or better than the first Pixelbook" and it "feels great to type on." The trackpad is "a traditional "diving board" trackpad and seemed sufficiently responsive and "clicky." There are single USB-C ports on the left and right side of the laptop, along with LEDs indicating the device's charging status. Like with past Pixelbooks, it seems like you can charge the device from either port. On the right side is also a headphone jack. Other specifications include: Intel Core m3, i5, and i7 configurations; Either 8GB or 16GB RAM; 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB storage; 2 front-firing speakers; 2MP front-facing camera -- 1080p at 60fps; Titan C chip; 13.3-inch touchscreen; and 16:9 aspect ratio, both Full HD or 4K "Molecular Display" options.

You can watch 9to5Google's hands-on video here.

System76, the Denver-based Linux PC manufacturer and developer of Pop OS, has some stellar news for those who prefer their laptops a little more open. Later this month the company will begin shipping two of their laptop models with its Coreboot-powered open source firmware. From a report: Beginning today, System76 will start taking pre-orders for both the Galago Pro and Darter Pro laptops. The systems will ship out later in October, and include the company's Coreboot-based open source firmware which was previously teased at the 2019 Open Source Firmware Conference. (Coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and run a modern 32-bit or 64-bit operating system.) What's so great about ripping out the proprietary firmware included in machines like this and replacing it with an open alternative? To begin with, it's leaner. System76 claims that users can boot from power off to the desktop 29% faster with its Coreboot-based firmware.

[...] Both of these laptops can be kitted out with 10th-Generation Intel CPUs (specifically the i5-10210U and the i7-10510U), and both have glare-resistant matte 1080p IPS displays. Beginning at $949, the Galago Pro features an all-aluminum chassis, a wealth of connectivity options including HDMI, DisplayPort to USB-C and Thunderbolt, and can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM and up to 6TB of storage space. The Darter Pro, meanwhile, can be built out with 32GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage, and features up to 10 hours of battery life.

When Kaby Lake G debuted at CES 2018, it made a big bang. No one expected sworn rivals Intel and AMD to collaborate on a CPU package, marrying a 7th-gen Kaby Lake CPU with a unique AMD Radeon RX Vega GPU. But what began with a bang ended Monday with an unceremonious memo. From a report: The Product Change Notification published by Intel on Monday confirmed that pretty much every single Kaby Lake G, including the Core i7-8706G, the Core i7-8705G, and the Core i5-8305G, would be discontinued. Last call for orders will be on January 17, 2020, and the final shipments are scheduled for July 31, 2020. While the end of life of a processor isn't typically a big deal to consumers who own them, one sticking point could have been driver support. Specifically, Kaby Lake G drivers for the custom AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics come only from Intel. With a normal discrete GPU, the consumer would download drivers from the original company, such as Nvidia or AMD. With Kaby Lake G kaput, where does that leave Kaby Lake G-owners? Intel said the company will follow its standard policy and provide driver support for Kaby Lake G for five years from the launch of the product. All told, that probably means another 3.5 years of driver updates.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the interesting developments of Intel's 9th Generation Core processors for desktops, known as the S-series, was that the company decided to release versions of the hardware with the graphics disabled in order to use every chip from the wafer. At the time Intel was criticised on its pricing: it was offering the same processor minus graphics for the same bulk unit cost, with no discount. Today Intel is adjusting its strategy, and pricing these F and KF processors lower than before. Nearly every 9th Generation Core processor for the desktop has a corresponding graphics-free option: the Core i9-9900K has its Core i9-9900KF, the Core i5-9500 has a Core i5-9500F. The difference between these two parts is just a matter of disabled graphics, which means the user can't take advantage of Intel's QuickSync or a display, however most of these processors end up in systems with discrete graphics cards anyway. At the time of launch, Intel priced them identically to the parts that did have graphics, but ultimately retail outlets were selling the K and KF processors at a small discount. Intel's announcement today makes that price difference official.

Last week Infoworld reported on a reunion of more than 1,000 former employees of Sun Microsystems including all four founders of the company -- Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy -- at just their second reunion since the 2010 Oracle acquisition. Prior to the formal festivities, the company founders met with a small group of press persons. Pondering recent developments in computing, Bill Joy, who is now concentrating on climate change solutions, recalled that Sun tried to do natural language processing, but the hardware was not fast enough. Regarding the emergence of the iPhone, Joy said the advent of mobility and data networks has been transformational for society. He noted that Sun had that kind of vision with Java ME, with Sun trying to do programmable smartphones. "But the hardware was just really nascent at the time," Joy said. Machine learning, though, will be as transformational as the smartphone, he added.

McNealy emphasized Sun's willingness to share technology, such as the Network File System (NFS), which helped to bring about the open source software movement now prevalent today. "We didn't invent open source but we [made it] happen. We were the leader of that parade." Asked if Sun should have moved from Sparc Risc processors and Solaris Unix to Intel processors and Linux, McNealy said he did not want to talk about mistakes he had made as Sun CEO but such a switch was not what Sun should have done....

Among those proudest of Sun's achievements was Sun founder and CEO Scott McNealy, who, taking the stage, had some sharp words for Facebook, which now occupies one of Sun's former Silicon Valley campuses, without mentioning Facebook by name. "I remember some company moved into one of our old headquarters buildings," McNealy said. "And the CEO said, we're going to leave the [Sun Microsystems] logos up because we want everybody in our company to remember what can happen to you if you don't pay attention. This company could do well to do one-one-hundredth of what we did."

Intel researchers published a paper last week suggesting a new kind of CPU memory to block side-channel attacks like Meltdown and Spectre, according to ZDNet: SAPM -- or Speculative-Access Protected Memory -- is the work of Intel STORM (STrategic Offensive Research & Mitigations), a team of elite security researchers that Intel assembled since 2017 to work on creating mitigations for all the speculative-execution attacks that have impacted the CPU maker's products. SAPM is only an idea for the moment, and there are no silicon prototypes. Intel STORM engineers only released "the theory and possible implementation options," to provide "a ground base for other researchers to improve upon and also for the industry to consider...."

Intel STORM researchers say SAPM will implement protections at the hardware level and will work with both physical and virtual memory addresses. "SAPM can be applied to specific memory ranges, with the attribute that any memory access to such memory type will be instruction-level serialized, meaning that any speculative execution beyond the SAPM-accessing instruction will be stopped pending the successful retirement of this SAPM-accessing instruction," Intel STORM developers said in their short description of SAPM's basic principles...

Intel STORM researchers say the second part (backend) of most speculative execution attacks performs the same actions. SAPM was designed to introduce hardware-based protections against the backend part of most attacks. It's because of this concept that Intel's research team believes that SAPM will also future-proof the next generations of Intel CPUs against other -- currently undiscovered -- speculative execution attacks.
"Intel STORM researchers don't deny that there's a performance hit," the article adds. "However, this impact is low and could be mitigated further by dropping other existing protections."

Intel and Brown University have started work on a DARPA-backed Intelligent Spine Interface project that would use AI to restore movement and bladder control for those with serious spinal cord injuries. Engadget reports: The two-year effort will have scientists capture motor and sensory signals from the spinal cord, while surgeons will implant electrodes on both ends of an injury to create an "intelligent bypass." From there, neural networks running on Intel tools will (hopefully) learn how to communicate motor commands through the bypass and restore functions lost to severed nerves. The initial interface will use external computing hardware to interpret spine signals. In the long term, the collaborators would like a wholly implanted system to make the connection.

Intel is whacking the prices of its high-end i9 processors as it refreshes an aging design. From a report: For example, last year's top-end Core i9-9980XE processor costing $1,990 at retail is replaced by the $979 Core i9-10980XE. The new chips are due to arrive in November. "People were stuck in the top part of the mainstream," unwilling to pay a lot more money for a bit more performance, said Frank Soqui, vice president of Intel's Client Computing Group. It's also cutting prices of the chips used in the related but more corporate high-end market: workstations. The price cuts are as deep as 50 percent, Soqui said.

These 10th-generation Intel i9 chips are built on an aging core called Skylake, but Intel has managed to squeeze out steady if unspectacular performance improvements in the chips year after year. Intel's newer Ice Lake-based designs have just begun arriving, but they're limited to power-sensitive, premium laptops. Once-dominant Intel faces plenty of competition in the chip market as smartphones have moved into our lives. Those are powered by the Arm family of chips, manufactured by companies like Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung. But Arm's virtues when it comes to sipping power can't keep pace with Intel's clout when you have a behemoth computer you don't have to unplug from that electrical power outlet on the wall.

At an event today, where Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop 3, Windows 10X, and an Android smartphone, the company also unveiled refreshed editions of its laptop-tablet hybrids: the Surface Pro 7, and the Surface Pro X. About the Surface Pro 7, which features a USB-C port: The price tag has also changed slightly: The Surface Pro 7 starts at $749 ($150 less than its predecessor). It's available for preorder today and ships on October 22. Microsoft has simply replaced the Mini DisplayPort with USB-C. There is still a USB-A port for all your existing accessories. Adding a USB-C port finally puts the Surface Pro on par with the Surface Book 2 of two years ago and last year's Surface Go. Surface fans have long asked for USB-C ports and Microsoft has been very slowly delivering. Surface Pro 7 comes with 10th-generation Intel Core processors (upgradeable all the way up to quad-core) and starts at 128GB of SSD storage (upgradable to 1TB). Like its predecessor, the Surface Pro 7 still comes with 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of RAM. Otherwise, the design is largely unchanged. The Surface Pro 7 still has a 12.3-inch display, 2736 x1824 resolution, and 267ppi. The Surface Pro 6 was available in black and silver, and so is the Surface Pro 7. About the Surface Pro X: Seattle tech giant unveiled the Surface Pro X, the spiritual successor to the Surface, the Surface 2, the Surface 3, and the Surface Go. It's ultra-slim and lightweight, with a bezel-to-bezel 13-inch display and an adjustable kickstand. And it's the first machine to ship with a custom-designed, ARM-based Microsoft SQ1 system-on-chip co-engineered with Qualcomm. The Surface Pro X will be available on November 5, starting at $999, and Microsoft will begin taking preorders today.

On the display front, you're looking at a PixelSense panel with 2880 x 1920 resolution with a 267-pixel-per-inch screen density and a 1400:1 contrast ratio. Microsoft says it has the thinnest bezels of any 2-in-1. Under the hood, the Surface Pro X sports the aforementioned 7-nanometer SQ1, which Microsoft says delivers more performance per watt than the chip in the Surface Pro 6. It's an octa-core processor Qualcomm-designed Kryo cores clocked at 3GHz and running at 7 watts maximum, sitting alongside a redesigned GPU and integrated AI accelerator. Altogether, it delivers 9 teraflops of computational power, with the graphics chip alone pushing 2.1 teraflops.

At its Surface event in New York City today, Microsoft refreshed its Surface Laptop with updated specs, USB-C support, and AMD Ryzen 7. From a report: This is the first time a Surface device has been powered by AMD. Furthermore, while the Surface Laptop 2 only came in a 13.5-inch size, the Surface Laptop 3 is available in 13.5-inch and 15-inch flavors. The Surface Laptop 3 starts at $999 (same as the Surface Laptop 2 and the original Surface Laptop). The 15-inch version starts at $1,199. The Surface Laptop 3 is available for preorder today and ships on October 22. Panos Panay, head of engineering for all of Microsoft's devices, said the Surface Laptop has the highest customer satisfaction of any laptop in its class. He shared that the trackpad is 20% larger, the hard drive is removable, and the laptop is now available in a machined aluminum finish.