Google has announced it will shut down Stadia for good on January 18, 2023. The company has already halted all Stadia-related transactions on its store and is preparing full refunds for most Stadia purchases. Anyone who bought Stadia hardware like the controller or a Stadia Chromecast bundle through Google’s store should receive a refund by January 18. Unfortunately, those who purchased Stadia products through retail stores like Best Buy are out of luck....

“We are discontinuing Google Translate in mainland China due to low usage,” Google said in a statement. But according to web analytics platform Similarweb (via the South China Morning Post), the Chinese Google Translate website recorded 53.5 million visits from desktop and mobile users combined in August. Google has had a complex relationship with China over the years. A massive cyberattack combined with the copious government censorship internet users must contend with prompted the US firm to pull its search engine from China in 2010, just four years after officially entering the market....

As a side note, last month we decided to stop tracking the CPU market as we observed that segment is basically back to normal and that continues to be true in July which is great news indeed. In fact, in our regular coverage we’ve mentioned how popular chips like the Ryzen 5600X is now selling at or below its $300 MSRP. Follow up: Stock Update August 2021, September 2021, October 2021, November 2021, December 2021, January 2022, February 2022, March 2022, April 2022, May 2022, June 2022...

A similar scenario is found when looking at the Radeon HD 6850 cards on offer. About $175 for a standard model (775MHz), while the HIS reference card is $165. Stepping things up, the Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X is $180 (775MHz) and the 6850 IceQ X Turbo (820MHz, our review unit) costs $190. In strict mathematical sense, you can expect to pay 20% more for the 6870 IceQ X Turbo X over a standard reference card, while the 6850 IceQ X Turbo is fetching about 15% more....

IO followed up on the success of its first title by releasing a sequel, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, in 2002 for PC and major consoles, as well as a third entry, Hitman: Contracts, in 2004, and a fourth, Hitman: Blood Money, in 2006. Due for a break from the Hitman franchise, IO shifted to other projects for the next half a decade. Fast-forward six years and it seems the developer is ready to revive the infamous Agent 47 in Hitman’s fifth game, which crept onto shelves last Tuesday, November 20 – or the 47th week of the year....

TorrentFreak, which collected data from BitTorrent over the past weekend, has compiled a list of the most pirated classic Christmas movies and a clear winner emerged. Home Alone, starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, topped the list followed by its sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, in second place. The Grinch, Elf and How the Grinch Stole Christmas rounded out the top five, in that order....

Other times, they take steps that leave users dumbfounded. Here’s one example. Apple for the longest time made it unnecessarily difficult to mass delete messages in its Mail app. With iOS 9, Apple finally saw the light and baked in a “delete all” feature… only to backtrack and remove the option a year later with iOS 10. If you’re like me and receive a ton of spam daily, not being able to clean out an inbox in a hurry is a major inconvenience....

The Galaxy Note products tend to be in the very upper echelon when it comes to smartphone pricing, so naturally not everyone is willing to fork out the cash required for such a premium device. This creates space for a market of mid-range handsets with large displays, exactly where HTC’s new product - the unimaginatively named Desire 816 - fits right in. The HTC Desire 816’s main feature is the large 5....

Now one of the biggest smartphone manufacturers in the world, Huawei is especially popular in Asia. The Shenzhen giant has come to the table in 2016 with their most compelling device ever: the Huawei P9. This is, without a doubt, a high-end flagship constructed with the same precision and quality as any of its competitors, including Samsung, HTC, and even Apple. This mid-sized phone is packed with modern hardware in every corner, and gives long time incumbents a serious run for their money....

Trying to distribute computing tasks across multiple locations and then coordinate those various efforts into a cohesive, meaningful whole is a lot harder than it first appears. This is particularly true when attempting to scale small proof-of-concept projects into full-scale production. Issues like moving enormous amounts of data from location to location—which, ironically, was supposed to be unnecessary with edge computing—as well as overwhelming demands to label that data are just two of several factors that have conspired to make successful edge computing deployments the exception as opposed to the rule....

Then compared the three CPUs with only 6 cores / 12 threads enabled to see how much of a difference the L3 cache capacity made when it came to gaming performance. After that, we compared that data to the 10700K and 10900K with 8 cores enabled, and finally the 10900K with all of its 10 cores turned on. Long story short, it turns out that in almost all games, it’s not the core count but the L3 cache capacity that is responsible for the improved performance seen across the higher-end Intel parts....

Playing BioShock using the low quality preset sees the Core i7-4790 deliver a barely playable 36.7fps at 1280x800. The Core i5-4690 also scrapes by with 35fps while the i3-4350 drops just below 30fps. None of the integrated graphics chips were powerful enough to deliver playable performance when using the low quality preset, even at resolutions as low as 1280x800. The Core i5-5690 was able to average 37fps in Hitman: Absolution using the lowest quality settings but the Core i3 processors weren’t so fortunate with just 27fps....

The Core i7-4960X is clocked slightly higher than the i7-4770K so it isn’t surprising to find both delivering similar performance. Thanks to a 300MHz frequency bump the i7-4960X was slightly faster than the i7-3960X. Again we see that the Core i7-4960X and i7-4770K delivered virtually the same results, making them slightly faster than the lower clocked i7-3960X. Finally we have Battlefield 3 and here the Core i7-4960X pulled 1fps ahead of the i7-4770K, making it 2fps faster than the i7-3960X....

Another advantage Ivy Bridge had over Sandy Bridge was the improved 3rd Gen Intel HD Graphics, which was up to 50% faster in some of our tests. However like Sandy Bridge-E the new Ivy Bridge-E architecture completely dumps the on-die GPU to make way for extra cores and more cache. One notable advantage the new Ivy Bridge-E processors have is their support for DDR3-1866 memory. The Sandy Bridge-E memory controller only supported 1600MHz memory and going beyond that speed was very difficult....

The product development suite includes Rodinia (pre-euler 3D), WPCcfd (based on OpenFoam), CalculiX, IOMeter (product dev trace), Catia viewset, Siemens NX viewset, SolidWorks viewset and Autodesk Showcase viewset. Here the Core i7-7700K was 8% faster than the 6700K while the 7600K was just 2% faster than the 6600K. Life Sciences includes Lammps, NAMD, Rodinia (heartwall, lavamd, hotspot,srad), Medical Viewset and IOMeter (life sci trace). Again Kaby Lake only offers a small performance gain over Skylake....

Results were even more disappointing when running EVEREST Ultimate Edition, where the write performance was considerably weaker for the 980X. Even the Core i5 750 was found to be much faster in both read and write tests. Using EVEREST Ultimate Edition we also checked L2 cache performance. As you can see, the Intel Core i7 980X performs rather well here. Clearly the additional L2 cache from the two extra cores came in handy in this test....

The crazy thing about the Z87E-ITX is that you would expect to miss out on a lot of features due to its tiny size. However that’s not really the case, as the board support six USB 3.0 ports, six SATA 6Gb/s ports, PCIe x16, two full size DDR3 DIMMs, eSATA, DisplayPort and wireless. Although many of these features are provided by the Z87 chipset, one feature is more unique to the Z87E-ITX....

Tom Clancy’s The Division was tested using the low-level DX12 API and this should help out the lower-end processors. Despite testing a very demanding section of the game where frame rates are pushed quite low at times, the G4560 seemed to hang in there. Performance was much the same with the GTX 1050 Ti while the Pentium processor was just 9% slower than the 6700K with the GTX 1060....

The Core i7-5775C processor has featured the best performing integrated graphics we’ve seen to date and the Core i7-6770HQ essentially adds more execution units to the same GPU design, resulting in even greater performance. That said, in BioShock Infinite the NUC6i7KYK and its Core i7-6770HQ processor were good for just a few more frames, a mere 4% performance boost in fact. The Dragon Age Inquisition results were more impressive as the Core i7-6770HQ provided a 12% jump over the Core i7-5775C and 44% more performance than AMD’s A10-7870K....

Besides that minor gripe, there is one issue with the bundled encryption software: it boots as a virtual optical drive when you plug the eGo into your computer and there is seemingly no way to remove it. If you plan to use the software, this point is moot. But if you despise a company forcing software down your throat, it’ll certainly become an issue. Sure, you can disable autorun in Windows, but that could be an inconvenience if you happen to rely on the feature often....