 Here we go. We're live! It's WAN Showtime! Luke is at PAX in Boston. Thank you for asking. James is here. James is here. Yay! New Luke! Discount Luke, discount Luke. Said everyone. Sorry we're late, you guys. I have to confess that it was not entirely my fault. James was at least partially to blame. Go on. Well, James distracted me with his marvelous beard. I spent 25 minutes just staring at it today, rather than working, which happens to be exactly the amount of time that I'm late. Yvonne looks confused and worried. Well, she shouldn't be confused, but she can be a little worried if she'd like. She knows by now. In all seriousness, guys, we have got... Oh, apparently the left ear is not getting the right amount of attention. Oh crap. I legitimately don't know how to fix that. Put your headphones in mono. Yeah, that may actually be the solution, because I don't remember which dial does what. Yeah. Okay. So, yep, nope. I don't actually know how that stuff works. So there you go. Apparently left... Why do people change these things? Why would anyone change that? Once again, we didn't touch it all week. And once again, it's different. Gremlins. I swear there are gremlins living in it. So what's actually going on is I have been in a mad sprint to get a bunch of stuff done, because I am going to China. I will be gone all next week, but there will still be videos, because this week, instead of being on time for Wanshow, I was shooting two videos. One's actually pretty cool. The other one's garbage. Yeah, the other one's kind of lame. Yeah, no, one of them... Intel released an entire lineup called Xeon W that, as far as we could tell, is basically their core series high-end desktop processors with a Xeon sticker over top of Core i9 and some ECC support kind of ticked on in the microcode or with a non-lasered connection somewhere in the chip or something along those lines. At least that's what we thought. And that turned out to be very true. So that's going to be interesting. So you can see what you're paying an extra... As much as like five, six hundred bucks for, depending on what kind of a currency you use. I'm just mad that that was like a spoiler. Yeah, I guess it's kind of a spoiler, but I mean, people who watch the Wanshow, we want to spoil them. They're nice people. They're good people. You're the best. Second one is actually on the Lenovo X1 Carbon. Really nice machine. But like everything this year, it is not quite perfect, which will drive me to madness at some point, because you got either 1080p with touch or 1440p with HDR, but no touchy. Is there any tactical reason for that? Actually, I remember talking to them back at CES and I managed to get not a marketing person, which is always awesome. When you manage to find like the engineering guy that's kind of like kind of like back at the back of the booth or like kind of sipping a coffee. They don't let me talk to people. Like, yeah, I'm just I'm here. But like, realistically, I'm not really supposed to say anything. You know, whatever. So you go find that guy and he'll be like, you know, yeah, I wanted that too. But yeah, there was there was some issue with this. And I don't remember what the reason was. It seemed to be a fairly, fairly good one. And anyway, we actually had a great chat. But you remember a technical reason. It wasn't just they're trying to hit a particular price point. There was a business reason. There was there was a compelling enough reason. Because I remember we had a long chat where we were discussing sort of the stagnation of display technology in the PC space. No one does anything until Apple does it. Because you think about it, a PC up till the very high end would be like 1366 by 768. You remember that horrible sort of HD resolution that they were pushing for a while? Freaking awful. And that was like the norm until Apple came out and was like, OK, no, Retina. Retina is a thing now. And then everyone everyone raced to Retina. But it's all it all feels kind of like like it's driven by just responsiveness rather than trying to trying to innovate in a way that's meaningful to the consumer. So I would look at notebook displays and I would go, why are we trying to sell 4K? Why aren't we just running a sensible resolution like 2560 by 1440 and doing it at a higher refresh rate? That's what I'd like to see. I don't mind seeing features like HDR, for example, but I don't necessarily want to compromise on them. So, yeah, to be clear, we are trying to we are trying to fix the audio. But for now, what I would recommend is that you use the I'm watching a podcast, but my kids are in the next room and I need to hear if they're crying technique. I can't do one headphone. Really? I can't do it. I don't know. It falls out. No, no, no, no, no. It's just the sound of it. I think I'm I think I'm like focusing on the fact that one of my ears is getting worn out faster than the other. I need them to be balanced. What? That's insane. I'll concede it could be insane. It just bugs me. So, and OK, let's say that I let's say that I do subscribe to you. Oh, wait, it's too loud. Anthony, just scream at him. Yeah, yeah, I'm between a rock and a hard place. No, it's fine. I'll message him. Technology. Let's see him walking away. So let's say that I do subscribe to your theory that listening to headphones is going to wear out my ears. Wouldn't I want to wear them out less? OK, no, it's it's not the fact that I would use just one for a bit. Right. Right here. Here I'll show you. I'll show you the technique I came up with. I call it the I call it the James is crazy, but maybe just crazy enough for it to work technique. I'm going to listen for a little while here. I'm going to listen for a little while here. I actually miss very little of my program. But you're saving on 50 percent. You're erosion. So you're erosion. Hey, here's the thing. It's not. Oh, hold on just a second. I hate you so much. It's not that they're getting used or worn out like your brakes on the car. That's fine. It's that they're getting used unequally. OK, all right, all right, all right. But this is all this was just like the seed that that resulted in me just hating the feeling of it now. Right. This is like when I was like 12 or something. Right. Oh, man. Luke, even he knew I wouldn't check. So he went out of his way to message me and tell me, make sure that you change the title of the WAN show, because I'm changing it for the thing that I'm doing at PAX. Oh, Fridays. Seventeen hundred. Can we talk about news while you do that? What you want to talk about news? You want you want the work that you do on this show to actually like be for something? Yeah, that's madness. Yeah, fine. OK, what do you want? Well, there is a thread on our forum posted by Aluminum Tech, also known as Aluminium Tech. And this thread is about the Facebook Messenger app and how Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook this week, confirmed that Facebook does indeed scan your messages, whether they're pictures or text or whatever, make sure that they conform with community guidelines before actually sending it to the to the recipient. So if you send something that's against their guidelines, like hate speech or inciting genocide or something like that, they may not actually deliver that message to whoever you're talking to, which definitely has some benefits. But the thread on our forum kind of erroneously implies that the that we're not just talking about Facebook Messenger's normal messaging. When we're talking about this surveillance, it implies that we're talking about Facebook's secret function, which is more akin to apps like Signal or Telegram. And that's actually not the case. Facebook does have a function. Facebook Messenger has a function where you can make your your chats encrypted end to end. And like the interface turns black and there's a little lock. And you can even make exploding messages like Snapchat style. Facebook is not scanning those messages at all. Or maybe they are and we have no evidence of it. But the news or whatever Zuckerberg confirmed has nothing to do with the secret messages. It has to do with the normal messages. And so we really shouldn't be surprised that they're looking at those. So tell me then. OK, do you use Facebook Messenger? Yeah, actually, it's one of my primary messaging apps. OK, how do you feel about them scanning your messages with an automated system for Community Guidelines standards adherence? As opposed to like a human? Well, I guess I'm asking two questions first. So do you like or dislike it? I believe OK, first of all, I think we should clarify. I believe that they're scanned with an automated system and once they're flagged, it requires a human to then say this message is not getting sent through. I believe that's how it works. Sure. I am fine with my messages being scanned. OK. And are you surprised by this? No, no. I should also mention that they do not use the data that any of the information that they scan. That information is not used to sell ads, which is what Gmail used to do prior to last year. Right. So I got to tell you, I so OK. OK, story time. So the only reason that I use Facebook is that Facebook does not permit you to manage a Facebook page. So the first page that I had to manage and the reason that I had to create a Facebook account was the one for NCIX PC back when I worked there. So we were trying to get into this whole newfangled social media thing. And so I needed an account so that the page could invite me to manage it and make posts on it and stuff. I have probably posted of my own volition a grand total of I don't know, between five and ten things on Facebook ever. I only use Facebook Messenger as sort of a as a digital phone book because the good thing about Facebook is that whether, you know, whether you're happy about it or whether you kind of just do it because you have to, pretty much everyone has it. And yes, thank you. Whoever's in the Twitch chat declaring that they do not have Facebook because they're taking some stand. Good for you. We're all jealous. We all want to be in your shoes. But but but the truth of the matter is that Facebook is a great way to get in touch with people. And aside from people changing their names, like, yeah. I OK. Like having your first name and middle name as your Facebook name. No, no. I mean, I mean people getting married. OK. So there's a this is kind of embarrassing. But I was going through my friends on Facebook and I was like, who are these people? And the shut up. The people I was confused about were mostly women from my high school class that are now married. And I was like, that kind of looks all. Oh, OK. That that makes sense. And then like a kid that I went to elementary school with, he changed his name from like his his stepdad's name, which was his last name for some reason. I'm not quite sure how that worked to his birth father's name. So I was like, oh, you're whatever your name is, Barry. Now, that's cool. Wouldn't have known that if I had from Barry to Barry, B, E to B, A. That would be tough. But anyway, so what's good about Facebook is that it's it's a digital phonebook. It's because the real phone books aren't a thing anymore. But the bad thing about it and the thing that has always made me both a little bit uncomfortable and just feel like it's a little bit unnecessary is that while I am technically a millennial, I share sort of updates about my life as a job. I have never done it for leisure. Not once. When I created a Facebook account, it was because I needed to for work. When I created a Twitter account, it was because I had to for work. And when I created a YouTube account, it was because I had to for work. Same with Twitch for that matter. So I just straight up like don't really get it. And I've never really felt it's never been because I feel super comfortable with it that I've shared a lot of detail about my life. Like some of you have probably noticed that I now that especially now that the Linus Tech Twitter account is managed by the entire team, I post almost nothing really personal on it. And I only post to my personal account like once every couple of weeks at most. And I've had a lot of people ask me like, why don't you do more videos on your Linus Cat Tips channel or why don't you vlog or why don't you do this or do that? And the truth of the matter is like I actually I like not having to talk to anybody when I go home. Yeah, no kidding. Like it's related. I found that I watched started watching our videos a lot less once I worked here for a while. And it's like not a surprise. Like what do you want to do when you go home? Do you want to watch Linus Tech Tips? Like, no, you just did Linus Tech Tips all day. I just had to look at him for the last eight hours. The last thing I want to do is to see him again because he's annoying. Oh, it's not you. See how I'm only wearing out one ear right now. It's not you. It's me. It's weird today. Someone made a thread about an item that they thought would be awesome for us to review. So I send it to Anthony. I was like, oh, have you seen this yet? And he's like, yeah, Alex just made a video about that today. Like it's done already. So OK, so back to back to Messenger. So for me, honestly, it doesn't affect me much because even though I do have a Facebook account, this is actually OK. You know, I'm going to go off on another thing here. The nut. Use your words. If I had a if I had a dollar for every time we've run a giveaway or a promotion or something, and it has required you to tweet something for every time someone's been like, yeah, well, you got you guys suck because I don't have Twitter. If I had a dollar for every time I saw that, I would still be mad because it's phenomenally stupid. Twitter is free. Facebook is free. And the only information they have is what you give them. Creating a Twitter account that's sole purpose is to enter giveaways really doesn't give them a lot on you. And get this. It's free. You could create a new one every time. Hey, but you need to have an email address, which is free to me. Also free. So if you don't if you don't want it that bad to create a free anonymous email and a free anonymous Twitter account, people are like cookies. Walk in once. Post the thing. Log back out. It's pet peeve show. Next pet peeve topic. How about that? So so I do so. So anyway, so I do have a Facebook account, but they actually probably know very, very little about me personally. Other than that, I'm a tech head and I post a lot of techie stuff for work. So I guess I'm trying to say that I just am not bothered that much. You know what sucks more about Facebook Messenger than that feature is them putting ads in your inbox. You probably haven't even seen this, but on mobile, like you'll open your messages. It'll be like your partner, your best friend, your acquaintance, Oculus, blah, blah, blah, with a picture and everything. Really? And then another acquaintance straight up like right in there. And I don't know if these are in WhatsApp yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if that happens soon since they've been wanting to monetize WhatsApp for a while and they own it. I would like to show you something super, super cool and funny. I think there's a way to see your page as though you are like, oh man, it's no, you might not your personal page. Yeah, view as a page visitor. No, no, no, no. The line at the line is tech tips one. Right. Oh, wow. Is it gone? Oh, that's pretty annoying. Well, anyway, up until sometime, hopefully fairly recently, the the line is tech tips page actually had as like like the top post, like somewhere near the top. Please don't send messages to this account. Nobody checks them. And right now, I don't even know where to find them, which is super terrible. See the feed. Do you know where you find messages? Maybe you disabled it. Maybe that's why that warning isn't even there anymore. I don't know. We had something horrendous like I don't remember how many tens of thousands of messages that people sent. And I was just like, I don't know. I don't know what I can do for you to help make it more clear that you shouldn't send messages through here. And it just said something like, yeah, you need to go on the you need to go on the Twitter page if you want to or the Twitter account if you need to send a message. And wow, I just I have no I should I should honestly I should be screen sharing right now because you guys would find this pretty funny. I have no idea how to use Facebook. How do I Facebook? You may maybe you used to and then as soon as you had a kid, it just left you know your old people. I just never did. I just actually never cared like at all. Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, so the point is I do use Messenger, but it's usually just to be like, oh, yeah, that person that I met at like badminton at the rec center a couple of weeks ago. What was their name again? Oh, right. Maybe I'll see if I can get in touch with them. Yeah. One Facebook Messenger feature I like is that you can make it your default SMS app on Android anyway. So you could type in someone's name and then choose to message them via Facebook or through like regular texting, which is sweet because then you only have one app for both purposes. But it also kind of sucks. So I eventually switched back to not doing that. All right. So why don't we jump into the next thing that I'm super mad about. The original article here is from a non-tech and this was posted by Aluminium Tech on the forum. Once again. All right. This is really dumb and really frustrating. And it's not the first time that this has been done by either AMD or Nvidia. And so right. To be clear, even though it's Nvidia doing it this time, AMD has done it in the past. Neither of them is getting a free pass here. And this behavior is absolutely 100 percent unacceptable. It's right in the headline. Nvidia quietly rolls out slower, lower TDP GeForce GT 1030 with DDR4 VRAM. Now, to be clear, the GT 1030 is not some kind of pillar of gaming cards or anything like that. And you wouldn't expect to be running the latest games at the highest settings at the highest resolutions with them. But you would expect that if you bought a GT 1030 that what you got out of the box would be similar to someone else's GT 1030. And I would make the argument that if you look a little bit closer at the specs here, look at this. Memory that is running at one third of the speed. Huh. Oh, man. Not to mention at lower base and boost clocks with a completely different memory technology. So we're talking DDR4 versus GDDR5. I would make the assumption that that is not what you would expect. And that that is going to make some difference to the gaming experience. And that if you are buying a dedicated graphics card, you probably care at least somewhat about the gaming experience. Is it true that these systems, the systems that will be running these low end cards, discreet as they may be, won't actually be able to really reap the benefits of GDDR5 anyway? So it's not a huge loss. OK, so you could make the argument that the way that a review site like us or an on tech or whoever else would typically benchmark a card like this is not necessarily very real world. Because what we'll do and we've taken a lot of flack for this over the years, presumably from people who don't understand why we do it this way. But what we'll typically do is we'll take the highest end processor on the market and we'll throw a GT 1030 on it. And then we'll report our results with the GT 1030 compared to some other graphics cards, you know, whatever suite of cards we decide to test. And the fatal flaw that people feel like they're pointing out for us is that no one would install a GT 1030 on a $2,000 7980 XC 18 car extreme edition. But the problem is that if we use anything else, we lose track of the difference between these graphics cards. Because what might happen is the higher end ones might end up bottlenecked, so it doesn't give you a clear idea of the value per dollar prospect of each card. You're trying to remove the CPU as a variable altogether. Yes. So it's as fast as possible. Now, with that said, it is possible that in the kind of system someone might install one of these in, you might not see as much of a difference. But I think you would probably see a difference, especially because GPU memory has an impact on the GPU's ability to load in textures, for example. So it might affect the detail level that you can run at. Now, this might be completely naive and ignorant, but does the type of memory impact the TDP of the graphics card? So it depends. It depends on the clock speed it's running at. It depends on the... I think it depends how many chips you're running. It depends on... Yeah, mainly that. It depends on the tech that's being used. Because you could also make an argument that it's better to have a lower TDP GPU. If you're looking to get a 1030 and the kind of system that's going to run it, you might actually want that lower TDP more than you want the extra memory. So that is possible. But in that case, what I'd like to see is a separate skew. I ended up arguing with Sapphire on the phone about... How old was I? It was supposed to be about 16 years ago, but I'm still mad. I ended up arguing with Sapphire on the phone, and AMD for that matter, about a Radeon 9600 that I bought. So that should give you guys some idea. Well, I told you how long ago it was. Anyway, the point is, it was a Radeon 9600, and it came with a 64-bit... I still remember to this day, it came with a 64-bit memory bus instead of a 128-bit bus. And back then, that was a big deal. And compared to a 1030, a 960 was still sort of a somewhat respectable card. Like, if you wanted to play... I don't remember if this is sort of era-appropriate, but I think like Sims would have been the kind of thing that my sister might have wanted to run on it. That would have made a significant difference. And the reason I was mad was that not only was it not marked clearly anywhere on the box what the difference in spec was between this card and the other one, the only place anywhere that I could find this information was on Sapphire's website, but not their North American one. It was on their European one. So I had to go all the way out of my own territory online in order to find out that this card was not the same thing. It was hidden way down somewhere. And this was at a time when manufacturers were often doing SE editions of cards, special edition or second edition, but with the community nickname, these things were slow edition, because a lot of the time they were cut down because of yields. So they had a bunch of scrap chips that they had to do something with, so they'd cut down the memory bus or they'd do something else like that. And that's a point that people are bringing up this time. What's the difference between this and 1080 TI? But the thing is they don't put these other letters, these qualifiers front and center on the box in this case. This is way down the line in the product description. It's a description of the memory. It's not upfront right beside the 1030. They do put D4 in the description, but it's not a 1030 D4. It's way, way, way, way down there. So I find it really frustrating, but Nvidia seems to be, rather than having taken our feedback and a lot of other members of the press feedback to heart, about the 1060 3G, which is more than just a 1060 with 3G of RAM, or I should say less. It's actually slower as well. They seem to have taken all the feedback that we gave them and crumpled it up and thrown it in a fire, because here they are doing it again, and it's only been a few months. So what I worry about is that if we don't call them out on this, it's going to be something that we're going to continue to see happen. And that's not what we need. You don't want to have to walk. Remember guys, this is the same company that brought you green light, that brought you a program that restricted their partners abilities to pre-overclock their cards to differentiate them. Supposedly to reduce confusion. That's why they have all these branding initiatives and stuff like that. Oh, not to mention GeForce Partner Program. We want to reduce confusion. Do you want to reduce confusion, or do you just want the right type of confusion? Right. So it's good for their business interests, so it doesn't matter. A lot of people won't notice anyway or won't know, so just let it kind of slip by. This is great. SparkleMan55 says, Rip, I got the notification a half hour late. No, no, we were just a half hour late. Unless you just got it now. Yeah, we're the ones ripped. So I guess I don't really have a ton more to add. I mean, this is really frustrating. You've got a note in here. Some of the listed documentation does show two different core names, GP108-300 versus GP108-310. But the whole thing is very confusing. Oh, this is what I ended up yelling at AMD about 16 years ago. AMD on their website, because remember, this was not an AMD card technically, it was a Sapphire card. As if AMD didn't send them the frigging chips. AMD's own website had no mention whatsoever of a 64-bit memory bus variant of this card. So in this case, once again, the official Nvidia GeForce GT1030 product page mentions nothing about this change. So how can you advocate for less consumer confusion when you're running around enabling your partners to release products, even if you're technically not your product or whatever the defense would be? How can you be running around enabling partners to create products based on your products that you don't even list on your website? Especially going forward when those partners are part of the GeForce Partner Program. Very, very frustrating. All right. Do you also feel passionately about this Spectre business? I can't imagine that you feel as passionate about it. What I really feel passionate about is eating Savage Jerky. In my head, I was like, he wouldn't. He couldn't. God damn it. He did. Savage Jerky is a tasty snack that's not bad for you. It's made with the best ingredients without nitrates or preservatives. And their goal was to create a snack that's full of flavor and not bad for you, which I think I already said. I got my talking points mixed up here. They've got 13 different flavors of jerky. Some of the fan favorites are the Sriracha bacon. My personal favorite is the maple buffalo bacon. I gave it to someone else to try like two weeks ago and they were like, eh, but whatever. I like it. I don't care. More for you, man. More for me. There's probably John. He's not Canadian. Doesn't understand maple. Not that I was going to share it with anybody anyway. So whatever. These cracked pepper and sea salt is really good. The traditional is really good. Anything mojo is really good. Can you hand me a bag? You're a vegetarian. I want to check out the label and stuff. Oh, and why not show off a different flavor? Fine. You can show off whatever flavor you want. You can have the whole box. So they not only make jerky, they've got hot sauces, barbecue sauces, a spice rub. Jacked. I never get any. You're not supposed to get any. Well, this bag's fine. Take it. This bag's been open for over a week. But you don't get to complain when I take your M&Ms anymore. I don't. Well, you do it all the time. Okay. I say I don't need M&Ms anymore. I eat trail mix. You take that all the time. Yeah, but you don't get to complain when I pick the M&Ms out of your trail mix. I think he's pretty generous. He's given me M&Ms without me even asking before. So use offer code LTT to save 10% on Savage Jerky products. Next up, we've got Honey. So when you shop online, are you the kind of person who suddenly turns into a tab hoarder? Yeah, turns into, sure. Loading dozens and dozens of new tabs. Middle click really is like the bomb. What is that? Middle click to open in a new tab. You mean like click mouse wheel? Yeah. Doesn't that just make it like the continuous scrolling thing? No. What? Not when you click a link. Oh, you middle click a link. Dang. Yeah, you don't know this? No, I don't know that. It's the best. That's how I end up with like a hundred tabs open. Oh, I really like that. You know what I use a lot? Control shift T. You know what that is? Reopen, close tab. Oh, no, I just never close them. It's far better. So anyway, one of the reasons you might end up with a bunch of tabs is searching for promo codes. Hopefully at least one that actually works. And you don't want to close any of them because you might have to go back and try them again or try them on a different product or whatever the case may be. Well, Honey gets rid of all that. Honey is the free browser add-on that over 9 million people are using every day to save money while they shop online. In two clicks, you can add Honey to any browser for free, then shop like you normally do. Honey scans and tests millions of coupons in the background. Then at checkout, Honey automatically applies the best coupon. I said 9 million. I felt like a sucker. Time Magazine calls Honey basically free money. What am I doing? So there's basically no reason to not add Honey to your browser. It's free, two clicks to install and will save you money. So try it out over at honey.com slash Linus and we're going to have that linked in the video description. Finally, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the super simple to use invoicing tool that does a lot more than just help you create and send professional looking invoices. It helps you track your time with their time sheet function, manage your expenses, and keep track of who owes you what, which is important. It also has a feature that tells you when your client has looked at your invoice for the first time so that you can put an end to that whole, Hey, did you get that invoice I sent? Wow, you're really not going to help me out here. This is what they do. They stare blankly at you. Ah, I see. What invoice Linus? I didn't pick up what you're throwing down. Anyway, the point is you'll know that they saw it. And if you have questions, you can reach out to their support staff where you will speak to a real human. No escalations, no return calls, just answers. Visit FreshBook.com slash when and enter when in the how do you hear about us section when you sign up for a free trial. That's FreshBooks.com slash when. FreshBooks! I think you just owned the ears of the viewers. Thank you for that. I don't have a choice. All right. What topic do you want to do next? Oh my, oh, oh. Can we do this one? Okay. I'm sorry. But the thing is only part of this is news. All right, fine. We'll do your stupid PS5 thing. No, this is good. I don't want to talk about this. No, I'm already screen sharing the original article here from Express.co.uk. PS5. Rumors are it might come out this Christmas. A lot of people think those rumors are dumb. So this started on a website called, what is it called? The Situation or. We're going to have to stop calling you laser James. Semi-accurate. We're going to have to go with Savage James. Here have some Savage jerky. That was Savage. Okay. So I actually this this website has a great name in this context. Semi-accurate dot com. Behind a one thousand dollar per year paywall or a hundred dollars a year for students. This website published an article with allegedly legit information claiming that the PlayStation 5 was going to come out this holiday season, which is a lot sooner than people would think, considering that the PS4 Pro came out only two years ago and the PS4 itself only came out five years ago. And when traditionally the launch cycles of these things have been about seven years between the three and four. So people think that you can we can make a lot more money off the PS4 Pro still. Like that can become the de facto like normal default PlayStation for people and they can start to push the price down to like 250 bucks. They don't need to release the new PlayStation just yet. The PS4 Pro was two years ago. Yeah, bro. See, the older you get, the faster time goes. What? Because each year of your life is a smaller proportion of your life. No, it was a year and a half. Oh, OK. Oh, OK. I should have written the months in. Oh, OK. No, no, no. But by the time this launched in the Christmas, it would be two years. Oh, I see your point. OK, OK, OK. So here's OK. Do you want to go through the rumored specs first? Sure. It's going to be AMD again. The platform, like the architecture is Navi. It's going to be eight cores. And I actually have a question about that. If we get to it, it's going to have a strong emphasis on VR support that some discussion there. You know, they have to make certain considerations and decisions to include that. And maybe no one cares, but maybe no one cares because there's no good VR yet. And this is a chicken and egg thing. They did recently drop the price of the PSVR, but I don't know what's my understanding is that the PSVR is the best selling gaming VR headset. But I also don't know if that's meeting Sony's expectations in terms of how many they have to sell in order to support it. It's I think at this point, it's a rising tide lifts all boats thing with VR. It's a setup for future profits. What else do we know about this thing? We know that the CPU would be rumored to be Zen based, although we could pretty much take for granted that any future custom SOC that AMD would produce for, whether it's Microsoft or Sony, would hopefully be Zen based at this point. So here's my question. And again, noob question, maybe on the PC in the realm of PC gaming prior to rise and then coffee lake for sure. Single threaded all the games and engines and all that APIs are optimized for single threaded. Right. So. Depends. Mostly. Strongly, it strongly depends. So some of them. Basically, since we started getting dual cores, which was actually a really long time ago now, sort of terrible. At least 10 years. More than that. You're in laptops. 10 years ago. Q6600. I remember buying our Q6600 engineering sample, which technically you're neither supposed to buy nor sell from my old boss at NCIX back in 2007. So, yes, quad core. And that was like six hundred seven hundred dollars CPU. So that was like the first non extreme edition quad core, but certainly not mainstream yet. Dennis just walked by with an eggplant. So we've got. You're the. So we've had quad cores on the desktop for 10 years and that chip later dropped in price, I think probably about eight months to eight to 12 months later and became far more accessible. So ever since then, we have seen an onward march towards supporting more cores now in the early days. The support was fairly rudimentary. Like you would have one core dedicated to like mostly the entire game. And then you'd have another one that handled like maybe enemy A.I. like like like one thing. You'll be offloaded. But over time, they got to supporting more and more and more threads natively. And I believe crisis three support something like four or six. Well, why is it then when Ryzen came out and it had all these cores, everyone was stoked on it. And in theory, the performance should be a lot of these Intel SKUs. It didn't. And it was because we had to wait for the game developers to optimize their games and the APIs for quality core. OK, so there were a couple of things that happened. First of all, a lot of the things that people were excited about with Ryzen and about multi-core on Ryzen. Well, actually, I think it's mainly two things. One is that AMD, depending on how you look at it, and it's complicated, but AMD wasn't that far behind Intel for gaming in a from a certain point of view, as Obi-Wan might put it, because at the resolutions that you would be likely to run games at so higher resolution with higher details, you'd be more likely to hit a GPU bottleneck than a CPU one. So in that sense, AMD CPUs weren't that far off unless you did want to turn down your details to get higher frame rates because you were a competitive player. Or unless you cared about your power consumption because they did consume a lot more power before Zen. Or if you wanted more up-to-date features on the platform, because by the end of it, those boards were looking pretty dated in terms of their feature sets. So there were lots of other things. I'm going to fully actually finish the question. The final clause of the question is, given that in the PC side, it's so weird that on the console side, you've got these multi-core AMD chips, like ruling the roost on all the consoles. So are game developers taking different approaches on console and PC? Okay, so back to your question. The things people were excited about. AMD having better single-threaded performance for gaming and AMD having multi-threaded performance for other workloads and also to put pressure on Intel. Because that's what Intel did. They launched quad-core on the desktop back in 2006, and it was quad-core on the desktop up until 2001-06. That was pretty much it, unless you wanted to spring from a higher desktop platform. There were six core AMD CPUs in 2010. No, what I mean on the Intel side. The thing about those six core AMD processors, though, is that they didn't threaten Intel. Even with six cores, they weren't competitive with Intel's own quad-cores that they could turn out. So it wasn't really relevant, and they sucked more power. They didn't overclock. There was a bunch of things. So people were excited because Zen would bring more competition to the market. Now, getting back to AMD's previous cores not necessarily being that underpowered for gaming. Well, that's what you're seeing on the game consoles. So because the game developers know exactly what hardware they're optimizing for, they can go, okay, we're going to have exactly this. Oh, right, the other issue with Zen performance on the desktop in games was actually more software and firmware related. There were scheduler issues with Windows, and there were, I mean, any new CPU. It's kind of like why I put...what was the not set of the... 6950Xs in the editing machines, like, three weeks before the new 18-core flagship came out. The reason is that any time you have a new CPU launch, whether it's AMD or Intel, and particularly on this last round, where both AMT and Intel were guilty of pulling up their launches just to have something out there and them being not quite 100% polished, any time you have a new CPU, you're going to have some issues. And that was a big part of what affected gaming performance on the desktop. And sometimes game developers did have to optimize, because even though it's x86, it's not like a new CPU is just the old CPU, but like, with a Trogdor arm stuck into it. Like, it's actually different. And so if you gave even a...let's say you gave a professional driver, and I don't know cars, so you'll have to forgive me, but let's say you gave them a Bugatti and a Lamborghini, some model, X and Y, and you were like, okay, get the best track time on this track. It would take them a little while if they switched from this one to that one to learn the best way to do it, even if this one was more powerful. They are...they're different machines. So coming back to consoles, this has been a very sort of winding topic here. They know exactly what they're optimizing for, they don't have to make any guesses, and they are going to run the game in such a way, and they're going to optimize the game in such a way that you aren't going to run out of CPU resources. Also, by the end of AMD's non-Zen course, while the performance wasn't great, their power efficiency was getting a lot better. So they take this good power efficiency, and they've got four kind of like good enough cores, and they've got developers who know that they can split it up exactly in this way, because it's going to run on four cores. There's not going to be some Yahoo out there running a dual core, because Intel still has dual cores for some reason, and they can split it up that way to make the best possible use of the quad core. And then the GPU, well, they can push the game's visual effects to the max so that they can run into a GPU bottleneck rather than a CPU one. Also, it's a console. It's going to run on a TV. It doesn't have to run higher than 60 FPS anyway. Cool. I get it. There's the long, the very, very long answer. Hopefully that wasn't too boring. Please finish your bacon. You've been talking with your hands way too much to still be holding that bacon. So please now circle all the way back to the beginning. In your opinion, is the PS5 coming out in 2018, even if it's December 31st? OK, consider that when the PS4, I think, was it Pro, came out, which it was either the Pro or the PS4, it came out in November and we knew about it in February of that year. If this is going to come out in the holiday, we're two months beyond that now, it probably would be launching in November if they're trying to make the holiday. So that's a short media window to get the media hype running. So do you think it's coming out this year? So normally I would say absolutely not. And the reason is that up until now, every PlayStation, whether it was Emotion or whether it was Cell or whether it was a move to Jaguar, every PlayStation has been architecturally dramatically different, totally different. So if you told me in April, there's a PlayStation coming in November, I'd tell you to go take a long walk off a short pier because you're an idiot, because there's no way that in, what does that work out to, seven months? There's no way that in seven months anyone is going to have launch titles ready because they're going to have to completely recode aspects of these games in order to run on this new machine. The developer things are already out there. That is known. OK, so that we know. But even then, like I'm saying, there's still no way that seven months would be even close. Like a modern AAA game, remember, you can't launch a console without, unless you're Nintendo, without at least a couple AAA tier games. And those take literally years to develop. And it's not going to be good enough to just take some existing titles and go now at 4K with better details or whatever else. If people were really into that, they'd go buy a PC. However, because a PlayStation 5 would be just PlayStation 4 on steroids with Zen cores, which is going to be a big difference, that's going to be like really nice. And then presumably, and it says Navi based graphics, which would be again, very nice. Remember, this is not Vega. This is a new architecture past Vega. Because it would be just like that on steroids, new architectures, but much more powerful ones, but still fundamentally x86 and crap. What does AMD call their thing again? So what you're saying is a GCN. It's kind of like PCN anymore. Anyway, you're saying it's kind of like PS4 Pro Pro. Yeah, like but way more pro because the PS4 Pro relied on Crossfire, which was a bad approach. I think actually your theory might have some credence given that one of the other leaked bullet points here is that the PS5 would be backwards compatible with PS4 Pro titles. Why not? It might as well be, right? Because it's fundamentally pretty similar in terms of the hardware. And so you've got you go you go. This site, Semi Accurate, you haven't heard of it apparently, but I've been following Charlie. I don't remember how to pronounce demerogen demerogy again. Whatever Charlie. I've been following Charlie since about 2002, back when he used to work at the Inquirer, not the National Inquirer, the Inquirer. And back then, the Inquirer was the bomb for industry leaks. They do have a track record of being prescient and accurately leaking, specifically console related leaks in the past. You've been wrong a couple of times with something. I can suggest why that might be. See, OK, and it makes me a little uncomfortable because I've never really talked to Charlie much. So I don't want to like talk about him when I don't actually know him that well. But what I can say is that I do know that I've never seen him at an industry event that isn't an AMD one. OK, so what I can extrapolate from that particular data point is that if AMD talks to him and no one else does, and he gets industry information somehow, that maybe he's getting his information from contacts at AMD. And if he has a track record of leaking console news, which AMD has their hardware in up until the Switch, had their hardware in all three, that would align with my guesses as to where his sources might be from. So that, to me, adds some credibility because over the years, Charlie has taken a lot of flack for saying a lot of stuff that didn't turn out to be true. But as a reader of his over the years who takes rumors with the grain of salt... You pay the thousand dollars a year? No. Are you a student? I read before he put up the paywall. But as someone who's kind of paid attention to his career, he's been right enough that if you read with the grain of salt that you should take rumors with in the first place, and he called the site semi-accurate, I mean, what more do you want? He's offered a lot of insight over the years. All right. That's what I'll say. So I'm not saying, yeah, there's going to be a PS5, but I would suggest that this might be why Sony hasn't had a response to the Xbox One X yet. And this might have been a good move for them to let Microsoft launch the One X a few months ago and then say, OK, you know what? We're going to miss out on having the crown for like a year. But realistically, Microsoft can't run out and release a new Xbox again. So we're giving up this year now of console, you know, thrown-dom. But we should have a year or maybe more than that afterward while Microsoft responds. Yeah, they want to wait until the PS4 Pro sales have peaked and are starting to taper off. But also enough time. So people, for some people who bought a PS4 Pro will also buy a PS5 at launch. Obviously, not everyone's going to do that. Another major factor is that they're at AMD's mercy here. They can't release a faster console until AMD releases a faster freaking piece of hardware. So that custom SOC design process takes time. And you can't start that process until the individual components of it, so both the CPU and GPU, are at least somewhat finalized. So that looks, I mean, that timeline sounds not that, you know what? The more we talk about this, I'm going with it. Oh, PS5, this Q4. It's on. Put your balls on the table. There you go. Bet something. So the bet would be either it's coming out holiday season or it's being announced at E3 next June? Or I guess this June. Yeah, I don't know. I'm going to say it's coming holiday season. I don't know exactly how they're going to handle the hype leading up to the release, but you know what? I'm in. When are they going to announce it? They can't wait till E3 at June. Could they? Yeah, they could. Yeah, that gives them like a few months. Do they need to announce it at a conference or an event or can they just launch it? More and more companies. Excuse me, I mean, announce it. Microsoft did this for the Xbox One. More and more companies are just doing an Apple-style conference. They're just doing, you know what? Forget it. We're not going to announce things at CES or Computex or E3 or whatever. We'll do our own party. But Apple does it at their own conference every year. Exactly. But does Sony have one of those? I don't know if Sony has done that, but more and more companies are trying to do this. So yeah, let's find out. Maybe they'll just do their own thing. I'm seeing CES, I'm seeing E3. Yep. You never know. MWC. Speaking of things you never know, you never know when Big Brother is watching. The original article here is from CNET. Sorry for the abrupt change in topics, but I really want to cover this. And it's like 20 after 6 already. And I really want to talk about this. I am going to Shenzhen on Monday. So an AI company that works with Shenzhen police is creating a system that will use CCTV cameras to identify jaywalkers and send them a fine via a messaging app. Okay, so full disclosure here. That CNET article is from July 2017, because this is the fact that people are getting in trouble. Like their faces are being projected onto a giant billboard in real time, because these facial recognition equipped cameras are watching them jaywalk. That's old news. That's been since last summer. The new update now is that if that happens to you, you might just get an SMS that's like, here's your fine bud, click through and pay it. Could be SMS, could be in WeChat, which I guess gets compared to Chinese WhatsApp. So over 10 months, ending in February of this year, these boards that they created displayed 13,930 jaywalker faces. It's like a public shaming thing or something, I guess? Yeah, well, apparently jaywalking is a bigger deal in China than it is over here. I can kind of see that. There's more people, they have a different attitude. Both the pedestrians have a different attitude to the law, according to Chinese political party opinion anyway, and drivers have a different standpoint to pedestrian right of way. Certainly, I saw there's studies where in Germany, you might only wait 60 seconds across the road, but in China, it might be 90 seconds, and that's longer than people who need to wait. And even when it's their turn, the drivers might still just not respect their right of way anyway. So there's a lot of jaywalking, and presumably because of the number of people there, it causes a lot of traffic and bottlenecks. So there's a high incentive for the government to try to work this out. One of the ways they'll de-incentivize people to jaywalk is by socially shaming them, putting their face and their family name, by the way, up on a giant billboard that you can see. And now, I guess they're attaching a monetary incentive or de-incentive on that as well. I mean, this is just so apparently only about 10% of the population can be identified by the city, by the system in the city of Shenzhen. But if you consider that they're already working with third parties, like these chat applications, to deliver fines, presumably they could work with third parties like... Crap, what's their Amazon, Alibaba? Like they could work with Alibaba. Aliexpress. Well, no, Aliexpress is like... Yeah, but Alibaba is like to contact manufacturers, not to just buy stuff. Oh, okay, you're right. So they could work with... Wait, hold on a second. Where's he going? Alibaba Group. Chinese multinational e-com. Yeah, no, Alibaba Group, not like Alibaba.com necessarily. Okay. Anyway, so the point is that they could work with companies like that, or they could work with Chinese phone manufacturers, for example, that I'm not going to say who or what they're doing now, but have been known in the past to put back doors on phones or share information with the Chinese government. So they could work with these groups to make the facial recognition just one part of how they identify you. So they could monitor where you go, what you buy, who you spend your time with, and they could use all of these things to augment their facial recognition technology so that they could actually make a very, very good guess as to who you are even if they don't get a perfect look at your face. And where you are. They can track you while you're driving your car. Exactly. There are apparently 600 million CCTV cameras in China. It's getting to full-on surveillance state. And some of these things are positive. There's benefits from it. You can go to certain airports in China and not have a boarding pass. It's all facial recognition. Your hands are full of your bags. You can walk by the attendant as you go onto the plane. That's pretty sweet. Wow. Maybe you'll get to do that. If you're in an airport that has that, you should make a video. There's no way I'll be able to do it because I won't be registered. In fact, the reason why only 10% of the population of Shenzhen gets their faces recognized is because presumably it's like the database of all the different provinces isn't integrated. So if you live in Shenzhen but you're from a different province, they just don't have your record available. So that's why they think that the number of people who will be susceptible to this tech should go up dramatically once they do get a more broadly-based system in the future. All right. Last topic for the day, because we are not going to stop harping on this, at least until you guys get bored of it, more GeForce Partner Program news. Jesus to Ares. Is it just me or does that sound like kind of like a Spanish? I'm actually trying to figure out if it's supposed to be Ares. Well, Ares used to be... They had Ares before with an S on the end. What they called their ROG AMD-based cards. So it was at the very high end. They had Mars on the Nvidia side. Well, maybe that's intentional because they're not allowed to say ROG anymore. They're still saying Strix. So maybe people will remember that Ares was ROG because losing ROG hurts, man. Like people, consumers know what ROG is and they want to buy it. Which is still bizarre to me because I still remember being just like baffled and angered by the original implementation of that branding. It's just like, this is so stupid. What does Republic of Gamers even mean? What is this like a place where all the gamers live? You've never been? It smells weird, but it's pretty dope there. That's what we need as a new sponsor, like a deodorant product. People's Republic of Gamers. The sales pitch writes itself. It's like, too busy gaming to shower? Just use this spray. No problem. At least for a little while. Eventually you'll have a problem. Heuristics! Asus ROG Strix turns into Ares or Ares Strix. Asus Dual turns into Ares Dual. Asus Expedition, which I've never even heard of before, turns into Ares Expedition. It's way out there. So not only do we appear to be losing ROG branding, it looks like they aren't even putting Asus branding on the cards. That, that weirds me out a little bit. Isn't that a maybe? At what point is somebody going to leak this freaking agreement so that we can have a look at it? Because I'll tell you, 99% of the time when some controversial document gets leaked or whatever, I'll read a bunch of articles, kind of figure out what the consensus is, and go, okay, yeah. Or I might read a couple of paragraphs of the thing. If the GeForce Partner program leaked, I would read the whole thing, like multiple times. I want to understand. I don't just want to see what's in there. I want to understand what's in there, because this sounds like a scary freaking document. Well, in the original, what's the site that leaked it? HardOCP, right? In that original blog post or article, he wondered if it was actually legal. I don't know, man. Me too. So thanks for watching, guys. See you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. So much bacon. Maybe different co-host. No, no, no, hold on, hold on a minute. Same bad time, variable co-host. Hold on a minute. Were you looking at the dates of taxes? No, no, no, we're going to straw pull this. We're going to straw pull this. James. Okay, good job. All right, let's get some options in here. Yes. No. Donkey balls. I'm going to log in and vote donkey balls. Create this poll here. Come on, you guys. You got a lot of snow. Do you really want a new co-host next week? I guess I ignored the possibility that the new co-host being replaced would be me, because I'm traveling next week. Oh, yeah. Some people have said that Luke James is their favorite combo. Well. It was my mom. She's biased. Oh, terrible. Hey, more donkey balls than nose. Come on, donkey balls. Let's get it. Let's get our act together here. That's a win. I want to see some more donkey ball. That's what the poster on your office door is about. Donkey balls inside. Well, I didn't need the whole donkey for that. Wait, Linus likes donkey balls. James donkey. And we'll see you again next week. Good show. Most people said good job. Cool. 51 percent. So it's like a very narrow most. That was a good show. That was fun. Felt smooth. You know we're still live, right? That's good. Felt smooth, buttery, savage jerky smooth. Smooth like honey. Fresh books. Number four. Saratoga.