You can’t live on esports only, so here’s my subjective choice of news from the PC industry and related fields.
Let’s start with something nice: video games.
There was a lot of buzz around the premiere of Red Dead Redemption 2, launched by the studio that created such products as GTA V. The new launch got a very warm welcome from gamers and an even warmer one from financial analysts, generating some decent profits for its authors. Even though RDD2 was offered only for consoles (Xbox and PlayStation), there are some leaks about the plans for a PC version. Let’s see what the future brings.
Battlefield V is coming like wildfire and it is probably not going to experience another premiere postponement (20 November), but instead the developers communicate the date of Battle Royale mode entrance. For this we will have to wait until March 2019. Generally, it seems that the game will be published in a lot of parts (unfortunately you have to pay for all this in advance…), and here is what you get first: 8 maps, 8 multi modes and one (still incomplete) War Stories campaign. In December we should expect another piece of the game, the Tides of War with Overture and a new Panzerstorm map. War Stories 4 (The Last Tiger) is scheduled for launch in January, together with a vehicle battle training map. Then, the Lightning Strikes chapter will follow, with its modified Storm mode, and Squad Conquest. Finally, there’s the BattleRoyale in March, announced as Firestorm. Most certainly there will be some more challenges on the way, distinctions, weapons and skins, and definitely some bugs, patches and hot-fixes…
It’s now time for some more material news:
IBM is buying RedHat to become the apparently largest cloud service provider worldwide. The rationale for this acquisition is software and subscription service development. The deal is worth ca. US$34bn.
The Apple Special Event, another one of this year’s presentations of new products featuring an ‘i’ in front, took place on 30 October. Apple presented a brand new Ipad Pro – it is indeed brand new, with its completely refurbished design (thin frames), a new A12X Bionic layout and a new Liquid Retina screen (11 and 12.1”); FaceID comes as a new function to Ipads, together with some new accessories: a keypad and an upgraded pen. The prices are new, too, ranging from PLN 3799 to almost 9k PLN. There is also the new MacBookAir with a seriously upgraded screen (resolution, color rendering, ultrathin frame) and a redesigned keypad. The new Air is based on 8th generation Intel Core CPUs, it can support up to 16GB RAM and hold max. 1.5TB of data on its SSD. They also presented the fresh MacMini in which Apple managed to pack 4- and 6-core CPUs, max. 64GB DDR4 RAM, max. 2TB SSD, together with such stuff as HDMI 2.0, Thunderbolt 3 and Ethernet 10Gb/s.
Intel and AMD presented their financial performance. In terms of value, the presentation was like David and Goliath, but in terms of financial performance, both companies are doing great. Here I should also mention some minor stabilization of Intel’s CPU prices (unfortunately in the top range) and some buzz generated by gossip about limited availability of AMD Ryzen CPUs.
New graphics card from AMD and a modified GTX 1060 from Nvidia. News are coming about a new Radeon RX 590 (mid-range performance card) and about the setup of the famous GTX 1060 with GDDR5X sticks, designed to increase data transfer rates from 192 GB/s to 240GB/s.
Microsoft has still not patched its October Windows 10 update, but instead they found the cause of file deletion and are now working on it. At the same time, users discovered another issue with *.zip file management by a system tool, along with some minor errors. Summing up: we are waiting.
