There have been some massive announcements so far this week such as AMD with hits Zen3+, RDNA 2 GPUs as well as Pluton (security processor). AMD will be the first out of the gate to support Pluton – it’ll be interesting to see articles explaining how Windows 11 makes use of it now and what Microsoft has planned for the future in terms of taking advantage of it to bring a more secure experience for Windows users.

Windows Weekly goes into good detail explaining what Pluton is, how one benefits from the development of it etc.

And not to be outdone Intel officially launching their Alder Lake 12th generation architecture with a lot of boasting about how it is faster than the M1 and other competitors but as I noted on Twitter, it is easy to get ‘top performance’ if you throw enough watts at the problem. Sure, based on the slides that have been disclosed it appears that can out perform the M1 but that comes at the cost of considerable power usage – 1.5x more performance at twice the power usage, not exactly a good trade off particularly if one is thinking about mobile workstations.

It’s good to see some competition in the technology space once again after almost a decade of kicking the can down the road but that being said I question whether the relative simplicity of RISC (Apple Silicon being ARM64 from the ground with legacy support jettisoned) gives Apple an advantage along with the fact that Apple is more or less starting with a clean slate and thus not have to be concerned about legacy support (outside of code morphing software like Rosetta).

Oneplus has released a list of specifications for its upcoming Oneplus 10 Pro (link) and although the hardware looks great my main concern is the merging of OxygenOS and ColorOS into a single platform with tweaks specific for Oneplus devices but sharing the backend code. Sounds like a great idea in theory but given the rocky release of Android 12 (link) it will be interesting to see whether the rocky start was due to it being an upgrade vs. being ground up Android based ColorOS. I know I sound like I’m picking on Oppo (the parent company of Oneplus) but Android OEMs tend to be pretty lazy when it comes to timely updates. This is one of the reasons I am attracted to a Pixel phone – because of a regular schedule not to mention the fact that it is free of crapware from third parties. Side note: I wish Android OEMs would realise that their products are merely a platform for people to access Google, anything that gets in the way of customer getting to their end goal of interacting with Google should be removed – be it crapware or the OEM insisting on having its own half baked cloud solution (I’m looking at you Samsung).