An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia for years in the high-end gaming graphics card race, to the point that it's primarily been pushing bang-for-the-buck cards like the RX 580 instead. But at CES, the company says it has a GPU that's competitive with Nvidia's RTX 2080. It's called the Radeon VII ("Seven"), and it uses the company's first 7nm graphics chip that we'd seen teased previously. It'll ship on February 7th for $699, according to the company. That's the same price as a standard Nvidia RTX 2080. [...] AMD says the second-gen Vega architecture offers 25 percent more performance at the same power as previous Vega graphics, and the company showed it running Devil May Cry 5 here at 4K resolution, ultra settings, and frame rates "way above 60 fps." AMD says it has a terabyte-per-second of memory bandwidth.

MojoKid writes from a report via Hot Hardware: NVIDIA launched a new, more reasonably-priced GeForce RTX card today, dubbed the GeForce RTX 2060. The new midrange graphics card will list for $349 and pack all the same features as NVIDIA's higher-end GeForce RTX 2080 and 2070 series cards. The card is also somewhat shorter than other RTX 20-series cards at only 9.5" (including the case bracket), and its GPU has a few functional blocks disabled. Although it's packing a TU106 like the 2070, six Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) have been disabled, along with 20% of its Tensor and RT cores. All told, the RTX 2060 has 1,920 active CUDA cores, with 240 Tensor cores, and 30 RT cores. Although the GeForce RTX 2060 seems like the next-gen cousin to the 1060, the RTX 2060 is significantly more powerful and more in line with the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080 in terms of raw performance in the benchmarks. It can also play ray-tracing enabled games like Battlefield V with decent frame rates at 1080p with high image quality and max ray-tracing enabled. NVIDIA has also apparently decided to support open standards-based adaptive refresh rate monitor technology and will soon begin supporting even AMD FreeSync monitors in future driver update.

AMD has been pushing its Ryzen lineup of processors for a few years now, with the company looking to put pressure on Intel's seemingly unbeatable hold on the chip landscape. From a report: At CES 2019, AMD unveiled its second generation of Ryzen laptop chips, which look to jump ahead of Intel's 14nm roadblock to offer some of the first 12nm processors on the market. To that end, AMD is launching a new lineup of Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 7 chips across both the 15W U-series and 35W H-series lineups, almost all of which are built off of the company's new 12nm Zen+ architecture. For the more powerful H-series, there are a pair of new chips: the Ryzen 7 3750H, offering four cores / eight threads, a base clock speed of 2.3 GHz (which can boost to 4.0 GHz), and the Ryzen 5 3550H, also a four core / eight thread processor, but with a 2.1 GHz base speed (which can boost to 3.7 GHz), and only eight GPU cores to the Ryzen 7 3750H's ten. Further reading: AMD Gets Serious About Chromebooks at CES 2019.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD's early CES 2019 announcements brought us some updates on its laptop processors, which include a targeted attempt to capture some of the growing cheap Chromebook market, slightly faster mobile Ryzens and a promise to keep everyone's AMD laptop drivers up to date with the latest zero-day game-release optimizations. Sadly, the news didn't include the much-anticipated, high-performance 7-nanometer Navi GPUs or the rumored Ryzen 3000-series desktop CPUs -- hopefully, the company's just holding back that info for its CEO's keynote on Wednesday. For the first time, AMD has gained a little bit of traction in Chromebooks with some partner announcements at CES such as the HP Chromebook 14 AMD and the Acer Chromebook 315. The announcements are in conjunction with the new A4-9120C and its sibling, the A6-9220C, which have slower CPU and GPU clock speeds than the 15-watt full-fat versions. That allows AMD to match the 6-watt target power draw of Intel's competing Celeron and Pentium models. AMD claims somewhat better performance on both Chrome OS and Android apps, which is possible given that their clock speeds are still faster despite the drop. Further reading: AMD at CES 2019: Ryzen Mobile 3000-Series Launched, 2nd Gen Mobile at 15W and 35W, and Chromebooks.

Linus Torvalds has announced the general availability of v4.20 of the Linux kernel. In a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds said that there was no point in delaying the release of the latest stable version of the kernel just because so many people are taking a break for the holiday season. From a report: He says that while there are no known issues with the release, the shortlog is a little longer than he would have liked. However "nothing screams 'oh, that's scary'", he insists. The most notable features and changes in the new version includes: New hardware support! New hardware support includes bringing up the graphics for AMD Picasso and Raven 2 APUs, continued work on bringing up Vega 20, Intel has continued putting together its Icelake Gen 11 graphics support, there is support for the Hygon Dhyana CPUs out of China based upon AMD Zen, C-SKY 32-bit CPU support, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC enablement, Intel 2.5G Ethernet controller support for "Foxville", Creative Sound Blaster ZxR and AE-5 sound card support, and a lot of smaller additions.

Besides new hardware support when it comes to graphics processors, in the DRM driver space there is also VCN JPEG acceleration for Raven Ridge, GPUVM performance work resulting in some nice Vulkan gaming boosts, Intel DRM now has full PPGTT support for Haswell/IvyBridge/ValleyView, and HDMI 2.0 support for the NVIDIA/Nouveau driver. On the CPU front there are some early signs of AMD Zen 2 bring-up, nested virtualization now enabled by default for AMD/Intel CPUs, faster context switching for IBM POWER9, and various x86_64 optimizations. Fortunately the STIBP work for cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation was smoothed out over the release candidates that the performance there is all good now.

Btrfs performance improvements, new F2FS features, faster FUSE performance, and MDRAID improvements for RAID10 round out the file-system/storage work. One of the technical highlights of Linux 4.20 that will be built up moving forward is the PCIe peer-to-peer memory support for device-to-device memory copies over PCIe for use-cases like data going directly from NICs to SSD storage or between multiple GPUs.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via ZDNet: Three academics from Northeastern University and three researchers from IBM Research have discovered a new variation of the Spectre CPU vulnerability that can be exploited via browser-based code. The vulnerability, which researchers codenamed SplitSpectre, is a variation of the original Spectre v1 vulnerability discovered last year and which became public in January 2018. The difference in SplitSpectre is not in what parts of a CPU's microarchitecture the flaw targets, but how the attack is carried out. Researchers say a SplitSpectre attack is both faster and easier to execute, improving an attacker's ability to recover code from targeted CPUs. The research team says they were successfully able to carry out a SplitSpectre attack against Intel Haswell and Skylake CPUs, and AMD Ryzen processors, via SpiderMonkey 52.7.4, Firefox's JavaScript engine. The good news is that existing Spectre mitigations would thwart the SplitSpectre attacks.

Journalist Brad Sams is releasing a book chronicling the company's Surface brand: Beneath a Surface. VentureBeat writes: While you'll want to read all 26 chapters to get the juicy details, the last one includes Microsoft's hardware roadmap for 2019, and even a part of 2020 -- spanning various Surface products and even a little Xbox. Here's a quick rundown of Microsoft's current Surface lineup plans:

Spring 2019: A new type of Surface-branded ambient computing device designed to address "some of the common frustrations of using a smartphone," but that isn't itself a smartphone.
Q4 2019: Surface Pro refresh with USB-C (finally), smaller bezels, rounded corners, and new color options.
Q4 2019: AMD-based Surface Laptop -- Microsoft is exploring using the Picasso architecture.
Late 2019: Microsoft's foldable tablet Andromeda could be larger than earlier small form factor prototypes for a pocketable device with dual screens and LTE connectivity.
Q1 2020: Surface Book update that might include new hinge designs (high-end performance parts may delay availability).
2020: A Surface monitor, and the modular design debuted for Surface Hub 2 could make its way to Surface Studio. The idea is to bring simple upgrades to all-in-one PCs, rather than having to replace the whole computer. GeekWire adds: A pair of new lower-cost devices Xbox One S devices could come next year. Sams reports that one of the models may be all digital, without a disc drive.

For more than 30 years, Intel has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world's computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of. From a report: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs," he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories. These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry. AMD recently chose TSMC to make its most advanced processors, having spun off its own struggling factories years before.

TSMC's threat to Intel reflects a sea change in chipmaking that's seen one company after another hire TSMC to manufacture the chips they design. Hsinchu-based TSMC has scores of customers, including tech giants Apple and Qualcomm, second-tier players like AMD, and minnows such as Ampere Computing. The explosion of components built this way has given TSMC the technical know-how needed to churn out the smallest, most efficient and powerful chips in the highest volumes.

"It's a once-in-a-50-year situation," said Renee James, the former No. 2 at Intel who heads startup Ampere. Her company is less than two years old and yet it's going after Intel's dominant server chip business. That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes. It's been a decade since Intel faced major competition and its 90 percent revenue share in computer processing will again deliver record results this year. But some on Wall Street are concerned, and rivals are emboldened, because TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business. Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.

After years of waiting for someone to design an ARM server processor that could work at scale on the cloud, Amazon Web Services just went ahead and designed its own. From a report: Vice president of infrastructure Peter DeSantis introduced the AWS Graviton Processor Monday night, adding a third chip option for cloud customers alongside instances that use processors from Intel and AMD. The company did not provide a lot of details about the processor itself, but DeSantis said that it was designed for scale-out workloads that benefit from a lot of servers chipping away at a problem. The new instances will be known as EC2 A1, and they can run applications written for Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu. They are generally available in four regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland). Intel dominates the market for server processors, both in the cloud and in the on-premises server market. AMD has tried to challenge that lead over the years with little success, although its new Epyc processors have been well-received by server buyers and cloud companies like AWS. John Gruber of DaringFireball, where we first spotted this story, adds: Makes you wonder what the hell is going on at Intel and AMD -- first they missed out on mobile, now they're missing out on the cloud's move to power-efficient ARM chips.

A team of nine academics has revealed today seven new CPU attacks. The seven impact AMD, ARM, and Intel CPUs to various degrees. From a report: Two of the seven new attacks are variations of the Meltdown attack, while the other five are variations on the original Spectre attack -- two well-known attacks that have been revealed at the start of the year and found to impact CPUs models going back to 1995. Researchers say they've discovered the seven new CPU attacks while performing "a sound and extensible systematization of transient execution attacks" -- a catch-all term the research team used to describe attacks on the various internal mechanisms that a CPU uses to process data, such as the speculative execution process, the CPU's internal caches, and other internal execution stages. The research team says they've successfully demonstrated all seven attacks with proof-of-concept code. Experiments to confirm six other Meltdown-attacks did not succeed, according to a graph published by researchers. Update: In a statement to Slashdot, an Intel spokesperson said, "the vulnerabilities documented in this paper can be fully addressed by applying existing mitigation techniques for Spectre and Meltdown, including those previously documented here, and elsewhere by other chipmakers. Protecting customers continues to be a critical priority for us and we are thankful to the teams at Graz University of Technology, imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven, & the College of William and Mary for their ongoing research."

MojoKid writes: When Intel officially announced its 9th Generation Core processors, it used the opportunity to also unveil a refreshed line-up of 9th Gen-branded Core-X series processors. Unlike other 9th Gen Core i products, however, which leverage an updated Coffee Lake microarchitecture, new processors in Intel's Core-X series remain based on Skylake-X architecture but employ notable tweaks in manufacturing and packaging of the chips, specifically with a solder TIM (Thermal Interface Material) under their heat spreaders for better cooling and more overclocking headroom. The Core i9-9980XE is the new top-end CPU that supplants the Core i9-7980XE at the top of Intel's stack. The chip features 18 Skylake-X cores (36 threads) with a base clock of 3.0GHz that's 400MHz higher than the previous gen. The Core i9-9980XE has max Turbo Boost 2.0 and Turbo Boost Max 3.0 frequencies of 4.4GHz and 4.5GHz, which are 200MHz and 100MHz higher than Intel's previous gen Core i9-7980XE, respectively.

In the benchmarks, the new Core i9-9980XE is easily the fastest many-core desktop processor Intel has released to date, out-pacing all previous-gen Intel processors and AMD Threadripper X series processors in heavily threaded applications. However, the 18-core Core i9-9980XE typically trailed AMD's 24 and 32-core Threadripper WX series processors. Intel's Core i9-9980XE also offered relatively strong single-threaded performance, with an IPC advantage that's superior to any AMD Ryzen processor currently.

As chipmakers struggle to keep up with Moore's law, they are increasingly looking for alternatives to boost computers' performance. "We're seeing Moore's law slowing," says Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer at chip designer AMD. "You're still getting more density but it costs more and takes longer. It's a fundamental change." Wired has a feature story which looks at those alternatives and the progress chipmakers have been able to make with them so far. From a report: AMD's Papermaster is part of an industry-wide effort around a new doctrine of chip design that Intel, AMD, and the Pentagon all say can help keep computers improving at the pace Moore's law has conditioned society to expect. The new approach comes with a snappy name: chiplets. You can think of them as something like high-tech Lego blocks. Instead of carving new processors from silicon as single chips, semiconductor companies assemble them from multiple smaller pieces of silicon -- known as chiplets. "I think the whole industry is going to be moving in this direction," Papermaster says. Ramune Nagisetty, a senior principal engineer at Intel, agrees. She calls it "an evolution of Moore's law."

Chip chiefs say chiplets will enable their silicon architects to ship more powerful processors more quickly. One reason is that it's quicker to mix and match modular pieces linked by short data connections than to painstakingly graft and redesign them into a single new chip. That makes it easier to serve customer demand, for example for chips customized to machine learning, says Nagisetty. New artificial-intelligence-powered services such as Google's Duplex bot that makes phone calls are enabled in part by chips specialized for running AI algorithms.

Chiplets also provide a way to minimize the challenges of building with cutting-edge transistor technology. The latest, greatest, and smallest transistors are also the trickiest and most expensive to design and manufacture with. In processors made up of chiplets, that cutting-edge technology can be reserved for the pieces of a design where the investment will most pay off. Other chiplets can be made using more reliable, established, and cheaper techniques. Smaller pieces of silicon are also inherently less prone to manufacturing defects.

AMD on Monday revealed the Zen 2 architecture for the family of processors that it will launch in the coming years, starting with 2019. The move is a follow-up to the competitive Zen designs that AMD launched in March 2017, and it promises two-times improvement in performance throughput. From a report: AMD hopes the Zen 2 processors will keep it ahead of or at parity with Intel, the world's biggest maker of PC processors. The earlier Zen designs enabled chips that could process 52 percent more instructions per clock cycle than the previous generation. Zen has spawned AMD's most competitive chips in a decade, including Ryzen for the desktop, Threadripper (with up to 32 cores) for gamers, Ryzen Mobile for laptops, and Epyc for servers. In the future, you can expect to see Zen 2 cores in future models of those families of chips. AMD's focus is on making central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and accelerated processing units (APUs) that put the two other units together on the same chip.

Ahead of the annual Supercomputing 2018 conference next week, Intel today announced part of its upcoming Cascade Lake strategy. From a report: The company teased plans for a new Xeon platform called Cascade Lake Advanced Performance, or Cascade Lake-AP, this morning ahead of the Supercomputing 2018 conference. This next-gen platform doubles the cores per socket from an Intel system by joining a number of Cascade Lake Xeon dies together on a single package with the blue team's Ultra Path Interconnect, or UPI. Intel will allow Cascade Lake-AP servers to employ up to two-socket (2S) topologies, for as many as 96 cores per server.

Intel chose to share two competitive performance numbers alongside the disclosure of Cascade Lake-AP. One of these is that a top-end Cascade Lake-AP system can put up 3.4x the Linpack throughput of a dual-socket AMD Epyc 7601 platform. This benchmark hits AMD where it hurts. The AVX-512 instruction set gives Intel CPUs a major leg up on the competition in high-performance computing applications where floating-point throughput is paramount. Intel used its own compilers to create binaries for this comparison, and that decision could create favorable Linpack performance results versus AMD CPUs, as well.

System76 is ready to share specifics about its new computer. From a report: There are three models from which to choose, and all three can apparently be configured with with Intel or AMD processors. This is refreshing news, as historically, System76 machines were an Intel-only affair. AMD has been more friendly to the Linux community over recent years, so I am happy to see System76 giving that option too.

1. Thelio (Up to 32GB RAM, 24TB storage) treks through tasks with ease despite its compact footprint.
2. Thelio Major (Up to 128GB RAM, 46TB storage) boasts stellar performance, allowing maximum configurability with up to 4 GPUs to tackle the most astronomical projects.
3. Thelio Massive (Up to 768GB of ECC Memory, 86TB storage) is the epitome of performance among workstations, offering maximum throughput and accuracy for demanding computational workloads.

Pricing starts at $1099.99, but that will obviously increase based on the specs you choose. Keep in mind, however, the computer will not ship until December. Full specs in the story above. In a statement, the company said, "Thelio Systems are designed to be easily expandable, making personalizing the computer a tantalizingly easy process. Slip in drives, add memory, and upgrade graphics cards at will. Additionally, the open hardware design that Thelio is built upon allows the user to easily learn how their computer works and make modifications using this information. Customization is simple to ensure that the computer encompasses people's needs, as well as their personality."

MojoKid writes: AMD launched its line of second generation Ryzen Threadripper CPUs over the summer, but the company offered 16-core and 32-core versions of it only at the time. Today however, the company began shipping 12-core and 24-core versions of the high-end desktop and workstation chips, dubbed Ryzen Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX, respectively. All 2nd Generation Ryzen Threadripper processors feature an enhanced boost algorithm that came with AMD's Zen+ architecture that is more opportunistic and can boost more cores, more often. They also offer higher-clocks, lower-latency, and are somewhat more tolerant of higher memory speeds. All of AMD's Ryzen Threadripper processors feature 512K of L2 cache per core (6MB total on the 2920X and 12MB on the 2970WX), quad-channel memory controllers (2+2), and are outfitted with 64 integrated PCI Express Gen 3 lanes. The new Ryzen Threadripper 2920X has a 180W TDP, while the 2970WX has a beefier 250W TDP. In highly threaded workloads, the Threadripper 2920X outpaces a far more expensive 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X, while the 24-core / 48-thread Threadripper 2970WX is the second most powerful desktop processor money can buy right now. It's faster than Intel's flagship Core i9-7980XE, and trailed only AMD's own 32-core Threadripper 2990WX. Pricing for the new chips falls in at $649 for the 12-core 2920X and $1299 for the 24-core Threadripper 2970WX.

MojoKid writes: Intel lifted the embargo veil today on performance results for its new Core i9-9900K 9th Gen 8-core processor. Intel claims the chip is "the best CPU for gaming" due to its high clock speeds and monolithic 8-core/16-thread design that has beefier cache memory (now 16MB). The chip also has 16-lanes of on-chip PCIe connectivity, official support for dual-channel memory up to DDR4-2666, and a 95 watt TDP. Intel also introduced two other 9th Gen chips today. Intel's Core i7-9700K is also an 8-core processor, but lacks HyperThreading, is clocked slightly lower, and has 4MB of smart cache disabled (12MB total). The Core i5-9600K takes things down to 6 cores / 6 threads, with a higher base clock, but lower boost clock and only 9MB of smart cache. In benchmark testing, the high-end Core i9-9900K's combination of Intel's latest microarchitecture and boost frequencies of up to 5GHz resulted in the best single-threaded performance seen from a desktop processor to date. The chip's 8-cores and 16-threads, larger cache, and higher clocks also resulted in some excellent multi-threaded scores that came close to catching some of Intel's many-core Core X HEDT processors in a few tests. The Core i9-9900K is a very fast processor, but it is also priced as such at $488 in 1KU quantities. That makes it about $185 to $225 pricier than AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X, which is currently selling for about $304 and performs within 3% to 12% of Intel's 8-core chip, depending on workload type.

Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish, the latest version of Ubuntu, is now available to download. From a report: Under the hood, the Cosmic Cuttlefish boasts the 4.18 Linux Kernel. This updates comes with better support for for AMD and Nvidia GPU, USB Type-C and Thunderbolt, a way for unprivileged users to mount Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) can be mounted by, and CPUfreq performance improvements. On top of this, you'll find the freshest version of GNOME 3.30. You can, of course, use other desktops, but GNOME, since Ubuntu 17.10, is Ubuntu's default desktop. You'll be glad to know that GNOME is faster than it has been for a while. That's because some nasty memory leaks have been patched. Canonical has also added some performance tweaks that didn't make it into the GNOME 3.30 upstream. Ubuntu 18.10 also comes with a new desktop theme, the Yaru Community theme installed by default, for your visual enjoyment. Further reading: Ubuntu 18.10: What's New? [Video]; Ubuntu 18.10 Review; and Ubuntu 18.10 Flavors Released, Ready to Download.

On Monday, Intel unveiled the 9th Gen Core i9-9900K, which will rival AMD's Ryzen 2700X when it goes on sale in two weeks. We will soon be reading reviews of the 9th Gen Core i9-9900K, which Intel claims is the "world's best gaming processor," to see how exactly it fares against its AMD counterpart. But as reviewers test the new CPU and comply with an NDA/embargo (non-disclosure agreement) with Intel, which requires them to not share performance data of Intel's new CPU for another few days, surprisingly, one publication has already made a bold claim. In a story published this week, news outlet PCGamesN said, "Intel's Core i9 9900K is up to 50% faster than AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X in games." The publication cites data from an Intel-commissioned report [PDF] by third-party firm Principle Technologies to make the claim. TechSpot explains the issues with this: So Intel can go and publish their own "testing" done suspiciously through a third party ten days before reviews, while reviewers are prohibited from refuting the claims due to the NDA. First bad sign. Scrolling down PCGamesN says the following when looking over Intel's commissioned benchmarks. "But the real point of all this is for Intel to be able to hold out the 9900K as hands down the best gaming processor compared with the AMD competition, and in that it seems to have excelled. On some games, such as Civ 6 and PUBG, the performance delta isn't necessarily that great, but for the most part you're looking at between 30 and 50% higher frame rates from the 9900K versus the 2700X."

Right away many of the results looked very suspect to me, having spent countless hours benchmarking both the 2700X and 8700K, I have a good idea of how they compare in a wide range of titles and these results looked very off. Having spotted a few dodgy looking results my next thought was, why is PCGamesN publishing this misleading data and why aren't they not tearing the paid benchmark report apart? Do they simply not know better?

Over at the Principled Technologies website you can find the full report which states how they tested and the hardware used. Official memory speeds were used which isn't a particularly big deal, though they have gone out of their way to handicap Ryzen, or at the very least expose its weaknesses. Ryzen doesn't perform that well with fully populated memory DIMMs, two modules is optimal. However timings are also important and they used Corsair Vengeance memory without loading the extreme memory profile or XMP setting, instead they just set the memory frequency to 2933 and left the ridiculously loose default memory timings in place. These loose timings ensure compatibility so systems will boot up, but after that point you need to enable the memory profile. It's misleading to conduct benchmarks without executing this crucial step.

Microsoft unveiled a bunch of new hardware during a press event last night, but one of the most interesting announcements the company made was their new "Your Phone" app for Windows 10. Basically, the feature will let Android users mirror any app on their device to a Windows 10 desktop. The Verge's Tom Warren writes about how Microsoft is embracing Android as the mobile version of Windows: We've seen a variety of ways of bringing Android apps to Windows in recent years, including Bluestacks and even Dell's Mobile Connect software. This app mirroring is certainly easier to do with Android, as it's less restricted than iOS. Still, Microsoft's welcoming embrace of Android in Windows 10 with this app mirroring is just the latest in a number of steps the company has taken recently to really help align Android as the mobile equivalent of Windows.

Microsoft Launcher is designed to replace the default Google experience on Android phones, and bring Microsoft's own services and Office connectivity to the home screen. It's a popular launcher that Microsoft keeps updating, and it's even getting support for the Windows 10 Timeline feature that lets you resume apps and sites across devices. All of this just reminds me of Windows Phone. It's only been three years since Microsoft launched its Lumia 950 Windows 10 Mobile device at a packed holiday hardware event. Windows Phone has vanished in the last couple of years, and Microsoft finally admitted Windows Phone was dead nearly a year ago. The software maker has now embraced the reality that people don't need Windows on a phone. Instead, it's embracing Android as the mobile version of Windows.