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Five for Friday is a weekly feature to give a brief roundup of our top five stories from the week that you might have missed. Think we left anything out? Let us know your favourite stories of the week by pinging us a tweet @pcr_online.
Microsoft teases wireless VR headset… but it won’t be at E3
Last June at E3 Microsoft announced Project Scorpio, its updated version of the Xbox One that promises 4K gaming and support for VR. While the company hasn’t shied away from its ambitions in the virtual – and mixed – reality space when it comes to Windows, the company has kept pretty schtum about VR on Xbox and that looks set to continue at this year’s event.
Speaking to Polygon, Microsoft technical fellow Alex Kipman said that the tech giant’s "primary focus is making our mixed reality experiences a success on Windows 10 PCs.
“We believe that right now a Windows PC is the best platform for mixed reality as its open ecosystem and enormous installed base offer the best opportunity for developers, and Windows offers the most choices for consumers.”
UK software developers want more money and to work from home
British software developers feel they are underpaid and want the option to work from home. A report by Stack Overflow reveals that as many as 45 per cent of UK developers think they deserve more money. When you take London out of the equation that number soars, with 64 per cent of Northern Irelanders particularly disgruntled.
Unsurprisingly then, the majority of the highest-paid software developer jobs are inside the capital to reflect the higher rate of living. While more than half of all software developers in Northern Ireland, the Midlands, and Wales earn less than £35,000 on average, those in London take home £50,000 each year.
And the wage gap only gets wider when you look at the top coders around the country. In London, the top 5 per cent of developers earn just under £100,000, while the top 5 per cent in Northern Ireland bring home half as much.
Gigabyte smashes records with 7.5GHz overclocked i7
We’ve come to expect pretty impressive stats out of any Intel processor with an ‘i7’ tag on it, but Gigabyte seems to have surpass all of that with its world record-breaking overclocking. Using liquid helium, the manufacturer and distributor managed to overclock an Intel Core i7-7740K to a spectacular 7.5GHz.
Working with Intel’s new Core X-Series chips that were announced at Computex, a team of overclockers lead by Gigabyte’s HiCookie used the firm’s own X299-SOC Champion motherboard to break the record. The liquid helium cooling chilled everything down to minus 250 degrees Celsius which allowed the processor to hit the full 7.5GHz.
Apple staff caught misleading Australian customers by sting operation
In a sting operation, Australia’s watchdog says it has caught Apple staff repeatedly misleading iPhone customers about their rights to a free repair after last year’s ‘error 53’ scandal.
According to court documents that have been reported by The Guardian, the Australian authorities have accused Apple of wrongly telling customers that they weren’t entitled to a free replacement or repair after receiving the error message. The case, set for trial in December, alleges that the same thing was said to customers even when the repair was not related to the fault.
IBM proves Moore’s Law is not dead by squeezing 30 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip
Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hailed the death of Moore’s law at Computex 2017. This week IBM has resurrected it. Finding a way to squeeze 30 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip, IBM has defied prediction by coming up with a practical way to make 5-nanometer processors.
In collaboration with its partners Globalfoundries and Samsung, the trio of tech giants have created the technology using the same ultraviolet lithography (EUV) that they used for the breakthrough 7nm chip. Ditching the common FinFET transistor, in favour of silicon nanosheets, the change allows for an incredible number of transistors to be crammed into an incredibly small space.
