Previously, we have reported that major OEMs are looking and exploring for ways of moving production outside of China, into other Asian countries, because of tariffs imposed by US-China trade war and rising labor costs. The original report from Nikkei specifically indicated that Microsoft will move its Xbox and Surface manufacturing to Thailand and Indonesia, while the production in China would stop.

However, Tom's Hardware had a conversation with Microsoft regarding the situation and the outcome was contradictory to the report of Nikkei. Microsoft told Tom's Hardware "that there currently aren't any plans to do so", which means that current manufacturing facilities are there to stay. We still don't know how will the rest of OEMs react or comment, but HP also said to Tom's that it shares industry concerns and will not comment any further to the rumors, adding that tariffs are hurting consumers.

Major American PC and consumer-electronics OEMs, namely Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Amazon, are reportedly moving some of their manufacturing out of China, in the wake of the ongoing US-China trade-war, an offshoot of which inflicts import-tariffs on a spectrum of products imported from China. This impacts China as a destination for manufacturing. According to Japanese business publication Nikkei, HP and Dell are each moving 30 percent of their laptop manufacturing volume out of China. This roughly aligns with their volumes bound for the US market. They could continue manufacturing in China for volumes headed to other markets.

Currently, the U.S. Government imposes import tariffs on $200 billion worth goods imported from China, and fully built PCs were immune to these tariffs. This has had an adverse and unfair impact on U.S.-based system integrators such as OriginPC, Falcon Northwest, etc., who import components and assemble gaming PCs and notebooks on U.S. soil, on a build-to-order basis. A new round of import tariffs proposed by Washington changes this, and brings even fully-built laptops, smartphones, and gaming consoles under the ambit of import tariffs. This explains why Microsoft and Amazon are eager to change their manufacturing landscapes. Microsoft makes its Surface line of premium portable computers, and Xbox game consoles in China, while Amazon makes a vast array of IoT products under its main brand, and various knick-knacks under its Amazon Basics brand.

Microsoft is apparently planning to take care of their Age of Mythology games series in the future. If anything, Adam Isgreen being Creative Director for Age of Empires at Microsoft saying so must surely mean it. However, this will only be done post current plans for the Age of Empires franchise, as Adam Isgreen said that they'll devote time to Age of Mythology "after we get through the Definitive Editions for the three here, and [Age of Empires] 4 is kind of rolling".

Age of Mythology takes a pretty creative look at mythology (which could be seen as a creative source material in and of itself), but that's part of what makes the game fun. It has already been treated to an Age of Mythology: Extended Edition back in 2014, so we'll have to wait on whether Microsoft is planning of releasing a Definitive Edition of the game, or a full-blown sequel altogether.

Microsoft at its E3 2019 keynote dropped a huge teaser of its next-generation gaming console development, codenamed "Project Scarlett." The console is expected to pack some serious hardware that powers gaming at 8K resolution (that's four times 4K, sixteen times Full HD). That's not all, it will also feature real-time ray-tracing. Microsoft's performance target for the console is to be 4 times higher than that of the Xbox One X. The company is also giving the console its first major storage sub-system performance update in years.

At its heart is a new 7 nm semi-custom SoC by AMD and a high degree of customization by Microsoft. This chip features CPU cores based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, which provide a massive leap in CPU performance over the current Scorpio Engine SoC that uses low-power "Jaguar Enhanced" cores. At the helm of graphics is a new iGPU based on the RDNA architecture that powers AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics cards. It's interesting here to note that Microsoft talks about real-time ray-tracing while we're yet to see evidence of any specialized ray-tracing hardware on "Navi." In its teaser, however, Microsoft stressed on the ray-tracing feature being "hardware-accelerated."

Tech Journalist Brad Sams, who first reported on Halo: The Master Chief Collection coming to the PC platform before its official announcement, has spilled the beans on another juicy detail regarding the Halo universe: that Microsoft will use this E3 2019 to showcase the first gameplay for the game. This isn't news, really - after last year's tease, it was expected that gameplay would be available this year to whet gamers' appetites. However, the fact that Halo Infinite will be running in the PC platform is newsworthy, since this is quite the departure from previously-known Microsoft, which seemed to relegate its PC gaming ambitions to other developers.

Now, with Microsoft vouching to treat the PC platform as the gaming juggernaut it is, and the already-known information that 343 Industries' (the current Halo developers) Slipspace engine would treat PC gamers with the latest technology in terms of graphics presentation, PC has become the defacto platform of choice to showcase Halo's next-gen visuals (whilst using an Xbox One controller, by the way). This likely only happens because Microsoft isn't ready to completely pull the wraps on the next-generation Xbox; or it could serve as a show of good faith from the company when it comes to PC gaming. Whatever the reason for Microsoft's decision, this seems like a great time to be a PC - and Halo - fan.

Microsoft extended variable refresh-rate (VRR) to games that don't natively support it, through a new global setting under Graphics Settings. To access this setting, you must have the latest Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903), a display that supports NVIDIA G-Sync, AMD FreeSync, or VESA Adaptive-Sync, and a graphics processor with a WDDM 2.6-compliant driver that supports these VRR technologies. For now, this setting only works with DirectX 11 games in exclusive-fullscreen mode. Microsoft clarified that this setting is not designed to override the VRR options presented by the control panels of your display driver provider (eg: NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Radeon Settings). The option is disabled by default, and isn't visible to users who don't meet both the hardware- and software-requirements of VRR.

The Wheel of Rumors turns, and assumptions come and pass, sometimes leaving unfulfilled hopes and dreams. In this case, the rumor mill, in what seems like a push from sweclockers, places Navi not as a "built from the ground-up" architecture, but rather as a highly customized iteration of GCN - iterated in the parts that it actually implements AMD's RDNA architecture, to be exact. And this makes sense from a number of reasons - it's certainly not anything to cry wolf about.

For one, AMD's GCN has been a mainstay in the graphics computing world since it was first introduced back in 2012, succeeding the company's TeraScale architecture. Game engines and assorted software have been well optimized already to take advantage of AMD's design - even with its two ISAs and assorted improvements over the years. One of the most important arguments is derived from this optimization effort: AMD's custom designs for the console market employ architectures that are GCN-based, and thus, any new architecture that would be used by both Microsoft and Sony for their next-generation consoles would have to be strictly backwards compatible.

Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Julie Brill in a blog post this Monday shared her - and Microsoft's - thoughts on regulation and its relationship to the tech sector. Julie Brill commented on the GDPR implementation originating in Europe, and how that could and should serve as a de facto standard of regulation that forces companies to steer away from the self-accountability on which they have remained for so long - and on which, paraphrasing Apple's own Tim Cook, "There are now too many examples where the no rails have resulted in great damage to society."

Microsoft feels that if left to self-regulation, companies won't do as mucha s they could in the pursuit of privacy and their consumers' rights as they would with a strong enforcement regime being planned and implemented at the governmental level. Of course, I think most of us agree with this at a fundamental level. However, there should also exist some defensive measures around the design and implementation of such governmental measures, such as, for one, no interference from corporations in the regulatory process. These should only serve as consultants, to prevent any ideas of bending the regulations in their behalf, and a pervasive strategy that accounts for both small businesses and huge corporation should also be key. We should remember that while the likes of Microsoft Apple, for example, should have relative ease in updating their practices and implementing regulation-required systems, other, smaller players could either live or die in their capability to quickly adapt to the new requirements. Snuffing out competition to the big companies by enforcing heavy penalties might not be the best road. What do you think? More regulation or self-regulation?

When visiting the Microsoft ISO Disc Image Download Page using a desktop PC, Microsoft will force you to use the Media Creation Tool to get the ISO. A direct download is not available, or you can use the Upgrade Assistant, to upgrade your current running system. This complicates things if you just want to grab the Windows 10 ISO image quickly, without jumping through Microsoft's hoops.

We have learned, that when you make your web-browser render the Windows 10 installation media download page as a mobile device, which obviously doesn't support running the Windows-based Media Creation Tool, Microsoft will give you a direct download link instead. Below we present step-by-step instructions for Firefox and Chrome, the two browsers we use ourselves.

It looks like E3 will be a very good event for Microsoft, which will have its hands full of announcements during the show. According to the latest rumors, Gears 5, the latest release in the Gears of Wars franchise, will be launched in September this year. The supposed launch will be happening during Microsoft's E3 conference. Besides Gears 5, Microsoft will launch PC exclusive game Gears Tactics.

As rumors suggest, we will be getting new Gears of War 5 game in September of this year. The new game is launching as a sequel to the well-known Gears of War 4 game, which showed focus on story and tactics driven gameplay. We expect its sequel to be no different. With many improvements in the game's graphics, we should expect to see high-quality game gameplay given the heritage the previous release, Gears 4, left us with.

The United States tech industry has overnight dealt a potentially fatal blow to Chinese electronics giant Huawei, by boycotting the company. The companies are establishing compliance with a recent Executive Order passed by President Donald Trump designed to "stop the import, sale, and use of equipment and services by foreign companies based in countries that are potential adversaries to U.S. interests," particularly information technology security. Google has announced that it will no longer allow Huawei to license Android, and will stop updates and Google Play access to Huawei smartphones. Huawei can still equip its phones with open-source Android, but it cannot use Google's proprietary software, including Google Play Store, Chrome, and all the other Google apps. Intel decided to no longer supply processors and other hardware to Huawei, for use in its laptops and server products. Sales of AMD processors will stop, too. Qualcomm-Broadcom have decided to stop supply of mobile SoCs and network PHYs, respectively. Microsoft decided to stop licensing Huawei to use Windows and Office products.

The ban is a consequence of the U.S. Government placing Huawei on a list of banned entities, forcing all U.S. companies to abandon all trade with it, without prior approval from the Department of Commerce. Trade cuts both ways, and not only are U.S. firms banned from buying from Huawei, they're also banned from selling to it. Huawei "buys from" over 30 U.S. companies, (for example, Windows licenses from Microsoft). CNN reports that U.S. firms could lose up to $11 billion in revenues.

Sony Corporation (Sony) and Microsoft Corp. (Microsoft) announced on Thursday that the two companies will partner on new innovations to enhance customer experiences in their direct-to-consumer entertainment platforms and AI solutions.

Under the memorandum of understanding signed by the parties, the two companies will explore joint development of future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure to support their respective game and content-streaming services. In addition, the two companies will explore the use of current Microsoft Azure datacenter-based solutions for Sony's game and content-streaming services. By working together, the companies aim to deliver more enhanced entertainment experiences for their worldwide customers. These efforts will also include building better development platforms for the content creator community.

Microsoft will release PowerToys - a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity. PowerToys are a collection of power tools and apps that give users the ability to customize UI and UX. Unlike previous PowerToys from Windows 95 era, this time we are getting them in open source form.

Inspired by the Windows 95 era PowerToys project, this reboot provides power users with ways to squeeze more efficiency out of the Windows 10 shell and customize it for individual workflows. A great overview of the Windows 95 PowerToys can be found here. The first preview of these utilities and corresponding source code will be released Summer 2019.

Jon Peddie Research has released a new report on the state of gaming and its future, with the research firm estimating a total of 20 million PC gamers will make the shift to console gaming by 2022. It does make sense, as the no-frills architecture of consoles and highly specialized hardware and development - alongside the lower cost of entry) have been calling gamers from all ages and budgets. Add to this the fact that IQ considerations are becoming smaller and smaller between a high-end gaming PC and their console counterparts - at least when it comes to global, base IQ of settings - and it does make sense that makers make the shift.

Adding to this is the expectation of increased doubling-down on exclusives from games consoles, with the exception of Microsoft, which will be bringing all of its exclusives to the PC market as well. The increased attention to game streaming, with Google's Stadia and Microsoft's own xCloud will prompt change in the way gamers consume content - no dedicated hardware may mean no consoles, but it will also mean no need to purchase expensive, high-end PC gaming hardware to run the latest games with the latest graphics technologies - that will all be run in the cloud. Smart TVs, for instance, may be all the investment required for a premium, lag-free gaming experience with maximum details, should worldwide internet access improve as it has been. Of course, the ratio of high-end PC gamers making their way to consoles is lower than that of gamers with basic or entry-level PCs that are capable of gaming - those will make up the vast majority of the quoted 20 million shift.

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood in a quarterly financial results conference call with investors this Wednesday hinted that the worst could be over with Intel CPU shortages. "In Windows, the overall PC market was stronger than we anticipated, driven by improved chip supply that met both unfulfilled Q2 commercial and premium consumer demand as well as better-than-expected Q3 commercial demand." It's important to note that Hood did not name Intel, as PCWorld otherwise observed, but it's highly likely that she was referring to Intel, given that it continues to dominate pre-built notebook and desktop markets.

PCWorld uses Hood's statement from the previous quarter's results call to zero in on Intel. "The overall PC market was smaller than we expected primarily due to the timing of chip supply to our OEM partners, which constrained an otherwise healthy PC ecosystem and negatively impacted both OEM Pro and non-Pro revenue growth," she had said. Prices of 9th generation Core desktop processors in the retail channel appear to be normalizing, with the Core i5-9400 selling for $184 on Newegg, which is close to MSRP, its iGPU-devoid twin, the i5-9400F selling at a discounted price of $169; the overclocker-friendly i5-9600K selling for $264, and the i7-9700K at $409, which is a tiny $20 markup over MSRP.

The April 2019 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 released this "patch Tuesday" (9th April), bearing knowledgebase code KB4493509, is discovered to cause machines with cluster shared volumes (CSVs) to become unresponsive upon restart after installing the update. Installation of cumulative updates forces system restart as Windows shuts down certain services and drivers to a bare-minimum state so it could overwrite system files. This latest issue of system freezing is caused on machines with incompatible security software, such as ArcaBit, however, users over at Ten Forums observed Avira Antivir to show the same incompatibility. Microsoft has since listed this incompatibility as a Known Issue in the description page of KB4493509. All versions of Windows 10 will soon be able to defer updates, letting users prevent buggy updates from being automatically installed. Currently only Windows 10 Pro and Workstation provide this feature.

Having the world's most pervasive operating system (or office suite) is sure to leave a big mark on any company when it comes to exploitation attempts from hackers. It's a simple equation: aim your efforts at a software that runs in millions (if not billions) of machines and even a light chink in the armor could be enough to cause a cascading effect through that many users.

This principle applies to almost everything: a small effect across a billion users usually provides greater returns than a large effect on one or two players. Kaspersky labs on its security report, presented at the Security Analyst Summit, reported that the favorite target for cyber attacks was Microsoft's Office suite - a 70% figure suggests an incredible attention given to Office, really. These Office-related cyber attacks don't directly relate to the suite itself; there are other, OS-integrated components that can be targeted, or simply that Office file extensions are used as clever, headache-inducing ways of disguising malware as the second greatest evil in the world - spreadsheets.

Microsoft has released the first public version of their Chromium-based rendition of Edge. Remember that Microsoft announced back in December of last year that they would be ceasing development efforts on their own browser back-end, and would instead be adopting the Chromium open-source coding - which powers the ubiquitous, 65% market share-earning Google Chrome. The plan is to streamline development efforts, reduce web development fragmentation, and contribute to a more open internet by building and contributing towards the Chromium project.

Now, users can take a look at the Chromium-powered version of Edge (yes, it did keep the Edge branding). The Chromium-based Edge release is nowhere near completion - MIcrosoft is instead using flighting programs, like it is doing with most of its products now, to aid in the development of features and bug correction - having a global Q&A is much better than having a dedicated team in-house, after all. This is being done via Canary and Developer builds of the Edge browser, where Canary are available daily, and follow the development flow of the browser at is being developed, or via weekly Developer builds, which should bring more impactful performance and feature upgrades - along with some added stability.

One of the big no-nos for some users looking to upgrade do Windows 10 was the fact that Microsoft enforced constant, 6-month update cycles independent of whether users wanted them or not. This move was done to streamline the update process and keep all users at parity when it comes to important security and feature updates that Microsoft considered relevant. However, it seems Microsoft is now abandoning this practice, which means that users that like to know exactly what is being changed in their systems - and at a time of their convenience - now have one less reason to not upgrade.

Not only will Windows no longer push updates inadvertently, now home users will also have the ability to not only pause updates, but also remove them. There's a caveat, though - you won't be able to postpone feature updates forever. As it stands, Microsoft has an 18 month "end of life" period for major Windows 10 versions, which means that after your 18 months of postponing updates are up (and all of the kinks have been ironed out), you PC will still update to the latest version. There are some other details, which I will transcribe from the Microsoft blog post for your perusal.

DNA, the most prominent genetic material, was successfully used as an end-to-end digital data storage medium. Nature reports that a team of biotechnologists led by Christopher N. Takahashi, Bichlien H. Nguyen, Karin Strauss & Luis Ceze with the University of Washington at Seattle, sponsored by DARPA and Microsoft, have succeeded in encoding and decoding digital information into DNA strands. With it, the team has developed an end-to-end DNA-based data storage device, which consists of an encoder that writes ones and zeroes into DNA sequences that are written into oligonucleotides; a liquid physical storage media in which the DNA is literally stored free from contamination and thermal hazards; and a decoder that consists of a nanopore sequencer.

The researchers have developed a protocol on how to convert 1s and 0s to A-G, C-T base-pairs, including error-correction. A 5-byte message "HELLO" was successfully encoded, stored, and decoded without data loss over a period of 21 hours. DNA-based storage unlocks innumerable possibilities. For starters, in the future, humans will be able to grow storage devices, store foreign information within their genome, and transmit digital information through plasmid agents such as purpose-built viruses. 007 writers must be rubbing their hands.

Originally Cinebench R20 was released to the Microsoft Store which as you can probably guess caused a bit of negative PR for Maxon due to the benchmarks popularity within the enthusiast community. What really seemed to fuel the fire was the fact it was always freely distributed just about everywhere even here on TechPowerUp. Fast forward to the latest release and with it being locked to a digital walled garden of sorts really didn't sit too well within the community. However, it did not take long for enterprising enthusiasts to discover you could make it standalone.

This prompted Maxon to request the hosted files be taken down which generated quite the discussion within our own forums both for and against the move. Yet in the end, Maxon's reasoning behind their decision still remains a bit perplexing and with little clarity. Even more so now as the company has released there very own standalone version. Which leads us to wonder why they went about doing things in this circuitous manner in the first place. Still, this standalone release will likely be met with much more fanfare, well that is if the download link pointed to the right files. Currently, the official download page will direct users to a Mac .dmg file, which seems to be a copy and paste mistake. We figured out the correct link, it's listed below.Download: Maxon Cinebench R20

We knew this was coming, especially after Google's teaser from earlier this month. Project Stream was a proof-of-concept in collaboration with Ubisoft, to see whether AAA gaming was possible over the internet. Things were smooth most of the time in our own experience, but there remained questions over how the concept would translate over to a finished product, especially with infrastructure challenges on the client side of things. Google's keynote at GDC just wrapped up, and the main focus was Stadia- the now named cloud gaming service borne out of Project Stream.

Stadia is built with instant access in mind. An example demo came in the form of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which was used in the public test before. It is integrated with partner YouTube channels such that a trailer for a supported game would have an option to play said game, which would then launch immediately. Stadia is built with support from a wide partner network including AMD, Unity, id Software, and more, with details seen past the break.

Microsoft today via a devblog announced their push to make Variable Rate Shading an industry-wide adoption in the search of increased performance that can support the number of pixels and quality of those pixels in future games. The post starts with what is likely the foremost question on the mind of any discerning user that hears of a technique to improve performance: "does it degrade image quality?". And the answer, it seems, is a no: no discernible image quality differences between the Variable Rate Shading part of the image, and the fully rendered one. I'll give you the option to speak on your own perception, though: analyze the image below and cast your vote on the poll.

As resolution increases, so does the amount of work that any given GPU has to process to generate a single frame - and compare that to the amount of additional work that goes from rendering a 30 FPS, 1080p game to a 60 FPS, 4K one, and... It stands to reason that ways of squeezing the highest amount of performance from a given process are at a premium. Particularly in the console space, where cost concerns require the usage of more mainstream-equivalent hardware, which requires creative ways of bridging the desired image quality and the available rendering time for each frame.

In what is likely to create a good deal of controversy along with a few cheers, Blizzard will be adding DirectX 12 support to World of Warcraft on Windows 7 thanks to a bit of effort from Microsoft. You might be wondering how that is possible? Well after seeing massive performance gains in WoW when Blizzard released their DirectX 12 update for Windows 10 in late 2018, resulted in the company wanting to bring those performance improvements to gamers still holding out on Windows 7. To facilitate this, they began talking with Microsoft who after getting a great deal of feedback from Blizzard decided to act on it. To achieve this Microsoft decided to port the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7, which will unblock developers, thereby allows them to take advantage of the latest improvements that the DirectX 12 API offers while still giving full support to customers on older operating systems.

For now, World of Warcraft is the first game to run in DirectX 12 on Windows 7 with the latest 8.1.5 patch. However, they will not be the last as more developers are working on porting DirectX 12 games to Windows 7 with more announcements to follow. Microsoft, of course, has taken it upon themselves to remind everyone that the best possible performance with DirectX 12 will still be had on Windows 10 due to numerous OS optimizations. How true this is remains to be seen, but for many curmudgeons still holding out on Windows 7, this will likely be seen as a form of vindication for sticking with the now venerable OS.

The last time an actual Halo game made its way to PC was 2007 when Halo 2 launched three years after the console version to little fanfare, as it required the Windows Vista operating system. Since then Microsoft has not bothered to release any of the mainstream titles on PC. However, that is no longer the case as Microsoft has announced that they will be bringing Halo: The Master Chief Collection to PC. While some may think it too little too late, considering the Master Chief Collection initially launched nearly five years ago, the fact remains with this release PC gamers now have access to the majority of the series including Halo 1, 2, 3, 4, ODST, and Reach which was just recently added to the collection. The only title missing at this point is Halo 5.

While a typical re-release is possible it appears that is not the direction 343 Industries will take as they recognize that PC gamers are an exacting bunch and as such have brought in help from Ruffian and Splash Damage studios in order to polish the collection ahead of its debut. As of now, you can expect support for 4K resolution, 60 frames per second gameplay, and HDR at least as a minimum along with proper controls. Overall the Master Chief Collection offers a ton of content including 67 campaign missions and 120 multiplayer maps when you include both Horde Survival and Spartan Ops. Pricing and availability currently remain unknown, but at the very least it will be available on Steam meaning it is not a Microsoft Store exclusive. That said, it will still require an Xbox Live account.