Artist: Wiz Khalifa Real Name: Cameron Jibril Thomaz Birth Date /Place: September 8, 1987 / Minot, North Dakota, U.S. Age: 34 Social status (Single / Married): Married Artist Picture: Musical Genres: Hip Hop Awards: Here Top 3 Songs (Names): Oh Wow & Still Wiz & See you again Other Information: Cameron Jibril Thomaz (born September 8, 1987), better known by his stage name Wiz Khalifa, is an American rapper and singer. He released his debut album, Show and Prove, in 2006, and signed to Warner Bros. Records in 2007. His Eurodance-influenced single "Say Yeah" received urban radio airplay, charting on the Rhythmic Top 40 and Hot Rap Tracks charts in 2008, becoming his first minor hit.

Music Title:Wiz Khalifa - Can't Stay Sober [Official Music Video] Signer: Wiz Khalifa Release Date: Dec 24, 2021 Official Youtube Link: Informations About The Signer: - Your Opinion About The Track (Music Video): Good

We're back for another year of Santa tracking, where we're bringing you all the updates from the top Santa trackers all over the world - and this year, we're live-blogging the experience for you too, focusing heavily on the two biggest trackers: NORAD and Google, both of which offer very different experiences. There are a variety of ways to track Santa these days thanks to the advent of the smartphone, so if you're looking to find out precisely when you're going to get your presents, that's what we're here for. The tradition of watching where Santa cross the globe began in 1955 when, legend has it, a child mistakenly called Colorado Springs' Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Center after a misprint in a Sears catalog for a number to call to speak to Santa. The American military realized this was a PR dream, and began putting out press releases on the whereabouts of Santa each year, with comical stories added in too, with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) taking over. In the early 1980s, a hotline was added to let people call to find out where he is. Fast forward to today and there are a number of ways to find out what's happening to Santa - with Google's Santa Tracker joining the party in 2004 - and these are the key ones to look out for. The original way of following Santa and, some would say, the best. This website, run by the US military, fuses gruff colonels presenting a video about Santa Claus with live, up-to-the-minute info on where the man in the big red suit is. You can download the app on the App Store or Google Play Store, and from there you'll be presented with a number of mini games to play as well as being able to follow the progress of the present giving live. It's a far more rudimentary experience than other trackers out there, lacking a lot of polish and website design. However, it's also the most po[CENSORED]r and has the heart-warming history behind it - as well as an army of volunteers ready to take your call to find out where Santa is. NORAD has also added in an AI chatbot called Radar to help you spot Santa too, if you can't be bothered with all that talking, which is a bit lovely. But if you can bothered, then dialling +1 (877) HI-NORAD will do the trick too. A more recent addition to the Santa tracking mix, Google's Santa Tracker has still been going since 2004, combining the power of Google Maps with the savvy knowledge of where Father Christmas is. While Google doesn't have the same satellite tracking power of NORAD, one has to assume the search giant has struck a deal with the North Pole to figure out where he is in real time using search and radar and lazers and... stuff. Don't ask us to interpret the magic. Backing up the Santa Tracker are a whole host of minigames to play, as well as a month-long website encouraging children to learn to code while they encounter a winter wonderland. There are some pro-Google tools moments in this Santa Tracker - the Quick Draw game is designed to teach Google's image recognition Tensor to improve, which feels a bit odd - but it's a wonderfully-designed site and arguably the most visually accessible way to follow Santa. You can download the app from the Google Play Store, but in our eyes the mobile site is just as good and accessible for iPhone users, plus Google's Santa Tracker has the best, simple-to-use desktop experience too.

SberTech, a technology arm of Sber, Russia's biggest bank, has evaluated the Russian-made MCST Elbrus-8C processors in multiple workloads, but the results were utterly disappointing and the processors failed the test. The testers cited "Insufficient memory, slow memory, few cores, low frequency. Functional requirements not been met at all" as key reasons for the failure. However, there is hope, according to SberTech engineers. Homebrew Hardware… As part of its ongoing conflict with the Western world following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war against Ukraine, Russia has publicly declared its intention to substitute hardware and software developed in the U.S. and Europe with its domestic technologies. On the hardware side of matters, this meant migrating from x86 AMD's Epyc and Intel's Xeon Scalable platforms to its homegrown CPUs, such as MCST's Elbrus processors based on a proprietary VLIW-like architecture, as well as Baikal Electronics' Arm-based SoCs. So far, some of the Russian government agencies and government-controlled companies have adopted Baikal and Elbrus-based systems. But when it comes to mission-critical servers, nobody has embraced any of the homebrew machines. This happens to a large degree because most Russian-made machines have fewer cores (compared to mainstream servers), insufficient capacity of slow and outdated memory, low clocks, and poor out-of-box software optimization. "The Elbrus-8C server is very weak compared to Intel Xeon 'Cascade Lake'," said Anton Zhbankov, a representative for SberTech, said at the Elbrus Partner Day conference (via ServerNews.ru) earlier this month. "Insufficient memory [256MB], slow memory, few cores, low frequency. Functional requirements not been met at all." Elbrus-8C: 8C/8T, 1.30 GHz, 16MB L3, 70W TDP, quad-channel DDR3-1600 memory, 28nm, 250 FP64 GFLOPS Intel's Xeon Gold 6230: Cascade Lake-SP, 20C/40T, 2.10 – 3.90 GHz, 27.5MB L3, 125W TDP, 14nm Elbrus-8CB: New microarchitecture, 8C/8T, 1.50 GHz, 16MB L3, 90W TDP, quad-channel DDR4-2400 memory, 28nm, 576 FP64 GFLOPS In fact, SberTech's evaluation was the first in-depth testing of the Elbrus-8C platform in a banking application. The evaluators compared dual- and quad-socket Elbrus-8C machines (16 - 32 cores per box) to a dual-processor server based on Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 processor that the company currently uses. SberTech could not test the more powerful Elbrus-8CB as it is still not available despite being formally introduced. …Cannot Compete Against Industry-Standard Parts Being one of the largest banks in Europe that offers many more services than just banking, Sber has certain requirements for hardware and has its own test methodology for evaluating machines it considers deploying. This methodology includes the following: Functional Testing (44 parameters to make sure that a platform can run what Sber needs and can be managed how Sber needs it); Synthetic Testing (using PGbench from the PostreSQL suite as well as SPEC CPU 2017); Application Testing (using Java apps). Every server begins from its chassis and some general features such as remote management, which Sber evaluates under its Functional Testing procedure. Apparently, an MCST Elbrus-8C machine failed 84% of Sber's Functional Testing as it could not be easily removed from the rack, lacked proper LED indicators, and came without remote management, which to a large degree made it unusable for usage in commercial datacenters. There is some hope, though. "One of the surprising things about the Elbrus-8C server was that it is a real product," said Zhbankov. "It was a real server that we were given. […] It is an actual product that has its disadvantages, loads of disadvantages, but we can work with them." Elbrus-8C Evaluation Summary 4-way Elbrus-8C vs 2-way Intel Xeon Gold 6230 SPEC CPU 2017 2.62 (base) ~ 3.15 (peak) times slower PGbench/PostreSQL 1.7 (read only profile) ~ 3.3 (read write profile) times lower Java 23 ~ 26 times higher response time The situation looks slightly better with the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark, as the quad-chip Elbrus-8C was 2.62 (base) ~ 3.15 (peak) times slower than the dual Intel Xeon Gold 6230 machine, which was not that bad as SberTech engineers expected a 20x to 30x difference. However, it should be noted that neither the x86 system nor the Elbrus machine achieved their peak performance numbers submitted by server makers to Spec.org. Meanwhile, in PGbench/PostreSQL tests, the Xeon Gold 6230 machine was 1.7 (read-only profile) ~ 3.3 (read-write profile) times better (in terms of transactions per $100,000) than the Elbrus-8C server depending on the workload, which is significant but not dramatically lower. With Java applications or emulated Java workloads, the situation got a lot direr for the Elbrus-8C platform that showed 23x to 26x times higher response time and did not meet any of Sber's quality-of-service requirements. According to the companies, the good news is that Java application startup times and response times improved with performance optimizations. The Elbrus-8C machine was still not quite competitive against the Xeon server, but its performance can be improved with software tweaks. Will Take Years to Catch Up But while SberTech's engineers expected the Elbrus-8C machine to perform much worse and be orders of magnitude slower than Intel's Xeon Gold 6230 machine from 2019, even a two to three times performance difference is significant enough for commercial companies not to deploy a platform since it makes no financial sense. "At the moment, Sberbank says no, we cannot deploy Elbrus machines into our ecosystem, but we are pleasantly surprised that it works at all," said Zhbankov. For now, there are problems even with MCST's system design itself, so the CPU performance is something that Sber or any other hyperscaler would not even normally evaluate. Speaking of CPU performance, the company introduced the Elbrus-8CB several years ago and it is expected to arrive shortly. This chip promises considerably higher performance due to a new microarchitecture and improved memory support. Also, MCST has a rather ambitious server roadmap that includes a 12-core Elbrus processor, a 16-core CPU that was taped out last year, and even a 32-core system-on-chip for PetaFLOPS-class systems. At some point in the future, MCST's Elbrus processors will get significantly faster than they are today. Still, the problem is that it takes the company an enormous amount of time to develop new CPUs and bring them to the market (e.g., the Elbrus-8CB was announced in 2018). Therefore, by the time the ambitious 32-core Elbruses arrive, chips from AMD and Intel will be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient in terms of performance-per-watt than they are today. This begs the question of whether various domestically designed Chinese or Russian CPUs will even catch up with those from leading developers. The answer appears to be multifaceted. Companies like MCST can develop CPUs that are good enough for office workloads. Such systems may well be deployed by governments that can pay extra to support domestic CPU developers and not use foreign technologies. Homegrown CPUs can also be used to build supercomputers if things like scalability and energy efficiency are not a concern. However, it does not seem that such homegrown CPUs will catch up with developments from AMD, Intel, and emerging Arm-based server SoC designers any time soon.

Name of the game: Forza Horizon Price: 53,99$ Link Store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1551360/Forza_Horizon_5/ Offer ends up after X hours: 5 January Requirements: Minimum : Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 version 15063.0 or higher Processor: Intel i5-4460 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVidia GTX 970 OR AMD RX 470 DirectX: Version 12 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 110 GB available space Recommended : Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 version 15063.0 or higher Processor: Intel i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: NVidia GTX 1070 OR AMD RX 590 DirectX: Version 12 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 110 GB available space

The Chinook helicopter’s Royal Air Force career got off to an unexpectedly dramatic start. The UK military began taking deliveries of this twin-rotor heavy-lift helicopter in late 1980, forming the first Chinook squadron at RAF Odiham in Hampshire in August 1981. Crews were still getting to know the capabilities of the aircraft in early 1982 when it was suddenly called on for its first major job: to support the liberation of the Falkland Islands from the Argentinian military. Five Chinooks were packed tightly on the deck of the requisitioned container ship MV Atlantic Conveyor, alongside Wessex and Lynx helicopters and Harrier and Sea Harrier jets, for the journey to the Falklands, with one of the Chinooks unloaded at Ascension Island en route.But no sooner had the Atlantic Conveyor arrived at its destination in the South Atlantic than it was hit by two sea-skimming Exocet missiles, aimed at but missing the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers. The strike killed 12 sailors and set the ship ablaze. Every aircraft on board was rendered inoperable. Three Chinooks were destroyed but, having just been made airworthy, one Chinook, codenamed Bravo November, was undergoing a flight test at the time of the attack. It landed on the nearby aircraft carrier HMS Hermes and, with the work of several helicopters to do and all ofits spares and maintenance parts lost, was thrown into a much more difficult task than had been expected of it. By the end of the conflict, it had shown its worth. It flew more than 100 hours, carrying 1500 troops, more than 550 tonnes of cargo and evacuating 95 casualties. It became known as The Survivor, but while the nickname applied specifically to Bravo November, which still flies in front-line RAF service today, it could easily apply to the Chinook in general. The Boeing CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter celebrated its 60th birthday this year, while 2021 has marked a year of 40th birthday celebrations for the Chinook in the service of the RAF. From the Falklands to the Balkans and the Middle East, the Chinook has been in every active RAF theatre since 1982. RAF Chinooks are supporting French anti-terrorism activities in Mali as we write. It’s an exceptionally durable aircraft. Of the 70 Chinooks the RAF has bought, more than 60 are still in service. They’ve been repaired and upgraded (although not always seamlessly), and such is the design’s practicality and longevity that the RAF ordered 14 more earlier this year to enter service from 2026. The Chinook is the first helicopter likely to see in its 100th birthday as an operational aircraft. It’s also the subject of this year’s Autocar Christmas road test. We like Unrivalled practicality / Exceptionally durable and dependable We don't like Servicing and maintenance cost / You’ll hear it coming Design and engineering The clue to the Chinook’s purpose is in its Boeing model code, HC-47, with HC standing for Helicopter, Cargo. It’s not a nomenclature used by the RAF, which calls its Chinooks HC.Mk (it’s currently up to Mk6) and includes various detail specification differences from the base Boeing unit. The Chinook is a heavy-lift helicopter designed for the military, although it has found civilian uses, too, including carrying large quantities of people and equipment into and out of hard-to-reach areas. The key to the Chinook’s success, and what sets it apart from almost all other heavy-lift helicopters, are its two sets of counter-rotating rotor blades, a straightforward enough concept that nonetheless requires some complicated engineering to put into action. Link : https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/christmas-road-test-2021-raf-chinook-helicopter There are two sets of three blades, one set at the front, one at the back, which spin in opposing directions (anticlockwise at the front) at the steady 225rpm that gives the Chinook its distinctive ‘wokka’ sound. Interlinked so they can never touch, each rotor balances out the other’s yaw moment, negating the need for a tail boom and vertical rotor to act against the turning force of the main rotor, as on a conventional helicopter. Without those, and with the main rotors mounted high on pylons, the entire back end of the Chinook can be given over to cargo.

The $10bn James Webb telescope has left Earth on its mission to show the first stars to light up the Universe. The observatory was lifted skyward by an Ariane rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. Its flight to orbit was expected to last just under half an hour, with a signal confirming a successful outcome due to be picked up in Kenya. Webb, named after one of the architects of the Apollo Moon landings, is the successor to the Hubble telescope. Engineers working with the US, European and Canadian space agencies have built the new observatory to be 100 times more powerful, however. Lift-off was eagerly awaited but accompanied also by a good deal of anxiety. Thousands of people worldwide have worked on the project over the past 30 years, and even though the Ariane is a very dependable vehicle - there are no guarantees when it comes to rockets. "Webb is an extraordinary mission," US space agency administrator Bill Nelson said before lift-off. "It's a shining example of what we can accomplish when we dream big. We've always known that this project would be a risky endeavour. But, of course, when you want a big reward, you have to usually take a big risk." At the core of the new facility's capabilities is its 6.5m-wide golden mirror. This is almost three times wider than the primary reflector on Hubble. The enlarged optics, combined with four super-sensitive instruments, should enable astronomers to look deeper into space - and thus further back in time - than ever before. A key target will be the epoch of the pioneer stars that ended the darkness theorised to have gripped the cosmos shortly after the Big Bang more than 13.5 billion years ago. It was the nuclear reactions in these objects that would have forged the very first heavy atoms essential for life - carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Another overarching goal for Webb will be to probe the atmospheres of distant planets. This will help researchers gauge whether these worlds are in any way habitable. "We're going to be entering a whole new regime of astrophysics, a new frontier; and that is what gets so many of us excited about the James Webb Space Telescope," said Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer and an interdisciplinary scientist on the mission. Webb's launch is only the start of what will be a complex series of initial activities over the next six months. The telescope is being put on a path to an observing station some 1.5 million km beyond the Earth. In the course of travelling to this location, Webb will have to unpack itself from the folded configuration it adopted at launch. "And then the critical thing is that it all has to get very cold," explained Mark Mark McCaughrean, senior science adviser with the European Space Agency. "This telescope actually will be at minus 233 degrees Celsius. Only then will it stop glowing at the infrared wavelengths beyond the visible where we want this telescope to work. And only then will it be able to take the sensitive pictures of the distant Universe where the first galaxies were born, and of planets going around other stars. So there's a long way to go." Link : https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59782057

Google Maps is home to a lot of unusual sights, from strange pentagrams in Kazakhstan to a parked UFO in Romania. But a Reddit user has just spotted one of the rarest ones yet: a flying stealth bomber. Although the B-2 Spirit can fly at 1,010 km/h (or about 628mph), an image of the bomber was nonetheless captured on Google Maps as it hurtled across a remote part of Missouri. The image was found by Redditor Hippowned. Naturally, the image is slightly blurry and also has some red, green and blue artifacts, which are the result of how satellites capture images. Google Maps, and its software-based companion Google Earth, gather their images from a variety of sources, but this frame is credited to satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies. Rather than focusing light onto a sensor like traditional cameras, satellites measure the intensity of certain wavelengths of light (like red, green and blue), which are then combined to make a single image. It's this process that's likely behind the colorful banding seen in Google Maps' shot of the stealth bomber, with the simultaneous motion of both the satellite and aircraft causing the psychedelic separation between the red, green and blue parts of the image. This isn't the first time a stealth bomber has been spotted on Google Maps; a craft was previously seen parked on the runway at Whiteman Air Force Base, the current home of the B-2 Spirit. But it is the first time one has been captured in flight, albeit in a location that's only 25 miles north of that AFB, which goes some way to explaining why it's seemingly hurtling towards St. Louis. Google Maps has been going for over 15 years, but much of its imagery is updated every few years, which explains why new, unusual sightings frequently pop up on the service. That said, it's relatively unusual to see fast-moving objects like planes – and stealth bombers in particular – in its patchwork of satellite images. In 2017, Redditors discovered an airliner in mid-flight over the South Downs National Park in the UK (above), with that photo also displaying the same red, green and blue artifacts as the B-2 Spirit shot, but it's still pretty rare. Google's method of compiling its satellite shots has also created some slightly spooky, aircraft-based anomalies. In 2019, a Google Earth user in the UK spotted what appeared to be the shadow of an aircraft under the sea, just off the coast of Edinburgh, Scotland. But a Google spokesperson told The Mirror that "the reason it looks like the plane is underwater is because each satellite image you see on the map is actually a compilation of several images." The spokesperson added that "fast-moving objects, like planes, often show up in only one of the many images we use for a given area. When this happens, faint remnants of the fast-moving object can sometimes be seen." Or in the case of the stealth bomber, a surprisingly clear shot of the one of the most recognizable aircraft ever made.

Adata has released a detailed teaser outlining what to expect from its CES 2022 presentation. The most noteworthy new products come in the form of two PCIe 5.0 SSD designs — the Adata Project Nighthawk PCIe 5.0 and Adata Project Blackbird PCIe 5.0. Adata claims these drives will deliver up to a blistering 14 GBps of sequential throughput, twice the speed of existing PCIe 4.0 SSDs. However, the company hasn't shared any information about random IOPS performance yet. The firm is priming the public for a wide range of new performance PC DIY components, peripherals and laptops that it will release at CES 2022 under the gaming-centric XPG sub-brand in its Dawn of a New Xtreme presentation on Wednesday, January 5. Adata's Nighthawk and Blackbird projects The Adata Project Nighthawk and Blackbird PCIe 5.0 SSDs are admittedly prototypes and are thus framed by Adata's PR department as making "a special appearance" at its booth at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. Thankfully, Adata isn't being too cloak and dagger about the star guests and has provided us with some key specs and performance metrics for the next-gen PCIe interface and controller packing M.2. SSD sticks. Adata's Project Nighthawk PCIe 5.0 is designed using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. At this time, we don't know what NAND will be used. However, according to Adata's internal testing, the Nighthawk "is capable of delivering sequential read/write performance of up to 14 / 12 GBps." The Adata Project Blackbird PCIe 5.0 is differentiated from the Nighthawk by its use of an InnoGrit IG5666 controller. This PCIe 5.0 SSD appears to be balanced differently, less adept at fast sequential writes, and Adata says that it "is capable of delivering read/write performance of 14 / 10 GBps." As mentioned previously, we don't know if the NAND used in these prototypes is a variable affecting performance or not. In September, Tom's Hardware reported on Kioxia's PCIe 5.0 SSD prototype hitting 14 GBps sequential read transfers, so Adata's figures appear to be in line with expectations. However, Kioxia's test product only achieved 7 GBps writes. At the time, indications were that IOPS figures would be uplifted by 50 to 80% with the move from PCIe 4.0 to 5.0 SSDs. Both Nighthawk and Blackbird PCIe 5.0 SSD models will be made in capacities up to 8TB, says Adata. We look forward to CES 2022 to pick through more details. As well as the above PCIe 5.0 SSDs, Adata will showcase a new Elite SE920 USB4 external SSD with speeds of up to 40 Gbps packed in an actively cooled chassis. Of course its latest DDR5 developments will be in the spotlight too. Adata says its new XPG Lancer RGB DDR5 and Caster RGB DDR5 "deliver next-level performance of up to 6,000 MT/s and 7,000 MT/s, respectively." Other Adata XPG components you might be interested in, range from AiO coolers and PSUs to full chassis designs. Adata will also have an updated family of XPG peripherals to showcase including a USB Type-C gaming mouse with integrated "XPG vault" SSD. Last but not least, Adata's CES 2022 booth will feature a range of gaming and ultrabook laptops.

Name of the game: It Takes Two Price: 19,99$ Link Store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1426210/It_Takes_Two/ Offer ends up after X hours: 5 January Requirements: Minimum : Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit or Windows 10 64-bit Processor: Intel Core i3-2100T or AMD FX 6100 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 or AMD R7 260x DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 50 GB available space Recommended : Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit or Windows 10 64-bit Processor: Intel Core i5 3570K or AMD Ryzen 3 1300x Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 or AMD R9 290X DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 50 GB available space

Within the likes of a Bentley, nature’s proceeds of timber, wool, hide and more are crafted from raw material into sophisticated and elegant yet functional finishes. They come together to create a cabin of atmosphere and comfort where synthetic materials might otherwise leave you cold. Yet the origins of these finishes are easily taken for granted. So we’re going on a road trip to discover the what, where, how and who of Bentley’s luxury interiors. We’ll visit four manufacturers that supply Bentley, and then finish up at Mulliner, home to Bentley’s most rarefied products and whose carriage-building roots in 1760 make it the oldest surviving name in the Volkswagen Group’s portfolio. By way of contrast, we’ll be driving a Formentor crossover from the VW Group’s youngest brand, Cupra, spun out from Seat in 2018. We start in my corner of Edinburgh, the Dean Village, which has its own four-wheeled history and links with Mulliner. We pose the Formentor outside what from 1934 to 2001 was the Bentley specialist workshop of Ian Cunningham senior and then junior. Both were trained in-house by the manufacturer and cared for countless Bentleys – including several Blowers – plus the Queen’s Scottish f leet and famous racers including Ecurie Ecosse’s 1956 Le Mans-winning Jaguar D-Type. The Cupra’s angular form and piercing LEDs are stark against the building’s weathered frontage. The car has a brooding, high-tech aesthetic outside and in, accentuated by ‘Dark Camouflage’ paintwork and black nappa. It comes in VZ2 spec and the UK market’s most powerful engine choice, the VW-familiar EA888 2.0 TSI with 306bhp. Exploring those credentials will wait, though, as we select Comfort mode to slip westbound out of town. Adaptive dampers softened, Edinburgh’s notoriously fractured roads are for the most part gently parried while the seven-speed DSG gearbox smudges us towards the M8. Swiftly reaching 70mph on the motorway, the engine sits docile at 2000rpm. There’s some roar from the 19in rubber on rougher sections but otherwise the Formentor manages this workaday stuff nicely. We’re soon bisecting Glasgow, where COP26 delegates are busy pondering the future of its kind. We cross the Clyde, whose shipping trade bankrolled the lavish lifestyle of Glen Kidston – derring- doer, Bentley Boy and winner of 1930’s Le Mans, sharing Woolf Barnato’s Speed Six. Then it’s a short hop into Renfrewshire to visit Bridge of Weir, supplier of leather to Bentley and other British and international marques. The Muirhead name has been in tanning as long as Mulliner has been in coachbuilding, and it’s James Muirhead, head of automotive sales, who shows us around. The hides processed here come from British and Irish bulls: the region picked for climate and diet, the sex for durability and tightness of grain. The leather is an unwanted by-product of the meat industry, so those with ethical concerns arguably have a beef with, well, beef more than the material itself. Once preserved via tanning, shaving machines reduce the unseen ‘B side’ so the hides are barely one millimetre thick. Imperfections are few; black patches of hair endure as blue splodges on the otherwise pale skins but disappear after dying in huge drums using organic dyes. Link : https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/let-it-blow-bentley-themed-winter-road-trip

A famous statue at the University of Hong Kong marking the Tiananmen Square massacre was removed late on Wednesday. The statue showed piled-up corpses to commemorate the hundreds - possibly thousands - of pro-democracy protesters killed by Chinese authorities in 1989. It was one of the few remaining public memorials in Hong Kong commemorating the incident. Its removal comes as Beijing has increasingly been cracking down on political dissent in Hong Kong. The city used to be one of few places in China that allowed public commemoration of the Tiananmen Square protests - a highly sensitive topic in the country. In 1989, Beijing's Tiananmen Square became the focus for demonstrations calling for greater political freedoms. Thousands of people camped for weeks in the square, but in June the military moved in and troops opened fire. What were the Tiananmen Square protests about? The Chinese government says 200 civilians and several dozen security personnel died. Other estimates have ranged from hundreds to as many as 10,000. "The decision on the aged statue was based on external legal advice and risk assessment for the best interest of the university," it said in a statement on Thursday. "The university is also very concerned about the potential safety issues resulting from the fragile statue." The Chinese authorities have previously cited safety or public health concerns as reasons for preventing events such as vigils taking place on anniversaries of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The first sign the statue was being taken down came late on Wednesday, when university officials fenced off the area with plastic sheeting. Construction workers worked overnight behind plastic barriers to dismantle the 8m (26ft) copper statue. Security guards blocked reporters from approaching and tried to stop them from filming. Like an affront to the city's identity By Grace Tsoi, BBC World Service, Hong Kong For decades, Hong Kong prided itself on being the "conscience of China" - the only place in Chinese territory that had not forgotten the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Beijing had allowed the annual candlelight vigil commemorating the bloody incident, which also become part of Hong Kong's collective memory. But under the national security law, the vigil organiser - the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China - was forced to disband, and many protest leaders were jailed. It is clear that Beijing will no longer tolerate any public display of defiance. The monument had been standing on campus for more than two decades. Now, even it had to be dismantled and removed - in the dead of night. There was the sound of cracking and drilling as the statue came down, but no one could see what was happening. To many, the abrupt removal felt like another affront to the city's identity. line The removed statue depicts a column of dozens of torn and twisted bodies with anguished faces, "to remind us of a shameful event which must never recur", according to its sculptor, Jens Galschiot. The university said it would put the statue, which has been on display at the university's campus for 24 years, into storage. Galschiot called the removal "really brutal" and that he would consider suing the authorities and demand compensation. "This is a sculpture about dead people and [to] remember the dead people in Beijing in '89. So when you destroy that in this way then it's like going to a graveyard and destroying all the gravestones," he told the BBC's Newshour programme. A student leader who survived the Tiananmen crackdown and is now living in the US, Wang Dan, strongly condemned the move and accused the Chinese Communist Party of trying to "cover up their crimes". "The Hong Kong government... has used this despicable act in an attempt to erase this blood-stained chapter of history," he wrote on Twitter. A student at the University of Hong Kong, 22-year-old Billy Kwok, told Reuters news agency the statue's removal was "really sad". "It's really ironic... I don't think people would expect this [to] happen in the university," he said, adding that the building was supposed to be a place that supported "so-called freedom of expression or freedom of speech". Why is its removal significant? "[The statue] was one of the few remaining prominent, public memorials [of the] crackdown... and a reminder of Hong Kong's freer past," Dr Ian Chong, Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, told the BBC. "[Its removal] takes away yet another public focal point for commemorating of the massacre... [and] appears to signal that the Hong Kong and Beijing governments will no longer tolerate public displays of remembrance of the events surrounding 4 June." The statue's removal comes on the heels of a poorly attended Hong Kong parliamentary election that saw pro-Beijing candidates sweep into power, the timing of which Dr Chong termed "symbolic". Beijing also introduced a strict national security law last year that criminalises secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces. Activists say the law is being used to suppress civil society, jail democracy campaigners and curb basic freedoms. What were the Tiananmen Square protests? International condemnation ensued after troops and tanks opened fire on protesters. The incident is considered highly politically sensitive in the mainland and authorities ban even oblique references to the events of 4 June. In 2020, Hong Kong authorities banned the annual vigil commemorating Tiananmen for the first time in 30 years, citing Covid restrictions - though activists have accused local officials of bowing to pressure from Beijing to muzzle pro-democracy expression. In October, nine pro-democracy Hong Kong activists were sentenced to between six and 10 months in prison for taking part in the vigil. Earlier this month, media tycoon Jimmy Lai also received 13 months in prison for participating in the same vigil. Link : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59764029

V2 - Resize, effects.

The Analogue Pocket is a delightfully indulgent device. From its pixel-perfect 3.5-inch display and beautiful, sleek design, it's unashamedly geared towards a small user base of devoted retro enthusiasts who want nothing more than to relive the halcyon days of handheld gaming. But in the best possible way. Crucially, there's no emulation here, unlike many other retro gaming handhelds on the market. The Analogue Pocket plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges natively, and you can buy adapters for Neo Geo Pocket, Sega Game Gear, and Atari Lynx games too. It means all those games you grew up playing decades ago will run exactly how you remember on the Analogue Pocket – but so, so much better. The Analogue Pocket's gorgeous screen and clever software include advanced features that inject new life into games – like a sharpening option, frame blending, as well as support for original display modes. You can also suspend and resume your gameplay at a moment's notice using the Analogue Pocket's sleep function, which is a delightful addition and all the more impressive when you realize it's running older games natively. Jumping back into Pokémon Silver and playing from exactly where you left off is just fantastic. The Analogue Pocket can also be docked to your TV, just like a Nintendo Switch (though the Dock is sold separately). The Pocket outputs games at 1080p when connected to a TV, and you can attach up to four Bluetooth controllers for some seriously old-school couch gaming. But that's not all. You can even create music on the Analogue Pocket. Heck, it's open to developers to create new games, which means it could one day be home to some incredible titles from independent developers. If that wasn't enough (and honestly, we're being utterly spoiled at this point), you can purchase Analogue's Link Cable and play local multiplayer games with multiple Pocket Analogues or with original hardware. That means you can trade Pokémon with someone using a chunky yellow Game Boy like it's 1998 again. Seriously cool. These modern-day additions provide a retro gaming experience that's simply unparalleled. The mere fact that you can delve into your existing library of titles – if you've hung onto them after all these years – is a novelty in itself. You might even need to blow into the cartridge slot to get some of them going again. How's that for nostalgia? But this isn't just a system that will please those with rose-tinted glasses. The Analogue Pocket not only transports you back to a simpler time but reinvigorates everything in the process. You don't have to suffer through playing on impossibly dim screens or scouring the cupboards for some new AA batteries; the Analogue Pocket makes it feel as though the Game Boy was released yesterday as opposed to 1989, and that's a remarkable achievement. It means that new players can discover and enjoy games from decades ago, many of which are still fantastic today, rudimentary graphics aside. The question is, though: in a world of 4K TVs, HDR, and 120Hz capable displays, is there a fevered demand to revisit Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games? Absolutely not. But if you have even the slightest interest in revisiting handheld games or have been dissuaded by the gray area of downloading ROMs and emulating in the past, the Analogue Pocket is a must-buy. It's a luxury product in the truest sense of the word ($219.99 for the console alone), and it's all the better for it. Welcome to your fast-track ticket to retro gaming heaven.

I've been rather happily running and benchmarking graphics cards with Windows 10 since just after it launched in 2015. Microsoft tried to encourage people to upgrade by initially offering Windows 10 for free, plus it was the only OS with support for DirectX 12. Portions of DX12 were eventually backported to Windows 7, and you can still get Windows 10 for cheap, but now Windows 11 is the new kid on the block. So how does it perform, specifically with games? That's what we wanted to find out, so we grabbed the two best graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia and put them to the test. Let's be clear: Change for the sake of change doesn't go over well with me, and Windows 11 puts a new coat of paint on the worn-in and comfortable feeling Windows 10 house I've been living in since 2015. A new coat of paint would be fine, and I'm not necessarily averse to that. But in the process, it seems as though the UI designers felt a need to rearrange the furniture, switch around the drawers, and clean house on a bunch of functionality that I actually like. We've covered some of the worst Windows 11 changes, and how to fix them. Ultimately, two months after release, our Windows 11 launch impressions remain largely unchanged, and we're discovering even more disappointing aspects to the OS—like the Windows 11 SSD issues, which apparently still persist. With that in mind, I wanted to verify that Windows 11 doesn't impact graphics card performance before switching to the new OS. Of course, that switch is still in the works since I'll be shifting to an Alder Lake Core i9-12900K system for GPU reviews in the near future. And of course, using Alder Lake is one of the only good (sort of) reasons to switch to Windows 11, thanks to the new process scheduler that integrates with Intel's Thread Director hardware. What if you're not using Alder Lake, though? I took my current GPU testbed, which is now about three years old, and did a clean install of Windows 11 on a new Crucial P5 Plus SSD for testing purposes. I tested basically the fastest graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, the Radeon RX 6900 XT and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and I also retested those cards on Windows 10 using the latest drivers and updates. (Yes, technically the 3090 is a bit faster and has twice the VRAM, but it's close enough and the 3080 Ti tends to be more readily available.) That means running the AMD 21.21.1 and Nvidia's 497.09 drivers, with a complete driver cleanup (via Display Driver Uninstaller) between testing. Here are the results of the 14 games I used for testing. If you were looking for yet another reason to hate on Windows 11, this is obviously disappointing. For those who are more open-minded, though, this is good news. Windows 11 may not be any faster at games than Windows 10, but neither is it any slower. Of course, we tested Windows 11 with VBS disabled—that was the default after a clean install on our test hardware. There has been some concern that VBS defaults to enabled on clean installs, but so far it looks like it needs to be explicitly enabled, which is likely only something you'll see from large OEMs and business PCs. Across our 14-game test suite, the overall performance difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11 at three resolutions was less than one percent. There was one instance where Win10 was 4% faster (RTX 3080 Ti in Far Cry 6), and Assassin's Creed Valhalla was consistently 3% faster, but a few minor anomalies are to be expected. Sometimes Windows 10 was a bit faster and sometimes Windows 11 came out ahead, but in practice there wasn't any significant change. The minimum fps (technically 99th percentile frametime converted to fps) results show a bit more variability, but that's always the case. Here we see an instance (Strange Brigade on the RTX 3080 Ti) where Win10 beat Win11 by 10%, and there are a few other cases of 5% differences, but a single frame or two rendering slowly can easily skew the results. That's why we don't place as much emphasis on minimum fps. Interestingly, the RX 6900 XT was far more consistent in its performance across the two versions of Windows, where average fps was within 0.3% overall, and the biggest differences were still less than 2%. Even the minimum fps only had up to a 5.5% difference, and in that case, it was Windows 11 coming out ahead. If you prefer seeing things in chart form rather than the above tables, here's a gallery of all 45 of the 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results. (Note: The above table uses the geometric mean for average, where all values are given equal weight, while the 14 game average charts below use the arithmetic mean and can skew due to "outlier" results.)

Name of the game: Planet Zoo Price: 11,24$ Link Store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/703080/Planet_Zoo/ Offer ends up after X hours: 22 December Requirements: Minimum : Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 7 (SP1+)/8.1/10 64bit Processor: Intel i5-2500 / AMD FX-6350 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (2GB) / AMD Radeon R9 270X (2GB) Storage: 16 GB available space Additional Notes: Minimum specifications may change during development Recommended : Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 64bit Processor: Intel i7-4770k / AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB) Storage: 16 GB available space

Toyota’s decision to unveil an entire motor show’s worth of new cars in a single presentation yesterday was as remarkable a public insight into a company’s future model plans as any in living memory. It’s one thing to say the cars you’ll be making in the future, quite another to show them all. Unprecedented, even. The best we could muster in the Autocar office was Dany Bahar’s Lotus a decade ago, when seven concepts were unveiled at the Paris motor show – about as unfair a comparison to what Toyota has done as Peckham Spring to champagne. This is the way now at Toyota, a company that only a decade ago was about as large a corporate machine as you could imagine but is now a car maker packed full of surprises and bold statements backed up with actions, all in the image of its leader, Akio Toyoda. Toyota is not a brand to dip its toe into something to see how it goes. It goes in big, having carefully weighed up the merits of doing so to avoid merely jumping on a bandwagon. To that end, there had been rumblings that Toyota had been slow to move towards full electrification, something that legislation has made an inevitability. Yet those rumblings will be no more after the unveiling of the 15 concept cars that are likely to form the basis of many of the production cars needed for Toyota to hit its target of selling 3.5 million electric cars per year by 2030. Toyoda said he is now "interested in future EVs”, having not been so until now. It was also announced that Lexus would be an electric-only brand in Europe by 2030 and everywhere by 2035, a logical step given its market positioning. Intriguingly, though, the same will not happen to Toyota. Toyoda said his firm is not yet wholly sure what the ultimate uptake and technology direction will be for electric cars and, as such, is keeping all future technology options on the table to respond to the needs of customers as different solutions emerge. For example, Toyota is still very much backing hydrogen as a fuel of the future, and the company’s engineering prowess and influence over Japanese industrial strategy gives that fuel a high chance of more widespread commercial success and uptake in the longer term. Toyota is unlikely to want to turn its back on more than two decades of development of hybrid technology, either, which it remains convinced offers significant emissions benefits at a much lower cost. It’s telling that here in the UK, the ‘meaningful’ electric range of a hybrid to allow them to stay on sale for five years after 2030 is yet to be announced, which we understand is in part due to Toyota’s influence and research in showing the real-world emissions benefits of its hybrid technology used in cars it manufactures in the UK. Hydrogen and hybrids aren’t the only options, either, as Toyota is one of several major car makers investigating e-fuels. “Banning internal combustion engines might be picking a fight with the wrong enemy,” Steve Sapsford, managing director of consultancy firm SCE, told a recent Autocar Business webinar on the topic. “Stopping our dependence on fossil fuels is where we should be focused.” It’s this kind of holistic and indeed realistic approach to future powertrains that we need, and once again Toyota is leading the discussion not just with words but with actions, too. It might well produce 15 electric cars within the next few years to satisfy that particular trend, but you can be sure these won’t be the only Toyotas you can buy. Link : https://www.autocar.co.uk/opinion/new-cars/opinion-five-minutes-could-make-toyota-leader-evs

A record number of daily coronavirus cases have been reported across the UK for the second day running, with 88,376 infections confirmed on Thursday. England's chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, said the Omicron variant could rise "incredibly fast", but its peak subside quickly due to boosters. There was also a record for top-up vaccines with 745,183 third or booster doses being given on Wednesday. Boris Johnson has urged people to use "caution" in the face of the variant. But the prime minister insisted England was not being put into lockdown by stealth, after some of his own MPs had accused the government of putting hospitality under an "effective lockdown". Meanwhile, the Queen has cancelled her traditional pre-Christmas lunch as a precautionary measure amid the surge of the Omicron variant. A further 146 deaths within 28 days of a positive test were reported on Thursday. Daily cases were up from 78,610 on Wednesday, itself a record, and more than 30,000 up on last Thursday when 50,867 infections were reported. Prof Whitty said the peak of the Omicron wave may fall faster than previous Covid-19 peaks, although he said the upswing will be "incredibly fast". But he added that this was just a possibility, adding that the rate of growth would slow down once people had received booster vaccines or been infected by the variant. Speaking to the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, he said that even with people acting cautiously the rise in Omicron cases would still be "very fast". But the booster programme was the route back to a "more normal track", Prof Whitty said. Plan B measures and "really critically the booster programme" were intended to slow things down, he said, but he added that "if the facts change and it becomes clearer that things are heading the wrong way, ministers are always going to take constant reviews of this". Prof Whitty said if vaccines were less effective than expected against Omicron then that would be a "material change" in how ministers viewed risks going forward. He also said it is likely that vaccines and antiviral drugs will do "almost all of the heavy lifting" when it comes to tackling future Covid variants. Prof Whitty said "each six months will be better than the last six months" when it comes to fighting Covid. UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) chief medical adviser Dr Susan Hopkins told MPs that there were now 15 people in hospital with the Omicron variant, but Prof Whitty said the real number will be much greater. Dr Hopkins said that the earliest there would be reliable data on Omicron would be in the week between Christmas and New Year, with around 250 people with confirmed Omicron needed in hospital for a full study on severity. Link : https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59688186

Happy birthday my friend ❤️

Microsoft downed down the chance to make GTA 3 a console exclusive on the original Xbox, which turns out was probably the greatest gift it could have given Sony in the sixth generation of consoles. As revealed in 'Power On: The Story of Xbox' documentary, Rockstar was in talks with Microsoft to revive one of its older franchises as an Xbox exclusive: that game would go on to be GTA 3. However, the publisher turned it down, which led to Rockstar developing Grand Theft Auto 3 as a timed exclusive for the PS2 back in 2001. The segment from the documentary was highlighted by Rockstar news specialist Ben Turpin on Twitter, stating that "Microsoft execs outright rejected" a pitch for GTA 3. And as stated in the documentary, Rockstar's open-world crime sandbox went on to sell 14.5 million units on the PS2 alone, eclipsed only by its sequel: Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Of course, Rockstar is on amicable terms with Microsoft these days, releasing most of its large-scale projects like GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 simultaneously on both PlayStation and Xbox platforms. However, GTA 3 was hugely responsible for the po[CENSORED]rity of the PS2 back in the day, effectively meaning that Microsoft handed Sony a huge win by snubbing the game originally. Still, the ripples of this decision were arguably felt throughout the sixth generation of consoles, as each of the three games in the GTA Trilogy (GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas) enjoyed timed exclusivity on the PS2. Not to mention Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, both of which were exclusive to the PSP handheld console for a decent amount of time. It's hard to say what the gaming landscape would have looked like back then, had GTA 3 actually been an Xbox exclusive. It certainly would've dragged millions of sales away from Sony, but the PS2 definitely wasn't lacking in superb games in its first couple of years on the market. Final Fantasy 10, Ridge Racer 5, Ratchet and Clank, Devil May Cry, and Tekken Tag Tournament all come to mind. The Xbox was hardly lacking in great games, either, thanks to ample third-party support from the likes of Capcom and Sega, but none managed to make the commercial splash that several of the aforementioned PS2 titles did, with Halo doing much of the heavy lifting in that regard. Still, we feel some credit is due on Xbox's part for being this honest in the Power On: The Story of Xbox documentary. The episodic documentary covers the entire history of the Xbox brand, warts and all, including the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death fiasco. And it's been interesting to see people intimately familiar with the brand be so open about its highs as well as its stooping lows. At least you can still play original Xbox games on Microsoft's latest console, many of which run at a higher resolution than ever before and include Auto HDR support. Unsurprisingly, GTA 3 isn't available.

Another AMD partner is shipping mining cards based on the company's silicon, this time via Aliexpress. From the listing we seem to have an XFX graphics card designed for mining workloads. The new XFX BC-160 card makes use of Navi 12, manufactured on 7nm silicon and packing 2304 Stream Processors across 36 Compute Units. It employs 8GB of HBM2 memory running over a 2048-bit bus. XFX's BC-160 features a straightforward naming scheme that's unlike any other AMD product. According to spec sheets and marketing materials for the cards, decoding the product code results in a Blockchain Compute (BC) card, in the first generation (1), offering up to 69.5 MH/s typical ETH mining performance (BC-160) in a 150W TGP envelope. This hash rate was achieved under the RedHat release of Linux, which we assume refers to RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as Red Hat Linux was discontinued in 2004. The cards also claim compatibility with the Ubuntu distro. There are a lot of interesting elements to this card. For one, the Navi 12 silicon was primarily used in one other AMD graphics product: the Radeon Pro 5600M for laptops, specifically Apple's MacBook Pro 16-inch model. It was also used in the Radeon Pro V520, though likely in far lower quantities, and that seems to be the basis for the BC-160 design. It's interesting that there are now apparently enough surplus chips that AMD is allowing partners to repurpose the GPUs for mining cards. Then again, with Apple shifting it's MacBook Pro line to its own M1 Pro and M1 Max, there's a good chance it has no real desire for additional AMD GPUs from 2020. Another interesting point is that these XFX mining cards are powered by two 8-pin PEG connectors. Considering a single 8-pin connector can supply 150W of power, and the PCIe x16 slot can deliver another 75W, putting two connectors on the cards seems overkill. Again, these were chips originally used in laptops, where they were tuned to consume far less than 150W — 50W, to be precise. The AMD Radeon Pro V520 had a 225W TGP, though, and similar to the BC-160 it used a single blower-fan cooling design, which should be adequate for cooling the cards considering the workloads they're meant to handle. Ethereum mining strains VRAM more than anything, and the screenshots indicate power use of around 120W. The use of HBM2 is part of the Navi 12 design, but at least on the MacBook Pro models it was clocked at a relatively low 1540 MT/s. Even with a 2048-bit bus, that's just 394 GBps of bandwidth, while the desktop 5700 XT GDDR6 models had a 256-bit interface and ran at 14 Gbps for 448 GBps of bandwidth. The screenshots show the BC-160 mining at "1275," which looks slower than the MacBook Pro model, but it's likely double that speed in MT/s, meaning 652.8 GBps of bandwidth after overclocking. That would explain how the card manages 70 MH/s in Ethereum mining, where the RX 5700 XT after tuning tops out at around 55 MH/s. At stock, the HBM2 likely runs at the same 2000 MT/s as the AMD Radeon Pro V520, which would put the hashrate at the target 60 MH/s. On other words, the BC-160 delivers more bandwidth than the otherwise similar Navi 10 GPUs that used GDDR6. Being a mining card, these are headless designs, so there's no display output. That means these cards are unfortunately only ever going to fulfil a singular purpose and will never be among the best graphics cards for gaming. They're pretty much solely designed for miners, potentially keeping said miners away from the gaming-oriented RX 6000 series. That's too bad, and it shows once more than the graphics card companies are more than happy to prioritize mining cards if that's where they can make the most money on sales. XFX's BC-160 joins Sapphire's X080 and X060 "unofficial" mining cards. Looking at how the cards differ in their design, it seems safe to say that AMD isn't providing AIB partners with a reference, blockchain-compute oriented design. Instead, AMD's partners are the ones that are designing these cards around AMD silicon. AMD likely makes the same bottom-line earnings whether the GPUs end up in RX 6000-series, RX 5000-series, or cryptocurrency mining products. Unfortunately, that also means less stock for gaming-oriented cards, as both XFX's Navi 12 and Sapphire's Navi 22 mining cards both consume 7nm chips that could otherwise have gone into the gaming segment. Based on the mining performance and power use, the BC-160 would likely rank well in our list of the best GPUs for mining. Its HBM2 memory subsystem does increase the price, however. Sapphire's best-performing X080 has an estimated price of around $850, while the new XFX BC-160 is listed on Aliexpress for a cool $2,000. That's more than it costs for an RTX 3080 Ti, using eBay GPU prices, which can do around 80 MH/s. A video of the XFX BC-160 cards in their mining environment (and the hashrate report, at 3:38) is also available, which you can see below.