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Today’s topics include Arm unveiling its roadmap to challenge Intel in the laptop chip space, and Visual Studio 2017 getting productivity updates.
Arm is making an aggressive push into a mobile PC processor space that has long been dominated by larger rival Intel.
Last week Arm unveiled a roadmap that includes the new Cortex-A76 CPU design that was introduced in May, which offers 35 percent more performance and 40 percent better battery life than its predecessor, the Cortex-A75.
In addition, later this year, Arm will roll out “Deimos,” a 7-nanometer design that the company claims will bring more than a 15 percent improvement in compute performance. In 2019, Arm will come out with “Hercules,” which will offer 10 percent improvements in both power and area efficiency.
Although Arm officials gave few details about the upcoming chips, they made it clear that they intend to take on Intel in the PC chip space, where the larger company holds more than 90 percent of the market.
Microsoft has added a wide range of improvements to Visual Studio 2017, including enhancements designed to make it easier to use.
According to John Montgomery, the director of program management for Visual Studio, one of the most helpful improvements is that multi-caret editing, or editing multiple locations in a file at once, is now easier to do. “Start by creating insertion points and selections at multiple locations in a file with multiple caret support. This will then allow you to add, edit, or delete text in multiple places simultaneously.”
Also new are the addition of a contextual navigation menu and new keybinding profiles for Visual Studio Code and ReSharper in Visual Studio, which allow users to keep their keybindings consistent with two new keyboard profiles.