When you think of Lenovo laptops you tend to think of suits and office suites, not Cheetos and Red Bull but DigiTimes has heard tell that this could possibly change. With Acer, Asustek's ROG and Dell's Alienware lineups all seeing decent profits from the niche market of high end gaming laptops the rumour is that Lenovo would like in on some of that filthy lucre. DigiTimes' source posits that MSI's gaming laptop subdivision would be the obvious target for Lenovo. It is possible that this is all hot air but Lenovo is a huge company and could easily afford to buy a division of a competitor, if they were willing to sell.
"Micro-Star International (MSI) has been successful in selling gaming notebooks and Lenovo is interested in acquiring MSI's gaming notebook business unit, according to sources from supply chain makers. However, MSI has denied the reports."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Elementary OS Freya: Is This The Next Big Linux Distro? @ Linux.com
- The Internet of Things: a jumbled mess or a jumbled mess? @ The Register
- Candy Crush Saga preloaded on Windows 10 is the key to enterprise sales @ The Inquirer
- Hackaday Prize Entry: A $100 CT Scanner @ Hack a Day
- You cannot be cirrus: 51 percent of Americans think storms bork cloud computing @ The Inquirer
Lenovo, now with GPU
Lenovo, now with GPU accelerated SuperFish, using that gaming GPU to massively parallelize the intrusions into your personal metrics.
Just how many laptops with discrete GPUs come with GPU monitoring software included in the OEM system installed image, or for that matter GPU monitoring software for the integrated GPU. Windows sure does not include any in the task manager, though it will report on the CPUs usage. With all the latest security vulnerabilities arising from new malware able to run on the GPU, M$ should have built into the windows OS some GPU activity monitoring capabilities into the task manager so users would be able to at least track what processes are using the GPU for tasks other than just graphics.
Certainly if windows can report on processor usage for the CPU, it should be able to report on Integrated or Discrete GPUs that may come on any laptop, and give the user some information about any processes activity on the GPU/s that come with many laptops. GPUZ did not work for me when I installed it on my laptop, in fact it broke some applications/services functionality and forced me to have to do a system restore to fix what it borked, as simply uninstalling GPUZ did not fix the problem. M$ is still focused on its universal crApps, and its crApp store ecosystem, when is should be focused on providing an OS with at least the built-in functionality to monitor a system’s installed GPU hardware, along with the CPU hardware. How does M$ expect the users of its OSs to be able to keep tabs on any suspected usage of GPU cycles for nefarious purposes, or even any antivirus/firewall software that usually uses the OS system APIs/hooks to monitor the hardware/software stack for malicious activity. On my laptop, other than device manager saying that my switchable integrated/discrete display adaptors are not malfunctioning and are in working order, there is no built-in functionality for me to monitor the GPU’s usage/performance, or any sort of possible GPGPU OpenCL/other usage from any process that may be running malicious code on the GPUs.
WTF M$, and Lenovo stop spending all your time trying to further monetize your OS/software, and bloatware ecosystem profit milking of PC/laptop users’ wallets and personal metrics, and work on securing your OS, and all the system hardware/software. For how many years have GPUs, both integrated and discrete, been on PC/Laptops, and Yet windows has no default way to for users to monitor the GPU hardware for any suspicious activity. Who knows how may key loggers, or other malicious software may be running on the GPU, its hard to tell under windows just what is going on with the GPU/s other than the hardware is not broken, and the drivers are working.