Reza Pahlevi

Beginning in late November, Google is making a small, but critical change to how Google Drive opens Microsoft Office documents, both on the web and on Chromebooks: They will open immediately into Office editing mode.

Chrome Unboxed, which noticed the change to Google’s Workspace suite of apps, also correctly characterized the change as an essential one to how users interact with Microsoft 365 or Office documents within Chromebooks. 

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On December 31, Adobe Flash Player will go out of support. A new Windows patch, however, will allow you to get a jump on things.

Microsoft detailed the process to remove support for Adobe Flash Player as part of a new support document, which links to the patch itself for various Windows platforms. As Microsoft warns, however, the process is a one-way street: Once installed, the patch cannot be uninstalled—though you could reinstall Windows if you were desperate.

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Welcome back to the high end, AMD.

For the first time since the days of the Radeon R9 290X—seven long years ago—AMD’s Radeon group is prepared to unleash enthusiast-level graphics cards that can do battle with Nvidia’s best and brightest. During the company’s second “Where Gaming Begins” event on Wednesday, AMD revealed a trio of Radeon GPUs based on a new RDNA 2 architecture, all armed with “revolutionary Infinity Cache” technology, sky-high clock speeds, and interesting synergies with Ryzen. They take direct aim at Nvidia’s RTX 30-series offerings, culminating in a $999 Radeon RX 6900 XT that seeks to seize the gaming crown from the monstrous $1500 GeForce RTX 3090 when it launches December 8—for $500 less than Nvidia’s beastly GPU costs.

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Q: Looking at common CPUs for PC building and the specs for the upcoming next-generation consoles, I’ve found myself wondering: Will we need 8-core, 16-thread CPUs for gaming soon?

No, not in the near future. High core-count processors with simultaneous multi-threading may be more common now, thanks to AMD, but gaming won’t require today’s more expensive processors just yet. Single-threaded performance is still a strong factor, and also, game development take years. Titles launching soon have been influenced by common hardware of the past. 

In the mid-to-longer term future, we will likely see an increase in games making use of more cores and threads—a growing number already exist in the wild, and PC hardware only continues to outdo itself every year. But the change will still be gradual for the reasons cited above.

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