Christopher Schodt

    Video Producer

    Chris Schodt is a former lab technician who switched to media production after realizing people would actually pay him to take photos. He received his master's in journalism from UC Berkeley, and worked as a freelance producer before joining Engadget. His twin passions for video production and video games are secretly just excuses to keep rebuilding his desktop PC.

  • We ran every test you could think of on the M1 Ultra

    We ran every test you could think of on the M1 Ultra to see how fast Apple's new flagship processor really is.

  • Apple's M1 Pro and Max chips are living up to the hype

    How do Apple's best chips stack up against AMD's 5950X and a top-of-the-line Intel MacBook?

  • Is Apple’s M1 Max really the fastest laptop chip ever?

    Apple's new processors double the core count of the already impressive M1, and quadruple the GPU power. All that power will cost you, though, with the new Macbook Pros running as much as $4,300 for a fully-loaded machine.

  • How are camera sensors still improving?

    In the latest episode of our Upscaled series, we explain how camera sensors work, and how they'll improve in the near future.

  • Intel has a plan to go beyond 3nm chips

    Intel revealed a rebrand of their node names, and an aggressive new roadmap that ends with inconceivably tiny 18-angstrom transistors.

  • IBM's 2nm transistors matter because of their shape, not size

    In the latest "mini" episode of our Upscaled explainer show, we dive into IBM's announcement that it had created 2nm transistors. Size, in this case, isn't the most important innovation.

  • Intel's plan to get back on track

    Intel unveiled its plan to get the company back on track. including taking contract manufacturing jobs, and a massive $20 billion investment in building new factories.

  • Hard drives are about to get supercharged

    HAMR and MAMR are a pair of new methods for writing data to hard drives that could boost capacity as high as 60TB per drive, or beyond.

  • Apple's M1 isn't witchcraft, it's good chip design

    Apple used a super-wide processor design paired with fast memory and cache to create a speedy, efficient processor for its new Macbook Pro.

  • How is the M1 so much faster than other chips?

    Apple's M1 is seriously fast, but how did they do it? Processor performance isn't witchcraft, it's physics and design. We compare the M1 to Microsoft's similar SQ2 and dig into just how Apple managed this feat.

  • 2020 put us on the edge of a processor revolution

    Intel put out another high-end chip, 10th-gen “Comet Lake”, which added a few cores but is still based on its aging 14nm transistor design, and AMD countered with Zen 3, an improved version of its desktop architecture that now goes up to 16 cores. While Zen 3 didn’t increase core counts or clock speeds dramatically, it did deliver a big boost in instructions per-clock without increasing power consumption.

  • How good is AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X for content creators?

    With the Zen 3 chips, AMD has reclaimed the desktop performance crown, and the flagship 16-core 5950X is one of the fastest processors we've ever seen. But how much speed do you really need?

  • RISC-V is trying to launch an open-hardware revolution

    RSC-V is a new fully open-source processor design and instruction set. Developed at UC Berkeley, RISC-V is trying to do away with license fees and proprietary tech to make processor design accessible to companies all other the world.

  • Will QLC SSDs make hard drives extinct?

    QLC flash is enabling bigger and bigger SSDs, including the first 8TB consumer flash drives, but it comes with the serious drawbacks. How exactly does flash memory work, what is QLC and what is it good for?

  • Will gallium nitride electronics change the world?

    The semiconductor GaN has already changed the world once, it's at the heart of blue and white LEDs, but researchers are looking at how this materials could revolution power systems, space travel, telecommunications, and even processors.

  • Do Apple's new Mac chips mean ARM has won?

    For the latest episode of our explainer show Upscaled, we dive into the history of the RISC architecture. With Apple dropping Intel for its own RISC-based CPUs, this will be the first time in decades we've seen a company try to produce high-end RISC processors.

  • How much does your CPU matter for gaming?

    For the latest episode of our explainer show Upscaled, we compared Intel’s new flagship 10-core chip, the i9-10900K, with AMD’s budget-level Ryzen 3 3300X. We were trying to answer one question: How much does your CPU matter in gaming performance?

  • NVIDIA's massive A100 GPU isn't for you

    In this mini-episode of our explainer show, Upscaled, we break down NVIDIA's latest GPU, the A100, and its new graphics architecture Ampere. Announced at the company's long-delayed GTC conference, the A100 isn't intended for gamers, or even for workstation users. Volta never directly came to consumers — aside from the Titan V and a Quadro workstation card — but the improvements and tensor cores it introduced were a key part of Turing, the architecture which underpins almost all of NVIDIA's current GeForce and Quadro cards.

  • Can Intel's 10th-gen desktop CPUs compete?

    Now, with its 10th-gen “Comet Lake” desktop chips, Intel is offering up to 10 cores on top-line chips. These Intel 10th-gen chips are also still based on Intel’s aging 14nm manufacturing process and Skylake architecture, so aside from more cores, don’t expect huge performance gains here.

  • Your monitor is lying to you

    Monitor specs are hard to interpret at best, and downright fictional at worst. So how can you tell which numbers to actually pay attention to?