General Motors will help the Chevrolet Corvette evolve into a sub-brand that includes both electric vehicles and traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. An electric Corvette is expected sometime in 2023, and a track-specific C8 is also in the works for 2024.

The thought of an electric Corvette is rather intriguing, as the car will benefit from instant torque when the driver hits the accelerator. Long-time Corvette fans will probably need an adjustment period when the car goes electric - and GM will still hear from enthusiasts that don't like what they see. However, Car and Driver chatted with someone from the GM Tech Center to learn the following:

"Corvette is not just a brand. It's a constantly evolving system paired with a dramatically different user experience."

"The aim is not to beat Taycan and Cayenne at their own game but to create three American legends capable of breaking new ground by making the essence of Corvette scalable. To do so, that essence must at all times be in a state of progressive flux."

NVIDIA's generalist AI agent has won itself an award for playing Minecraft, well, performing actions from written prompts, at the recent NeurIPS conference.

The AI agent won the Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper Award at the 2022 NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference, with NVIDIA researchers pumping a huge 730,000 videos of Minecraft from YouTube into training the MineDojo framework to play Minecraft.

We're talking over 2.2 billion words transcribed, 7000 stacked webpages from the Minecraft wiki, a huge 360,000 posts on Reddit, and 6.6 million comments on Reddit that described Minecraft gameplay to the AI agent crafted by NVIDIA researchers. The data allowed NVIDIA researchers to create a custom transformer model it calls MineCLIP, which uses video clips with specific in-game Minecraft activities.

GIGABYTE has just announced that its "Instant 6GHz" feature is now available for their Z690 motherboards with a simple BIOS update, ready to boost performance on Intel's Core i9-13900K and Core i7-13700K processors.

The new Instant 6GHz feature on GIGABYTE's fleet of Z690 motherboards will add another 3% performance for single-core on the Core i9-13900K and Core i7-13700K processors. This new Instant 6GHz feature is great for Z690 motherboard owners who have the new Core i9-13900K or Core i7-13900K, without needing to buy a new Z790 motherboard to hit 6.0GHz.

GIGABYTE Z690 motherboard owners will simply need to upgrade to the latest BIOS on their motherboard to enjoy the Instant 6GHz feature, with the system automatically tweaking CPU voltage and Vcore Load Line Calibration of the Intel Core i9-13900K and Core i7-13700K processors, detecting the two most optimized cores to handle 6.0GHz, providing an additional 3% of single-core performance, just like the Z790 motherboards easily do.

EK has just announced its new EK-Quantum Vector2 waterblock, built for Intel's new Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards, and while it looks pretty... it costs nearly as much as the Arc A750 graphics card itself.

The new EK WaterBlocks waterblock for the Intel Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards is called the EK-Quantum Vector2, and costs €248. If we compare this against the cost of the Intel Arc A770, it's not so bad -- the Arc A770 costs €419 -- but up against the slower Arc A750, it's close to the same price the Arc A750 costing €333.

EK will begin shipping out its new EK-Quantum Vector2 waterblock in mid-December, so we're still a couple of weeks away from the launch, so if you wanted to water cool your Arc A770 or Arc A750 graphics card, you'll still have a couple of weeks to wait.

Samsung has just announced its new GDDR6W memory, which the South Korean giant says was created for "immersive metaverse experiences with powerful graphics memory" or whatever that means.

The new Samsung GDDR6W was created with double the capacity, and performance based on the cutting-edge Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging (FOWLP) technology. The new Samsung GDDR6W memory is the industry's first next-gen graphics DRAM technology, building on top of the foundations of Samsung's GDDR6 memory with the new Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging (FOWLP) technology, boosting memory bandwidth and capacity.

GDDR6 has been on the market for a while now, with Samsung unleashing faster 24Gbps GDDR6 memory in July 2021, quickly becoming the industry's fastest graphics DRAM. The new GDDR6W modules have bandwidth and capacity that are doubled over GDDR6 while maintaining the identical side of GDDR6 modules.

NVIDIA has reportedly discontinued production of their GeForce RTX 2060, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, GeForce GTX 1660, and GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics cards... with plans moving onto the GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs moving forward.

If you rewind the clock, the GeForce RTX 2060 and GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER graphics cards are based on the Turing GPU architecture and were released back in 2019. Sure, there have been upgrades in that time, with the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER released later, as well as being upgraded with the 12GB model in 2021.

However, NVIDIA's older-gen GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics cards are a bit old in the tooth now... lacking features like ray tracing and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technologies. AIB partners are currently getting rid of their existing stock of GeForce RTX 2060, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, GeForce GTX 1660, and GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics cards, and pumping up the manufacturing of GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs in their replacement.

German manufacturer ZF has shown off a smaller, lighter new e-drives designed for passenger cars and commercial vehicles. The company believes the auto industry's immense backlog for electronic drive components is worth upwards of $26 billion - and more can be done to help car companies.

Instead of finding ways to engineer better mechanical components for an internal combustion engine, R&D is now focused on creating efficient electric powertrains.

To meet customer demands, ZF plans to hone in on efficiency, performance, and cost, among other major requirements drivers may have. The company's next-generation platform includes the electric motor, power electronics, transmission, and control software to help it all run properly.

TIDAU has just announced its new 34-inch Mini-LED curved ultrawide gaming monitor, with a native 3440 x 1440 resolution and super-smooth 165Hz refresh rate.

Titanium (aka TAIDU) is a Chinese monitor manufacturer that has just unveiled its new Titanium M34HWW-Pro gaming display, which is sold exclusively in China for 5799 RMB which converts to around $800 USD. Inside, it rocks a new HVA quantum dot display with a contrast ratio of 4000:1, a 21:9 aspect ratio, and a screen curvature of 1500R.

We have a full-color gamut (DCI-P3) of 97% while the Adobe RGB color gamut is identical -- TAIDU has an independent 2304 partition matrix backlight design, which the company explains with a "light-focused display" that Longli Technology uses for halo reductions, better use of light, and "first-class" energy efficiency.

AMD recently launched its fleet of Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, but now early listings by retailers for some non-X variants have hit the internet in the form of the Ryzen 9 7900 and Ryzen 7 7700 processors.

AMD's new Ryzen 9 7900 and Ryzen 7 7700 CPUs (source: PC21.fr)

The upcoming AMD Ryzen 9 7900 processor will feature 12 cores and 24 threads of Zen 4 processing power, while the Ryzen 7 7700 processor packs 8 cores and 16 threads of Zen 4 processing power, both with 65W TDPs by default. They're identical to the X-series processors -- the Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 7 7700X in terms of core and thread count -- but CPU clocks have changed.

The upcoming Ryzen 9 7900 processor has a 3.6GHz to 3.8GHz base CPU frequency, which is 900MHz to 1.1GHz lower than the Ryzen 9 7900X, and down 105W from the Ryzen 9 7900X and its 170W TDP. Moving onto the Ryzen 7 7700, the CPU clocks have been reduced by 700MHz to 900MHz from the Ryzen 7 7700X.

NASA has taken to its social media and its blog to share an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the globular star cluster Pismis 26.

Pismis 26 is a globular star cluster, which is a region of space that contains a stable, tightly bound cluster of anywhere between tens of thousands to millions of stars. Pismis 26 is approximately 23,000 light-years from Earth and resides within the constellation Scorpius near the galactic bulge. Notably, the globular star cluster was first discovered in 1959 at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico.

Furthermore, the location of Pismis 26 features a high density of dust that results in a process called "reddening" to occur. NASA explains that dust scatters short wavelengths of blue light, allowing longer wavelength red light to pass through, causing the image to be distorted with a reddening effect.