Latest News - Page 1070

As the price of Bitcoin continues to teeter around the $20,000 mark, it was revealed that Elon Musk's Tesla has sold the majority of its BTC holdings.

Tesla announced that it had purchased a whopping $1.5 billion worth of the world's most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, back in February 2021 while simultaneously announcing it would be working towards accepting BTC as a form of payment for its vehicles.

The announcement caused the price of Bitcoin to skyrocket, and when Musk pulled back from integrating BTC, much of the positive sentiment surrounding Musk and Tesla flipped to negativity as the price of the world's most popular cryptocurrency began to tumble.

The creator behind one of the biggest games to ever come out, Minecraft, has taken a firm stance on adopting Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the blockchain.

Minecraft developer Mojang has taken to the Minecraft website to discuss NFTs and blockchain integration with their community, writing that the studio wished to provide players with some transparency and clarity about what's to come.

According to the article, Mojang wants Minecraft players to continue to have a "safe and inclusive" experience, and to ensure that standard is maintained, the developer has chosen not to allow any blockchain technologies to be integrated inside the Minecraft client or server applications.

During a call with Tesla investors, the company's CEO, Elon Musk, teased when the Cybertruck is expected to be shipped out to buyers.

Elon Musk has been teasing the release of the Cybertruck for quite some time now, with the Tesla CEO previously stating that the design for the vehicle is "locked" and that the production timeline has been moved to early 2023. Now, Musk spoke to Tesla investors on a call and said that he hopes that Tesla can begin delivering the Cybertruck to buyers sometime in the "middle of next year".

Notably, the Cybertruck was announced in 2019, and since then, Tesla has been forced into delaying its production until 2022, which was then pushed back to the current production date estimation of 2023. Musk revealed during an interview that Tesla is undergoing hardships with its production line and is suffering from major cash hemorrhaging as Tesla factories struggle to produce vehicles.

Intel's new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs have been getting more and more details over the last couple of months, but now the next-gen mid-range Core i5-13600K has appeared.

The new Intel Core i5-13600K "ES3" processor is a 14-core, 20-thread CPU that has been benched in "Engineering Sample 3" form, which has been simulated to run at the same CPU clock speeds as the "QS" (Qualification Sample).

The Core i5-13600K processor has 5.1GHz + 4.9GHz CPU clocks on the P-cores, while the E-cores have their clock speeds at up to 4.0GHz. Power consumption is reportedly sitting at around 173W with 1.31V, with "ECSM_Official" adding that "there is still a lot of room for optimization". The official Core i5-13600K processor might be "optimized at about 160W".

Ubisoft has signed a huge new licensing deal that is expected to significantly accelerate its mobile earnings.

Today Ubisoft announced a substantial partnership that will help boost its mobile presence. The publisher has signed a licensing deal with an unnamed publisher and/or developer to make a new mobile game based on a popular game franchise.

Ubisoft has received an upfront payment that will be recognized this fiscal year and help boost topline growth by 10% year-over-year, but the game won't launch in 2022 and still remains unannounced. Ubisoft will also receive royalties and payments after the game is released. This appears to be a separate deal from the Tencent partnership.

Ubisoft today announced that it has cancelled four in-development projects so it can free its teams for other games.

Ubisoft just posted up its Q1 Fiscal Year 2023 earnings and made some big promises to investors. The publisher says it will achieve 10% year-over-year topline growth as it accelerates towards a new mix of premium and what it calls AAA free-to-play mobile games (The Division: Resurgence is an example).

One of the ways that it will achieve this growth is streamlining its development teams. Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet confirmed that four games have been cancelled, including Ghost Recon Frontline and the Splinter Cell VR game. The publisher also delayed the big new Avatar Frontiers of Pandora game by as much as 16 months.

The new next-gen Avatar Frontiers of Pandora game will not release alongside the Avatar movie sequel, Ubisoft has announced.

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora has been delayed by up to 16 months. The game was originally set to release in November 2022 and has now been pushed back to Ubisoft's FY24 period, which is from April 2023 - March 2024. Frontiers of Pandora is a big multi-year live service game that will have tons of post-release content that ties into the movie and sets its own storyline.

"Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will now release in 2023-24. We are committed to delivering a cutting-edge immersive experience that takes full advantage of next-gen technology, as this amazing global entertainment brand represents a major multi-year opportunity for Ubisoft. We also decided to release in 2023-24 a smaller unannounced premium game, originally slated for 2022-23," Ubisoft said in a press release.

The new Chinese space telescope is expected to become operational around 2024, joining China's Tiangong space station.

The space observatory is called the Chinese Survey Space Telescope (CSST) and is also known as the Chinese Space Station Telescope, or Xuntian, meaning "survey to heavens." Its mission is planned to last at least ten years, though this could be extended down the line. It will launch at the end of 2023 and join the same orbit as the Tiangong space station while staying a fair distance away from it, though it will be able to dock with the station.

It remains closer to Earth, unlike the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but similar to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), so it can be serviceable. The bus-sized telescope weighs over 10 tonnes (11 tons) and is as long as a three-story building is tall. The telescope comprises five observation apparatuses, including the wide field of view (FOV) Xuntian camera module. The 2.5-billion-pixel camera has a FOV 300 times greater than that of Hubble but retains a comparable resolution.

The boring robot, named the Rapid Burrowing Robot (RBR), was developed by Earthgrid, a startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The robot uses has a large array of plasma torches mounted on the end of rotating arm, arranged in a spiral pattern following the Fibonacci sequence. The extremely high temperatures produce by the plasma torches result in spallation, where material is blown away from rocky walls as they are heated by the torches, which can reach temperatures of 27,000 °C (48,600 °F).

The design allows tunnel boring without any machinery touching any walls, so the process can continue unimpeded, resulting in 98% less tunnel boring than current methods at one hundredth the cost. Traditionally, tunnels have been bored with large, mechanical rotary boring machines that grind away the rock, leaving much debris in their wake and requiring more maintenance, while taking much longer and being more expensive than Earthgrid's new method.

NASA has announced it will finally launch the first mission in its Artemis program, Artemis I, with lift-off planned for August this year.

The uncrewed test flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft around the Moon is scheduled to take place as soon as August 29th, 2022. NASA associate administrator Jim Free told reporters this date marked the opening of the first possible launch window for the mission, with other potential launch dates available on September 2nd and September 5th.

The spacecraft has completed its wet dress rehearsals as of June, with most things going smoothly. One of the remaining problems was a hydrogen leak on the SLS due to faulty seals, which has since been rectified.

A study on the new phase of matter titled "Dynamical topological phase realized in a trapped-ion quantum simulator" has been published in the journal Nature.

An international team of researchers has fired a specific sequence of laser pulses at atoms in a quantum computer, causing them to adopt a never-before-seen phase of matter. The quantum computer's ten atoms, ions of ytterbium, acquired an "extra" time dimension. The laser pulse sequence used on the atoms was inspired by Fibonacci numbers, the sequence of numbers that starts with 0, then 1, and the next number is the sum of the previous two, resulting in 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on.

The ytterbium ions in the quantum computer serve as quantum bits, or qubits. These qubits store information much more information than traditional bits in conventional computers, with a qubit existing as either a 0 or 1, like a traditional bit, or any combination of the two, in what's known as a superposition. However, upon observation, a qubit must become either a 0 or 1, so researchers have sought to make qubits more robust by adding "symmetries," which make them more resistant to change.

A recently posted video shows a robot dog similar to Boston Dynamics' Spot robot.

The robot dog featured appears to be the Unitree Yushu Technology Dog, which can be bought on AliExpress for around $3,000. Boston Dynamics has made it clear they won't sell their robots to people interested in using them as weapons. Hence, people appear to have turned to cheaper imitations for experimentation. Footage of the armed robot first appeared on the YouTube account of Alexander Atamov on March 22nd, 2022, which he has appropriately named "Skynet."

Atamov lives in Moscow, Russia, and the dog has had a Russian flag and wolf's head attached to its sides using Velcro. The gun strapped to its back appear the be the Russian PP-19 Vityaz, a submachine gun derived from the AK-74. Atamov is not the first person to equip such robots with weapons; defense contractor Ghost Robotics showed off a robotic dog of its own equipped with a weapon akin to a sniper rifle late last year.

Minisforum has just introduced a new ultra-thin desktop PC that's based on Intel's new NUC X15 Laptop Kit.

The new Minisforum NUC X15 and X17 Mini-PCs are powered by the new Intel NUC X15, featuring Intel's 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" CPUs -- the Minisforum X15I5 packs an Intel Core i5-11400H CPU + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU -- offering 6 cores and 12 threads at up to 4.5GHz.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile GPU is inside, using the GA106 GPU and 6GB of GDDR6 memory, but the higher-end model bumps up those specs a bit. Minisforum's higher-end NUCX17 uses the Core i7-12800H processor (8 cores and 16 threads) while we've got the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile GPU, with 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory bus.

AMD's next-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture isn't too far away now, with the flagship Navi 31 GPU rumored to roll out with a 350mm² graphics die... smaller than the current RDNA 2-based Navi 21 GPU.

In a new tweet, leaker "Greymon55" says that the next-gen AMD Navi 31 GCD (Graphics Complex Die) comes in at a small 350mm², making it much smaller than the 520 mm² on the Navi 21 GPU. VideoCardz has a mock up of the Navi 21 GPU next to the Navi 31, where you can see the GCD in the middle with the MCD (Memory Complex Die) flanking the GCD.

AMD is reportedly using 1 x GCD and up to 6 x MCDs through advanced packaging technologies, where we're expecting to see hybrid 5nm + 6nm nodes being used. AMD is reportedly using this hybrid 5nm + 6nm advanced packaging technology on its Navi 31 + Navi 32 GPU designs. Navi 33 is reportedly secure on 6nm, no hybrid 5nm + 6nm GPU there.

I'm sure you can tell that the tech press isn't happy with what Intel has done with what they're calling the "launch" of their new desktop Arc Alchemist GPUs -- first out of the gate is the new Intel Arc A380 -- a total mess of a launch.

Intel is on a roll with its absolute disaster of GPU launch with marketing campaigns shilling videos on LinusTechTips, where it's all smiles... but the real reviewers, they say the Intel Arc A380 discrete GPU is "like living in the middle of a minefield, while playing drunk".

While Intel is bringing suitcases of cash and some Intel Arc A770 graphics cards to YouTubers, traditional tech media that has been around before YouTube was even a word, have been left out of the cheques and cards. Some media worked together to secure an Intel Arc A380 from China, saving on shipping fees. Golem, ComputerBase, and Igor's Lab (all out of Germany).

Intel is throwing some money around... I mean, on a marketing parade for its first GPU since the Intel i740 from the 90s... with its new Arc A770 flagship benched at LinusTechTips.

GPU reviewers aren't getting their hands-on samples, so Intel is doing what Team Red used to do under RTG's broken-apart GPU marketing team from AMD (that are mostly now at Intel, which explains things) but they've got time to stop by GamersNexus, LinusTechTips... and now, a shilly new video.

In the expensive new video, Intel shows off its new flagship Arc A770 desktop GPU that the company says is going to "kill everyone in price to performance" in optimized DX12 titles. Furthermore, and for the largest "Tech YouTuber", this video is embarrassingly slim on actual performance details (frame rates, settings, etc). The video does show Tomb Raider and F1 2021 running DX11 + DX12 APIs, but other than that... Linus must've had a large suitcase to keep those details under wraps.

Netflix is now pushing out its password-sharing hand slap to customers in 5 different Latin American countries, which will see them paying between $1.70 and $2.99 per month.

The company will be requesting customers pay a fee to use their Netflix accounts in an additional house, with Netflix customers from Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic needing to cough more money up per month. If users are using their Netflix account for more than 2 weeks outside of their primary residence (the address of your Netflix billing account).

Netflix announced the news on their website, with Netflix apps on smartphones, tablets, and laptops won't be affected if you're on vacation. It's just for those using it for over 2 weeks, outside of your primary residence... in a bid for Netflix to claw back more money after bleeding on the stock market (and a tiny 200,000+ customers lost in Q1 2022, and an expected 2M+ in Q2 2022).

Microsoft's first-party game studio The Coalition is currently hiring for a new Gears of War project, and it could be the next mainline game in the series.

The Coalition has put out six new job openings recruiting developers for a new Gears of War game. The listings strongly suggest that the new project will be a major entry in the series with direct mention of both campaign and multiplayer game modes.

The job listings also mention the new Gears game will be a AAA experience built in Unreal Engine 5.

Mojang, the developer of one of the most popular video games on the planet, firmly opposes NFTs.

Today Mojang announced new rules for Minecraft. NFTs and blockchain-based content and worlds are not permitted within the game, and the developer is pushing back against the emerging speculative market.

In a succinct quote, the Minecraft dev outlined why NFTs simply have no place in a game like Minecraft where inclusivity and accessibility to in-game content is available for every player.

With sub-20,000 playercounts, Halo Infinite's next move towards earnings and profitability may be to monetize its upcoming Forge mode.

Halo Infinite is currently getting lapped by ultra-popular competitors like Call of Duty Warzone, Apex Legends, and Fortnite. The Halo-as-a-service shooter has largely failed to hit its stride and routinely pulls in less than 10,000 daily players for many weeks on end--a paltry sum compared to Apex's mighty 347,783 players in the last 24 hours.

Lower playercounts typically means less monetization, which of course means 343 Industries is theoretically making less money from Halo Infinite than they would like to. The game's microtransaction system, a mix of piecemeal cosmetics and battle pass purchases, has largely remained unchanged. That's probably because of massive scrutiny and controversy coming from what the community feels to be overpriced content.