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AMD has a big week ahead of itself, with the next-gen X670 chipset launching packing both PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 technologies... and ASUS... well, they have an interesting dual-chipset board being teased.

In a new leak we're getting to see the purported ASUS X670 Prime motherboard through a PCB diagram, with 4 x DDR5 memory slots and a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. ASUS is using a 14-phase VRM design. But at the bottom, we've got two chipsets -- ASUS isn't the first and won't be the last -- but we can expect next-gen high-end X670/E motherboards to be insane.

AMD's new AM5 socket uses an LGA1718 socket, supporting both DDR5 + PCIe 5.0 but also AMD's next-gen Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. The difference here with the ASUS X670 Prime motherboard over the just-teased ASRock X670E Taichi is that we have PCIe 5.0 x16 for a graphics card... not a PCIe 5.0-based SSD. If you want super-mega-ultra-fast PCIe 5.0 SSD goodness, be careful which motherboard you buy.

ASRock has officially teased -- and kinda revealed -- its next-gen X670 series motherboards.

The company teased its new AM5-based motherboards on its official YouTube channel, with the AM5-based series ready to rock and roll with AMD's next-gen Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. ASRock has teased the new X670 Taichi, and introduced the X670 Taichi Carrara: a new special edition board celebrating ASRock's huge 20th birthday.

ASRock has confirmed the new X670E chipset will power its new X670E Taichi motherboards, which delivers both next-gen PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 technologies. The company has also confirmed that it "went all out" on the VRM design of its new X670 Taichi motherboards, with a beasty 26 power stages.

It looks like AMD could unveil something truly awesome at Computex 2022 in the next few days, after a new tease of AMD's next-gen X670, X670E, and B650 chipsets.

AMD's new X670, X670E, and B650 chipsets will be ready for AMD's next-gen socket AM5 processors, which will be the home of their new Zen 4-powered Ryzen 7000 series CPUs that will arrive later this year. The new X670E will be an "Extreme" version of the chipset, that will support PCIe 5.0-capable GPUs and SSDs.

We might not see many PCIe 5.0-enabled GPUs this year, but AMD's next-gen Navi 31-based Radeon RX 7970 XT graphics card will be the first to market with PCie 5.0 x16 support. NVIDIA will be lagging behind, and Intel... well let's not even get into that, shall we? The new flagship X670E chipset will not only rock PCIe 5.0 support, but also DDR5 RAM support bringing AMD up to the same level as Intel in the high-end chipset department.

Nintendo's billion-dollar growth will be hindered by the ongoing supply chain crisis as forecasts show a second straight year of earnings declines.

Nintendo expects earnings and sales drops in Fiscal Year 2023 due to semiconductor shortages and lower game sales, but Research & Development spending is at 102 billion yen (nearly $800 million), the highest R&D spending since 2002. This indicates that Nintendo is funding the development of the next-gen Switch model alongside new games.

It's also likely that Nintendo is elongating production of its new Switch model to weather the earnings drop impact and preparing for a big upward spring when the system launches. The 4K-ready Switch could be delayed past its expected FY24 release timeline and push the Switch into a sixth year.

Nintendo's Fiscal Year 2022 results are in, and despite a post-pandemic dip the numbers are quite good.

Nintendo's FY22 period delivered strong results while facing an ongoing hardware shortage. The video game giant didn't achieve Fiscal Year 2021's all-time record highs in FY22, but it did beat all other non-historic fiscal year periods since the NES days back in 1983.

According to data provided by Nintendo and compiled and converted by us, the company delivered the following revenue KPIs in Fiscal 22:

Over 11,000 physical video games have been released for Nintendo platforms across the last 39 years.

Nintendo has updated its historical game sales figures and the results are pretty interesting. According to the data, there have been 11,235 packaged video games released for Nintendo handhelds and consoles from the NES to the Switch. These numbers include games released across all worldwide regions, but do not include digital versions of games (the Switch eShop, for example, lists over 4,000 titles).

Below we have a breakdown of the titles released versus software sales. The DS reigns supreme in both metrics with over 2,100 games released and 948.76 million games sold. The Switch is in second place with 1,417 titles released in its five-year lifespan, but in third place in sales with 822.18 million software sales as of FY22.

Nintendo's video game sales hit an all-time yearly high as Switch console shipments drop.

Nintendo's Fiscal Year 2022 period delivered a surprise software surge that pushed yearly game sales to a new record high. According to data provided by Nintendo and compiled by us, the company sold 235.07 million games throughout the FY22 period, making it the top year for game purchases.

These results are on the heels of FY21's breakthrough performance of $16 billion in net sales, with a heavy emphasis on hardware and software sales. FY22 benefitted from more software, but flagged behind in hardware revenues.

New cases of the rare monkeypox virus first resurfaced in England, Spain, and Portugal from May 17th.

Outbreaks of the virus were first recorded in England, with officials warning of potential spread given the unknown origin and chains of transmission. Since then, cases have doubled in England to 20, and following cases appearing in Spain and Portugal, cases have also appeared in more European countries, including France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Sweden.

Cases have also been reported in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The monkeypox virus is endemic to Africa, and cases are seldom seen outside of the region, though currently, at least 11 non-African countries have reported a combined 120+ confirmed and suspected cases of it.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft appears to be operating normally; however, it's sent back data that says otherwise.

Voyager 1 is continuing to execute commands it receives from Earth as expected and gathering and returning science data. However, Voyager 1's attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which controls the spacecraft's orientation, is sending back invalid telemetry data that appears either randomly generated or reflects an impossible state for the AACS.

Voyager 1 hasn't been triggered to put itself into safe mode due to the issue, a state in which only essential functions remain active to give engineers time to diagnose and fix any problems. The team is continuing to monitor the signal closely to determine the nature of the issue. However, Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. This means it takes about two days to send a message to the spacecraft and receive a response, though the mission team has become well adjusted to that delay.

The Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has awarded two Prototype Other Transaction (OT) contracts to develop nuclear-propelled spacecraft, with launches expected in 2027.

The DIU has awarded one contract to the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) and the other to Avalanche Energy Designs, "to demonstrate the next generation of nuclear propulsion and power capability for spacecraft." The companies' will be testing nuclear-powered prototypes that allow small spacecraft to "maneuver at-will in cislunar space" and "enable high-power payloads."

A study on the new solar cell titled "Triple-junction solar cells with 39.5% terrestrial and 34.2% space efficiency enabled by thick quantum well superlattices" has been published in the journal Joule.

Researchers from the United States Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have created a solar cell with the highest efficiency under 1-sun global illumination conditions. The new cell has an efficiency of 39.5%, up from the previous record of 39.2% efficiency, which was previously set by NREL researchers as well in 2020.

A study on the updated Hubble constant titled "A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹ Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team" has been accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal.

Data from the Hubble Space Telescope has been used since it was launched to measure the rate of the universe's expansion. However, there is a discrepancy between the rate derived from Hubble's observations and what other independent observations predict. The SH0ES team (standing for Supernova, H0, for the Equation of State of Dark Energy) and others have been working to refine the universe's rate of expansion, known as the Hubble Constant.

The Switch will become Nintendo's #1 software sales platform by 2023, company data suggests.

According to data provided by Nintendo and compiled by us, the Switch family of consoles will soon become the company's top platform in game sales and beat out all other previous handhelds and consoles.

Data trends show that the Switch should beat game sales of the Wii (920.81 million) and the DS (948.76 million) by the end of Fiscal Year 2023 (March 31, 2023). The Switch has currently sold 822.18 million games across its five-year lifespan, and software sales trends show the platform has sold an average of 211 million games over the past three years,

From the early days of the NES to the modern Switch, Nintendo has sold billions of games across its mighty lineage of hardware.

Nintendo has sold nearly 5.4 billion video games across all of its handheld and console platforms, new data reveals. According to our calculations, the Nintendo Switch is currently the #3 platform in software sales with 822.18 million units sold to date. The Wii is in second place with a mighty 920.81 million, and the DS conquers with 948.76 million.

These numbers actually put Nintendo in second place. Although Nintendo has been on the market for many years before Sony, the PlayStation platform has sold an estimated 5.71 billion games. Sony has a 300 million+ lead over Nintendo.

Nintendo has sold over 822 million games since the Switch launched in 2017, and the majority of those were from the handheld-console hybrid.

In just 5 years' time, the Switch has revolutionized Nintendo's business. The company was teetering on the brink of ruin following the Wii U's massive flop, but the Switch sparked incredible year-over-year growth and eventually led to the highest operating profits and ordinary profits in Nintendo history.

A significant portion of this turnaround success is owed to the Nintendo Switch's vast library of games. First-party game sales and revenues reign over third-party--Nintendo is the only platform-holder to make more from first-party than third-party--and software has steadily grown year-over-year thanks to the Switch's strong lineup and growing eShop presence.

Nintendo's first-party giants continue to dominate the platforms best-seller charts.

Nintendo's recent full-year performance shows strong consistent earnings across both hardware and software sales. The company sold more games in FY22 than the record-breaking FY21 period, driven by continued momentum in key first-party hits.

Charting Nintendo's top 10 best-selling Switch games shows little deviation in games placement. The overall selection is the same as it was last quarter--Mario Kart 8 still leads the race and now has 45 million+ copies sold, followed up by surprise mega-hit Animal Crossing New Horizons, which is now at 38.6 million sales.

Surprise! Hideo Kojima is making a sequel to his successful, critically-acclaimed new IP Death Stranding.

Death Stranding 2 is apparently happening. Neither Kojima Productions nor Sony Interactive Entertainment have made a formal announcement, but actor Norman Reedus has once again spilled the beans.

In a recent interview with men's style site Leo Edit, Reedus said: "We just started the second one."

May 19th saw Tesla's stock price drop to its lowest level so far in 2022, erasing $12.3 billion from Elon Musk's wealth.

Musk took to Twitter that same day to voice political concerns in a multitude of tweets, saying that now he will vote Republican, after voting Democrat in the past, and claimed that "political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months." Musk also tweeted at S&P Global Ratings, saying they "lost their integrity" after Tesla was not included in its S&P 500 ESG (environment, social & governance) Index.

Margaret Dorn, an executive at S&P Global Ratings, told Reuters that the exclusion was a result of reports of racial discrimination at Tesla facilities, and crashes involving its autonomous vehicles. With Twitter stocks also dropping in value recently, Musk has lost a combined $49 billion in wealth since moving to purchase the social media platform.

Starlink customer Steve Birch has posted a photo of his off-grid Starlink setup powered exclusively by solar energy.

Birch took to Reddit to post about his "remote fully off-grid Starlink station installed in the Sawtooth mountains of Idaho." The three solar panels produce a combined 300 watts of solar power and are supported by a 450 amp hour (Ah) battery bank for when the panels can't produce enough power. According to Birch, the system has "been running like a champ 24/7 for the last week."

The campsite where Birch set up the system has a diesel generator that provides power during the day, which Birch sought to bypass for his Starlink setup. Birch calculated that he would need roughly 200 Ah for 24 hours of operation and opted to use four 6V lead acid batteries for his battery bank because lithium wouldn't be viable due to charging issues in the cold.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has recently participated in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) where he explained why he doesn't hold any cryptocurrencies.

Gates took to Reddit yesterday to answer numerous questions ranging from his philantropy ventures into climate change, vaccines, COVID-19, how young people can impact the world and cryptocurrencies. Gates was asked what he thought about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, Gates stated that he doesn't own any cryptocurrencies and that he likes "investing in things that have valuable output".

The Microsoft founder explains that companies "valuable output" is based on the product that they make and the quality of it, while the "value of crypto is just what some other person decides someone else will pay for it so not adding to society like other investments." These remarks from Gates about cryptocurrency are hardly surprising as the world's fourth richest individual said in March that if you have less money than Elon Musk and are involved with cryptocurrencies "probably watch out".