Latest News - Page 1191

Intel has scooped up yet another member of AMD's core Radeon GPU team, with AMD Senior Fellow and Lead Radeon Discrete GPU Architect of AMD Technologies, Rohit Verma, joining Team Blue.

Verma began his journey at AMD as a Fellow and Lead SoC Architect inside of the Semi-Custom Business Unit, where he called home for close to 5 years. In that role, he matured into a Senior Fellow and Lead Senior SoC Architect for Discrete GPUs at AMD for over 3 years.

But now that Verma is at Intel, he has become the new Lead Product Architect of Discrete GPU SoCs -- something he actually did, with Intel back in 1999-2013 in a 15-year stint. Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger has been turning things around for the company in record time, with his vision for 2022 pretty clear: "The brain drain, well that's changed. We now have brains coming back".

Intel has made its BonanzaMine official, with its new Bitcoin ASIC miner very different to other Bitcoin ASIC miners on the market from the likes of Bitmain, and others.

The new Intel Bonanza Mine System has a huge 300 x BonanzaMine ASICs that push out an impressive 40 THash/s, while chewing through 3600W of power. Intel's new Custom Compute Group team within the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) business division made the custom silicon platforms that are optimized for specific clients' needs... in this case, a Bitcoin ASIC miner.

All of the required components are built into an individual self-contained computer that's known as the Bonanza Mine System, with 4 x hash boards, an Intel FPGA control unit, 4 x fans, and a programmable PSU. The 4 hash boards are behind the dual-fan cooling system, the control unit at the top, and the PSU is found vertically on the left of the system.

Intel might not have even launched its new Arc Alchemist GPU but it is confident in announcing "Project Endgame" which is shaping up to be a GeForce NOW-style cloud computing competitor.

The new Project Endgame was announced during a flurry of announcements and reveals at its recent Investors Meeting -- where we had many more details on the upcoming and future-gen Arc GPUs, 13/14/15th Gen Core CPUs, and so much more -- but Project Endgame is big for Intel, but is it too early?

Intel explains Project Endgame: "Project Endgame will enable users to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience. Project Endgame will be available later this year".

Intel's flagship Arc Alchemist GPU has been benchmarked once again, with its GPU boost clocks hitting 2.4GHz in a new Geekbench OpenCL test.

The new Intel Arc Alchemist desktop GPU was tested with a 2.4GHz boost clock, alongside an Intel Core i9-9600K processor (with 6 cores, and 6 threads). As for the GPU, it's rocking the DG2-512 GPU so we're looking at 512 Compute Units -- the flagship Arc Alchemist GPU.

In the Geekbench OpenCL test, the Intel Arc Alchemist with 512 EUs and 2.4GHz GPU boost clock, hits 85448 points which see it competing against NVIDIA's previous-gen Turing-based GeForce RTX 2070/2060 graphics cards.

GIGABYTE has formally announced its next-gen UD1000GM PCIe 5.0 power supply, which will support the next-gen wave of PCIe 5.0 graphics cards. GIGABYTE joins the ranks of ASUS and just recently, Cooler Master, with next-gen PCIe 5.0 ready PSUs.

The new GIGABYTE UD1000GM PCIe 5.0 PSU of course has the nifty, and very powerful, 16-pin PCIe 5.0 power connector that can drive up to 600W to a next-gen GPU. GIGABYTE admits that "traditional power supplies need a three 8-pin to 16-pin adapters to support the latest PCIe Gen 5.0 graphics cards" but their new UD1000GM PCIE 5.0 power supply "needs only a single 16-pin cable to directly supply power to the PCIe Gen 5.0 graphics cards".

A single 16-pin PCIe 5.0 power cable to your next-gen GPU... delicious. I'm sure those next-gen 16-pin PCIe 5.0 power connectors will be exclusive to NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti (and their new flock of Ada Lovelace-powered GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs later this year and into 2023).

Intel has officially detailed its next-gen NUC 12 Extreme "Dragon Canyon" with its latest high-end SFF gaming PC, where it's pretty much just a beasty desktop PC at this point.

Inside, the new NUC 12 Extreme "Dragon Canyon" will pack Intel's latest 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPU with a desktop LGA1700 socket on offer meaning you can use any LGA1700-based CPU at up to a huge 65W. Intel will sell it bundled with a Core i9-12900 or Core i7-12700 processor, but you can upgrade it.

Interestingly, there'll be a monster PCIe 5.0 x16 slot that's ready for a next-gen discrete GPU, as well as up to 64GB of DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM memory. Intel's new NUC 12 Extreme will also support the company's upcoming 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs, and 10GbE enthusiast-grade Ethernet, with an additional 2.5GbE port on the Core i9 model.

Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda has ordered more HD2D remakes of SNES games. Could a Chrono Trigger remaster be on the way?

Square Enix loves to re-release classic games on practically every platform known to man, and the new HD2D art style offers a unique opportunity resurrect retro games with new, enhanced graphics. The HD2D wave started with Octopath Traveler, then, Square Enix upgraded its original Final Fantasy games. Now the engine could overhaul other old-school SNES games including the beloved RPG Chrono Trigger.

"The president ordered us to make more use of HD-2D, so we decided to think about remakes of past titles," producer Tomoya Asano said in a recent Square Enix stream (in Japanese).

Guardians of the Galaxy is the second big Marvel game that missed Square Enix's expectations.

Square Enix may have overestimated the Marvel brand. First the publisher said that its ambitious Avengers live game delivered disappointing results, and now its the singleplayer-only Guardians of the Galaxy game missed its original targets. Deep discounts throughout the holiday period where the game sold for about $25 helped stabilize sales revenues, Square Enix says.

"Despite strong reviews, the game's sales on launch undershot our initial expectations. However, sales initiatives that we kicked off in November 2021 and continued into the new year have resulted in sales growth, and we intend to work to continue to expand sales to make up for the title's slow start,"Square Enix chief accounting officer Atsushi Matsuda said.

Square Enix plans to support Final Fantasy XIV for 10 more years and confirms a bunch of new content, features, and upgrades coming to the best-selling MMORPG.

Final Fantasy XIV is a big part of Square Enix's games division earnings; MMORPGs accounted for $419 million, or 23% of total 9-month games revenues. It definitely makes sense that the publisher keeps Final Fantasy XIV going for as long as possible, and that's exactly what they plan to do.

In a four-hour content stream, game producer Yoshi-P recently confirmed the 10-year support plan while outlining key features that are both coming soon and in deep development. One of the biggest new updates is a graphical overhaul that will add a new level of fidelity to in-game areas, NPCs, and player characters.

Sony has "vastly overpaid" with its $3 billion buyout of Bungie, analyst Michael Pachter says.

Sony's decision to buy Bungie was a knee-jerk reaction to its competitors making power plays. According to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard and Take-Two's $12.7 billion merger with Zynga prompted Sony to make a "me too" purchase of Bungie--and that the buyout was significantly overpriced.

In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Pachter outlines his value-oriented rationale. It all comes down to share price and revenues generated by each company. Pachter estimates that Bungie makes $200 million in revenue a year, and Sony essentially paid $4 million per developer (Bungie has over 900 developers).

With a new Fallout game more than 5 years away, Fallout 76 isn't going anywhere. Bethesda has revealed the new content coming to Fallout 76 to carry the game through 2022.

Fallout 76's 2022 roadmap will introduce one of the most ambitious new content drops to date. Later in the year during the Fall season, Bethesda plans to roll out Fallout 76's first-ever expedition to The Pitt, a region previously explored in Fallout 3's original DLC. Expeditions, which are basically bite-sized instances outside of the main Appalachia zone, were originally announced in April 2021 and have been a long time coming to Fallout 76 and original D.C. assets have been in the source files for quite some time.

The main 2022 roadmap cadence looks like this: Every quarter (3 months) gamers will get a new season alongside special themed content, which can include public events, rewards, missions, etc.

Darkstalkers is making a comeback with the new Capcom Fighting Collection arcade re-release.

Capcom is packing in some of their most obscure fighting games into one package. The Capcom Fighting Collection features five Darkstalkers games alongside the first console and PC release of Red Earth. Content-wise, this looks to be a must-have for fighting game enthusiasts. The game "leverages the rich library of content that the company has built up in the fighting game genre over its history," the developer said.

Capcom is going all-out with the Fighting Collection with great bonus features like save states, training modes, and supports rollback netcode for online multiplayer with ranked, casual, and lobby-based matches. All of the games included in the collection have these features and support online play.

Capcom has built Street Fighter 6 specifically for competitive esports gaming.

Street Fighter 6 was announced at the Capcom Cup 2021 with tons of fanfare. The new fighter is built on the higher-end RE Engine, and the in-engine teaser clip shows some serious next-gen effects including higher-end reflections (Ryu's feet are particularly shiny this time around), ultra high-def textures, and superb lighting on two character models, Ryu and Luke.

Capcom has confirmed Street Fighter 6 was made to tap Japan's growing esports market, which remains one of Capcom's core focuses.

OpenSea, the world's largest marketplace when it comes to NFTs, has announced via its Twitter account that it's currently investigating a "phishing attack".

Since the attack was announced, numerous updates have been posted by OpenSea and its co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer, who said that the marketplace is communicating with more than a dozen individuals who were affected by the attack and that it appears the exploit doesn't have to do with the OpenSea website.

OpenSea has since published an update, writing that it has narrowed down the victims of the attack to 17 and that the attacker doesn't seem to be active as the malicious account hasn't seen any movement for the past 15 hours. Finzer wrote that the rumors regarding this attack being worth $200 million are false as the attacker has "$1.7 million worth of Ethereum in his wallet from selling some of the stolen NFTs".

NASA has published a short movie shot by one of its Mars rovers of Martian clouds drifting high sky, allowing scientists to understand the planet more.

If you have ever wondered if there are clouds on Mars, you now have your answer as NASA has recently published a short movie showcasing Martian clouds drifting over the agency's Curiosity rover. NASA's Mars rover used its navigation camera to take eight images of the sky on December 12, 2021, and the 3,325th Martian day of the mission.

While these images are certainly a spectacle, they also provide researchers with information to understand Mars better. NASA explains that from the video, scientists are able to calculate the altitude of the clouds, and according to NASA's Mars blog, these clouds are nearly 50 miles above the surface of Mars. It's extremely cold at that altitude, which is why NASA researchers believe that these clouds are composed of carbon dioxide ice.

NASA has taken to its blog and social channels to showcase an image captured by its famous Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA has posted the image to its blog where the space agency explains that Hubble has snapped an image of a distant galaxy merger called IC 2431 that's located approximately 681 million light-years away from Earth within the constellation Cancer. The space agency writes that IC 2431 is three galaxies merging in slow motion with a thick cloud of dust residing in the center of the image.

However, light from the background galaxy is able to pierce the other regions of the galaxy where the density of dust is minimal. Additionally, NASA mentions that lots of star formation is happening within IC 2431 as the galaxies slowly collide, mixing all of their elements. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has published a first-of-its-kind image that showcases a giant solar eruption.

The ESA has taken to its website to publish an image captured by the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter that showcases what is called a "solar prominences", which are "large structures of tangled magnetic field lines that keep dense concentrations of solar plasma suspended above the Sun's surface." These solar prominence's often appear as long filaments that look like arching loops. Additionally, the ESA says these eruptions are regularly associated with coronal mass ejections (CME).

The ESA explains that on February 15 a coronal mass ejection occurred on the Sun, which resulted in a large amount of charged particles being ejected out of the Sun. These CMEs can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth if the blast is directed towards our planet, but in the instance of the CME that occurred on February 15, it was heading in the opposite direction.

One astronaut aboard the floating laboratory called the International Space Station (ISS) has snapped an image of Earth's closest neighbor, the moon.

NASA astronaut Mark T. Vande Hei took to his personal Twitter account to post a picture he snapped of the moon, with the Vande Hei writing that it was looking "shockingly bright as I opened our shades". The NASA astronaut goes on to say that "soon we'll be exploring our neighbor again", which is no doubt a reference to the upcoming Artemis mission that will take the first woman and person of color to the surface of the moon.

The upcoming Artemis mission will be the first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo missions more than 50 years ago. As for Vande Hei, the NASA astronaut is currently scheduled to break the record for the longest stay in orbit with a 355-day stay, which will beat the previous record of 340-days set back in 2016 by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. Notably, the record for the longest single space visit was set by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov who spent 437 days and 18 hours aboard the Mir space station.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) peered down at Earth and witness an erupting volcano that was spewing lava and smoke.

Being 250 miles above the surface of the Earth provides a fantastic vantage point for viewing the surface of the Earth, and while astronauts are unable to see objects such as cars and people, they can observe natural events such as hurricanes and volcanoes. European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer posted to Twitter an image of Mount Etna erupting and the image showcases a plume of smoke billowing from the volcano's summit.

Maurer wrote in his post that "Etna is clearly smoking (and spitting lava as I learnt from the news)". Maurer wasn't the only astronaut aboard the ISS to spot the active volcano as Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov reported on the event, writing, "Red-hot lava flows out of the crater, and clouds of ash and smoke are in the sky over Sicily. The activity of the volcano then stops, then resumes with a series of powerful explosions." Space.com reports that Mount Etna was extremely active throughout 2021 and as a result grew by about 100 feet in just 6 months.

Back in 2016, the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex was hacked, and 120,000 Bitcoin worth about $72 million at the time was stolen.

Recently, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the arrest of a couple living in Manhattan for conspiracy of laundering the stolen funds. The couple Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan were linked to the 2016 heist, and the price of their stolen Bitcoin increased from $72 million to nearly $5 billion over the years of the investigation. The DOJ announced that it had seized $3.6 billion of the stolen funds, with the DOJ's Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco saying during the announcement, "Today's arrests, and the department's largest financial seizure ever, show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals."

Now, Netflix has ordered a documentary series to be created on the couple accused of laundering billions of dollars as it's alleged that they attempted liquidating the stack of Bitcoin by creating multiple fake identities and accounts that purchased physical gold, NFTs, and more. Due to the transparent nature of the blockchain, vigilante hackers were able to track down the wallets containing the stolen Bitcoin, which resulted in publications such as Cointelegraph tracking any activity of these wallets. The latest movement out of a stolen wallet was as recent as February 1, 2022, when 10,000 Bitcoin worth $383,540,711 at the time was transferred to an unknown wallet.