Latest News - Page 1239

The hype train for Apple's upcoming -- and hopefully game-changing -- AR glasses continues, with new rumors today teasing new renders of Apple's new AR glasses.

In the new renders by designer Ian Zelbo, Apple's mixed reality glasses give us our best look yet. They look premium AF, and have a very Apple AirPods Max headphones look and I'm digging that. Inside, Apple's new AR headset is expected to rock their in-house M-series processor -- which will be powerful enough for high-end gaming and media consumption.

Apple's new AR headset renders by Ian Zelbo were uploaded in the glorious 8K resolution, so we have a huge 7680 x 4320 in fresh new renders. If Apple's new AR headset ends up looking like this, and I really think it will, we're in for a helluva ride in 2022/2023+ with XR headsets (AR, VR, MR). We need a major force like Apple plinking into the market, especially if recent rumors that the Apple AR headset "could replace the iPhone in the next 10 years".

AYANEO has just teased its next-gen AYA NEO 2022 handheld gaming device, and that the next-gneeration Windows gaming handheld will feature "High Performance AMD Cores".

In a new tweet the handheld gaming company teased a silhouette of its next-gen AYA NEO 2022 handheld gaming console, and along with the new high-performance AMD cores AYANEO tease that its new handheld will also have "cutting-edge innovations". We should expect some big upgrades in the SoC and display, with some new Zen 3 and RDNA 2 silicon grunt.

The current-gen AYA NEO 2021 has an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U APU with 8 cores and 16 threads at up to 4.2GHz, while the GPU side of things is handled by an AMD Radeon Vega 8 at up to 1.75GHz. It has 16GB of LPDDR4X-4266 RAM, 512GB and 1TB NVMe SSD options, and a 7-inch 1280 x 800 IPS-based display.

Optical computing startup Lightelligence has developed a new GPU that outstrips the very best GPUs on the planet -- at least in the most challenging mathematical problems -- with the introduction of the Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE).

Lightelligence's new Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE) thrashes NVIDIA's third-fastest Turing-based GPU in the GeForce RTX 3080 by nearly 100x in the NP-complete class of problems. The new PACE accelerator under the Ising model -- an example of a thermodynamic system that's used for understanding phase transitions -- with record-breaking results.

The new PACE accelerator when compared to the GeForce RTX 3080 is around 100x faster, with Lightelligence using 12,000 optical devices integrated onto a circuit, clocked at 1GHz. Up against the purpose-built Toshiba's simulated bifurcation machine based on FPGAs, Lightelligence's new PACE accelerator still beats that system by 25x -- just as impressive.

The purported new Intel Arc Alchemist graphics card has been spotted again, this time running on the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark. This is interesting, as it might have something to do with what we'll see from Intel at CES 2022.

The system was powered by Intel's new flagship Core i9-12900K processor, with what would be an engineering sample of the Xe-HPG DG2 GPU aka Intel Arc Alchemist a320. Intel's new Arc Alchemist graphics card was benchmarked at 1080p on the Medium preset, scoring 12,500 points and an average of 126.9FPS.

Intel is going to have a beefy first GPU -- it won't beat NVIDIA or AMD, but it'll do quite well -- especially the flagship Xe-HPG 512 EU version. This GPU should have 16GB of GDDR6 memory @ 16-18Gbps on a 256-bit memory bus, with 225W TDP on the desktop (and 120-150W on the laptop GPU).

Tesla is pushing out a new holiday software update, and with it comes a slew of new features -- including Sonic the Hedgehog, the actual game -- and so much more.

There's around 15 new features and changes in the Tesla holiday software update, with all Tesla vehicles supported and FSD Beta 10.8 is expected to drop this week sometime. Your Tesla can now run you a choreographed light show in its new Light Show feature inside of the Toybox.

There's a new customizable app launcher, which lets you tweak your favorite apps into a particular position along the bottom bar -- similar to Android. You can adjust climate change controls from the touchscreen, where you can tap the temperature or swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Simplified controls, and very welcomed from Tesla.

Intel was expected to unleash its new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs with flashy new retail coolers, but they didn't make it in time -- and it seems they're now not too far away.

In a new tease, the Intel "Laminar RH1" cooler for Alder Lake-S processors has been teased, with a radically changed design to say the least. The new cooler is much taller than Intel's boring retail coolers over the last 10+ years, with the RH1 and RM1 coolers looking different themselves.

Side-by-side here we have the Intel RH1 cooler and RM1 cooler, the RH1 cooler is taller while the RM1 cooler is smaller. There's some gorgeous RGB lighting of course, with the boxed 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPU cooler made of metal and should dissipate heat better than current designs -- at a TDP of 65W.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla will stretch into 2022, but Ubisoft has big things for the franchise in 2023 and beyond.

Today Ubisoft shared a special teaser to celebrate Assassin's Creed Day. The small hint is centered around Assassin's Creed Infinity, the next game in the series. Reports say Infinity isn't just a name, but an adjective that describes a never-ending Assassin's Creed game. Similar to Halo Infinite becoming a portal for all future Halo games, it looks like Ubisoft is doing the same with the Assassin's Creed franchise.

The teaser is short but sweet, telling fans that the series has an "exciting' future beyond Assassin's Creed Valhalla. That strongly indicates Infinity won't be ready until at least 2023, especially since Valhalla is getting a second season pass in 2022, starting with its huge new Dawn of Ragnarok expansion.

Halo Infinite's new $20 cosmetic pack looks extremely similar to Marvel's Iron Man.

343i is apparently trying to capitalize on someone else's billion-dollar IP, but unlike Fortnite, neither 343 Industries nor Microsoft have attained the rights to do so. The new $20 Fire and Frost cosmetic pack includes armor skins that are instantly recognizable to Marvel fans. The Vermilion Fire skin is an almost perfect match to the old-school red-and-gold Iron Man getup worn by Tony Stark in countless comics and a galaxy of films.

While this isn't exactly grounds for a copyright lawsuit, Halo fans seem eager to buy the cosmetic pack. Enticing players with fancy new armor coatings isn't new, but it also helps that Halo Infinite's base armor colors are faded and drab, while the premium Iron Man-esque skin is shiny, new, and visually impressive. Who doesn't want to play as Iron Man in their favorite shooter?

Horizon Forbidden West will reportedly require up to nearly 100GB of install space on PlayStation 5, database trackers report.

The amazing graphics and huge open worlds of Guerrilla Games' new Horizon sequel may come at a hefty storage cost. Reports from data trackers suggest Horizon Forbidden West may clock in at 96GB on the PS5, which is roughly 14% of its available 667GB of useable SSD storage.

This is par for the course for higher-end next-gen games, even with the PS5's built-in Kraken compression technology that's able to shrink file sizes (and the SSD's ability to load up assets as they're needed).

Embracer Group has made six major acquisitions in December 2021, rounding out its portfolio of content to include practically every medium that gamers, nerds, and fans know and love.

Embracer Group is one of the mightiest forces in the games industry. The company has expanded far beyond gaming, though, and includes film, TV, and now board/card games and comics. This month Embracer made a bid to purchase Asmodee, one of the largest producers of board and card games in the world, for $3 billion.

And just today Embracer bought Dark Horse Comics, the iconic company that sourced heavy-hitting series and films like Sin City, 300, Hellboy, Duckman, The Mask, Alien vs Predator, Timecop, and The Umbrella Academy.

Embracer Group just secured the founders of legendary sports game mavens at Tiburon Entertainment.

Embracer Group just purchased Shiver Entertainment, a 17-person indie studio located in Miami, Florida mostly known for making ports like Mortal Kombat 11 on Switch, and other work-for-hire projects. The buyout also includes two of the most influential people in the industry: John Schappert and Jason Andersen, who, in 1994, founded Tiburon. If you grew up in the 90s and loved sports games, odds are you're familiar with that name.

Shortly after leaving Visual Concepts, the team behind Madden NFL '94 and '95, Schappert and Andersen formed Tiburon. EA took a chance on the studio and gave them NFL '96 and '97, and Tiburon has handled EA's legendary sports licenses including seventeen iterations of the beloved NCAA Football series.

The Embracer Group has entered an agreement to buy the North American publishing arm of MMORG-maker Perfect World Entertainment for $125 million.

Shortly after its Asmodee acquisition, Embracer has snapped up another diversified games company. This time it's Perfect World Entertainment, a publishing division that's responsible for key free-to-play MMOs like D&D Neverwinter and Star Trek Online.

Embracer has offered Perfect World Europe $125 million ($60m in cash, $65m in Class B shares) for the Redwood City, California publishing division and Los Gatos, California-based Cryptic Studios, the team behind the aforementioned online games. Perfect World will join Gearbox Entertainment's publishing division as a new subsidiary.

Yusaku Maezawa, Yozo Hirano, and Alexander Misurkin have safely landed on Earth after their brief stint aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Spending twelve days aboard the ISS, the fashion tycoon Maezawa, his producer Hirano and their cosmonaut companion Misurkin have safely returned home, making a soft landing with their Russian Soyuz capsule. They landed in Kazakhstan roughly 150 kilometers (90 miles) southeast of the city of Zhezkazgan at 10:13 p.m. EST Sunday (03:13 UTC).

Helicopters could not reach the landing site quickly due to weather conditions, so two all-terrain vehicles were dispatched to collect the crew. All of the crew reported feeling fine, and they were later flown to the Star City space flight preparation facility outside of Moscow to continue the post-flight assessment.

SpaceX will be carrying out another resupply mission for NASA, heading to the International Space Station (ISS).

Launching from Cape Canaveral in Florida, SpaceX's Cargo Dragon spacecraft will make its way to the ISS as part of the CRS-24 mission. The rocket will be carrying more than 6,500 pounds (2,948 kilograms), resupplying the station and its astronauts, as well as delivering new scientific projects. The launch is scheduled for 5:06 a.m. EST (10:06 UTC) on Tuesday, December 21st, 2021.

The Falcon 9 rocket will use the first-stage B1069-1, a brand new booster. The last brand new booster to be used by SpaceX was for the CRS-22 resupply mission in June 2021, using the B1067 booster. If the B1069-1 successfully lands on SpaceX's Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (ASDS) 'Just Read The Instructions' roughly nine minutes after lift-off, it will mark SpaceX's 100th successful landing on a Falcon rocket booster.

NASA's upcoming Artemis 1 moon mission has been delayed thanks to an issue in its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

A communications glitch in the avionics experienced during pre-flight testing means NASA will need to replace an engine controller aboard the SLS rocket. Boeing is the rocket's primary contractor for the project, which has suffered years of delays and exceeded its original budget by billions of dollars.

NASA was previously targeting February 12th, 2022, for the flight of the SLS, but it is now being pushed back to March or April. The flight will be the first in the Artemis program, which hopes to return astronauts to the moon's surface before the decade's end.

With its recent comeback to the industry, Russia is ready to make sure it remains a dominant force in space tourism.

With the recent launch of and now safe arrival of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant to the International Space Station (ISS), Russia is back in business for space tourism. It was the country's first launch of tourists in 12 years.

Russia's space tourism ventures took a backseat in 2011 after NASA retired its space shuttles, choosing to purchase seats on Roscosmos flights to take astronauts to the ISS. These seats went for $90 million apiece, but with the emergence of SpaceX, NASA has turned to it to take astronauts to the ISS.

With recent successful back-to-back launches, SpaceX smashes a company record by even more than first projected.

The first of the flights was the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base, taking place at 7:41:40 a.m. EST. The flight was initially scheduled to take place at 4:24 a.m. EST. The payload launched was 52 Starlink satellites and also set a record for the most flown Falcon 9 booster thus far at 11 flights and recoveries total. You can re-watch the launch here.

The second Falcon 9 flight launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:58:39 p.m. EST, on time for the scheduled 10:58 p.m. EST launch time. The payload for this mission was a Turksat 5B satellite, being delivered to an geostationary orbit. You can re-watch the launch here.

Russian company Baikal Electronics has officially fired up its new Baikal-S processor, which has 48 cores based on the Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).

The CPU is codenamed "BE-S1000" and has its 48 cores at 2.0GHz base frequency, with boost clocks reaching 2.5GHz -- all within a 120W TDP. You can use up to 4 x sockets in a server board, offering a home-grown RISC-V processor for safe boot and management, with the entire SoC being controlled by a custom design.

In some of its own benchmark data, Baikal Electronics has the performance of its new Baikal-S in SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack. The new Baikal-S is compared against -- and keeps up with -- the Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake design, and the AMD EPYC 7351 CPU which is based on the original Zen 1 core.

Spider-Man: No Way Home has earned a pretty penny over its opening weekend, with a haul of $260 million in the US over the weekend alone -- destroying pandemic-ridden box office numbers.

The new movie has now secured itself the honor of the second-best opening of all time, only behind fellow MCU flick Avengers: Endgame. Spider-Man: No Way Home took an estimated $260 million in the US, and another $340 million from over 60 overseas markets for a global box office opening weekend haul of over $600 million.

Spider-Man: No Way Home has absolutely destroyed the most recent MCU movie that hit theaters -- Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Tend Rings -- which has secured $224 million since it hit theaters... back in September, some 3 months ago now. Spider-Man: No Way Home smashed that in a single weekend. Way to go, Spidey.

Ford has just announced upgraded battery capacities for its Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup, with the Standard Range model packing up to 230 miles of range while the Extended Range version has up to 300 miles of range.

The Ford F-150 Lightning Standard Range model has a 98 kWh battery pack, while the upgraded Extended Model packs a huge 131 kWh battery. Ford will install the Standard Range package on 3 of its 4 versions: the fleet-focused Lightning Pro, the XLT, and the Lariat. The higher-end Extended Range will be optional for the XLT and Lariat, and will come as standard for the flagship Platinum model.

Ford explains that the "F-150 Lighting Pro model will be available with the standard-range battery to retail customers". There's also power fold mirrors in the Lariat and Platinum models, while the Tough Bed spray-in bed liner isn't standard -- but now an option available on all trims.