Latest News - Page 1285

Intel's new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs are official with the new flagship Core i9-12900K processor already overclocked, with multiple OC world records already broken.

LN2 cooling was used to chill Intel's most advanced CPU ever, moved away from the 14nm process node, and made on the new Intel 7 node -- overclocker Allen "Splave" Golibersuch overclocked his Core i9-12900K on the Golden Cove "Performance" (P-cores) to a crazy-high 6.8GHz, while the Gracemont "Efficiency" (E-cores) at 5.3GHz.

Splave used ASRock's new Z690 Aqua OC Edition motherboard, with just dual DDR5 DIMMs -- with some of Klevv's brand new DDR5-4800 overclocked to DDR5-6200. Splave also used a Reaktor 2.0 LN2 pot, and a high-end EVGA SuperNOVA 1600W PSU.

Apple Music integration is now available on the PlayStation 5, Sony today announced.

Apple Music subscribers can now natively listen to content while playing games on the PlayStation 5. Gamers have been able to listen to music USB or Spotify since 2020 and the new Apple Music service functions the exact same way: Install the app and launch it directly or listen to music natively via the PS5's UI. Users can access Apple Music by hitting the PS button and opening the Control Center, selecting Music, and selecting Apple Music from the source list.

"PS5 offers seamless integration with the Apple Music streaming service with background music and music video playback, so players can listen before, during, or after their gameplay session."

Can you believe the day is here? Intel has launched its next-gen Alder Lake CPU architecture, the largest shift in Intel CPU architecture in over 10 years -- a shift into hybrid architecture, and a shift away from the problematic 14nm process node and onto Intel 7.

Intel's new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" range of CPUs is led by the flagship Core i9-12900K processor, which packs 16 cores and 24 threads of CPU power under its hood. We have 19% IPC improvement over the current-gen 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" CPUs, new hybrid-based Performance and Efficiency cores, DDR5 memory support, PCIe 5.0 support, and Intel Smart Cache architecture which shares its L3 cache with the p and e cores.

If we go from pure gaming benchmarks on the new Intel Core i9-12900K, which Intel has compared against its Core i9-11900K and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor -- the new Alder Lake flagship Core i9-12900K beats everything across the board in a decent spread of games including Far Cry 6, F1 2021, Crysis: Remastered, and Troy: A Total War Saga.

Microsoft is spending more into gaming as it ramps up key services like Xbox Game Pass, Project xCloud game streaming, software development, and new console hardware.

Right now Xbox is bigger than its ever been. The brand is now a service that delivers games, content, engagement, and monetization across consoles, mobile phones, tablets, PCs, and soon directly to television sets via native built-in apps.

Microsoft has spent billions to get Xbox where it is today and these investments are paying off. Xbox just achieved a new historic Q1 earnings record of $3.593 billion. This is just the beginning, and Microsoft has continued its aggressive spending and investment into video games.

Announcing the Xbox 2042, the world's most powerful video games console with over 1 million TFLOPs of compute power.

Microsoft just put out a hilarious promo for Battlefield 2042 that details what kind of crazy next-gen games hardware that might exist in 21 years. Sure the world of Battlefield 2042 has literally crumbled under climate change and obliterating world powers, but at least video games are more advanced than ever, right?

The fake advertisement dives into nascent technologies like quantum computing, neural interfaces, special contacts you can pop into your eyes for controller-less interactions, and a full holographic display. This reminds me of the super Wii console used in that episode of South Park where Cartman freezes himself to go to the future.

An international team of astronomers has discovered an infant planet orbiting an infant star, adding to a very small list of the youngest planets ever found.

The team of international astronomers has had their research accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which details the discovery of the planet named 2M0437b. What makes this planet special is that it's newly formed and can be directly observed with telescopes, paving the way forward for researchers to garner a deeper understanding of planet formation, and thus the evolution of Earth.

The team of researchers estimates that the planet is a couple more times massive than Jupiter and formed with its host star only several million years ago. According to the KeckObservatory website, the planet formed "around the time the main Hawaiian Islands first emerged above the ocean". The planet and its host star reside are located 417 light-years from Earth in what astronomers call a stellar "nursery", a region of space that is producing stars and planets at a high rate.

It wasn't too long ago that a co-founder of Apple announced he was joining the private space industry with a company called Privateer.

That Apple co-founder is none other than Steve Wozniak, and about halfway through September, Wozniak announced Privateer Space, a space-based company that's purpose remains shrouded in mystery. What we do know about Privateer Space is that it plans on tackling the ever-growing problem of space junk, but how the company will solve this issue is unknown.

Recently, Privateer Space acquired a new chief scientific adviser, Moriba Jah, who's an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as an expert on space junk and one of the leading voices that are pushing for the problem of space junk to be solved.

A team of astronomers has claimed that they may have detected the first planet outside of our Milky Way galaxy.

The study from the researchers has been published in Nature Astronomy and details a possible exoplanet candidate that resides in the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), or Whirlpool Galaxy, located 28 million light-years away. The astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory that specializes in observing celestial objects in X-rays and used the transit technique to observe the possible exoplanet.

]The transit technique is quite simple to understand - imagine looking at a star and then seeing a drop in its brightness. From this drop you can infer that a celestial body is orbiting the star and has passed in between the observational line drawn from the telescope to the star. This technique is widely used by astronomers searching for exoplanets in optical light, but is rarely used by astronomers using X-ray-based telescopes.

The International Space Station is nearing its end of life, but before it's retired, it will be joined by a new space station called Orbital Reef.

The announcement comes from Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Space, and a few other companies who plan on launching the new space station that will have the facilities to support interests from national governments, the private industry, and tourism. According to Brent Sherwood, the senior vice president of advanced development programs for Blue Origin, Orbital Reef will lower the cost, expand access and provide the services needed to normalize spaceflight.

Sherwood said, "We will expand access, lower the cost, and provide all the services and amenities needed to normalize spaceflight. A vibrant business ecosystem will grow in low Earth orbit, generating new discoveries, new products, new entertainments and global awareness." The announcement states that Orbital Reef will be up and running with operational capabilities by the late 2020s. If you are interested in reading more about this announcement, check out this link here.

Officials are saying that we may have to add a "negative leap second" onto the official Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).

UTC is the international method for timekeeping and is based on the atomic clock that is the epitome of precision as it measures the time by the movement of electrons in atoms, hence its "atomic clock" name. Officials that operate the atomic clock look for differences between Earth's rotation speed in time, which averages out to be 86,400 seconds per day, versus what the atomic clock states.

When there is a discrepancy between the atomic clock and Earth's rotation speed, the atomic clock is adjusted, and its recorded down whether Earth's rotation speed has sped up or slowed down. For example, in 2016, a leap second was added at 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds on Dec. 31. Officials have been adding leap seconds around every 18 months since 1972, but now reports are indicating that Earth's rotation speed has slowed down, which means that a second may have to be subtracted from the atomic clock, something that is known as a "negative leap second".

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, along with astronomers have seen for the first time the moments just after a star ended its life in a fiery explosion.

The new study has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and details observations made of the star's supernova, now dubbed SN 2020fqv. Researchers are now calling the supernova observation the "Rosetta Stone of supernovas", which is a reference to the Rosetta Stone that features the same text in three different languages. The stone was used by historians to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Now, astronomers, with their newly-found observations, will be able to use the data recorded by Hubble to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of supernovas and what happens within a star right before it's about to explode. Hubble's observations took place only a few hours after the explosion had occurred, which allowed for researchers to observe the material close to the star after the explosion.

All of the rovers that are currently station on the Red Planet were forced into safe mode for a two week period, but now they are back online.

NASA, along with the China National Space Administration (CNSA) had no choice but to switch their rovers into "safe mode" for two weeks as Earth and Mars reached opposite sides of the Sun. This two week period is called a "solar conjunction", and its when Earth and Mars are obscured from each other by the Sun, meaning researchers and engineers will lose sight of Mars, and thus communications.

Now that period has passed, nominal operations for all of the rovers have resumed, meaning research is back underway. Operations for NASA's Perseverance rover officially came back online on October 19, and immediately the rover began traversing the martian landscape in search of new interesting prospects. During this down period, all rovers, including China's Zhurong rover were collecting valuable data while in safe mode. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

SpaceX's Starship launch vehicle has recently passed a major hurdle in its construction, and now SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased its launch may happen earlier than expected.

On October 21, SpaceX successfully completed a static fire test with its SN20 Starship prototype, and this static fire test is no small achievement as preparations are being made for its first orbital flight test. SpaceX has previously said that Starship's first orbital test flight would likely occur within a couple of months or before the end of the year, but now SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased via Twitter that the test flight could occur next month.

At the moment, the launch of SpaceX's largest orbital vehicle is "pending regulatory approval" from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is essentially an official license that grants SpaceX approval to launch the new vehicle. Musk took to Twitter on October 22 and said, "If all goes well, Starship will be ready for its first orbital launch attempt next month, pending regulatory approval." Patience and timing are the two things the public and SpaceX must now wait for as the space transportation company gears up for its biggest launch yet.

Apple's new MacBook Pro laptops are here with 14-inch and 16-inch offerings powered by Apple's latest M1 Max SoC, with powerhouse mobile performance that rivals laptops and desktops, all on a 5nm chip fabbed at TSMC.

The new Apple 2021 MacBook Pro 16.2-inch model has received a quick teardown treatment by @L0vetodream on Twitter, showing that the new MacBook Pro is cooled by a single heat pipe and dual fans. Apple's new M1 Max SoC does not require massive amounts of cooling, with the thermal design of the new MacBook Pro allowing for 50% more airflow with lower fan speeds.

Apple's energy efficiency out of the new M1 Max SoC and TSMC's new 5nm process node is showing its strength here, with the teardown revealing the new 2021 MacBook Pro and its M1 Max SoC is surrounded by 4 memory chips, and compares it to a small coin. Impressive stuff that, as a nerd, is really awesome to see.

EA DICE has announced that Battlefield is receiving its first non-binary character, which will launch with Battlefield 2042 as a new Specialist: Emma "Sundance" Rosier.

Battlefield 2042 fans noticed that descriptions for the character had "they/them" pronouns, so one gamer asked EA DICE what was going on. EA DICE community manager Adam Freeman explained: "Yep. Sundance is non-binary and uses the Pronouns They/Them".

"Sundance" has her their own special traits and abilities, with Emma being from France and is an Assault-class Specialist with a wingsuit that allows for faster entry in objectives and tactical situations. Sundance also has Smart Explosives, which can be used to take down enemy aircraft.

Phison has revealed some juicy new details on the future of SSD controller technology, with future PCIe 5.0, PCIe 6.0, and PCIe 7.0 connectivity on the way.

The next-gen PCIe 5.0, PCIe 6.0, and PCIe 7.0 SSD technology was talked about during MSI's recent Insider Livestream, where Phison CTO Sebastien Jean talked about all things next-gen SSDs and PCIe tech. He said that it takes around 16-18 months to develop a brand new SSD design, while the technology and enabling for a new silicon process node starts 2-3 years earlier.

Phison says that it has begun work on low-level components for PCIe 6.0 SSDs and expects them to be here in 2025-2026, a few years from now. As for what to expect from PCIe 6.0 SSDs we can expect up to 32GB/sec from a PCIe 6.0-based SSD, up from the 14-16GB/sec we're going to see from PCIe 5.0-based SSDs with Intel's new Alder Lake and Z690 platform launching in a few days, and up from the 7-8GB/sec you get from PCIe 4.0-based SSDs.

ADATA has thrown another hat into the DDR5 memory ring with the unveiling of its new XPG LANCER DDR5 gaming memory that has RGB lighting.

The new ADATA XPG LANCER DDR5 memory comes in kits of up to 16GB and speeds of up to DDR5-5200, with ADATA adding in a PMIC (Power Management Integrated Circuit) and ECC (Error Correcting Code) for enhanced performance and stability.

ADATA reiterates that the company is using high-quality ICs and PCBs to "ensure uncompromised performance and reliable overclocking, ideal for discerning gamers and overclockers. With support for Intel® XMP 3.0, users can get overclocking easily without the need to go into BIOS. There is no need to repeatedly adjust and fine-tune overclocking parameters".

ASUS will be debuting a new tweak to its ROG Maximus and ROG Strix motherboards, with the ASUS PCIe Slot Q-Release.

The new ASUS PCIe Slot Q-Release would be a special button on the ROG Maximus and ROG Strix motherboards, which will make it much easier to pull your graphics card -- no matter what it is -- out of the new PCIe 5.0 x16 slot on the Z690-based ASUS ROG Maximus and ROG Strix motherboards.

There's nothing like this on any MSI or GIGABYTE motherboard, even the new Z690 motherboards, so ASUS will make it much easier for graphics card reviewers -- hey ASUS, I need this new ASUS PCIe Slot Q-Release button and ASUS Z690 ROG Strix motherboard -- as it will make putting in, and taking out -- and in again -- easier than ever before.

NVIDIA has released its new GeForce 496.49 WHQL drivers which are Game Ready for some of the very latest, and greatest games for the last few months of the year.

The new GeForce 496.49 WHQL drivers have Game Ready support for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Battlefield 2042 Early Access, Call of Duty: Vanguard, Chivalry 2, Forza Horizon 5, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition, Jurassic World Evolution 2, and Riders Republic.

NVIDIA is also adding in support for 6 new G-SYNC Compatible displays that provide VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support. These monitors include 2 from AOC 24G2W1G4 and AOC AG274QS3R1B+, 3 from ASUS in the XG27AQM, VG32AQ1LA, and XG249CM, and then 1 from MSI with the MPG321QRF-QD. All of these monitors now have VRR between 60-165Hz on the MSI, 48-270Hz depending on the ASUS model, and 48-170Hz depending on the AOC model.

AMD has announced its new Accelerated Data Center Premiere Virtual Event for November 8, 2021 -- barely 2 weeks away, where we should be introduced to the next-gen Instinct MI250 accelerator, and new EPYC Milan-X processors.

We should be introduced to the first multi-chip module design (MCM) GPU which will come in the form of the new AMD Instinct MI250X and MI250 accelerators, rocking the codename Aldebaran GPU. We only heard a couple of days ago that the Instinct MI250X would feature an MCM GPU with 110 Compute Units (CUs) and 128GB of super-fast HBM2e memory.

Not only will AMD introduce the MCM-based Aldebaran GPU, but also the next-gen EPYC Milan-X CPU which will reportedly offer up to 64 cores and 128 threads on the Zen 3 architecture. 64C/128T on Zen 3 + 280W TDP and a gigantic, mind-blowing 768MB of L3 cache.