Latest News - Page 2284

While I've pumped in excess of 50 hours into my Switch playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it comes as no surprise to me that Nintendo expects big sales from their new Switch console.

According to Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima, who says he expects total Switch sales to reach 110 million units, with 20 million units expected to ship in the first year. Taiwan-based supply chain makers have a "conservative estimate" of at least 10 million Switch consoles shipping.

DigiTimes reports: "Nintendo released the Switch in March 2017 and the game console enjoyed over one million units of sales in the first week after the release. Nintendo president Kimishima Tatsumi also recently said that he expects Switch's overall sales to reach 110 million units".

Bungie has just officially announced Destiny 2, through a picture pushed out onto the official Twitter account of Destiny - with key artwork from the game lining up with what we saw teased last week. Our own Gaming God, Derek, went into some detail on why he hoped the leaked Destiny 2 poster was fake - check it out.

Destiny 2 won't let you bring your Destiny characters over, so it's a full fledged sequel to the original. Activision Blizzard has also teased that there will be a PC release of Destiny 2, unlike its predecessor which was a console exclusive. There's also mention of a PS4 beta that might come soon - and as for Destiny 2 itself, it should be released later this year.

Warner Bros. Pictures has just signed an "strategic partnership" with HTC Vive, that will see HTC being the "exclusive VR partner for all content, online and offline activities" for the upcoming release of 'Ready Player One' from legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

Ready Player One has been one of, if not the most anticipated movie to be shifted into the VR realm - and is teased as a "sci-fi action thriller that unfolds largely within the virtual reality space", making for perfect VR content. HTC will provide "multiple pieces of VR content tied to the world of Ready Player One" in VR, with the VR content available through HTC's software portal, Viveport.

There will be location-based entertainment for Ready Player One, as well as high-end PC-based VR and mobile versions. Blair Rich, President of Worldwide Marketing for Warner Bros. Pictures explains: "The virtual reality world within Ready Player One is extremely advanced, sophisticated and engaging, and with Vive, we chose the best system to represent the future of VR. Vive is the perfect partner to bring that to life and also has the broadest reach to global markets for the use of VR in home, mobile and offline channels. We're delighted that HTC Vive will be partnering with Ready Player One and very excited to work with them leading up the movie's release in Spring 2018".

Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android, has teased a photo of a smartphone on which he is working at his new company Essential Products.

Rubin worked at Google until 2013, and he was in charge of the OS. His latest business adventure is the recently founded company which should unveil their first smartphone somewhere around the middle of the year.

The photo which Rubin posted to Twitter reveals that the smartphone rocks an almost bezel-less design, something similar to the Xiaomi Mi MIX. Rubin wrote that he is eager to see the smartphone in more people's hands.

While we are still waiting for the release of the Model 3, Elon Musk has teased the next electric car from Tesla - Model Y.

Tesla's CEO didn't reveal anything about the car other that it will come in few years, but what's interesting here is the name of the car.

Tesla first introduced the Model S, followed by Model X, and the latest Model 3, which was, according to Musk, was supposed to be named Model E.

A couple of days after Samsung announced that they will issue a new update to end the charging of all the Note7s still in operation around the world, the company has announced more information about the future of the faulty devices.

It was previously rumored that the Korean giant might return the refurbished Galaxy Note7 devices to the market, and now the company has issued a statement that clarifies that the Galaxy Note7 isn't quite dead yet.

The company noted that the Galaxy Note7 "devices shall be considered to be used as refurbished phones or rental phones where applicable." This means that the company plans the fix the devices, clearly by putting new batteries, and offering them in selected markets as refurbished devices.

IHS Markit has announced the list of best-selling smartphones for 2016 and Apple is the clear winner.

According to the report, the iPhone 6s is the best-selling smartphone last year with around 60 million units sold. Apple dominated the top of this list and the second place belongs to iPhone 7, followed by iPhone 7 Plus. Fourth place on the best-selling smartphone list belongs to yet another iPhone - 6S Plus.

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and S7 ranked fifth and ninth. Sales of these two devices have outperformed their immediate predecessors, S6 and S6 Edge: the combined shipments of S7 and S7 Edge in 2016 were 10 million higher than S6 and S6 Edge over the same period.

Most of the crazy new CPU headlines have been going to AMD over their new Ryzen family of processors, led by the new flagship Ryzen 7 1800X - but we've been hearing about 12C/24T chips, and even 16C/32T processors. But the 32C/64T goodness coming later this year from AMD with Naples is going to be huge for the prosumer/workstation/datacenter markets.

Now we have a tease of what looks like Intel's next-gen Xeon, based on a 32C/64T design, thanks to benchmarks spotted in Geekbench. The new Skylake-EP platform is teased, with the 32C/64T processor running at 2.3GHz, with 46MB of L3 cache, AVX-512 instruction set support, UPI, and the next-gen Stoem Lake OmniPath architecture - making the new Xeon a tasty mix of CPU architecture goodness.

Until now, Intel has only mentioned a 28C/56T processor coming in the Xeon line - but it looks like Intel is responding to AMD's threat of Naples coming in 32C/64T with its own Xeon CPU with 32C/64T of performance. The datacenter/server market is huge, so it only makes sense for chipzilla to get involved in the multi-threaded fight.

Microsoft will be the first console maker with a truly 4K-capable console later this year with Project Scorpio, but what about big first-party games by Microsoft and its closest partners? They're important too, right?

According to Xbox boss Phil Spencer: "Having our [first-party] games ready for Scorpio is critical". Now we don't know what "ready" means, but we might see some highly tuned first-party games rocking 1080p 60FPS or 4K 30FPS on Project Scorpio at launch, with big system sellers like Halo and Gears of War running at liquid smooth 60FPS - or offering 4K at 30FPS.

I don't see Microsoft being able to squeeze 60FPS out of 4K, considering the PC can't do that without spending in excess of $1000. What do you think we'll see?

If there was ever a wild rumor for 2017, it would be that Apple is considering an acquisition of Disney - you know, the company that owns Marvel, LucasFilm, and Pixar - and is a giant on its own.

Apple is just as massive in the consumer electronics business, and with $200 billion in cash laying around, Apple could really stir up the entire world with an acquisition of Disney. With the largest cash reserver for a private company in history, Apple would own the rights to IP like The Avengers, Toy Story, Star Wars, Frozen, and so many more with an acquisition of Disney.

Now imagine all of that content having its parent company Apple, provide them with the rights to use their products like iPhones and Macs in their movies and TV shows - without the why-do-they-bother crappily made custom OS for a shot of a smartphone in a movie, or the fact that they're using an iPhone or Mac and they put tape over the logo. Imagine actual product placement, without it needing to be, and by a company as large as Apple - in movies as big as Iron Man, for example.

In Win has just unveiled its new X-Frame 2.0 chassis, built from the ground up for professional tests (like me, and now I want 3 of them) - as it can be setup in a horizontal position for much easier swapping in and out of components, especially graphics card testing.

X-Frame 2.0 features a detachable, rotating stand that allows the test rig to be positioned at every 15 degrees through an easy-to-use specialized clip release.

This feature alone will save people hours of time across lots of testing, with In Win making the structure of the X-Frame 2.0 with sandcasting and a CNC machine that cut 4mm of aluminum.

Uber has halted all of its self-driving car efforts after a self-driving car was involved in an accident in Tempe, Arizona - even though Uber's autonomous car wasn't at fault, as it was the human driver that caused the accident.

One of Uber's Volvo-made self-driving SUVs can be seen on its side, with an Uber spokesperson confirming the accident, and that the company is "suspending its autonomous tests in Arizona until it completes its investigation and pausing its Pittsburgh operations" reports Bloomberg. There were no injuries in the accident, with the police report stating that another car "failed to yield for the Uber car, causing the autonomous vehicle to flip on its side", reports Bloomberg.

Tempe police information officer Josie Montenegro said: "There was a person behind the wheel. It is uncertain at this time if they were controlling the vehicle at the time of the collision". An Uber spokesperson added that the company is "continuing to look into this incident and can confirm we had no backseat passengers in the vehicle".

GIGABYTE has been owning with its new AORUS push, and now we have the upcoming Z270X-Designare motherboard, and a slick silver/black/blue look which has me salivating all over my keyboard.

The new Z270-powered Designare motherboard has been fully validated and optimized for NVIDIA's high-end Quadro workstation and high-end graphics cards, so if you're looking for performance without limits - GIGABYTE's new Z270X-Designare motherboard is what you should be looking at.

VP of GIGABYTE's Motherboard Business Unit, Henry Kao, explains: "Content creators need a high-performance platform that can keep up with the inventive minds as they craft their masterpieces".

To celebrate this week's release of Disney's 'Moana' on Blu-ray 3D, 2D DVD and digital, we have five Blu-rays to give away thanks to our friends at Walt Disney Home Entertainment.

Three thousand years ago, the greatest sailors in the world voyaged across the vast Pacific, discovering the many islands of Oceania. But then, for a millennium, their voyages stopped and no one today knows why. From Walt Disney Animation Studios comes Moana, a sweeping, CG-animated adventure about a spirited teenager who sails out on a daring mission to prove herself a master wayfinder and fulfill her ancestors unfinished quest. During her journey, Moana (voice of Aulii Cravalho) meets the once-mighty demi-god Maui (voice of Dwayne Johnson), and together they traverse the open ocean on an action-packed voyage, encountering enormous fiery creatures and impossible odds.

To go into the running to win a prize, simply correctly answer the following question:

MSI has made its GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X graphics card official, with a proper tease at card with its spruced up cooler both on, and off - as well as the technical specifications, so we have some GPU and VRAM clock speeds to share.

MSI will be offering its usual three overclocking modes: Silent, Gaming, and OC modes. Silent Mode sees the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X clocked at 1480/1582MHz on the GPU, and 11000MHz on the 11GB of GDDR5X. Gaming Mode ramps up the GPU clocks to 1544/1657MHz, with the GDDR5X clocks at 11016MHz (16MHz overclock), while the OC Mode clocks the card at 1569/1683MHz, and the GDDR5X at 11124MHz.

The card doesn't look as long as usual, with MSI doing some great work on the custom PCB on the GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X.

Blizzard has announced StarCraft Remastered, a full HD port of their legendary RTS classic.

We knew that Blizzard was working on a StarCraft remaster, and now the company has finally confirmed it with an official StarCraft Remaster announcement. As Blizzard says, StarCraft Remastered "upgrades the essential sci-fi strategy experience from beginning to end," and the new HD port will included the original base game and its Brood War expansion.

The studio has remastered everything from units, buildings, environments, game audio, and widened the resolution support for modern monitors and displays. But this is just a remaster, not a remake, and Blizzard promises the "strategy gameplay that StarCraft perfected years ago remains unchanged."

Intel is going to have a hard time on its hands with this current rumor of the purported Core i7-7740K processor, a new CPU based on the Kaby Lake X architecture - on the HEDT platform.

The new Core i7-7740K won't be a slight bump on the current Kaby Lake (non-X) processor is a 4C/8T offering on the LGA 1151 socket, while the Core i7-7740K is on the LGA 2066 socket powered by the X299 chipset. The X299 chipset will be ready for the high-end Core i7-7740K, which will rock 4C/8T of Kaby Lake X at 4.3/4.5GHz for base/boost clocks.

But, the new Core i7-7740K will not include an integrated GPU for on-board graphics, like the 7700K does now - and will bump the TDP up to 112W, from 91W on 7700K. 20 more watts, for the same Turbo Boost clock of 4.5GHz, and 4C/8T - without integrated graphics, hmm.

AMD hosted its Tech Summit in China recently, with CEO Lisa Su announcing their mid-range Ryzen 5 availability, with demos and more on show. There were some new details released on Radeon RX Vega, and because I foolishly had a night off from work - I missed this story, but here it is!

Scott Herkelman, the former General GeForce Manager at NVIDIA and now VP of AMD took the stage, with his segment concentrated solely on Radeon RX Vega. We now know that Radeon RX Vega will definitely come in both 4GB and 8GB variants, both running the new HBM2 memory that should hopefully pave the way for various improvements. HBM2 uses far less space on the PCB, so we should expect shorter cards that are magnitudes faster than the Radeon RX 480.

Just as the 'Justice League' is coming together (to the tune of The Beatles), Zack Snyder's upcoming film looks to be doing much the same thing - which has got me tentatively optimistic. Warner Bros have today released a new trailer for the upcoming superhero feature.

Featuring DC Comics' biggest assemblage of comic book heroes including Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), the Flash (Ezra Miller), Superman (Henry Cavill), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa), 'Justice League' is set to be the DC comics version of 'The Avengers', which the studio is hoping will bring in the huge revenue that eluded last summer's 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice'.

'Justice League' is set to hit 3D, 2D and IMAX cinema worldwide from November 2017.

BMW has a bright future ahead of it, if its latest 'A new Era has begun' video is anything to go by, with the carmaker showing off what it envisions, as the next 100 years of automotive and wearable technology.

BMW sees a future of self-driving cars that pull up to you when you need them, with welcoming lights just below the drivers side door that get projected onto the ground, a steering wheel that can be used for driving - but will disappear into the dash when you want autonomous driving enabled. The company continues with augmented reality helmets, and more - it really is a great envisioning of the future of automotive tech, and more so - how it'll improve, and make our lives easier.

These are the four new concept vehicles on show.