Latest News - Page 409

Google has just introduced its state-of-the-art quantum chip dubbed Willow, with Willow performing a standard benchmark computation in under 5 minutes, something that would take one of the world's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years... or longer than the universe has existed.

Google Quantum AI Founder and Lead, Hartmut Neven, wrote an extensive blog explaining the new Willow quantum chip and its journey beginning over 10 years ago when Neven founded Google Quantum AI back in 2012.

The vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could use quantum mechanics -- the "operating system" of nature to the extent we know it today -- in order to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and solving some of the world's biggest problems.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be the biggest release of virtually any product ever, with billions and billions of dollars to be made at launch... scaring other developers and publishers, making them push their game releases as far away from GTA 6 as possible.

Rockstar is still hard at work on GTA 6, with Bloomberg reporting that the anticipation for the game is so high that some competing game publishers are "waiting as long as possible" before committing release dates for their games in the fall of 2025, according to "people familiar with their deliberations who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly".

In full, Bloomberg reported: "Anticipation [for GTA 6] is so high that some competing game publishers are waiting as long as possible to commit to their release dates for the fall, according to people familiar with their deliberations who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly. The publishers want to see whether GTA 6 will make its deadline or slip into 2026, these people say, and they're determined to keep their own games far, far away".

LEGO Fortnite is getting a makeover, shifting into a new experience with the moniker "Odyssey," presumably in reference to Odysseus' mythical journey.

Epic has recently made some big announcements around Fortnite, specifically the side experiences within the mighty metaverse-like umbrella. LEGO Fortnite is getting a very GTA-esque roleplaying sim mode called Brick Life, and Fortnite is even getting its own first-person, Counter-Strike-inspired, bomb-planting attack vs defense mode called Ballistic.

Now comes LEGO Fortnite Odyssey, a quick name swap with the original LEGO Fortnite. Instead of being its own game, Epic now assigned the LEGO Fortnite name to describe LEGO content altogether. Odyssey's swap is coming with the new Storm Chasers update, which will be out on December 10.

Apple's next-gen Vision Pro headset could feature an in-house 5G modem, with smart glasses expected to ship with a 5G modem in the coming years.

In a new report from insider Mark Gurman on Bloomberg, we're learning that the Apple Vision Pro successor launching in 2025 with the company's new M5 processor, will NOT ship with an in-house 5G modem. However, in future-gen Apple AR glasses we could expect a 5G modem, and a future Vision Pro successor of the future with a built-in 5G modem (because we all want, or need it.. Apple being Apple).

Apple's future AR glasses will most likely tether to an iPhone which will have a 5G modem inside, with the company's in-house 5G modem expected to beat the 5G champion -- Qualcomm -- with its future-gen iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max smartphones which should debut with mmWave baseband chips.

GPD has just launched its new Win Max 2 (2025) gaming handheld, rocking AMD's new Ryzen AI HX 370 "Strix Point" APU, a huge 10.1-inch screen, OCulink connectivity, costing $1462.

The new GPD Win Max 2 gaming handheld features a 10.1-inch 1080p 120Hz display, AMD Ryzen AI HX 370 "Strix Point" APU, 64GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory by default, and dual M.2 SSD slots with a 2280 port for up to 2TB of SSD storage hidden inside of the WIn Max 2 handheld, and another that is hidden behind a small lid on the back.

GPD is even including 4G LTE module support for internet on-the-go, an OCulink connector for external graphics cards, dual USB4 ports for devices that require Thunderbolt 3/4, SD and microSD card support, and audio ports on both sides of the Win Max 2 gaming handheld.

Epic Games and LEGO have a message for gamers: Can't wait for Grand Theft Auto VI? Maybe try this new brick sim with Miami-esque city streets, neon lights, and tons of vehicles. Sound familiar?

Epic is on a roll lately. The Fortnite-maker recently announced Ballistic, a new 5v5 FPS that's a direct contender to its rival's biggest game, Counter-Strike. Now LEGO Fortnite is expanding with a very Grand Theft Auto-esque "social roleplay experience" coming on December 12. It's called Fortnite Brick Life, but most people just call it LEGO GTA.

With a rather limited set of players to one world, Brick Life looks like a good mix of simulation and multiplayer. The mode supports 32 players total and the city itself will expand over time, both organically based on player choices and interactions and directly from developers through continued content updates.

Despite the industry's solidarity with the collective Survive till '25 sentiment, GTA 6 is striking fear into the hearts of publishers everywhere. No one wants to go up against Grand Theft Auto.

GTA 6 is expected to be so big that it will help save the video games industry. At least, that's the popular belief going around...and there's a good chance the game will boost the market across the board, whether it be full game sales across digital and retail channels, or gaming hardware sales across consoles and PCs.

Recent history has shown the market is full of unknowns and unprecedented occurrences--your best-selling Palworlds and Helldivers 2 in 2024, for instance, or Baldur's Gate 3's cultural explosion throughout 2023 remain key examples. When it launches in 2025, there's a chance GTA 6 could even beat GTA 5's thunderous success, as if magnified by the current trends of high consumer appetites.

Windows 11 24H2 ran into difficulties with some Ubisoft games, and therefore the upgrade was blocked for users with those titles installed - but the good news is that a fix is now in place for two of said games.

The affected Ubisoft games were three Assassin's Creed outings (Valhalla, Origins, Odyssey) along with Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Those games would freeze up (with a black screen crash in some cases), and this could happen when loading, or during gameplay.

A hotfix was pretty swiftly released for Star Wars Outlaws, and now Avatar has one, as well, so owners of those titles are free to upgrade to Windows 11 24H2 (as long as their PC doesn't have any other compatibility issues that could lead to a block being put in place by Microsoft).

Apple has reportedly sold just 500,000 units of its expensive Vision Pro headset since its launch earlier this year.

In his new PowerOn newsletter, insider Mark Gurman explains that current Vision Pro customers aren't using the $3500 headset anywhere near as much as Apple expected, and that it's a growing problem that's not affecting just Apple, but the likes of Meta and other headset makers.

Gurman explained in his PowerOn newsletter: "Since the Vision Pro went on sale in February, I'm told that the company has sold fewer than half a million units. And a large number of Vision Pro buyers (those who haven't returned it) aren't using the product as much as Apple anticipated, according to internal data gathered by the company".

NetEase's big new superhero live game breaks a huge milestone with double-digit million players in just a few days' time.

It's official: Marvel Rivals is a mega-hit, and during the critical holiday spending period no less. The multiplayer free-to-play team-based shooter is essentially Marvel's answer to Overwatch, complete with unique hero synergies, iconic designs across 33 free player characters, and an ever-changing narrative centered around Marvel's wide-spanning multiverse. The game's popularity has sent social media buzzing and everyone seems to be talking about Rivals--the need for healers and Jeff the Shark, in particular.

Thanks to the colossal pull of Marvel's heroic franchises and the surprisingly layered gameplay mechanics, Rivals has attracted 10 million players across consoles and PC in just 72 hours since launch.

OpenAI has just created a more expensive version of its ChatGPT chatbot, with a new "reasoning" model series out of preview status with o1, costing $200 per month.

The new $200 per month subscription tier includes unlimited access to OpenAI o1, GPT-4o, and the new Advanced Voice mode. OpenAI is including a version of o1 that is exclusive to ChatGPT Pro subscribers, which provides more compute power to generate the best answer possible, even with the hardest questions or prompts.

The AI startup has compared its new o1-preview, with people paying $200 per month to expect a more powerful, faster, and more accurate model that is better at coding and math. The new o1 "reasoning" model is also able to respond to images, with OpenAI promising that it's been trained to be more concice, leading to faster response times than the o1-preview model.

Broadcom has just announced its new 3.5D eXtreme Dimension System in Package (XDSiP) platform technology, which enables consumer AI customers to develop next-generation custom accelerators (XPUs).

The new 3.55D XDSiP integrates over 6000 mm2 of silicon and up to 12 HBM stacks in a single package, enabling high-efficiency, lower-power computing for AI at scale. Broadcom says that it has achieved this significant milestone by developing and launching the industry's first Face-to-Face (F2F) 3.5D XPU.

Broradcom explains: "The immense computational power required for training generative AI models relies on massive clusters of 100,000 growing to 1 million XPUs. These XPUs demand increasingly sophisticated integration of compute, memory, and I/O capabilities to achieve the necessary performance while minimizing power consumption and cost. Traditional methods like Moore's Law and process scaling are struggling to keep up with these demands. Therefore, advanced system-in-package (SiP) integration is becoming crucial for next-generation XPUs".

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang attended the AI Vision event in Thailand last week, announcing a "sovereign AI" project with local AI company Siam.AI Cloud, the country's first Thai NVIDIA Cloud Partner.

In a new post from the Bangkok Post, we're learning that Siam.AI Cloud also announced comprehensive partnerships with leading institutions to drive the national digital transformation with "sovereign AI". NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has talked about sovereign AI many times in the past (in the links below) which refers to a nation's ability to provide AI using its own infrastructure, data, workforce, and business networks.

Jensen said: "Thailand recognizes the importance of having AI infrastructure and data. Siam AI Cloud is the first AI cloud in Thailand, the first AI language in Thailand, with the OpenThai GPT local large language model, and this is an extraordinary moment. And frankly, there are only 20 countries in the world that have done this".

ASRock has just shown off DDR5 memory overclocking on its Z890 Taichi OCF motherboard, passing 10,000 MT/s with regular ait cooling and at ambient room temperatures.

We've already seen ASRock's new Z890 Taichi OCF motherboard used by professional overclockers reaching speeds of 12,666 MT/s but it required much more cooling, and now we have overclocker Nick Shih at HKEPC hardware achieving a world record for dual-DIMM memory overclocking. This is the first time that dual-rank memory has been used to surpass the 10,000 MT/s barrier.

Room temperature, no dedicated cooling on the DDR5 DIMMs (which were v-color Manta Xfinity RGB DDR5 memory modules) on the ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF motherboard. The 48GB kit of DDR5 (2 x 24GB sticks) were running at 5066MHz each, or 10133MT/s speeds.

TSMC's initial 2nm manufacturing yields have been better than expected during recent trial runs at its fab in north Taiwan, Hsinchu, with mass production of 2nm chips on schedule for 2025.

In a new report from Taiwanese outlet LTN and their supply chain sources, TSMC's 2nm trial production yield rate was "better than expected" and that the world's most advanced process technology will be mass-produced in 2025. TSMC's new 2nm process node will use nanosheet architecture for the very first time in the semiconductor industry, and is currently in trial production at TSMC's fab in Baoshan.

TSMC's new 2nm process node will see the company debut its next-gen nanosheet architecture, and after its 2nm node, we'll see the A16 process node that will combine the Super Power Rail architecture and nanosheet transistors, with TSMC's next-gen A16 node expected to hit mass production in 2026.

ASUS has just unveiled its new 32-inch ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV monitor which features a stunning 6016 x 3384 resolution with 226 pixels per inch (PPI) for unparalleled image clarity, making it ideal for video editors, photographers, and AI artists. Check it out:

The company compares its new 32-inch ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV monitor with another monitor of the same size but with a native 4K resolution, the new ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV features 145% more onscreen workspace which provides a bigger canvas for professionals to work with.

The new ASUS 32-inch ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV features 98% DCI-P3 and 100% sRGB coverage, with VESA DisplayHDR 600 certification, providing true-to-life color reproduction.

Video games industry expert and data analyst Joost van Dreunen has dire predictions for Ubisoft.

After a string of failed games, years of controversy, numerous creative and financial restructurings, and costly mismanagement, Ubisoft isn't in a great place right now. It's to the point where Ubisoft is said to be considering partners in an effort to buy out all remaining company stock and take the games-maker private. The idea is to go private before someone makes a hostile takeover attempt. Tencent is one such partner, and rightly so given the share position in both Ubisoft and Ubisoft's principal shareholder; Ubisoft's majority shares are in the control of the Guillemot family under a company called Guillemot Bros., of which Tencent has 49.9% stake.

New reports say that Ubisoft's shareholders are currently involved, meaning a plan could be executed in the coming months. Some industry experts like Joost van Dreunen, founder of now-absorbed analyst firm SuperData, believe that the French publisher will essentially be made private while it sells pieces of itself off.

PlayStation's new image-upscaling AI tech isn't without its flaws and limitations, and some games actually end up looking worse having utilized it.

The $700 PlayStation 5 Pro owes its high-end performance to two main upgrades: The new beefed-up GPU, and PlayStation Spectral Resolution Scaling, or PSSR. So what is PSSR? It's basically Sony's own proprietary version of NVIDIA's DLSS AI-driven upscaling technology. Sony worked with AMD to engineer custom machine learning hardware onto the PS5 Pro's SoC, and has trained PSSR's AI on its first-party games.

"And finally, we added custom hardware for machine learning, and an AI library called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. PSSR analyzes the game's images pixel by pixel, and can add an extraordinary amount of detail which boosts the effect of resolution for the games," PS5 Pro architect Mark Cerny said in the console's technical reveal showcase.

ViewSonic is reportedly preparing to unveil a monster new OLED gaming monitor at CES 2025 with the introduction of a new 27-inch 1440p OLED gaming monitor with a blistering 520Hz refresh rate.

The details on the new ViewSonic 27-inch 1440p 520Hz OLED gaming monitor are coming from German outlet ComputerBase, but outside of the size, panel, resolution and refresh rate, we don't know much else. We should expect some "Dual Mode" functionality like other gaming monitors have been rolling out with lately, probably to 4K but at a lower refresh rate (240/260Hz most likely).

ViewSonic should unveil a suite of new monitors at CES 2025, including a new ColorPro monitor that will be targeted at professionals with a higher-pixel 5K resolution and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. This is aimed at professionals who are seeking higher color accuracy for their photo and video editing workloads.

Can you imagine Valve stepping into the console market with a SteamOS-powered device? Well, that's what the new "Valve Fremont" could be, and it would compete against PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

In a swirl of rumors over the weekend, the Valve Fremont turned up and it could be a new console that plugs into your TV, found by Redditor "Coolbho3k" who discovered a change in the Steam Deck Kernel by a Valve staffer, who was testing something called "Fremont".

Valve's purported Fremont device appeared to have an AMD "Lilac" chip, but Brad Lynch from EOZ (which makes VR straps) posted on X that Quanta Computer is manufacturing the Valve Fremont device. Brad thinks that the Lilac was the original PCB that Valve used in its first prototype of Fremont, but now has a completely different, fully finished board.