Latest News - Page 412

Google has just introduced its new generative AI video model, Veo, beating OpenAI's text-to-video service Sora, launching Veo into private preview on Google's in-house Vertex AI platform.

Google's new Veo model can generate "high-quality" 1080p resolution videos in multiple different visual and cinematic styles, all from text or image-based prompts. The search giant unveiled its text-to-video model a few months ago with generated clips that would be "beyond a minute" in length, but the company didn't specify... but now, these videos that were made by Veo are pretty astounding.

The latest version of Google Imagen 3 text-to-image generative will be online and available for all Google Cloud customers on Vertex "starting next week" says the company, which will see an expansion of its US-first release on Google's AI Text Kitchen in August 2024.

TEAMGROUP's gaming division T-FORCE has just unveiled its new XTREEM CKD DDR5-8800 CU-DIMM memory in a huge 48GB kit, with an OC hitting 9600 MT/s speeds. Check out the new DIMMs:

The new TEAMGROUP T-FORCE XTREEM CKD DDR5-8800 CUDIMM memory has been designed with an advanced Client Clock Driver, and with speeds hitting 9600 MT/s, the company says its new memory module "redefines overclocking potential with the groundbreaking CUDIMM platform, delivering exceptional performance and setting new industry milestones".

TEAMGROUP's new T-FORCE XTREEM CKD DDR5 has been designed for stability at an "exclusive frequency" of 9600 MT/s on 2 DIMM motherboards. The company is using a premium 2 mm-thick aluminium alloy heat spreader and high thermal conductivity silicone, it significantly improves heat dissipation by 10%. The company explains its "CNC cutting technology, matte sandblasting, and black anodizing processes create a refined, understated aesthetic. Paired with the iconic T-FORCE logo, it offers gamers a product combining high performance and premium design".

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has teased its next-gen Trainium3 AI accelerator at re:Invent on Tuesday, promising 4x higher performance than its current-gen Trainium2 chip.

The new Trainium3 AI accelerator is due in late 2025, with Gadi Hutt, director of product and customer engineering for AWS' Annapurna Labs team, expects the new AI accelerator to be the very first dedicated machine learning accelerator built on a 3nm process node (at TSMC) and hit a 40% improvement in efficiency over Trainium2.

Amazon hasn't been too clear on the exact performance of its Trainium3, but the 4x performance improvement figure is based on AWS' complete "UltraServer" configuration, which The Register reports is still in development. The outlet works out that the Trainium2 UltraServer features 64 accelerators, capable of 83.2 petaFLOPS of compute performance (unknown precision).

The first AMD B850-powered motherboard has been spotted, with the budget-focused mid-range chipset ready for AMD's new Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" processors.

In some new photos of GIGABYTE's upcoming B850M AORUS ELITE WIFI6E ICE motherboard from VideoCardz, we can expect a huge flood of B850 motherboards in the near future... probably at CES 2025 in January. We don't have much to go on with the photo, but it does show the B850M chipset, an all-white design, and AORUS branding on the VRMs.

AMD's new B850 chipset is a mid-range affair, featuring Gen5 and Gen 4 support -- which is fantastic to see, the mid-range B850 supporting Gen5 SSDs -- with motherboard makers to make the decision to have dedicated Gen5 lanes for discrete graphics cards if they want. B850 motherboards will support both memory and CPU overclocking, which will make them just that much more enticing against Intel's mid-range counterparts.

SK hynix and Samsung are massive memory rivals both residing in South Korea, but are now collaborating on LPDDR6-PIM (Processing-in-Memory) technology for future on-device AI products.

In a new report from MyDrivers, we're learning that the two South Korean memory giants are setting aside their (memory) differences, and forging together to standardize LPDDR6-PIM memory. We can expect LPDDR6-PIM to be released sometime in 2026, improving overall system performance for mainstream-focused devices.

Why is LPDDR6-PIM important? This will remove the need for additional computations that are otherwise run on the processor (CPU), meaning that there is less data transfer between both of the components (RAM + CPU). Not only are there performance improvements, but power consumption comes down massively, which will be a huge help for LPDDR6-PIM-powered devices of the future.

Meta is shifting into the warm arms of nuclear power for its AI training, with the company posting a new blog on its sustainability website saying that "we believe nuclear energy will play a pivotal role in the transition to a cleaner, more reliable, and diversified electric grid".

In the new post, Meta announces that it is going to release a request for proposals (RFP) to find nuclear energy developers to help them on their nuclear-powered journey. Meta aims to add 1-4 GW of new nuclear eneration capacity in the United States to be delivered "starting in the early 2030s".

Meta explains: "We are looking to identify developers that can help accelerate the availability of new nuclear generators and create sufficient scale to achieve material cost reductions by deploying multiple units, both to provide for Meta's future energy needs and to advance broader industry decarbonization. We believe working with partners who will ultimately permit, design, engineer, finance, construct, and operate these power plants will ensure the long-term thinking necessary to accelerate nuclear technology".

Ubisoft is making more deep cuts to reduce spending, this time leading to layoffs of over 200 people.

Yesterday, Ubisoft announced it was sunsetting its failed first-person shooter XDefiant. The game is effectively locked off from access, and will be taken offline in June 2025. The decision was a simple one to make: XDefiant wasn't profitable, and showed no signs of becoming profitable as soon as Ubisoft would've hoped. Rather than keep paying for upkeep, maintenance, and further content production, Ubisoft decided to freeze XDefiant and essentially start winding it down.

The game cancellation wasn't the only bad news from yesterday's announcement. Ubisoft is also closing down two studios in this cost-cutting pass. Production groups in San Francisco, USA and Osaka, Japan have been closed and the layoffs are expected to affect around 277, Game File's Stephen Totilo reports.

A former Apple employee has sued the company over alleged labor violations that accuse Apple of suppressing employee speech, and invading employee privacy via conducting surveilling on employees through personal iCloud accounts.

According to a new report from Semafor, the new lawsuit that was filed last Sunday in a California state court names the former Apple employee Amar Bhakta, who worked at Apple since 2020. According to Bhakta's suit, Apple used its internal policies to harm its employment prospects by preventing Apple employees from adequately describing their jobs, accomplishments while at Apple, and professional growth on job-search-based websites such as LinkedIn. Bhakta claims these policies surrounding job discussion have hindered his chances of future job prospects.

Additionally, the lawsuit alleges the Apple devices Apple employees are required to use "collect and use the valuable personal data" of employees during non-work periods. More specifically, the lawsuit states Apple employees have to agree to physical, video, and electronic surveillance by Apple and that Apple is within its rights to search any Apple or non-Apple device while an employee is on company premises. According to Bhakta's lawsuit, Apple employees are subject to "Apple's all-seeing eye" while both at work and at home.

Recently, Blizzard launched Warcraft I: Remastered and Warcraft II: Remastered, which updates the visuals of these iconic real-time strategy games alongside other improvements as part of the Warcraft franchise's 30th anniversary celebrations. With that, the original versions of these games are being delisted from services like GOG.

GOG, a division of CD Projekt Red, is committed to game preservation and ensuring classic games are not only available to purchase but also run on modern hardware. For Warcraft I and Warcraft II, the team at GOG enhanced these titles with multiplayer LAN support and improved graphics features like antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.

At Blizzard's request, both titles will be delisted from GOG on December 13. However, they will live on thanks to the GOG Preservation Program. If you want to pick these DRM-free versions, you can do so with the 'MakeWarcraftLiveForever' discount code.

Tesla CEO has lost his bid to get a $56 billion pay package reinstated, according to a recent ruling by a Delaware judge who upheld the original ruling in January, which denied the pay package.

The ruling came on Monday when Tesla CEO lost his bid to have his 2018 CEO pay package reinstated, which is estimated to be worth approximately $56 billion, making it the largest compensation package of any executive of a publicly traded company. Musk rebukes the ruling by the Delaware judge, writing on X, formerly Twitter, that he plans to appeal the ruling, which he describes as "absolute corruption".

Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick voided the push for the pay package back in January, citing Musk's control over Tesla at the time that enabled him to curate the pay package as he saw fit, and through a process that McCormick stated was "deeply flawed." Following these decisions, Tesla conducted a shareholder vote on the pay package in June, and the results were used by Musk's lawyers to try and convince McCormick to overturn her decision. However, it didn't work. McCormick said, "Even if a stockholder vote could have a ratifying effect, it could not do so here."

A team of researchers has had their interest peak at the sight of mysterious "dark ovals" appearing on the surface of Jupiter, and given the size of Jupiter, these ovals are approximately the size of Earth.

A new paper published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy details a NASA-supported group of researchers analyzing the disturbances on Jupiter's upper atmosphere. These "dark ovals" appear near Jupiter's poles, and according to the researchers, they may be an indication of the processes within Jupiter's strong magnetic field, specifically a disturbance in Jupiter's ionosphere.

The team looked at images of Jupiter snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2015 and 2022 and found the different atmospheric layers and the magnetic tornadoes that erupt within them are possibly causing these dark ovals to appear. The team explained that research such as this enables astronomers and scientists to further develop a more complete understanding of Jupiter and all-encompassing planetary processes.

Elon Musk has seized his opportunity to prevent OpenAI from converting into a for-profit company, with the Tesla CEO filing for an injunction against OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO has long been after OpenAI since the non-profit took an investment of $13 billion from Microsoft, claiming the company Musk originally helped create as a counterweight to Google, and the rapid development of artificial intelligence has now strayed away from its original non-profit mission of bringing transparency to artificial intelligence. Now, Musk has filed an injunction that will be heard in early January next year at the United States District Court, Northern District of California.

The injunction requests that OpenAI be prevented from performing activities such as investing in OpenAI's competitors - even xAI, Elon Musk's own AI company, utilizing "wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information" through OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft, its conversion from a non-profit company into a for-profit company, and the transferring of any OpenAI assets to competitors, subsidiaries, or affiliates. Musk has also claimed in previous complaints that OpenAI swindled him out of $44 million by preying on "well-known concerns about the existential harms" of AI.

Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11 as the cut-off date for Windows 10 support slowly approaches.

The Redmond-based company has been pushing Windows 10 customers via various in-operating-system advertisements to upgrade to Windows 11, as support for the world's most popular operating system will end on October 25, 2025. Following the severance date, Windows 10 machines will no longer receive security updates, resulting in affected machines becoming exponentially more susceptible to security breaches or hacking. Notably, Windows 10 is still by quite a margin the most-used operating system in the world, with it holding a 61.8% market share versus Windows 11's 34.9% market share.

What's interesting is Windows 11 went from 35.6% in October to 34.9% in November, meaning it lost millions of users. As for Windows 10, the older generation operating system managed to grow its market share by just under 1%. It should be noted that these figures aren't official from Microsoft, as Redmond doesn't make those kinds of statistics public. However, Statcounter calculates its results with data from more than five billion page views across 1.5 million global sites, making it quite a reliable indicator for market share.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has departed the company ahead of what was meant to be a four-year stint as CEO, and seemingly at the same time as Intel announcing its new "Battlemage" GPU.

Intel has announced via a new press release that company CEO Pat Gelsinger will be departing the chipmaker as both a CEO and board member. Gelsinger's departure from the company came into effect on December 1, 2024. According to industry analyst Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, who theorized, Intel's board of directors "made a decision or overruled a decision that Gelsinger thought was a bad one and he was out." Adding, "Something happened in the last week."

The departure of Gelsinger comes at a tumultuous time for Intel, as the company is still recovering from numerous missteps over the past few years. 13th and 14th generation CPU failures and the lack of disclosure regarding the issue to its customers broke consumer trust. Additionally, Intel largely missed the massive AI boat which is now being absolutely dominated by NVIDIA. All of these mistakes and others resulted in Intel letting go of 15% of its employees, or 15,000 staff members.

MSI has officially launched its second-generation PC gaming handhelds, the new MSI Claw 8 AI+ and MSI Claw 7 AI+ (a refresh of the first-gen Claw 7 with the latest Intel Lunar Lake APU). MSI is touting outstanding gaming performance and efficiency, and the flagship Claw 8's look is inspired by 'wind-sculpted desert rocks.'

The MSI Claw 7 AI+ sports an all-black design with the same overall shape and button layout. The naming refers to the screen sizes of each mode, with the MSI Claw 8 AI+ sporting an 8-inch 1080p 120 Hz VRR IPS display and the MSI Claw 7 AI+ featuring a 7-inch 1080p 120 Hz VRR IPS display.

The big difference between these and other PC gaming handhelds running Windows 11 is that both Claw devices are powered by the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with integrated Arc 'Battlemage' graphics. MSI says you're looking at 20% more performance than the competition, which we assume is the ROG Ally X from ASUS. Both also feature 32GB of memory, which is impressive.

NVIDIA's next-generation Rubin AI GPU architecture release rumored to be pulled up by 6 months, TSMC 3nm process expected, with ultra-fast next-gen HBM4 memory.

The new Rubin AI GPU architecture is the successor to the Blackwell GPU architecture, which is being used in the current fleet of B200 and GB200 chips, as well as the future GB300 series AI GPU that we're hearing more and more about lately. In a new report from UDN, we're hearing that NVIDIA is already working with supply chain partners in Taiwan on the Rubin AI GPU architecture and its new R100-powered AI servers.

Rubin was originally scheduled for 2026, but sources of UDN say that the company has launched the development of Rubin early, so that the AI boom can continue from one AI GPU chip to another (Blackwell to Rubin, and so on).

Bethesda and Machine Games have released the PC hardware specs and requirements for the highly anticipated Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is set to launch on December 9. If you plan on picking this up or jumping in via PC Game Pass, fair warning: you'll need a pretty powerful PC to don the iconic fedora of one of cinema's greatest heroes.

On PC, the game will feature a 'Full Ray Tracing Mode' (which looks to be arriving in a post-launch update), ala Alan Wake II, Black Myth: Wukonh, Cyberpunk 2077, and NVIDIA's own Portal with RTX. According to the PC specs for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, you'll need a GeForce RTX 4090 with DLSS 3 and Frame Generation enabled to enjoy the game's 'Full Ray Tracing' or path tracing mode at 4K 60 FPS.

But what about no ray tracing? You're still looking at a game that will be very demanding. The recommended GPU for 1440p 60 FPS without RT is a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or a Radeon RX 7700 XT. To play the game at 1080p with 'Low' settings, you'll need a GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER.

NVIDIA is moving into the automotive market in 2025, with the AI and GPU giant reportedly working with high-end Chinese EV companies to use its new Drive Thor chip.

In a new report from the Commercial Times and picked up by TrendForce, we're learning that NVIDIA's new Drive Thor chip will be used by high-end smart EV brands including BYD, SAIC Motors, Li Auto, and more. These companies plan to fully transition to NVIDIA's new Thor platform by the end of 2025, or by early 2026.

NVIDIA's new Thor platform is reportedly available in 5 versions depending on how much computing power the EV companies need, with the GPU side handled by the Blackwell architecture, boosting TOPS performance over the current Orin platform.

MSI has confirmed its upcoming MPG 322URX 4K 240Hz QD-OLED gaming monitor supports the DisplayPort 2.1a UHBR20 standard, offering full DP bandwidth.

The new 32-inch 4K 240Hz QD-OLED gaming monitor won't be a huge upgrade over the 2024 model, but the MPG 322URX will feature DisplayPort 2.1a with the full UHBRR20 mode, offering a huge 80Gbps of bandwidth. We've seen multiple DisplayPort 2.1 monitors, but they were either rUHBR10 or UHBR13.5.

MSI's new MPG 322URX QD-OLED gaming monitor also features higher Power Delivery through USB-C, with up to 98W of power (up from 90W). This means the monitor will be able to handle devices with more power being drawn over the USB-C connector, including smartphones, laptops, and more.

Ubisoft has officially sunset XDefiant, a new free-to-play shooter that failed to meet internal expectations.

The reports were right: Ubisoft's FPS XDefiant was indeed struggling, and Ubisoft has ultimately made the decision to pull the plug on the game. The game is now in its winding down phase. XDefiant is no longer available to download, and gamers can't make new user registrations or purchase items. The servers will remain online until June 2025, though, which essentially transforms the game into a big private beta.

"Thank you for your incredible support and dedication to XDEFIANT. We regret to inform you that we are initiating the sunset process starting today, December 3, 2024.