Latest News - Page 505

NVIDIA's marketing department has made an interesting move by introducing a new case badge for its GeForce RTX range of GPUs which specifically mentions AI usage.

Tech Powerup noticed the new official badge - that'll be slapped on laptops packing GeForce graphics cards, and maybe even some prebuilt desktop PCs - which has a new tagline of 'powering advanced AI.'

As the site notes, this is fair enough, as AI is a major piece of the GeForce puzzle these days, and RTX products have built-in AI acceleration (sporting tensor cores).

Batman Arkham developer Rocksteady is downsizing its quality assurance teams as it faces the "unfortunate reality" of lower-than-expected game sales.

After a string of hits with the wildly successful Batman Arkham series, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a big miss for Rocksteady. The game failed to meet sales expectations, and also did not monetize as well as WB Games would have liked. All-told, WB lost around $200 million on Suicide Squad. The game's soft underperformance led to a -66% reduction in game revenues for WB's Q2'24 period, but of course this is compared to the meteoric sales of Hogwarts Legacy from a year prior.

Even still, there's no denying that Warner Bros. Discovery is not happy with Rocksteady's latest game. In a call to investors, WBD exec JP Parrette said: "In the short period of 12 months, we went from having the record year that we had in 2023 with Hogwarts Legacy, to unfortunately having the opposite side of that spectrum with Suicide Squad."

Update - Meta has provided the following statement in response to the 404 Media report, "Meta does not use your phone's microphone for ads and we've been public about this for years. We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data" - More information here.

Have you ever been talking about something with someone and then picked up your phone and saw whatever it was you were talking about as an advertisement?

Sometimes, the timing of tailored advertisements on social media platforms, particularly Meta-operated platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, can be incredibly jarring, especially if there is only a matter of seconds between the conversation ending about that product and then it suddenly appears in the middle of your feed. The consistency of this has begged the question for some time - "Do social media companies use the microphone in your smartphone to listen to conversations that are then used to feed tailor advertisements?"

Telegram is facing a tumultuous future following the arrest of the company's CEO and founder, Pavel Durov, who was taken into custody by French authorities for the alleged distribution of child sexual abuse material, facilitation of drug trafficking, and more.

If you are a Telegram user it's possible the app is facing significant headwind, with Durov's allegations claiming the CEO was complicit in aforementioned points, and also facilitated organised fraud and various other illegal transactions. Why does this put Telegram in between a rock and a hard place? Telegram's brand is an anti-moderation, anti-regulation, anti-government messaging service that prioritizes security and any inference from a governing body.

Durov's personal story is part of that brand, which includes the Telegram founder creating the popular messaging app as a retaliation to facing pressure from Russian authorities to hand over personal data from what he also created, VKontakte, Russia's largest social media platform at the time. Durov fled Russia and launched Telegram, which now has more than 950 million active users globally on a monthly basis.

A company attending the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week has used humans in robot costumes to showcase humanoid robotics.

Last week, social media platforms received an influx of exceedingly impressive humanoid robots as the World Robot Conference took place in Beijing, which is essentially a gathering of robotics companies to display the projects they are working on and network with each other. However, some people are being fooled by a select number of videos claiming the subjects in the video are humanoid robots, but they are just humans cosplaying as humanoid robots.

At first many thought the technology in developing humanoid robots had reached a lifelike level, but then an image of one of the female humanoid robots having lunch. The company behind the two cosplayers reportedly is Ex-Robots, and the reasoning behind the presence of the women is currently unknown.

Apple is closing in on the reveal of the iPhone 16 line-up, and rumors indicate that the company will showcase its new Mac Mini powered by an M4 chip the following month.

The upcoming Apple event is scheduled for September 9, and is expected to also feature reveals for the Apple Watch Series 10 and AirPods Pro 3. But in October, according to the latest Power On newsletter by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's upcoming M4 Mac Mini will be unveiled and it will drop all USB-A ports in favor of USB-C ports. It was only last week that Gurman teased the upcoming Mac Mini was going to have at least three USB-C ports on its rear.

This week, the Bloomberg reporter has confirmed it will feature three USB-C ports on the back and two on the front, for a total of five USB-C ports. In addition to the USB-C ports, the new Mac Mini will also feature a HDMI and Ethernet port. Previous specification expectations of the coming Mac Mini include an estimated height of 1.4 inches, the M4 chip being 50% faster than the M2, a 10-core GPU, Dynamic Caching, and hardware ray-tracing. The new Mac Mini was described as "essentially an iPad Pro in a small box".

Free performance boosts via updates are always welcomed by gamers just like discounts on hardware that powers those games, and now AMD's latest Ryzen 9000 series CPUs have been hit with price reductions.

AMD released its Ryzen 9000 series Zen 5 desktop CPUs on August 8 and August 15, meaning they haven't even been out an entire month, and we are already seeing price reductions. Reports indicate that prices have been cut by up to 12% on some select CPUs, which is particularly good for those who weren't entirely sold on the new generation of CPUs from AMD and were slightly hesitant to make that upgrade from likely a CPU that's several generations older.

As for more performance for your dollar, Ryzen CPUs are seemingly getting significant performance boosts from new Windows 11 updates. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X has been discounted by nearly $30 at Microcenter, with the Ryzen 9900X being discounted by a much grander 12%, or $60 by reducing the price from $499.99 to $439.99. As for the Ryzen 7 9700X Microcenter is listing it $349.99 from its original $359.99, a saving of $10.

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) phoned home to report a mysterious sound coming from Boeing's Starliner capsule.

NASA astronaut Barry (Butch) Wilmore contacted NASA's ground crew on Saturday, informing them of a strange sound that was presumably coming from the Boeing's Starliner, which NASA recently deemed too dangerous to ferry the NASA astronauts it transported to the ISS back in June. Starliner arrived at the ISS in June with some leaks, which later turned into even more leaks and then the eventual ruling out by NASA as the designated method of transportation back to the surface of Earth.

Most importantly, the two astronauts initially intended to stay aboard the ISS for a week, but their stay will now span more than 200 days. Wilmore informed NASA that it was hearing a repeated sound that was described by a member of NASA's ground team as "almost like a sonar ping." Given the location of space, the mysterious sound has a somewhat automatic ominous nature, but unfortunately, the explanation will more likely than not be disappointingly ordinary.

NVIDIA might have its new Blackwell AI GPU architecture slowly coming out, but its Hopper H100 and new H200 AI GPUs are continuing to get even stronger with new optimizations in the CUDA stack.

The H200 and H100 AI GPUs offer leading performance across every single text compared to the competition, including the latest benchmarks like the 56 billion parameter "Mixtral 8x7B" LLM.

NVIDIA's monster HGX H200 packing 8 x Hopper H200 GPUs and NVSwitch has some strong performance gains in Llama 2 70B, with a token generation speed of 34,864 (offline) and 32,790 (server) with a 1000W and 31,303 (offline) and 30,128 (server) in the 700W config.

OpenAI is rumored to have its first in-house AI chip made by TSMC on its new angstrom process (A16) production lines, according to the latest rumors.

UDN is reporting that OpenAI's first self-developed AI chip will be made by TSMC on its A16 process node, with its new AI chips said to power OpenAI's text-to-video service: Sora. OpenAI's new Sora text-to-video service will be a "major selling point" of Apple's AI in the future, reports UDN.

The big boost of OpenAI's new in-house AI chip will "boost" Apple's efforts to attack the AI market, and to stimulate the development of related networking and high-speed transmission industries. The legal person who spoke with UDN said that Sora has stimulated a surge in demand for data transmission speeds, and that silicon photonics and high-speed optical modules can increase those data transmission speeds.

Great, so now people have to be careful when purchasing AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processors with a new scam exposed by Der8auer. The scammers are selling 7800X3D CPUs with fake heatspreaders, and empty PCBs... check it out:

Overclocking legend "Der8auer" purchased an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor from an enthusiast, who had fallen victim to the scam. The processor was sold on the second-hand market in Romania, through a platform called OLX. OLX doesn't allow people to return items purchased from individuals, but there are protections in place that let customers counter-claim if the product delivered is fraudulent, making sure that the scammer doesn't receive their money.

VideoCardz notes that some buyers will try and save money, negotiating a deal directly with the seller outside of OLX, but that removes any protection to the consumer. This consumer purchased a second-hand AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor that turned out to be fake.

Although not directly mentioned in the release notes, Microsoft's new 'intelligent media search' for Windows 11 is referenced in the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27695 (Canary Channel). What does it do? Well, once confirmation is given, media files on your device will be scanned and scraped (and transcribed with AI) and then indexed for spoken word search.

In some ways, Microsoft's new 'Intelligent media search' for Windows 11 is reminiscent of the controversial Recall feature that was quietly put on hold before the launch of Microsoft's new Copilot+ AI PCs. Recall was a system that would have your PC take screenshots of everything you do and then use an AI model to index and make your PC history searchable.

This sounds much more practical, especially if you can set and select which audio and video files to scrape, scan, and transcribe with AI. For those who record meetings or work with video used as a reference, it sounds like a great addition to Windows 11 and a great use of local AI. Searching a long video for specific words or topics sounds extremely useful.

Diablo 4's first major expansion, Vessel of Hated, arrives in October, adding a new class (the Spiritborn), zone, raid-like dungeons, and story campaign. The expansion is also coming with Diablo 4's massive 2.0 update for Season 6, which Blizzard has outlined in an extended two-plus hour Campfire Chat.

A lot is coming, with the overall sentiment among the community being that Blizzard is leaning into what makes Diablo 4 fun to play while incorporating and expanding on Diablo 3 and Diablo 2 elements. One of the most prominent examples of Blizzard taking aspects from Diablo 3 and Diablo 2 is how this 2.0 update changes how sockets work.

Runewords for Diablo 2 are finally returning to the franchise, while Diablo 4's Glyph system is changing to be more like Diablo 3 Legendary Gems. With new difficulty tiers, max level and Paragon changes, and more, here's a summary of all the fundamental changes coming with Diablo 4's 2.0 overhaul.

Last year, we reported on one of the most iconic releases from the Nintendo 64 era, Perfect Dark, receiving a PC port. With support for keyboard and mouse controls, 4K resolution, and the option to improve texture quality and other features, it was similar to the 'native' PC versions of Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

This was possible by decompiling the code from the original games to the more PC-friendly 'C' language. The result is that these games can be run without emulation, with greater support for modern hardware and displays. And now, another classic game from the Nintendo 64 era has been decompiled: the fan-favorite Banjo Kazooie.

Released in 1997, Banjo Kazooie from Rare is a 3D platformer similar to Super Mario 64 set in a stylized and comedic fairy tale world. Many view the game as one of the N64's best, and with its code successfully decompiled, it's only a matter of time before a full PC port arrives.

AMD is reportedly going to position its Radeon RX 8000 series "RDNA 4" family of graphics cards like it did with the first-gen Radeon RX 5000 series "RDNA" graphics cards.

In a new post from leaker Golden Pig Upgrade, who explained: "the positioning of RDNA 4 is similar to that of RDNA 1, so don't expect flagship-level performance. The focus is on reducing costs. If Navi 44 can improve the performance of mid-range GPUs, that would be a good thing. Otherwise, it could become common for NVIDIA to sell the AD107 as the RTX 4060 in the future".

AMD launched its Navi 10 XT GPU inside of the Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card at the time, its highest-end RDNA card (that didn't compete with NVIDIA flagship GPUs at the time). We've been hearing for months now that RDNA 4 could NOT be competing in the high-end, with AMD taking the mid-range route with its upcoming Radeon RX 8000 series graphics cards.

Microsoft is finally ready to enter the custom AI hardware race, a chip market in which NVIDIA has at least a 75 percent market share. At this year's Hot Chips conference, the company unveiled its first AI accelerator, Maia 100, built on TSMC's 5nm process node.

Designed to "optimize performance and reduce costs," Maia 100's architecture includes custom server boards, racks, and software for running AI services like Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Services.

"The Maia 100 accelerator is purpose-built for a wide range of cloud-based AI workloads," Microsoft's technical blog on Maia 100 details. "The chip measures out at ~820mm2 and utilizes TSMC's N5 process with COWOS-S interposer technology. Equipped with large on-die SRAM, Maia 100's reticle-size SoC die, combined with four HBM2E die, provide a total of 1.8 terabytes per second of bandwidth and 64 gigabytes of capacity to accommodate AI-scale data handling requirements."

NVIDIA launched the 'world's first GPU' with the release of the GeForce 256 back on October 11, 1999 after announcing the card on August 31, 1999. It's now 25 years old. Wow.

NVIDIA changed the entire industry -- technology and gaming -- with the release of the GeForce 256, fast-forwarding to today and the "little-known brand" reached a milestone $3.3 trillion market cap and has been leading the charge in gaming and AI for years.

The GeForce 256 at the time introduced hardware transform and lighting (T&L) features directly into the GPU, previously these calculations were run on the CPU or required dedicated hardware (like everything did back in the 90s: sound cards, networking cards, graphic cards, MPEG2 decoder cards, and more). NVIDIA introduced the 'world's first GPU' with the GeForce 256, and the rest is history.

Intel's next-generation Panther Lake CPUs have been in the headlines a few times this year, but now we've got some new information on CPU configurations of Intel's next-gen processors.

First up, we'll be introduced to the new Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" CPUs later this month for laptops, with the desktops getting Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake" CPUs (200V = laptops, 200 = desktops) later this year. After that, is when we'll be introduced to the Core Ultra 300 series "Panther Lake" CPUs that will be unleashed in the second half of 2025.

The new information on the Panther Lake processors is coming from a Coreboot patch, detailing 4 different Panther Lake SKUs. Intel will be using its new Cougar Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores, while the Skymont E-Cores featured on Panther Lake are expected to be optimized, or possibly updated so we could see a naming change of the E-Cores before Panther Lake launches in 2H 2025.

Concord's sales on PC may be even lower than originally expected, new estimates from Game Discover Co's Simon Carless reveal.

Given the current reception around the game, it seems fair to say that Sony's new shooter Concord has failed to make a dent in the billion-dollar live service market. Metrics from SteamDB estimate that Concord has sold around 17.7K copies on the high end, meaning Concord's sales revenues could be well below $1 million on Valve's platform, which has recently set a new concurrent peak record of 37 million players.

According to estimates from other analysts, Concord's Steam sales could be even lower. Game Discover Co's market expert Simon Carless believes Concord could have sold around 10K copies on Steam, which is a maximum revenue range of $400K - $600K, depending on which version that gamers had purchased.

Intel is considering splitting its product design and manufacturing businesses, as well as factory projects potentially being scrapped, led by CEO Pat Gelsinger.

In a new report from Bloomberg, we're learning that Intel is looking at splitting its chip product business from its foundry -- chip-making -- businesses, as it attempts to navigate its most difficult time in its 56-year history. The news of splitting its businesses saw Intel shares rise 9.5% on Friday, the biggest single-day gains since October 2022.

Intel will present its various options during a board meeting this month, according to the usual "people familiar with the matter" reports Bloomberg. The site adds that no major moves are imminent and that discussions are still in the "early stages" with an Intel representative declining to comment (of course).