Latest News - Page 559

In early March, a man from Naples, Florida, took to X to report an object crashed through the roof of his house, splintering through two floors and almost hitting his son, who was home at the time of impact.

An investigation was launched into the object, and it was later confirmed to be a piece of space debris that had been jettisoned from the International Space Station (ISS). The homeowner is Alejandro Otero, and on March 8, the two-pound object smashed through his roof. The object was recovered, and NASA launched an investigation into its origins, eventually tracing it back to old batteries being launched from the ISS into an uncontrolled orbit on March 11, 2021 - three years ago.

The object was taken to NASA's Kennedy Space, where it was confirmed to be a piece of the EP-9 support equipment that was used to mount batteries, as shown above. At the time, NASA expected the debris to "harmlessly" burn up in Earth's atmosphere as it made its reentry, with it beginning as more than 2.6 metric tons, or 5,800-pound refrigerator-sized pallet, and eventuating into what was discovered in Otero's living room.

It was only a few weeks ago that NVIDIA passed Apple in being the most valuable publicly traded company, and then a week later, NVIDIA received a staggering $3.3 trillion market valuation, making it the most-valuable publicly traded company in the world.

After reaching the top of the company valuation food chain, the green team decided to dilute its shares, bringing its price per share down to $150. However, as the market opened on Monday, NVIDIA's share price took a downward turn, dropping to $118.11 per share and marking the third consecutive day of reducing prices.

Since its peak, NVIDIA's share price has dropped 13%, which is also being felt across many other technology companies that are involved in the mass development of AI-powered products and services. For example, Super Micro Computer, which sells servers outfitted with NVIDIA's AI GPUs, dropped 8.7%, and Dell, which also competes in the same market, fell 5.2%. Furthermore, chip designer Arm dropped 5.8%, and semiconductor giants Qualcomm and Broadcom fell 5.5 and 3.7%, respectively.

The company behind the immensely popular AI-powered tool ChatGPT has announced it's acquiring a startup company called Multi.

The latest acquisition by OpenAI could be a clue to what features its AI systems will be adopting in the future. What makes Multi so special? According to a statement on the company's blog, Multi is a company that works on advanced screensharing and collaboration tools, which are specifically designed for software engineers. The tool enables screensharing with up to 10 people, and shared cursors.

While this tool may seem useful for a very niche number of people, combining the technology with the power of OpenAI's systems could provide a new way for humans to interact with desktop PCs. Multi's goal, as outlined in its blog post, was to make desktop PCs "inherently multiplayer", and set out to achieve this by asking themselves "how we should work with computers. Not on or using computers, but truly with computers."

A team of scientists created a new gene-editing tool that they claim is more accurate than the industry standard, CRISPR.

Researchers from the University of Sydney, Australia, developed what is called SeekRNA, a new gene-editing tool that uses a programmable ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand capable of identifying and inserting itself into specific sites in genetic sequences. The team behind the project is being led by Dr. Sandro Ataide in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, and their findings have already been published in Nature Communications.

The team explained that while CRISPR is the industry standard when it comes to genetic engineering, having revolutionized multiple industries such as medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology, it doesn't come without any problems. According to Dr. Ataide, SeekRNA differentiates itself from CRISPR in various ways, such as by not requiring any extra components to be cut and pasted into genetic sequences. SeekRNA is a stand-alone cut-and-paste tool that has higher accuracy.

Jefferies analysts are happy right now. In a new note released on Monday, they raised their price target for NVIDIA shares from $135 to $150.

The analysts just enjoyed a recent Asia trip and upcoming meetings with "key players" in the AI space. In its most recent note, Jefferies analysts said that while NVIDIA and Broadcom are big winners, there are "growing concerns" regarding AMD and Marvell, noting that it's "too early to call any losers for 2025".

The analysts at Jefferies calls NVIDIA "both king and kingmaker" within the AI ecosystem, and that their upcoming "AI Bus Tour" will see the analyst firm get some great insights from industry leaders, including management from AI kingmaker NVIDIA.

Apple is reportedly gearing up to establish a new data center in Taiwan, and negotiations with third-party manufacturers are underway.

Apple would join US technology giants Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA with Taiwan-based datacenters after a "new wave of AI server purchasing momentum" is occurring, and a rush to buy "green electricity" reports UDN.

The outlet reports that the industry is optimistic about Foxconn and its long-term collaboration with Apple -- Foxconn is a contract manufacturer that makes the iPhone and other products for Apple -- and is now the world's largest AI server foundry. Once Apple's new data center lands in Taiwan, Foxconn will benefit "the most," reports UDN, as the "best ally and landlord". Meanwhile, Quanta, Wistron, and Inventec are "also expected to enjoy good fortune".

LG Display has just announced it has started mass production of the industry's first 13-inch Tandem OLED panel for laptops, which will debut inside of Dell's new XPS 13 2024 laptop.

The company is targeting the OLED market with the higher performance and lower power consumption of Tandem OLED technology, first commercialized by LG Display in 2019; Tandem OLED's advantages are achieved by combining two stacks of RGB OLEDs.

Working together in tandem -- get it, Tandem OLED -- these layers offer superior durability and performance when compared to single-layer OLED panels, as well as boasting longer life spans and even higher peak brightness. Tamdem OLEDs first appeared in automotive OLEDs that have "particularly high quality standards" said LG Display, to disperse energy and allow them to operate more reliably over longer periods of time.

Uhh... so the United States Federal Reserve has been hacked, with a new post on a Dark Web leak site associated with ransomware group LockBit, holding 33TB of incredibly confidential financial data from the Fed.

On June 23, 2024 at 8:27 UTC, LockBit announced it had hacked into the systems of the Federal Reserve, with 33TB of sensitive banking information taken. The data includes confidential details of American banking activities, which if veritified, would make this one of the largest breaches of financial data in history.

The post reads: "Federal banking is the term of a way the Federal Reserve of the United States distributes its money. The Reserve operates twelve banking districts around the country which oversee money distribution within their respective districts. The twelve cities which are home to the Reserve Banks are Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Richmond, Atlanta, Dallas, Saint Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and San Francisco".

Julian Assange is finally free, released from Belmarsh maximum security prison today after 1901 days under 23-hour isolation. The news was announced on the official Wikileaks account on X:

Assange was granted bail by the High Court in London, released to the Stansted airport in the afternoon, and was aboard a plane back to his home country, Australia. Wikileaks says that this is a result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations.

Wikileaks adds that this created space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, "leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalized," and that they will "provide more information as soon as possible".

Intel is gearing up for the launch of its new Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" and Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" processors for laptops and desktops, respectively.

In a new report from Benchlife, we've got the launch date plans from Intel for its Core Ultra 200 series CPUs on both Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake. Lunar Lake is very special here: it features an entirely new CPU and GPU architecture, with on-package memory that will take the fight (and most easily beat) to Qualcomm and its new Snapdragon X series processors.

Benchlife suggests that we'll see Intel launch its new Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors between September 17-24, while the Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake-S" platform will drop a month later in October. In between all of this, we've got AMD launching its new Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APUs and Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" CPUs in July, and then X870 and B650 motherboards from AMD sometime in Q3 2024.

Windows 11's Phone Link app has been worked on quite extensively by Microsoft of late, so it's clear the company wants to tie Android smartphones (and iOS devices) more tightly into its desktop OS - and another useful feature just popped up in this regard.

Phone Link recently got the ability to swiftly pipe photos from your smartphone across to your Windows 11 desktop, and the new trick is the ability to copy text from those photos.

The 'Scan Text' option in the Phone Link app is OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capable of detecting characters in an image, and copying them out for you. Windows Latest spotted that this functionality has now rolled out to all Windows 11 (and Windows 10 users), where previously it was in testing.

Apple has internally greenlit a plan to reduce the total number of workers on the assembly line of the iPhone by implementing automation.

According to a new report from The Information, Apple has ordered managers to reduce the headcount of workers on the assembly line for the iPhone, particularly the final assembly lines. Apple reportedly told managers that it wants the final assembly line headcount reduced by as much as 50% over the next few years and that supply chain and automation projects Apple previously ruled out due to high up-front costs have now been greenlit.

This move by Apple has fallen in line with its overall downward trend in the total number of monitored employees at Apple's manufacturing partners, with figures falling from 1.6 million in 2022 to 1.4 million in 2024. Furthermore, the report states these orders have come from Sabih Khan, Apple's senior vice president of operations, along with Peter Thompson, an operations vice president at Apple. At the moment it remains unclear how many jobs will be lost to this automation.

Intel announced its new Gaudi 3 AI accelerator earlier this year, rocking up to 128GB of HBM2e memory with up to 3.7TB/sec of memory bandwidth... but how does it stack up against NVIDIA's dominant Hopper H100 80GB AI GPU?

Well, that comes down to cost -- Intel's new Gaudi 3 AI accelerator costs just $16,000 per AI accelerator with 128GB of HBM2e memory, compared to $30,000+ for NVIDIA's Hopper H100 AI GPU with 80GB of faster HBM3 memory. Intel is charging around $65,000 per 8 x Gaudi 2 accelerators on a baseboard, and $128,000 per 8 x Gaudi 3 AI accelerators on a baseboard.

This means that a single Gaudi 2 AI accelerator costs around $8125, while Gaudi 3 costs $15,650, when purchased in bulk, with the baseboards, of course.

NVIDIA's new GB200 Superchip is getting another supplier according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, reporting that Alpha and Omega Semiconductor Ltd (AOSL) is to join the GB200 AI server train.

In a new post on Kuo's own Medium blog and a post on X, the analyst said: "Alpha and Omega Semiconductor Ltd (AOSL) is poised to become a new GB200 supplier and one of the leading beneficiaries of NVIDIA's certification process change".

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said recently that the company will be releasing new versions of its flagship AI chips annually, and while this will absolutely enhance NVIDIA's competitiveness, it introduces other issues. Execution, acceleration of supplier certification processes, as well as accelerating system development.

A team of scientists have penned a new article in Nature Reviews Materials outlining the challenges of creating an edible robot, and it appears we aren't necessarily too far away at all.

Technology developments move in leaps and bounds, making it very hard to predict what the next big thing will be that is mass-adopted. Edible robots may not be at the top of everyone's prediction list, but they could be for some doctors who are looking to give extremely precise care to a patient through accurate assessment of areas of the body or performing internal general tests.

An edible robot isn't completely out of the question, and RoboFood researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) explored the idea in a new report that says it doesn't have all the necessary parts for an edible robot, but some main components have been crossed off the list. For example, the team created a working battery out of food items, which could be used to power an edible robot.

Apple has already teased us with its new TSMC-made M4 chip with its addition to the company's iPad Pro line-up, but when is the new chip coming to Apple's Mac family?

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple will be implementing its new M4 chip into its entire Mac family, from its most affordable Macbook Air all the way up to its most expensive Mac Studio. This move will be a first-of-its-kind for Apple, as Gurman writes iMacs, MacBook Pros (both high/low-end), along with Mac Minis (both high/low-end) will be arriving with different variations of the M4 chip.

As for Apple's laptops, the new MacBook Airs will be coming in the Spring of 2025, and the Mac Pro and Mac Studio M4-powered models will be coming in the second half of next year. Since Apple's entire Mac family line-up will be adopting its new M4 chip we can expect to see different variations such as the M4 Pro, M4 Max, and eventually the M4 Ultra.

Intel hasn't said much about its new Arrow Lake CPUs, but now some log files have revealed some key details about what we can expect performance-wise.

X user @InstLatX64 shared some log files that revealed three new chips: Arrow Lake-S 24-core, Arrow Lake-HX 24-core, and Arrow Lake-H 16-core. The log files reveal that the Arrow Lake-S 24-core and 24-thread chip has a base clock speed of 3.6 GHz, which, if proven to be true, would mean a 600 MHz increase compared to the previous desktop flagship CPU, the Raptor Lake Core i9-14900K.

Also featuring a significant clock speed improvement is the Arrow Lake-HX 24 core and 24 thread chip with a 3.0 GHz, an 800 MHz increase compared to the Core i9-14900HX, the previous gen HX flagship. However, that isn't the biggest increase with these new Arrow Lake CPUs, as the Arrow Lake-H SKU, a 16-core and 16-thread CPU whose base clock is 1200 MHz faster than the previous gen Core Ultra 9 185H.

NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is tasked with the agency's ongoing mission of finding, tracking, and defending Earth from asteroids and comets, has published a report that found NASA doesn't currently have the infrastructure in place to defend Earth from an asteroid impact adequately.

The report explains an internal exercise conducted by NASA on a proposed scenario for an asteroid impact. The proposed scenario was as follows: 72% chance of an asteroid impact in 14 years on July 12, 2038, and requirements for preventing its impact are unknown. The asteroid is between 196 and 2624 feet in diameter but is more likely to be between 328 and 1049 feet.

There is a 45% chance its impact will affect no one, a 47% chance more than 1,000 people will be affected, a 28% chance of 100,000, an 8% chance of more than 1 million people, and a 0.04% chance 10 million will be affected. The impact area was across multiple populated regions such as Mexico, the United States, Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

TSMC and contract chip design partner Global Unichip have won the bulk orders for base dies used with SK hynix's next-generation HBM4 memory chips.

In a new report from UDN, we're learning that after being the exclusive OEM for AI chips for technology giants like NVIDIA and AMD, TSMC is seizing another AI business opportunity. UDN reports that TSMC will collaborate with its special application IC (ASIC) design service factory Creative, now successfully developing the HBM key peripheral components required for AI servers, jointly inking a "large order" for base dies required for next-gen HBM4 memory.

UDN's report says that TSMC and Creative have "never commented on order developments," but the legal source of the site said that demand for AI is strong, and not just HPC-related chips, but HBM demand is "growing rapidly" and is "becoming a new business opportunity in the market" which has three major memory chip companies including SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron, investing as much as they can into their respective HBM supply chains.

FIFA is the governing body behind the world's most popular sport, football (or soccer for those of us in the United States or Australia). For many years, it has supported the rise of esports, though, for the most part, it has been via traditional soccer games like the former EA FIFA series.

If you're a fan of competitive gaming on PC or console, then no doubt you're aware of Rocket League, the vastly popular soccer-like game where you control cars trying to push and hit a giant ball and score goals.

With a new announcement on its social media channels, FIFA announced that the first FIFAe World Cup featuring Rocket League is coming later this year. Much like the real-world Word Cup, teams representing various countries will go head to head in a tournament.