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Samsung is forcing all of the executives from its Samsung Group units to work 6-day weeks from as early as this week, in a shift to "emergency mode" reports the Korea Economic Daily.

The emergency mode shift is happening because of the South Korea won and its sharp depreciation, rising oil prices, and high borrowing costs are amplifying uncertainies in business, after some of Samsung's businesses delivered poorer-than-expected results last year.

A Samsung Group company executive said: "Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome it".

If you haven't seen the torrential rain flooding Dubai in the UAE, well, the country has experienced extreme flooding after the gigantic downpour on Monday. The downpour disrupted everything in Dubai, closing schools and flooding homes and businesses.

A meteorologist has warned that potential future "weather wars" will happen between countries if cloud seeding technology gets "out of hand". There have been theories of how the torrential rain in Dubai occurred -- possibly by cloud seeding or chemtrails, geoengineering technology to make it rain -- something that sees chemicals injected into clouds, sparking precipitation (rain).

This kind of technology has been around for close to 100 years, with one of the notable uses of it in the last few years being China spending millions of dollars to control the weather ahead of the Beijing Olympics back in 2016, something the country had been using the modify the weather since 2008.

Baldur's Gate 3 is not only one of 2023's most celebrated games but is widely considered one of the best RPGs ever made, an iconic release that will influence RPGs for years. Developer Larian is still hard at work on the game, with the upcoming Patch 7 set to expand and improve the branching story's "evil endings" with new cutscenes.

However, as part of a recent communityupdate on Steam, Larian confirmed that the studio is already working on its next game, and won't be Baldur's Gate 4. The studio's next two games will be moving on from the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

"After six years in the Forgotten Realms and much discussion and rumination, we've decided to seize the opportunity to develop our own IPs," Larian wrote. "We're currently working on two new projects, and we couldn't be more excited about what the future has in store." So, what does it mean for Baldur's Gate 4? Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are figuring that out.

NVIDIA has just announced optimizations across all of its platforms to accelerate Meta Llama 3, Meta's latest-generation large language model (LLM).

The new Llama 3 model combined with NVIDIA accelerated computing provides developers, researchers, and businesses with innovation across various applications. Meta engineers trained their new Llama 3 on a computing cluster featuring 24,576 NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs linked through the NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand network; with support from NVIDIA, Meta tuned its network, software, and model architectures for its flagship Llama 3 LLM.

To further advance the state-of-the-art generative AI, Meta recently described plans to scale its AI GPU infrastructure to an astonishing 350,000 NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs. That's a lot of AI computing power, a ton of silicon, probably a city's worth of power, and an incredible sum of money on AI GPUs ordered by Meta from NVIDIA.

Meta has a nice surprise today: its latest large language model (LLM), Llama 3. The company explains its new Llama 3 8B contains 8 billion parameters, while its Llama 3 70B features 70 billion parameters.

Meta promises a gigantic increase in performance over the previous Llama 2 8B and Llama 2 70B models, with the company claiming that Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B are some of the best-performing generative AI models available today, trained on two custom-built 24,000 GPU clusters.

The company trained its new Llama 3 model on over 15 trillion tokens that were all collected from "publicly available sources," and that Met'a training dataset is 7x larger than what was used for Llama 2, and that includes 4x more code.

AI startup TensorWave is one of the first with a publically deployed setup powered by AMD Instinct MI300X AI accelerators, and its CEO says they're a far better option than NVIDIA's dominant Hopper H100 AI GPU.

TensorWave started racking up AI systems powered by AMD's just-released Instinct MI300X AI accelerator, which it plans to lease the MI300X chips at a fraction of the cost of NVIDIA's Hopper H100 AI GPU. TensorWave plans to have 20,000 of AMD's new Instinct MI300X AI accelerators before the end of the year across two facilities, and has plans to have liquid-cooled systems online in 2025.

Jeff Tatarchuk said that AMD's new Instinct MI300X AI GPU in "just raw specs, the MI300X dominates H100," and he's not wrong. But that's the original H100 with 40GB and 80GB HBM3 options, while a beefed-up H200 with a much larger 141GB of ultra-fast HBM3e memory with up to 4.8TB/sec of memory bandwidth, but once Blackwell B200 is here, NVIDIA owns the AI GPU game with 192TB of HBM3e at 8TB/sec memory bandwidth for the B200 AI GPU.

Samsung has just announced that it has developed the industry's first LPDDR5X memory, supporting the industry's highest performance at up to 10.7Gbps.

The South Korean giant uses 12nm-class process technology, with Samsung achieving the smallest chip size among existing LPDDR memory, which the company says solidifies its technological leadership in the low-power DRAM market. We have all seen the insatiable demand for AI, with on-device AI being a big future for processing AI workloads on devices, which is where low-power, high-performance LPDDR memory steps in.

YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning of the Memory Business at Samsung Electronics, said: "As demand for low-power, high-performance memory increases, LPDDR DRAM is expected to expand its applications from mainly mobile to other areas that traditionally require higher performance and reliability such as PCs, accelerators, servers and automobiles. Samsung will continue to innovate and deliver optimized products for the upcoming on-device AI era through close collaboration with customers".

SK hynix has just announced it signed a memorandum of understanding with TSMC for collaboration to make next-generation HBM memory and enhance logic and HBM integration through advanced packaging technology.

The South Korean giant is working on HBM4 right now, the sixth generation in the HBM family, and is expected for mass production in 2026 with the help of TSMC. SK hynix said that working with TSMC, combining the global leader in the AI memory space with the top global logic factory in the world, will lead to "more innovations" in HBM technology.

The collaboration is expected to enable breakthroughs in memory performance through a trilateral collaboration in product design, foundry, and memory provider with the combined powers of SK hynix and TSMC. The two companies will first focus on improving the performance of the base die that is mounted at the very bottom of the HBM package.

Intel Foundry has announced that it's completed the assembly of the industry's first commercial High Numerical Aperture (High-NA) Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine.

ASML provided Intel, its first customer, with the $380 million Twinscan EXE:5000 High-NA lithography machine. Yesterday, it shipped its second High-NA EUV lithography machine to a mystery customer. Intel has now assembled its High-NA EUV lithography machine at its D1X fab in Oregon, a milestone for Intel as this prepares the company for its Intel 14A process node in 2025.

The new ASML Twinscan EXE:5000 machine will allow Intel to print features up to 1.7x smaller than what's possible with existing EUV tools, eventually letting Intel shrink down to smaller transistors than what's possible with standard Low-LA EUV machines, which will provide huge 2.9x transistor density improvement for a single exposure.

Intel's fleet of next-gen "Granite Rapids-AP" processors in the future Xeon 6 family of CPUs have leaked details, with the flagship Xeon 6 processor featuring up to 128 P-Cores and CPU clocks of up to 3.2GHz.

The information on the Granite Rapids-AP processors comes from RainNymph, a member of the Intel Insiders Community. The four SKUs that have been leaked are the Xeon 6980P, 6979P, 6972P, and 6960P, which all feature differing core counts.

It starts with 72 cores for the Xeon 6960P, 96 cores with the Xeon 6972P, 120 cores for the Xeon 6979P, and finally, 128 cores for the Xeon 6980P. All of these new Xeon 6 processors are based on the new Redwood Cove P-Core architecture, the same one found inside Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs. Intel's new Xeon 6 processors are rated at up to 500W of power, with boost clocks ranging between 2.7GHz and 3.5GHz

Microsoft isn't in a rush to disrupt its new billion-dollar publishing triumvirate--the company appears to be taking the old phrase 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' to heart.

Business consolidations can often be messy things, leading to hundreds of layoffs, product cancellations, and big interruptions. But that isn't the case with Microsoft's $70 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard King. The three-armed unit is indeed owned by Microsoft, but ABK operates as a limited-integration company--similar to ZeniMax/Bethesda, ABK has its own budgets, creates its own projects, and balances its own books.

Blizzard is apparently enjoying the transition over to Microsoft's employ. In a recent interview with VideoGamesChronicle, World of Warcraft VP Holly Longdale says that the trillion-dollar tech giant hasn't come in and starting telling everyone what to do. WoW is doing great right now, and Microsoft doesn't want to get in the way. In short, Microsoft wants Blizzard to just keep doing what it's doing--making hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter from successful live service games.

Target has confirmed plans to significantly reduce the amount of physical media that it sells on store shelves, but video games will not be impacted.

Last night, a social media post went viral that lamented the death of disc-based media at Target. "Exclusive: Target sources are telling me they reportedly will stop selling physical media in-store and online by 2025," the so-called President of Physical Media said on Twitter. It turns out this is only half true.

Target delivered a statement to IGN that clarified a few things.

On the heels of the big new Amazon Prime adaptation, Fallout games are headlining Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service.

Thanks to the new Fallout TV show, millions of people are talking about the series. People are also buying and playing the games en masse--much to Microsoft's delight. We've already seen Fallout games skyrocket on Steam and now the same thing is happening on PlayStation.

According to listings on the PlayStation 5 console, the Fallout games are among the most popular titles on PlayStation Plus in the United States. Fallout 4 headlines the top 10 list with the #1 spot, and Fallout 76 is close behind at #3.

A fresh jaw-dropping initiative for AI, this one from Microsoft, runs like this - give AI a photo of someone, and an audio clip of their voice, and it'll mock up a video clip of that person chatting away.

So, from just an image and a minute long chunk of audio of the person's voice - which is what was used to create the example videos Microsoft shares - you get these fully realized talking faces, complete with lifelike facial expressions, head and eye movements, full lip-syncing, and so on.

In short, the whole works needed for it to look like a totally realistic video of said person espousing their thoughts on any given topic, all generated in real-time by the AI.

the Apple Vision Pro has been on sale for almost three months now and while it's fair to say that the excitement has definitely started to die down somewhat, there's no denying that it is still the hottest piece of tech around right now. It launched with a ton of apps in the visionOS App Store in February but the number of actual Apple Vison Pro apps was surprisingly small - many were just iPad apps enabled to run on the headset. But more apps are coming all the time and now Microsoft has announced that it's brought one of its best to the spatial computer as well.

Microsoft OneNote is the go-to note-taking app for a ton of people, especially those who find themselves living in the Microsoft ecosystem. Its availability on the Apple Vision Pro was perhaps to be expected, but it's always surprising when Microsoft launches something on an Apple platform, whether it should be, or not. And from what we're reading in the announcement blog post, there's plenty to like about this release.

Microsoft says that Apple Vision Pro owners can make use of the OnteNote app's infinite canvas in a spatial computing environment alongside other apps like Word and Excel via multitasking. The company says that the OneNote app now means that people can stay productive no matter where they are, and there are tons of features already available with more on the way.

You don't need to have been following along with the Apple rumors too closely to have known that Apple is expected to announce a raft of new iPads as soon as next month. We've been hearing as much for weeks now, and after many false dawns, it now seems that Apple will indeed launch the updated iPad Air and iPad Pro tablets in the first couple of weeks of May. We've heard a variety of things about these new tablets and the arrival of the 12.9-inch iPad Air might actually be the most interesting. Now, a new report appears to suggest that the tablet is going to be even more interesting than we first thought.

The addition of a new 12.9-inch size to the iPad Air lineup is notable because it will give buyers a new option if they want a big tablet but won't or can't buy the iPad Pro. But according to a new report, the larger display won't be the only interesting news, with the type of display that's being used will also raise some eyebrows. If the report is accurate, the 12.9-inch iPad Air will have a mini-LED display.

That would be a first for the lineup and the 11-inch iPad Air is expected to stick to its existing LCD construction. But the new mini-LED design has been reported by Ross Young, a display supply chain analyst who is normally very well connected. He also has an extremely positive history and reputation in terms of this kind of report, so we see little reason why this information would turn out to be incorrect.

Buying an Apple Watch Ultra 2 just got cheaper in China after Apple started to allow people to buy a refurbished model via its website. Apple regularly offers refurbished products but this is the first time that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has been offered in this way outside of the United States. It now seems more likely than ever that the refurbished Apple Watch Ultra 2 will start to go on sale in other countries around the world sooner rather than later.

Buying a refurbished Apple Watch Ultra 2 will save you around 15% off the price of a new one, according to MacRumors which was the first to report on the new buying option. The refurbished products do tend to come and go in terms of stocks however, so make sure to place your order for a refurbished Apple Watch Ultra 2 if you want to be sure of getting one soon.

Apple's refurbished products have all been thoroughly checked and cleaned and come with the usual 12-month warranty and 14-day return window. They also offer people the chance to take out AppleCare+ for additional coverage while all wearables come with all of the usual accessories and are fully functional. Buying a refurbished product from Apple is definitely a batter option than buying refurbished elsewhere unless you can get a particularly good deal.

After announcing its plans to make it easier for people to watch content via AirPlay in hotel rooms during the WWDC event in June of 2023, Apple has finally started to make good on those plans. Today, the company announced that guests staying at some IHG Hotels & Resorts properties including Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Hotel Indigo, Candlewood Suites, and InterContinental Hotels & Resorts can use AirPlay like never before,

According to the press release shared via the Apple Newsroom, people can look forward to using AirPlay to privately and security stream content including TV shows, movies, and more. The press release even says that Apple Music and even Apple Arcade games can be sent to the big-screen TV in hotel rooms. On top of that, there will also be support for workouts and meditation via the Apple Fitness+ subscription, too.

The press release says that there are now more than 60IHG properties across North America that support AirPlay as of right now and that more hotels are set to be added to the list in the coming months.

The Apple TV+ streaming service continues to go from strength to strength with new TV shows, movies, and documentaries appearing seemingly every other week. Now, the streamer has announced the impending arrival of another TV show with some big names involved.

Executive produced by and starring Rashida Jones, Sunny is a TV show that Apple TV+ describes as being a mystery thriller with a darkly comic bent, which should be enough to get the attention of many people. It'll premiere globally with two episodes being made available on Wednesday, July 10. After that, a new episode will debut every Wednesday through September 4 when the 10-episode run will come to its finale.

Apple TV+'s press release announcing the new show says that it is created by Katie Robbins of The Affair and The Last Tycoon fame. Lucy Tcherniak will also act as executive producer as well as director, coming off the back of Station Eleven among other things. In terms of stars, Rashida Jones will be joined by Hidetoshi Nishijima, Joanna Sotomura, Judy Ongg, and others.

Bethesda isn't done with Starfield yet, and there are some 'really good updates' planned for the sci-fi RPG which will be revealed soon enough.

That's the word from Bethesda's Todd Howard, in an interview with IGN that mostly focused on the currently very popular Fallout TV show (streaming on Amazon Prime Video).

The gaming side of the equation did come up in the interview, unsurprisingly, and indeed IGN questioned whether the success of the show on Prime might lead Bethesda to switch priorities and have Fallout 5 come out before Elder Scrolls VI.