Latest News - Page 637

Introspect Technology is a member of JEDEC, the body that covers memory -- including the next-gen GDDR7 memory standard -- with Introspect shipping the world's first GDDR7 memory test system.

The just-launched Introspect M5512 GDDR7 Memory Test System is the world's first commercial solution for testing JEDEC's fresh new JESD239 Graphics Double Data Rate (GDDR7) SGRAM specification. GDDR7 is a category-creating memory solution that enables graphics memory engineers, GPU design engineers, product engineers in both memory and GPU spaces, and system integrators to quickly design new GDDR7 memory devices, debug protocol errors, characterize signal integrity, and perform detailed memory read/write functional stress testing without requiring any other tool.

The new M5512 GDDR7 Memory Test System is the perfect solution for these engineers, AMD and NVIDIA, and AIB partners to get ready to launch GDDR7-powered graphics cards, the first of which will be NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs.

We already know that in the age of the Windows AI PC, devices are set to arrive with dedicated Copilot keys. Microsoft's AI is on track to be integrated with all parts of the operating system. Today, Intel executives at Intel's AI Summit in Taipei confirmed that Copilot AI services will soon run locally on PCs - as long as they meet a certain performance threshold.

That threshold is 40 TOPS of performance on the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found in an AI PC. Based on this information, which Tom's Hardware confirmed, the definition of an AI PC has been given a specific hardware or performance baseline. Anything below 40 TOPS will still be able to run Copilot AI tasks and processes in the cloud, but it will serve as a way to differentiate hardware-based 'AI PCs' versus could-only devices.

Though it might take a generation or two to get there, Intel says it has next-gen products lined up that will fall into this 40 TOPS of performance category. Currently, The Meteor Lake NPU in Core Ultra chips offers only 10 TOPS performance, with AMD's Ryzen Hawk Point offering 16 TOPS.

NVIDIA might have just announced its next-generation Blackwell B200 AI GPU, but the beefed-up Hopper H200 AI GPU is smashing performance records in the very latest MLPerf 4.0 results.

NVIDIA's optimizations on TensorRT-LLM have been a non-stop chain of progression since the company released its AI Software suite last year. There were major performance increases from MLPerf 3.1 results to MLPerf 4.0, with NVIDIA amplifying Hopper's AI performance.

Using these new TensorRT-LLM optimizations, NVIDIA has pulled out a huge 2.4x performance leap with its current H100 AI GPU in MLPerf Inference 3.1 to 4.0 with GPT-J tests using an offline scenario. With server-based scenarios using GPT-J, NVIDIA's current H100 AI GPU had a huge 2.9x increase in MLPerf 3.1 to 4.0 performance.

If you thought the insatiable AI GPU demand was (and is, and will continue) nuts, well... the cocoa beans market is in trouble, with the price of cocoa beans skyrocketing. The price of cocoa beans has smashed through $10,000 a ton for the first time in the futures market.

The last major cocoa tree planting spree happened throughout the early 2000s in West Africa, which, if you didn't think was important to the global cocoa business, you're wrong: West Africa counts for around 75% of the global supply of cocoa beans. After already bad weather amplified by the ongoing El Nino phase of the Pacific Ocean, cocoa trees throughout Ghana and the Ivory Coast have been decimated.

Fast-forward to today, and the world is heading to an annual supply deficit of between 300,000 and 500,000 tons of cocoa beans, the largest shortfall in over 60 years. Right now, the price of cocoa is more expensive than copper on the commodities market, and we're sprinting directly into Easter, which is when chocolate makers have now increased pricing for consumers after multiple years of subpar cocoa harvests in West Africa with another on the way.

Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake-MX mobile processor for future-gen thin and light laptops has been leaked by our good friend Igor at Igor's Lab. Check it out:

The next-gen Intel Lunar Lake-MX processor will have up to 8 cores, with 4 powerful "Lion Cove" P-Cores and 4 efficient "Skymont" E-Cores. There's no need for massive amounts of cores in thin and light laptops, as Intel is focusing on balancing performance and efficiency, something Lunar Lake-MX is expected to deliver.

On the integrated GPU side of things, Lunar Lake will feature an Intel Arc Battlemage GPU with a maximum of 64 Xe2-based Execution Units (EUs) and 8 x Xe2 GPU cores. Igor's report says that this will provide a "significant leap in graphics performance that could set new benchmarks for integrated graphics solutions".

LG is promising a whopping 100 trillion won (around $74.3 billion USD) in investments in South Korea through 2028. Half of the $74.3 billion will go towards future growth drivers, including AI, biotechnology, batteries, and displays.

According to LG, the huge $74.3 billion sum will be 65% of LG's entire global investment for the same four-year period. The gigantic new investment plan was announced on Wednesday at LG's recent 62nd shareholders meeting. It comes in hot off the heels of fellow South Korean company -- SK hynix -- which announced an even bigger $90 billion investment for the "world's largest mega fab complex" in South Korea.

LG Chairman Koo Kwang-mo, said: "The global management environment in 2024 will have more uncertainties as a number of inflection points reside related to the generalization of AI, decarbonization, and so on. While closely monitoring the industries around our core businesses, we will bolster future businesses like AI, bio and cleantech so they can grow into main pillars of our future business portfolio".

Apple has confirmed that it will hold the annual WWDC event starting from June 10 and that's likely to be when the company will unveil the new iOS 18 software update, among others. Apple has yet to officially confirm what the update will have to offer but strong rumors have suggested that new AI functionality will very much be the order of the day. However, those hoping for Apple's in-house chatbot to debut are going to be left disappointed.

That's according to a new report by the well-connected Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg. According to him, Apple's chatbot won't be ready for iOS 18, but that doesn't mean that there won't be those rumored AI improvements this time around. Instead, Apple has plans to use technology from other companies instead.

We'd already heard from previous reports that Apple is in talks with both Google and OpenAI about potentially using their own generative AI technology instead. Baidu is also thought to be a company that Apple is in talks with, but its AI features will only be used in China.

With Apple announcing yesterday that it intends to launch the WWDC 2024 event on June 10 we now know exactly how long we will have to wait before we get to see what the company has been cooking in terms of new software updates. We're expecting new releases for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro and we've been told to expect big things. Now, a new report has again reiterated that fact, saying that the iOS 18 update will be "the most ambitious overhaul" of the iPhone's software that we have ever seen.

The iOS 18 software update has long been tipped to be a key update for Apple especially given its intent to bring new AI technology to bear this year. Now, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has again upped the ante, saying that people working on the new software update have told him that this will be a huge update for iPhone owners.

There are a few things that we've been told to expect from this release with Apple itself also tipping that that AI will be a focus this time around. SVP of marketing Greg Joswiak posted to the X social network to say that the event is going to be "Absolutely Incredible," with the choice of capitalization thought to be a clear nod to Apple's AI work.

Apple has long been rumored to have plans to launch a new iPhone SE 4 device as a new budget model for those who don't want to pay for more high-end models like the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. However, despite those rumors there has so far been no indication from Apple that the phone is on the way, and it's continued to be pushed back in terms of when analysts and commentators expect it to be released. Now, it seems that Apple has taken a key step towards making the new phone available.

According to a new report by IT Home, Apple is now ready to give BOE the contract to build the new displays for the iPhone SE 4 after Samsung Display and Tianma were also thought to have been in discussions with Apple. Today's report says that Samsung has decided to withdraw itself from negotiations over concerns in relation to pricing, despite already having iPhone 14 OLED displays that it could potentially have used.

It's reported that Apple wanted to get the price of iPhone SE 4 displays down to around $25 per panel while Samsung wasn't ready to budge from a $30 per panel price point. Tianma now seems unlikely to be the supplier of choice, however, with the company reportedly struggling to meet Apple's quality requirements which now leaves BOE as the primary option for Apple.

NVIDIA's RTX 4060 has a recommended price of $299, though it has sunk a bit below this before - although a fresh low has now been reached with its price tag in the US.

VideoCardz noticed that - at least at the time of writing - there's a Zotac RTX 4060 Twin Edge OC White Edition on sale for $279 at Newegg.

Now, while that pricing may have been seen as part of local offers (in-store pick up) in the past, this is the first time that we're aware of that the vanilla RTX 4060 has sunk to $279 via an online listing you can just click and buy, there and then.

We keep hearing about AI PCs, and some more info just dripped through on the topic - namely that such a device will have a hard requirement in terms of a dedicated key for Copilot on the keyboard.

The concept of the Copilot key was introduced by Microsoft back at in January 24, with the idea being that it's a dedicated key in the same vein as the Windows key, except obviously in this case tapping it summons the AI assistant.

Apparently having a Copilot key on the keyboard deck of your AI PC will be mandatory going by details Intel just shared as spotted by The Verge.

Smuggling video cards into China is understandable, considering the current trade restrictions and the U.S. flat-out banning the sale of the GeForce RTX 4090 to the region. However, smuggling a batch of second-hand seven-year-old GPUs is more of a stretch because you wouldn't think it would be worth trying to smuggle 44 Radeon RX 580 graphics cards through Chinese customs.

According to a new report on MyDrivers (via Tom's Hardware), Shanghai Pudong International Airport customs officers caught a passenger trying to sneak in a batch of old Radeon GPUs into the country. Based on the seizure image all 44 Radeon RX 580 GPUs look to be the same make and model, presumably used for crypto mining.

Naturally, this is a case of someone trying to avoid paying import fees by not declaring that they have a bunch of old graphics cards they will wipe down and sell for a quick profit.

Xbox head Phil Spencer has been vocal about opening up the traditional walled gardens associated with videogames, from exclusives to storefronts to platforms. This is reflected by recent Xbox actions, which have seen previously exclusive first-party releases like Sea of Thieves, Grounded, and Hi-Fi Rush make their way to platforms like PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.

In the same Polygon interview where Phil Spencer hinted at more exclusives making their way to other platforms, he agreed to a radical idea for Xbox consoles: opening up the platform to additional storefronts like the Epic Games Store, Itch.io, and Steam. This would mean more than an open place to buy a game on a console, presenting a major shift for Xbox as a brand.

"[Consider] our history as the Windows company." Phil Spencer said. "Nobody would blink twice if I said, 'Hey when you're using a PC, you get to decide the type of experience you have [by picking where to buy games]. There's real value in that."

The more frames per second, the more a viewer can see, but what if the frames per second reached the trillions? How slow can slow motion actually be?

A team of researchers has decided to answer that question by creating a new scientific camera called SCARF, which stands for Swept-Coded Aperture Real-time Femtophotography. The creation of this camera has been detailed in a new study published in the esteemed scientific journal Nature, where research led by Professor Jinyang Liang of Canada's Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), who is known for breakthroughs in high-speed cameras, explained that traditional frame-by-frame capturing techniques has its limitations.

A letter has been sent to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking why the regulator didn't conduct an investigation into the company before it granted it approval for human testing.

The lawmaker is Democratic U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer, who sent a letter to the FDA on Monday claiming the regulator ignored "troubling evidence" of Elon Musk's Neuralink violating animal testing procedures. Notably, animal testing violations at Neuralink can be traced back to at least 2019, with previous reports from Reuters citing a complaint that accused Neuralink's brain implant testing on monkeys produced "recurring infections", "suffering" and significant health complications that comprised the "integrity of the research".

Back in September 2023, Neuralink founder Elon Musk responded to the allegations, saying, "No monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant" and that the monkeys that have died throughout testing were terminally ill and "close to death already". As for the lawmaker's letter, Blumenauer also cited Reuters reports of Neuralink employee complaints of "hack jobs" due to a rushed schedule, which resulted in needless suffering and deaths. Blumenauer has asked the FDA how it reconciled these reports, which led to Neuralink being granted approval for human trials.

The dreaded "devil comet" is back in the news as an astronomer has decided to snap an incredible photograph of its core, rather than the extremely long iconic tail.

The comet that many astronomers around the world are now focussing their instruments on is none other than 12P/Pons-Brooks, a 10.5 mile-wide (17 kilometers) ball of ice and rock that circles the Sun at an extremely elliptical orbit that takes 71 years to complete.

12P is currently on its way to make its closest approach with the Sun, which is scheduled to happen sometime in April, and while it approaches, the Sun's rays continuously heat up the surface of the comet, melting its icy outer shell, creating gas that then turns into what we know as the iconic comet tail, or as astronomers call the coma.

Diablo IV's long-awaited ray-tracing update is here, with ray-traced reflections and shadows adding more detail to the game on PC and console. On the PC side, DLSS 3 with Frame Generation and Reflex can improve performance by up to 3X - with the GeForce RTX 4090 can hit an average of 144.4 FPS at 4K with max settings, according to NVIDIA.

The recently released GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and RTX 4080 SUPER can also push performance past 100 FPS at 4K. Jumping down to 1440p, the GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER hit triple-digit performance, followed by the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which averages 92.5 FPS.

If you turn off DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, performance does take a notable hit, as the game's RT reflections reflect all pyrotechnics in the environment. RT shadows replace existing shadows to create a more realistic Sanctuary with "contact hardening and softening."

If you've ever formatted a disk using Windows, you've probably noticed that the UI and design of the Format tool haven't changed in a while. In fact, it's basically the same as it was in 1994 - which is impressive considering so much of everything else in Windows has changed. However, it was only meant to be temporary.

Microsoft programmer Dave W. Plummer shared some history of the Format tool and UI on X - which he created while working on Windows 95. As Microsoft's big update brought over many features of Windows NT, the Format tool had to be customized based on differences between the two operating systems.

"I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994," Dave writes. "I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make regarding formatting a disk, like a filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on."

SK hynix is putting $4 billion worth of investment into a new advanced chip packaging facility that will be built in West Lafayette, a western city in Indiana.

The news is coming from The Wall Street Journal sources, which say it's not yet decided on the new advanced chip packaging investment. If SK hynix goes ahead with its $4 billion investment, we'll see the facility operational by 2028 if there are no delays between now and then.

SK hynix's new advanced chip packaging facility would add between 800 and 1000 new jobs, with this news on the heels of the South Korean giants' plans to invest $90 billion on the world's largest fab complex, which will be completed by 2046. There will be multiple facilities at SK hynix's new fab complex, with some of them operational in the next couple of years.

The Sabrent 7-Port Hub with Switches (HB-3A4C) is a straightforward device. It's a USB-C hub with three 5Gbps USB-A ports and four 5Gbps USB-C ports, one of which can deliver an impressive 20W of power. If you're in the market for a hub, then this is definitely one to consider, as each port also comes with its own switch and LED indicator to make managing multiple connected devices a breeze.

With charging and hosting, this powered hub arrives with a dedicated power adapter to ensure reliability when connecting multiple accessories and devices. One of the key features of the hub is the per-port switches that let you enable and disable devices without having to plug or unplug them. This is an excellent feature for external devices like an Xbox controller or headset - allowing you to turn them on and off with a button.

And some good news: there's no need for additional software. Simply plug in the single USB Type-C interface to your PC, laptop, smartphone, or portable gaming handheld like the ROG Ally or Steam Deck, and you're ready.