Latest News - Page 683

Microsoft has announced improvements to Copilot in what's the latest step forward for the AI (no doubt the first of many this year).

In a blog post, the software giant told us that it has made Copilot more streamlined, with a cleaner and slicker look, as well as introducing a carousel of suggested prompts to stoke your curiosity (perhaps) to explore those topics.

What this means is that the interface for Copilot does indeed look tidier and neater, with that carousel occupying center stage in the middle of the page.

Sources reportedly familiar with Nintendo's plans are telling publications the company is currently gearing up for a new Nintendo Direct expected to air sometime next week.

For those who don't know, Nintendo typically broadcasts its Nintendo Direct showcase sometime in February each year, and now that month is upon us, we can expect the company to reveal what to expect for the remainder of the year. Nintendo insider "Guarana" has taken to the ResetEra forums to say that they've heard Nintendo is going to drop the Direct showcase on February 15.

As you can probably imagine, Guarana was asked about the date, to which they replied, "I got some info from a friend working on the Brazilian Portuguese localization of some titles, and they said that it's expected for February 15". Backing up the theory that Nintendo is prepping its Direct for next week is a report from Italian outlet Universo Nintendo that states sources have informed the publication that the Direct will take place between February 12 and February 15.

A new report from The Information claims Apple has two foldable iPhones in development that are half as thick as current-gen iPhones.

According to the report both of these purported iPhones resemble Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip models and have a severe reduction in thickness compared to the current-gen iPhones we know today. The report also states that Apple is exploring the idea of adding an exterior screen, but engineers are struggling with implementing batteries and display technology to meet this design.

Furthermore, Apple is reportedly in talks with Asian manufacturers regarding ordering components for these two new iPhones, with the possibility always being on the table that if designs don't meet Apple's high standards, both projects will be scrapped. However, that doesn't rule out a foldable iPad, which seems to be a much more achievable task given the larger footprint of the device.

Entertainment giant Disney has purchased a $1.5 billion stake in Epic Games and teamed up with the company to create something incredible.

This partnership intends to develop a new expansive, open, persistent, and social universe that will seamlessly "interoperate" with the popular game Fortnite and let fans "play, watch, shop and engage" iconic characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more.

The news was revealed during Disney's Q1 FY24 Earnings call, where it was said this new experience will be built entirely in Unreal Engine and will give players the ability to "create their own stories and experiences, express their fandom in a distinctly Disney way, and share content with each other in ways that they love."

Insomniacs Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was one of the most anticipated games of 2023. Although long-awaited, the game was an absolute hit with fans, selling more than 2.5 million copies within its first 24 hours and breaking the record for the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game in PlayStation history in a 24-hour period when it launched on October 20th.

However, some fans were disappointed when finishing the game's main story to find it was missing some key features from the first game, such as the ability to change day and night cycles, weather, and, most importantly, New Game+.

It is not unusual these days for studios to not add a New Game+ feature to new triple-A games at launch and instead opt to add it later as an update, usually adding extra features as well. We have seen this in games just in the last year alone, such as God of War Ragnarok and Alan Wake 2, to name a few.

Musk has previously offered to fund suits for X users who "were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something," former Star Wars actor Gina Carano is taking him up on that offer.

It has been three years since Disney cut ties with The Mandalorian actor Gina Carano, and now the actor is filing a lawsuit against the company with help from Elon Musk. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Carano is suing Disney for discrimination and wrongful termination after she was fired following antisemitic posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.

Interoperability with other encrypted messaging apps is what it will be called when the popular messaging app WhatsApp adds the ability for users to send and receive messages from people using a completely different communication app like Messenger, iMessage, or Signal.

WhatsApp boasts around 2 billion users globally, and this notable update arrives courtesy of compliance with new EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) legislation. According to the new law, companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta must open up their core services to others - with a DMA compliance date of March 2024.

According to a new report at Wired, the WhatsApp team has been working on adding this feature for years - letting people chat across apps without impacting end-to-end encryption. So, it will be interesting to see how it pans out.

The 2014 war film Fury, directed by David Ayer and starring Brad Pitt, has made its way on Netflix's Global Top 10 chart this week with over 3.3 million total views.

The film follows a five-man American tank crew who are tasked with going behind enemy lines to complete a dangerous mission in Nazi Germany during the final weeks of World War 2. Brad Pitt's character leads the team as a rough, tough, and battle-hardened tank commander, Don "Wardaddy" Collier; he stars alongside Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jon Benthal, Jason Isaacs, and Scott Eastwood.

As of this year, the film is a decade old and is still finding new success on the streaming site Netflix. Between January 29 and February 6 of this year, Fury has been watched a total of 3.3 million times; that's a whopping 7.3 million hours! It ranked ninth in Netflix's Global Top 10 for the week, just ahead of Dennis Quaid's sports film The Hill, which is in its second week of the Top 10.

NASA's Mars rover has pointed its instruments at the downed Ingenuity helicopter sitting in its final resting place.

The Mars helicopter was initially sent to the Red Planet as a technology demonstration with the goal of seeing if flight on another planet was possible. The demonstration was a success and Ingenuity became the first human-made object to take flight on another world.

The Mars helicopter went on to perform more than 70 additional flights, serving as a reconnaissance helicopter for the Perseverance rover. However, on flight 72, the helicopter had a rough landing, causing damage to its rotor blades and ultimately ending its mission.

Harvard scientist Avi Loeb, known for claiming the interstellar object known as 'Oumuamua that passed through our solar system in 2017 was an alien probe, has backed up his claims from last year that pieces of alien technology were discovered in the ocean off the coast of Papa New Guinea.

It was back in July last year that Avi Loeb claimed his team discovered fragments of alien technology at the crash site of the meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere in January 2014. The team sifted through meteor data and discovered the meteorite known as IM1 was traveling "too fast" to have come from within our solar system, meaning it was an object that came from outside of our solar system.

The team ran a magnetic sheet over the seafloor, and what was recovered is claimed to be made from material that is stronger than "all space rocks cataloged by NASA over the past decade," per Loeb. Notably, the Harvard scientist went on the record saying the tiny spheres recovered from the crash site looked like miniature Earths as they contained distinct colors of blue, brown, and gold.

Patriot has unveiled its latest storage solution with the new Viper PV553 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen5 x4 SSD, arriving in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB flavors, featuring what the company calls an 'innovative active cooling system.'

The Viper PV553 offers next-gen SSD performance, with read/write speeds of up to 12,400MB/s and 11,800MB/s, and the promise of consistent cooling and thermal performance even during extended usage during gaming sessions.

Alongside the slim 16.5mm aluminum heat shield and thermal sensors, you can find a small fan - with Patriot confirming that this is its first SSD to incorporate a blower-fan design. Make no mistake, though, you can barely see it. Regarding SSDs with active-colling go, the Patriot Viper PV553 looks stunning - with a sleek sports vehicle-like design that would look great in a PC gaming build.

The Last Night, from indie studio Odd Tales, is a visually stunning 2.5D game set in a post-cyberpunk world that blends retro and modern visuals. It's a game we've been waiting to play for years, and even though it's still in development, there's no word on when it might come out. Tim Soret told PCGamer a few years ago that the team was taking its time building the world and tech "brick by brick," but we haven't heard from the team in a while.

Yesterday, we got a new thread by Tim Soret over on X that doesn't so much provide an update on The Last Night as it does showcase how the studio is using its tech stack to remaster original PlayStation games, presenting them in widescreen 4K HDR at 60 FPS. To demonstrate, he presented footage of the original Metal Gear Solid, switching between the original and remastered visuals, and the results were fantastic.

"I'm very unhappy with PSX remasters," Tim Soret writes. "Either lazy (MGS) or disrespectful (Tomb Raider). Changing the art assets is not preservation [and] pure emulation is lazy. PSX aesthetics can look absolutely gorgeous in 4K HDR with special techniques to retain the charm of the era."

Generative AI and autonomous agents will make their way into government-run programs, including the military, so this little experiment with some of the most well-known LLMs is interesting... to say the least. Like the classic 1983 film WarGames, various AI models were pitted against each other in multiple wargame scenarios to see how they'd react and make decisions.

You can read the full results of the experiment in a new paper titled 'Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making' from several high-profile universities and institutes. Eight different "autonomous nation agents" using the same LLM were put in a wargame scenario - with a separate AI model summarizing the simulated world's outcomes, consequences, and state.

Turn-based tabletop gaming, except to see what would happen if AI was in charge of every military asset, including nuclear weapons. And yes, a few of the LLMs went nuclear and started dropping bombs.

ASRock has released a new BIOS for its range of Intel 600 and 700 Series motherboards, with the new BIOS set to "drastically improve CPU performance" on 14th Gen Non-K processors. According to ASRock, the Intel Core i7-14700 sees a performance increase of up to 10% in Cinebench R3 benchmark tests with the new update.

Suppose you wonder what's happening and where ASRock found this additional performance. In that case, it all comes down to Intel's latest microcode update - and ASRock is the first to implement it alongside additional optimizations across its wide range of Z790 motherboards.

The update improves performance for Intel's 14th Gen non-K CPUs, which feature lower TDPs of 65W compared to the unlocked K variants. In addition to the new microcode, the BIOS updates from ASRock include additional optimizations to boost CPU performance further.

Zephyr is a name you probably have never heard of when it comes to graphics cards, but the company is preparing its first-ever liquid-cooled graphics card, starting with the upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER with an AIO cooler.

Zephyr has worked with Valkyrie, which provided a new all-in-one liquid cooling solution with a dual-slot GPU featuring a dual 140mm radiator (280mm total). Zephyr's new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Valkyrie graphics card features Valkyrie RGB fans connected to the GPU through white-braded tubing.

The company is using a super-stylish silver theme across the card, looking really mean and tough -- with a beautiful RGB mirror effect in the bottom right-hand side -- and no fans on the card, that's all handled by the 280mm radiator and dual fans away from the card itself.

A regional court in Germany has ruled that Intel infringed on a patent covering an integrated voltage regulator technology that belongs to R2 Semiconductor, which could see select Intel processors banned from being sold in Germany. It's not just Intel but also Dell and HP products that use the affected Intel processors in the patent dispute.

Intel has bitten back at R2 Semiconductor, accusing the Palo Alto, California-based company of using a low-quality patent and that it would appeal the decision. The regional court in Dü Dusseldorf, Germany ruled against Intel on Wednesday, issuing an injunction against sales of Intel Core series CPUs, including "Ice Lake," "Tiger Lake," "Alder Lake," and Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake Server," processors.

Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs are still out in the wild, so these processors might disappear from the market if Intel isn't successful in its appeal. It doesn't mean that the 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs will disappear from the market overnight, so there's no need to worry right now.

Amazon Studios finalized a deal with the maker of Warhammer 40,000 -- Games Workshop -- late last year that would see the world getting Warhammer 40K movies and TV shows with Superman and The Witcher actor Henry Cavill.

Henry Cavill will star in Warhammer 40,000 productions including TV shows and movies, and is personally a huge fan of the game. He was recently interviewed during his press junket with Argyle director Matthew Vaughn, where Cavill said being involved in Warhammer 40,000 "is the greatest privilege of my professional career to have this opportunity".

Cavill continued: "I can't say too much, again, it's early days still. But to have this opportunity to bring it to screen, and be at the tiller so it can be faithful, is key to me".

Minisforum has just formally launched its new V3 high-performance AMD AI 3-in-1 tablet, powered by AMD's latest Ryzen 7 8840U "Hawk Point" APU.

Minisforum will be the first in the world with an AMD AI-powered 3-in-1 tablet, packing the latest Ryzen 7 8840U "Hawk Point" APU that sees 8 cores and 16 threads of Zen 4-based CPU power built on the 4nm process node and featuring a base clock of 3.30GHz and a max boost clock of 5.1GHz.

The Minisforum V3 tablet is equipped with a 14-inch screen, offering a 2.5K resolution and a high refresh rate of 165Hz, complemented by 32GB of RAM and a substantial 2TB of storage. It's powered by the "Ryzen 7 flagship chip," specifically the Ryzen 7 8840U, which brings 8 cores and 16 threads of Zen 4 processing capability, along with 16MB of L3 cache, 8MB of L2 cache, and clock speeds ranging from a 3.3GHz base to a 5.1GHz boost.

NVIDIA's new Grace Superchip has just been benchmarked, giving us a look at NVIDIA's first-ever in-house server CPU that's based on the Arm architecture.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the State University of New York have benchmarked the NVIDIA Grace Superchip, which doesn't beat Intel's new Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs with 48 cores and 96 threads per processor. NVIDIA's new Grace Superchips will be a competitive data center and HPC processor, which comes from its efficiency.

A single Grace CPU packs 72 cores and 480GB of LPDDR5X memory, while the Grace Superchip features 2 x Grace CPUs combined on a single board that provides a huge 144 cores and an even bigger 960GB of LPDDR5X memory. Impressive stuff to see, and just to once again point out the fact that this is an Arm-based CPU that NVIDIA has built.

Apple's new Vision Pro headset is blowing the minds of anyone who tries it, with scalpers jumping in and securing lucrative headsets to re-sell for huge profits.

The new Apple Vision Pro headset starts at $3499 for the 256GB model, with some people selling the Vision Pro 1TB model for $10,000. That's a huge jump over the MSRP of $4999 on the 1TB model of the Vision Pro, so let's hope no one spends $10K when Apple has the Vision Pro in stock, which needs YOU there in person to get the headset perfectly fitted to your face and head.

Anyone purchasing the new Vision Pro headset anywhere other than an Apple Store must remember that the company scans you in-store and prepares you through an iPhone. You can buy a replacement headband for $99 or $199 for a new light seal and cushions, so just buy it from Apple, peeps.