Latest News - Page 688

V-Color has just announced its new collaboration with MSI, with the unveiling its new Manta DDR5 Xfinity MPOWER memory, offering speeds of up to DDR5-8400 speeds.

The company says that its new Manta DDR5 Xfinity MPOWER memory combines the prowess and innovation from both V-Color and MSI, engineered for overclocking. V-Color's new memory is ready to deliver high performance and exceptional endurance.

V-Color's new Manta DDR5 Xfinity MPOWER is developed with overclocking in mind, where the company ensures top-tier performance and endurance, ready for PC enthusiasts and high-performance users. Not only is the performance side of things looked after, but the new Manta DDR5 Xfinity MPOWER memory also has a sleek and modern design with a heatsink tackling the heat, and 16 LEDs that light up the memory making it look gorgeous while you are gaming, or opening countless browser tabs.

NVIDIA's latest GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics card is out and in the wild, but now we're looking at what changes the company has made to its in-house RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition graphics card.

Inside the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition, it looks like the company has reduced power phases from 13 on the RTX 4080 Founders Edition (the non-SUPER version) to just 11 on the new RTX 4080 SUPER FE. In contrast, memory phases have been reduced from 3 to 2, respectively. There's also one phase missing near the power connector.

Geekerwan thinks that the PCB design change means that NVIDIA could lower the power consumption of its new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition during gaming. The RTX 4080 SUPER FE features a TDP of 320W, but the card uses around 246W in gaming loads, which is something NVIDIA points out on its own website, as you can see in the photo above.

Raytheon has just announced a new $20 million contract through its Strategic and Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems (SSMARTS) consortium to develop a next-gen, multi-chip package that will be used in ground, maritime, and airborne sensors and built by AMD.

Under the new contract, Raytheon says it will package state-of-the-art commercial devices from partners like AMD to create a compact microelectronics package that will convert radio frequency energy to digital information with more bandwidth and higher data rates. This new chip will enable new system capabilities designed with higher performance, lower power consumption, and reduced weight.

Colin Whelan, president of Advanced Technology at Raytheon, said: "By teaming with commercial industry, we can incorporate cutting-edge technology into Department of Defense applications on a much faster timescale. Together, we will deliver the first multi-chip package that features the latest in interconnect ability - which will provide new system capabilities to our warfighters".

Building a functioning 16-bit processor or CPU inside Microsoft Excel, with its own memory, output, and custom assembly language, is an impressive - if not entirely useful - feat. This is because you're looking at a 16-bit CPU with a clock speed of just 3 Hz, 128KB of RAM, and a 16-color output display.

But this isn't Intel's iconic 8086 CPU recreated in Excel, as it features its own custom architecture and instruction set. YouTube channel Inkbox breaks down how they created a functioning CPU inside Excel in a fascinating and informative 15+ minute video above.

The Microsoft Excel CPU was made possible due to how a spreadsheet app works - where, with each cell, you've got a powerful calculator that can take in data and output a result. Stack them together, and they can mimic a CPU's input and output functionality, albeit from the era when MS-DOS was the height of cutting-edge technology.

Xbox is reportedly mulling over a shift in its business model that will help maximize game sales.

Microsoft has discussed bringing big-name Xbox exclusives to PlayStation 5, sources have told The Verge's Tom Warren. Bethesda games like Starfield and the new Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game are both potentially heading to PS5. It's believed Microsoft is aiming at magnifying game sales by offering its titles on PlayStation, further cementing third-party ties between the two harmonic rivals.

The decision has faced heated opposition among Xbox teams, and Microsoft has yet to make any official comment on the reports. There is no guarantee that the games will break exclusivity and release on PlayStation.

SK hynix has officially announced plans for its 5th Generation of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which is otherwise known as HBM3e, launching this year, while next-gen HBM4 memory is coming in 2026.

Kim Chun-hwan, vice president of SK hynix, announced the plans during his keynote speech at SEMICOM Korea 2024, which was hosted at the COEX in the Samseong neighborhood of Seoul, on January 31. VP Kim said: "With the advent of the AI computing era, generative AI is rapidly advancing" and that the "generative AI market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 35%".

We can expect SK hynix's new HBM4 memory to arrive with a 2048-bit memory interface, and a huge 1.5TB/s memory bandwidth per stack. The huge advances in AI GPUs from the likes of NVIDIA and AMD, and its next-gen AI GPUs of the future, will rely on ultra-fast next-gen memory like HBM4. SK hynix wants to have its next-gen HBM4 memory in 2026, but we could see it a bit earlier in late 2025.

If you want to upgrade your gaming PC and step into a cheaper AM4 motherboard, AMD's new Ryzen 5 5700X3D processor is now available. A cheaper X3D-based AM4 processor that costs $249.

AMD's new Ryzen 7 5700X3D processor features 8 cores and 16 threads based on the Zen 4 CPU architecture, the same as the higher-end Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but with lower boost CPU clock speeds. The new Ryzen 7 5700X3D processor -- on paper -- should offer around 7% to 9% less performance over the 5800X3D with its 400MHz slower CPU boost clocks.

There are no launch reviews of the Ryzen 7 5700X3D because the company didn't send out review CPU samples. But, on Chinese platforms like Bilibili, we're getting our first look at 5700X3D performance.

Intel is reportedly gunning hard to win the contract to both build Microsoft a semi-custom APU for its next-gen Xbox console and fabricate the chip at its own foundry. This is compared to both console SoCs being made by AMD and fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan.

Intel had a custom Pentium III "Coppermine-based" CPU at 733MHz inside of the original Xbox back in 1999, but AMD has been securing contract after contract from both Microsoft and its Xbox consoles and Sony with its PlayStation consoles. Intel powering the next-gen Xbox would be an exciting thing to see, as AMD has reportedly already signed a contract with Sony to build a next-gen PlayStation 6 console.

Intel has been hard at work with its Tile-based APU approach, with its latest Meteor Lake CPUs featuring CPU, GPU, AI tiles, and more on a single chip. Intel's own Arc GPU division is reportedly not going to continue on with discrete GPUs past Battlemage, where rumor has it the company will shift to using GPU Tiles only on future-gen APUs.

Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake-S processor has been spotted again, with news that it will not support Hyper-Threading.

Intel first introduced Hyper-Threading (HT) technology with is Xeon CPU architecture back in 2002, over 20 years ago now, with simultaneous multithreading technology allowing physical cores inside of Intel CPUs to perform two tasks at the same time, effectively acting as two logical cores.

As the years went on, the first consumer-focused Core and Core 2 processors didn't support Hyper-Threading, with HT being introduced with its Core i7 "Nehalem" processors in 2008. There are changes coming for Intel's consumer and gaming-focused processors anyway, with the introduction of Performance Cores (P-Cores) and Efficient Cores (E-Cores) that we have in the 12th Gen Core, 13th Gen Core, and just-launched 14th Gen Core CPUs.

AMD's current desktop motherboards are being offered with mobile processors, at least by a Chinese company, and this first motherboard... supports a Ryzen 7 8845HS chip with 65W TDP and even 4 x 2.5GbE ethernet ports.

Intel has Mobile on Desktop (MoDT) right now, but now we've got AMD's new Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, offering 8 cores and 16 threads of Zen 4 processing power with a low 65W TDP (which also doesn't require a crazy cooler to keep chill). High-end CPUs at lower price points than regular desktop processors and motherboards are the point here.

Changwang's new AMD MoDT Mini-ITX motherboard is aimed at NAS and storage use, with support for 4 x 2.5GbE ethernet ports (important for NAS and storage) as well as up to 9 x SATA drives for huge amounts of fast storage.

Video game developers would like to rely less on monetization and more on creativity for their games.

Gaming is a business, and that means profits come first. Since the introduction of new transformative disruptions like live service games and microtransactions, game devs have tried to balance their project vision with some sort of guaranteed money-maker. Project budgets are skyrocketing, and sales aren't guaranteed, so devs will often try to improve the odds of success by putting in microtransactions into their projects (often at the behest of publishers).

Apparently, game devs want this to change. According to a new 2023 State of Game Development & Design report from Perforce, video game creators would like to see the industry move towards quality games and away from aggressive monetization for the sake of profits.

Apple's Vision Pro headset is now on sale after months of waiting, and as people start to spend time with the product we're learning more and more about what it can and cannot do. Apple is also publishing new support documents detailing the headset's capabilities and it's one of those documents that has given us a surprising fact.

A new support document has confirmed that the Apple Vision Pro does not fully support the Find My network. In fact, it's perhaps more accurate to say that it barely supports the feature at all with Apple saying that the only thing it can do is support is the ability to remotely lock the Vision Pro if it's lost.

That surprising news means that the Vision Pro, a headset that starts at a whopping $3,499, doesn't support any FInd My location features including the ability to locate the headset should it be lost. The headset doesn't even support the ability to make it make a sound for easier locating around the home, either.

Apple's Vision Pro is now on sale and buyers in the United States are already sharing their first experiences with spatial computing and everything that it has to offer. But while most people are unboxing their Vision Pro and being as careful as possible not to damage it, not everyone is looking after it they way you might expect someone who just spent at least $3,499 to.

In fact, one YouTuber decided that the best thing to do was to see how long it took them to break their new AR/VR headset - all in the name of science. The result is a video that might be hard to watch but does go to illustrate how durable a Vision Pro can be - even if it's far from indestructible.

In the video shared above you'll see a Vision Pro knocked against a wall to try and simulate what would happen if someone accidentally walked into something while wearing their new headset. The tests aren't perfect, but they're a decent starting point and it turns out that the Vision Pro holds up surprisingly well. If there's one weak link it appears to be the Vision Pro's speakers, with those suffering more than most other components following some hefty bangs.

Now that Apple's Vision Pro is available to buy the company is starting to share more details about how it works and as part of that it has begun to publish new support documents related to the headset. One of those documents gives us more information about the headset's battery and how it actually works.

First spotted by MacRumors, the support document explains that the battery has a light that can be used to see the current battery charge state including whether it is fully charged. The light displays the charge state whenever the battery is connected to power, is moved, or is tapped while connected to power.

According to Apple, the battery's indicator light has three different states that can detail the current charge state while plugged into power.

Apple's Vision Pro headset is now available to buy in the United States with prices starting from $3,499 for the 256GB configuration. As part of the launch Apple has started to publish more information about the headset and its capabilities on its website and now it's launched a new support document that goes into details about specific situations when the Vision Pro may limit its performance.

The support document, which was first reported by MacRumors, says that Vision Pro owners could notice performance reduction that will cause apps to run slower, the displays to run at a slower refresh rate, and more. The screens might even dim at times, too.

The report suggests that performance may be reduced in conditions such as when a battery has a low state of charge, is in a high peak power situation, or has become chemically aged. That last one is most likely to start to become an issue for Vision Pro owners in a few years and is unlikely to affect people at launch.

If you were worried about your webcam being a privacy threat, well, here's some bad news - there's something else to be concerned about that snoopers could leverage on your devices, namely the ambient light sensor.

These light sensors are present with many pieces of hardware - from phones and tablets through to laptops, or indeed TVs - and as the name suggests, they detect ambient light levels in order to adjust screen brightness appropriately.

However, there's a dark side to the light sensor, in that it can be compromised to spy on you, rather like a webcam (which these sensors are often placed near in laptops), if not to quite the same extent in terms of the invasion of your privacy.

Apple's Vision Pro is now available to buy with those who placed their preorder early now likely receiving their headsets as of today. Those who placed an order for in-store pickup can also get their hands on their headset on the date they agreed when placing that order, too. And when those people finally slide their headset on for the first time, they can look forward to enjoying more than 600 Vision Pro apps. One of those apps will be the Disney+ app, and Disney has now shared a list of all the 3D movies that they can look forward to watching on their new headset.

That list of movies includes some big hitters including various Marvel movies as well as the Avatar movies, Aladdin, Encanto, Finding Nemo, and many more.

Disney says that all of its 3D movies support Dolby Vision, 4K resolution, and HDR while some also support a higher frame rate than the rest as well. In total, there are 42 movies that support 3D streaming on the Vision Pro and we can expect more to be added in the coming weeks and months, too.

Apple's Vision Pro headset is now officially on sale which means that people across the United States are picking the headset up from an Apple Store or waiting for it to arrive on their doorstep. They'll no doubt also set about downloading all of their favorite apps and enjoying all that they have to offer. But while Apple says that there are more than 600 Vision Pro apps available at launch, there are a couple of notable exceptions including Google's video streaming service, YouTube.

The lack of a YouTube app means that fans of the service will have to resort to watching content in Safari using the YouTube website, but while that will work, it's definitely less than ideal. And with visionOS not supporting adding websites to the Home screen accessing YouTube will mean opening Safari and then visiting the website manually. But that isn't something that developer Christian Selig wanted to do - so he created an app of his own.

That app, called Juno, is now available for download from the Vision Pro App Store for $4.99 and it works in much the same way that you might expect. When browsing for content the app will use a modified version of the YouTube website to make it appear more Vision Pro-like and add transparency effects. Watching video creates an automatically-adjusting window that will react to the aspect ratio of the content being viewed, too.

Apple's Vision Pro is finally available to buy in the United States after being unveiled in June of last year and up for preorder for the last two weeks. Those who placed an order early will receive their headsets today, with reports suggesting that up to 200,000 Vision Pro headsets have been sold. But for those who don't yet have a Vision Pro on the way or are unsure whether or not to pick one up, Apple is now offering potential buyers a way to take the headset for a spin ahead of time.

Those who want to try Apple's Vision Pro headset out can now do so via an Apple Store with Apple offering people the chance to reserve a spot online via the company's website. That website takes people through the steps to make a reservation including questions surrounding whether or not they wear prescription glasses so as to allow Apple Stores to ensure they have the required ZEISS optical inserts available for the demonstration. Apple is also running a first-come, first-serviced system for Vision Pro try-ons across the United States from today through Sunday. Those days do not include the ability for people to book reservation slots, however.

Apple's Vision Pro is the company's first step into a new product category since the Apple Watch debuted a decade ago and expectations are high. But pricing will not help, with the 256GB entry-level model costing $3,499 at the time of launch. The price also increases when buyers choose to opt for more storage with 512GB and 1TB models also available.

We've just caught a glimpse of some more evidence that Window 11 will get a 24H2 update later this year, meaning the next version of Windows won't be an all-new release (such as Windows 12).

Windows Latest uncovered a Windows App Development support document in which Microsoft talked about a specific function (EnumDeviceDrivers) and its history, noting that it will be changed in the next version of Windows.

Specifically, an incoming tweak is mentioned that'll start with Windows 11 version 24H2. The document states: