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The move away from usernames and passwords continues to gather pace with another company seemingly on the way to allowing people to start using passkeys when securing their PlayStation Network accounts.

The PlayStation Network accounts are currently protected via an email and password system with 2FA support also included to help ensure that people keep their accounts safe and sound. Sony has published a new webpage on its website detailing how passkeys work while there is also an option for activating a passkey for a user's account as well. However, there have been mixed responses as to whether the feature currently works or not and there has been some suggestion that a bigger PSN security announcement could come soon.

Passkeys are a new way to secure accounts using biometrics rather than passwords that have to be remembered or saved in a password manager. People tend to use the same passwords over and over which is a bad security practice and one that puts accounts at risk. By removing the need to choose a password, passkeys are more secure as a result.

Apple's MacBook Air is a hugely popular computer all around the world and is often seen as a gateway into the Mac and Apple ecosystems for a lot of people. It's the cheapest laptop that Apple makes, and it's among the cheapest computers the company makes, too. But while we're waiting for a new M3 MacBook Air to arrive within the next few weeks, we almost found ourselves in a world where none of that happened. That's according to a new report by the well-connected journalist Walt Mossberg when speaking on The Vergecast.

Mossberg said that there were talks about potentially canceling the MacBook Air lineup entirely, leaving the MacBook Pro as the only laptop lineup that the company offered. The suggestion originally came from the then head of design at Apple Jony Ive, with his design team believed to have been in a tug of war with Apple's product managers.

The suggestion is that Apple had intended to remove the thin and light MacBook Air from the lineup based on Ive's belief that his team could make the MacBook Pro so thin and light that the MacBook Air would no longer be required. It's also thought that Apple's Ive believed that people would buy the more expensive MacBook Pro whether or not they needed any of the additional capabilities or processing power that they offered.

The GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition arrives as the third entry in NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 sUPER Series GPU refresh and the second to receive a Founders Edition model after the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. Like that variant, this new SUPER model features a matte black finish that is stunning in person, shifting away from the bronze and chrome look of non-SUPER Founders cards.

Usually, we kick off our review coverage with a deep dive into the Founders Edition, using it as the baseline for comparison to other GPU models. Unfortunately, due to a delay in arriving at TweakTown HQ (aka my office, which is currently overflowing with GPUs), we haven't been able to fully test it out - because we only have it for a couple of days.

In the meantime, be sure to check out our reviews for the INNO3D GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER X3 16GB (which is an MSRP model) and the new beautiful MSI GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER 16G EXPERT (a premium model that draws a lot of inspiration from the Founders Edition design). And ahead of our full Founders Edition review, check out these snaps of the card.

Amazon began delivering orders to customers in select areas in 2022, and now the company is celebrating its fastest drone delivery time during the fourth quarter of 2023.

The company outlined the delivery achievement on its website, where it also mentioned that it delivered more than 7 billion units to Prime members, either arriving on the same day or the next day. The 7 billion units were in total and not delivered by drones, but that area of delivery is expanding at Amazon, and we can expect more and more drones to be taking to the skies for fast delivery of relatively light products.

Currently, Amazon's drone delivery service is limited to College Station and Lockeford, California. Prime members in this area can request a drone delivery between the hours of 9:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. on specific days of the week. Despite the consistent challenge of weather, Amazon will be expanding its drone delivery service to new locations in the US, Italy, and the UK.

NASA's Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater in February 2021, and since then, it has been collecting sediment samples, some of which may contain proof of past microbial life.

A new study published in Science Advances details a geological survey of the Jezero Crater in which researchers used radar instruments attached to Perseverance to penetrate the ground to collect data on what is beneath the rover's wheels. The new study found the 4 billion-year-old crater that was created through an asteroid impact was later filled with younger sediment and rocks.

Notably, these younger sediments and rock could have been carried down into the crater through multiple river systems, which coincides with researchers' previous strong suggestion that the Jezero Crater once contained deltas fed by an ancient river system. These suggestions were why Perseverance was sent to investigate the Jezero Crater. Now, scientists have found horizontal layers of underground sediment that resemble a lake on Earth.

Google conducted massive layoffs last year, which is going to cost the company billions of dollars in severance packages and costs related to layoffs.

More specifically, Alphabet's earnings report for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023 stated the company was expecting to shell out $700 million in severance costs this quarter. Alphabet, Google's parent company, continued with the layoffs at the company behind the world's largest search engine, with additional layoffs occurring in January 2024 that amounted to hundreds of workers across core engineering and hardware teams.

Furthermore, Google conducted layoffs in January 2023, and according to Business Insider, the company "recorded employee severance and related charges of $2.1 billion for the twelve months ended December 31, 2023." During this time period, in January 2023, the company laid off 6% of its total workforce, or 12,000 employees. Affected staff or former staff, were paid during the 60-day-minimum WARN notification period, with the offer of severance of at least 16 weeks' salary + two weeks of severance for every year they worked at the company.

Miguel Claro, a professional photographer, has captured some stunning footage of a large solar prominence occurring on our host star, the Sun.

The professional photographer, author, and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, captured a solar prominence, or filament of plasma gaining in height, eventually snapping and resulting in a coronal mass ejection (CME).

Claro captured the stunning footage seen above on February 22, 2022, and explained in a recently published article on Space.com the prominence is so large it could likely fit dozens of Earths within it, with some prominences even being so large they can stretch thousands of miles into space.

Tencent management feels malaise as competition hits a crescendo throughout 2023.

2023 was one of the best years for game releases, with a bevy of must-have greats launching throughout the year. All the games that were in development pre-COVID had flooded the market at the same time. Developers and publishers were eager to cash in on the products that had cost many millions and years to make.

All of these projects constrained a market that's already being hit by selective spending. Suddenly, a ton of high-quality AAA games were readily available. Even still, consumers picked and chose which titles to buy. On the surface, big heavy-hitters like Chinese juggernaut Tencent might feel left out of the fun.

With Activision's help, Xbox has delivered record-breaking $7.111 billion revenue during holiday 2023.

Now that the Activision merger is closed, Microsoft has started combining Xbox and Activision revenues together. All of ABK's games and content are now recognized as first-party games, leading to a significant boost to content and services earnings.

In today's Q2 earnings report, Microsoft confirmed that Activision had a net impact of $2.08 billion revenue on Xbox's total quarterly results. Without Activision, Xbox gaming would have earned $5.031 billion during the quarter, making it the third-highest holiday period behind Holidays '20 and '21. This also means that Xbox only grew by 11.4% year-over-year, or $273 million, since the $4.758 billion recorded during Holiday 2022.

MSI has made its Claw gaming handheld official, also confirming that it will feature a 7-inch 1080p display with a 48-120Hz VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), joining the ASUS ROG Ally with its VRR panel.

MSI's new Claw gaming handheld is also one of the first to feature Intel's new Core Ultra CPUs, with the Core Ultra 5 135H processor powering the $649 version of the Claw, while the faster Core Ultra 7 155H processor powers the higher-end $749 version of the Claw handheld, according to The Verge.

The new MSI Claw handheld and its two versions with the Core Ultra 5 135H and Core Ultra 7 155H processors from Intel are similar to the Ryzen Z1 and Ryzen Z1 Extreme APUs used inside of the two versions of the ASUS ROG Ally handheld, both made by Intel's competitor: AMD.

ASUS has just announced its new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Noctua Edition graphics card, and it is really a big boy graphics card... check it out:

This isn't ASUS' first rodeo when it comes to GeForce RTX series Noctua Edition graphics cards, with its beefy new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Noctua Edition featuring a huge Noctua heatsink and dual 120mm Noctua NF-A12x25 PWN fans. There's a vapor chamber cooler and heatsink, with ASUS increasing the frame to house the two Noctua fans.

The current ASUS GeForce RTX 4080 Noctua Edition graphics card is one of the wildest-looking, most noise-efficient designs on the market, but it requires three fans. The new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Noctua Edition uses just two fans in comparison, cutting an entire fan from the card... so it should be even quieter.

Tesla's entire future is AI, so it makes sense that the Elon Musk-led company would be spending billions of dollars securing AI GPUs for its new Dojo AI supercomputer.

NVIDIA already commands an estimated 90% of the AI GPU market, but Tesla has said that it will be not only using NVIDIA's various AI GPUs but also AMD AI GPUs but didn't specify which of AMD's AI GPUs it would be purchasing. Tesla boss Elon Musk did state that it is readying $500 million to spend on an equivalent of 10,000 x NVIDIA H100 AI GPU order from NVIDIA.

Elon Musk posted on X: "The governor is correct that this is a Dojo Supercomputer, but $500M, while obviously a large sum of money, is only equivalent to a 10K H100 system from NVIDIA. Tesla will spend more than that on NVIDIA hardware this year. The table stakes for being competitive in AI are at least several billion dollars per year at this point".

Intel's truly next-gen Nova Lake CPUs will be made on TSMC's new 2nm process node, joining Apple as its first customers on TSMC's queue for its latest fab node.

Intel still has a few CPU generations before we get to Nova Lake, which is expected to be released in 2026 with its CPU Tile made on TSMC's (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) fresh new 2nm process node. Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs will feature the largest architectural uplift in the company's history, eclipsing the huge uplift that Intel delivered with the Core architecture.

I have been writing about Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs over two years ago now if you can believe it, reporting back in August 2021 on the rumors at the time. In that story, Nova Lake was teased as the: "biggest architectural change in cpu architecture since the Core architecture is introduced in 2006. Intel is working to build an entirely new architecture from the ground up much like Ryzen with up to 50% cpu performance improvement from lunar lake. This is also the reason why Glenn Hinton returned".

AMD will be releasing its next-gen Zen 5 architecture later this year, as well as a new 800-series chipset with the flagship X870E chipset ready for high-end Ryzen 8000 series CPUs of the future.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, we hear from one of his sources that Zen 5 "has had a lot of issues" and that the original goal was to rush out another 16-core lineup in the second half of 2024, even if that meant launching before (or without) a new chipset.

The same source continued, saying that they'd be surprised if Zen 5 is ready before the summer of 2024, but said the good news is that AMD could launch X3D variants of Zen 5 processors, or even Zen 5c chiplets into the original announcement of Zen 5 when it happens. The source said that if Zen 5 is delayed at all, it will "at least be aggressive."

NVIDIA can't make enough of its AI GPUs to meet current demand, let alone the non-stop demand for AI computing power... with the company reportedly working with Intel using its advanced packaging services.

The news is coming from UDN, which reports that TSMC's (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and its CoWoS advanced packaging production capacity is "insufficient" which has left NVIDIA turning to Intel. Intel will use its advanced packaging production for NVIDIA, providing them with around 5000 pieces per month.

Intel's help here for NVIDIA will allow the AI GPU giant to pump out, even more, AI GPUs, which have been strained in supply because of various factors, mostly in the advanced packaging supply chain. Once Intel begins advanced packaging production for NVIDIA, it's expected that NVIDIA's total advanced packaging production capacity will increase by a significant 10%.

With the help of Activision Blizzard King, the Xbox gaming division generated record-breaking results during goliday 2023.

Q2 FY24 marks the first time that Microsoft recognized Activision's revenues in its Xbox gaming segment. The company today announced the results for the Oct - Dec holiday 2023 period as a historic day for the Xbox brand.

Xbox gaming made $7.11 billion in global holiday revenues, driven primarily by a significant +61% spike in content and services. Xbox was able to deliver an extra $2.353 billion revenues over last year, where it generated $4.758 billion in total Xbox ecosystem revenue.

Intel's next-gen Battlemage GPU architecture launches this year, but after that, its next-next-gen Celestial and Druid GPUs could be GPU Tiles on future APUs from Intel, according to the latest rumors.

In his latest video, Tom from Moore's Law is Dead reports from his sources that both Celestial and Druid have a single tile configuration and are listed (internally at Intel) as alternative flagships for their GPU architectures. This could suggest that Intel is "considering fully canceling" its discrete graphics cards and has already reportedly started the groundwork for Arc to only consist of GPU Tiles after Battlemage.

So, what does this mean for Intel's range of Arc GPUs? Well, Arc Alchemist is already on the market and hasn't been doing too badly... but it doesn't come close to competing with AMD's flock of Radeon GPUs or NVIDIA's fleet of GeForce RTX series GPUs. It's next-gen Battlemage GPU will be better, but it will still only compete with what's on the market now from both AMD and NVIDIA... but won't come close to next-gen GPU offerings.

Apple has reportedly sold close to 200,000 of its upcoming Vision Pro headsets, according to a source of MacRumors, with the company accepting pre-orders for its Vision Pro headset on January 19, so it's only been available to purchase in the United States for just 10 days now.

It was only last week that Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that an estimated 160,000 to 180,000 Vision Pro units were sold during Apple's recent pre-order weekend, so sales seem to have slowed down in the last week. Apple's new Vision Pro headsets for launch day home delivery were all snapped up within hours of pre-orders launching, with in-store pickups for the Vision Pro diminished the day after.

We don't have any reviews from the media with the Apple Vision Pro headset just yet, with that coming on Tuesday... we should expect sales to increase once they get a proper look at the headset from the usual big names that get Apple hardware. But what about after that?

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics card reviews were meant to go live today, but they aren't... NVIDIA has moved up the NDA until tomorrow, January 31.

The company originally announced its new GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER alongside the new GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER graphics cards back at CES 2024 in early January, with a review embargo on the RTX 4080 SUPER for January 30.

The reason for NVIDIA pushing the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER graphics card review NDA to January 31 is that some reviewers didn't get their samples on time, which makes sense. I reviewed graphics cards for TweakTown for 10+ years before the new GPU God in Kosta took over, so I know this has happened first hand before. It's not new, and it gives those reviewers who got their cards late time to catch up and those who have the RTX 4080 SUPER more time to complete their testing.

This is something you don't see every day: a passively-cooled GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card with 10 x tower heatsinks taking care of cooling the graphics card.

Redditor "Everynametaken9" has modified his NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card, where he wanted to passively cool the GPU in the most monstrous way. In this journey, the Redditor used absolutely massive amounts of metal to keep it cool, and it looks insane.

Everynametaken9 was inspired by the growing "passive cooling" wave, experimenting with 10 different cooling heatsinks on the GPU, testing the thermal dissipation with the goal of "zero noise". There were some heavy DIY modifications installed, including a massive copper heatsink with gigantic dimensions: 2" x 3" x 12" -- yeah, the heatsink is 12 inches long! -- and then all of the 10 x CPU heatsinks strapped to the RTX 3080 Founders Edition.