Latest News - Page 780

Netflix has just announced some price hikes to its Basic and Premium subscriber plans while keeping the prices of its ad-supported and Standard plans the same as they are now. The last monthly subscription price hike was in early 2022, so it's been a good while since Netflix increased its prices.

Netflix butchered its Basic plan earlier this year, but will now (as a grandfathered customer) cost you $12 per month -- up from $10 per month -- while the Premium subscription is now $23 per month, up from $20 per month. The ad-supported and Standard plans will remain the same, at $7 and $15.49 monthly, respectively.

Recently, the streaming giant cracked down on password-sharing, which seems to have resulted in more monthly subscriptions. Netflix has reported 247.15 million subscribers, which is a chunky 10% annual increase. Netflix also reported a paid net subscriber addition of 8.76 million for Q3 2023, the biggest increase of the year in fact.

Samsung's upcoming 5th generation HBM3e memory product has been codenamed "Shinebolt," with the marketing and development of Samsung's new HBM3e memory catching up to the great work SK hynix has been doing with its own next-gen memory.

According to sources at Business Korea, Samsung Electronics is currently shipping out HBM3e prototypes to some of its clients for quality approval (QA) testing. Samsung is reportedly shipping out 24 gigabit (Gb) chips in 8 layers (8-Hi), but will soon have a 36GB HBM3e product with 12 layers (12-Hi).

Samsung's new HBM3e "Shinebolt" memory will have a 50% performance boost over HBM3, with a huge 1.228TB/sec (12280MB/sec) memory bandwidth. The future is AI; we all know it, with NVIDIA's crazy-fast AI GPUs needing more and much faster VRAM. This is where Samsung's new HBM3e "Shinebolt" memory shines -- pun not intended, but it just works so well here -- capacity and bandwidth.

If you're one of the Windows 11 users who frequents the Microsoft Store with any regularity, you may have noticed some improvements having been made in recent times - with the latest tweak speeding up loading times.

Those whose patience was wearing a bit thin at waiting for the store to actually appear after clicking its icon will doubtless be pleased to hear that it now loads around three times faster.

That's according to one of Microsoft's software engineers working on the store as part of the Windows team, who posted on X (formerly Twitter) to share the good news about the latest version of the app (22309).

Spider-Man 2 is due out for the PS5 in just two days now, and as you may be aware, there's a day-one patch for the game - and Insomniac has just shared some new info about it on X (formerly Twitter).

While we don't get to see any release notes, the tweet (spotted by Wccftech) reminds us that those who have plumped for a digital copy of Spider-Man 2 will get the version 1.001.002 patch included with the pre-load, so there's nothing to worry about on that score. They'll be good to go with the fully patched game from the off.

Those who have bought a disc copy, though, will want to download the update on launch day to get the "best experience" of the game.

Since the iPhone 15 launched, you can't have missed the controversy around the screen and reports of 'burn-in' - or more accurately image retention - with some models.

This has been a pretty worrying episode as the provided pics from those suffering the gremlin in question have showed some quite nasty looking image retention indeed.

Amidst theories that this was a hardware problem, and a fault in the OLED screen, it turns out that it's an issue that can be fixed on the software front.

The company behind the software that took the world by storm, ChatGPT, have announced a new piece of software that is specifically designed to detect if an image was created by AI or not.

The new software was announced at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference, which was conducted on Tuesday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, along with Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, spoke at the event where Murati explained the new software is currently being internally tested at OpenAI and that results indicate that this new software is "99% reliable" at detecting if an image is AI-generated.

It should be noted that there are many AI image detection tools already floating around the web. However, none of them are reliable, the same way there are no reliable AI-text-generation detectors, which some teachers wrongfully used to check student work. However, OpenAI is the leading company in the AI-tool space and seemingly knows more about AI than any other company. With the accreditation comes some hope that this new software will actually work.

Nintendo has revealed what Hogwarts Legacy will look like when it's running on the Nintendo Switch, only weeks out from the title's launch.

There are undoubtedly many Nintendo Switch gamers who want to get their hands on Hogwarts Legacy when it releases on the handheld console on November 14. However, some gamers may want to check out what the title looks like before making a purchase, as there are major expected graphical downgrades to get a game such as Hogwarts Legacy running on the Nintendo Switch.

Nintendo has taken to its website to share six screenshots of in-game, and it's immediately clear there have been some big graphical downgrades. It should be noted that the Nintendo Switch version of Hogwarts Legacy was announced back in March 2022, and unlike the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions, which only suffered a short delay, the Nintendo Switch version has been delayed more than a year.

Chang Guang Satellite Technology, the first commercial remote sensing satellite company in China, has announced its successfully beamed down data at 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps).

A new report from South China Morning Post states that one of Chang Guang Satellite Technology's satellites has successfully sent remote sensing images from a Jilin-1 satellite to a vehicle-mounted ground station. The test pushed data transfer speeds to 10 Gbps, which converts to 1.25 gigabytes per second, or 1,250 megabytes per second. Imagine looking at your game downloading at that kind of speed.

It should be noted that the type of vehicle this data was sent to hasn't been disclosed, nor its capabilities, which may influence the overall speeds achieved. Furthermore, Chang Guang Satellite Technology operates more than 108 satellites, and the satellite that beamed down the data was only launched in December 2022.

A leaked benchmark of AMD's next-gen desktop flagship, theoretically the Ryzen 8950X processor, has popped up online.

The leak comes from YouTuber RedGamingTech (RGT), who touches more broadly on Zen 5 desktop, too, noting that clock speeds will be dialed back with the next-gen CPUs, and AMD is focusing on beefing up IPC.

As for the leak itself, it's of an engineering sample (obviously) of the 8950X which has been run through its paces on Cinebench 2024.

AMD has launched new GPUs this week, but in a strange move, it's two new models in the RDNA 2 powered Radeon RX 6000 Series, the Radeon RX 6750 GRE 10GB ($269) and Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12GB ($289).

These GRE or Golden Rabbit Edition graphics cards are available now in China, with AMD also providing prices in USD - pointing to these cards making their way to more regions soon. Like the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, these cards will likely be limited to system integrators outside China.

What makes this release confusing, outside of the fact that AMD is releasing previous-gen RDNA 2 hardware, is that although they share the same name, these new Radeon RX 6750 GRE 10GB and 12GB GPUs feature completely different specs and hardware. It's reminiscent of the GeForce RTX 4080 12GB and 16GB reveal from NVIDIA, which saw the company rename the 12GB model to become the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti to avoid confusion.

The social media platform formerly called Twitter, now called X, is testing its "Not A Bot" subscription method that will force new users to the platform to sign up for $1 USD a year or suffer from "read-only" account restrictions.

X took to the blog side of its website to announce the "Not A Bot" subscription program that will be rolled out across two countries. This latest test is designed to reduce the number of spam and fake accounts that are popping up across the platform and is part of the overarching effort from both X, and its owner, Elon Musk, to reduce the number of fake accounts on the platform to as little as possible.

The new program will force new users in New Zealand and the Philippines to perform two steps before they are granted access to X. The first will be an active mobile phone number entered into the account details. The second will be to select a subscription plan. The "Not A Bot" subscription plan is a $1 annual fee that enables actions such as: post content, Like posts, Reply, Repost and Quote other accounts' posts, Bookmark posts. Other subscription plans also include X Premium, which unlocks a bunch of bonus features.

Over the past several weeks, there have been a few different rumors surrounding Nintendo's next-generation console, which is presumably the "Nintendo Switch 2".

Previous rumors about the Nintendo Switch 2 were very positive as they pointed to a significant performance that can be linked to the console purportedly being powered by an Ampere-based NVIDIA GPU that will enable DLSS. The performance hike would make the Nintendo Switch 2 comparable to the PS4 and Xbox One. It was only yesterday a Nintendo patent surfaced online that resembled a console design that looked like a complete step backward, as it didn't include Joy-Con controllers, only has one joystick, four front-facing buttons, and two shoulder buttons.

Now, another rumor is making the rounds, and it can be traced back to the XboxEra podcast, where co-host Nick Baker shared some information acquired from an unnamed source seemingly familiar with Nintendo's next console. The rumor is that there will be two versions of the Nintendo Switch 2 - one capable of playing Switch games and another that can't. So, if this rumor is true, Nintendo will be releasing one console that comes with backward compatibility and one that won't. Likely through one Switch 2 having cartridges and the other being purely digital.

A team of astronomers detected a large outburst from a massive volcanic comet called 12P/Pons-Brooks, more commonly called simply 12P.

The outburst resulted in the comet becoming dozens of times brighter over the course of a few days, and according to reports, the brightness increase can be attributed to light reflecting off the expanded coma. So, what caused this outburst or explosion? Solar radiation, or heat from the Sun, heats up the exterior of comets such as 12P, which are cryovolcanic comets or cold volcano comets.

The interior of the comet then slowly heats up as well, creating an immense amount of pressure that then bursts out a weak point in the comet's outer shell, shooting out the frozen innards into the surrounding space. Depending on the size of the explosion and the damage it caused, comets such as 12P can make strange shapes with their increasing in brightness.

The small helicopter situated on the surface of Mars has broken its ground-speed record, which marks the fastest NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has traveled during a flight.

It was only last week that NASA announced it was going to attempt to break its ground-speed record that it set back on Flight 60, and now the space agency has done it, with Ingenuity traveling up 22 mph (10 m/s) for 121 seconds, compared to the previous record of 17.8 mph (8 m/s) for 124.18 seconds. NASA has continuously pushed the limitations of flight on another planet with Ingenuity, and with 62 flights and counting, we can expect even more records to be broken in the future.

According to NASA's flight log for Ingenuity, Flight 62 consisted of the small helicopter traveling 880 feet horizontally at a maximum altitude of 59 feet. Ingenuity traveled 22.4 mph for 121.1 seconds in a North Eastern direction. Ingenuity will continue its primary mission of imaging the surface of the Red Planet and relaying those images back to NASA headquarters, where they undergo analysis to identify any valuable scientific prospects to inspect and to map out a favorable path for Ingenuity's companion, NASA's Perseverance rover.

Over the weekend, millions of people around the world looked upward for the annular solar eclipse - a cosmological phenomenon that occurs when the moon lines up perfectly between the Sun and Earth.

In some locations around the world people were able to catch the "ring of fire" phenomenon, an effect that takes place when the moon covers the entire middle section of the Sun, blotting out the majority of the light it emits and only leaving visible a yellow/orange outer ring. While this perspective of the event would truly be incredible, another unique perspective has been captured from 1 million miles away by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR).

This satellite lies 1 million miles from Earth and from its position, offers an interesting perspective of the solar eclipse, perhaps one that not many people have seen before. From the above image, you can see the area of the planet that is currently being covered the shadow of the moon. The region of the planet covered in this black patch is seeing the solar eclipse event take place, and it will move further southward over the course of the day.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit 2023 is underway. KIOXIA is showcasing its extensive data center and enterprise SSD solutions lineup alongside next-generation technology, Software-Enabled Flash technology, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Its presence at the Summit is about connecting and collaborating with customers focused on the same goals across enterprise and hyperscale data centers.

Collaboration is one of the key reasons why the Software-Enabled Flash technology movement and KIOXIA's involvement are so impressive. Spearheaded by the Linux Foundation, Software-Enabled Flash technology is all about open-source SSDs designed to meet the needs of hyperscale environments like the cloud. It gives developers direct control to maximize the benefit of flash memory - KIOXIA's specialty.

KIOXIA's presence includes a broad portfolio of products, including low-latency KIOXIA XD7P Series EDSFF E1.S SSDs and the new PCIe 5.0 KIOXIA CD8P Series U.2 Data Center NVMe SSDs.

NVIDIA is expected to add 3 more members to the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPU family, with the purported GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, and finally, the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER graphics cards.

The new rumor is coming from @hongxing2020, which reliably leaked that NVIDIA would be renaming its GeForce RTX 4080 12GB graphics card, which was correct in the end and was then "unlaunched" and then turned into the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti in the end. Now, the same leaker is talking about the refreshed "SUPER" family of graphics cards in the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, and finally, the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER.

NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 is a big chunk faster than the GeForce RTX 4080, with no GPU in between those two gaming beasts. The introduction of the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER -- or even the GeForce RTX 4080 Ti -- makes sense in this position. We've heard rumors of the RTX 4080 Ti using the AD102 GPU, packing 20GB of GDDR6X, which positions it between the 16GB on the RTX 4080 and the 24GB on the RTX 4090.

Intel's next-gen Meteor Lake CPU platform has popped its head up just as the company is launching the 14th Gen Core "Raptor Lake Refresh" processors today, with our review on the flagship Core i9-14900K available for your reading pleasure.

Anyway, the new Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 9 185H mobile processor has been spotted flexing its new mobile CPU muscle during a Geekbench 5.4 benchmark run. If you were expecting surprising results, where you thought the new Core Ultra 9 185H would be kick-ass? You'd be wrong. It can't keep up with lower-end CPUs that have been on the market for years, at least in its current form.

Intel's new Core Ultra 9 185H mobile processor benched in Geekbench saw a single-score result of between 1773 and 1849 points while providing a multi-core score of between 9787 and 9832 points. This means the new Core Ultra 9 185H mobile processor -- at least in these early Geekbench scores -- can't even beat an older Core i9-12900H processor (which scores 1832 points in single-core and then 12710 points in multi-core Geekbench).

AMD's new Anti-Lag+ technology has been a mess for weeks now, seeing Radeon RX 7000 series GPU owners experiencing game crashes, problems, and even VAC banning on Steam for Counter-Strike 2 players. It's been a headache, and now so much so that AMD has completely disabled Anti-Lag+ tech on its recent Radeon GPU drivers. Download the new 23.10.2 drivers here.

The company previously removed the old drivers -- 23.10.1 driver -- causing the issues with Anti-Lag+ and multiple games, while the new 23.10.2 driver disables Anti-Lag+ completely. This means that games that were experiencing problems with Anti-Lag+ were enabled, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, PUBG, Apex Legends, and Counter-Strike 2.

Anti-cheating algorithms in games were detecting Anti-Lag+ as hacking-related, banning gamers across the world with an AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPU. AMD's move of removing Anti-Lag+ from its Radeon GPU drivers is somewhat strange but hints at what should be the fact that AMD shouldn't have launched Anti-Lag+ in this state without knowing the consequences of its action for gamers.

The US Department of Commerce has announced new plans to prevent more AI GPUs from shipping to China, with the Biden administration implementing new rules to close up some of those loopholes after the US sanctions on China were placed on AI chips last year.

The initial AI GPUs that were banned were the NVIDIA H100, the number one choice for any firm working on AI, while Chinese companies weren't restricted from buying cut-down NVIDIA GPUs in the form of the H800 and A800 AI GPUs. The US restrictions didn't apply to these GPUs, but the new rules are banning those lower-end AI GPUs as well.

NVIDIA won't be the only company affected, but Intel and AMD will feel a little pain from the latest additions to the US sanctions on AI GPUs shipping into China. Not only that, but senior Biden administration officials have eluded to plans to extend the list of semiconductor manufacturing equipment subject to US restrictions. Gaming consoles, smartphones, and other consumer products with high-end chips inside of them will remain unaffected by US sanctions.