Latest News - Page 903

AMD has formally announced new Ryzen Z1 and Ryzen Z1 Extreme processors designed for "handheld PC gaming consoles," like the upcoming ASUS ROG Ally, which will use the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. This is great news for the future of portable PCs as gaming consoles and will undoubtedly lead to several new devices in the coming years that will deliver incredible results.

With AMD RDNA 3 architecture-based graphics and "Zen 4" processing, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme features 8 cores and 16 threads with 12 AMD RDNA 3 Compute Units and 24 MB of cache. The baseline Ryzen Z1 features 6 cores and 12 threads with 4 AMD RDNA 3 Compute Units, and 22 MB of cache.

The Ryzen Z1 Extreme sounds particularly impressive, with AMD noting that it can deliver up to 8.6 TFLOPS of graphics performance - more than the AMD hardware found inside the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X. Designed for portable gaming handhelds that feature 1080p displays AMD has released the following in-game benchmark results for the Ryzen Z1 Series.

A Japanese company that's attempting to land the first private spacecraft on the surface of the Moon may have failed their mission, or at the very least, it's not looking good.

ispace launched its Hakuto-R spacecraft on the back of SpaceX's Falcon 9 in December 2022 and has been in a circular orbit around the Moon for quite some time. ispace announced that it was expecting that Hakuto-R would touch down on the surface of the Moon on April 25 after sharing some photos of the Moon and Earth that were snapped by the lander as it continued its long orbit.

ispace selected the northeastern quadrant of the Moon for its designated landing site as the location filled all necessary mission requirements, such as a viable surface for the spacecraft's landing technology, scientific exploration objectives, and various other objectives. The Japanese company took to its Twitter account and blog to write that the spacecraft was expected to land on the surface of the Moon at 1:40 am JST on April 26, 2023, but HAKUTO-R Mission Control Center located in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, is unable to confirm the success of the Lunar Lander.

With reports of AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors burning out and causing damage to the CPUs and motherboards, there are reports outlining what could be causing the issues. Earlier today, we reported that it looks to be related to overclocking SoC voltages.

The issue looks quite serious as the result is a damaged CPU and motherboard. Board partners like MSI and ASUS are releasing firmware updates designed to address the problems relating to the AM5 platform and AMD's new Ryzen 7000X3D processors with 3D V-Cache.

Voltage restrictions will minimize the chances of these processors experiencing physical damage to both the chip and motherboard socket. With several reports of the issue cropping up on Reddit, AMD has issued a statement (via Anandtech) below.

The release of Valve's Stream Deck has been something of a disruption in the PC gaming space. Even though it wasn't the first gaming handheld PC in the style of something like the Nintendo Switch, the ease of use, affordability, and console-like design have made it a runaway success.

And there's no better way to gauge the platform's success than by looking at the sheer number of peripherals and secondary devices designed for Valve's handheld. From docking stations to carry cases to new SSD drives. And now we can add Corsair's new MP600 MINI 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 2230 SSD to the list, a new storage solution that is "ideal for the Steam Deck and Microsoft Surface."

The 1TB capacity is aimed at Steam Deck owners, offering the best price-to-performance option for upgrading the internal NVMe SSD to house more game installs. As a PCIe Gen4 SSD, it provides up to 4,800 MB/s sequential read and writes performance - which would be an improvement even for the 512GB Steam Deck models.

Microsoft is seeing strong growth in subscription revenues, company CEO Satya Nadella has confirmed.

In a recent earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced that subscriptions like Xbox Game Pass generated nearly $1 billion in revenues during Microsoft's Q3 period (January - March 2023). Our data indicates that Xbox Game Pass could make up nearly 1/3rd, or around 32%, of total Xbox content and services revenues.

Xbox's content and services segment generated $3.105 billion during the Q3 period, helping offset a significant 30% drop in hardware sales. These metrics reinforce the Xbox brand's focus on subscriptions and content rather than raw hardware and console sales.

Our Dead Island 2 build should help you get through some of the tougher parts of the game, and provide some disgusting zombie-bashing action along the way.

Dead Island 2 isn't necessarily a hard game, but it does have its moments. There's parts of L.A. that are just crawling with the undead. Sometimes there's dozens of enemies on the screen at any given time. This simple build will help you survive the colorful nightmare world of Hell-A.

First things first: This build is a melee build focused on up-close-and-personal attacks. In fact, this build actually prioritizes your fists.

Xbox console sales are down 30% year-over-year, hitting the lowest revenue mark since the Xbox Series X/S consoles released in November 2020.

Microsoft just announced its Q3 Fiscal Year 2023 earnings report and the results aren't so good for Xbox hardware.

According to the data provided by Microsoft, total Xbox console sales revenues are down a staggering 30% from last year. Our records indicate that Xbox consoles generated around $508 million throughout the Q3 period (January - March 2023). This is the lowest point since the launch of the Xbox Series line of consoles during Microsoft's Q2 FY21 period.

We've just seen a couple of fresh nuggets from the rumor mill pertaining to Intel's Meteor Lake processors, and it turns out there may still be desktop models incoming - at least up to Core i5 chips.

VideoCardz picked up on this, first of all pointing out a piece of spillage from Intel itself, namely an Intel Design-In Tools web page for an 'LGA1851-MTL-S Interposer for the Gen5 VR Test Tool'.

MTL-S stands for Meteor Lake-S, meaning desktop Meteor Lake processors, and the existence of such a test tool at least hints that we might still see desktop chips released. Rather than more recent rumors which have suggested that it's likely that all we'll get this year is a Raptor Lake refresh. (Most recently, that's been the line of thinking from Moore's Law is Dead, though the YouTuber did note that he couldn't rule out Meteor Lake desktop for 2023).

Dead Island 2 has managed to sell 1 million copies in 3 days' time, making it one of the Embracer Group's most successful new games.

Gamers have been waiting 10 years for Dead Island 2, and it looks like people are showing up en masse for the horrifyingly violent zombie slasher. Deep Silver recently announced that Dead Island 2 has sold over 1 million copies since release, but we have to wonder...how many of those were old pre-orders?

Even still, Dead Island 2 remains one of (if not the) best zombie games of all time. We'll have a review up on TweakTown shortly as I've been taking my time with the game, but I can honestly say that it's rip-roaringly fun and shockingly grotesque. In short, it's a horror movie fan's dream.

ZeniMax Workers United, the second-ever video games labor union in the United States, has started collective bargaining discussions with Microsoft.

Back in January 2023, over 300 Quality Assurance (QA) workers at ZeniMax Media voted to form a union. Allied with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) labor group, Microsoft formally recognized the union shortly after the vote. Now the union has opened up talks with Microsoft regarding key issues that QA workers face in the industry, including low pay and long hours.

"Today, we are excited to announce that ZeniMax Workers United of CWA have started our first day of bargaining for our first ever contract with ZeniMax and Microsoft! IN SOLIDARITY!" the union wrote on its Twitter page.

SEGA of America employees are collecting with the intent to unionize and become the video games industry's third major worker's union, following other unions like those at Activision-Blizzard and ZeniMax.

Workers at SEGA of America's Irvine, California branch have grouped together to form a union known as AEGIS, or the Allied Employees Guild Improving SEGA. The collective includes some 144 workers from SEGA's North American branch across all job types, from QA to development.

Employees voted to unionize due to "wages that are below the industry average, weak benefits, and lack of paths to promotion" at SEGA of America. What's most interesting about this particular union is that SEGA is a Japanese company and the American branch is just a subsidiary, so there may be significant cultural gaps. SEGA has yet to comment on the matter, and according to integrated reports, the entirety of SEGA Sammy employs over 7,000 workers.

AMD Ryzen 7000 processors have been burning out - literally dying, and in some cases, there are reports of them damaging the motherboard they're in, too - and a reason why this is happening has now been put forward.

A report from Tom's Hardware informs us that the root cause is SoC voltages being jacked up to unsafe levels in affected CPUs. That's according to multiple industry sources who wish to stay anonymous for the time being.

Naturally, we must remain cautious around this as it's not an official declaration of the problem from AMD, but those sources are all saying the same thing, and are backed up by a statement from motherboard maker ASUS (made to expert overclocker Der8auer).

If you want to run Diablo IV at 4K resolution on the highest settings, you'll need quite the gaming PC - but the good news is that the system requirements are far more forgiving lower down the resolution food chain.

The headline spec for 4K at Ultra graphics details running at a fluid 60 frames per second (fps) demands 32GB of system RAM and an NVIDIA RTX 3080 on the graphics card front, or an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. (Of course, if you want DLSS 3 to speed up those frame rates, you'll need an RTX 4000 GPU).

That's a pretty steep hill to climb, particularly as not all that many folks have pushed out the boat to 32GB of RAM just yet. (Granted, the percentage is climbing going by the latest Steam hardware survey, but still, only 23.5% of gamers have 32GB of system memory or more, with most still on 16GB).

OpenAI's ChatGPT has pioneered AI-powered chatbots such as Microsoft's Bing Chat or Google's Bard. But how much does it cost developers of these chatbots to keep them up and running?

A new report posted on The Information cites Dylan Patel, chief analyst at semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis, who said that OpenAI could be paying as much as $700,000 a day to keep ChatGPT servers up. So, why does ChatGPT cost so much to run? It's relatively simple. ChatGPT requires a large amount of power to analyze its database and create an appropriate response for a prompt. Patel spoke to Insider and said that his initial estimate was based on OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model, which is far less powerful than OpenAI's most-recent model, GPT-4.

Patel says that GPT-4 would cost the company much more money simply because that language model has many times more parameters. Furthermore, speaking to Forbes, Patel and Afzal Ahmad, another analyst from SemiAnalysis, said that it would have likely cost tens of millions of dollars to train ChatGPT's underlying language models, but that cost is nothing compared to operational expenses or inference costs. The analysts said that ChatGPT's inference costs "exceed the training costs on a weekly basis".

SpaceX recently conducted its first orbital test flight of Starship, the rocket poised to be the transportation method astronauts will take to walk on the surface of Mars.

Starship's first orbital test flight took place on April 20, and only four minutes after liftoff, SpaceX was forced into initiating the flight termination sequence that resulted in the nearly 400-foot rocket exploding mid-air. The call to terminate the mission came after Starship's first-stage booster, Super Heavy, failed to detach from the second-stage spacecraft, causing the entire rocket to begin to tumble, lose altitude, and ultimately, fail its mission.

Despite this tragic ending, SpaceX employees, along with company CEO Elon Musk rejoiced at what was achieved in the short amount of time Starship was airborne, with Musk taking to Twitter to congratulate all SpaceX employees on a great launch. So, why was SpaceX happy even though Starship was intentionally exploded? It's simple, SpaceX, along with Elon Musk, believed there was about a 50/50 chance Starship would even make it off the launch pad. Additionally, SpaceX was just happy to see Starship reach a height above its launch tower.

A Japanese company will attempting to secure first place in successfully landing private spacecraft on the surface of the Moon.

The Japanese company is ispace, and the spacecraft that is scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Moon is called Hakuto-R, which was recently launched by SpaceX's workhorse launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 rocket. Hakuto-R was launched in December 2022 and is currently in a circular orbit around the Moon at approximately 62 miles above its surface. ispace took to its official Twitter account to share an image of the surface of the Moon at 62 miles. The image was captured by Hakuto-R's on-board camera at 4:32 am on April 15 (JST).

The images didn't stop there as ispace shared an image of the lander snapping a photograph of Earth during the recent solar eclipse. This image, which can be seen below, was also taken at approximately 62 miles above the surface of the moon. As for the landing, ispace has shared an image of its designated primary landing site, which is located in the northeastern quadrant of the Moon. According to ispace, this location meets all of the technical specifications of the lander's technology, scientific exploration objectives, and mission requirements for its other customers.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has experienced a glitch in its Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the instrument used to capture light in the wavelength range of 5 to 28 microns.

NASA has taken to its blog on its website to explain that during Webb's routine monthly performance monitoring and calibration check, NASA engineers noticed a discrepancy in the data Webb's MIRI instrument was observing and what has already been well documented. To calibrate Webb's instrument, NASA engineers compare the brightness of standard stars that have already been cataloged to what Webb's instruments are observing.

Throughout this process, the data discrepancy was discovered, and further analysis was conducted on MIRI's Medium Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) mode. NASA noticed that since Webb has been in operation, the amount of light being registered by MIRI's sensors when Webb is in the MRS mode has decreased. NASA notes that there is no risk to the MIRI instrument itself and that there has been zero impact on all other observation modes within MIRI and on Webb's other scientific instruments.

Twitter's owner Elon Musk has shifted gears from discussing Twitter's legacy blue checkmark fiasco to promoting his social media platform's revised Creator Subscription Program.

The social media platform calls the new feature "Subscriptions" and enables creators to opt in to subscribing directly to a specific creator in return for exclusive access to bonus content, exclusive previews, tweets, subscriber-only Twitter Spaces, and other perks. Essentially, Subscriptions are very similar to Only Fans, or Patreon, in the sense that fans are able to directly support their favorite creators in return for exclusive content, features, experiences, etc.

To promote Twitter's new way to support creators on its platform, Twitter owner Elon Musk took to his personal Twitter account with a screenshot of his account UI. The screenshot showed he is following 240 accounts, has 136.4 million followers, and has 24,700 paying subscribers. Navigating to Musk's subscription option on his account, it can be seen that he charges $4 for exclusive access to "this and that". A calculation of 24,700 x $4 gives us an approximate figure on how much Musk is making from his Twitter subscribers, which is just shy of $100,000 per month at $98,800/month.

Earlier today, we reported that the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti could potentially go head-to-head with AMD's desktop Radeon RX 7600 Series, with launches happening towards the end of May or early June.

According to reports, the Radeon RX 7600 is expected to be revealed at Computex 2023, which aligns with the launch dates, with AMD partners like ASRock, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX all set to showcase models.

Naturally, following up the December 2022 launch of the flagship AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX models with the mainstream Radeon RX 7600 begs the question: Where are the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT?

We're more than familiar with TEAMGROUP's (or TEAM) T-Force line-up of memory for high-performance and gaming at TweakTown, with the company's T-Force Delta RGB DDR5-7200 32GB Dual-Channel Memory Kit earning our Editor's Choice award earlier this year due to its performance, thermals, and stylish design.

And speaking of stylish, TEAMGROUP has a new range of DDR5 memory designed for creators looking for reliability and performance under the T-CREATE brand. And it's no wonder T-CREATE Expert DDR5 Desktop Memory has won the Red Dot Design Award 2023, as the memory modules feature a minimal and efficient one-piece cooling design featuring high-conductivity thermal silicone for heat dissipation.

Red Dot Design Awards are highly coveted in the hardware space as it points to a stylish physical look and is backed up by hardware that works as intended. The T-CREATE Expert DDR5 range ticks both boxes, with 32 GB and 64 GB memory kits available with impressive speeds/frequency - 6000, 6400, and 7200.