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Microsoft has met with UK regulators to address antitrust concerns and explore possible remedies for the Microsoft-Activision merger approval process.

Following a persuasive meeting with European regulators, Microsoft is now meeting with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority in a bid to secure approval of its $68.7 billion merger with Activision. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft met with the CMA to tackle the agency's antitrust concerns while also discussing potential remedies (or negotiated adjustments to the deal itself and/or Microsoft's business conduct) that may be necessary for approval.

Reports indicate that Microsoft has already satisfied European regulators with 10-year contracts with competitors Nintendo and NVIDIA. In light of Microsoft's new multi-platform deals, the European Commission is now expected to approve the merger. The CMA, however, is seen as a major hurdle that may not be completely influenced by any approval decision from the EU.

Microsoft's recent offer to bring Call of Duty to competing platforms may be enough to satisfy European Commission regulators and signal merger approval.

Days ago, Microsoft counsel met with regulators to discuss key points of the Activision merger. During the hearing, Microsoft presented its recent 10-year deals with Nintendo and NVIDIA to show that it's willing to work with competitors. Microsoft's licensing deals may have persuaded European regulators and sealed the deal for approval.

Sources tell Reuters that the European Commission (EC) is now likely to approve the Microsoft-Activision merger. The EC had identified a few antitrust concerns with the merger, namely with Call of Duty's exclusivity and possible affects on multiple markets like the nascent game streaming infrastructure. Microsoft's compelling arguments made during the Brussels hearing have apparently swayed regulators and satisfied their concerns with the case.

We've got some initial sales numbers for the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D processor (from Europe), and the CPU looks to be selling well - perhaps to the surprise of some - although the flagship 7950X3D is a bit more of an enigma (we'll come back to that).

The latest figures from major German retailer MindFactory were shared on Twitter by TechEpiphany, showing how many units of the 7900X3D were sold on launch day - 360 to be precise. (Add your own seasoning with leaked sales stats, as ever).

That made this processor the third best-selling model at MindFactory, behind the top seller which was the 5800X3D (that shifted 490 units), and the 5700X (on 400 units).

If you've just bought an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D or 7900X3D processor, then there's a quickstart guide on getting up and running with these new X3D chips you might be interested to see.

Basically, this is a bunch of helpful tips AMD has put together in order to facilitate a smooth installation of your shiny new 3D V-Cache-toting CPU, and to ensure it's working to the best of its abilities.

The gist of the preparation work is to make sure you have an up-to-date version of Windows 10 or 11, meaning in the case of Windows 11 you want version 21H2 build 22000.1455 or better, or with Windows 10 version 1903 build 19044.2546 or newer.

Those looking to trade in an old iPhone when buying a new one - or a used Mac in the same scenario - will be interested to learn that Apple will pay out more cash for their hardware in the US, at least in some cases.

No, there hasn't been an uptick in cash pay-outs across the board, but iPhone 13 and 12 owners are getting more dollars for their handsets with some models.

As Mark Gurman (of Bloomberg fame) pointed out on Twitter, those models are the iPhone 13 Pro Max which will now score you up to US$600 (rather than a maximum of US$570), and the iPhone 13 Pro which is now at US$500 (up from US$470). Finally, the iPhone 12 Pro Max will now net you a return of US$420 (an increase from US$400).

One of the most famous investors has warned of "terrible consequences for America" if President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan comes to fruition.

Michael Burry, known for one of the most ambitious trades in finance history (betting against the housing market ahead of the 2008 collapse), has taken to Twitter to share his thoughts on the rumblings of Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. The famed investor posted a series of tweets where he warned that if student loans are forgiven, it will lead to higher college tuition, a compounding debt crisis, and overall "terrible consequences".

Burry continued and wrote that a government bailout of student loan debt would only compound the overall issue. For those wondering, under Biden's proposed student loan forgiveness plan, student loan borrowers could get $20,000 wiped away from their overall debt. Currently, the Supreme Court is revising Biden's plan and will determine when federal student loan payments will resume following a nearly three-year COVID-19-related pause.

Elon Musk has indicated that he's interested in creating his own version of OpenAI's ChatGPT in order to rival the popular AI chatbot.

A new report from The Information goes into detail about AI researchers being contacted by Musk's team to develop a new version of OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to the report, Musk's team has already reached out to several developers regarding the purported project, and one of those researchers was Igor Babuschkin, a former senior AI researcher at Google's Deepmind, who was contacted for the position of lead developer on Musk's vision for the AI.

Details of Musk's new AI chatbot are scarce and hardly set in stone, but we can expect that it will be different from OpenAI's ChatGPT in certain aspects. Notably, Musk co-founded OpenAI back in 2015 but left the company in 2018. Since then, Musk has been quite vocal about how he believes the company has changed direction from its initial heading and why the company was created in the first place.

The new high-end mobile Ryzen 9 7945HX with 16 Zen 4 cores has been tested in the latest ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 over at Notebook Check. Initial benchmarks showcase multi-core performance faster than Intel's flagship Core i9-13980HX (inside an MSI Titan GT77).

Although the 5% lead might seem slight, it's all the more impressive because the Ryzen 9 7945HX tops out at 120W compared to the 150W and higher for the Intel Core i9-13980HX.

The tests included a range of popular CPU benchmarks, including the various versions of Cinebench, Blender, 7-Zip, and Geekbench. To get a more like-for-like comparison, the outlet limited the Intel CPU to 120W, and with that, the Cinebench R23 score was 22% higher on the AMD Ryzen 9 with the same power consumption.

The integrated RDNA graphics hardware inside AMD's latest Ryzen 7000 desktop CPU range features only 2 compute units with up to 0.563 TFLOPs of performance. It's the first time AMD put RDNA graphics inside a desktop CPU, but its addition was purely made to improve diagnostic capabilities and offer basic GPU functionality. Translation, it's not meant to be used to play games.

This, in a way, is almost like asking tech reviewers to do precisely that - and with the launch of the new (and impressive) AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU with 3D V-Cache technology, that's what happened over at PCMag. It seems that 3D V-Cache is brilliant for gaming, even in integrated RDNA GPU form, with performance gains in the region of 4X in 720p and 1080p.

The outlet tested four games; F1 22, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Bioshock Infinite, and Tomb Raider. Using the Ultra-Low preset in the visually demanding F1 22 and the average frame rate at 720p for the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU was an impressive 62 fps compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X's 19 fps. Which is playable, with the Ryzen 9 7950X3D also hitting 33 fps in 1080p. This puts its performance slightly faster or on par with the integrated graphics of the Intel Core i9-13900K.

Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake is an important CPU launch for Intel. It will be built on the company's new 7nm process and be its first "chiplet" processor with separate dies for CPU cores and integrated graphics. It's also expected to introduce AI capabilities, which are set to become a mainstay in all processing and gaming hardware in the future. It's also expected to launch later this year or early 2024.

And with that, a new leak by a reputable Intel leaker @leaf_hobby (which has since been deleted, so take all of this with a big ol' grain of salt) has revealed that Intel's 14th-generation Meteor Lake-S desktop processors list Windows 12 as a supported operating system.

The gap between Windows 10 and Windows 11 was around six years, but it's being reported that Microsoft is moving to a three-year cycle for Windows, which puts its potential release sometime in 2024. This adds some weight to Meteor Lake-S listing Windows 12 as a supported OS, as Microsoft's next major Windows release could arrive sooner than expected.

id Software's Doom from 1993 is an iconic release; arguably, it helped create and foster a brand-new game genre in the form of the first-person shooter. I know, Wolfenstein 3D came out first, and for many, that was the game that introduced them to the FPS, but Doom was a monster hit that spawned so many first-person shooters that instead of FPS, we called them "Doom clones."

The iconic status of the game is one of the reasons why it's become something of a meme to get the game running on hardware ranging from a calculator to a smart fridge and more. Syntiant's NDP200 (Neural Decision Processor) is an ultra-low power chip for AI with 26 GPIO pins and up to 100MHz speeds. And with that, its neural network was trained using VizDoom (a custom version of the game built for AI research) for a reasonably standard shooting sequence in the Doom style.

And it does so by drawing just 1 Milliwatt of power. That's 1/1000 of a Watt. This makes the GeForce RTX 4080's 320W over 300,000 times more power than what we see here, and that's pretty remarkable. Check it out in the video below.

Earlier this year at CES, Sony confirmed that its latest console, the PlayStation 5, had sold over 30 million units since its debut in late 2020. Although figures for Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S console, which similarly features AMD hardware in terms of CPU and an RDNA GPU, haven't been made official - it's agreed that Sony's PS5 is outselling its competition by a factor of 2:1.

According to analyst Sravan Kundojjala, if Xilinx results are excluded, Sony accounts for 20% of AMD's revenue - making it its largest customer. The other day, we reported that gaming revenue for NVIDIA and AMD is surprisingly close, considering NVIDIA's dominance in the desktop and laptop GPU space. Still, it's not hard to see why when you factor in the success of the PlayStation 5.

In terms of money, AMD sold over USD 3.7 billion in chips for PS5 consoles in 2022, as noted in the company's latest SEC filing. As demand for AMD's discrete GPUs for desktops (the Radeon line-up basically) has declined alongside the rest of the PC hardware market, it looks like console hardware is now making up the most significant share of AMD's gaming revenue.

FTC administrative law judge D. Michael Chappell orders Sony to mostly comply with Microsoft's subpoena for important documents and data relating to Microsoft-Activision merger defense.

Microsoft legal counsel is currently building a case that defends the proposed $68.7 billion buyout of Activision-Blizzard. Such a case requires lots of information on the video games industry, and both the FTC and the parties (Microsoft and Activision) have subpoenaed relevant players to attain the info, including non-parties like Valve, Nintendo, Google, and Take-Two Interactive.

As a complainant in the case, Sony is also involved in the process and has been subpoenaed by Microsoft; essentially Microsoft wants to use Sony's records to help systematically break apart Sony's allegations and debunk the FTC's antitrust complaints while also defending itself against any points that the FTC's Complaint Counsel may also make in the administrative court hearing in August.

Hitman developer IO Interactive is now making their dream game...and it has nothing to do with assassins or secret agents.

IO Interactive has officially confirmed the existence of Project Dragon, a fantasy game that the studio was rumored to be working on for Microsoft. While the game hasn't been formally announced, the Hitman dev did reveal that Project Fantasy (working title) is in active development and recruitment phases. IO was surprisingly candid about their vision for the game.

Project Fantasy is set in a new all-original IP and is described as a kind of dream come true for the studio. The game will hearken back to the old days of tabletop RPGs and focus on the traditional motifs of the genre: Monsters, magic, and adventurers of derring-do and bravery.

Apple has today increased the price of its iPhone batteries, making it more costly to put a brand new power source in anything from an iPhone 8 through to an iPhone 13. However, the iPhone 14 lineup hasn't been affected - because its $99 batteries were already more expensive than the others.

The battery price increases don't just affect iPhones, but they're the devices most likely to get new batteries. Price hiked can be found in the iPad and Mac lineups as well, however.

In terms of prices, batteries for iPhone 13 models now cost $89, which is $20 more than they cost yesterday. The iPhone 8 and earlier have had a similar price increase and now cost $69.

Qualcomm has today announced that it has managed to create the world's first GSMA-certified I Integrated SIM, or iSIM.

We're all familiar with the eSIM, an electronic version of the physical plastic SIM cards that have been used for decades. But the new iSIM technology takes things a step further.

While an eSIM requires a dedicated chip that can be installed into smartphones like the iPhone 14 and Samsung Galaxy S23, the iSIM works differently. Instead, an iSIM can be part of the SoC of the phone itself, which is normally left to house the CPU, GPU, and other key components.

The European Commission has extended its deadline to make an decision on the Microsoft-Activision merger.

European regulators have given an update on merger procedure timelines for the Microsoft-Activision case. The EC today announced that it has slightly delayed the deadline for its final decision on the games acquisition by 10 days, and regulators now have set a provisional decision deadline of April 25, 2023.

The EC's Activision-Blizzard merger register was recently updated with a notification that reads "deadline extended by 10 working days under article 10(3)2 on 01.03.2023."

Apple is looking at different ways to beef up the battery life of its smartwatch, according to an interview with an Apple executive, who also hinted that a new Mac Pro is inbound from the company.

Bob Borchers, who is VP of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple, talked to India Today, and when the subject of the Apple Watch came up, it was noted that battery life is something that could use a further boost.

Borchers admitted that battery longevity is obviously a tricky matter, as there's a very thorny balance to be achieved between adding cool new features - health-related functionality, for example, like the rumored incoming blood glucose monitoring - and keeping battery life at a good enough level.

Intel is putting the pedal to the metal in the graphics card market, with its Arc Alchemist products having drawn level with AMD's Radeon GPUs, according to some newly released figures.

This comes from analyst firm Jon Peddie Research (JPR), which produces quarterly reports on graphics card market share, measuring shipment quantities from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA.

The latest report pertains to Q4 of 2022, and it shows that NVIDIA is still by far the most dominant desktop GPU maker, which is no surprise to anyone, on 82%. However, Intel is now on 9%, equalling AMD's market share, meaning these two rivals to Team Green have split the remaining share down the middle.

Google has brought a new feature to its Pixel Watch, namely the ability to detect if the wearer has taken a tumble.

The watch uses its motion sensors combined with AI smarts to determine if a fall has occurred, and can differentiate between a hard fall, and say a more natural jolt or stumble. (It'll also pull in other data from the watch, presumably like your heart rate, which will doubtless spike in a nasty fall).

Then, if you aren't moving after the fall has happened for a certain length of time, the Pixel Watch can automatically call the emergency services, so you'll get the attention you need as quickly as possible.