Latest News - Page 956

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti will reportedly launch with a TGP of only 160W, which would be 20% less than the Amper generation's GeForce RTX 306 Ti. Power efficiency has been one of the most impressive things of the new Ada Lovelace generation, so it's cool to see the power draw in the mid-range coming down.

The still-to-be-revealed GeForce RTX 4070 (the non-Ti model) will also feature a lower power rating than its Amper counterpart, with a TGP of only 200W. This news arrived courtesy of an established GPU leaker of pre-release information - @kopite7kimi.

We also got word that the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti will use the AD106-350-A1 chip, 4352 CUDA Cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. It remains to be seen how well the RTX 4060 Ti performs against the RTX 3060 Ti. Still, as that GPU ended up being one of the most popular of the Ampere generation due to its impressive performance and reasonable price point, it wouldn't be unusual to expect a decent gen-on-gen performance uplift. Plus, all the benefits of the 40 Series, like DLSS 3.

A rogue asteroid has been spotted photo-bombing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's field of view as it attempts to observe a nearby galaxy.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has taken to its website to explain the "visitor to a galaxy", as displayed in the above image. The above image was captured by NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope that was pointed at the small galaxy known as UGC 7983, which appears as a hazy cloud of light in the center of the image.

This small galaxy is located approximately 30 million light-years from Earth within the constellation Virgo and is categorized as a dwarf irregular galaxy that is believed to be one of the earliest galaxies to form in the universe.

The BBC has come out and publicly apologized for accidentally playing pornographic sounds while conducting its live coverage of the FA Cup football match. The publication says it was the victim of a prank.

The prank involved a mobile phone playing pornographic sounds loudly over the air while host Gary Lineker was chatting about the game. In the above video, you can see the pranksters communicating with what seems like to be an inside man that stuck the mobile phone to the back of the set. While the host is chatting away, the prankster proceeds to call the phone at the set, engaging its ringtone, which was pornographic sounds. The phone was called multiple times, and each time it was clearly heard over the broadcast.

Notably, the prank occurred just before kick-off in the third-round replay fixture between the Wolves and Liverpool. As the sounds started to be heard, Lineker looked somewhat startled by what he was hearing, resulting in him looking around briefly and continuing with what he was saying. As the sounds continued, the host tried not to laugh at what he was hearing, eventually saying he thinks someone is sending something to someone's phone and that he doesn't know if the sounds were heard by viewers at home.

A new report claims the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accidentally leaked the personal information of many cryptocurrency miners.

The claims come from the Washington Examiner, which published a report that stated it had seen screenshots of the SEC failing to bbc all of the people involved in its investigation into the blockchain company, Green. As the report states, the SEC has been privately investigating Green for years and communicated with many of its members that cooperated with the regulatory body. Green's users answered all of the SEC's questions, and on January 6 the regulatory body failed to bbc all 650 users in an email, leaking their personal information online.

Notably, the information that was leaked contained personal data such as names, email addresses, and more. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have said that the leaked information is more than enough for a hacker to access the "nodes", or computers used to mine the Green cryptocurrency token. These nodes are used to verify transactions of the coin across the network, and according to crypto enthusiasts, they are now compromised.

Elon Musk acquired Twitter back in late October for a hefty $44 billion, and now the SpaceX and Tesla CEO is facing his first bill that is said to be due at the end of the month.

Musk received financing for the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter through several banks such as Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and Mitsubishi. Now, the first installment of interest payments related to the $13 billion of debt Musk used to complete his takeover is about to be due, with reports stating that the Tesla CEO will need to pay $1.5 billion in annual interest payments. Notably, this $13 billion in debt acquired from the aforementioned banks is held by Twitter, not Musk personally.

However, Musk made a personal investment in Twitter, with Musk's equity in the company amounting to $26 billion. In the event of Twitter declaring bankruptcy, Musk's $26 billion position will be completely wiped out. Since the SpaceX CEO took over the company, he has been rushing to stop Twitter from hemorrhaging money, with the new CEO proceeding to cut costs wherever he can. More than half of the staff that was at Twitter prior to Musk's takeover have been fired, and the entire company has experienced a complete reshuffling.

A team of astronomers has used the Green Bank Telescope to capture what is now being described as the most detailed image of the Moon ever taken from Earth.

A new report from BGR has claimed that the new images of the surface of the Moon by the Green Bank Telescope are the most detailed photographs humans have captured from the surface of Earth. The Green Bank Observatory took to its website to explain that it used the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to capture the highest-resolution radar images of the Moon, which will be used to pave the way for next-generation radar systems that'll study planets, asteroids and other moons within our solar system.

The press release states that a low-power radar transmitter, capable of 700 watts of output power at 13.9 GHz, was tested on the GBT. Astronomers aimed the telescope at the Moon's Tycho crater "An image of the Tycho crater was captured with a 5-meter resolution, showing unprecedented detail of the Moon's surface from Earth. "It's pretty amazing what we've been able to capture so far, using less power than a common household appliance," emphasizes Patrick Taylor, radar division head for GBO and NRAO."

As the rumors indicated yesterday, Apple revealed its new line of M2 chips inside of next-generation 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros.

The company conducted a presentation where it introduced a new Mac Mini and MacBook Pro that feature Apple's updated line of M2 chips. According to the announcement, the latest MacBook Pro was displayed running on the M2 Pro and M2 Max SOCs (system on a chip). More specifically, the new M2 Pro is built on a 5nm process, sports 40 billion transistors, and features 10/12 cores along with 32 GB of unified memory. The M2 Max is where Apple has slapped all of the bells and whistles, with the company throwing in 12 Cores and 96 GB of unified memory.

So, where is the biggest difference? The GPU configurations. Notably, the M2 Pro features 19 GPU cores with a larger L2 cache that comes with a 30% performance increase when compared to the M1 Pro. The M2 Max steps things up again with a whopping 38 GPU cores, a large cache, and the same performance increase of 30% compared to the M1 Max. Here's where things get a little dicey.

Walking into a Porsche dealership to buy a gaming chair sounds like a phrase you'd type into an AI image generator for a bit of fun. As it turns out, the new Porsche gaming chair is real and expensive to boot - with the new RECARO × Porsche Gaming Chair Limited Edition launching at a retail price of USD 2499.

Now, that might make you do a double take, but it's worth noting that this collaboration is exciting. RECARO is a company dating back to the early days of cars, where it even designed the seats found in the iconic Porsche 911. So you're getting a premium slice of gaming chair action here. And as it made its debut at the recent virtual 24-hour Le Mans race, it's been designed with esports and racing games in mind.

Which comes across in the product's description.

With NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops making their debut next month - covering everything from RTX 4090 down to RTX 4050 - prices for select models from MSI have appeared over at retailer Microcenter. With a high-end RTX 4090 powered laptop costing as much as USD 4700.

That's for the premium MSI Titan GT77HX that includes an RTX 4090 GPU, i9-13980HX CPU, 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, and a 17.3" UHD Mini LED IPS 144Hz Display. And with a high-end 4K display and DDR5, no doubt the cost comes from more than the inclusion of an RTX 4090 laptop GPU.

On the opposite end of the product line-up, the MSI Katana 15 includes an RTX 4050 GPU, i7-13620H CPU, 16GB DDR5-4800 RAM, and a 15.6" Full HD IPS 144Hz Display. The price for this model is listed at USD 1200, which is similar to the model featuring an RTX 4060 GPU.

The rise of AI-generated art has been impressive, with several services and tools opening the door to near-limitless and near-instantaneous creations. Without going into too much detail, like all AI-based applications, it's all about learning from vast quantities of sources and styles.

And with that, it's something of a legal grey area, as for AI-generated art to be a powerful tool, it needs art created by humans to work from. This makes the news of popular image source Getty Images suing Stability AI a notable moment in the rise of AI-generated art.

Getty Images claims that the company's Stable Diffusion platform has 'unlawfully' scraped millions of images from its site, infringing copyright.

It's only a matter of time before NVIDIA lifts the lid on the next Ada Lovelace desktop GPU, the GeForce RTX 4070, which is rumored to launch later this quarter. But this hasn't stopped the RTX 4070 logo from appearing on marketing materials from GALAX for some cool-looking EX Gamer White and SG White edition graphics cards.

Weirdly the official marketing materials showcase both logos on the same box, as captured by Videocardz.com, where we can see RTX 4070 Ti on the side of the box and RTX 4070 on the front.

Historically Ti and non-Ti models share similar specs and cooling configurations, so this could be a case of someone over at GALAX putting the wrong logo on the box. Mistakes from GALAX like this aren't uncommon either, as the company made the mistake of creating a banner for an RTX 4090 Ti HOF GPU that doesn't exist. Yet.

Square Enix's new interesting-looking fantasy IP Forspoken demands some serious PC horsepower.

Japanese games typically aren't very well optimized on PC, and that seems to be the case for a few Square Enix titles (remember NieR: Automata's issues?) Now it looks like the publisher's latest game Forspoken could be affected as well, which makes sense considering Luminous Productions titles are pretty intensive.

The devs just released Forspoken's PC spec requirements and they're pretty hefty. The game will require at minimum an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB of VRAM, an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, and 16GB of RAM to deliver...720p at 30FPS. That's rough performance but the spec-perf ratio reflects how the PC gaming world is moving on.

Activision-Blizzard games will be taken offline in mainland China next week as negotiations with publisher NetEase have terminated.

Back in November, Activision announced that it will be suspending many of its games in China because it couldn't iron out a deal with Chinese games juggernaut NetEase. American companies typically team up with a Chinese-based publisher to navigate China's strict mandates on video games, and that's how Activision and NetEase started working together. Now it looks like NetEase is not interested in working with Activision to publish key Blizzard games like Overwatch and Diablo III.

As reported by Reuters, Blizzard's Chinese division has issued a statement saying that NetEase has rejected a deal that would extend their partnership by six months. The deal would ensure that Blizzard games would not be taken offline until July 2023. While NetEase hasn't issued a statement on this new deal, the company did say Activision-Blizzard's previous terms were unacceptable and that it tried to negotiate a better offer.

The European Commission is preparing to publish a Statement of Objections against the $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision merger, sources tell Reuters.

European regulators will soon file a particular document that outlines all of the issues that the commission has regarding the Microsoft-Activision merger. This brief is called a Statement of Objections and is essentially akin to the Issues Statement that the UK's Competition and Markets Authority filed months ago. We'll see the commission discuss possible antitrust and anti-competitive worries with the deal, and how the deal could affect vertical or horizontal markets--as well as a deep dive into data points that reflect the overall performance metrics of Xbox, PlayStation, and Activision Blizzard King games in the European Union.

It should be noted this is standard operating procedure to any deals or mergers that the European Commission is looking closely at. Needless to say, the Microsoft-Activision merger will not be outright approved at the European Commission, and lawyers from both Microsoft and Activision will each prepare their own documents that attempt to counter or clarify the claims made in the Statement of Objections.

Elon Musk's private jet was very active throughout 2022, with the Tesla and SpaceX CEO taking more than 100 flights in total.

Musk has publicly stated many times that he is attempting to save the planet through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Tesla and the electric vehicles it produces are a reflection of these statements, and it quickly became a pioneer of the electric vehicle industry. However, some question Musk's effort for a cleaner world and point to the emissions that are produced by his private jet.

According to a report that cites a bot that tracks Elon Musk's private jet whenever it takes off and lands at an airport, Musk has taken a total of 134 flights throughout 2022, with the billionaire doing international travel to eight different countries. The Twitter account also estimated the total amount of CO2 produced by Musk over his travels, and according to reports, Musk's Gulfstream G650ER private jet burns 503 gallons of fuel for every hour of flight, meaning it burnt 178,686 gallons or 709,578 liters of fuel during the year and produced 1,895 tons of CO2 emissions.

The world's most populated nation has recorded its first population decline in declares, according to a new report released by the National Bureau of Statistics.

The new report was released on Tuesday and stated that China had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than it did at the end of 2021. Notably, the report states that the census of people included populations in mainland China and excluded places such as Hong Kong and Macao. The report goes on to state the nation's total was 1.41 billion people, with 9.56 million births against the 10.41 million deaths recorded.

Furthermore, the report found that Chinese men greatly outnumber Chinese women, with the report finding there are 722.06 men and 686.69 million women. This disparity between total men and women can be, at least in part, attributed to the strict one-child policy that was implemented in the late 1970s / early 1980s. The one-child policy was abandoned in 2016 and was followed by Chinese authorities encouraging residents to have multiple children.

Since Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, the world's second-largest social media platform, has taken a hit in terms of advertising spending, with many previously big advertisers cutting their spending or stopping it altogether.

Elon Musk took the reins at Twitter in late October last year, and since then, the Tesla CEO has been moving fast and breaking something along the way. This strategy by Musk has pushed out the release of several new features on Twitter, such as Twitter Blue, but with fast development comes problems that need to be fixed.

One main problem is the loss of major advertisers that Twitter counts on for revenue. Notably, GroupM, the world's largest ad-buying company, has cut its spending on Twitter by anywhere between 40% and 50%, leading Twitter executives to become more and more desperate for fresh advertising revenue.

Rumors are swirling that Apple is about to unveil the very first of its 2023 products, starting with new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBooks.

Several publications, including Bloomberg, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, and Front Page Tech, have all published reports that claim Apple is scheduled to make a big product announcement tomorrow. Some of the publications aren't specific about what this announcement will entail, but Bloomberg's Mark Gurman claims that 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros are likely the product slated to be unveiled. Notably, these next-generation MacBook Pros are said to include Apple's new M2 chips.

So, what are the differences between the coming next-gen MacBooks and the latest released models? Not much. According to Gurman, Apple's new MacBook Pros will feature the same design as the company's M1 MacBooks but instead include the M2 Pro and M2 Max Chips. In particular, the M2 Max chip sport up to 12 CPU cores and 38 GPU cores, driving up total performance for those hungry performance users.

A Princeton neuroscientist has warned that artificial intelligence-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT are sociopaths without the one thing that makes humans special.

In a new essay detailed by The Wall Street Journal, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano explains that AI-powered chatbots are sociopaths without consciousness and that until developers can implement consciousness, they will pose a real danger to humans. For those that don't know, AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are designed to have human-like conversations by remembering what was written by the human earlier in the conversation, providing almost real-time answers and thorough answers to questions.

While the dangers of AI aren't so prevalent now, in the future, that could very well change as these sophisticated tools are further upgraded and developed. In order to make them more human-like, Graziano proposes that they are taught human traits such as empathy and prosocial behavior. Notably, the neuroscientist says that these systems will need a form of implemented consciousness to understand these traits and, in turn, adjust their responses to align more with human values.

Elon Musk has taken to his Twitter account to propose a fix for 'left-wing' and 'right-wing' echo chambers on Twitter in the form of a new feature.

The SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter CEO took to his personal Twitter account to reply to an individual that claimed Twitter is showing or more actively promoting more 'right-wing' views to timelines. Musk said that people on the 'right' of the political sphere should be shown more 'left-wing stuff,' and the people on the left should see more 'right-wing stuff'.

Musk goes on and says that users "can just block it" if they want to stay in an "echo chamber", which is when a group of people form and echo the same opinions on topics while also dismissing any new information that goes against their already formed narrative. Notably, these tweets from Musk come after the SpaceX CEO updated his Twitter bio to 'state-affiliated media' following his statements that media accounts should have a 'state-affiliated media' label like China Global Television Network's account.