Latest News - Page 961

AMD has publicly acknowledged thermal issues that are pushing Radeon RX 7900 XTX video cards to abnormally high temps, but the company won't be able to offer new cards any time soon.

AMD has a big issue with its top-tier Navi 31 video cards. Faulty AMD reference RX 7900 XTX cards are being throttled to immensely high temperatures of up to 100-degrees Celsius during gaming sessions, especially at 4K 120FPS. AMD has officially recognized and commented on the problem, saying that temps are caused by a vapor chamber issue, but it could be while before affected consumers can RMA for a new replacement card.

Why? The short answer is that AMD has run out of stock and the company doesn't know when they'll get more RX 7900 XTX cards in.

Best Buy has good news and bad news for consumers who use the My Best Buy rewards program.

Reports indicate that Best Buy will start offering free shipping to all My Best Buy members with no minimum purchase requirement. This is a big step towards e-commerce from the retailer, who had posted a reduction of 16% in nine-month earnings in 2022 driven by lower revenues. That's the good news.

The bad news is that starting in mid-February consumers will no longer be able to earn rewards points unless they have a My Best Buy Credit Card.

Starting in February, Elon Musk's new Twitter will radically change into a blog-style social media platform.

Elon Musk has confirmed that Twitter will soon expand to 4,000 characters in a new update planned to release in early February. This would allow users to create fully-fledged blog posts within the social media platform complete with text formatting options. Much like Twitter itself and its owner, the update is controversial among users who prefer the more concise delivery of the service.

Users argue that the update erodes the basic function of Twitter as a micro-blogging platform. Twitter's current 280-character limit forces people to concisely articulate their points in smaller bite-sized blasts. Thoughts, ideas, and information can be displayed in neat threads with proper segmentation and media wrapped in an easy-to-read UX.

CES 2023 - Intel's new lineup of mobile processors includes 32 different SKUs with varying performance aimed at particular segments, but its Intel Core i9-13980HX takes the mantle as the "world's fastest mobile processor" with up to 5.6GHz speeds

Intel's CES presence was a resounding call to arms against its competitors. Intel announced a staggering amount of 13th Gen hybrid architecture processors at CES with 32 chips in total spread across four different processor series including a new peak HX Series.

The pinnacle of HX Series is the Intel Core i9-13980HX that offers "extreme performance" with a whopping 24-core processor with 32-threads that is capable of hitting a blazing-fast 5.6GHz, complete with 36MB of cache for better in-game perf and higher FPS.

CES 2023 - Sony's new electric vehicle packs in serious high-end tech including tons of sensors and a fully-fledged PlayStation 5, but the car's name is rather odd.

Sony and Honda are teaming up to make an electric smartcar that fully utilizes each company's breakthrough tech, namely Sony's sensors and Honda's overall vehicle designs. The result is an interesting new car called Afeela that blends entertainment, connectivity, and something that Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida calls "intelligent mobility."

Sony unveiled a concept prototype for its new EV platform at CES that's essentially a roving tech ecosystem on wheels. Afeela features 45 cameras and sensors inside and outside of the vehicle specifically designed by Sony, including a system of onboard computer chips and SoCs that deliver a combined 800 TOPs that will help facilitate advanced AI and deliver both automated drive and ADS (Automated Drive Assistance) to operators.

A start-up company is shaking up the sculpture-making industry as its designed a robot that can produce marble sculptures extremely close to a human skill level.

Marble sculptures have played a significant role in human history and continue to be an important form of artistic expression that has been used for thousands of years. Sculptures have been used to depict a wide range of important subjects, including gods and goddesses, emperors and kings, as well as everyday people. The ancient Greeks were particularly skilled at creating marble sculptures, and many of their works have survived to the present day and are on display.

In addition to their aesthetic value, marble sculptures have also been used as a means of preserving cultural and historical memories, as they can last for thousands of years. Famous figures such as Michelangelo and Canova spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours chipping away at their sculptures, but now a new player has entered the sculpture game and its called "1L". The robot stands at 13-feet tall and is designed to reduce the time required to create a sculpture by hand, which typically takes a couple of months.

A comet that hasn't visited Earth for more than 50,000 years is on its way, and skywatchers will likely be able to see it with the unaided eye.

The comet is called C/2022 E3 and was originally discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility in March 2022. C/2022 E3 is currently on its way to make its closest approach to Earth since the Neanderthals roamed our planet's surface, and over the course of January and February, skywatchers may be able to see the bright green hue of the comet (depending on the weather of course).

Since its discovery, researchers have captured several images of C/2022 E3, with some particularly good shots coming from John Chumack from GalacticImages.com. Chumack snapped the above image from Yellow Springs, Ohio, and writes that the comet was anticipated to be shining at around 11.00 magnitude, and that its tail, as well as the 2.5 arc-min Green Coma, was visible.

Elon Musk's legal team published a filing last Friday that requested Musk's upcoming trial be relocated over the jury having a potential bias against him.

The trial comes from a class action lawsuit that accuses Musk of manipulating Tesla stock with his infamous 2018 tweet where he wrote that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private. As a result of the tweet, Tesla's stock price went up and down chaotically, which sparked an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and an eventual fine of $40 million. CNBC reports that the purpose of the upcoming trial is to determine if Musk/Tesla should be held accountable for any damages to shareholders.

The filing from Musk's legal team states that Musk's takeover of Twitter and his unpopular mass layoffs has created an environment that encourages San Francisco's jury pool to have negative biases about Musk as a result of local media outlet coverage. Additionally, the filing states that jurors will be unable to separate this bias from the facts throughout the case, making them unable to impartially evaluate Musk's actions.

Elon Musk's Twitter has unsurprisingly cut more of its staff after Musk reportedly said just last November that the company wouldn't fire or lay off any more of its workers.

Bloomberg has reported that Twitter has laid off "at least a dozen" staff in its Dublin and Singapore offices, targeting divisions such as content moderation and misinformation. Notably, of the approximately twelve staff that were fired included Analusia Dominguez, the company's former senior director of revenue policy. Furthermore, reports indicate that a handful of employees tasked with maintaining Twitter's global appeals process and state media program were also cut.

The news was confirmed by Ella Irwin, Twitter's head of trust and safety, who said that a selection of staff had been laid off as a result of the company-wide cuts to expenditure. Irwin spoke to Bloomberg and said that "It made more sense to consolidate teams under one leader (instead of two), for example", and that Twitter conducted a company-wide evaluation and eliminated roles that weren't producing enough "volume" to justify employing the talent behind them.

NASA has many rovers exploring the barren wasteland of Mars, and most are making solid progress in relaying valuable information about the planet's climate, geology, and history.

Now a new study has been published that details researchers examining several photographs taken by Curiosity over the course of its mission. The scientists examined the halo-like fractures that are found across Mars' surface, and their Curiosity led to NASA's rover being instructed to take samples from the area.

According to reports, these halos are possible opal deposits, and if proven to be true would mean that Mars harbored water much more recently than scientists estimate, as water is a primary component in the development of opal deposits. What does this mean for astronauts? Well, if the halos are proven to be opal deposits, it would mean that their locations may be a valuable source of water for the colonization of Mars.

A developer map called "Zombie_City" that is reportedly created by either Valve or Turtle Rock Studios has leaked online.

The leak of the developer map is part of a larger leak of Counter-Strike maps, and more importantly, Zombie City is a mod for Counter-Strike: Source, which was previously not playable - until now. Notably, Zombie City isn't a fully fleshed-out level as it doesn't actually feature any zombies, but instead, players go up against AI terrorists that can only attack with melee.

Turtle Rock founder Michael Booth discussed the idea behind Zombie City and explained that as the team was developing bots for Counter-Strike: Source, they play-tested levels where developers were armed with automatic weapons and faced off against 30+ knife-wielding terrorists. Booth says that as the team experimented with more prototypes, they kept finding themselves coming back to players versus hordes of AI, or as Booth says, "co-op vs the horde game".

Scientists have been using stem cell research for many years, and as development in the technology progresses, researchers have been able to grow human organs and even small human brains successfully.

While growing these human organs, such as livers, has proven to be successful, transplanting them into a new body is where the complications lay, as some bodies simply reject the new organs. Notably, a study that was published in late December 2022 details scientists at Stanford University taking human brain organoids and implanting them into rats for the very first time.

Additionally, the researchers discovered the mini-human brains began to make connections with the rat's brain, forming pathways between the mini-human brain and the rat's neurons. The new study details researchers for the first time being able to see the responses from the rats when they were exposed to different tests.

It was only a matter of time before NVIDIA announced that it was bringing Ada Lovelace graphics to gaming laptops, and in doing so it has lifted the lid on what to expect hardware-wise in addition to pricing. And it's the entire range too; RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 4070, RTX 4060, and even RTX 4050. There's a lot on the way.

Built on the same Ada tech found in the desktop variants, these new lower-power laptop versions of the GeForce RTX 40 series will benefit from the impressive power efficiency of the Ada architecture. And on that note, NVIDIA is touting that the new laptop RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 graphics will run with up to 3X the efficiency of the previous gen flagship laptops - with a release date of February 8. It's worth noting that the laptop RTX 4090 is very different from the desktop RTX 4090 - with specs more in-line with the desktop RTX 4080.

Here are the specs for the entire range, where much like the Ampere-powered GeForce 30 Series laptops there'll be different versions of each chip based on overall power draw - with different CUDA core counts and memory configuration than desktop models.

With the recent release of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, the desktop line-up of new GeForce RTX 40 Series cards built on NVIDIA's new Ada Lovelace architecture expanded with its third entry. And as is the case with GPU line-ups, each variant uses a different chip.

In terms of the Ada dies used so far, the GeForce RTX 4090 utilizes the cut-down AD102-300, the RTX 4080 AD103-300, with the RTX 4070 Ti using AD104-400. The latter is the fully unlocked and enabled AD104 chip, with Wccftech reporting that NVIDIA is preparing to mass-produce two more AD104-based GPUs. Which, yeah, would potentially be the GeForce RTX 4070 and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti respectively.

The two new chips will be AD104-251 and AD104-250, with the report noting that both cards will feature a 200W TGP. Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti's 7680 CUDA Cores, the baseline RTX 4070 will potentially feature 5888 CUDA Cores and the RTX 4060 Ti 4352. From there the GeForce RTX 4060 will switch chips to the AD106-300 die.

It's been a strange few months of major GPU launches, from high launch pricing through to issues with new power connectors potentially melting and temperatures reaching their throttling point. The latter is an issue related to the recent launch of the flagship AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, where owners began reporting that GPU hot spot temperatures would hit 110 degrees Celsius.

A detailed and in-depth report by the YouTube channel Der8auer investigated the issue and concluded that it was a fault with the cooling itself, with throttling impacting performance in the significant region of double digits. Summarising that the issue was directly related to the vapor chamber cooling; which has now been confirmed by AMD. Speaking with PCWorld's Gordon Mah Ung at CES 2023, Scott Herkelman, Senior Vice President and General Manager at AMD Radeon responded to confirm that the issue is indeed serious. But only affects a "small percentage" of cards.

Specifically, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX models made by AMD. This means cards sold by AMD and partner cards with AMD reference cooling only. The lower-specced AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT models and cards with custom cooling aren't affected - so the issue isn't related to RDNA 3 architecture.

2022 wasn't the best year for video games earnings, a new report from analyst firm Newzoo suggests.

From 2020-2021, pandemic spending sparked record-breaking earnings across gaming's Big 3 (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) and various publishers like Activision-Blizzard, Take-Two Interactive, and Electronic Arts. Now in 2022 the video games market is stabilizing itself.

The global games market is expected to make $184.4 billion in 2022, down a significant 4.3% from 2021. A quick bit of math shows that 2022 brought in nearly $8.3 billion less than the previous year. Newzoo's latest annual games market report notes that this is the first year-over-year decline in worldwide games earnings since the company started tracking data.

Here's the thing, you can use the word "robot" to describe something without it feeling like a, you know, robot. Sci-fi, films, and TV shows have given us the impression that to be a robot, there has to be some form of intelligence - even though, that's not the case. And with CES 2023 being the place to see and hear about robots that are, or will be, available for purchase we take a look at three that you could say feature 'some form of intelligence'.

There's an AI-powered lawn mower that can avoid obstacles like pets and, err, humans. A robotic pool cleaner that features an ultrasonic radar to plan underwater routes like the special forces team from The Rock. And finally, a robot tennis ball machine. Because if your lawn and pool don't require any human maintenance, you've got time to hit a few balls and work on your backhand.

Automated lawnmowers have been a thing for a little while, expensive sure, but not exactly worthy of the robot tag on account of their intelligence is limited. The LANDROID Vision Robotic Lawn Mower certainly earns its name thanks to the addition of an onboard HDR camera and AI that allows it to be dropped into any backyard to roam, learn, and mow. Apparently, it can distinguish grass from anything else and can easily crossover driveways and pavement to the green stuff that must be cut. Of course, there's Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity for monitoring.

There is no shortage of apps that can be used to monitor and optimize sleep quality, thanks to the seemingly simple act of "getting a good night's sleep" being something of a rare unicorn for so many. With so many factors at play, from exercise to diet to screen time and so much more, this has led to a whole range of sleep wearables and other smart tech designed to combat this global problem.

The FRENZ Brainband from tech company Earable Neuroscience presents a somewhat different and exciting solution, a wearable that can track and stimulate brain activity. The AI-powered bit of tech not only tracks several data points but provided instantaneous cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) content in the form of curated audio delivered by the Brainband's "integrated bone-conduction speakers". And as out-there as the idea of bone speakers might be, on the plus side the FRENZ Brainband has the look of something from the distant future.

"In providing accessibility, affordability, and easily acquirable habits, the FRENZ Brainband can improve sleep worldwide and unleash true human potential," Tam Vu, the Founder, and CEO of Earable said in a somewhat bold claim. "We aim to be the deep tech neuroscience company that dramatically improves the world's mental state at scale and ease."

Thanks to chip shrinkage, more affordable processing power, and panels improving year-on-year, wearable display technology has seen continued advances. That said, getting all of that tech into something the size of everyday glasses isn't easy. And even in 2023, augmented reality (AR) smart glasses still carry the air of oversized joke glasses. This is where TCL's new RayNeo X2 comes in.

Smart glasses that might be a tad chunky but they're relatively small and stylish, with some impressive tech under the hood. We're talking full-color binocular Micro-LED optical waveguide displays that feature a high-contrast ratio (CR) of 100,000:1 with a peak brightness of up to 1,000 nits. These are high-end TV numbers, and with the glasses themselves actually looking like something you'd wear out and about they might just live up to the promise of Google Glasses from all those years ago.

With Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 processing power some of the day-to-day usages include a smart GPS that supports gesture recognition and can seamlessly showcase nearby landmarks. Keeping things in the travel wheelhouse, TCL has even developed a way for the glasses to recognize languages and offer up real-time subtitles and captions. Very cool. All of this sits alongside the usual smart glasses stuff like on-screen notifications for calls and messages and upcoming meetings.

When will the Microsoft-Activision merger finally be over? Possibly not until 2024.

The $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision merger has become everyday news. The proceedings just keep developing and there's always something to report on, whether it's interesting info and claims in regulatory documents or announcements from the companies themselves. We've done our diligence to keep up to date on merger reports with our ever-growing merger coverage which can be found here.

Regulators around the world are currently scrutinizing the merger in an effort to determine if it's anti-competitive. So far there have been four jurisdictions that have approved the merger, namely those that are not meaningful contributors to any of the Big 3's earnings (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) nor Activision Blizzard King's earnings. The four regions that have approved the Microsoft-Activision merger include Chile, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Serbia.