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The PlayStation 5 just turned 2 years old, and the next-generation PlayStation 6 could release in just a couple years' time.

The United Kingdom's Competition Markets Authority regulatory body, who is currently investigating the Microsoft-Activision merger, just published two new sets of documents today that reveal some very interesting information. One of the documents outlines Sony's response and statements to the CMA's concerns about the merger. Included in Sony's comments is a snippet about the next-generation PlayStation console.

According to the document, Sony could expect the PlayStation 6 to release as early as 2027. This would give the PS5 a shorter 7-year life cycle when compared to the PlayStation 4. No details on the new PS6 were confirmed or discussed, just a brief timetable on when consumers could expect the new higher-end PlayStation hardware.

Black Friday hasn't even arrived yet, and Amazon is already hot out of the gate with crazy daily deals, as the online retailer has slashed prices for a selection of gaming PCs.

If you were considering buying a new gaming PC and didn't want the hassle of piecing it together yourself, there is always the option of a pre-built rig. While you may not necessarily save money by purchasing a pre-built PC when compared to building one yourself, you have the convenience of being able to just simply plug it in and have it work without having to learn anything new about the construction process. Additionally, pre-built gaming PCs are also great gifts for a very special someone.

Amazon has kicked off the Black Friday week of deals strong by slashing prices across a variety of technology products, with the online retailer already announcing discounts on JBL headphones, Samsung SSDs and AMD CPUs. Furthermore, Amazon has slashed prices for Skytech gaming PCs, with discounts ranging from 10% to 25% on select pre-built gaming PCs.

If you were thinking about upgrading your CPU and were considering AMD, now might be the time to pull the trigger, as Amazon has slashed prices by at least 20%.

Amazon is getting ahead of the insane Black Friday sales with what seems to be Black Friday-week, where the online retailer changes discounts each day leading up to Friday. Amazon has slashed prices on the Ryzen 7 5800X 8-core, 16-Thread, Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core, 24-Thread, Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core, 12-Thread, and much more. The minimum discount on the available AMD CPUs is 22%, with the Ryzen 7 7700X 8-Core, 16-Thread previously being priced at $449.00 and currently being priced at $348.99.

The largest discount is 54% off on the Ryzen 5 5600G 6-Core 12-Thread, which was previously listed for $259.99 and is currently being listed for $120.01. These aren't the only deals Amazon has in technology, as the online retailer has also slashed prices on JBL headphones, as well as Samsung memory drives.

NASA launched the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on November 16, and as Orion is heading on a journey around the Moon, officials have inspected the launch pad for any potential damage caused by the rocket's lift off.

The successful launch made the SLS rocket the world's most powerful rocket, with nearly 9 million pounds of thrust. On November 16, the SLS pushed the Orion spacecraft on its reconnaissance journey around the Moon, marking the first stage of NASA's Artemis missions, which will put US citizens back on the surface of Earth's neighbor. NASA declared the launch a success, and is now inspecting the launch pad to see how it can minimize any damage for future launches.

NASA's Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, in a press conference with reporters on Monday, November 21, said the damage caused by Artemis 1's liftoff is isolated to just a few different areas of the launch pad, and that the vital parts of the launch pad weren't damaged. Sarafin said that while Artemis 1 used water suppression to reduce the sound, as well as the damage from the rocket's launch, the force generated by the rocket peeled the paint off the launch pad.

Last week Elon Musk commented on the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and his connection to its former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who is caught in the middle of the financial catastrophe.

In the span of a week, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange collapsed after experiencing the digital version of a bank run combined with a crash that reduced the value of the assets it was holding. The result was that FTX had to file for bankruptcy, sending former CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried's net worth down by 94% in a single day, Bankman-Fried was worth an estimated $15.6 billion prior to the collapse.

In leaked emails between Elon Musk and Mike Grimes, the FTX co-founder is brought up as a potential investor in Musk's $44 billion bid to purchase Twitter, which was originally made back in March. Musk confirmed in a tweet reply that SBF was trying to get into contact with Musk about investing $3 billion in Twitter and was interested in further integrating blockchain technology into the social media platform.

A customer of what was the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange has filed a lawsuit against NBA champions Golden State Warriors.

The class lawsuit was filed by Elliott Lam, a Canadian that is currently living in Hong Kong and is a customer of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which recently declared bankruptcy. Lam claims he has lost $750,000 after the exchange declared chapter 11 bankruptcy and that the NBA champion team fraudulently promoted a ponzi-like scheme to consumers. According to reports, the lawsuit is looking to obtain $5 million in damages for non-US consumers, as well as assisting the "thousands, if not millions, of consumers internationally" who have also felt the impact of the FTX collapse.

Notably, FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, and according to the company's court filing, FTX had up to one million creditors, with its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and other high-ranking management having little to no oversight of the company's direction. Additionally, the court filing stated that FTX didn't even have an accounting department. As for the Golden State Warriors, the FTX customer's lawsuit alleges that FTX used "A-list celebrities and mass branding campaigns" in a move to push "unwitting investors and consumers into a Ponzi-like scheme."

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has reached another milestone in its observations of the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

It was only in late August that the JWST was used by astronomers to discover carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called WASP-39b, located outside of our solar system at a distance of approximately 700 light years. The discovery of CO2 in WASP 39b's atmosphere was deemed a milestone observation as it was the first time clear evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside of our solar system had been identified.

With that discovery came numerous follow-up studies on the data Webb had acquired, and now those studies are beginning to come out, revealing more interesting details about the strange atmosphere on the Saturn-like planet. Using Webb's extremely sensitive instruments, astronomers were able to capture large amounts of data on WASP 39b, revealing aspects of the planet such as its size, approximately one-third the size of Jupiter, how far away it orbits, 4.3 million miles from its parent star, or about eight times closer to its star than our solar systems closest planet, Mercury, and that it's shrouded in thick clouds that contain high amounts of sulfur and silicates.

Jon Peddie Research has pushed out a new report for the GPU market in Q3 2022, with the biggest drop in GPU shipments since the 2009 recession.

GPU and CPU shipments dropped significantly year-over-year by 19% with GPU seeing a compound growth rate of 2.8% between 2022-2026, where they'll see an install base of 3.1 billion units at the end of JPR's forecast period. In the next 5 years, JPR predicts discrete GPUs inside of PCs will hit 26%.

Looking at the year-to-year total GPU shipments, these numbers aren't good: they're down 25.1% for all types of platforms and GPUs, while desktop graphics cards dropped 15.4% and notebooks by 30% which is huge: the largest since the 2009 recession. Who lost the most? AMD.

MSI has unleashed a new special BIOS for its mid-range B660M Mortar MAX Wi-Fi motherboard, which when teamed with the Intel Core i5-13600K "Raptor Lake" processor can be overclocked to a hefty 5.8GHz, mighty impressive stuff.

At first, the Intel Core i5-13600K couldn't be overclocked on B660 chipset-based motherboards -- exclusive OC was allowed on the Z790 and Z690 motherboards -- but now the mid-range MSI B660 Mortar MAX Wi-Fi motherboards can be pushed with some impressive overclocking through the special BIOS.

Up until now, overclockers could only push the BCLK to 102.9MHz on the MSI B660 Mortar MAX Wi-Fi motherboard, but with the new Special BIOS that the company has released in the form of the "E7D97IMS.123U24" BIOS, you can push the BCLK up to an impressive 125MHz. The BIOS lock hurt overclocking, until now... since the 102.9MHz hurdle would only allow for a 5.25GHz CPU frequency.

Elon Musk is figuratively and now physically cleaning out the closet at Twitter as Musk has posted a video to his account showing what he's discovered in Twitter's secret storage compartment.

The Twitter owner posted to his account on November 23 the above video that shows what was discovered at Twitter's "merch thing" - presumably, the company's merch department. Musk explains in the video that "there's an entire closet", and someone in the background can be heard saying "secret closet", followed by Musk saying "of #staywoke t-shirts".

The SpaceX CEO recently announced that he wouldn't be rolling out the relaunched Twitter Blue subscription on the date he announced last week, as he wants to ensure there is high confidence in stopping impersonation across the platform. The Twitter owner said the company will likely use a different color check mark for organizations and individuals.

Apple was originally meant to be sourcing its 128-bit 3D NAND flash memory from Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) -- a Chinese supplier -- but because of the US trade ban with China, the company can't do that and now needs to work with Samsung to get memory chips into the iPhone.

The iPhones sold in China would've used the Chinese-supplied memory chips, with Apple reportedly prepared to source around 40% of all of its iPhone memory chips from YMTC, but not anymore according to sources at DigiTimes. The site reports that Apple is now working with Samsung -- which is one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world -- to make around 40% of its iPhone memory chip orders.

Samsung is already working with Apple to supply displays for the current-gen iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max smartphones, and with new contracts for memory chips, Apple's main competitor is putting more and more of its technology into its competitors' smartphones.

Samsung might have kicked off mass production of its next-gen 3nm GAA chips before TSMC, but the company has run into a multitude of problems so far... so much so that the South Korean electronics giant has reportedly needed to team with a US-based firm to help them get yields higher.

The new Samsung 3nm GAA yields are reportedly at just 20% -- which is horrible, absolutely horrible -- and after their disastrous last couple of process nodes, this isn't what anyone wants to hear. A new report from the Commercial Times suggests that while Samsung's new 3nm GAA process node was meant to deliver huge improvements across the board over its 5nm process node, there are serious issues at hand.

Samsung has reportedly partnered up with US-based Silicon Frontline Technology, in the hope that the company can help boost its disastrous 3nm GAA yield rate. Silicon Frontline Technology has used methods to improve yield rates through water qualification and electrostatic discharge prevention technologies, but that's still not a good look for Samsung up against the titan that is TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).

If you've been waiting to pick yourself a monitor bargain during the Black Friday sales, Samsung has its gigantic 49-inch Odyssey G9 gaming monitor on the cheap: down from $1499 to just $999.

The Samsung Odyssey G9 gaming monitor rocks a massive 49-inch Quantum Dot-based QLED panel, with a native resolution of 5120 x 1440 and a super-smooth refresh rate of 240Hz. It has the same desktop real estate as two 27-inch monitors side-by-side but in one massive, beautiful gaming monitor.

Samsung has a beautiful 1000R curvature on the Odyssey G9, something that it markets as the "new apex of curved screen technology" and has been designed to match the contours of the human eye for "unimaginable realism". There's some beautiful design work on the back, with Samsung using a sleek matte black exterior that has a gorgeous lighting panel. It will stand out, that is... if it's not pressed against a wall on your gaming desk.

Sabrent has just unleashed its new Rocket nano v2 portable SSD, its smallest portable SSD ever... and man, it packs quite the punch in its tiny footprint.

The new Sabrent Rocket nano v2 portable SSD is a sleek new portable SSD that the company is offering in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. The portable SSD can drive up to 1.5GB/sec (1500MB/sec) reads which is for all capacities, while the company has used high-grade aerospace aluminum alloy through CNC machining.

Not only does this make the Sabrent Rocket nano V2 portable SSD look good, but the material is durable and perfect for dissipating heat away from the internal components, prolonging the life of the drive. Sabrent also provides a removable silicone sleeve that offers even more protection against drops and debris... perfect considering it's a portable storage powerhouse.

TSMC is going to be charging more for its bleeding edge 3nm chips according to a new report from DigiTimes, which suggests the company will be charging $20,000 for 3nm wafers.

The current-gen 5nm designs that we're already enjoying with NVIDIA and its new GeForce RTX 40 series "Ada Lovelace" GPUs are made on a custom 5nm design by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), as well as Apple and soon AMD's new Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA 3" graphics cards.

Back in 2018, TSMC was charging $10,000 (USD) per 7nm wafer -- which TSMC's 7nm process node made millions of devices sing with silicon magic: Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and so much more -- but in 2020 when it started pumping out 5nm wafers the costs were jacked up to $16,000 per wafer. But now, TSMC's next-gen 5nm wafers will reportedly cost $20,000 meaning next-gen CPUs and GPUs from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA will be even more expensive than they are now.

The $31 billion Call of Duty franchise may deliver its best year ever as 2022 numbers continue to soar.

Call of Duty is currently at a watershed moment. In the next few months, the franchise will have five monetized products on the market at once: Modern Warfare 2, Warzone 1.0, Warzone 2.0, Warzone Mobile, and Call of Duty Mobile. Modern Warfare 2 isn't just a game, it's the gateway to new experiences like Warzone Mobile and Warzone 2.0, both of which have been built from the ground up in the MW2 game engine.

Activision's master plan, which combines full games with cross-platform live services, is paying off big time. Call of Duty is so big that it commands all of Activision's development teams and to much success; Modern Warfare 2 made $1 billion from game sales alone in 10 days time, breaking previous franchise records. MW2 was also the #1 best-selling digital Call of Duty game in PlayStation history.

A new Alien game is in development and it could be a spiritual successor to the popular Alien Isolation thriller.

The next Alien game will be a big-budget AAA survival horror game, sources have told Insider Gaming. No details about the new project have been announced, however it's possible this project and Alien Isolation 2 are in simultaneous development (although this seems unlikely given the niche appeal of horror, and that both projects would then technically be AAA games).

The Alien series has seen a modern resurgence over the last two decades, first with the ill-fated Aliens Colonial Marines, then with the well-received fright fest Alien Isolation in 2014. We've also seen Aliens Fireteam Elite, which stands far above Colonial Marines as the best Alien shooter ever made, and a brief foray into mobile games. The next Alien project, Aliens: Dark Descent, will round out the catalog with an isometric squad-based tactics game.

Both Microsoft and Sony are relaying sensitive information about closed-doors deals and discussions on the impending Activision merger, and it probably isn't good for either company.

Pressure is mounting on the $68.7 billion Activision merger. Worldwide regulators are closely scrutinizing the deal, which would bestow upon Microsoft eight separate billion-dollar Activision-Blizzard franchises, including the $31 billion mega-hit Call of Duty, the mobile sensation Candy Crush, and the PC MMORPG World of Warcraft. The pressure has had different effects on Microsoft and Sony.

Microsoft, for one, has responded to the pressure with increased confidence and clarity in its messaging around the merger. Through Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer, Microsoft has now delivered four separate clear-cut statements on how it intends to continue releasing Call of Duty on PlayStation.

Microsoft has offered Sony a deal that's almost too good to be true--a deal that could assuage regulators as they closely investigate the enormity of Activision merger.

According to new reports from the New York Times, Microsoft has offered Sony a deal to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for at least 10 years. This deal, which Sony probably won't accept (or publicly admit that it has accepted) during the ongoing regulatory investigations, would effectively guarantee Call of Duty games on the PlayStation platform until 2032. That's a hell of a deal from a company who had originally wanted to only guarantee 3 years of access to Call of Duty.

Quoting the NYT:

The fallout of the implosion of what was the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is still being felt around the world and at the center of it all is former FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Sam Bankman-Fried, or as often referred to as SBF, was once touted as one of the most generous billionaires in the world, and since the utter collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, SBF has admitted the "ethics stuff" had been "mostly a front". FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 11, the same day SBF stepped down as CEO, with Bloomberg now reporting that SBF's own lawyers are now dropping him as a client over several of his tweets that he has made since November 11.

Reports indicate that some of SBF's lawyers have thrown in the towel over SBF's "incessant and disruptive tweeting", with Paul Weiss counsel Martin Flumenbaum saying in a statement, "We informed Mr. Bankman-Fried several days ago, after the filing of the FTX bankruptcy, that conflicts have arisen that precluded us from representing him."