Nintendo has taken to its website to announce its cutting ties with X, the social media platform formerly named Twitter.

Nintendo's announcement found on its website states as of June 10, players will no longer be able to post screens or videos directly from their Nintendo Switch's Album to X. Additionally, they send friend requests to social media users via the Friend Suggestions feature will be removed. Nintendo notes that posting screenshots and videos to Facebook "will continue to be available," but it will remain a service that "may also be discontinued at a later date."

Nintendo goes on to target three games specifically; Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Splatoon 3, and Splatoon 2. The company explains the ability to post Smash Ultimate screenshots from the Album in the Nintendo Switch Home Menu to Smash World, within the Nintendo Switch Online smart device app, will also become unavailable. As for Splatoon 3, posting to X via mailboxes in Splatsville, Inkopolis Plaza, or Inkolpolis Square will be removed, along with posting to Facebook. The same change applies to Splatoon 2's mailboxes.

Intel has been in a spot lately regarding its flagship high-end 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors, with widespread reports of instability. The extent and detailed causes of the crashes are still unknown. Still, many believe it to be due to the increased power requirements of high-end Intel CPUs and motherboard profiles and official specs and guidelines bypassing proper voltage regulation.

Various motherboard makers have released BIOS updates to address the issue, implementing new 'Intel Baseline Profiles' to improve stability at the cost of performance. The band-aid approach was simple: reign everything in, and the issues will disappear.

In a new statement for its customers and partners, Intel states that the new 'Intel Default Settings' represent a range of power delivery profiles based on a motherboard's capabilities. In fact, Intel wants customers to continue pushing the new CPUs as it "recommends customers implement the highest power delivery profile compatible with each individual motherboard design."

AMD has shared some data on its CPU shipments courtesy of Mercury Research's first quarter (Q1 2024) report. And it's good news for Ryzen and AMD's growing server market, with Unit Share and Revenue Share increasing year-over-year - with Desktop and Server products leading the charge.

AMD cites growing demand for 4th Gen EPYC and Ryzen 8000 Series processors for the growth in the Client sector. Its server share (compared primarily to Intel) is now 23.6% compared to 18% a year ago. For Desktop processors, aka Ryzen, AMD's share has increased to 23.9% compared to 19.2% a year ago.

Mobile CPUs, which are Ryzen chips for laptops, mini PCs, and PC gaming handhelds, also saw their share increase in Q1 2024 to 19.3% compared to 16.2% a year ago. However, this figure presents a slight dip from the previous quarter - chalked up to a decline in overall shipments for low-end PCs.

During a recent earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that the publisher's developers and studios have a "real hunger" for generative AI. The company is looking to use the new technology to make game development more efficient and to deliver big and complex games quickly.

"As a company, we've been deeply tied to AI since our inception," Andrew Wilson said. "It has been the very center of all of the games that we create, replicating human intelligence in the context of a gameplay experience. But certainly, as we think about the wave of generative AI today and as it merges into artificial general intelligence, broadly, we're still very early."

Citing FIFA as an example, using the game's animation and run cycles - this grew from 36 run cycles in FIFA 23 to 1,200 run cycles in EA Sports FC 24. The result is a more realistic-looking depiction of football/soccer and one that feels closer to watching the sport live on TV than the series has ever been.

The Steam Hardware Survey & Software Survey results for April 2024 are in, and it's no surprise that NVIDIA continues to dominate the discrete GPU market for desktop and laptop computers. Overall market share remains relatively unchanged, with NVIDIA and GeForce holding strong with 76.7% of total PC GPUs, followed by AMD with 15.8%.

It's not all bad news for Radeon, as the company experienced growth thanks to the rise of Ryzen chips with integrated Radeon hardware.

The most popular GPU is still NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060, followed by GeForce GTX 1650, RTX 3060 Ti, and RTX 2060 (you can check out the Top 20 GPUs According to Steam below). However, the story does change when you look at the current generation of GPU hardware from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, covering the GeForce RTX 40 Series, Radeon RX 7000 Series, and Intel Arc graphics.

NVIDIA is still cooking its new Blackwell GPU architecture and B200 AI GPU, and while we've had teases of the next-gen Vera Rubin GPU, now we're hearing the next-gen R100 AI GPU will be in mass production in Q4 2025.

In a new post by industry insider Ming-Chi Kuo, NVIDIA's next-generation AI chip will enter mass production in Q4 2025 with the R-series and R100 AI GPU, with the system/rack solution to enter mass production in Q1 2026. NVIDIA's next-gen R100 will be made on TSMC's newer N3 process node, compared to B100 which uses TSMC N4P, with R100 using TSMC's newer CoWoS-L packaging (the same as B100).

NVIDIA's next-gen R100 AI GPU features around 4x reticle design, compared to the B100 with 3.3x reticle design, while the interposer size for R100 "has yet to be finalized," with Ming-Chi saying there are 2-3 options. R100 will feature 8 x HBM4 units, while GR200's new Grace CPU will use TSMC's N3 process (compared to TSMC's N5 for GH200 and GB200's Grace CPUs).

Rumors have been circulating for a while, indicating that ASUS planned to release a new version of its ROG Ally gaming handheld this year. This led to people speculating that it could be a full-blown sequin or laptop-style refresh with new Ryzen hardware or possibly even a new OLED display, ala the Steam Deck refresh.

Recent speculation and rumor have pointed to the 2024 ROG Ally refresh being nothing more than a minor hardware update that would fix the SD Card Reader issues that have plagued some units since ASUS launched the Windows 11-based PC gaming handheld in 2023. It's a minor but very welcome fix that would sort out one of the only real faults with the hardware and something that wouldn't warrant a special presentation.

That said, ASUS is teasing a special stream set to broadcast tomorrow with the title 'The Next ROG Ally.' This indicates that there's a lot more coming to the ROG Ally 2024 refresh than a fix to the SD Card Reader.

Western Digital has introduced the new SanDisk Desk Drive, a portable and sleek external storage and SSD solution for creators and those who don't want to worry about running out of space. The SanDisk Desk Drive is available in 4TB and 8TB capacities, starting from $379.99 USD. The internal SSD is formatted for exFAT, and it has a USB-C interface compatible with Windows and Mac devices.

With NVMe storage, the SanDisk Desk Drive achieves read speeds of up to 1,000 MB/s, enough to house and readily access an extensive library of videos, photos, music files, and games. Western Digital says the drive is perfect for content creators and digital creators who work with large media libraries, giving them a high-capacity, fast, and flexible solution.

It can even handle 8K content. And for PC gamers, with an average install size of 36GB, the 8TB SanDisk Desk Drive can house around 200 games.

It seems Microsoft is finally testing the display of memory speeds as MT/s (mega-transfers per second) over the traditional MHz (megahertz) in the Windows 11 Task Manager.

PhantomOcean3, a self-proclaimed Windows sleuth, noticed that Microsoft is now testing showing MT/s for RAM instead of MHz in the Windows 11 Task Manager performance tab. Why is this important?

We see the data transfer speed of computer memory (RAM) advertised with the MHz metric, which represents how many millions of cycles per second the memory module can perform, with each of those cycles being an action on the memory module itself, like storing and retrieving data.

VESA has just announced a major update to its High-Performance Monitor and Display Compliance Test Specification (DisplayHDR), which launched the display industry's first fully open standard specifying high dynamic range (HDR) quality.

The new updated spec, DisplayHDR version 1.2, includes significantly tighter performance requirements, including for luminance, color gamut, and bit depth. There are also multiple new test requirements for color accuracy, contrast ratio, black levels, and subtitle flicker, that VESA (the Video Electronics Standards Association) addresses for recent advanced in display technology.

VESA explained on their press release that companies can begin certifying products under the new DisplayHDR 1.2 spec today, while continuing to allow products to be certified under the previous DisplayHDR 1.2 spec through to the end of May 2025 for monitors, and May 2026 for laptops.