Bethesda's highly anticipated space RPG, Starfield, will require a 125 GB of storage space on the Xbox Series X/S and PC, according to leaked details from the Amazon listing. The game's preload is also set to become available starting August 9.

With over 1000 explorable planets promised Starfield was always expected to be a large game. The 125GB download reinforces that this is one of Bethesda's most ambitious releases yet. For comparison, 2018's Fallout 76 was under 50GB at launch.

Allowing preloading over three weeks before Starfield's September 6 launch gives players plenty of time to download the game's files. This should also help to avoid server congestion and login problems on launch day.

We have previously reported that Starfield requires 125GB of disk space. Let's take a look at the rest of Starfield's PC system requirements, which will be an AMD-sponsored title:

Minimum

• OS: Windows 10 version 22H2 (10.0.19045)
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 125 GB available space
• Additional Notes: SSD Required

Recommended

• OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 125 GB available space
• Additional Notes: SSD Required

In the last week of July, Bethesda dropped three new animated short stories that offer some backstory on the game's future setting. The videos are collectively titled The Settled Systems: A Starfield Animated Anthology.

On the other hand, if you decide to purchase Starfield for Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S, you will be able to get the PC version of the same game at no additional cost from the Xbox or Microsoft Store. That's because the game has been confirmed as one of Microsoft's Xbox Play Anywhere titles.

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The company said in a support document that its grammar check feature is only available in English. It uses AI to analyze the language and may not be 100% accurate, Google cautioned, especially when dealing with partial sentences.

The tool can also work without including the "grammar check" keyword if Google Search senses that you are trying to do a grammar check. It can correct spelling mistakes and suggest fixes for sentences and phrases.

A green checkmark will display if the input sentence is correct. However, Google said its grammar check tool won't allow content that falls into categories such as dangerous, harassing, hateful, medical, explicit, terrorist, violent, etc.

If you realize that the analysis done by Google's grammar checker tool is incorrect, you can report it by clicking on the Feedback button in the bottom right corner.

Apart from that, the search giant is rolling out some new features that will allow users to take better control of their data. Through a new dashboard, users will be able to request the removal of personal data that shows up in search results.

For users enrolled in the Search Labs program, the company announced it's adding support for images and videos to its AI-powered Search experience (SGE). Google recently settled an Italian probe over data portability and agreed to make it easier to transfer user data to third-party services.

Google Search is still one of the biggest breadwinners for its parent Alphabet. The company revealed in its Q2 2023 earnings results that Google Search generated $42.628 billion in revenue, up from $40.689 in the same quarter a year ago.

Via: 9to5Google

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The rise of digital stores like Steam, GoG.com, and more recently the Epic Games Store has contributed to allowing PC games of all types to be sold nearly everywhere. A few weeks ago, we posted our list of the most anticipated Xbox Series X/S games of 2023, so we decided to do the same for PC games as well.

We will mention that all of our games on the Xbox 2023 list will also be released on the PC as well. We didn't want to duplicate our Xbox list for our most anticipated PC game, so we picked some more upcoming titles, many of which will be released either exclusively for PC or first on that platform (although some games may show up on other platforms as well).

Update: August 6: We have added The Lamplighters League to the list and removed some games that have been released.

Counter-Strike 2 - Summer 2023

• Developer: Valve
• Publisher: Valve
• What's it about: You team up with your online friends and shoot other online friends in matches of terrorists and counter-terrorists.
• Why we want to play it: It's the long-awaited Source Engine 2 remake of Counter-Strike. Who wouldn't want to play it? And best of all, it's going to be free to play.

Payday 3 - September 21, 2023

• Developer: Starbreeze Studios
• Publisher: Prime Matter
• What's it about: It's time to come out of retirement and start robbing banks again, and take care of anyone who gets in our way.
• Why we want to play it: Starbreeze has had its problems, but it appears that the studio is finally going to bring the popular Payday co-op shooter series out of mothballs and into an all-new version, and we can't wait to see it.

Pre-order Payday 3 on Steam

Pre-order Payday 3 console versions on Amazon

Witchfire - September 20

• Developer: The Astronauts
• Publisher: The Astronauts
• What's it about: Fight a demon invasion of your land with a combination of firearms and witch spells in fast combat.
• Why we want to play it: It's rare when we see a first-person shooter that looks like it will actually offer a different experience. Mixing guns with magic in a dark fantasy environment is right up our alley.

Pre-order Witchfire at the Epic Games Store

The Lamplighters League - October 3

• Developer: Harebrained Schemes
• Publisher: Paradox Interactive
• What's it about: Set in the 1930s, this pulp action-themed tactical action game has you controlling a series of characters as a team that's fighting to stop a group from dominating the world.
• Why we want to play it: This turn-based game looks like it will be a cool mix of strategy and action, plus its 1930s time period of over-the-top pulp magazine storylines is very different.

Pre-order The Lamplighters League for PC on Xbox.com

Lords of the Fallen - October 13

• Developer: Hexworks
• Publisher: CI Games
• What's it about: Fight your way through both the land of the living and the land of the dead in this Souls-like dark fantasy RPG.
• Why we want to play it: Not only do the Unreal Engine 5-based graphics and art style look spectacular, but we love that the gameplay will let us explore two parallel worlds instead of just one.

Pre-order Lords of the Fallen on Steam

Pre-order Lords of the Fallen console versions on Amazon

Cities: Skylines II - October 24, 2023

• Developer: Colossal Order
• Publisher: Paradox Interactive
• What's it about: It's time to create your dream city, with all sorts of cool buildings, highways, and other infrastructure
• Why we want to play it: Colossal Order picked up the ball and developed a true spiritual sequel to the Sim City franchise with the original Cities: Skylines. This sequel looks like it will have more of what we liked in that game.

Pre-order Cities Skylines II on Steam

Total War: Pharaoh - October 2023

• Developer: Creative Assembly
• Publisher: Sega
• What's it about: You control the fate of ancient Egypt and rise to power as Pharaoh. Lead the fight to take out your enemies in massive battles.
• Why we want to play it: Creative Assembly is the master of historic RTS strategy games, and this new entry in the long-running franchise promises to be one of its best yet, with huge armies fighting against each other, and a new Campaign Customization feature that should add lots of replayability.

Pre-order Total War: Pharoah at the game's official website

S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl - TBD 2023

• Developer: GSC GameWorld
• Publisher: GSC GameWorld
• What's it about: In the near future, the area around the Chornobyl nuclear reactor has been turned into a radiation-filled wasteland filled with mutated creatures and strange occurrences.
• Why we want to play it: We have also been waiting a long time for a new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. The brief glimpses of the sequel in trailers have given us high hopes it will be worth the over decade wait.

The Finals - TBD 2023

• Developer: Embark Studios
• Publisher: Embark Studios
• What's it about: In a future version of a reality show, you compete with friends in a virtual battleground for money and fame.
• Why we want to play it: Embark's recent beta test of this game generated a lot of buzz, mostly because nearly everything on the game's maps could be destroyed. We think the developer will use the beta feedback to give us a multiplayer shooter with some unique twists.

Hades II - TBD 2023

• Developer: Supergiant Games
• Publisher: Supergiant Games
• What's it about: The Princess of the Underworld is going to try to defeat the Titan of Time with some help from the Olympian gods.
• Why we want to play it: The original Hades was a refreshing new take on a dungeon crawler title, and we think the experience from that game will help make the sequel an even deeper and more entertaining experience.

Helldivers 2 - TBA 2023

• Developer: Arrowhead Games Studios
• Publisher: Arrowhead Games Studios
• What's it about: It's time go to back and kill some aliens in order to protect the future of Super Earth
• Why we want to play it: The first Helldivers game was a fun and action-packed sci-fi top-down shooter. The sequel will switch perspectives and put players on the ground fighting alien bugs in a third-person viewpoint. That should make it an even more frantic game experience.

The Talos Principle II - TBD 2023

• Developer: Croteam
• Publisher: Devolver Digital
• What's it about: In an abandoned world, you play a robot who tries to solve puzzles of various levels to discover what happened to this land
• Why we want to play it: The first game in this series was a surprise, coming from the same team that made the Serious Sam FPS games. This sequel looks like it will continue to offer gamers some mind-bending puzzles in a beautiful gameplay world.

Pre-order The Talos Principle II on Steam

That's our list of our most anticipated PC games of 2023. Again, we will be updating this list every so often as more games are announced, and other games get release dates.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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Table of contents:

• Windows 11 and preview builds
• Windows 11 and Edge stats
• App updates
  • Surface updates and news
  • App updates
  • Driver updates
• A bunch of guides and how-tos
• Gaming news
• Taking a look back at the history of Microsoft
• Random (cool) fact about Microsoft

Windows 11 and preview builds

This week was full of Windows 11 news, fresh features, and bugs. Let's kick this section off with Windows 11 preview builds and all the notable changes they introduced:

• Canary Channel: 25921 with rich thumbnails preview in the Start menu, HDR wallpapers, virtual desktop improvements, and more.
• Dev Channel: 23516 with screen casting improvements, HDR backgrounds support, new accessibility features, and more. Note that build 23516 contains a bug that could cause the taskbar to disappear. Check out this guide detailing what to do in that scenario.
• Beta Channel: 22621/31.2129 (KB5029359) with Windows Copilot, Dev Drive, Narrator improvements, and other features introduced earlier in the Dev and Canary channels. By the way, Windows Copilot is set to receive a host of new plugins and add-ons, as revealed by a recent leak.
• Server vNext: 25921 with Terminal and Storage Replica Enhanced Log.

Here are the most exciting features Microsoft is preparing for its operating system:

• Improvements for systems with multiple high-refresh monitors will ensure your displays operate at optimal refresh rate for the displayed content. Windows 11 Canary builds can now adjust refresh rates for each connected monitor, providing you with the optimal experience for gaming, videos, static content, etc.
• An updated Dynamic Lighting featurewith a new option to match your peripherals' RGB lights with the system accent colour.

  

• Windows Recovery via Windows Update will let you resolve Windows bugs by download and re-installing your current Windows build without losing apps and files. The feature was spotted in Windows 11 build 25905 from the Canary Channel, and now it is available in build 23516. Note that you need the ViVeTool app to enable it.

Besides releasing new Windows 11 preview builds, Microsoft announced its plans to kill old TLS standards in future Windows versions. The company plans to remove TLS 1.0 and 1.1 support from its desktop OS and all subsequent releases due to low usage and poor security. For reference: TLS 1.0 was unveiled in 1999, and TLS 1.1 in 2006.

On August 2, 2023, Microsoft kicked off the traditional bug-hunting event. During the August 2023 Bug Bash, Windows insiders can help Microsoft find and resolve bugs in the recently unveiled features. Interestingly, the event led to an unexpected finding: users discovered Microsoft's internal tool for managing features in Windows 11. To participate in Bug Bash, update your computer to one of the latest builds from the Canary, Dev, or Beta channels.

Finally, Neowin discovered several changes in the list of supported processors in Windows 11. If you want to run Microsoft's latest OS without hacks and modifications, your computer should be equipped with a relatively modern CPU from the list of supported models. This week, Microsoft removed a bunch of Intel models and added several from AMD including one which has not been announced (yet).

Windows 11 and Edge stats

Statcounter and Valve publish their reports at the beginning of each month, revealing how popular each Windows version is among regular users and gamers.

• Almost every fourth PC user runs Windows 11. According to Statcounter, Microsoft's latest operating system currently holds 23.68% on the Windows market.
• 37% of all Steam customers are now using Windows 11. Although Windows 10 remains a dominant operating system among PC gamers, its market share is steadily declining.
• Microsoft Edge has 10.75% of the desktop browser market, a seemingly unchanged share compared with a few previous months.

App updates

Several Surface devices and multiple apps received firmware and software updates this week. Microsoft released a set of network improvements for the fifth-generation Surface Laptop 5 and fixes for the Surface Pro 8 and 9 5G to resolve graphic issues and improve overall stability. On the unofficial side, the original Surface Duo received a new set of drivers to improve the experience when running Windows 10 and 11.

Speaking of Surface, new reports revealed fresh details about Microsoft's upcoming budget-friendly devices. The company reportedly prepares the Surface Laptop Go "3" with newer processors and improved specs and a higher price tag.

Another budget-friendly Surface due to receive an update later this year is the Surface Go 3. According to the latest report, Microsoft has decided to ditch its plans for an ARM-powered Surface Go "4." Instead, the Redmond giant wants to use Intel's latest entry-level chip called N200.

Notable app updates include the following:

• A weird-looking feature makes it to Microsoft Edge, promising to take screenshots of every single web page you visit. Although it looks and sounds extremely concerning in terms of privacy, it is a Pocket-like feature that lets you save every webpage for offline view. However, Microsoft's wording makes it way too suspicious.

  

• More customization for mouse gestures. Microsoft Edge will soon let you create a list of websites where the recently revealed "Edge Mouse Gesture" feature will not work. This change will ensure gestures do not clash with a specific website's capabilities.

• Microsoft 365 iOS app can now merge PDF files, sparing you from downloading extra applications for managing PDF files. The feature is now rolling out to Microsoft 365 insiders with an active Microsoft 365 subscription.

• PowerToys 0.72 is out. One of our all-time favorite apps has been updated to version 0.72. It now has a much smaller installer and a couple of new tools, such as a value generator and an improved mouse highlighter.

   

  

   

• Microsoft Loop is now available from the Microsoft Store. Microsoft's take on Notion is now available for grabs from the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 and 11.

• Microsoft Teams gets spatial audio support on desktops, aligning the perceived audio location of each participant with their video representation. This feature will help those with compatible hardware better understand and track who is speaking.

• Word on the Web has picked up a few quality-of-life improvements. The app now lets you view documents across separate pages, plus customers can customize paragraph settings to ensure their documents look according to their needs. Both changes are now available to all users.

• Windows Subsystem for Android Preview received Vulkan API support and other improvements to test before the public rollout. By the way, it seems that Microsoft quietly lowered Windows 11 CPU requirements for Android apps.

• Microsoft Edge will let you rewrite text using Bing AI. Highlight a portion of text and press Alt + I.

• Firefox 116 is now available in the release channel with an improved Sidebar switcher, copy-paste improvements, and more.

• Cortana is no longer with us. Microsoft has deprecated the app on Windows 11 as the assistant reached its end of support.

   

And here are the latest drivers you may want to install on your computer:

• Intel ARC 31.0.101.4577 with support for new graphics cards and fixes for F1 23.
• Intel ARC 31.0.101.4578 Beta with Baldur's Gate 3 support and more.
• Intel Wi-Fi driver for Windows 10 and 11 with speed improvements and fixes.
• AMD Software 23.10.23.03 with special optimizations for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

A bunch of guides and how-tos

Windows 11 users may want to check out our guide detailing how to revert the recently redesigned taskbar search and restore the search highlights feature. Microsoft now uses Windows 11's taskbar to promote Bing, so our guide will help you remove that useless ad and replace it with something more exciting and visually appealing.

If you plan to clean-install Windows 11 or 10, here is a neat trick to ensure your installation is bloat-free and has no third-party apps pinned to the Start menu. All you have to do is change one setting on the very first installation screen.

Windows 11 enthusiasts unhappy with the system's design inconsistencies can check out the first Rectify11 3.0 Release Candidate. It promises a truly consistent design across the operating system with reworked icons, a proper dark mode, improved scaling, more Mica material, etc. However, since we are discussing pre-release software for heavy customization, you better find a spare PC or a virtual machine for testing.

On the gaming side

This week, Microsoft announced the retirement of the Xbox Console Companion app. On August 28, 2023, Microsoft will deprecate the program it revealed in 2014. Now the company encourages every PC gamer to use the newer Xbox app. Unlike the original program, the Xbox app receives regular updates with new features and improvements.

In a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft announced a major update to the classic Xbox fighting game Killer Instinct. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the software giant revealed multiple changes, such as balance improvements, updated servers, support for the latest Xbox consoles, and more.

Also, the company provided more details about the recently unveiled controller remapping feature that lets you map keyboard shortcuts to specific gamepad buttons. As of right now, this capability is only available to Xbox Insiders with the Xbox Elite Series 2 and Adaptive Controller. Those users can also try a new version of the YouTube app for Xbox Series X|S.

Another software-related feature coming soon to Xbox gamers is Discord streaming. Two companies announced a new partnership, allowing Xbox owners to stream their gameplays directly to Discord, with some features locked behind the Discord Nitro subscription.

Once you’re all connected, the next time you press the Xbox button on your controller and open the Parties & Chats tab on your Xbox Series X|S or Xbox One, select Discord, then scroll to one of your available servers and join a Voice channel. You’ll be placed in that community’s Voice channel. Select “Stream your game” when you’re ready to start streaming.

Also, you probably remember that Microsoft recently killed the Xbox Live Gold brand, replacing it with the new Xbox Game Pass Core tier. Microsoft plans to test the new service ahead of its September 14 launch, and its needs some help from insiders. Microsoft did the same in 2017 before launching the legendary Xbox Game Pass subscription.

If you are among Xbox Game Pass subscribers, check out the latest addition to the catalog featuring Airborne Kingdom, Broforce Forever, Limbo, Everspace 2, and other titles. Sadly, with the latest additions, subscribers need to kiss goodbye to Death Stranding and Total War: Warhammer III.

Those looking to play something new without spending much money should check out our regular weekend PC game deals featuring discounts and special offerings from various PC gaming marketplaces. In addition, you can get two games for free—the Epic Games Store is giving away Bloons TD6 and Loop Hero. Xbox users can check out a similar series covering weekly Deals with Gold discounts.

If you play games using NVIDIA's cloud streaming service, you will be delighted to learn that Microsoft continues adding new games to the service. This week, the company revealed it will soon be possible to play Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, and other critically acclaimed games on NVIDIA GeForce Now.

Finally, Microsoft revealed a new addition to its custom controller collection. The new Xbox Stromcloud Vapor Special Edition Controller features a unique cloud-like finish inspired by stormy skies, rubberized grips, and even an exclusive Xbox Dashboard background. The controller is now available for preorder for $69.99.

Look back at the history of Microsoft and more

Sixteen years ago, long before the pandemic and the boom of videoconferencing, Microsoft unveiled a futuristic-looking product called Microsoft RoundTable, a 360-degree camera system for video calls capable of simultaneously showing everyone in the room. The Microsoft RoundTable used a system of five cameras and mirrors paired with six directional mics to ensure you can see and hear every participant. You can learn more about this sci-fi device in the look-back article published this week by John Callaham.

The Microsoft RoundTable is not everything from the history of Microsoft this week. Another look-back article is about some truly ancient computers, namely the Radio Shack TRS-80 PC unveiled on August 3, 2977. Also, John Callaham published a story about the Microsoft Comic Chat, an app for generating 2D comic book panels for users who wanted to chat with others. Microsoft launched the program in 1996 and killed it in 2001.

Random fact about Microsoft

Did you know that Microsoft's ill-fated Zune media player was codenamed "Argo?" Before it was officially known as "Zune," the project was internally referred to by its code name. The name "Argo" was inspired by the Greek mythology of Jason and the Argonauts, who sailed on the ship "Argo" in search of the Golden Fleece.

The choice of the code name "Argo" was likely meant to evoke the sense of adventure and exploration that Microsoft wanted to associate with its new portable media player. It reflected the company's ambitions to venture into the competitive market dominated by Apple's iPod and create a product that would offer a fresh and exciting experience for users.

As the project progressed and moved closer to launch, Microsoft eventually revealed the official name "Zune" for its portable media player, but the early stages of development were marked by the secret code name "Argo."

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From Surface Go disappointment to exclusive reports about a handheld gaming PC from Lenovo, this week was packed with all sorts of news. We even got to share a story about Linux surpassing macOS when it comes to gaming on Steam. Whether it's Microsoft Loop coming to the Microsoft Store or another trending topic, you can stay in the loop here with our weekly news roundup.

Microsoft leaks hidden Windows 11 features

(Image credit: Windows Central)

Microsoft engineers have access to a tool that allows them to enable hidden features on Windows. But this week that tool leaked, allowing Insiders to turn on features that are in limited testing or that are hidden. It's called "Staging Tool," and it was spotted in a bug bash quest through the Feedback Hub.

Staging Tool is a command line interface that lets people enable or disable features through the use of feature IDs. That means you have to know a feature ID to enable or disable a specific feature. Thankfully, there's a GitHub page to help out.

Microsoft Surface Go 4 with ARM postponed

(Image credit: Future)

Those with hope for picking up a Surface Go 4 with an ARM processor got some bad news this week. According to our Senior Editor Zac Bowden, Microsoft has postponed its plans to ship and ARM-powered Surface Go. The company was going to release a Surface Go powered by a Qualcomm 7c-based processor, but it decided to go in another direction.

Instead, the next-gen Surface Go will feature an Intel Processor N200 CPU. That chip is part of a new lineup that replaces Intel's entry-level mobile series processors.

It's not entirely clear why Microsoft shifted its plans, but there's a chance that it's related to the Surface Go being aimed at business and education customers. Users in those sectors are less likely to have their needs met by a Windows on ARM PC.

Lenovo Legion Go in the works

(Image credit: Liliputing | Windows Central)

This year is the year of handheld gaming PCs. Valve's Steam Deck and ASUS' ROG Ally are doing well and AYANEO has an impressive portable gaming PC as well. Soon, we will have an entry from Lenovo to compete within the space. Our Managing Editor Jez Corden shared an exclusive report that Lenovo is working on the Legion Go.

The Legion Go will reportedly run on AMD's new Phoenix processors. Based on what Corden has heard, the Legion Go could feature an 8-inch screen, which is larger than the display of the Steam Deck and ROG Ally.

Of course, plans are always subject to change. We may never see the Legion Go ship to consumers, but if it does, we'll have another contender in the growing portable gaming PC market.

Steam Deck tops Mac

(Image credit: Windows Central / iMore)

Sticking with mobile PC gaming, the rise in popularity of the Steam Deck has officially bumped macOS into third place when it comes to Steam gaming. The most recent Steam survey shows that Linux has taken the second spot when it comes to Steam users. Rather than 2023 being the fabled year of the Linux desktop, the shakeup in rankings is thanks to the Steam Deck.

Valve's Steam Deck runs Linux, and the handheld PC appears to be quite popular. SteamOS makes up 42% of the Linux market share of Steam users.

Microsoft Loop now in Microsoft Store

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft Loop brings together components from across Microsoft 365 into shared workspaces. The aim is to facilitate collaboration while giving fine-tune controls over what is shared with specific people. For example, a shared workspace could have information from a Word document and financial data from an Excel spreadsheet, but only have that sensitive information shared with specific people.

Microsoft Loop shipped in preview to Android and iOS earlier this year. Now, it's available through the Microsoft Store on Windows 11.

Initially, Microsoft Loop only supported work accounts, but it now works with personal accounts as well.

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Early in 1997, Apple bought out NeXT, the PC OS company that had been created by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who resigned from Apple back in 1985. Initially, Apple brought back Jobs just as an advisor, but in July 1997, Jobs organized an effort to remove Gil Amelio as Apple's CEO. The company's board then put Jobs in as its interim CEO.

Jobs immediately went to work, and one of the first things he did was to get the company to talk with Microsoft. In short, Apple needed some cash to jumpstart the company into new ventures. 26 years ago today, on August 6, 1997, Jobs was on stage at the MacWorld event in Boston, when he announced something that no one in that audience expected; a partnership with Microsoft that included a $150 million investment in Apple.

The talks initially began between Microsoft and Apple to resolve a number of patent disputes but quickly expanded beyond that. In addition to settling the patent issues, Microsoft pledged to develop its Office apps for Mac PCs for at least five years. Apple and Microsoft also pledged to collaborate on Java development, and Apple pledged to make Microsoft's Internet Explorer the default web browser for Macs.

The reaction from the audience to that MacWorld presentation was mixed. Some clapped while others were silent, and there were even some boos. That mixed reaction escalated when Microsoft CEO Bill Gates appeared in a satellite live stream on a big screen behind Jobs.

That image of Gates looming over Jobs became iconic in Apple's history. Less than two years later, in June 1999, it was replicated in the TNT TV biopic movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, with Anthony Michael Hall playing Gates, and Noah Wyle playing Jobs.

The Washington Post reported on the event at the time, and got some quotes from a couple of the MacWorld attendees on the Microsoft-Apple partnership:

"I think it's just another way for Bill Gates to take over the world," said Steve Ferlazzo, a longtime Macintosh user who attended the event.

Others were more sanguine. Peter Hanson, a partner in Sienna Software Inc., a Toronto company that makes a popular astronomy program for the Mac, said any news from Jobs that helps to turn around Apple is welcome, even if it involves Microsoft. "We've been with the Mac since 1984 and will keep with it," he said. "It's just been a tough couple of years."

Mac-History.net reports that Jobs later regretted that image of Gates towering over him at MacWorld. He's quoted by his official biographer, Walter Isaacson, as saying:

That was my worst and stupidest staging event ever. It was bad because it made me look small, and Apple look small, and if everything was in Bill’s hands.

Even Gates reportedly admitted that he "didn't know that my face was going to be blown up to looming proportions."

Microsoft's $150 million investment meant that it owned seven percent of Apple with 150,000 shares of preferred stock. Microsoft had pledged to continue to own shares in Apple for three years. In 2001, Microsoft converted its investment into common stock, which mean it owned 18.1 million of Apple shares. Finally, just two years later, Microsoft sold off all of its shares in Apple for $550 million.

Most people would think that was a pretty solid return on an investment after six years. However, what if Microsoft had kept that relatively small amount of ownership Apple until today? Apple has split its stocks a number of times since Microsoft turned the preferred stock into common stock. In 2005, Apple had a 2-1 stock split, followed by a huge 7-1 split in 2014, and then a smaller but still big 4-1 stock split in 2020.

Doing the math, Microsoft would have owned 1.013 billion shares in Apple if it stuck with its investment until today. Its stock closed on Friday at $181.99 a share. That means Microsoft's $150 million investment would have been worth a whopping $184,465,064,000 today.

Today, the tech industry is much different than it was in 1997, when Apple basically asked Microsoft for some money. While Microsoft continues to rule the PC desktop and laptop operating system business with Windows, Apple's success in other types of hardware with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch have made it a bigger company than Microsoft in terms of its market cap. One wonders if those folks in the MacWorld audience who booed Bill Gates on screen feel differently now.

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Several months ago, AMD announced and released the Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards. They received unexciting reviews. Not only is the Radeon RX 7000 series slower than its Nvidia counterparts, but it also consumes more power.

Additionally, the generational uplift from RX 6000 to RX 7000 isn’t much greater either. The same can be said about the Nvidia RTX 4000 series too, though.

So far, AMD has released four models in the RX 7000 series. AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT, RX 7900 GRE (OEM only) and RX 7600. With AMD Radeon RX 7800, RX 7700 and even RX 7500 expected to release soon.

While the RX 7900 series is based on the top-of-the-line Navi 31 GPU, the RX 7800 and RX 7700 are expected to be based on the Navi 32 GPU. While the RX 7600 is based on the Navi 33 GPU, RX 7500 too is highly likely to use the same GPU.

So far, we have had no information about the successor of the RX 7000 series, the next generation of graphics cards from AMD. That has now changed.

No Top And Mid-Range Models In Next-Gen AMD Graphics Cards

A well-known Twitter-based leaker @Kepler_L2 has revealed something that will not only surprise but also disappoint many.

In a tweet, he revealed that Navi 4x GPUs, which are most likely to be used in Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards, will not come in any enthusiast or flagship versions.

He has compared it to the RDNA1 (Radeon RX 5000) or Polaris (Radeon 400 series) generations of graphics cards by AMD. Both generations didn’t have flagship models.

When asked about the source of the information, Kepler confirms that he has heard about it from three different sources.

To take matters further, another leaker @All_The_Watts has added more information to it.

She says that the Navi 4x GPU series will have only Navi 43 and Navi 44 GPUs. Which means that the AMD RX 8000 series might only have RX 8600 and lower graphics cards. Anything above that is unlikely to be made.

Conclusion

If this rumor turns out to be true, then it’s going to be a massive disappointment. We don’t know what is the reason behind this move by AMD.

As Nvidia is delaying its RTX 5000 graphics card series, it’s possible that AMD could release the RX 8000 in between them, but only with budget models. Meaning that the RX 9000 could be reserved for the time Nvidia releases the RTX 5000 graphics cards.

There’s another possibility, though. AMD could use the Navi 4x series in the RX 7000 series itself. But that those GPUs would be reserved for the cheaper models.

The problem is that the rivalry between the graphics card makers is almost nonexistent now. Nvidia is massively leading in graphics card users according to the Steam survey. If AMD doesn’t compete with Nvidia, the difference could increase further.

This means monopoly for Nvidia, which is cutting out on VRAM, releasing more expensive graphics cards with minor performance uplift and doing other such stuff due to a lack of sufficient competition from AMD.

Let’s hope better sense prevails and AMD does better than that.

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What is surprising though is the naming and the positioning of the 7800 XT that AMD could be planning for. According to the leaked specifications of the GPU, the 7800 XT may only be a bit faster than the current RX 6800.

We did speculate over this months ago (in November 2022) suggesting that such specs would not be good enough for a 7800 XT or even a 7800 non-XT. If you are wondering why, it is because Navi 32, which the 7800 XT is apparently based on, has a maximum of 60 Compute Units (CUs) or 3,840 stream processors (SPs). This is the same amount of CUs as the RX 6800 and is lower than the 6800 XT's 72 CU count. And based on how the RX 7600 compares with a similarly specced last-gen 6650 XT, it is fairly safe to assume that the 7800 XT would not be all that faster than the 6800 and end up being slower than the 6800 XT.

Powercolour does however put up the standard disclaimer that the listed specifications may not be final and may change without notice. We do hope AMD revises the naming of the card as this would only mean the 7800 XT could potentially even outdo the poor reception received by Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti:

The entire information provided herein are for reference only.
Powercolour reserves the right to modify or revise the content at anytime without prior notice.

Here are the full detailed specifications of the Powercolour RX 7800 XT:

SPECIFICATION

Feature Support

Maximum Resolution

Power Specs + Board Dimensions

The only thing the RX 7800 XT has going on for it, compared to the 6800 XT and the non-XT, is the higher-clocked 18Gbps memory and the corresponding 576 GB/s, compared to the 6800 (XT)'s 16Gbps and 512 GB/s bandwidth. However, even that advantage may be lost owing to the 6800 (XT) having 128MB of Infinity (L3) cache as opposed to the 7800 XT packing just 64MB.

A card with such specs is destined to fail if it is priced any higher than $449, and only then will the media overlook the poor naming (assuming AMD decides to keep calling it the 7800 XT).

Spotted by: All The Watts!! (Twitter)

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The sudden move has apparently taken some people by surprise. In a post on X (formerly Twitter). Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics & Technology, offered some reasons for this decision.

Chandrasekhar stated it was the Indian government's goal to reduce the number of exports of these products, encourage the local manufacturing of such devices, and also "ensure trusted hardware n systems."

He added:

This is not at all abt license raj - It is about regulating imports to ensure trusted and verifiable systems AND ensuring India tech eco-system uses trusted n verified systems only that are imported and/or domestically manufactured trusted systems / products.

This move could hurt sales of these kinds of products from major PC and tablet companies. Indeed, Bloomberg reports that three of those companies (Apple, Samsung, and HP) have decided to halt imports of those devices into India for now.

CNBC quotes Tarun Pathak, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, as saying this move by the Indian government could cause price increases in PCs and laptops while the affected companies either start making these products in India or apply for those licenses. He added:

With the festive season approaching, there might be some disruptions in offers and discounts as well and those couldn’t be as aggressive as last year due to possible demand and supply mismatches.

India is starting to become a major source of tech products. Earlier this year Foxconn announced it will invest $700 million into making a new iPhone plant in India.

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The significance of this statement lies in the fact that Tim Cook has not openly discussed generative AI in the past. Instead, he focused on more general forms of AI and machine learning (ML). This indicates a shift in Apple's approach and highlights its growing interest in generative AI technologies.

"We’ve been doing research across a wide range of AI technologies, including generative AI, for years. We’re going to continue investing and innovating and responsibly advancing our products with these technologies to help enrich people’s lives."

-Tim Cook on Reuters

(Image credit)

This is a significant remark coming from Cook, who has avoided discussing generative AI in the past in favor of discussing more general forms of AI and ML. Although Cook welcomed AI's promise in May, he acknowledged that "issues need to be sorted."

Apple & generative AI

Apple is using generative AI in a variety of ways to improve its products and services. For example, generative AI is being used to develop new features for Siri, to create new augmented reality experiences.

One of the most visible ways that Apple is using generative AI is in its virtual assistant, Siri. Siri is constantly being updated with new features, and many of these features are powered by generative AI. For example, generative AI is being used to improve Siri's ability to understand natural language. This means that Siri will be able to understand better what you are saying, even if you are not speaking perfectly.

These kinds of generative AI efforts also give Apple an opportunity to create something "bigger." According to a recent patent, Apple is already working on a lip-reading Siri. If this project comes to life, generative AI will have an undeniable contribution.

Featured image credit: Apple

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More than a year ago, AMD released the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card. It was around the time when the crypto-mining craze was at its highest, causing the prices of the graphics cards to be tremendously expensive.

Not to forget, the demand for computers and computer parts was high too, due to pandemic reasons. So their availability was scarce.

So when AMD released the Radeon RX 6500 XT, everyone thought that they would finally be able to get their hands on an affordable graphics card. It was affordable, but only on paper. To add to that, it was also very disappointing launch.

The reasons are many. First, it was a mobile GPU that was converted into a desktop graphics card due to high demand for consumer graphics cards. Second, it came with just a 64-bit memory bus, which makes it tremendously lacking in performance. Third, it came with a x4 bus lanes on PCIe 4.0. Means it was lacking the bandwidth required to run games properly.

Another major problem was that those who bought the graphics card for video streaming were in for a surprise. The card lacked support for hardware based encoding for codecs like H.264 and H.265 (HEVC).

All this ensured that the RX 6500 XT graphics card didn’t only perform poorly in reviews where, it was in-fact, slower than the RX 5500 XT, but it also sold poorly.

In recent times, AMD has released graphics cards in the RX 7000 series like the RX 7900 XTX, 7900 XT and 7600. With RX 7800 and 7700 possibly releasing soon.

Now it looks like we have some early leaked specs for the AMD RX 6500 XT’s successor, the RX 7500.

AMD RX 7500 Leaked Specs

A few months ago, we had revealed how the specs for the whole RX 7900 series had leaked. As expected, the leak wasn’t final and the specs did change afterward. However, it gave us a fair idea about things.

In that leak, it was revealed that the RX 7500 would come with 24 compute units, which is a major indicator of a graphics card’s performance. It looks like those numbers could be incorrect and might have changed.

A well-known Twitter based leaker @All_The_Watts has leaked new basic specs for the AMD Radeon RX 7500.

In it, she reveals that the AMD RX 7500 would come with 28 compute units, which is 4 more CUs than the originally leaked one. For the record, RX 6500 XT comes with 16 CUs. This alone could make RX 7500 graphics card 55% faster if raw specs alone are considered.

Not only that, it would come with 8GB VRAM. Which is not only a big upgrade over the RX 6500 XT’s 4GB VRAM, but it directly takes on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050, which was originally leaked to have only 6GB of VRAM. Though, we haven’t heard about Nvidia’s offering since the then. Graphics card VRAM is in all the news these days as modern games are demanding a lot of memory.

Interestingly, she also reveals that the RX 7500 will come with 16Gbps of memory speed. Which is a downgrade over the 18Gbps of memory speed that the RX 6500 XT came with. Even the RX 7600 has 18Gbps memory speeds.

Lastly, she reveals that it would have a 130W TBP, which means that the graphics card will require a single 6-pin or 8-pin power cable.

Conclusion

In all the noise about expensive graphics cards, people tend to forget about budget gamers. They form the majority of buyers and yet their voices are always go unheard.

Yes, these days, x600 / xx60 graphics cards sell more, but x500 / xx50 need to perform well for them to be attractive to buyers.

Additionally, both AMD and Intel are preparing powerful iGPUs which are embedded into the CPUs themselves. They could take on or replace the budget graphics cards directly. However, these CPUs with powerful iGPUs seem to be mostly getting released for notebooks and we aren’t hearing much about their release on desktops.

If the leaked specs for the RX 7500 come out to be true and the graphics card does perform well, then expect the RX 7500 to sell way better than what the RX 6500 XT did.

In terms of pricing, we expect AMD RX 7500 to be priced at $200 to $220. For the record, RX 6500 was priced at $200, but was selling at $300 and more due to the reasons written above.

As always, it should be mentioned that these rumored leaks are just leaks. They could be incorrect or AMD could also change the specs later. So unless more leaks come out, like clock speeds and even officially confirmed specs, we cannot say anything for sure.

So we will have to wait for more information about this graphics card to get the full picture about it.

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According to a report from the Windows Central, Microsoft has pushed its plans to go ahead with ARM chips for Surface Go this year. Earlier, Microsoft had intended to go forward with the Surface Go refresh featuring ARM Qualcomm 7c processor.

According to sources, Microsoft is postponding Surface Go with ARM chip in favour of Intel's new N200, an entry level mobile processor. It features four cores and four threads, along with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.7GHz. The N200 also comes with 6MB Intel Smart Cache and has a maximum TDP of 6W. Intel had announced the N200 processor in Q1 of 2023.

The new Intel processor will give the upcoming Surface Go a decent performance boost when compared to the existing Surface Go 3 which is powered by Intel Pentium Gold 6500Y or Core i3-10100Y processors.

Windows Central notes that the new Surface Go will retain the similar form factor as its predecessors but will be easier to repair. Furthermore, Microsoft seems to be planning to target business users with the Surface Go so the new device may be called Surface Go+, instead of Surface Go 4. This is similar to the Surface Pro 7+ that was announced for businesses and educational customers back in 2021. The move may also explain why Microsoft is going with Intel instead of ARM as Intel will provide much better software support for commerical and business users.

While Microsoft has pushed its plans for ARM on Surface Go, the report claims that it is not cancelled. So, there is a chance that we could see an ARM powered Surface Go in the future. As for the Surface Go with Intel processors, Microsoft is expected to launch the new hardware along with the refreshed Surface Laptop and Surface Pro at its Surface event this fall.

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Apple's net income for the quarter was $19.881 billion, up slightly from $19.442 billion from the same period a year ago.

As usual, iPhone sales had the biggest revenue numbers with $39.669 billion, down from $40.665 billion from the same period a year ago. Mac PC revenues were $6.840 billion, down from $7.382 billion, and iPad revenues were $5.791 billion, down from $7.224 billion from a year ago. Apple no longer offers any specific sales unit numbers for its hardware products.

Apple's wearables, home, and accessories division which includes its Apple Watch business, had revenues of $8.284 billion for the quarter, up slightly from $8.084 billion from the same period a year ago. The company's services division, which includes things like the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple TV+, had the biggest gain, with revenues of $21.213 billion, up from $19.604 billion from the same period a year ago.

Indeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a big deal out of the Services revenue number, stating it was an "all-time revenue record" for the division, and adding that it now has "over 1 billion paid subscriptions." Luca Maestri, the chief financial officer at Apple, added that " . . . our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high in every geographic segment."

Apple is expected to announce new iPhone 15 and Apple Watch 9 devices at a press event later this year, with rumors stating it will happen on September 15. Of course, the big question is exactly when the company's mixed reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, will launch. The company officially revealed the Vision Pro in June, and it's supposed to go on sale sometime in early 2024 for a starting price of $3,499.

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At the time of its announcement, Radio Shack was owned by the Tandy Corporation. According to the History Computer.com, one of Tandy's retail buyers, Don French, became a fan of the very early kit-based PCs that were mainly for tech-oriented fans. He thought it might be a good idea for Tandy to sell its own PC at its Radio Shack stores.

French managed to convince Tandy's vice president of manufacturing John Roach to give a green light for the company to develop its own PC product. A 24-year-old former National Semiconductor employee named Steve Leininger was in charge of designing the PC.

The name of the computer, the TRS-80, came from two sources. TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack. while the 80 was a reference to the PC's processor, the Zilog Z80. The 8-bit chip had 8,500 transistors and had a clock speed of 1.774 MHz. The TRS-80 had about 4 KB of RAM but the PC could support the expansion to as much as 48 KB. All of that hardware was put inside a QWERTY keyboard case. Finally, the TRS-80 used its own TRSDOS operating system.

When the TRS-80 went on sale, Radio Shack offered the PC by itself for $399. However, most people bought it with a 12-inch video monitor and a tape recorder to store data for $599. That's about $2,970 in 2023.

Even with that high a price, the PC was still cheaper than its main competition, the Apple II at $1,298 (which didn't come with a monitor) and the Commodore PET, which had a price of $795, and did include a monitor.

Radio Shack started delivering the first units to people who pre-ordered it in November 1997, and Radio Shack stores started selling it in December of that year. With that high price tag, Tandy projected sales of just 3,000 units in its first year.

However, the company greatly underestimated the demand for the TRS-80. With the help of thousands of Radio Shack stores, the PC sold 10,000 units in just its first month and went on to sell 55,000 units during the first year. Tandy also boosted sales with a solid TV and marketing campaign. In 1978, it launched a floppy disk drive expansion product, and that also sold extremely well

The TRS-80 was later renamed as the TRS-80 Model 1. That's because Tandy decided to go all in with its personal computer lineup and made newer versions. That included the Model II, which was made for business customers, and the true successor to the original TRS-80, the Model III in 1978. The original Model 1 was discontinued in early 1981, but not before it sold over 200,000 units in its lifetime.

Today, the PC industry owes a lot to the success of the Radio Shack TRS-80. It proved that people would want to get a personal computer for various tasks in the home. Even though the Tandy lineup of PCs would soon be superseded by the IBM PC and its clones, along with Apple's future products.. there's no denying that the TRS-80 helped to create a new business and a new type of product that continues to be a strong part of the overall tech industry today.

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Her name is Shadowheart, she's a half-elf, she's obsessed with a strange object, and she's not quick to trust people. I get the feeling I am going to spend 100 more hours with her.

Larian Studios

 

There's a fortified encampment of druids you come across early in Baldur's Gate 3. Just outside the camp's gate, there are travelers, under attack from goblins, begging to be let in. There's a chance you could save the travelers, but there will be casualties. This latest attack pushes the current leader of the camp to expel all the refugee tieflings it had previously taken in, both to fortify the camp with an elaborate ritual and because many believe the nomads' presence is the cause of these latest attacks.

 

Your party is let through the gate. What you're there to do, technically, is find a healer. But what you can do inside is a remarkable amount of role-playing. Role-playing of the kind familiar to any player of Dungeons & Dragons. Role-playing like you might have done in the Baldur's Gate games of 20 years ago or the Divinity series that brought developer Larian into the D&D fold. It's the kind of crunchy, infinitely replayable, "Half-orc ranger with Gloom Stalker subclass" game that makes you feel like your choices matter, both to the world and how the gameplay unfolds. The wait has been long, the anticipation strong, but even from a short dive into the release version of the game, it all seems worth it.

 

Patch-y, but worth playing now

Baldur's Gate 3 is "a huge RPG designed to be played over many weeks," according to a statement sent to reviewers with early game codes. "Early" ended up being about four days, with a new patch arriving nearly every day. With other things to write about and the typical sleep, food, and middle-aged life tasks required of me, I'm not nearly as far as I'd like to be in the game. Technically, I could have been playing the true Early Access of the game since late 2020, having access to the first act and roughly 25 hours of the game, but I did not (and Early Access players' saves and progress will not transfer over to the full game). My impressions come from about six to seven hours of gameplay, including a lot of time spent in the character creation tool before deciding to run with the stock characters.

 

There's a patch arriving today and another outlined for shortly thereafter. The game has been playable on my Windows 11 desktop with an RTX 3070 graphics card, though not without some graphical hitches and stutters, which were far worse before I switched from the default DirectX 11 to the Vulkan version for the game, though your results will certainly vary. If you're capable of waiting a bit before diving in, many things will likely be smoother for you. But as-is, the game is playable, and my saves—local, on Steam, and on Larian's own cross-platform save system—seem intact.

 

As I've come to expect from Larian, everything about the map movement and the combat is tight, fluid, and visually intriguing enough without being too visually busy. The rendered cutscenes, especially the opening cinematic, have been impressive enough, but I've only seen a half-dozen or so. Dialogue scenes are far more frequent and involve tight shots on speakers and reactions. The lip-syncing is not quite there, but there's a lot of engaging dialogue to get through, so it's an easy thing to overlook. You'll probably be more focused on whether your paladin can make a persuasion check against a shopkeeper, anyways.

 

Today's launch is for the PC version only. Versions for Mac, PS5 (September 6), and, eventually, Xbox consoles are due to arrive in the coming months.

 

Interesting choices

Back to that fortified druid encampment. One of the tieflings is shot through with goblin arrows trying to open the gate. His enraged companion grabs a crossbow and runs to the makeshift jail, where she takes aim at a captured goblin. If you hit your dice roll, you can nudge her toward justice, mercy, revenge, or simply watch as things play out. Not only might this affect other tieflings' stance toward you, plus the fate of a little foul-mouthed goblin, but other members of your party will approve or disapprove of your choice and tell you about it.

 

Elsewhere, you can thwart a child fraudster seeking to foist fake magic rings onto travelers passing through. If you hit a perception check, you can also catch her pickpocket accomplice and then, through intuition, convince the ruffian that he's not made for a life of crime. Just around the corner, tiefling parents are reaching their boiling point with the guards who arrested their child. There's a child just outside who's entranced by a harpy song. And there's a druid who knows the camp's original leader would never push out the tieflings, were he not lost after venturing out on a quest recently.

 

It's the closest a game has come for me to feeling like an actual D&D campaign, albeit with a Game Master far, far more skilled than is typical. Baldur's Gate 3 has a story, with acts, maps it wants you to get through, and bosses to fight. But everything outside of that gentle, untimed corralling is seemingly up to you. You could refuse to take on the companions the game has on its cover art. You can kill nearly any character in the game (I haven't tried children, but you can let me know, I guess). You can break down a gate with weapons, set it on fire, find the opening mechanism with high perception, or use a character's race-inherent leaping boost skill and jump over it. When you start multiplying out the possibilities and think about debugging all of them, the mind boggles at how much work Baldur's Gate 3 must have been to make.

 

Divinity: Original Sin 2 with D&D trademarks

A whole bunch of Baldur's Gate 3 evokes Larian's critically lauded prior game, Divinity: Original Sin 2. The map exploration, object highlighting, combat positioning, party grouping, inventory—it's all there in BG3. Which is good because all of that worked really well, and it'd be a shame to see it not get used for Larian's big licensed outing. I greatly prefer the turn-based-but-timing-sensitive D:OS2 approach to combat used here over the "real-time with pause" system of the prior Baldur's Gate entries. That might be a personal thing, but I also think today's screens and graphic capabilities better suit a system where moving your archer just 0.3 meters to the left, into a tree shadow, gives them the stealth advantage they need for their next attack.

 

Like D:OS2, there's also a considerable learning curve to the systems and controls. I didn't attempt to play this game on the Steam Deck during my review, nor did I play with a controller. I didn't even really have time to dig into the keyboard shortcuts, which I'm sure are robust but could also cause a few mishaps when first learning. I stuck to my mouse and keyboard and pecked my way through the dozens of on-screen UI elements you can click.

 

BG3 has the typical tooltips and explainers when you first encounter new things, and it even color-codes some elements to help you understand things like "is this armor actually better?" But holding it all in your mental RAM is a commitment. Having a working knowledge of 5th Edition D&D will help you out a lot, but the game translation of it still has its own quirks. It will be a while before I understand exactly how grease can be deployed in combat.

 

I'm going to keep playing Baldur's Gate 3 and will likely report back on how it fares as a multi-week experience, as the developers intended. But in just the opening hours of the campaign, any lingering doubts about Larian's ability to bottle up and distribute the freedom of the role-playing experience have been overcome. Let me know what you think about the game, either from Early Access or your tentative first few hours, in the comments.

 

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In case you haven't been following, earlier this year, it was found that Linux too was now exhibiting fTPM-related stuttering and freezing issues, something that was limited to Windows only last year. The issue is related to HWRNG.

On a patch note, Torvalds writes:

Let's just disable the stupid fTPM hwrnd thing.

Maybe use it for the boot-time "gather entropy from different sources", but clearly it should *not* be used at runtime.

Why would anybody use that crud when any machine that has it supposedly fixed (which apparently didn't turn out to be true after all) would also have the CPU rdrand instruction that doesn't have the problem?

If you don't trust the CPU rdrand implementation (and that has had bugs too - see clear_rdrand_cpuid_bit() and x86_init_rdrand()), why would you trust the fTPM version that has caused even *more* problems?

So I don't see any downside to just saying "that fTPM thing is not working". Even if it ends up working in the future, there are alternatives that aren't any worse.

Later, he further adds:

Because honestly, even if AMD is the one that has had stuttering issues, the bigger argument is that there is simply no _point_ in supporting randomness from a firmware source.

There is no way anybody should believe that a firmware TPM generates better randomness than we do natively.

And there are many reasons to _not_ believe it. The AMD problem is just the most user-visible one.

Now, I'm not saying that a fTPM needs to be disabled in general - but I really feel like we should just do

[..]

and be done with it. But hey, if we have no way to see that whole "this is firmware emulation", then just blocking AMD might be the only way.

You can follow the series of messages on the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) here.

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Here's a part of the transcript, courtesy of Seeking Alpha, which mentions the upcoming Radeon cards as well as yearly revenue trends from the rest of the gaming segment:

.. turning to our Gaming segment, revenue declined 4% year-over-year to $1.6 billion as higher semi-custom revenue was more than offset by lower gaming graphic sales. Sequentially, segment revenue declined 10%. Semi-custom SoC sales were strong in the quarter as Microsoft and Sony had healthy console demand based on improved retail availability globally, and the launches of new AAA games.

In gaming graphics, we expanded our Radeon 7000 GPU series in the second quarter with the launch of our mainstream RX 7600 cards for 1080p gaming. We are on track to further expand our RDNA 3 GPU offerings with the launch of new, enthusiast-class Radeon 7000 series cards in the third quarter.

Although the "enthusiast-class" could well refer to the recently released Radeon RX 7900 GRE, AMD typically refers to its 7900 series offerings as "Ultra-enthusiast", which means there is a good possibility (via VideoCardz) that the company was teasing the RX 7800 series or perhaps even the RX 7700 series here.

The RX 7800 and the RX 7700 (naming not confirmed) may have to compete with Nvidia's RTX 4070 and 4060 Ti respectively. While the RTX 4070 is one of the best GeForce cards of this generation, as it has ample VRAM, and is also priced fairly appropriately, the same cannot be said for the 4060 Ti. Hence, AMD may need to price the RTX 4070 competitor more aggressively if it wants to move more units.

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The hallway is bathed in harsh white, a figment of LEDs. Along the walls, doors recede endlessly into the distance. Each flaunts a crown of blue light at its base, except for the doors you’ve walked through before, which instead emit a deep purple. But these are but specks of sand in the desert of gateways.

You are searching for something.

You prepare yourself for an arduous journey. Before the first door you come upon a pedestal. The box that lies on the pedestal gives airs of gildedness despite being as plain as the walls that surround it. It isn’t adorned with a title, but its name echoes in your mind, intuitively: the Answer Box. A plaque reads:

I have crawled through each and every door. Not just the doors in this hallway, but the doors in every hallway in existence, the doors within doors, as well as some doors that I dare not show you, doors that would make you flee in terror. I have seen everything. I am impartial. I have your best interests at heart. I understand what it is you want to know and it is knowable. I have the answer that you seek.

Your finger caresses the latch.

Cataloging the web was doomed from the start. In the summer of 1993, Matthew Gray created the World Wide Web Wanderer (WWWW), arguably the first internet bot and web crawler. During its first official attempt to index the web, The Wanderer returned from its expedition with 130 URLs. But even in the baby years of the internet, this list was incomplete.

To understand how a simple web crawler works, imagine making a travel itinerary that contains three cities: New York, Tokyo, Paris. While visiting each destination, listen for any mentions of other places and add those to your itinerary. Your world crawl is complete when you have visited all of the cities on your ever-growing list. Will you have seen a lot of places by the end of your journey? Undoubtedly. But will you have seen the whole world? Almost certainly not. There will always be cities, or entire webs of cities, that are effectively invisible to this process.

A web crawler similarly consults a list of URLs and recursively visits any links it sees. But the resulting index should not be confused with a comprehensive directory of the internet, which does not exist.

I have a theory of technology that places every informational product on a spectrum from Physician to Librarian:

The Physician's primary aim is to protect you from context. In diagnosing or treating you, they draw on years of training, research, and personal experience, but rather than presenting that information to you in its raw form, they condense and synthesize. This is for good reason: When you go to a doctor’s office, your primary aim is not to have your curiosity sparked or to dive into primary sources; you want answers, in the form of diagnosis or treatment. The Physician saves you time and shelters you from information that might be misconstrued or unnecessarily anxiety-provoking.

In contrast, the Librarian's primary aim is to point you toward context. In answering your questions, they draw on years of training, research, and personal experience, and they use that to pull you into a conversation with a knowledge system, and with the humans behind that knowledge system. The Librarian may save you time in the short term by getting you to a destination more quickly. But in the long term, their hope is that the destination will reveal itself to be a portal. They find thought enriching, rather than laborious, and understand their expertise to be in wayfinding rather than solutions. Sometimes, you ask a Librarian a question, and they point you to a book that is an answer to a question you didn't even think to ask. Sometimes, you walk over to the stacks to retrieve the book, only for a different book to catch your eye instead. This too is success to the Librarian.

There are book reviews that say "I read this so you don't have to" (Physician), and others that say "I read this and you should too" (Librarian). There are apps that put you in a perpetual state of simmering, unrealized wanderlust from the comfort of your couch (Physician) and others that inspire you to get up and go (Librarian).

A search engine, at its core, is a product that tries to help you visit pages made by humans, quintessentially Librarian. In a 2004 Playboy interview, Google cofounder Larry page was unequivocal in his assertion that “we want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.” But over the past 10 years, let's just say Google has gone to medical school. The answer is king; a mere link is nothing more than failure of technology.

Google Search launched five years after the World Wide Web Wanderer, and its main innovation was its PageRank algorithm, which created a trustworthiness score for each website based on how often other "trustworthy" sites linked to it; this score was used not only to decide which sites to index and how often, but also how highly to rank them in search results.

I'd like to emphasize here the utter audaciousness of this undertaking. I remember when Google first announced in 2007 that it would take 3D scans of the world in order to power Google Street View. The task felt impossibly, absurdly immense. But over the course of a decade, whether through sheer economic might, or creative use (or exploitation) of labor, Google managed to do just that. Or at least, it's convinced us that it has.

Every large-scale archival project is a Shakespearian tragedy that always ends the same way: incomplete. It requires players with the hubris to go on every night, as well as an audience willing to suspend disbelief, to believe in a corporate overlord's omniscience and omnipresence. Because there are more streets than it is realistic to scan. And even once scanned, a street continues to evolve: Buildings are torn down, trees grow taller, empires fall. The signified distances itself from the signifier. So, difficult decisions need to be made. And hidden within those decisions are ideologies about which places are worth saving.

The number of websites outnumbers miles of road by many orders of magnitude.

Building an index, while onerous, is only part of the battle. There is also the problem of processing your search query into a list of results. Usually this involves natural language processing (NLP), a set of techniques that help computers interpret human communication. A rudimentary NLP algorithm might split the query "baking a loaf of bread" into individual tokens (baking, a, loaf, of, bread), remove any commonly occurring words that don't add much obvious meaning to the query (baking, loaf, bread), reduce words to their base form to better match word variations (bake, loaf, bread), and expand the query to include common synonyms (bake, cook, prepare, make, craft, loaf, bread).

But the more sophisticated NLP techniques that Google uses today involves wielding a concoction of interconnected machine learning algorithms that predict which results will be most useful to a searcher. The underlying goal is to understand a user's "intent" using any contextual clues at its disposal: current events, and the user's location, search history, language, device. When a user searches for the word "mars," are they searching for information about the planet, the God, the gene, the chocolate bar, the present-tense verb, or the city in Nebraska?

Of course, natural language is a bit of a misnomer. There is nothing "natural" (in the colloquial sense) about the way we talk to Google. We wouldn't walk over to a friend and bark "italian restaurant nearby" or "what watch netflix romcom." In the words of the media scholar Father John Culkin, "we shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.” Put differently, we evolve to ask our questions in ways that we think our machines can answer them, and over time, privilege questions that are technologically solvable. Can Google ever really understand what our intent is? Can we?

A piece of software that interprets your intent and returns a list of links from a large index is a perfectly usable search engine. However, since the early 2010s, Google has embraced a radically different vision of what a search engine can be: one that can respond directly to questions directly on the results page. This feature has been referred to using a slew of confusing, ever-changing names (rich answers, direct answers, instant answers, quick answers, featured snippets, knowledge panel), but for our purposes we’ll use the colloquial umbrella category: the Answer Box.

The Knowledge Graph, a semantic network that perceives the world in terms of discrete entities containing structured data, plays a pivotal role in Google's pursuit of this vision. Under the Knowledge Graph, for example, the band Boygenius is associated with genres, record labels, a discography, images, a list of links and videos, and contains the members Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, who are each themselves considered entities in the Graph with their own associated data.

To cast a slightly wider net of answerable questions, Google also uses a technique it calls Passage Ranking, which picks out specific excerpts from pages that might answer a user's question, whether or not it's the focus of the page. Passage Ranking can tell me, among other things, how Boygenius met ("Julien and Lucy performed on the same bill in Washington, DC, followed by Julien meeting Phoebe a month later"), where the band's name came from (“men are taught to be entitled to space … a 'boygenius' is someone who their whole life has been told that their ideas are genius”), and pluck out of a 1400-word New Yorker profile that Julien Baker is “five feet tall and a hundred and five pounds.”

The vision of the world that these rich results represent is one in which everything worth knowing is unambiguous and perfectly atomizable; call it the baseball-card-ification of knowledge. For anything else, well, for that you'll have to scroll a bit. A 2020 investigation by The Markup found that almost half of Google's mobile results page on the most popular queries was taken up by links to Google's own properties via sections like the “knowledge panel,” “people also ask,” and “featured snippets.”

All of these technologies—web crawling, PageRank, Natural Language Processing, the Knowledge Graph, and Passage Ranking—converge to convince us of a sequence of lies: I have seen everything. I am impartial. I have your best interests at heart. I understand what it is you want to know and it is knowable. I have the answer that you seek.

The Answer Box's decade of glory, at least in its current form, may be coming to an end. Google has announced, to much fanfare, that it is experimenting with injecting generative AI into the results page. This will enable Google to present answers to more oblique queries, like "tell me what makes boygenius' music unique or special," or "write a poem using the titles of unreleased boygenius tracks," queries that we now might associate more with ChatGPT.

Ask ChatGPT a question, and you will be given a convincing-sounding answer, what Neil Gaiman calls "information-shaped sentences." When I asked it to give me examples of how different cultural and historical contexts shape the definition of creativity, it readily rattled off 10 vague but coherent examples of differing expressions of creativity across time and space. But when I asked it to point me to the source of its knowledge about creativity and Indigenous Australian "Dreamtime" stories, it could only say "as an AI language model, I have been trained on a large dataset of written text, including books, articles, and other documents from a diverse range of fields and sources … I don't have direct access to specific sources that I have been trained on." It then began to list some books I might read, many of which were invented whole cloth. Generative AI is far from the beginning of Google’s foray into Physician-based search, but it just may be the straw that breaks the Librarian’s back.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a Physician. Diving into rabbit holes is time-consuming, and sometimes, with a trusted source, it is worth discarding context to get to the root of understanding. The problem is when that Physician is not a person or a population of people but a monolithic cluster of machine learning algorithms. When we talk about AI, the speed at which we run toward or away from context becomes amplified, and we run along with the three horsemen of generative text—misinformation, economic exploitation, and creative rot—all of which are enlivened by context collapse and allergic to depth.

But even scarier is the soft apocalypse of a truth that's reduced to trivia.

There is the kind of commodifiable Physician-truth you’d get from an encyclopedia entry: Visit five different webpages and they will tell you the same melting point of gold. But there are other kinds of truth as well, the kinds inherent in the poetry—not poems, mind you, but poetry—of everyday context. There is truth in the aesthetic sensibilities of a webpage, in a text’s surroundings, and in a writer's voice. It's the truth of a speaker's involuntary gestures, the twitch of a lip. Truth in the way words feel tossed about the top of your tongue, in the slanting of letterforms, in slips o fthe pen, in (the volume of the words in) parentheses. A sentence fragment that interrupts a rhythm.

A text changes with the knowledge of its provenance. A text changes with the knowledge of how much work was put into it. A reader finds meaning in atmosphere and timbre in the same way that a parent knows whether a baby is crying out of hunger, fear, or exhaustion, or a heart is moved differently by the same song performed in a new key. Like the keen understanding that persists after you awaken from a dream you can't remember, communing with the messy context of human creativity yields a specter that lingers, haunting you with ambiguity and depth.

The specter is what Tim O'Brien called a story-truth that's "truer sometimes than happening-truth"; Audre Lorde called poetry "the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought"; and Maggie Nelson (paraphrasing Wittgenstein) called the inexpressible "contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed."

And this inexpressible, poetic story-truth transcends mere knowledge. It is the foundation of conversation, the exchange of ideas, critical thinking, serendipity, and properly valued labor. These are the particles that coalesce into a community of care that gives a shit about its inhabitants, into an internet that doesn't sacrifice the complex beauty of communication for the fleeting satisfaction of knowing.

There are hints that Google may be more interested in providing context than ChatGPT. And AI can certainly, at least in a technical sense, serve as a force in the direction of depth. But Google's business incentives and search history make me skeptical. Dividing an analog world into discrete digital bites of information means that we spend more time with Google's products. It also makes the information easily recyclable for other platforms, like Google’s voice assistants.

In another world, a web crawler can be training wheels for our own crawling, a language processing algorithm can eschew exaction in exchange for the rich stream of consciousness quality of, well, "natural" conversation, and a search engine can withhold the brick wall of a solution and instead present us with doors.

But instead, I worry that the Answer Box is a premonition of where Google wants to go, a future in which we’re hurried toward destinations, journey be damned, and links are only included out of obligation, rather than invitation. I worry that instead of evoking wonder, our tools will treat our wonder as if it’s an ailment. I worry that this will mean not only a Barthesian death of the author, but a death of the humanmade work itself, human language replaced with its simulacrum. I worry that we’re hurtling toward contextual eradication.

Which technological future do we want? One that claims to know all of the answers, or one that encourages us to ask more questions? One that prioritizes output, or accessibility? One that sees people as a dataset to mine and an inefficiency to overcome, or one that sees them as valuable and worthy of attention?

In being given exactly what we’re searching for, will we lose ourselves?

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Renowned analyst Ming-Chi Kuo published a new note on Medium that provides hints about Apple's approach to artificial intelligence (via 9to5Mac). Kuo suggests that Apple is avoiding the AI hype train and will not add generative AI features to its hardware for consumers next year.

Kuo writes:

At present, there is no sign that Apple will integrate AI edge computing and hardware products in 2024, so it is difficult to benefit the stock prices of Apple and its supply chain.

The analyst believes Apple’s progress in the tech is “significantly behind its competitors”. In contrast, companies like OpenAI and Google have made major announcements in the field. Google has even integrated AI into many of its services, such as Google Maps and YouTube.

There have been rumors that Apple is working on generative AI internally. The cupertino company is apparently developing its own ChatGPT-like chatbot, which is currently being used by the company's engineers. Apple reportedly doesn't intend to release the Chatbot. Instead, the company might weave it into its products.

As a reminder, Apple is holding its quarterly earnings performance call tomorrow. Based on Kuo's analysis, he believes that AI will not have a positive impact on the price of Apple stock after the quarterly earnings performance call tomorrow.

He also predicts that the production and shipments of Vision Pro, Apple’s first augmented reality headset, for 2024 will be "quite small," making it currently challenging for Apple's stock prices to benefit from this factor. Reports suggest Apple has already cut production due to the complexity.

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The company aims to capitalize on the growing demand for AI chips in China. AMD's new chip, the MI300 accelerator, is hoped to compete with Nvidia's dominance in the AI market. It plans to increase its foothold in this key geography by tailoring its products to meet export control requirements.

China is a very important market for us, certainly across our portfolio, as we think about the accelerator market. Our plan is to of course be fully compliant with U.S. Export controls, but we do believe there's an opportunity to develop a product for our customer set in China that is looking for AI solutions.

The strategy mirrors that of Intel and Nvidia, who have already created modified versions of their AI chips for the Chinese market. With AI being a rapidly expanding field worldwide, AMD sees an opportunity to provide locally-compliant solutions to customers in China looking for AI accelerator chips.

The new AMD chip appears to be the company's MI300 accelerator. The company is betting heavily on the MI300 to drive significant growth in its data center business in the coming months.

China has become a significant market for AI chips from U.S. companies, as only few domestic alternatives exist currently. AMD likely wants to capitalize on this demand while tailoring its products to meet export control requirements.

AMD's CEO confirmed earlier today that more Radeon RX 7000 series cards are arriving soon at the company Q2 2023 earnings call. This will follow its recent launch of the RX 7600 which competes with the Nvidia RTX 4060.

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