As we move towards smaller nm architecture in chips, the need for innovation increases more and more.

AMD did their own way of innovating their Ryzen processors by adapting a chiplet based design. Where a single CPU would have two chiplets inside it, each consisting of 8 cores max. The reason is simple, the smaller the chip is, the higher chance of picking the good ones out of a silicon wafer, giving higher yields and massively saving costs.

After years of waiting, Intel decided that it needed to do something like that too. So Intel announced that it’s next-gen, that is, 14th-gen Meteor Lake CPU processors will come with a tile-based design.

While AMD went for two smaller core chiplets and a big I/O chiplet, Intel has decided to do it differently.

Intel Meteor Lake’s Tile-based Design

In Meteor Lake, Intel has announced that the processor will have 4 tiles. One SOC tile, one IO Tile, one GFX (GPU) tile and one CPU tile. The CPU tile will have all the performance and efficiency cores inside it.

While moving forward, this is an ideal move taken by Intel. As a big monolithic CPU would get harder and harder to manufacture and splitting things inside a processor is better. The problem is that, it seems that making a tile-based processor isn’t easy either. We aren’t sure what exactly is the status of these processors currently.

Intel Meteor Lake Desktop Maybe Cancelled

From some time now, there are rumors that Intel might cancel the Meteor Lake Desktop processor. This rumor became public by a tweet by a known Twitter based leaker @OneRaichu.

In it, he mentions that Intel has most likely converted whatever chips or design they had for Meteor Lake desktop into Meteor Lake mobile CPUs.

The MTL-S chip is referring to is Meteor Lake desktop. With MTL being Meteor Lake and S being the desktop variants of Intel Core processors.

It’s entirely possible that Intel tried making a tile-based desktop chip, but was not able to do so yet. Hence, making it available only for laptops.

Meteor Lake Might Target Efficiency More Than Performance

Another hint that Meteor Lake might not release on desktop is from an earlier tweet by OneRaichu.

In it, he mentions how Meteor Lake is going to target 1.5x times the efficiency of the current generation Raptor Lake.

Efficiency is something that mobile processors used in laptops benefit more than just desktop processors.

More Information About A Possible Meteor Lake Desktop Appears

To make things more confusing, another Twitter based leaker has shared the details about a possible Meteor Lake Desktop CPU. Twitter based leaker @leaf_hobby had posted a now deleted Tweet sharing the details about possible Meteor Lake Desktop features.

In that tweet, it is mentioned that Intel Meteor Lake Desktop will have x20 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU. One x16 for the graphics card and one x4 possibly for an M.2 SSD.

It also mentions that the Z890 chipset might have an additional x4 PCIe 4.0 lanes, totaling x24 lanes. This is x4 more than what is found in current-gen Raptor Lake processors. Debut support for Wi-Fi 7 too is stated.

But what makes interesting is that it mentions that Meteor Lake Desktop has only 6 performance cores with 8 performance cores version possibly under or not under development. This is where it gets interesting. 6 performance cores are found in the Raptor Lake P (mobile variant), so does that support OneRaichu’s contention that Meteor Lake-S (desktop) processors are now converted to Meteor Lake-P (mobile) instead.

When asked about it, leaf_hobby doesn’t deny that being a possibility.

The @leaf_hobby, however, has later shared that their accounts are getting compromised repeatedly after leaking details about Intel. So they have decided to stop sharing Intel related information.

Either way, for now, we cannot say anything for sure about Meteor Lake. Whatever it maybe, there’s one thing almost certain, Intel is going to release Raptor Lake Refresh processors with higher clock rates this year. With Meteor Lake likely to be delayed till next year.

Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs Might Not Release On Desktop

All the tech giants are trying to show off their new technologies and products. On the first day, companies like Huawei and Samsung dominated the exhibition area, but Xiaomi's genius strategy to bring its promising and interesting robots to Barcelona surely attracted much interest. Around a week prior to the event, Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun tweeted that the CyberOne and CyberDog robots would also be present at the MWC 2023 event, and the ground was already prepared beforehand.

CyberDog was first introduced in 2021 and looks similar to Boston Dynamics' Spot. It has three different control methods. You could use your phone, an external remote control, or your voice to give commands and communicate. The remote control will be sold separately. In the demo video of CyberDog, it was announced that only Xiaomi’s Redmi K40 Gaming Edition, Redmi K40, Redmi K30 5G, Redmi 10X Pro, Redmi 10X, and Mi MIX 2S are supported. The company's plan is to introduce 1,000 of them and keep them a more valuable asset rather than bringing them to every home.

CyberOne, on the other hand, was introduced last year, sooner than CyberDog. It is a concept humanoid robot with a Mi-sense depth vision module and an AI algorithm that helps it recognize objects and react accordingly. The MiAI environment semantics recognition engine is offered with it. It can detect your voice, recognize your gestures and expressions, and have 45 different classifications of human emotions. CyberOne can recognize 85 environmental sounds and uses NVIDIA's Jetson Xavier NX platform with 11 built-in sensors. It comes with a curved OLED module that shows real-time interactive information.

Both robots still have limited functionalities, and more features are expected from their succeeders. However, Xiaomi's flex in Barcelona attracted many people as a robot dog is not something we see on a daily basis. This also showed the company's plans to concentrate on the West more.

Do you want a new "dog"? Xiaomi latest cyberdog is here

In a follow-up message, he stated the major improvements in Bing Chat v96. One is that users should now experience fewer times when the chatbot won't answer a question for no real reason. The other big improvement might cause some to chuckle, as Parakhin states there should be "Reduced instances of hallucination in answers."

That should make a few folks happier, as Bing Chat has generated some very weird interactions in the past month. Microsoft limited the number of daily chat turns in Bing Chat to combat that kind of "off the rails" response, but the company expanded those limits to 100 per day this weekend.

In yet another Twitter post, Parakhin stated that the final version of the Bing Chat Mode Selector will be released in "the next couple of days". This will allow Bing Chat users to select if they want standard answers to questions, more accurate responses, or more "creative" answers.

Microsoft rolls out Bing Chat v96 with less "hallucination in answers"

For those unfamiliar with PC Game Pass, it is a sister service to Xbox Game Pass and carries hundreds of PC games, including Microsoft's own Xbox party releases and Bethesda games, alongside access to EA Play titles.

Here's the full list of new countries joining PC Game Pass starting today, February 28:

Like the last injection of new supported regions, this wave is also beginning its mission as part of the Insider Preview Program. During this period Microsoft usually tests local payment systems, usually at a cheaper price while the tests are ongoing and gather feedback from new users regarding the experience.

To join the PC Game Pass Insider Preview as someone residing in one of the mentioned countries, download the Xbox Insider app from the Microsoft Store and join the program in the Previews section. Subscribing to PC Game Pass will then be enabled and all the available games will be accessible via the Windows Xbox app like usual.

PC Game Pass announced for 40 new countries, Insider access begins today

As carbon dioxide continues to build up in the Earth’s atmosphere, research teams around the world have spent years seeking ways to remove the gas efficiently from the air. Meanwhile, the world’s number one “sink” for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is the ocean, which soaks up some 30 to 40 percent of all of the gas produced by human activities.

Recently, the possibility of removing carbon dioxide directly from ocean water has emerged as another promising possibility for mitigating CO2 emissions, one that could potentially someday even lead to overall net negative emissions. But, like air capture systems, the idea has not yet led to any widespread use, though there are a few companies attempting to enter this area.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT says they may have found the key to a truly efficient and inexpensive removal mechanism. The findings were reported recently in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, in a paper by MIT professors T. Alan Hatton and Kripa Varanasi, postdoc Seoni Kim, and graduate students Michael Nitzsche, Simon Rufer, and Jack Lake.

The existing methods for removing carbon dioxide from seawater apply a voltage across a stack of membranes to acidify a feed stream by water splitting. This converts bicarbonates in the water to molecules of CO2, which can then be removed under vacuum.

Hatton, who is the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering, notes that the membranes are expensive, and chemicals are required to drive the overall electrode reactions at either end of the stack, adding further to the expense and complexity of the processes. “We wanted to avoid the need for introducing chemicals to the anode and cathode half cells and to avoid the use of membranes if at all possible,” he says.

Initially, the system can use existing or planned infrastructure that already processes seawater, such as desalination plants, but the system is scalable. This rendering shows how the new method could also be used by ships and offshore platforms. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

 

The team came up with a reversible process consisting of membrane-free electrochemical cells. Reactive electrodes are used to release protons to the seawater fed to the cells, driving the release of the dissolved carbon dioxide from the water. The process is cyclic: It first acidifies the water to convert dissolved inorganic bicarbonates to molecular carbon dioxide, which is collected as a gas under vacuum. Then, the water is fed to a second set of cells with a reversed voltage, to recover the protons and turn the acidic water back to alkaline before releasing it back to the sea. Periodically, the roles of the two cells are reversed once one set of electrodes is depleted of protons (during acidification) and the other has been regenerated during alkalization.

This removal of carbon dioxide and reinjection of alkaline water could slowly start to reverse, at least locally, the acidification of the oceans that has been caused by carbon dioxide buildup, which in turn has threatened coral reefs and shellfish, says Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering. The reinjection of alkaline water could be done through dispersed outlets or far offshore to avoid a local spike of alkalinity that could disrupt ecosystems, they say.

“We’re not going to be able to treat the entire planet’s emissions,” Varanasi says. But the reinjection might be done in some cases in places such as fish farms, which tend to acidify the water, so this could be a way of helping to counter that effect.

Once the carbon dioxide is removed from the water, it still needs to be disposed of, as with other carbon removal processes. For example, it can be buried in deep geologic formations under the sea floor, or it can be chemically converted into a compound like ethanol, which can be used as a transportation fuel, or into other specialty chemicals. “You can certainly consider using the captured CO2 as a feedstock for chemicals or materials production, but you’re not going to be able to use all of it as a feedstock,” says Hatton. “You’ll run out of markets for all the products you produce, so no matter what, a significant amount of the captured CO2 will need to be buried underground.”

Initially at least, the idea would be to couple such systems with existing or planned infrastructure that already processes seawater, such as desalination plants. “This system is scalable so that we could integrate it potentially into existing processes that are already processing ocean water or in contact with ocean water,” Varanasi says. There, the carbon dioxide removal could be a simple add-on to existing processes, which already return vast amounts of water to the sea, and it would not require consumables like chemical additives or membranes.

“With desalination plants, you’re already pumping all the water, so why not co-locate there?” Varanasi says. “A bunch of capital costs associated with the way you move the water, and the permitting, all that could already be taken care of.”

The system could also be implemented by ships that would process water as they travel, in order to help mitigate the significant contribution of ship traffic to overall emissions. There are already international mandates to lower shipping’s emissions, and “this could help shipping companies offset some of their emissions, and turn ships into ocean scrubbers,” Varanasi says.

The system could also be implemented at locations such as offshore drilling platforms, or at aquaculture farms. Eventually, it could lead to a deployment of free-standing carbon removal plants distributed globally.

The process could be more efficient than air-capture systems, Hatton says, because the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater is more than 100 times greater than it is in air. In direct air-capture systems it is first necessary to capture and concentrate the gas before recovering it. “The oceans are large carbon sinks, however, so the capture step has already kind of been done for you,” he says. “There’s no capture step, only release.” That means the volumes of material that need to be handled are much smaller, potentially simplifying the whole process and reducing the footprint requirements.

The research is continuing, with one goal being to find an alternative to the present step that requires a vacuum to remove the separated carbon dioxide from the water. Another need is to identify operating strategies to prevent precipitation of minerals that can foul the electrodes in the alkalinization cell, an inherent issue that reduces the overall efficiency in all reported approaches. Hatton notes that significant progress has been made on these issues, but that it is still too early to report on them. The team expects that the system could be ready for a practical demonstration project within about two years.

“The carbon dioxide problem is the defining problem of our life, of our existence,” Varanasi says. “So clearly, we need all the help we can get.”

Source

US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has made her recommendations for the revitalization of America’s semiconductor industry, a plan that is pivotal to retaining US economic leadership but one that also raises hard questions about government interference in the private sector and potential damage caused to US allies in Europe and East Asia.

In a speech entitled “The CHIPS Act and a Long-term Vision for America’s Technological Leadership,” delivered on February 23, Raimondo spoke about “the incredible opportunity we have as a nation to unleash the next generation of American innovation, protect our national security, and preserve our global economic competitiveness as we implement the historic CHIPS and Science Act.”

Signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, the CHIPS and Science Act allocates US$52.7 billion to semiconductor production and R&D, and authorizes another $24 billion in tax credits for semiconductor production.

In her speech, Raimondo also outlined the Biden administration’s desire for the US to dominate the global tech industry:

I want the United States to be the only country in the world where every company capable of producing leading-edge chips will have a significant R&D and high-volume manufacturing presence.

 

We will be the premier destination in the world where new leading-edge chip architectures can be invented in our research labs, designed for every end-use application, manufactured at scale and packaged with the most advanced technologies.

 

This combination of technological leadership, supplier diversity, and resiliency does not exist anywhere else in the world today.

 

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Photo: Progressive Hub

Raimondo’s statements seem to suggest she would like to reverse the globalization of the semiconductor industry and establish a complete supply chain for every product on US territory, regardless of comparative advantage.

Is this a good idea? Morris Chang, founder and former CEO and chairman of TSMC, the world’s leading semiconductor foundry (contract chip manufacturer) and a 25-year veteran of Texas Instruments, wouldn’t think so. Speaking in Taipei in 2021, he said,

If you want to reestablish a complete semiconductor supply chain in the US, you will not find it to be a possible task. Even after you spend hundreds of billions of dollars, you will still find the supply chain to be incomplete, and you will find that it will be very high cost, much higher cost than what you currently have.

It should be noted that most new leading-edge IC designs always have been and are still created in the US.

In 2022, according to market research firms and media reports, seven out of TSMC’s top 11 customers were American (Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, Marvell, Analog Devices and, number 11, Intel), one was Taiwanese (MediaTek), one Japanese (Sony) and one European (STMicro).

And, we might ask, must Sony, the world’s top maker of image sensors, establish R&D and manufacturing operations in the US? Sony has just formed a joint venture with TSMC in Japan.

Outside Japan, Sony Semiconductor has design and development bases in Belgium, France, Finland, Spain, Switzerland, Israel and Taiwan; manufacturing bases in Thailand (image sensor assembly) and China (optical pickups); and sales bases in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the UK and the US (San Jose).  Presumably, management has a pretty good idea of what should be done where.

To be sure, Raimondo is not a complete techno-nationalist:

Very importantly, we are not aiming for self-sufficiency or looking to close ourselves off from global markets or competition. And of course, we are eager to continue working with our partners and allies to create diverse, resilient, and sustainable supply chains, write tech standards that align with our values and invest in our shared digital future.

After reviewing the decline of semiconductor manufacturing in the US – its share of global chip manufacturing is down from 37% to 12% since 1990; none of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are now made in the US – Raimondo went on to say:

This manufacturing atrophy has real consequences. For starters, it’s a threat to our national security. So many of our defense capabilities – like hypersonic weapons, drones, and satellites – depend on a supply of chips that aren’t currently produced in America.

That could indeed turn out to be a problem, Raimondo said:

But our dependence on foreign semiconductor supply chains also hurts our economy. In 2001, the US had more than 300,000 semiconductor manufacturing workers. In the past 20 years, we lost a third of those jobs while the global semiconductor industry has more than tripled in size. We sacrificed our manufacturing capacity and workforce in the mistaken belief that we could somehow maintain our technological leadership without them.

Raimondo correctly identifies the link between manufacturing and technological advances and the consequences of rampant outsourcing driven by an obsession with financial returns. Pointing out that “funding in technology hardware makes up only 3% of America’s venture capital, down from 20% in 2005,” she stated:

The brutal truth is that, without manufacturing strength in the US, and the innovation that flows from it, we are at a clear disadvantage in the race to invent and commercialize future generations of technology.

This is not always the case, as the overwhelming dominance of American semiconductor design and software companies demonstrates. However, as a general proposition, it is a correct diagnosis of what has been going on in the semiconductor, consumer electronics, industrial robot and other tech-focused industries for the last three decades.

As US production has been outsourced overseas, the development of some key semiconductor production equipment, flat panel TVs, industrial robots and other products has gone with it.

China, of course, has taken the opposite tack, to its great benefit and to the alarm of the US government. Raimondo noted that “over the last two years, China has produced more than 80% of new global capacity for certain mature chips, and their market share is growing.”

Is her concern justified? Data from Gartner show that among the top 10 semiconductor vendors in 2022 ranked by revenue, seven were American (Intel, Qualcomm, Micron, Broadcom, AMD, Texas Instruments and Apple), two South Korean (Samsung and SK hynix) and one Taiwanese (MediaTek).

Samsung and SK hynix ranked first and third, respectively, while Intel ranked second. Five were design companies that outsource to TSMC.

Taiwan-based TSMC is, along with South Korea’s Samsung, one of the two leading pillars of the global chipmaking industry. Photo: AFP / Sam Yeh

On the other hand, Raimondo stated that “Taiwan alone produces 92% of the world’s leading-edge chips.”

Defined as ICs made at the 7nm process node and below, that means TSMC. The rest are made by Samsung. Although not the subject of her speech, the key semiconductor industry-related risk to US national security is dependence on TSMC’s factories in Taiwan.

To hedge this risk and rebuild the US semiconductor industry, Raimondo said,

We need the private sector to invest with us, using our $50 billion of public investment to crowd in at least $500 billion in additional funding for manufacturing and R&D.

 

Specifically, the US will have at least two new large-scale clusters of leading-edge logic fabs, that will have been built by highly-skilled union labor.

 

Each cluster will include a robust supplier ecosystem, R&D facilities to continuously innovate new process technologies, and specialized infrastructure. Each of those clusters will employ thousands of workers in well-paying jobs.

 

Additionally, the US will develop multiple high-volume advanced packaging facilities, and become a global leader in packaging technologies.

That’s a tall order, history shows. Judging from the US auto industry, the application of the US-style adversarial relationship between union labor and management could disrupt and increase the cost of the project, and undermine the frontier spirit and entrepreneurial mentality that created companies like Intel, Microsoft, TSMC and Apple.

Already there is a “culture clash” at TSMC’s new factory in Arizona. Last year, EE Times quoted an American engineer working there as saying, “The work culture in Taiwan is really different than in the US. TSMC will have to change to an eight-hour workday five days a week.”

But TSMC engineers often work longer hours and are always on call, on weekends and at night, in case of an emergency.

There has also been an effort to organize workers at Intel’s factories in Oregon in order to “address long hours, pay disparities and job security.” This comes even as Oregon Live reports that “Workers in Oregon’s chip industry earn an average of more than $150,000 annually, according to state wage data.”

President Biden appears virtually at an event in Michigan on August 2, 2022, to celebrate the passage of the bipartisan CHIPS Act. Photo: Screenshot

On top of that, $550 billion is a lot of money. The Taiwanese, South Koreans, Japanese and Europeans, who are also subsidizing and otherwise promoting their semiconductor industries, might see it as a threat – perhaps as more dangerous than doing business with China.

And there is a risk of oversupply if investment decisions are made by ambitious politicians rather than by experienced, market-sensitive executives.

Raimondo also aims to shore up semiconductor R&D in the US:

The $39 billion in incentives [under the CHIPS Act] will bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the US, but a robust R&D ecosystem will keep it here. That is why we will invest $11B to build a strong semiconductor R&D ecosystem to generate the ideas and the talent we need to support these efforts.

 

The heart of these investments will be the creation of the National Semiconductor Technology Center. The NSTC will be an ambitious public-private partnership where government, industry, customers, suppliers, educational institutions, entrepreneurs, and investors converge to innovate, connect, and solve problems.

 

We envision a network of several centers around the country, solving the most impactful, relevant and universal R&D challenges in the industry. Their work – fueled by industry support – will generate new devices, processes, tools, and materials for our manufacturing ecosystem.

So does this mark the advent of an expensive, unfocused, bureaucratic boondoggle or is Raimondo’s plan ultimately sound industrial policy?

The American Semiconductor Innovation Coalition (ASIC) thinks the NSCT can work as long as it can develop and implement a “practical, technical agenda focused on the transition from innovation to commercialization” and “be held accountable for reaching clear and measurable goals.” To this end, ASIC has published detailed recommendations.

Raimondo phrased her bottom line this way: “Here’s the truth: If we don’t invest in America’s manufacturing workforce, it doesn’t matter how much we spend. We will not succeed.” 

Tens of thousands of engineers, technicians and scientists must be trained, she acknowledged.

“In the 10 years after Kennedy announced his mission to put a man on the moon, the number of physical science PhDs tripled and engineering PhDs quadrupled,” she said.

That level of commitment and inspiration is needed again. It already exists in China, after all.

Source

Technology firms are in a serious race with each other on who will come up with an innovative solution or an improvement for daily-used products. Internal hardware, chipsets, and displays have seen serious changes in the past few years. Tech giants mainly concentrated on the three aspects mentioned recently, but battery capacities were always left behind. In the past couple of years, we haven't seen many innovative solutions regarding battery capacity and density from these companies. However, Honor came to Barcelona to change the game.

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer, Honor, has revealed one of the most interesting features in Barcelona, apart from its new products Magic5, Magic5 Pro, and the Magic Vs. Yesterday, the CEO George Zhao announced Honor's new silicon-carbon battery with a longer runtime. According to Zhao, the silicon-carbon battery has 240% more capacity than a lithium-ion battery when run at 3.5 V. Honor's new technology offers approximately a 12.8% better performance than the current lithium-ion batteries which are used in most devices.

Honor

As mentioned, Honor also introduced its new Magic5 family, and the new Magic5 Pro comes with a 5,100 mAh battery. If the new technology had been used in this model, it could have gone up to 5,400 mAh. It might seem like a small improvement, but it is pretty impressive for a start. According to GSMArena, Honor's new Magic5 Pro comes with a 5,400 mAh battery, while the global version offers a 5,100 mAh battery. It looks like Honor has already started using the new silicon-carbon battery in China. However,

it might also be a coincidence as the company yet to make any announcements regarding the matter. In both ways, the global version features a regular 5,100 mAh battery.

Source

I wrote a little while ago (okay, five years) that “AI Powered” is the meaningless tech equivalent of “all natural,” but it has progressed beyond cheeky. It seems like just about every product out there claims to implement AI in some way or another, yet few go into detail — and fewer still can tell you exactly how it works and why.

The FTC doesn’t like it. Whatever someone means when they say “powered by artificial intelligence” or some version thereof, “One thing is for sure: it’s a marketing term,” the agency writes. “And at the FTC, one thing we know about hot marketing terms is that some advertisers won’t be able to stop themselves from overusing and abusing them.”

Everyone is saying AI is reinventing everything, but it’s one thing to do that at a TED talk; it’s quite another to claim it as an official part of your product. And the FTC wants marketers to know that these claims may count as “false or unsubstantiated,” something the agency is very experienced with regulating.

So if your product uses AI or your marketing team claims it does, the FTC asks you to consider:

• Are you exaggerating what your AI product can do? If you’re making science fiction claims that the product can’t back up — like reading emotions, enhancing productivity or predicting behavior — you may want to tone those down.

• Are you promising that your AI product does something better than a non-AI product? Sure, you can make those weird claims like “4 out of 5 dentists prefer” your AI-powered toothbrush, but you’d better have all 4 of them on the record. Claiming superiority because of your AI needs proof, “and if such proof is impossible to get, then don’t make the claim.”

• Are you aware of the risks? “Reasonably foreseeable risks and impact” sounds a bit hazy, but your lawyers can help you understand why you shouldn’t push the envelope here. If your product doesn’t work if certain people use it because you didn’t even try, or its results are biased because your dataset was poorly constructed… you’re gonna have a bad time. “And you can’t say you’re not responsible because that technology is a ‘black box’ you can’t understand or didn’t know how to test,” the FTC adds. If you don’t understand it and can’t test it, why are you offering it, let alone advertising it?

• Does the product actually use AI at all? As I pointed out long ago, claims that something is “AI-powered” because one engineer used an ML-based tool to optimize a curve or something doesn’t mean your product uses AI, yet plenty seem to think that a drop of AI means the whole bucket is full of it. The FTC thinks otherwise.

“You don’t need a machine to predict what the FTC might do when those claims are unsupported,” it concludes, ominously.

Since the agency already put out some common-sense guidelines for AI claims back in 2021 (there were a lot of “detect and predict COVID” ones then), it directs questions to that document, which includes citations and precedents.

Source

A year ago, AMD announced a new addition to the world of processors which completely changed how we looked at CPUs while gaming. It released AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 3D V-Cache. In it, AMD added an extra 64MB layer of cache on top of the existing L3 cache. This gave it a tremendous boost in some games.

So great were the results that Ryzen 7 5800X3D was able to beat all the top, far more expensive processors. Seeing that, we expected AMD to do the same in the AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors. But to our surprise, AMD announced not one, but three new processors with the same 3D V-Cache tech in them. The processors it announced were AMD Ryzen 7950X3D, 7900X3D & 7800X3D.

While the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D are releasing 28th February. AMD Ryzen 7800X3D releases more than a month later. AMD had meanwhile sent its samples of AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D to all the reviewers. However, the reviews were not allowed to be made public until 27th February. Now the reviews are finally out and they are really exciting.

Prerequisites Before AMD Ryzen 7950X3D Reviews

All AMD Ryzen 9 7000 CPUs come with two chiplets inside a single CPU. While AMD Ryzen 7950X3D has 8 + 8 Cores on two chiplets, Ryzen 7900X3D has 6 + 6 Cores on it. So, AMD had to decide on what chiplet to add the 3D V-Cache on. AMD finally decided that only one chiplet will have the 3D V-Cache. The second chiplet without the 3D V-Cache, on the other hand, will be clocked higher.

So that means, games will need to run on either one of the chiplet, not both. That means, something needs to tell the games which chiplet to use. That is why AMD released special chipset drivers for these processors. In it, AMD would decide which games / software will need to use the chiplet with cache and which will use the chiplet with higher frequency but without 3D V-Cache.

Additionally, AMD required the reviewers to one, make sure the Game Mode is enabled in OS settings, and Xbox Game Bar app be installed. Not to forget, latest version of BIOS with 3D V-Cache optimizations and settings is installed. Only then reviewers were suggested to review the processors. However, all the efforts seem worth it when we check all the reviews posted by top reviewers out there.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Reviews

Tom’s Hardware

Tom’s Hardware made one of the best reviews for the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. In it, they tested 3D V-Cache’s L3 latency compared to the non-cache chiplet (page 3). Then they checked clock and power usage of both the chiplets (page 4). Later came, all the other tests like overall power consumption, thermal, software and gaming benchmarks.

In gaming tests at 1080p (page 6), AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was 12% faster than Intel Core i9-13900KS and Core i9-13900K. It also found that AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was 26% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X and 16% faster than Zen 3 based Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Which is massive.

What’s noticeable was that not all the games benefited with the 7950X3D’s extra cache, those games which did, they performed extraordinarily.

In productivity and rendering tests, Ryzen 7950X3D was behind, but not too behind. Which was nice, but that’s not what this CPU was designed for.

The biggest thing AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D achieved, however, was doing all this with extraordinary power efficiency. While Tom’s Hardware didn’t give us the power usage for the games, in rendering benchmarks, it showed that Ryzen 9 7950X3D consumed half, yes, we repeat, half the power than the Intel Core i9-13900K CPU. This is something we feel is unheard of.

TechPowerUp

TechPowerUp was another one with a great review for AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. It not only tested the processor with various software, but it also tested it with emulators too. But the great thing they did different from others, is that they tested everything, including games, by setting the processor to use either the cache chiplet or the non-cache one. Not to forget PBO results, that is, overclocked results are included too.

At 1080p, AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D performed almost the same as Intel Core i9-13900K, both in average FPS and minimum FPS. There was a minor increase in performance when the chiplet with cache was preferred. Here too it was seen that it performed great in some games but badly in some others. However, big improvements were seen when using Ray Tracing in games. Except in Ray Tracing, similar benchmark results were found in 1440p and 4K gaming benchmarks too.

However, here too the biggest achievement of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was seen was the power efficiency. TechPowerUp did power usage tests on both software and gaming workloads. The results were similar all around. AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D consumed less than half the watts of Intel Core i9-13900K.

igor’sLAB

igor’sLAB was another professional reviewer which reviewed AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D.

In gaming benchmarks at 1080p (page 4), AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was 9% faster than Intel Core i9-13900K, 17% faster than Ryzen 7 5800X3D and 18% faster than Ryzen 9 7950X. This performance difference were seen at 1440p and 4K too, though with more parity.

What igor’sLAB did different from others was it checked frametime in various games. There too, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was impressive and almost did it better than others.

Here too, AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D showed great power efficiency in gaming. So much so that Igor says “it’s an outright humiliation” for both Intel and other AMD Ryzen 7000 processors.

Other Reviewers

There are many other reviewers which got hold on to the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor. AnandTech, Club386, KitGuru and Gamers Nexus (YouTube) to name some of them.

However, the most unique reviews were from Hardware Unboxed (YouTube) and TechPowerUp’s other review article where they simulated how yet to be released AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D would perform by disabling the non-cache core on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. But take those reviews with some considerations like different core clock and such on AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. So we cannot say for sure until it’s actually released.

Conclusion

It must be mentioned that we only posted images of 1080p benchmarks. There’s a lot of debate about what’s the best resolution to test CPUs at. The almost unanimous conclusion in the benchmarking community is that games are more CPU bound at lower resolutions and hence they best for testing CPUs. The higher you go, the more GPU bound the game become, hence true difference between CPUs are not visible. So we thought 1080p is perfect.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D is a new gaming king. That’s for sure. Not only it’s the fastest gaming processor out there (depending on the game), it’s also one of the most power efficient processor ever created. All thanks to the 3D V-Cache which AMD has banked on. Sure, it doesn’t deliver on all the workloads, but in gaming it does, with great abilities.

However, one, there are hardly any reviews available for AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D which got released together. It has only 6 cores on the 3D V-Cache chiplet. So it’s expected to perform worse than Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Is it the reason why AMD has not sent it to everyone for sampling or is there any other reason, we don’t know.

What’s important thing to mention is that AMD is holding onto Ryzen 7 7800X3D by not releasing it with the above two CPUs. The reason is simple, games are only going to use a single 8 core chiplet like they do in the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. Meaning, Ryzen 7 7800X3D is expected to perform almost the same as Ryzen 9 7950X3D in gaming, at far cheaper prices. So all we can say is, wait for AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D to release if gaming is main and only use.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Reviews Are Out: The New Gaming CPU King

Several weeks ago, iniBuilds revealed plans to bring the Antonov An-225 "Mriya" to the Microsoft Flight Simulator. Those waiting for the largest jet plane ever built can rejoice as the Mriya has just landed in Microsoft Flight Simulator on PC.

The An-225 "Mriya" (from the Ukrainian word for "dream") was the world's largest transport aircraft capable of hauling up to 225 tons or 496,000 lbs of cargo. It was initially made to transport the Buran orbiter but then converted to cargo aircraft once the Buran space program collapsed alongside the USSR. The "Mriya" features six engines, two vertical stabilizers, and 32 landing gear wheels.

Unfortunately, the plane was destroyed on February 27, 2022, during the first days of the Russian invasion. After liberating the area, Ukraine announced plans to rebuild the An-225 using the remaining parts from the destroyed plane and the spare airframe. According to Microsoft, all proceeds from the in-game An-225 will go toward the rebuilding effort to bring the iconic aircraft back to life.

An-225 wreckage in Hostomel, Ukraine. Photo by Oleksii Samsonov, KCSA

The An-225 in the Microsoft Flight Simulator features three real-life liveries from 2010, 2008, and 2006, plus three extra. You can purchase the "Mriya" in the in-game marketplace on PC for $19.99. Microsoft says the DLC will arrive on consoles and Xbox Cloud Gaming in late March.

An-225 "Mriya," world's largest aircraft, is now available in Microsoft Flight Simulator

The Outer Worlds publisher Private Division has announced a new version of Obsidian's The Outer Worlds is incoming. Dubbed Spacer's Choice, the Obsidian Entertainment-developed title is heading only for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 platforms, and it touts enhanced graphics, smarter AI, higher level cap, and more. The last-gen original version came out in 2019, and the game never received an official next-gen upgrade.

On the visuals side, lighting, environments, character details, and particle effects have all received upgrades, and there's even dynamic weather conditions now. Meanwhile better enemy and companion AI, 4K 60FPS support on consoles, and DualSense controller adaptive triggers and haptics support on PS5 have also been confirmed.

Both Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos story expansion packs are also included here.

"Don’t worry, we didn’t dare touch the core of what made The Outer Worlds great," Obsidian remarks regarding the changes being made here. "There’s no point in reinventing the wheel, but fresh tires are always a plus."

The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition launches March 7 with a $59.99 price tag on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. Private Division is also offering an upgrade path for owners of the original game and all DLC on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or PC, with them only needing to pay $10 to get the Spacer's Choice version.

While the original RPG is still getting development time, keep in mind that Obsidian is also working on The Outer Worlds 2 in the background under Xbox. Unfortunately, not much has been announced about the sequel other than its humorous cinematic trailer from 2021.

The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition brings upgraded graphics, smarter AI, and more

Asteroids, like stars, only come out at night. Hidden in the glare of our Sun are an unknown number of asteroids on paths we cannot track, many of which could be heading for Earth, and we just don’t know it.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) planned NEOMIR mission will be located between Earth and the Sun and will act as an early warning system for asteroids 20 meters and larger that cannot be seen from the ground.

Predicting Chelyabinsk

No one saw the Chelyabinsk meteor of February 15, 2013, coming. Just after sunrise on a calm and sunny winter’s day, a 20-meter (66-foot) asteroid struck the atmosphere over the Ural Mountains in Russia, at a speed of more than 18 km/s (40,000 miles per hour).

Fallen trees at Tunguska, Imperial Russia, seen in 1929, 15 km from epicenter of aerial blast site, caused by explosion of a meteor in 1908. Credit: Photo N. A. Setrukov, 1928

 

The relatively small rock approached Earth from very near the direction of the Sun, exploding in the atmosphere and creating a shockwave that damaged thousands of buildings, breaking windows and injuring roughly 1500 people from flying shards of glass. It was the largest asteroid to strike Earth in over a century.

Statistically, asteroids this size strike Earth about once every 50-100 years. Larger asteroids are far less common but – just ask the dinosaurs – do a great deal more damage. These are, fortunately, much easier to detect.

Asteroid danger explained. Credit: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

 

In fact, we have discovered almost all asteroids larger than 1 km in size. Small and medium-sized asteroids are more common, and can still do great damage, but warning times of a few days can be enough for local authorities to notify the public to keep away from windows or even to evacuate a local area.

With NEOMIR, we’ll be prepared

Whether it’s preparing for a mission to deflect a large asteroid years in advance or providing the data for local authorities to keep communities informed of airbursts weeks ahead, ESA’s NEOMIR will fill a gap in our current asteroid detection capabilities.

Asteroids are visible because they reflect the Sun’s light, which we can detect from Earth. However, the closer they get to the Sun, the harder they are to see. Asteroids crossing the face of the Sun are particularly difficult to detect, but from Earth, we are also blind to asteroids near the Sun as they are outshone by its glare.

Lagrange points are locations in space where the gravitational pull from the Earth equals the pull from the Sun, and satellites can reside with less ‘orbital maintenance’ than those orbiting Earth or flying out to deep space. Credit: ESA

 

ESA’s upcoming NEOMIR mission will be launched into orbit around the first Lagrange point (L1) between the Sun and Earth, remaining in the same position relative to the two bodies. This will give the telescope a view of asteroids that may come towards the Earth from the direction of the Sun.

Being situated outside of Earth’s distorting atmosphere and with a telescope observing in infrared light, NEOMIR will monitor a close ring around the Sun that is impossible to observe from the ground. The mission will detect asteroids passing between Earth and the Sun – any that pose a threat and that we cannot currently see will have to pass through this ring.

Our brightly burning Sun, photographed here on an Antarctic summer day by ESA-sponsored medical doctor Stijn Thoolen at Concordia research station. Credit: ESA/IPEV/PNRA–S. Thoolen

 

By making observations in the infrared part of the light spectrum, NEOMIR will detect the heat emitted by asteroids themselves, which isn’t drowned out by sunlight. This thermal emission is absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, but from space, NEOMIR will be able to see closer to the Sun than we can currently from Earth.

Asteroids 20 meters (66 feet) and larger that are heading toward Earth should be detected by NEOMIR at least three weeks in advance. In the worst-case scenario, in which the asteroid is spotted passing near the spacecraft, we would get a minimum of three days’ warning – the fastest the asteroid could move from L1 to Earth.

Current status

Details of the Space Safety Program’s NEOMIR mission are currently being fleshed out and it is planned to be launched around 2030 with an Ariane 6-2 rocket.

Artist’s view of the configuration of Ariane 6 using four boosters (A64). Credit:
ESA – D. Ducros

 

An initial study to assess the feasibility of the NEOMIR mission was conducted by ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility in the Netherlands, in 2021. The study focused on defining a mission that would complement NASA’s NEO Surveyor mission. The US-funded mission should fulfill the US Congress mandate to discover 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter, while NEOMIR is designed to focus on imminent impactors of any size.

NEOMIR is currently early mission study phase. It will require a half-meter telescope with a large, corrected focal plane, as well as two infrared channels covering light in the 5-10 micrometer waveband.

NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the smaller body of the Didymos binary asteroid system in September 2022. ESA’s Hera mission will survey ‘Didymoon’ post-impact and assess how its orbit has been changed by the collision, to turn this one-off experiment into a workable planetary defense technique. Credit: ESA–ScienceOffice.org

 

The required detector technologies and associated electronics for this novel mission are currently under development. Industrial research and development projects are planned as supporting activities in parallel.

The requirements will be to deliver a similar performance to the ‘NEO Surveyor detectors’, i.e., Teledyne’s HxRG, which are in use in the James Webb Space Telescope (NIRSpec) and ESA’s Euclid (NISP) and Ariel missions, although at shorter wavelengths.

Source

However, it looks like the 3GHz RNDA 3 iGP core clock, which was listed previously on AMD's site has now been altered. Spotted by Twitter user Bionic_Squash, AMD has seemingly and quietly lowered the Radeon 780M's core clock speed on the Ryzen 9 7940HS. While the previous clock was 3,000MHz or 3GHz (surprisingly similar to those 3Ghz rumors before Radeon 7900 series was officially revealed), the 780M is currently rated at 2.8GHz or 2,800MHz, which is a 200MHz reduction.

Throttled clocks have not only affected the flagship 7940HS though, as other Phoenix SKUs, like the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS, also see reduced clocks by 200MHz. Overall, it looks like all Radeon 780M IGPs have been stifled by 200MHz due to some reason, probably because the graphics portion of the APUs are unable to hit such clocks under the allotted TDP and voltages.

Another area where Phoenix has faltered is PCIe support. Back when AMD began teasing Phoenix, the company had claimed that PCIe 5.0 support would come to the Dragon range, as well as Phoenix. Here's an image of a slide that showed such features:

However, things did not turn out that way as Phoenix had to settle for PCIe 4.0 only. Perhaps AMD had felt that the Dragon range, which is geared more towards performance, would benefit much more from it.

Source: Bionic_squash (Twitter) via Andreas Schiling (Twitter)

AMD quietly throttles clocks, PCIe 5.0 support on Ryzen "Phoenix" Zen 4 APUs

Over 500 Apple computers and related accessories are being auctioned off next month online and in Beverley Hills, California. The auction will feature numerous products dating from 1977 to 2008, including Macintosh systems from the '80s, more modern machines like the 2001 iMac G3, and old-school accessories like RH Electronics' Mac N' Frost external fan and surge protector.

Auction house Julien's Auctions has dabbled in Apple auctions before. Sadly, that includes the auction of Steve Jobs' Birkenstocks for a disturbing $218,750. Its upcoming auction, announced last week and spotted by sites like PetaPixel, features classic Apple items accrued by Swiss collector Hanspeter Luzi.

The auction house's announcement describes Luzi as a late historian with many hobbies who maintained a collection of old sewing machines that are now part of Germany's Sewing Machine Museum.

Luzi reportedly became a volunteer IT manager for schools, where he'd buy off unwanted vintage computers and parts. The auction house said Luzi died in 2015, and his family decided to auction his collection of Apple products.

Julien's Auctions' announcement included a sneak peek at some of the hundreds of items it'll be putting up from the collection next month.

One of the most notable items listed is a 1983 Lisa. Not surprisingly, it has the most expensive price estimate of the bunch, at $10,000 to $20,000. Although, we wouldn't be surprised to see the vintage computer sell for more. Previous auctions have seen functioning Lisa computers go for over $50,000, including on eBay. (If the whole Lisa is too pricey, maybe the Lisa OS source code is more your budget.)

Like some of the other computers in the auction, the Lisa is being auctioned with extras. A deep-pocketed collector can walk away with the system, a keyboard, the box it came in, and a "Lisa CRT Magnets Spares Kit (652-4520)." For a detailed look at the computer, which was one of the first to leverage a mouse and GUI, check out our recent deep-dive on the Apple Lisa's short life.

For those looking to spend less, the auctioneer is also advertising a motherboard from the Lisa, as well as other Apple motherboards dating back to 1978. The boards are expected to sell for up to $200 each.

Julien's will also try to sell numerous Apple computers from the '80s, including the Apple III from 1980 with a Monitor III and "various connecting cables" included (estimated price of up to $500), plus the first Macintosh, from 1984. They're even throwing in the floppy disk apparently still in the Macintosh 128K's drive.

Meanwhile, the 1989 Macintosh Portable will be sold with its "Apple Portable canvas case, with adapter, connecting cables, an Apple luggage tag, and two manuals in German (one copyrighted 1988, the other 1990)," Julien's Auctions said. Apple fans will remember the laptop as the first Mac to run on a (heavy) battery and one of the first personal computers to use an active matrix LCD display.

For those who couldn't afford the machine when it sold for a short time for $6,500, you may be able to get it at a much more affordable $300 to $500, by the auction house's estimates.

Other items included in the auction are joysticks for the Apple IIe and IIC from 1983-1984 and 1994's Apple QuickTake 100 camera.

It'll be interesting to see what these products actually go for, however, as pricey Apple auctions aren't new. Most recently, an original iPhone from 2007 originally expected to auction for $50,000 ended up selling for $63,356.

Julien's Apple auction will run from March 27 to March 30.

Source

Credit: The Verge

Foldable phones are welcomed pretty "normally" in today's technological world. They were first introduced a couple years ago, and people are now used to seeing them. Moreover, LG also introduced its foldable TV a while ago, which is also off the table regarding technological innovations. However, Lenovo is onto something new. The company introduced its first-ever rollable laptop at MWC 2023. Lenovo has also teased its first "rollable smartphone" at the event under the Motorola banner, its subsidiary smartphone brand.

According to The Verge's Jon Porter, Lenovo's rollable laptop prototype was placed near regular laptops, and at first glance, nobody really realized the impressive technology behind it. It looks like any other ThinkPad, but once the "show begins," you understand its technology is very different compared to other laptop models. There is a small switch on the right side of the chassis, and once you turn it on, the screen starts to roll. It turns into an almost-square 15.3-inch display with an 8:9 aspect ratio. Normally, it comes with a regular 12.7-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio.

It has a 2024x1604 resolution, and once the rolling begins, it increases up to 2024x2368. "Lenovo thinks such a tall display could be helpful for both office workers and creative professionals alike, offering everything from more lines of code to more cells in a spreadsheet," Porter says. The concept is very similar to LG's rollable TV model.

Credit: The Verge

Regarding specifications, Lenovo didn't provide information regarding the battery life and weight. However, the company officials said that "it is aiming to get 20,000 to 30,000 rolls." Moreover, Porter wasn't allowed to hold the laptop in his hands.

Unfortunately, Lenovo's new concept design is nowhere near hitting the shelves soon. The prototype might seem promising, but the company has to work on multiple aspects to make it ready for consumer use. For now, it is only a "show off" that Lenovo revealed at Mobile World Congress 2023.

The second prototype Lenovo showcased at the event was the rollable smartphone. However, it was revealed under the Motorola banner. Multiple companies showed improvement signals regrind rollable smartphones in the past, but none have hit the shelves yet. It is known that Lenovo is one of the few companies with a "foldable laptop," which makes the rollable one possible to hit the shelves soon.

Source

Xiaomi, the Chinese technology giant, has unveiled a prototype pair of AR glasses to prove they can sell products beyond smartphones. The Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition will be considered on par with the Google Glass Enterprise and Microsoft’s HoloLens if Xiaomi officially launches the product on the AR market.

Xiaomi has stated its AR glasses won’t be on sale yet as it still is a concept technology. However, at the world’s biggest mobile industry trade show, MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona, the announcement highlighted Xiaomi’s ambition to enter the augmented reality space.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google technology giants focus on mixed or augmented reality to feature new experiences to users. The “metaverse” has become part of an idea of whatever important part technology can play.

Tim Cook (Apple CEO) mentioned the previous year: “I think AR is a profound technology that will affect everything.” However, Apple hasn’t officially launched or acknowledged any AR or virtual headset.

Although Bloomberg reported that Apple’s mixed reality headset would be unveiled this spring and at the beginning of fall 2023 with consumer deliveries.

“It’s a widespread view in the technology industry that AR smart glasses could be the next major form of mobile computing after the smartphone,” an analyst at CCS Insight, Leo Gebbie, stated.

Xiaomi AR Glasses Gesture Control

The lightweight Xiaomi AR glasses connect wirelessly to a smartphone and offer a “retina-level display,” allowing users to see virtual objects as clearly as they would the real thing!

Another exciting feature for the headset wearers will be gesture control to carry out tasks. By something as simple as raising your hands in front of the AR glasses and moving your fingers or hands, you can execute certain functions. Xiaomi says, "the thumb sliding on the index finger is used to enter and exit applications.”

Without the need to touch the device, “This kind of interaction showcases one of the directions that Xiaomi believes human-computer interaction will take in the future,” Xiaomi said.

The Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition will work with its flagship smartphones like Xiaomi 13, and 13 Pro, said to launch worldwide on Sunday. Xiaomi continues to unlock revenue from other devices and is seen as one of the prominent smartphone players globally. Over recent years the company has become known for launching devices from electric scooters to TVs.

Gebbie stated, “Xiaomi’s new AR glasses feel more like a stake in the ground than a meaningful product launch. Chinese rivals, including Oppo and TCL, have also shown off AR devices, and it’s clear no one wants to get left behind.”

These features sound impressive on paper, but it’s still a prototype. So only time will tell how well the AR glasses will succeed in the real world. Let’s wait and see what the future holds for.

Xiaomi’s new AR glasses, shall we?

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Earlier on Sunday, Android Authority showed off the Motorola rizr, a smartphone concept device with a rollable expandable display. Now, the same site has a similar prototype device from Motorola's parent company Lenovo. This is a Windows notebook that also has a rollable screen that moves vertically to expand the laptop's display.

You may remember that Lenovo launched a Windows notebook with a foldable display, the ThinkPad X1 Fold, back in late 2020 and followed it up with a 2022 hardware refresh. This new concept notebook uses lessons learned from that foldable laptop in its design. The story reports that X1 Fold owners frequently used the notebook in a portrait configuration to multitask, write code, and more.

Lenovo then decided to make this concept rollable notebook with that in mind. The display rolls inside the case when normally used as a 12.7-inch laptop with a 4:3 aspect ratio. The laptop expands to a 15.3-inch plastic OLED screen and a nearly square 8:9 ratio when fully rolled out.

Since this is a concept device, it won't be sold to the general public, and Lenovo didn't reveal anything more about the laptop's hardware specs. We will likely have to wait a while to see when or if this rollable notebook will be released as an actual laptop.

The Lenovo Rollable Notebook concept can expand its screen vertically

Notably, Twitter product manager Esther Crawford has also been laid off from the company, says Zoë Schiffer of Platformer. Crawford spearheaded various projects on Twitter, such as the company's planned payments platform and the Blue subscription service that allowed anyone with $8 to get their own verification badge. She was also one of the people behind the "Official" label that Twitter launched back in November of last year as a way to distinguish between Blue subscribers with checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official.

Crawford was also one of the most noteworthy people under Musk's leadership. Evan Jones, one of her former colleagues, tweeted a photo of her on the floor with a sleeping bag and eye mask. Crawford acknowledged the tweet, saying that "When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork."

Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of the defunct Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021, was also given the pink slip.

Musk recently said in an interview that he wants to stabilize Twitter, make sure the company is in a financially healthy place, and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out. Once he does, he says he will be able to choose his successor and finally step down as CEO of Twitter.

Source: The Information, Zoe Schiffer

Twitter lays off more people, including Blue head Esther Crawford

A few days ago, Warner Bros Interactive announced that its Harry Potter-based game Hogwarts Legacy had sold 12 million copies in its first two weeks on sale. That's some pretty impressive sales numbers for any game, but remember that it was made as an AAA-budgeted game based on a well-known entertainment franchise, and had tons of hype and marketing well ahead of its launch.

Having said all that, consider the Thursday launch of Sons of the Forest, from developer Endnight Games. The game didn't get a fraction of the mass media marketing of Hogwarts Legacy, and launched in Early Access on just one platform, the PC on Steam. Yet, the developers posted on Twitter late Friday that the game had already sold over two million copies just 24 hours after it launched.

As of the writing of this article, Sons of the Forest remains the top-selling game on Steam in the US and worldwide, ahead of Hogwarts Legacy, which currently is in third place. It's also in the top five among the most players currently playing games on Steam, with a peak of well over 400,000 players in the last 24 hours.

So, what is Sons of the Forest? It's actually a sequel to Vancouver-based Endnight's first game The Forest. It launched in early access for the PC in 2014, and officially launched in 2018 for the PC and PlayStation 4 consoles. The game sold 5.3 million copies by the end of that year.

Both The Forest and the sequel are open-world survival horror games set in dense forest locations. The storyline for Sons of the Forest centers on the player character, who is sent to a remote island on a mission to find a missing billionaire and his family. However, the player character soon has far more immediate issues as his helicopter crash lands. He now has to survive on the island, find the missing rich people, and deal with the island's mutated inhabitants.

Players can play the game alone with an AI NPC companion, Kelvin. You can also play with up to seven friends in online multiplayer. No matter how you play, you must build shelters, use and create tools and weapons, and defend yourself against the island's population and the changing seasons, all while trying to solve the mystery of the missing billionaire in a setting that's four times the size of The Forest.

Sons of the Forest's development has taken a while longer than Endnight originally planned (it was due to be first released in 2021 but has suffered through a number of delays). It looks like the wait has been worth it.

Sons of the Forest is the new PC game hit with over 2 million copies sold in first 24 hours

Ads for Edge

Earlier in the week, we made a rather interesting but unpleasant discovery in Microsoft Edge Canary when we attempted to download Chrome through Google's website. Google's website was injected with not one, but two ads for Microsoft Edge. The first one is smaller and showed up when the website loaded. Meanwhile, the other is much bigger and shows up when the download starts and helpfully informs you that "Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft". Facepalm. Microsoft removed the ad banners shortly after we broke the story, but the aggressive strategy to advertise its browser is now clear.

In some more positive news, Edge's built-in VPN, dubbed "Edge Secure Network", has started showing up for many users in the Stable channel. Interestingly, it does not contain the Preview tag, despite Microsoft not having announced general availability yet. While we are on the topic of browser security, beware of "Bing AI crypto tokens" masquerading around with Microsoft branding, they are a scam.

Speaking of Bing AI, the technology is now rolling out to more platforms such as Android and iOS - as rumored earlier -, along with the ability to converse with Bing in Skype conversations. Microsoft has also increased the daily limit for turns with Bing Chat to 100, a notable increase from the previous figure of 60. The service is still not available for everyone though.

We also learned more about the Prometheus project powering the new Bing. An estimate indicated that the compute behind the AI-powered chat could be 10 times more expensive in terms of operational expenditure as compared to regular search engines. In related news, Microsoft is steeply increasing the price of its Bing Search API for developers, find out the new rates here.

Windows 11's next major update

Although we did not receive a Dev or Beta Windows Insider build this week, Microsoft has offered an off-ramp to Beta Channel users until March 8. Basically, if you no longer wish to receive Beta builds or want to move to a lower channel, now is the time to do so.

While we did not get an Insider build, internet sleuths discovered some upcoming features for Windows 11. Microsoft is seemingly implementing a lot of new capabilities in the Settings app, including improved keyboard options, a brand-new "Home" section, the ability to add VHD/VHDX drives, and more. Another report also claims that it may be looking to ditch DirectUI in favor of XAML and WinAppSDK.

With Windows 11 "Moment 2" update around the corner, Microsoft is seemingly prepping to make the "Moment 3" update available to Beta Channel Insiders soon as well. Some Moment 3 enablement packages have also leaked, suggesting that the update is being targeted for late 2023. While that is still a way off, Release Preview Insiders have received a new build with tons of new featues too.

And if you're not a fan of the stuff Microsoft includes in its latest operating system and would rather debloat it, check out (at your own risk!) either this third-party utility or this video that demonstrates how you can customize the OS image and convert it into a lightweight installation yourself.

Windows bugs

We had an interesting occurrence this week when Microsoft unexpectedly tried to force Windows 10 PCs not eligible for Windows 11 to upgrade to its latest OS. The company later acknowledged that this was due to a bug that should be resolved in 48 hours.

Microsoft also confirmed a new bug for Windows customers in Croatia, which would lead to incorrect currencies being displayed in some applications. This is due to the country recently joining the Eurozone and adopting the Euro as its new currency, a change that is yet to be reflected by Microsoft in Windows locale data.The Redmond tech firm is looking to resolve this bug as well as another related to file copy slowdowns in an upcoming update. For now, it has patched virtualization-related problems and also disabled its new Snap Layout changes in the Dev Channel build 25300 due to undisclosed issues.

On the improvements front, AMD has patched Microsoft DirectX 11 Ryzen and Radeon performance issues on Windows 10 and Windows 11. There are other performance improvements in tow for the operating systems too. Moreover, the latest release of Macrium Reflect has also fixed "Invalid Function" image and Windows Server 2003 AVX startup failures.

Since this section is mostly about bugs, it's also worth highlighting a now-resolved issue which led to personal Outlook accounts being flooded by spam emails. In a similar vein, a Gmail problem that disallowed the service from fetching emails from Outlook and Hotmail has also been patched. Finally, Teams is getting a preview release next month with a major performance boost.

Git gud

Microsoft met with EU regulators this week to try and convince them to let their acquisition of Activision Blizzard go through. In an effort to further emphasize how this deal is going to benefit gamers at large, the company signed an agreement with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty games to its platform. It also announced another deal with Nvidia to bring Microsoft's Xbox PC games to the GeForce Now cloud gaming service.

When it comes to actual game releases, Microsoft-owned Bethesda is launching a freemium Mighty Doom spinoff on Android and iOS soon. Forza Horizon 5's Rally Adventure expansion has been announced too and will launch in March. Meanwhile, Halo Infinite will be getting its biggest content update on March 7.

Over on the deals and promotions side, Xbox Free Play Days has gained Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, Dragon Ball: The Breakers, and more. Similarly, No Man's Sky and Wasteland 3 headline this week's Deals with Gold. Meanwhile, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, F1 22, and Soul Hackers 2 are slated to hit Xbox Game Pass soon. Speaking of Xbox Game Pass, it's also worth noting that the service's nascent family plan is now available in six more countries.

But if none of the aforementioned deals tickle your fancy, check out this Weekend's PC Game Deals curated by our News Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe instead.

Dev Channel

• Files 2.4.40 is now out with tags editor, improved context menus, and other changes
• Microsoft's Inspire 2023 conference will take place in a virtual setting on July 18-19
• Microsoft has announced .NET 8 Preview 1, and you can download it right now
• Visual Studio 2022 17.5 is now live
• OneDrive on the web will get a Favorites feature in March
• Windows 10 and 11 will soon finally let you paste as plain text, thanks to PowerToys
• Microsoft Word will get a 'Send-to-Kindle' sharing option next month
• Microsoft has recommended an interesting change to boost Exchange Server security
• Alleged specs for the Surface Laptop Studio 2 have leaked

Under the spotlight

Our resident reviewer Robbie Khan conducted his review of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, which he found to be excellent. Read more of his thoughts here.

On the other hand, News Reporter Taras Buria recapped and shared his thoughts on all the features coming the Windows 11 "Moment 2" update planned for release within the next couple of months.

Meanwhile, I took a bit of a stroll down the memory lane and talked about how Microsoft has had a bit of a troubled history with building AI chatbots, the remnants of which we are still seeing in Bing Chat today.

We also published a couple of guides. The first one comes from News Editor Justin Luna who explained how you can secure your Twitter account's authentication with the platform taking away SMS-based 2FA from non-Blue users.

And the other guide comes from forum member Adam Bottjen, who talked about how you can fix a corrupt Windows profile in his latest Tech Tip Tuesday piece.

Logging off

Our most interesting news item of the week isn't related to Microsoft but is intriguing nonetheless. Basically, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has accused Google of destroying evidence in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit regarding the latter's dominance in the web search market. The government claims that Google violated federal laws by using instant-messaging apps that deleted messages within 24 hours.

It alleges that sensitive business dealings were conducted through these off-the-record mechanisms and Google employees were practically trained to engage in these practices. Google has denied any wrongdoing but we'll likely find out what U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta - who is handling the case - thinks about the matter shortly.

Microsoft Weekly: Ads for Edge, the next major update for Windows 11, and bugs

Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

Over the past few weeks, AI chatbots have both fascinated and frustrated a wide range of early adopters. Big corporations have lauded them as the next big thing in search engine technology; journalists have tested their accuracy and intelligibility; everyday users have probed the limits of what they know.

Up until now, artificial intelligence has remained within the purview of experts, enthusiasts and the occasional sci-fi fan. Over the next few years, though, it seems entirely possible that AI could become a topic of mainstream discussion — and a contentious one, at that.

To add anything substantive to the discourse, everyday users will have to familiarize themselves with some basic AI concepts. And to do that, they’ll first have to understand whether the chatbots even possess meaningful artificial intelligence in the first place. The question isn’t nearly as straightforward as it may seem.

In spite of what Microsoft may say about Bing with ChatGPT, or what other companies claim about their similar products, calling these services “artificial intelligences” in the first place is a bit of a misnomer. And to understand why, we need to look outside of the technological sphere and into the weird and wonderful world of philosophy. To learn about the limitations of current-gen AI, and whether we’ll ever be able to transcend those limits in the future, it’s helpful to consider two philosophical concepts: solipsism and the Blockhead thought experiment.

The uncertainty of solipsism

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

To delve into the philosophy of AI, I spoke with Cameron Buckner, an associate professor of philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Houston. Dr. Buckner has worked on everything from corvid cognition to metaphysics, but his research into neural networks and machine learning makes him the ideal candidate to discuss artificial intelligence, and its relationship with humans.

In a recent piece about Star Trek and AI chatbots, I wrote that one of the primary problems with artificial intelligence is that we can never be absolutely certain whether the entity in question possesses any real cognition. As it turns out, this isn’t a problem exclusively for AI; it affects other people and animals as well. In philosophy, this concept is called “solipsism.”

“Solipsism, at least in this particular context, is the belief — or maybe worry — that I’m the only one with a mind,” Buckner said. “I know my own mental states in some kind of special way that I don’t know the mental states of others. I know that I have a mind in a way that I don’t know other agents have minds. It’s a very interesting philosophical problem that’s been discussed all the way back to ancient Greece.”

Buckner pointed out that while solipsism is a problem for humans and animals, it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that other living beings must have cognitions similar to our own. Even ravens appear to understand that both they and their conspecifics are autonomous agents, according to Buckner’s research.

When it comes to AI, however, the situation seems much less clear. Learning information from another person is a fairly reliable process, since we can reasonably infer that other people have drawn justifiable conclusions based on a logical sequence of events, just like us. AIs, however, don’t learn like that at all. Instead, AIs try to find patterns in word sequences and respond algorithmically.

“In the case of these [chatbot] language models … what they have is a bunch of text. We can give them cues in the text, and text typically does contain such cues about the mental state of the person who’s speaking or writing,” Buckner said. “One of the questions we all have now is, should we be attributing mental states to these language models that are capable of this flexible kind of approximate copying behavior? It looks like they can give appropriate responses to a very, very wide range of social interactions with humans. And, can they infer our mental states when they’re interacting with us, from purely textual evidence? Even though they don’t have the same type of inner mental life that we do.

“We at least know that much,” he asserts. “They don’t have emotions. They don’t have an autobiographical memory in the way we do. They don’t have long-term projects.”

Buckner’s “autobiographical memory” point is perhaps the most salient thing to keep in mind about AIs. Our defense against solipsism regarding other humans — and to some extent, animals — is that we know that each person has a consistent set of memories and experiences that influences their disposition and behaviors. The technical term for this phenomenon is “psychological continuity,” and it’s intricately linked with the idea of consciousness. We are conscious agents because we are aware of our own thoughts and actions in both the present and the past. AI chatbots, by and large, can’t say the same.

“The large language models are trained on the entire text of the Internet,” Buckner said. “They’re not a kind of individual super-agent. It’s rather like a slurry of agents. Like you took hundreds of thousands of coherent agents, and you put them in a blender and stirred it up.”

AI chatbots don’t have humanlike cognition in their current state. But their architecture suggests that even in the future, any kind of inner life, as we understand it, is a dim possibility. If AIs have no psychological continuity, then they can’t reason like living things can, if they can reason at all. And if AIs can’t reason, then any conclusion they draw, apart from trivial regurgitation of information, is suspect.

If solipsism is the fear that no one else has a conscious mind, then the fear appears to be justified for AI chatbots.

A Blockhead’s intelligence

 (Image credit: Kindel Media)

The Blockhead thought experiment represents another serious hurdle in ascribing agency to AIs. Like solipsism, it challenges us to think about whether other entities have inner lives — and whether it matters if they do.

“The Blockhead thought experiment is this idea going back to the earliest days [of AI] when we saw that you could fool humans into thinking you were intelligent just by having a good stock of canned responses,” Buckner explained. “What if you just scaled that up indefinitely?

“Any conversation you have with one of these systems is going to be finite. There’s a finite number of things you can say to it, and a finite number of things it can say back to you. At least in principle, it could be explicitly programmed as a kind of lookup table.

The same way that the kid who doesn’t really want to learn how to do long division and wants to do well on the quiz might just memorize a bunch of common answers … without ever actually learning how to do the long division process. It’s like that, but for everything.”

Most readers have probably heard of the Turing test, which cryptographer Alan Turing devised in 1950 to determine whether machines could exhibit human intelligence. Without rehashing the whole experiment here, the idea is that a human and a computer would communicate, and that a human observer would try to determine which participant was which. If the observer could not tell, then the computer would pass the test. Whether doing so proved a computer’s “intelligence” is up for debate, but the Turing test is still a useful shorthand for machines that aim to mimic human behaviors.

Ned Block, the philosopher who first proposed the Blockhead experiment (although not under that name), argued that any program with a sufficiently diverse range of responses could reliably pass the Turing test, even though doing so would not demonstrate any kind of actual intelligence. Instead, the program would essentially be an extremely intricate spreadsheet, picking the most “sensible” response based on algorithmic logic.

The idea of a program with an essentially infinite cache of stock answers was far-fetched in the early days of AI technology. But now that chatbots can essentially access the whole Internet to craft their responses, what we have sounds an awful lot like a Blockhead computer.

“The Blockhead thought experiment is meant to decisively rebut [the Turing] test as a test for intelligence,” Buckner said. “Just by having canned responses to everything preprogrammed in a lookup table. That is a real threat today with these deep learning systems. It seemed like an ‘in-principle’ threat or a thought-experiment-type threat rather than an actual engineering threat, until we had the systems that have the memory capacity to memorize huge swaths of the Internet.”

Block used this thought experiment to argue for a philosophical concept called “psychologism,” which maintains that the psychological process by which an entity synthesizes information is important. In other words, a disciple of psychologism would argue that a Blockhead computer is not intelligent, because consulting a lookup table is not the same as reasoning through a problem. (Block presented this idea in contrast to another philosophical concept called “behaviorism,” although the two are not always mutually exclusive.)

“[An AI] could have the exact same responses as a human, and yet it’s not intelligent, because it’s not generating them by intelligently processing the information,” Buckner said. “We need to actually probe what’s going on under the hood in these systems to see if they’re doing some intermediate, representational processing in the way that we would.”

Under a psychologistic approach, nothing your AI chatbot tells you is an original idea, even if it comes up with a phrase, song lyric or story concept that no one’s ever used before. With a complex enough algorithm, and a big enough source of information, it can essentially bluff its way past any query without ever applying real reason or creativity.

“Very confident nonsense”

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

To make matters even more complicated, there doesn’t seem to even be a consistent definition of what constitutes artificial intelligence. Microsoft and other companies seem to have settled on AI as “procedurally generated responses to naturalistic queries.” A sci-fi fan, on the other hand, might insist that AI must refer to a single autonomous entity, like Lt. Cmdr. Data in Star Trek, or EDI in the Mass Effect trilogy.

“What is artificial intelligence?” asked Buckner, paraphrasing Turing. “What is artificial thought? If you ask the philosophers, they’ll tell you 20 different things, and it’s really hard to see which is the right answer. It’s a very amorphous concept; it seems to be kind of evaluative. Looking in the dictionary doesn’t seem to be the right solution, because the dictionary could be wrong.”

On the other hand, pinning down an exact definition for AI — particularly the “I” — doesn’t seem to be the primary purpose of this current generation of chatbots. They’re already out there in the world, ready to interact with people. Even so, Buckner believes that even in its current iteration, AI has the potential for serious misuse, from individual impersonation to national propaganda.

“There are a lot of people, even deep learning pioneers … who are very pessimistic about what the current generation of chatbots are useful for, if they’re not actually thinking,” he said. “I’m a little more worried about a lot of misuse of these models. Given a little bit of prompting, you can get it to generate enormous amounts of pretty coherent text. That, you could use for misinformation purposes, you could use for persuasion campaigns, you could use to impersonate people, you could use for phishing. I think the people who say that there aren’t a lot of very dangerous potential misuses of this technology are also very wrong.

“There’s also a lot of fun uses,” Buckner allowed. “I don’t want to downplay the fun uses.”

As an example, a colleague of his — a metaphysician — recently got engaged, and Buckner asked ChatGPT to come up with some funny suggestions for the congratulations card. Buckner called the subsequent jokes and puns “brilliant,” and perhaps even better than the ones he would have thought of by himself. He also discussed how AI chatbots can write entertaining song lyrics, or accurately mimic regional dialects.

However, in their current form, we can’t ascribe any agency to AI chatbots, and we can’t count on them to come up with anything truly original.

“If you’re really asking [an AI] to solve some new problem or do some kind of serious analysis that it can’t just look up on the Internet,” he said, “it’s going to give you very confident nonsense.”

Source

On Friday, Meta announced a new AI-powered large language model (LLM) called LLaMA-13B that it claims can outperform OpenAI's GPT-3 model despite being "10x smaller." Smaller-sized AI models could lead to running ChatGPT-style language assistants locally on devices such as PCs and smartphones. It's part of a new family of language models called "Large Language Model Meta AI," or LLAMA for short.

The LLaMA collection of language models range from 7 billion to 65 billion parameters in size. By comparison, OpenAI's GPT-3 model—the foundational model behind ChatGPT—has 175 billion parameters.

Meta trained its LLaMA models using publicly available datasets, such as Common Crawl, Wikipedia, and C4, which means the firm can potentially release the model and the weights open source. That's a dramatic new development in an industry where, up until now, the Big Tech players in the AI race have kept their most powerful AI technology to themselves.

"Unlike Chinchilla, PaLM, or GPT-3, we only use datasets publicly available, making our work compatible with open-sourcing and reproducible, while most existing models rely on data which is either not publicly available or undocumented," tweeted project member Guillaume Lample.

Meta calls its LLaMA models "foundational models," which means the firm intends the models to form the basis of future, more-refined AI models built off the technology, similar to how OpenAI built ChatGPT from a foundation of GPT-3. The company hopes that LLaMA will be useful in natural language research and potentially power applications such as "question answering, natural language understanding or reading comprehension, understanding capabilities and limitations of current language models."

While the top-of-the-line LLaMA model (LLaMA-65B, with 65 billion parameters) goes toe-to-toe with similar offerings from competing AI labs DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI, arguably the most interesting development comes from the LLaMA-13B model, which, as previously mentioned, can reportedly outperform GPT-3 while running on a single GPU. Unlike the data center requirements for GPT-3 derivatives, LLaMA-13B opens the door for ChatGPT-like performance on consumer-level hardware in the near future.

Parameter size is a big deal in AI. A parameter is a variable that a machine-learning model uses to make predictions or classifications based on input data. The number of parameters in a language model is a key factor in its performance, with larger models generally capable of handling more complex tasks and producing more coherent output. More parameters take up more space, however, and require more computing resources to run. So if a model can achieve the same results as another model with fewer parameters, it represents a significant gain in efficiency.

"I'm now thinking that we will be running language models with a sizable portion of the capabilities of ChatGPT on our own (top of the range) mobile phones and laptops within a year or two," wrote independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a Mastodon thread analyzing the impact of Meta's new AI models.

Currently, a stripped-down version of LLaMA is available on GitHub. To receive the full code and weights (the "learned" training data in a neural network), Meta provides a form where interested researchers can request access. Meta has not announced plans for a wider release of the model and weights at this time.

Source

Women seeking online advice about abortions are being directed to pregnancy counselling services run by anti-abortion campaigners, an Observer investigation has found.

Google adverts that are styled to look like real search results and appear above genuine listings are routinely being shown to people searching key terms relating to pregnancy and abortion.

In an analysis this month, 117 out of 251 adverts shown by Google UK to a user searching 40 key phrases, including “NHS abortion advice”, “confidential abortion support” and “pregnant teenager help”, were from groups opposed to abortion.

The findings reveal the marketing efforts of anti-abortion groups in the UK and have led to concerns that women could be exposed to biased information when seeking out medical advice. One sexual health charity described the advertising as “clearly immoral”.

The adverts in the analysis – which were offered to a woman in her 20s in London in early February – contain a small tag marking them as advertising but look similar to real search results and appear above trusted information sources, including the NHS website. In some cases they promote advice services that claim to offer impartial support but do not clearly state the anti-abortion views of the people behind them.

One of the biggest advertisers was Pregnancy Crisis Helpline, whose adverts appeared after searches for 14 out of the 40 phrases tested in the analysis. They included one that said: “Considering an abortion? Talk to someone,” and appeared after searches for “buy abortion pill” and “pregnant teenager help”.

People clicking on the links were taken to the helpline’s website, which says it is a “safe and confidential place” offering “support for women struggling with an unplanned pregnancy”.

But while it says it does “not refer for abortions”, neither does it offer information about its organisers’ anti-abortion views and presents itself as an impartial service offering support “away from all the pressures”.

In reality, the helpline was co-launched with Christian Concern, a rightwing evangelical organisation that wants abortion to be banned. The helpline’s trustees include Regan King, a pastor at the Angel church in Islington, London, who has described abortion as “Disgusting. Disturbing.

Grim. Gruesome. Horrifying. Shocking. Terrible. Vile” and likened it to “the new slave trade”. Another trustee is Christian Clive Copus, a former director of the anti-abortion campaign group the Prolife Alliance.

The helpline has recently reported a spike in the number of people contacting it, saying it had 2,000 clients in 2022 compared with 500 in 2021.

Other Google adverts directed women to a counselling service run by the charity Life, which opposes abortion. One said: “We provide a safe space for you to explore your feelings away from outside pressures. Talk through your options in confidence.”

Google said the adverts flagged by the Observer complied with its rules, highlighting that they contain an “ad” tag in bold lettering and a line stating that the services they promote do not provide abortions.

Google advert styled to look like real internet search results for women seeking pregnancy advice. Photograph: Google

But Lisa Hallgarten, head of policy at young people’s sexual health charity Brook, described the marketing approach as “clearly immoral” and said adverts provided to those searching terms such as “NHS abortion advice” could delay women’s access to healthcare.

“We are really concerned that people looking for impartial support are being directed to organisations and websites where they could experience the complete opposite,” she said. Pam Lowe, an expert on anti-abortion activism, said: “Anyone who puts ‘NHS abortion’ into Google should be shown a link to the NHS website as the first result. There’s a risk that people could end up with biased information.”

Labour MP Stella Creasy, who has campaigned on access to reproductive healthcare, urged the government to compel tech companies to remove potentially harmful listings. She said there was a difference between allowing free speech and “seeking to mislead vulnerable readers who need to be confident that what they are reading is medically sound and impartial”.

The Pregnancy Crisis Helpline said it stated on its website that it did not offer medical advice or “refer for abortion”.

“If a client asks for medical advice, we signpost them to their GP, 111 or A&E as appropriate,” said Toby Cosh, chair of the trustees. He added that while the helpline had been set up with support from Christian Concern, it had operated independently since 2018 and was a registered UK charity.

Kerry Smart, chief executive at Life, said: “Our person-centred online pregnancy listening service was inspired by the Samaritans and is non-coercive and non-judgmental.”

She added that people using Life’s “listening services” were told it did not refer for abortion or give information on abortion providers, and that the charity complied with ethical guidelines from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. “If clients wish to explore medical topics, we inform – not advise – using NHS information in skilled listening sessions,” she said. “We agree that attempts to mislead or give false information are wrong.”

Other adverts that appear on UK Google searches relating to pregnancy and abortion came from regulated abortion providers, including MSI Reproductive Choices and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

They appeared alongside adverts placed by anti-abortion charities in the UK and US that do not run counselling services and instead direct people to webpages about the ethics of abortion. The Observer understands that they do not always pay for their adverts because of a Google scheme that means organisations with charity status can be granted free advertising credits.

Google said: “We know that people come to Google looking for information they can trust, and we’ve invested heavily in providing a safe and transparent experience.

“When it comes to abortion-related ads, we require an added level of transparency so that people seeking abortion-related resources know what services an advertiser actually provides. Any organisation that wants to target queries related to getting an abortion must complete our certification process and clearly disclose whether they do or do not offer abortions.”

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Gelsinger made those remarks as part of Intel's Capital Allocation Update conference call (via Tom's Hardware), where he stated:

The simple answer is no. No delays. Arrow Lake is on track. The 3nm programs are on track, both with TSMC as well as our internal 3nm programs including Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest. Good solid execution on both the client, the server, and AXG side. We are gaining momentum with foundry customers as well. So, I feel good that we have turned the corner on many of the execution challenges. These rumors, like many others, will be proven by our execution to be firmly false.

Currently, Intel plans to release its 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPUs sometime in 2023. Intel has confirmed that those chips will support AV1 encoding, with rumors that they will also use the company's "Xe LPG" architecture for onboard graphics.

Meteor Lake will be followed by the Arrow Lake CPUs in late 2024, according to Intel. The online rumors this week claimed Intel was going to delay the launch of Arrow Lake chips until sometime in the first half of 2025.

Source: Intel via Tom's Hardware

Intel CEO denies online reports that its 3nm CPUs have been delayed