News: Technology News

Microsoft Weekly: Visual Studio, decent Windows 11 builds, and the death of Ninjacat

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 20:52:22 +0000

We are the end of yet another week of 2022, which means that it is time to recap all the important things that happened in the world of Microsoft in the past few days. This time, we have some news that developers may find interesting, some Windows 11 news for Insiders, and a farewell to a Windows mascot. Let's dive in to our weekly digest for February 12 - February 18!

Developers, developers, developers!

If you're running older versions of Visual Studio in your development environments right now, you should know that some iterations of the IDE are running out of support soon. Some versions of Visual Studio 2012, 2017, and 2019 are reaching their end of lifecycle within the next few months. Microsoft has recommended upgrading to a supported version, ideally Visual Studio 2022.

Microsoft also rolled out Visual Studio 2022 17.0 Preview 6 for Mac. It fixes a lot of the issues present in Preview 5, but more importantly, it also completes the migration of mainline features to the native macOS UI. The company is also enhancing support for Xamarin and .NET MAUI development in this build and those coming in the next few months.

Visual Studio 2022 17.1 also hit general availability. Indexed Find in Files is now enabled by default, you can allow the IDE to save dirty documents whenever the window loses focus, take advantage of Git enhancements, and lots more. Microsoft has noted that organizations and developers who plan to leverage from the latest enhancements should plan their upgrades soon.

Significant Windows 11 builds

This week finally saw a Windows 11 Dev Channel release in the form of build 22557. This is a relatively major build because it packs a ton of new features and changes such as an updated Task Manager, App folders in the Start menu, Focus, Live Captions, new touch gestures, and lots more. Do check out all the details about the new capabilities here and a list of fixes and known issues here.

It is important to note that Microsoft has cautioned that Windows 11 Pro users will soon need a Microsoft Account in order to set up their installation, just like Windows 11 Home.

But if you're a gamer, build 22557 contained a couple of welcome surprises too. Microsoft is working on enhancements to windowed gaming for legacy titles running on DirectX 10 and DirectX 11. This includes automatically migrating their presentation model to the one utilized by DirectX 12 which will result in lower latency and also open the door to Auto HDR and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR).

The Xbox HDR Game Calibration app is coming over to Windows 11 in the form of the Windows HDR Calibration app. It's present in build 22557 but is not functional yet.

It wasn't all Windows 11 Dev Channel builds news this week, though. Microsoft generally rolled out its set of "new experiences" for Windows 11 users as well. This includes a public preview of the Amazon Appstore, enhancements for Taskbar, and redesigned apps for Notepad and Media Player, among other things.

KB5010415 and KB5010414 updates were released for Windows 10 and 11 respectively, and you can check out all the details here.

R.I.P. Ninjacat

It seems like Microsoft is finally ditching its unofficial "Ninjacat" mascot which made its debut back in 2015 and was associated with Windows 10. Although the company has not officially commented on the matter, reports citing insiders claim that the company has parted ways with Ninjacat, so will likely not be using the mascot in its promotional material moving forward.

To be fair, Ninjacat was never an official thing from the company management itself. Instead, the sticker - a cat riding on a unicorn holding a Microsoft flag in its paw - was actually made as a fun project by some Microsoft employees. Although it was welcomed by many employees and members of the public alike, it was mostly just a character like Clippy that people had began associating to Microsoft. Well, no more (if reports are to be believed).

Talking about other Microsoft products, you'll soon be able to access Teams apps directly from the Office app on Windows or Office.com, as well as control your Teams call through a Bluetooth headset. And if you're an active user of Microsoft Edge, it seem like the Redmond tech giant is testing Skype Meet Now integration with the browser and the ability to quickly install web apps in Edge across all your devices.

Dev Channel

Surface Laptop 5 may use the latest Ryzen 6000 Rembrandt APUs
A report claims that Microsoft plans to announce a GoldenEye 007 remaster soon
Microsoft has detailed the requirements for running Android apps on Windows 11, and SSDs are a must
Halo Infinite's multiplayer is getting ranking fixes on February 22, and the Mid-Season Update is coming next week too
Paramount's Halo has already been renewed for a second season
Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise is now available as a free preview

Under the spotlight

This week, Neowin News Reporter Asher Madan published his thoughts on Dying Light 2 played on Xbox Series X. He has described it as "parkour heaven" but has noted the story missteps and how they bring down the overall experience.

Meanwhile, I resumed our Closer Look series with a slightly different approach where we also look at in-development features on Windows 11. To kick us off again, I shared my thoughts about the implementation of App folders in the Start menu of Windows 11 Dev Channel build 22557. If that tickles your fancy, check out my piece here.

Logging off

In this section, I would like to direct your attention to Windows 11 apparently running on a Google Pixel 6 on a preview version of Android 13. While its utility is arguable, it's definitely interesting to see what you can accomplish when you set out to do what many would perceive to be impossible.

Microsoft Weekly: Visual Studio, decent Windows 11 builds, and the death of Ninjacat

Read exactly how Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal for Activision Blizzard came together

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 20:46:45 +0000

A new SEC filing has a detailed timeline

Microsoft shocked the tech and gaming world on January 18th when it announced it would acquire Activision Blizzard in a $68.7 billion deal, by far the biggest ever in gaming. Activision Blizzard, one of the most storied developers on the planet, had been reeling for months from multiple scandals, including California’s lawsuit accusing the company of creating a culture of “constant sexual harassment,” an explosive Wall Street Journal report suggesting CEO Bobby Kotick was both aware of that harassment and that he himself was accused of mistreatment by women, as well as labor protests from Call of Duty workers.

Microsoft’s Phil Spencer, at the time the company’s Xbox chief, reportedly responded to the accusations from the WSJ article two days later in an email to Xbox staff, saying he was “disturbed and deeply troubled by the horrific events and actions” at Activision Blizzard and that Microsoft is “evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard and making ongoing proactive adjustments.” But based on a timeline of the acquisition Activision Blizzard has now laid out in its official merger proposal to its own shareholders (via CNBC), it seems that Spencer’s idea of changing the relationship with Activision Blizzard was to almost immediately offer to purchase the troubled company.

And, according to the documents, he wasn’t the only one interested in a deal.

The initial conversation about an acquisition happened between Spencer and Kotick on November 19th, just three days after the WSJ’s report about the Activision Blizzard CEO and a single day after Spencer said told Xbox staff he was “deeply troubled.” It might have even come up as part of the same conversation.

“In the course of a conversation on a different topic between Mr. Spencer and Mr. Kotick, Mr. Spencer raised that Microsoft was interested in discussing strategic opportunities between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft and asked whether it would be possible to have a call with Mr. Nadella the following day,” the document reads. The next day (a Saturday), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was apparently more explicit, indicating that “Microsoft was interested in exploring a strategic combination with Activision Blizzard.”

That kicked off nearly two months of conversations between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard into what would become the acquisition announced on January 18th, and you can read the whole blow-by-blow over the course of ten pages in Activision Blizzard’s filing, beginning on page 31. (The copy of the document embedded at the bottom of this article should begin there.) I’ve always wondered what goes on behind the scenes to make these sorts of mega-acquisitions happen, and the document provides an illuminating look at the wheeling and dealing to pull this deal together.

One thing I found interesting was that Activision Blizzard was in touch with four other companies and one individual about some sort of deal in addition to Microsoft. Disappointingly, they are only named as companies A, C, D, and E, and the individual is named as “Individual B,” so we don’t know who else could have ended up owning Call of Duty. None of those deals went through for various reasons — Company E, for example, said it couldn’t do a full acquisition of Activision Blizzard — and Microsoft was rapidly and aggressively pursuing its deal, getting the terms together before some other companies had even entered the picture.

Activision Blizzard’s SEC filing also includes the terms of the merger agreement, which shows that Microsoft would be on the hook if the merger gets blocked by government regulators — it would pay Activision Blizzard a termination fee ranging from $2 billion to $3 billion if the acquisition is axed due to an “Injunction arising from Antitrust Laws.” If Activision Blizzard’s shareholders do not vote to approve the merger, though, it might have to pay Microsoft a termination fee of $2.27 billion.

While it’s unusual for mergers like these to get actively blocked, we do have a recent example: Nvidia’s $40 billion deal to acquire Arm from SoftBank fell apart due to regulatory challenges. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which sued to block Nvidia’s purchase of Arm, specifically noted in a statement this week that the failed merger “represents the first abandonment of a litigated vertical merger in many years.” While Microsoft says it’s still early in the Activision Blizzard deal — it’s “so early in the process that we’re not yet at a point where we’re getting any real feedback [from the FTC],” Microsoft president Brad Smith told reporters, according to CNN — there’s always the possibility that the FTC and other regulatory bodies intervene.

While Kotick is expected to leave the company should the deal go through, the document also shows he’ll leave with a tremendous fortune either way: with 4,317,285 shares in Activision Blizzard, he stands to gain $410,142,075 based on the $95 per share that Microsoft plans to pay — and he has an additional “golden parachute” worth $14,592,302 if he decides to stay and Microsoft then pushes him out anyway. That doesn’t count his 2.2 million stock options, either, which could be worth hundreds of millions of additional dollars depending on how much they cost to exercise.

The document also reveals that Call of Duty: Vanguard, 2021’s annual release in the mega-popular series, underperformed and failed to meet its fourth quarter projections.

Disclosure: Casey Wasserman is on the board of directors for Activision Blizzard as well as the board of directors of Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.

Contributed to DocumentCloud by The Verge (Vox.com) • View document or read text

Correction February 19th, 11:55AM ET: The Wall Street Journal’s Bobby Kotick profile reports that women accused him of harassment, including one instance where he fired a woman who was allegedly being sexually harassed by his pilot, but doesn’t suggest he sexually harassed employees himself. We regret the error.

Read exactly how Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal for Activision Blizzard came together

Flagship Intel Arc 512EU Geekbench score leaks and it's impressive for a start

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 20:42:05 +0000

At its Investor Meeting 2022, Intel revealed some very interesting details about its upcoming Arc discrete GPU lineup. The company assured that Arc is indeed landing in Q1 but first inside notebooks and then hitting desktops in the next quarter.

Perhaps to the disappointment of some, Team Blue made it abundantly clear that the first-gen Arc "Alchemist" and second-gen Arc "Battlemage" GPUs won't be taking on the top dogs from rivals AMD and Nvidia. Such "ultra-enthusiast" levels of performance are in the works with third-gen Celestial GPUs. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the flagship Alchemist GPU packing 512 Xe HPG Execution Units or 32 Xe-cores, dubbed the SKU1, is going to be a slouch.

A Geekbench score leak today suggests the Arc 512EU part is pretty competent, at least in this kind of workload as the GPU has scored 85,448 points in Geekbench 5's OpenCL benchmark test. This is about in the vicinity of the GeForce RTX 2070 / 2060 SUPER. For a comparison with AMD Radeon GPUs, the score is slightly higher than the Radeon RX 6600 XT.

It must be noted here that OpenCL compute score is not always indicative of gaming performance, however, it does provide a rough estimate of a GPU's might. Also apparently the Arc GPU is tested here with a Core i5-9600K running 2666MT/s memory. While the Geekbench OpenCL test is mainly GPU intense, the Arc 512EU SKU1 might score a bit higher with a more powerful system.

Source: Geekbench via Benchleaks (Twitter)

Flagship Intel Arc 512EU Geekbench score leaks and it's impressive for a start

Intel's 'Project Endgame' is a low-latency, cloud computing platform with Arc GPUs

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 02:45:20 +0000

Intel is quite confident about its upcoming Arc GPUs. The company is even planning a cloud-based remote computing platform based on the Arc discrete GPU architecture. Intel’s "Project Endgame" appears to be a multi-role or multi-purpose platform that could offer a variety of graphics-intensive services through the internet.

Intel’s latest investor note indicates the company is “on track” to release products that come under the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG). As the name suggests, the Visual Compute Roadmap and Strategy discusses the company’s plans for its GPUs. It mentions “Project Endgame”:

Project Endgame: Project Endgame will enable users to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience. Project Endgame will be available later this year.

It is apparent that Intel’s upcoming service will be powered by its own Arc discrete graphics cards. The name and description also hint at a cloud-hosted, game streaming service. However, Intel doesn’t make it clear if the service will be geared towards gaming or computing.

As Project Endgame merely received two short lines of description, it is difficult to ascertain what exactly Intel is planning. The company has mentioned that Endgame will give users access to Intel Arc GPUs through a cloud service, providing a low-latency computing solution without having the required hardware at users’ premises. This seems a lot like NVIDIA GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PlayStation Now, Google Stadia, and so on.

However, Intel has clearly refrained from explicitly stating that Project Endgame will be aimed at gamers. Moreover, there are many remotely-hosted game streaming services. Hence, it is quite likely that Intel could offer cloud-based computing solutions to workstations, perhaps similar to Microsoft Windows 365. If Intel’s Arc GPUs are powerful, they could offer capable GPU power to low-powered desktop or laptop computers through the internet.

Intel’s Arc GPUs are the company’s big bet this year. This year’s iterations might not compete with the top-end models in the NVIDIA GeForce RTX series. However, they could certainly help the company secure a place in the discrete GPU market, currently dominated by NVIDIA and AMD.

Source: Digital Trends

Intel's 'Project Endgame' is a low-latency, cloud computing platform with Arc GPUs

Google.com tests a busier homepage with a row of info cards

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 21:24:23 +0000

Google Search's stark, white homepage could be in for some big changes.

Whoa, there are cards at the bottom of the Google homepage!

9to5Google

Check out this totally wild Google homepage experiment spotted by 9to5Google: the search page suddenly has a row of cards at the bottom. If this design is widely adopted, it would easily be the biggest google.com design change ever.

In the experiment, Google.com has a row of six cards at the bottom of the page. There's weather, trending searches, "what to watch," a stock card, local events, and COVID news. Clicking on a card will either expand it or load a search-results page. There's also a "hide content" switch, which will turn the cards off. All of this seems very similar to the Google.com app, which has a scrollable list of "discover" cards.

One of the reasons Google Search initially became popular was because the search page was plain and easy to use. The competition at the time included search engines like Yahoo and Alta Vista, which presented users with a massive wall of ads and content. Google's starkness was a major differentiator in the early days, and it's interesting to see the company toy with moving a little closer to the days of Yahoo, even if it's presenting a more modern take on the idea.

You have to wonder how many people actually still use the Google.com search page. If you have Google's browser, Chrome, you basically never see it. The Chrome "new tab" page looks similar to Google.com, but it's not the same, and the prevalence of address bars that double as search bars makes a search homepage rather obsolete. So far, there are no indications that Google plans to release the design change as a permanent feature, but the company has seemed willing to make big changes to search lately. Dark mode (shown in the screenshot) rolled out just five months ago.

Listing image by NurPhoto/Getty Images

Google.com tests a busier homepage with a row of info cards

Intel assures Arc is definitely coming this Q1, but don't expect "ultra-enthusiast" showing

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 20:31:10 +0000

Intel disclosed details on its Arc discrete GPU architecture last year at the company's Architecture Day 2021 event. During this, Intel also stated that Arc would be launching in Q1 this year, and despite a lot of rumors suggesting that Arc was likely to miss this mark, Intel has confirmed today that Arc is indeed landing this Q1 as per the company's Technology roadmap that was shared today.

As can be seen in the image above, Arc, the first-gen Alchemist GPUs to be precise, will indeed be coming to notebooks first in Q1 followed by desktop GPUs in Q2 and Workstation cards scheduled for Q3. A recent report suggests that Arc is launching in March which seems very plausible seeing that February is already halfway over.

The Acer Swift X 2022 model is apparently the first PC to be featuring Intel's Arc discrete GPU. Images of the Arc Alchemist engineering cards have also leaked alongside memory spec details of the mobile Arc SKUs.

Intel says that its graphics division, the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG) is expecting to ship more than 4 million discrete GPUs in 2022, basically doubling down on what Intel graphics chief Raja Koduri had stated earlier.

And Intel isn't stopping there as the company claims it is already working on its third-gen Arc Celestial GPUs which will "address the ultra-enthusiast segment". This means first-gen Alchemist and second-gen Battlemage are probably not going to offer performances paralleling Nvidia's and AMD's top-end cards.

Intel also unveiled its new Project Endgame game streaming service that will let users play on Intel Arc GPUs, similar to Nvidia's GeForce NOW.

Project Endgame will enable users to access Intel Arc GPUs through a service for an always-accessible, low-latency computing experience. Project Endgame will be available later this year.

Raja Koduri had also earlier mentioned a new remote play technology that would allow gamers to play on friends' PCs. But that isn't coming anytime soon.

Source: Intel

Intel assures Arc is definitely coming this Q1, but don't expect "ultra-enthusiast" showing

What Microsoft’s big acquisition of Activision Blizzard means for gamers

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 03:04:06 +0000

Following a massive acquisition by Microsoft, games such as Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot will soon find a new home. Microsoft said today that it is acquiring Activision Blizzard Inc., one of the world’s largest gaming studios.

The transaction set a new record in the gaming industry, costing Microsoft a hefty US$68.7 billion, or nearly $100 billion in Australian dollars. Once completed, Microsoft will have control of over 30 video game firms. Microsoft will then be the world’s third-largest gaming studio, trailing only Sony and Tencent.

This means that Microsoft Gaming will now control games including Call of Duty, Warcraft, Candy Crush, Tony Hawk, Diablo, Overwatch, Spyro, Hearthstone, Crash Bandicoot, and StarCraft.

This is the second large acquisition in the last year, following Microsoft’s acquisition of game firm Bethesda/Zenimax for $7.5 billion – a pittance in contrast.

Bobby Kottick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, will remain in his position, but after the acquisition is finalized, Activision Blizzard will report directly to Microsoft games CEO Phil Spencer. The companies will continue to function independently until the transaction is completed.

What does this imply for PlayStation users?

You’d think PlayStation owners would be left in the dust, but it’s too soon to tell.

While Mr. Spencer asserts that they would continue to support gaming on existing platforms, it is unclear whether this refers to current or future releases. “Activision Blizzard games are enjoyed across a wide range of platforms, and we intend to continue to support those communities in the future.” Mr. Spencer stated in a blog post on the Xbox website.

Microsoft appears to be concentrating its efforts on cloud gaming and its Xbox Game Pass service. Microsoft also stated today that they had 25 million customers to the program.

“(The acquisition) will also expedite our Cloud Gaming plans, allowing more people in more places across the world to play in the Xbox community utilizing phones, tablets, computers, and other devices you already possess.” Mr. Spencer stated. The Activision Blizzard acquisition has no set closing date.

What Microsoft’s big acquisition of Activision Blizzard means for gamers

The next best thing to OLED is getting cheaper

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 03:01:52 +0000

Cooler Master GP27-FQS gaming monitor will lower the cost of entry.

Cooler Master

OLED is so popular among shoppers seeking high-end image quality that its acronym is expanding (see: QD-OLED). But in PC monitors, OLED means limited size options and lofty prices. Mini LED is a strong alternative but has long carried high price tags as well, partially due to the devices being so frequently marketed to creative professionals. But with this week's mini LED PC monitor announcement, the technology is getting cheaper than ever.

Mini LED monitors can fit more LEDs into their backlight because each individual light-emitting diode in a Mini LED monitor is about half the size of the diodes in regular LED monitors. In a full-array local dimming (FALD) monitor, which has independently controlled lighting zones, this should lead to greater contrast, since the display has greater control over brightness in differing areas of an image. Contrast, however, won't be as extreme as what you can expect from OLED.

The Cooler Master GP27-FQS monitor will come out some time between late Q2 and early Q3 with an MSRP of $699. However, a Cooler Master representative told Ars Technica that there will "most likely" be sale prices "closer to $550."

Even at its expected MSRP, the GP27-FQS should be the cheapest mini LED monitor. The current holder of that title appears to be the $2,000 Asus ProArt PA27UCX-K. It's a 27-inch IPS monitor with 576 local dimming zones, a 60 Hz refresh rate, and 3840 x 2160 resolution. Today's mini LED options go all the way up to the famously priced Apple Pro Display XDR, a 32-inch 6K screen with a $5,000 starting MSRP.

You might expect moving away from the creative professional side of tech, which tends to be expensive, to yield more affordable monitors. But today's nonprofessional mini LED options are still expensive due to their extreme refresh rates. Asus' ROG Swift PG32UQX has a $3,000 MSRP but is available as of writing for $2,900. There's also the massive Samsung 49" Odyssey Neo G9 G95NA, which you can find for $2,200.

A side view reveals the GP27-FQS's cable management.

Cooler Master

The GP27-FQS should also hold a price advantage over upcoming mini LED monitors, including the pile of nonprofessional products announced at CES last month. For example, Acer plans on releasing the Predator X32 FP mini LED monitor in Q2 for $1,800.

Why so cheap?

One obvious reason for the GP27-FQS' lower price is that it has 2560 x 1440 resolution rather than 4K and is 165 Hz. AOC's upcoming 170 Hz AG274QXM is also 1440p but was announced at about $450 more than the GP27-FQS.

The GP27-FQS also doesn't employ any flavor of Nvidia G-Sync, which often comes at a cost. (The GP27-FQS does use AMD FreeSync Premium, and you can typically get G-Sync monitors to run on such monitors unofficially with varying results).

Cooler Master's lower-priced mini LED monitor also has 576 local dimming zones. There are FALD monitors and TVs with fewer zones, but you can also find mini LED monitors with over 1,000 zones. The aforementioned Neo Odyssey Neo G9, for example, has 2,048.

More local dimming zones results in greater dynamic range and control over how different parts of an image look. That means you can have an image that's very bright in patches but still has strong blacks in others. With OLED, every pixel is like its own zone, so if you're considering mini LED as an OLED alternative, more zones is especially important.

As of writing, Cooler Master's upcoming mini LED monitor doesn't have any VESA certifications around its HDR delivery, which many competitors have.

Cooler Master also announced a 4K 160 Hz version of this monitor, the GP27-FUS. This device is also cheaper than other mini LED monitors. With similar specs to the GP27-FQS, save for a bump to HDMI 2.1, the monitor will cost $1,100 when it debuts alongside its lower-res sibling.

Brighter than OLED

A benefit mini LED has over OLED is that it's generally brighter. The GP27-FQS claims to hit up to 1,200 nits, which it does with HDR content. With SDR content, you can expect a max brightness of 600 nits.

Colorwise, the monitor claims 97 percent DCI-P3 coverage with the help of quantum dots. That's not quite on par with what QD-OLED, a purportedly more colorful type of OLED that also uses quantum dots, claims. (Meanwhile, Alienware's AW3423DW claims 99.3 percent.) But the GP27-FQS still has a wide color gamut.

Lighting in Cooler Master's favorite shade of purple.

Cooler Master

Outside of image quality, a monitor's price is affected by its feature set. The GP27-FQS has a pair of 2W speakers, USB Type-C connectivity (90 W power delivery), plus two HDMI 2.0 (rather than the latest HDMI 2.1) ports, DisplayPort 1.4, two USB-A ports, and a USB-B. There's also lighting on the panel's backside.

Listing image by Cooler Master

The next best thing to OLED is getting cheaper

Google should kill Stadia

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 19:54:02 +0000

In two years, Google hasn't shown a single significant advantage in cloud gaming.

Stadia looks doomed.

At the beginning of the month, a report from Business Insider detailed ongoing issues with Google's troubled streaming platform. Apparently, Google is putting the consumer product on the back burner while it tries to sell the Stadia technology as a white-label service to power other companies' cloud offerings.

Much has happened between the 2018 "Project Stream" beta, the official Stadia launch in 2019, and today. You could arguably call Google a leader in the second wave of cloud gaming, after the early debuts of services like PS Now and OnLive. Now, though, there is more competition, and the demands of the market are crystallizing. Google tried to make a case that it could bring market advantages to cloud gaming, but the company's vision has not borne fruit. Today, Stadia is languishing and has few prospects of success.

No company wants to call its own project a failure, of course. But now might be a good time for Google to pause for a moment and ask, "What, exactly, are we doing here?" Why does it want to be in the cloud gaming market? What advantages does it have over its competitors, and how does it plan to maintain these advantages over time?

There are no good answers to these questions.

Stadia doesn't have the scale Google implied it would

During a Stadia presentation, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stands in front of a big map that has nothing to do with Stadia.

Google

Let's return to the original Stadia announcement at the 2019 Game Developers Conference and see how some of Google's original claims have played out. Google's GDC presentation emphasized the company's cloud expertise, but it glossed over how that expertise would help win the cloud gaming space.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Stadia announcement by touting the worldwide scale of Google's cloud, saying:

Our custom server hardware and data centers can bring more computing power to more people on planet Earth than anyone else. Today, we are in 19 regions and in over 200 countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables.

Google is a massive cloud computing company that has servers all over the world. So Stadia is available all over the world, right?

Not exactly. Stadia certainly isn't available in "over 200 countries." It's available in just 22 countries, or about 10 percent of the scale Pichai heavily implied Google could work at.

Until recently, Stadia's home inside Google has been the hardware division, with project leader Phil Harrison reporting to Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh. Google is actually pretty bad at competing on an international scale, and every Google Hardware product is capped at about 20 countries. It is strange that Stadia, a cloud service, ended up in the hardware division, but that's where Google decided to put it. The company really wants people to use its game controller and Chromecast media players, so Stadia is limited to the small list of countries Google is willing to sell hardware in. (If you compare the Google Hardware country list to the Stadia country list, they are essentially the same.)

"Everyone" means "in these 22 countries."

Google

To be fair, international business is hard. Can any of Google's competitors match Stadia's 22-country distribution list?

Nvidia's GeForce Now is available in 82 countries. Xbox Cloud Gaming—which is still labeled a "beta"—is available in 26 countries. Google is in third place. PlayStation Now—the most neglected service on our list (though it is reportedly due for a big update)—works in 19 countries. Google has Amazon Luna soundly beat, at least. That service is still in an invite-only "early access" and is available in one country, the United States.

Google has no latency advantage

So Google is bad at international distribution—anyone outside of the US will tell you this. Google is a massive cloud company, though, and with all of that experience from YouTube video streaming and other server technology, Google should have unmatched cloud expertise.

That was the sales pitch from Stadia Head of Engineering Majd Bakar during the reveal event:

We've built Stadia's architecture on top of the Google data center network, the same network that has been delivering search results to your fingertips in milliseconds for more than 20 years. The network consists of fiber optic links and subsea cables between hundreds of points of presence and more than 7,500 edge node locations around the globe, all connected with our network backbone. Stadia is built on infrastructure that no one else has. More edge nodes mean the compute resources are closer to players, which results in better performance.

This is the latency argument. Google has more servers in more places, and because there is probably one close to you, latency will be lower. This should be a competitive advantage for Google. Is it?

This sounded impressive at the time.

Google

You won't find much of a consensus winner among the current cloud gaming options. Ars' testing gives GeForce Now a slight latency advantage over Stadia. Digital Foundry has GeForce Now beating Stadia in every latency test and points out that GeForce's 120 fps mode is something Stadia can't touch. In PC Gamer's latency tests, GeForce Now soundly beat Stadia; the publication even experienced in-game rubber-banding due to lag between Google and the game server. Gamers Nexus gave Stadia a slight edge over GeForce Now, but only by 12 ms (less than one 60 fps frame).

Google has no actual competitive advantage here. No one will find Stadia's lag acceptable if they find the lag on other services unacceptable. The cloud advantage was one of the main pillars upon which the Stadia business was built, and there just isn't any evidence that this theoretical benefit is working to Google's benefit in real life. Nvidia isn't even a cloud company, and it can at least match Google.

Google doesn’t want to invest in Stadia’s hardware

How much are these specs worth today? $500? $700?

Google

I don't know if somebody at Google needed to hear this in 2018, but the Gmail servers can't run a video game.

Google runs incredible warehouse-scale computers that push exabytes of data around the world for apps like Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, and more. But Google designed all of those services, so the platforms were created from the ground up to run on Google's warehouse-scale computers. A video game is not designed to run on a warehouse-scale computer, so none of the company's existing data centers are all that helpful when it's time to game. Google's traditional servers can push the video frames around once they're made, but they can't run Doom. Superior servers could theoretically push you the video frames faster with more latency, but as we've established, there is no evidence for that happening. Whatever cloud synergy Google was supposed to have with Stadia doesn't seem to exist.

One of the many problems the platform faces is that Stadia hardware is only good for Stadia. It can't run anything other than Stadia, so Google is reluctant to invest in this single-use hardware and keep it up to date. The Stadia computer you're renting from Google is pretty outdated. The Stadia hardware was equivalent to a mid-range PC when the service launched in 2019, and Google has never upgraded the specs. Today (if you can find the supply) you could get this level of PC performance for a few hundred bucks.

Stadia games are regularly held back by how slow the servers are. Destiny 2 can only run at the PC equivalent of medium settings. Despite claims that Stadia runs at 4K, that resolution is usually upscaled from a native 1080p or 1440p because, again, Stada is too slow. (There's even a class-action lawsuit over Google's allegedly false 4K advertising).

The real-life situation is the opposite of what Bakar claimed during the Stadia announcement:

Stadia is not constrained by the limitation of traditional console systems. Instead, we have built a truly flexible, scalable and modern platform that allows us to push performance beyond what was previously considered possible. This architecture gives us even more flexibility to scale. And thanks to fast transfer speeds between the Stadia instances in our data center, our platform can connect instances together to dynamically expand the capabilities, along with the need of your games. As a developer, you're used to being forced to tone down your creative ambition, [which is] limited by the hardware. But our vision with Stadia is that the processing resources available will scale up to match your imagination. In this new generation, the data center is your platform.

This entire statement appears to be false. Power scaling has certainly never been demonstrated to the public on any Stadia game at any time during its two-year history. Many games are limited on Stadia and could really use more power, but this feature does not seem to exist. There's no missing context about this being a "plan for the future," either. During the event, the feature was advertised as a system that would be ready at Stadia's launch.

Stadia VP Phil Harrison says the "fundamental benefit" of Stadia is this multi-GPU feature—which never materialized.

Google

Stadia VP Phil Harrison also talked about the service's supposed power scaling and again implied that it would be ready for launch, saying, "The fundamental benefit of our cloud-native infrastructure is that developers will be able to take advantage of hardware and power in ways never before possible, and that includes taking advantage of the power of multiple GPUs at once." He even showed a video demo of multi-GPU support in action.

Harrison called the multi-GPU feature Stadia's "fundamental benefit," which is certainly not a phrase I would use for a feature that didn't exist at launch, didn't come shortly after launch, and indeed may never exist.

Here's another performance slide:

Google's slide about a future 8K, 120 fps mode. The Stadia servers aren't even fast enough to render native 4K.

Google

It was certainly ambitious to claim that an 8K, 120 fps mode was in the works when the company couldn't even deliver 4K, 60 fps performance without upscaling. At least this one was scoped to "the future."

Cloud gaming is more hardware business than cloud business

So if cloud gaming needs completely custom hardware and Google's supposed cloud supremacy hasn't resulted in a single tangible market advantage, isn't the company just a hardware vendor? It isn't selling the gaming PC; customers are renting it. Therefore, won't the best cloud gaming company just be a gaming PC hardware company?

For Exhibit A of this argument, let's look at Nvidia's GeForce Now, which is absolutely smoking Google Stadia with the GeForce Now 3080 package. Unlike Google's three-year-old mid-range PCs, Nvidia is rocking state-of-the-art performance that's on par with one of the fastest video cards money can buy.

It makes perfect sense that Nvidia is winning the cloud gaming race. It is the world's biggest graphics card company, and developers already build games with features and APIs aimed at Nvidia cards. Because Nvidia makes the cards, it not only has the resources to get existing graphics cards for cheap (and before the Bitcoin miners do), but it can also design custom cards aimed at server workloads. The GeForce Now 3080 package is meant to be equivalent to the consumer GeForce RTX 3080 in power, but Nvidia actually built a custom, RTX-upgraded variant of its Tesla T10 server-grade GPU. It's serious hardware from a serious hardware company, and it's something Google Stadia can't compete with.

Nvidia already knows how to market its cloud gaming platform.

Nvidia

Nvidia's vertical graphics card integration also puts it in a solid position for future upgrades. The game-streaming market is just getting started, but once several serious competitors become fully operational, the space may turn into a battleground. Every year, the question will be, "Who has the fastest cloud gaming hardware?"

The company that can win that war—and maybe still turn a profit—is Nvidia.

For Nvidia, the speed of the 3080 package makes for a solid sales pitch: This cloud PC is probably faster than your home system, so cloud gaming is worth it. Cloud gaming will always present a latency tradeoff, but that latency is easier to accept if you're getting otherwise-unattainable graphics quality along with it. Nvidia is the first company to enable ray tracing on its cloud platform, and it's pushing features like 120 fps and 4K resolution.

It's conceivable that in a few generations, you won't be able to build a PC that can compete with the cloud. That is pretty much the way non-gaming cloud workloads operate today. You could never have a local copy of Google Maps or YouTube, because the cloud computer is just way too powerful and always up to date, and it has essentially unlimited storage.

Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming is just what it says on the tin—Xbox hardware in the cloud.

Microsoft

Exhibit B in the "hardware companies will win cloud gaming" argument is Microsoft, whose Xbox Cloud Gaming service is literally "rent an Xbox." The company produced a great intro animation for this service back when was it was called "Project xCloud": Four Xboxes slide into frame, the plastic shells come off, and the four motherboards go into a server blade. It's just a big XBox server farm. You won't get the speed and power of glorious PC gaming hardware, but you'll get the console advantage that comes from developers being able to target one piece of hardware to get as much performance out of it as possible.

Microsoft isn't as low-level as Nvidia when it comes to hardware, but selling around 10 million Xboxes in most years gives it a large amount of purchasing power that Google can't match. For Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft is using those same components to build gaming servers, so it probably doesn't cost the company a bunch of money. Unlike Google, Microsoft has already updated its hardware; the Project X Cloud beta started with Xbox Series S units and later jumped to the latest-generation Series X hardware.

Your hardware is also useless unless developers make games for it. The Xbox already has a ton of exclusive games and a relationship with just about every major third party. Microsoft's business model also allows cloud streaming to exist as a free add-on to the red-hot Game Pass platform. It's basically the "Netflix for games" service that everyone has always wanted. Nvidia is just a Windows PC in the cloud, so the message to developers is simply "make PC games." Getting companies to make Stadia games has been much more difficult.

The gaming business is brutal, and Google doesn’t have the stomach for it

Noted non-gamer Sundar Pichai demonstrates Google's gaming pedigree.

Google

If Google has no advantages in the "cloud" part of "cloud gaming," how about the "gaming" part? Throughout Stadia's development, Google underestimated how difficult the gaming market is, how much everything costs, and how long everything takes.

Sundar Pichai opened the Stadia announcement by proclaiming to the crowd, "I'm not a big gamer." He then cited the Chrome offline dinosaur game as Google's previous gaming experience. The Chrome shoutout was meant to be a joke, but looking back, I think Pichai was raising a really good point: Google has no idea what it's doing in the gaming market.

The most damning evidence in support of that thesis is Google's mismanagement of Stadia's first and only in-house game studio, the Stadia Games & Entertainment division. At the Stadia announcement, SG&E was charged with creating exclusive first-party games and working with third parties to bring "bleeding-edge Google technology" to partner studios.

During the show, Google demoed a fully destructible game world that took advantage of cloud compute power. The company said split-screen multiplayer games could be run without a performance penalty since Stadia could just feed the output from two server instances to a single screen. Google demoed a multiplayer squad game with a live video feed from many players—an easy task since they were all just copies of each player's Stadia feed. All these cloud-specific features would need a development house to take advantage of them, and the public and other developers would need to actually use them. SG&E was supposed to be that studio, and it seemed set up for success, with Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond taking the helm.

Google killed SG&E about one year after Stadia launched, before the studio had released a game or done any public work. In a blog post announcing Stadia's pivot to a "platform technology," Stadia VP Phil Harrison explained the decision to shutter SG&E, saying, "Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially."

How are we supposed to interpret this statement from a long-term planning perspective? Did Google not know how long it takes to develop a game? Did it not know that game development is expensive?

Quotes from several shocked and angry SG&E employees ended up in a Kotaku report detailing the final days of Google's mismanagement of SG&E. Phil Harrison told employees that they were making "great progress" on "establishing a strong lineup of Stadia exclusive games," only to lay them off five days later. When pressed by employees to explain what changed in the five days between "great progress" and "you're fired," Harrison admitted that nothing had changed. He offered a chilling response about the shutdown: “We knew.”

One SG&E employee couldn't fathom how Google started a game studio without knowing what it was getting into. The employee told Kotaku, “They just want an explanation from leadership. If you started this studio and hired a hundred or so of these people, no one starts that just for it to go away in a year or so, right? You can’t make a game in that amount of time... We had multi-year reassurance, and now we don’t.”

A later report from Business Insider flagged Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda as a major wakeup call for Google, saying that the deal "scared the crap out of Google executives." Again, it seems that Google only found out about the scale and cost of the gaming industry after it hired hundreds of people and made public announcements. The Xbox division did $15 billion in revenue in 2021, so even the Bethesda purchase didn't break the bank. I wonder how those same Google executives feel about Microsoft's recent purchase of Activision Blizzard for (not a typo) $68 billion.

Welcome to the gaming industry, Google.

Even if Stadia’s pivot works, Google is the #3 cloud company

Canalys

With Stadia's consumer model going down the drain, Google announced it would pivot Stadia to become a behind-the-scenes, white-label data center service that the company will reportedly re-brand as "Google Stream." Instead of Google hosting the store and developers submitting apps to it, Google will quietly run branded solutions for other vendors. There are already two examples of white-label Stadia content: AT&T's Batman: Arkham Knight offering and Peloton's Lanebreak beta.

This move would make Google Stream a new part of the Google Cloud Platform, which lets third parties run their own services on Google's infrastructure. But Google isn't thriving in the cloud services arena, either. Google's web infrastructure is absolutely massive, but the company is just not great at selling that infrastructure to third parties. Enterprise customers value platform stability and compatibility, which is often at odds with Google's way of doing things. (To its credit, Google Cloud is trying to shake this reputation.)

Google is in a distant third in the cloud infrastructure market—way behind Microsoft and Amazon. Market analysis firm Canalys puts Google Cloud at only 7 percent of the cloud infrastructure market, Microsoft Azure at 19 percent, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 32 percent. A 2019 report from The Information claimed that Google's management gave the Cloud division an ultimatum: Come in second place by 2023 or risk losing funding. If that report is true, Google Cloud is in trouble. So Google's plan to salvage Stadia is to tie it to the last-place cloud division?

Google Cloud's "Developer Cheat Sheet." Someday, this will be Stadia's final resting place.

Google

If the plan to sell cloud gaming infrastructure to third parties is a winner, why wouldn't Google's cloud rivals crush the company in this area, too? Microsoft has a bigger, better cloud business and more gaming know-how and developer connections than Google could ever dream of. Amazon is a cloud infrastructure giant and is already bragging about Luna's "Powered by AWS" pedigree and integration with Twitch, the number-one live game streaming platform.

As with consumer Stadia, it doesn't look like Google can offer a cloud gaming platform with a serious competitive advantage. Microsoft and Amazon already provide an easier developer experience. Xbox Cloud Gaming is an Xbox—if it runs on an Xbox, it will run on Xbox cloud gaming with no additional developer effort. Luna is a Windows PC in the cloud, and Amazon wants to "make porting games as low-effort as possible." Nvidia's platform isn't even really a platform—it's just a cloud Windows PC with Steam on it. Stadia is a Linux PC that runs the Vulkan API—it's not impossible to port games to the service (getting Doom Eternal running apparently took three weeks), but it's not one of the standard systems developers typically target, either.

One of the biggest problems with Stadia (and now Google Stream)—and one that Google doesn't seem to understand—is that Google's reputation for killing products is poison for a service like this. Gamers don't want to invest in Stadia, because they are afraid Google will kill it and they'll lose all their purchases. Game developers probably don't want to build for Google Stream because they're worried about Google's cloud gaming division shutting down. The situation has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, where nobody uses the product because they're afraid of it being shut down, and it gets shut down because nobody uses it. When there are other, equal-or-better options from more reputable vendors, why would you pick the Google option?

After the Stadia playbook failed with gamers, the cloud pivot seems to be repeating the same plan for enterprise customers. Google's only hope is reaching this new market first, but being one of the early movers didn't help it with Stadia. Indeed, it seems like Google is just throwing good money after bad.

Please, Google. Just let Stadia die.

Google should kill Stadia

Intel buys Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion to diversify foundry business

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 20:45:38 +0000

CEO Pat Gelsinger continues to aggressively pursue the foundry strategy.

Intel has agreed to pay $5.4 billion to buy Tower Semiconductor, an Israeli foundry that focuses on specialty processes to make chips for imaging, power management, and wireless communications.

The acquisition is Intel’s latest move to add capacity and customers to its new foundry division, which focuses on making chips for other companies. CEO Pat Gelsinger is betting that by expanding capacity and making more semiconductors—not just its own—his company can claw its way get back to the leading edge. Today, just two firms, TSMC and Samsung, make the world’s most advanced chips.

“Tower’s specialty technology portfolio, geographic reach, deep customer relationships and services-first operations will help scale Intel’s foundry services and advance our goal of becoming a major provider of foundry capacity globally,” Gelsinger said in a statement.

Intel and Tower said they expect the transaction to be completed in about a year provided that it gets approved by regulators.

Tower runs five fabs itself—two in Israel, two in the US, and one in Italy—and another three in Japan with Nuvoton Technology Corporation Japan.

Intel has been aggressively pursuing its “IDM 2.0” strategy with a string of announcements and acquisitions. Last week it announced that it was investing in some key technologies, including RISC-V, in an attempt to gain market share in the low-power and embedded markets. Last month, it announced a $20 billion “megafab” in Ohio that will start making chips in 2025. And last fall, Intel announced another $20 billion investment in Arizona, where it’s adding two more fabs to its Ocotillo campus.

Intel buys Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion to diversify foundry business

AMD 5nm Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 might launch in April featuring 18% IPC bump

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 21:29:01 +0000

If you have been following Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, you probably are aware that the processors are a hit, at least for gaming, where even the entry-level i3-12100F is easily able to keep up with some of the best AMD has to offer. This means the pressure is on AMD to put out some good competitive parts.

At CES 2022, AMD already announced that it is launching the Ryzen 7 5800X3D (image below) that packs the new 3D V-Cache technology in Spring this year.

However, the company may feel that a single SKU may not be enough to take on Alder Lake-S. As such, a new rumor suggests that AMD is hastening the launch of next-gen Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series processors which might launch in April, alongside or soon after the release of the 5800X3D. The information comes from a Chiphell forum member "getwinder" (via HXL on Twitter).

Back at CES 2022, AMD said that the upcoming 5nm-based Zen 4 architecture will launch in the second half of the year (2H 2022), and it's very unusual for a company to advance the launch dates of a product of such scale.

However, the new rumor also contains lots of new information related to performance which is certainly interesting and worth sharing.

The leaker claims that:

The instructions per cycle (IPC) on Zen 4 is 18% higher than a previous architecture (we aren't sure if it's Zen 3 or Zen3D),
The peak frequency or the maximum boost on a single core is 7% higher,
The all-core boost is raised by 8.7%.

The high clock speeds information is most likely correct as AMD itself showed off a 5GHz all-core Zen 4 demo running Halo Infinite at the CES 2022 event (YouTube link). And if the 18% IPC boost bump figure is correct then we may once again see AMD as the top dog in the CPU market.

Source: getwinder (Chiphell forum)

AMD 5nm Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 might launch in April featuring 18% IPC bump

Google has made a smart lamp but you can’t have it

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 21:25:49 +0000

Google has made a rather sleek and enticing looking smart lamp, which features built-in Google Assistant support, but they’re not selling it.

Google designer Ben Gold has officially revealed Google’s latest innovation, a lamp named the “dLight,” which is primarily designed for video conferencing through emitting light, just like a regular lamp would do.

To make the delightful dLight just a little bit special, it’s able to change its colour temperature through a variety of presets and you’re also able to pivot the light to provide the best lighting conditions for your video conferencing setup.

Featuring a very clean circular base, thin stalk, and an oval light diffuser, there’s solid reasoning to say that the dLight looks good, so long as you’re into ultra-modern home furnishings, however, no matter how much you compliment it, chances are you won’t be able to get your hands on it.

“This product will likely never be for sale outside of the company,” Gold revealed, much to the dismay of anyone invested in the latest innovations in lamp technology. This means that if you want to get your hands on the dLight, your best shot is getting a job at Google that requires a whole lot of video conferencing. Even then, however, the light is still on backorder.

While this lamp does look very snazzy if you’re going for an entirely white desk setup, it’s not an entirely unheard-of feat of engineering to control a lamp with your voice. With no microphone onboard, the dLight doesn’t offer much over already available solutions that you’re able to achieve with any run of the mill smart speaker and compatible smart plugs.

To make matters worse for consumers outside of Google who already want to get their hands on the dLight, the lamp may be getting even better over time, as Gold revealed that the lamp gets over the air firmware updates and even has a USB-C port for ambiguous “future expansion.”

Google has made a smart lamp but you can’t have it

Nvidia probably wants you to forget it ever revealed the RTX 3090 Ti "BFGPU"

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 21:23:58 +0000

Back at the CES 2022 event, Nvidia revealed to the world (image below) its next "big ferocious GPU (BFGPU)", the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, a card faster than the RTX 3090, the latter being the current flagship of the Ampere lineup. The company stated back then that more details regarding the product would be shared by the end of the month, ie, January.

However, that evidently didn't happen and when inquired about the matter, Nvidia gave the following statement to The Verge. The company's spokesperson Jen Andersson said:

We don’t currently have more info to share on the RTX 3090 Ti, but we’ll be in touch when we do.

The response is pretty bland, a standard statement that companies often give which provides no indication of any positive or negative development. However, rumors are generally pointing to a much more negative outlook for the RTX 3090 Ti.

Back in January itself, soon after the CES 2022 event ended, reports about Nvidia asking its add-in-board (AIB) partners to cease production of the RTX 3090 Ti aftermarket variants surfaced.

Tech YouTuber and renowned leakster Moore's Law Is Dead (MLID) also alleges that sources close to it have confirmed that the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is "delayed indefinitely".

via MLID (YouTube)

MLID says that the reason for the delay is related to some PCB design issues, among other things, which are causing problems for the 3090 Ti. The card reportedly features a 450W total graphics power (TGP) and making enough workable, fully functional 8nm 3090 Ti units is seemingly a challenge at the moment.

For all this power, the RTX 3090 Ti will feature 24GB of the fastest GDDR6X memory on the entire Ampere lineup at 21Gbps. The card is rumored to pack the full GA102 die with 10,752 CUDA Cores. Some of the highest models, like EVGA's Kingpin, could feature a power headroom of up to 975W.

Source: The Verge

Nvidia probably wants you to forget it ever revealed the RTX 3090 Ti "BFGPU"

Intel says its new crypto chip is designed to be energy-efficient

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 20:39:35 +0000

Jack Dorsey is one of the company’s first buyers

Intel is investing in blockchain technology with a new chip designed to mine cryptocurrency (via Reuters). The company is focusing on sustainability, and plans on “developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.”

Intel’s first crypto-focused chip, which it calls a “blockchain accelerator” is set to ship later this year. Two companies have already preordered the technology, including Bitcoin mining company GRIID Infrastructures and Block, the Jack Dorsey-owned fintech company formerly known as Square.

“We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining,” Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president explains in the announcement, referring to the SHA-256 hashing algorithm used to generate Bitcoin and a number of other cryptocurrencies.

Intel says more information about the chip will become available at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which starts on February 20th. As PCMag points out, the company is scheduled to make a presentation (PDF) at the ISCC on February 23rd, titled “Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC.” ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuits, is a chip designed for one specific task, such as cryptocurrency mining.

The environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining has become a huge concern, and Intel’s new chip may be an attempt to address that. Power-hungry mining rigs often get their energy from coal and natural gas plants that can harm the environment, and can also contribute to high electricity costs and blackouts. US lawmakers have even brought up the issue in Congress, debating how to tackle the rising energy consumption associated with mining crypto, and even asking Bitcoin companies to disclose how much energy they consume.

Intel says its new crypto chip is designed to be energy-efficient

Lost Ark becomes the second most played game in Steam history after just 24 hours

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 02:05:55 +0000

Amazon Games has another hit game

Lost Ark has comfortably passed 1 million concurrent players after just 24 hours, becoming the second most played game in Steam history by concurrent counts. The Diablo-like MMO launched yesterday in the West, after Amazon Games collaborated with Smilegate RPG to localize and translate Lost Ark and make it available in English. It has now passed concurrent records for both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which regularly dominate the top of Steam’s most-played games.

Lost Ark is so popular right now that it has experienced server issues and there’s a queue just to start playing. SteamDB lists concurrent players of Lost Ark at 1,311,842, passing CS:GO’s record of 1,308,963 players and Dota 2’s of 1,295,114. It’s not clear exactly how many of those players are actually actively playing the game and not sitting in a server queue, though.

Either way, it’s now second place on the top concurrent list behind only PUGB. It still has a long way to go to beat PUBG’s all-time peak of 3,257,248 players. Lost Ark is a second huge hit for Amazon Games, after New World set a concurrent record of 913,634 players four months ago.

Lost Ark was originally released in 2019 in South Korea, and has millions of active players in South Korea, Russia, and Japan. It’s free-to-play and has also quickly risen to the top of Twitch, overtaking the popular Just Chatting category.

Lost Ark becomes the second most played game in Steam history after just 24 hours

Microsoft Weekly: Windows 11 features leak, Teams upgrades, and security insights

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 20:16:57 +0000

We are at the close of yet another week, which means that it is time to recap everything that happened in the world of Microsoft in the past few days. It is safe to say that this was one of the busiest weeks of the year so far in this space. Read on to find why this was so in our weekly digest for February 5 - February 11.

Windows 11 feature leaks

Interestingly, there were a lot of leaks regarding upcoming Windows 11 features in this week. One report claims that Windows 11 users will soon be able to add Stickers to their wallpapers, set priority notifications outside of Focus Assist, leverage from Tablet mode, and check out their device's sustainability score. Focus Assist might also be rebranded to simply "Focus".

Another leak indicates that Microsoft might introduce a prompt in Settings for users who are running Windows 11 on unsupported configurations. The company is also considering adding an overflow flyout in the Taskbar so you can switch between more apps.

There are also indications that more functionalities will be added to Task Manager, as can be spotted in Dev Channel build 22543. This includes information regarding app health, battery health, and more.

Finally, yet another report says that Microsoft is considering adding some more features to Windows 11 in the form of App folder in Start menu, the return of drag-and-drop to Taskbar, acrylic effects for legacy title bars, and a new Snap Bar UX. All of these are expected to gradually roll out to Insiders over the coming weeks.

This week was Patch Tuesday as well, and you can find the change logs for different versions of Windows below:

On the Insider Preview front, Microsoft is still ironing out some issues in the Dev Channel so while we don't have a new build there, we do have one in the Beta Channel with build 22000.526 (KB5010414). There's a lengthy list of fixes, do check it out here.

Finally, it is important to remember that Windows 10 version 20H2 (October 2020 Update) is reaching the end of servicing in May this year, so if you're still running it, it might be time to consider updating to the latest available feature update.

Teams enhancements

If you are an active user of Microsoft Teams, you'll be pleased to know that there are some improvements to look forward to. First up, Microsoft highlighted that it has made Teams 50% more power-efficient in the past couple of years thanks to CPU and GPU enhancements. Some of the performance improvements deal with GPU-based hardware acceleration, camera optimization to reduce CPU loads, and upgrading Teams' video re-scaling when working with different resolution group calls. That said, the company's work isn't done yet, and it will continue working with CPU and GPU vendors to make further gains in this area.

People who use breakout rooms will be happy to know that their management has been made more streamlined. Some of the new features include being able to reassign participants to ensure the correct people are in breakout rooms when needed, assignment persistence which ensures the same people are included in subsequent sessions, breakout room timers, the ability to add up to 10 breakout room managers, and create breakout rooms and participant assignment tasks ahead of the meeting. All of these capabilities are now available in the generally available version of the desktop app.

Teams users on Android haven't been forgotten either. They have text prediction to look forward to, come April. The same will be added to iOS devices at a "later date".

Since we are talking about Microsoft apps, it is worth pointing out that Outlook for Android has received text prediction too. Meanwhile, SwiftKey has received support for more languages, emoji search, and Intelligent Nudge that can create To Do tasks on your behalf. OneNote on the web and Teams has a bunch of new features that have started to roll out too, such as auto-inking stylus support, a new mode switcher, and the ability to resize videos. Microsoft is also working on bringing an enhanced link sharing experience.

The unified Whiteboard experience that has been designed for hybrid work will become available for Surface Hub devices this month. And the Microsoft Your Phone app has been updated to show recent apps in Windows 11 notification area in Insider builds.

Security insights

There was a lot of news to cover in the cybersecurity domain this week. In a major announcement, Microsoft stated that it is also going to block Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Macros in Office files obtained from the internet by default. This change will affect Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word files. It will also make it much more difficult for users to enable macros in such files.

The Microsoft Defender Preview app for Windows and Android is now live too. Although it is identical to Defender for Windows users, it does bring some added security for Android devices, with some caveats. Being an always-on service, Microsoft Defender Preview needs users to grant the “Accessibility Services” permission. It periodically performs scans in order to lessen the impact on battery life. In its preview phase, it requires a Microsoft account, but once it becomes generally available, it will need a Microsoft 365 Family or Personal subscription. It is currently available only in the U.S.

In related news, security company AV-Comparatives has released it annual report for 2021, and it isn't super-impressed by Microsoft Defender. This has sparked a bit of a debate in our comments section, so feel free to participate here.

If you're looking for workarounds to force-upgrade your machine to Windows 11, be on guard against malicious websites posing as Microsoft offering downloads for the OS. Such websites usually pack malware such as RedLine. Find out all the details here.

Microsoft has also announced a Security Insider program for business leaders, namely Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). Security Insider is essentially a hub containing guidance from Microsoft about how you should manage your organization's security.

Dev Channel

In the Activision Blizzard camp, the company posted a revenue of $8.8 billion for 2021, but it seems like some of its leadership will be on the chopping block once the Microsoft acquisition complete. However, the Redmond tech giant has confirmed that it will continue to make multi-platform games such as Call of Duty available on PlayStation
PlatinumGames wants to revive Scalebound and has petitioned Phil Spencer on the topic
Minecraft Dungeons now has over 15 million players
Xbox executive Shannon Loftis has announced retirement after 30 years at Microsoft
A research from Microsoft indicates that online civility is finally improving, albeit slowly
The Xbox Gear Shop now has Valentine's Day-themed stock
Microsoft has announced Open App Store Principles for its storefronts
PowerToys version 0.55.2 is now out with some minor fixes
In a sneaky move, Microsoft is offering its Microsoft 365 subscription to legacy G Suite users at 60% off for the first year
A couple of original Halo composers have threatened to block the upcoming Halo show due to allegedly unpaid royalties
Some Xbox Insiders can now pin games to Quick Resume on Xbox Series X|S consoles

Under the spotlight

Although our original content this week didn't relate to Microsoft, it is still worth talking about. Neowin News Reporter Dean Howell discussed his thoughts this week on how Portal: Companion Collection for the Nintendo Switch is actually a masterstroke for the Steam Deck. You can read his views here.

Logging off

Before we sign off in this week's column, we want to draw your attention to some findings from Google's Project Zero security team. Project Zero released some stats regarding its security investigations into various products developed by Google and other vendors in the past couple of years. It turns out that most security vulnerabilities were discovered in Microsoft products and the company takes 76 days on average to fix reported issues. There were less-than-glowing remarks for Google's Android and Apple's iOS too. If this has piqued your interest, do check out the report in full here.

Microsoft Weekly: Windows 11 features leak, Teams upgrades, and security insights

Dying Light 2 crosses 3 million players, latest patch greatly improves performance

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 21:28:01 +0000

Dying Light 2 is a first-person action game that takes place after a zombie apocalypse. The title received mixed reviews at launch, and currently sits at a 77 on Metacritic for the Xbox Series X version. However, over the past week, developer Techland has issued a few patches that have addressed many of the concerns critics had with the bugs and performance.

Today, the team released another update that improves performances, adds a 60+ frames per second (FPS) variable refresh rate mode, improves ally and enemy behavior, and corrects some broken quests. Neowin has been testing out the patch for the past few hours and there's a noticeable increase in smoothness.

Performance mode, where the game runs at 60 FPS, is still the best way to play and now has minimal FPS drops. Quality and Resolution mode also seem smoother, but the difference is less evident because they're locked at 30 FPS.

Despite the not-so-stellar reviews and bugs at launch, Dying Light 2 has set the sales charts on fire. According to the game's official Twitter account, the title has been played by over 3 million unique gamers already. This is an excellent start and hopefully will continue into the future.

Dying Light 2 is a good game, but it's story isn't as gripping as it could be with less characters and a tighter focus on the main quest. It's still a lot of fun and you can pick it up on the Microsoft Store or the platform of your choice, like PC or PlayStation, for $59.99.

Dying Light 2 crosses 3 million players, latest patch greatly improves performance

Factory contamination affects “at least” 7 billion gigabytes of flash memory

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 20:44:29 +0000

Two factories used by Western Digital and Kioxia have been affected.

Solid-state storage devices have so far been spared from the scarcity and high prices that the chip shortage has wrought upon graphics cards, cars, Raspberry Pi boards, and innumerable other products. But that may change soon, due in part to a "contamination" at two Japanese factories used by Western Digital and Kioxia to make flash memory.

According to a short Western Digital press release, the contamination issue has affected "at least" 6.5 exabytes of flash memory, which works out to a bit under 7 million terabytes or 7 billion gigabytes—that's a lot of NAND that will suddenly be unavailable for SSDs, phones, memory cards, and USB drives. An analyst speaking to Bloomberg suggested that the final total of the lost capacity could be as much as 16 exabytes.

The contamination issue could be compounded by other factors, like a recent COVID-19-related shutdown at one of Samsung's Chinese NAND factories. Real or perceived scarcity of SSDs or other components could also lure in scalpers seeking to make a quick buck by snapping up available stock and selling it on eBay or elsewhere at inflated prices.

Countries and businesses are investing billions of dollars in additional chipmaking capacity right now, but the long lead time on these factories means that most companies and analysts expect chip shortages to last throughout 2022 and beyond. Shortages of everything from wafers and packaging materials to labor aren't helping. And with inventories low and supply chains stretched thin, normal, run-of-the-mill manufacturing errors and factory shutdowns can have an outsize impact on pricing and availability.

Factory contamination affects “at least” 7 billion gigabytes of flash memory

Intel’s strategy for outflanking Arm takes shape with bet on RISC-V

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 20:10:23 +0000

RISC-V chips could give Intel Foundry Services some much needed volume.

Many of Intel’s current woes can be traced to the fact that the company was left out of the iPhone. Whether Intel passed on the opportunity or couldn’t meet the spec is by now a moot point, but missing out on the smartphone revolution—and its billions of chips—played no small part in the company falling behind the leading edge.

Now, Intel is ponying up $1 billion in an attempt to avoid repeating history.

The company announced an “innovation fund” this week that places bets on a couple of key technologies, chief among them RISC-V, a free, open source instruction set that shows promise in low-power and embedded systems, markets that are expected to grow significantly over the next several years.

Distracted competitor

Intel’s announcement conveniently comes at a time when one of its main competitors, Arm, is somewhat distracted. Nvidia’s acquisition of the British company, recently valued at $80 billion, was challenged by regulators around the world, and earlier this week, the deal finally fell apart. Arm’s current owner, SoftBank Group, is desperate for cash. It wants to unload the chip designer while the market for semiconductors is hot, hoping that any windfall will make up for a string of losses caused by everything from China’s tech crackdown to the WeWork flop.

With the Nvidia acquisition scuppered, Arm appears headed toward an IPO, a long and laborious process that will take many months to complete. That’s not to say that Arm’s engineers won’t keep sharpening their designs, but it does give Intel a small opening.

Intel’s investment in RISC-V isn’t just calculated—it’s complementary. The company’s existing processors are as powerful as they are power-hungry, and they run the decades-old x86 architecture. RISC-V, on the other hand, is relatively new, having been developed at UC-Berkeley just over a decade ago. As an instruction set, it’s fairly trim, and chips that use it tend to be smaller than competing ARM designs. Still, RISC-V is immature compared with ARM instruction sets, which have been refined over decades with the help of feedback from myriad customers. While RISC-V is not quite ready to challenge ARM-based smartphones, it has begun to make inroads in embedded systems, another market where ARM excels.

In pushing RISC-V, Intel appears to be ceding the current smartphone market to Arm (it wasn’t much of a competition anyway) while betting on simpler, smaller, and even lower-power chips that promise to be in everything from cars to smart lightbulbs. In other words, Intel is trying to squeeze Arm from the top and the bottom.

Manufacturing experience

While RISC-V chips tend to be small, their production numbers are not. RISC-V supplier Andes Technology said more than 3 billion SoCs using its intellectual property shipped last year alone.

The new fund will no doubt bolster Intel’s relationships with promising RISC-V designers, including Taiwan-based Andes Technology and US-based SiFive. The fabless companies have been making their designs with TSMC, though the new partnership will probably help Intel peel off some of that business. If the bet pays off, Intel will gain experience manufacturing low-power chips, an area TSMC has plenty of experience in.

Volume from RISC-V chips could not only help Intel fill its newly announced fabs—two in Arizona and two in Ohio—it could also help the company refine its manufacturing processes. TSMC was able to push ahead of the competition in part because it made enormous quantities of chips. That allowed the Taiwanese company to work out the kinks in ever more advanced nodes, and by reaching the most advanced nodes first, TSMC put itself in a better position to win new orders, giving it even more volume. It’s a positive feedback loop that has allowed the company to become a juggernaut in the foundry world.

Intel’s nascent foundry operation is small by comparison, but by starting with low-power and embedded systems, where all-out performance isn’t a requirement, the company can establish a beachhead that will let it win some orders in a new corner of the market. Intel is clearly hoping to combine revenue and process learnings from its foundry and IDM operations to create a similar sort of feedback loop.

Given enough time, Intel may be able to use its expertise with RISC-V to push into other markets, just as Arm’s designs are now found in everything from automotive brake controllers to laptops and data centers. That’s a big "if," but to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, it’s likely an opportunity that’s too tempting to pass up.

But at $1 billion, is Intel’s bet big enough?

Intel’s strategy for outflanking Arm takes shape with bet on RISC-V

$66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 07:47:08 +0000

Arm owner SoftBank will instead spin the business off via an IPO.

SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.

The deal, the largest ever in the chip sector, would have given California-based Nvidia control of a company that makes technology at the heart of most of the world’s mobile devices. A handful of Big Tech companies that rely on Arm’s chip designs, including Qualcomm and Microsoft, had objected to the purchase.

SoftBank will receive a break-up fee of up to $1.25 billion and is seeking to unload Arm through an initial public offering before the end of the year, said one of the people.

The failure is set to result in a management upheaval at Arm, with chief executive Simon Segars being replaced by Rene Haas, head of the company’s intellectual property unit, the person added.

The collapse of the deal robs SoftBank of a big windfall it would have earned thanks to a boom in Nvidia’s stock price.

The cash-and-stock transaction was worth up to $38.5 billion when it was announced in September 2020. But the value soared as Nvidia’s shares took off, reaching a peak of $87 billion last November.

In the UK, where politicians have viewed Arm as a strategic national asset, attention is set to shift to whether the company will be listed on the country’s domestic market. A British competition review into the deal was extended late last year to include national security considerations.

However, people close to SoftBank said the group prefers the idea of listing Arm in New York and will seek to resist nationalistic pressure. US markets accord higher valuations to tech stocks, even after a recent sharp reversal, and UK tech executives recently pressed for changes to listing arrangements to make London more attractive.

Nvidia decided to abandon its pursuit of Arm at a board meeting earlier on Monday, said a person familiar with the discussion. Nvidia's pursuit of Arm marked an opportunistic attempt to score an end-run around chip rivals such as Intel and AMD, and it was prompted by an approach from SoftBank after the Japanese company decided to shed the business.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, hoped to use Arm’s processor designs to cement his company’s growing role in data centers, where Arm’s graphical processors have become important tools for machine learning.

However, some of the Big Tech companies that rely on Arm’s designs for their own chips argued that Nvidia would get an unfair advantage by having first rights to Arm’s technology, hurting competition.

Nvidia offered to competition regulators that it would maintain sales to Arm’s other customers after the deal was completed. However, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority said it did not believe any such arrangements would be effective, and the US Federal Trade Commission launched an in-depth investigation late last year.

$66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses

Activision posts $8.8 billion revenue for 2021, $5.1 billion from microtransactions

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 20:14:55 +0000

Activision Blizzard recently released its yearly earnings report and the company boasted some impressive figures for 2021. According to its investor portal, the publisher broke records by generating $8.8 billion in net revenue, and $2.7 billion in net income. However, what's surprising is that $5.1 billion of that was through microtransactions, subscriptions, and other add-ons.

It's no secret that the latest entry in the Call of Duty franchise, Call of Duty: Vanguard, didn't perform as well as Activision Blizzard expected due to its technical issues. Despite that, the company saw one of its best years ever on the strength of its microtransactions, mostly.

Activision Blizzard also boasts some of the biggest monthly active user counts in the industry. While previous figures have gone as high as 435 million players every month, December 2021 saw 371 million.

Back in January 2022, Microsoft shocked the gaming industry by announcing its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard for around $70 billion. Despite the missteps this year, Call of Duty is still the biggest game in Western markets, but the monthly active user count is probably more attractive to Microsoft. The corporation has focused on growing Xbox Game Pass in recent years, and making the Call of Duty games available through Xbox Game Pass should boost subscribers.

Activision posts $8.8 billion revenue for 2021, $5.1 billion from microtransactions

With Wi-Fi 7 near, consumers expected to bypass Wi-Fi 6E

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 20:12:50 +0000

Issues impacting Wi-Fi 6E products won't alleviate until the end of this year.

Wi-Fi 6E is the latest wireless tech standard, but due to components shortages, it wouldn't be surprising if you never end up with a Wi-Fi 6E router or other supported tech and instead jump straight to the next generation, Wi-Fi 7.

Components shortages, which have hindered the availability of everything from graphics cards to Chromebooks, monitor panels, and integrated circuits for Wi-Fi, have impacted Wi-6E availability and adoption, telecommunications analyst Dell'Oro Group said in a statement released Thursday, as reported by Tom's Hardware on Saturday.

“Although manufacturers launched Wi-Fi 6E products in mid-2021, products are either not available or they are in very limited supply," Tam Dell’Oro, the founder and CEO of the firm, said in a statement. Dell'Oro added that Wi-Fi shipments are "significantly limited because of supply constraints," except in China.

That's not to say Wi-Fi 6E products are impossible to find. Some Android smartphones, like the Google Pixel 6, support Wi-Fi 6E, as do high-end motherboards for PC builders and even some laptops. But a quick search for Wi-Fi 6E routers shows fewer and more costly options compared to Wi-Fi 6 options.

Businesses are often early adopters of new generations of technology, but systems integrators have reported that businesses are showing greater interest in Wi-Fi 6 over the newer version, Dell'Oro noted. So when it comes to tech vendors prioritizing resources, Wi-Fi 6 is getting a bigger piece of the pie.

"Supply constraints have prompted manufacturers to focus on enabling the availability of popular models by re-designing these models with components that are more readily available," Dell’Oro said.

Wi-Fi 6E differs from Wi-Fi 6 in that it can use the 6 GHz frequency band, adding 14 more 80 MHz channels and seven extra 160 MHz ones. Those upgrades help fight congestion and target fast speeds for applications like high-definition video streaming.

According to unnamed "ecosystem players" cited by the analyst, supply constraints impacting Wi-Fi 6E products won't alleviate until the end of this year. And Wi-Fi 7 offerings, especially those aimed at businesses, could be available as soon as next year.

"With Wi-Fi 7 products shipping as early as 2023, we predict users will bypass 6E,” Dell’Oro said.

In January, MediaTek, which makes Wi-Fi chips, began live demos of Wi-Fi 7. The next-generation tech is expected to support a max theoretical throughput of at least 30Gbps, compared to Wi-Fi 6 and 6E's 9.6Gbps, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, which makes the specification. Upon conducting its live demos, MediaTek said it expects to have products available in 2023.

Besides limited supplies, federal regulations are also reportedly slowing down Wi-Fi 6E adoption. "In addition to supply constraints inhibiting the rate of adoption of Wi-Fi 6E, we have learned that compliance with regulations to operate within the 6 GHz spectrum are slowing the deployment process," Dell’Oro explained. "Compliance processes have yet to be standardized and easy to implement."

With Wi-Fi 7 near, consumers expected to bypass Wi-Fi 6E

Google sued for €2.1 billion by shopping rival for unfair search placement

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 20:11:29 +0000

PriceRunner sues for business damages after Google loses EU Commission lawsuit.

Google is being sued in the European Union again over anti-competitive shopping practices.

The EU Commission ruled in 2017 that Google's preferential treatment of its own Google Shopping product in search results was illegal, and it slapped the company with a record-setting fine of 2.4 billion euros. The penalty was upheld in an appeal in 2021. Now, price-comparison service PriceRunner is suing Google for the harm it says was caused to its business over the last 12 years. PriceRunner is starting the suit at 2.1 billion euros, but "since the violation is still ongoing, the amount of damages increases every day," the company said. "We expect the final damages amount of the lawsuit to be significantly higher."

In a press release, PriceRunner Chief Executive Mikael Lindahl said the company is suing Google for "the damage Google has caused us during many years." But the company also sees the lawsuit "as a fight for consumers who have suffered tremendously from Google’s infringement of the competition law for the past fourteen years and still today,” Lindahl wrote.

Google's original shopping-comparison product—first called "Froogle" and later renamed to the more sterilized "Google Product Search"—existed from 2002 to 2012 as a useful, organic view of all the shopping items Google's web crawler could find. Google killed this product in 2012 to launch "Google Shopping," an ad platform in the guise of product search. From 2012 to 2020, Google stopped crawling the web for products and only showed paid-for product ads on the Shopping site and at the top of Google searches. Changes were made in April 2020, and now, if you scroll down on the Shopping page, you'll see non-ad listings. But the listings come only from participating merchant data feeds; they're not indexed, organic search results. No matter what was going on behind the scenes, Google would pin these shopping results to the top of search results above any competitors, and the EU Commission ruled this action was anti-competitive.

PriceRunner says Google artificial shopping listings are hurting consumers, too:

Accountancy company Grant Thornton has established that prices for the offers shown in Google’s own comparison shopping service are 12-14 percent higher than from other services. For the most popular areas, clothes and shoes prices, these are 16-37 percent higher. As a result of Google’s violation, European consumers are estimated to be overpaying billions every year.

PriceRunner says it expects the battle to "take several years" and says it has "secured external funding that is deemed to cover all litigation costs."

Google sued for €2.1 billion by shopping rival for unfair search placement

Microsoft Weekly: The future of Windows 11 updates, a Mac trojan, and Defender

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 21:39:43 +0000

This was an interesting week in the Microsoft-verse with lots of news flowing in from a variety of diverse topics. There was some new information regarding upcoming Windows 11 updates as well as some reports related to cybersecurity. Find out more in our weekly digest for January 29 - February 4 below!

The future of Windows 11 updates

Unfortunately, Insiders did not release a Dev Channel build this week due to the candidate build not meeting Microsoft's quality bar. Flighting in this channel is expected to resume from next week. That said, the new Media Player app did land on the Beta Channel this week and you can now give it a go if you're a member of the Insider channel. Microsoft seems to have ironed out some issues that were present in the Dev Channel version of the software, which is why it is now being promoted to the next ring of public testing. It's not yet known as to when the Media Player will become generally available.

Microsoft made a bit of a marketing blunder back in October 2021 when it revealed that the 3D emoji that it is using in promotional material for Windows 11 under the implication that they will be available in the OS are actually not planned for release on Windows 11 at all. This announcement received backlash with many claiming that the company had scammed customers through misleading advertisements.

Now it seems that Microsoft is looking to backtrack on its previous announcements. A Microsoft Design lead has revealed that the firm is working on bringing 3D emoji to Windows 11. That said, keep your expectations in check as nothing is guaranteed.

Although Microsoft has transitioned to an annual release cadence for Windows feature updates, the company says that it will continue to deliver new features as they become generally available through Feature, Web, and Online Service Experience Packs. This is an interesting approach and you can read more about it here.

Microsoft-discovered Mac trojan and other security threats

Microsoft disclosed details about a sophisticated trojan named UpdateAgent targeting Mac devices. The company says that the trojan is quite dangerous as it has been steadily evolving since its first appearance in September 2020. It disguises itself as legitimate software and is installed on machines through drive-by downloads.

UpdateAgent then proceeds to bypass security layers, persist on the macOS device, steal information, download secondary payload, and hide its tracks. Microsoft has cautioned that right now it is downloading the Adload adware but there could be even more dangerous payloads planned in future iterations of the trojan since it is in active development. The company has recommended the use of Advanced hunting queries, Microsoft Edge, and Defender for Endpoint to protect yourself against this emerging and sophisticated threat.

In related cybersecurity news, Microsoft has formally announced that it disabled the MSIX app-installer protocol because it was being used as an attack vector by threat actors. The company is looking to enable the functionality again via group policy configurations, but for now, the feature is unavailable. Find out more details about the threat and Microsoft's remediation steps here.

Microsoft Defender for the win

Microsoft Defender once again performed admirably in the latest AV-TEST assessments and was crowned a "top" security solution alongside ESET, Kaspersky, Norton, and more. The categories that security solutions were being tested against were protection, performance, and usability, and Defender managed to score full marks in all three.

Speaking of security solutions, ESET has released some critical product updates to fix a local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability that affected its products. The problem stemmed in the Windows Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) scanning feature, and the exploitation of it by threat actors could lead to LPE. You can check out the list of affected products here and update your own ESET software accordingly.

Finally, Microsoft proudly claimed that it blocked 71 billion cyberattacks in 2021 using Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Azure Active Directory (AAD). Although this is good news, the company rightly expressed concern over the growing number of threats in the cybersecurity space and the low adoption rates for stronger identity authentication solutions like multi-factor authentication and passwordless solutions.

Dev Channel

The Halo show premieres on March 24, there's a new trailer out now, and multiple seasons are planned - a recent update to Halo Infinite also packs Big Team Battle fixes
PowerToys 0.55.0 introduced three new utilizes for File Explorer and Mouse, while version 0.55.1 patched some issues with Settings
Microsoft Flight Simulator's biggest update yet is out in the form of World Update VII: Australia
The FTC is in the process of reviewing Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but Microsoft expects the deal to go through with no concessions
You can now test IE mode in Microsoft Edge with Internet Explorer Drive, and version 98.0.1108.43 of the browser also adds a new mode for enhanced security
CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer will receive the D.I.C.E. Lifetime Achievement Award this month
Microsoft's updated Custom Translator portal is now in public preview
Microsoft Sentinel will ingest GitHub audit logs for continuous threat monitoring
Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 is out now with a new text rendering engine, a customizable bell sound, and a revamped UI
You will soon need a Microsoft account to play Minecraft: Java Edition

Under the spotlight

This week, I talked a bit about how Gmail is getting an arguably welcome UI revamp that makes it quite similar to Outlook at first glance thanks to some rearrangement of icons into different panels and categories. This will become the default experience by the end of Q2 2022. Let us know if you like the change by heading over to the dedicated article here.

Logging off

This week's most interesting news item relates to former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos petitioning to Dutch city officials to partially dismantle the historic Koningshavenbrug De Hef bridge so his expensive yacht can pass through. Apparently, the vessel - that is being built in Rotterdam - is too large to fit under the bridge as it ventures out into deeper waters. Bezos has reportedly stated that he will foot the bill for the dismantlement as well as reconstruction of the bridge but the move is obviously facing a lot of backlash from the public and local history experts. The only time this historic bridge was partly demolished in the past was due to German bombardment in the Second World War, back in 1940, so take that as you will.

Microsoft Weekly: The future of Windows 11 updates, a Mac trojan, and Defender

FTC Investigates Microsoft-Blizzard Deal

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 21:35:24 +0000

The Government Is Looking Into Microsoft Acquiring Blizzard

The US Federal Trade Commission will be checking Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Blizzard to ensure that it doesn’t harm competition, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The Microsoft-Blizzard acquisition is reported to have cost $70 billion in December 2018. While the company has assured fans that they will continue to support Blizzard games on different platforms, there is a chance that this could lead them down an anti-competition path.

This is because the FTC has been known to take a harder stance against acquisitions which could negatively affect competition when compared to the Justice Department, which usually takes over antitrust reviews concerning other products and services. The deal is expected to go through by June 2023 unless any complications occur during the FTC’s review process.

Blizzard’s Strides in the Gaming Industry

Blizzard has some of the most popular gaming franchises ever created under their belt. The next Call of Duty game will be coming out in the Fall, just a year after Black Ops IV was released in 2018. Blizzard has also announced that Diablo Immortal is being developed for mobile devices only since Blizzard doesn’t have plans to develop it for PC at this time.

Blizzard’s biggest franchise, Overwatch, has also been around since 2016, and there are many passionate fans surrounding the game. While Microsoft’s Xbox division remains behind Sony when it comes to revenue, they are expected to gain more ground once Blizzard titles are brought over to their console.

What It Means for Blizzard and Sony Relations

Blizzard titles will be available on the PlayStation 4 as well, which is Blizzard’s main competitor. This means that there could be potential anti-competitive behavior happening if Blizzard games were to be pulled from the PS4 once they’re brought over to Xbox One consoles.

The FTC is expected to complete its review process by June 2025 in order for Blizzard games to remain on multiple platforms. If this deal goes through, Microsoft will have spent more money than what they have ever done before in order for them to acquire Blizzard which many people saw coming since it was only a matter of time before Activision Blizzard started looking for buyers with Blizzard being one of their most popular brands currently out.

With Sony being Blizzard’s main competitor in the gaming industry due to the number of Blizzard titles available on the PlayStation 4, there is a chance that Blizzard games may only receive their updates and patches for Sony’s console first if Microsoft were to pull Blizzard games from the PS4 once they’re brought over to Xbox One. Nevertheless, the Microsoft-Blizzard deal has been reported as “historic.”

Looking for More Insider Scoop?

Here’s what Microsoft CEO says about the deal.

FTC Investigates Microsoft-Blizzard Deal